You read what I had to say about Bootstrap-lifters, and the Wholesale Pickpockets' Association making use of their incantations. You admired my ability to sling language, but not my taste; and you certainly did not think that I would back my rhetoric with facts. But what do these quotations mean, unless they mean what I have said? Are not these three professors men of culture? Are they not as "spiritual" as any men of learning you can find in our present-day society?
And now stop for a moment and put yourself in the position of the young student of the working-class, who goes to these books and discovers that truth is not truth, but only a bait for a snare. Who discovers that professors of ethics, practical or impractical, are not interested in justice among men, but only in collecting funds for their specialty; that in order to get funds, they are willing to teach the rich how to paralyze the minds of the poor! Do you wonder that such young students conclude that bourgeois thinkers do not know what honesty is, but are prostitutes, retainers and lackeys, to be kicked out of the temple of truth?
Running the Rapids
And now, can you form to yourselves a clear concept of what it means to society that practically all its moral teaching should be in the hands of men who are incapable of clean, straight thinking? That all the intellectual prestige of the Church should be lent to the support of vagueness, futility, and deliberate evasion? Here we are, all of us, caught in the most terrific social crisis of history; I search for a metaphor to picture our position, and I recall a canoe-trip in the wilds of Ontario, hundreds of miles down a long swift river. You sit in the bow of the canoe, your partner in the stern, watching ahead; and there comes a slide of smooth green water, and you go over it, and into a torrent of foaming white, which seizes you and rushes you along with the speed of a race-horse. With every sense alert, You watch for the rocks, and when you see one, you dip your paddle on one side or the other and with a quick motion draw the canoe clear of the danger. If by any chance you fail to do it, over you go, and your partner with you, and all your belongings go down-stream, and maybe you are sucked into a whirlpool, and not seen for several hours afterwards. Precisely like this is the voyage of life, for the whole of society and for every individual. The paddle which would save us from the rocks is experimental science; but in most of our canoes we put a man who has no paddle, but a Holy Book; and he casts up his eyes and murmurs words in ancient Greek and Hebrew, and now and then, when he sees an especially formidable obstruction—a war, or the gonococcus, or the I. W. W.—he casts a holy wafer upon the foaming torrent.
And mind you, it isn't as if I could save myself and you could save yourself; we are all in the same canoe, and we all go overboard together. You, perhaps, have a son who is drafted into the trenches in winter-time, and drowned in blood and mud, because in Europe the Catholic party supported militarism, and kept aristocratic criminals in control of states. Or you find yourself involved in a marital tragedy, and in order to free yourself from unendurable misery, you are obliged to go to law-courts dominated by the tradition of Paul, the Roman bureaucrat, who despised women, and regarded marriage as a means of gratifying an unclean animal desire. "It is better to marry than to burn," he said, with unmatchable brutality; and so of course those who think him a voice of God can form no conception of the dignity and grace of love, and if you want sound and wholesome sex-conventions, you will be as apt to find them among the Ashantees or the Kamchadals as among the followers of the Apostle to the Gentiles.
You go to a so-called "divorce-court," which is dominated by this Christian taboo, and exists for the purpose of barring you from a second chance at the gratification of your unclean animal desire. You are not permitted to tell your own story, for that would be "collusion;" you listen while your intimate friends recite the pitiful and shameful details of your domestic misfortune, under the cross-questioning of lawyers who have suppressed for the time whatever decent instincts they may possess, and follow blindly the details of a prescribed procedure, at the cost of all sincerity, humanity and truth. The next morning you find that the privacy guaranteed you by law has been taken from you by corrupt court officials, who have sold copies of the testimony to the newspapers, so that all the intimate details of where you slept and where your wife slept and what you saw your wife doing have been thrown out to journalistic jackals, who scream with glee as they rend the carcass of your dead love. And in the end, perhaps, you find that you have gone through this horror for nothing—the august court with its Roman Catholic judge throws out your petition, its suspicions having been excited by the fact that when you discovered your domestic tragedy, you sought to behave like a civilized person, with pity and self-restraint, instead of like a sultan in Turkey, or a basso in an Italian grand opera.
Birth Control
I assert that the control of our thinking on ethical questions by minds enslaved to tradition and priestcraft is an unmitigated curse to the race. The armory of science is full of weapons which might be used to slay the monsters of disease and vice—but these weapons are not allowed to be employed, sometimes not even to be mentioned. Consider the misery which is piling itself up in the slams of our great cities—-the degenerate, the defective, the insane, who are multiplying as never before in history. There exists a perfectly harmless and painless method of sterilizing the hopelessly unfit, so that they can not reproduce their hopeless unfitness; but religion objects to this operation, and so the law does not make use of this knowledge. There exists a simple, entirely harmless, and practically costless method of preventing conception, which would enable us to check the blind and futile fecundity of Nature, and to multiply as gods instead of as animals. Consider the festering mass of misery in the slums of our great cities; consider the millions of terrified, poverty-hounded women, bearing one half-nurtured infant after another, struggling desperately to feed and care for them, and seeing them drop into the grave as fast as they are born-until finally the mother, worn out with the Sisyphean labor, gives up and follows her misbegotten offspring. Consider how many women, in their agony and despair, make use of the methods of the primitive savage, to escape from Nature's curse of fecundity. Dr. Wm. J. Robinson has estimated that in the United States alone there are a million abortions every year; and consider that all this hideous mass of suffering—a bloody European war going on continually, unheeded by any newspaper correspondent—might be avoided by the use of a simple sterilizing formula, which we are not permitted to give! The Federation of Catholic Societies have placed a law upon the statute-books of the nation, and of all the states as well; the whole power of police and courts and jails is at the service of religious bigots, and a young girl is sent to prison and forcibly fed with a tube through the nose for telling poverty-ridden, slum-women how to keep from becoming pregnant!