"For the more you 'ave known o' the others The less will you settle to one." Very few people, I suppose, are so foolish as to believe that man is by nature either a chaste or a constant animal, and indeed in this respect he appears to his disadvantage when compared with certain varieties of birds, which are _by nature_ constant to each other. On the other hand, millions of people believe that man is able to overcome his animal nature; and for the past two thousand years the civilised races of the world have held that this is a goal towards which mankind should strive. In the opinion of Christendom chastity and marriage are both morally good, but, according to the philosophy of our Neo-Malthusian author, they are morally evil. "Chastity, or complete sexual abstinence, so far from being a virtue, is invariably a great natural sin" (p. 162). Is it not obvious that to the writers of such passages love is synonymous with animalism, with lust? It is by no means necessary to go to saints or to moralists for a refutation of this Neo-Malthusian philosophy. Does any decent ordinary man or woman agree with it? Ask the man in the street. Turn the pages of our literature. Refer to Chaucer or Spenser, to Shakespeare or Milton, refer to Fielding or Burns or Scott or Tennyson. Some of these men were very imperfect; but they all knew the difference between lust and love; and it is because they can tell us at least something of that which is precious, enduring, ethereal, and divine in love that we read their pages and honour their names. Not one of these men could have written the following sentence: "Marriage distracts our attention from the real sexual duties, and this is one of its worst effects" (p. 366). Now it is certain that if "the real sexual duties" are represented by promiscuous fornication, then both marriage and chastity are evil things. That philosophy is very old. From time immemorial--it has been advocated by one of the most powerful intelligences in the universe. Such is the soil on which the Neo-Malthusian fungus has grown--a soil that would rot the foundations of Europe. [Footnote 66: _The Lancet_, May 14, 1921, p. 1024] [Footnote 67: _British Medical Journal_, 1921, vol. ii, p. 93.] [Footnote 68: _The Small Family System_, 2nd edit., p. 2.] [Footnote 69: _Supplement to The British Medical Journal_, March 18, 1905, p. 110.] [Footnote 70: _Common Sense on the Population Question_, by Teresa Billington-Greig, p. 4. Published by the Malthusian League.] [Footnote 71: _Medico-Legal Society_, July 7, 1921.] [Footnote 72: _Suppl. Qu_. 49, Art. 6: "_Voluptates meretricias vir in uxore quoerit quando nihil aliud in ea attendit quam quod in meretrice attenderet_" (A husband seeks from his wife harlot pleasures when he asks from her only what he might ask from a harlot). Quoted by the Rev. Vincent McNabb, O.P., _The Catholic Gazette_, September 1921, p. 195.]