An American writer has well said: “If there is one social phenomenon which human ingenuity ought to bring completely under the control of the will, it is the phenomenon of procreation.” “Just as everyone is his own judge of how much he shall eat and drink, of what commodities he wants to render life enjoyable, so everyone should be his own judge of how large a family he desires, and should have power in the same degree to leave off when the requisite number is reached.” (Lester F. Ward. _Dynamic Sociology_, vol. 2, p. 465.) The Bible Communists of Oneida Creek practised voluntary control over the propagative function during thirty years with marked success. The number of births was regulated in accordance with the wishes of the community, and such careful attention was paid to the laws of heredity that no children of defective organisms or unsound constitutions were born. Were man universally intelligent and morally self-controlled, the knowledge of physiological facts and of invention applied to those facts would suffice to create general spontaneous limitation of the birth-rate and hygienic propagation of species. But one has only to think of the battered humanity in the back slums of every great city—the physical, mental and moral weaklings of our degraded populace—to realize that it is fantastic folly to expect individual intelligence under vicious and utterly depressing conditions, to counteract habit and save society from a rising tide of overwhelming numbers, the product of random pregnancy and sportive chance. It cannot be a solution nor even a relief to the population difficulty that the intelligent—comparatively few—should limit their families so long as the masses refuse or fail to limit theirs. When society, becoming fully alive to the imminent danger of a too rapid birth-rate solves the population and social problems combined—in the only way possible—it will facilitate and promote the use of scientific checks to conception, and, if necessary, exact their adoption by some legislative device. (See _Social Control of the Birth-rate_, by G. A. Gaskell.)