Mr. Wheatley says, as his excuse for refusing this liberation of knowledge, that Roman Catholic voters will object to paying rates and taxes if this sort of use is made of public money. The Roman Catholic is to decide what the poor Protestant woman shall know and do. This is a pretty impudent claim for a religion that was formerly disenfranchised. But the whole Labour Party in Parliament cringes at the thought of the Roman Catholic vote. As a matter of fact, there is nothing in sound Roman Catholic teaching to forbid the diffusion of physiological knowledge. There is nothing, indeed, in proper Roman Catholic teaching to prohibit the practice of birth-control under any circumstances. At any time the Vatican might commend birth-control; it is not committed in the least in that respect. But a great number of priests, like our Labour Elder Spinsters, betray an extreme excitability and malignity at the thought of any sexual life that is not mainly frustrated desire. They commit the extreme sin of presumption, they invent teachings quite unsanctioned by the Church to excuse the impulses of their own troubled and unhappy thoughts. And it is of the back-street priest and not of the eternal Church that Mr. Wheatley and his Labour colleagues as pushing politicians have chiefly to think. Now let the reader note that in this paper I have said not a word for or against the practices known as birth-control nor about anticipatory sexual hygiene. I have my own very definite opinions on these matters, but the question under discussion here is not what should or may be done, but about _what may be known_. It is the far profounder question of whether common poor people are to be treated as worthy of understanding and knowing about the things that concern their most intimate lives, or whether in the interests of cheap labour, the Roman Catholic, population statistics, army recruiting, racial jealousy, or out of regard to the unpleasant feelings and imaginations of priests and elderly spinsters, they are to be left and imprisoned in black ignorance even when they want to know. Here I find in myself a streak of surprisingly passionate democracy. I hold that every man and woman should be the conscious and instructed master of his or her own fate. It is amazing, it is dismaying, to find a Labour Minister as ready to consider the common people a breeding herd of human beasts and as ready to keep them helplessly in the dark as the extremist Tory could be. I am convinced that even as a politician he has blundered. When women fought for votes they fought for a symbol; the reality was the possession of themselves. And that is impossible without this, if not forbidden, at least impeded knowledge.