No citizen, so far as I know, has yet come to Congress and said this to his Representative or Senator: “Will you please keep these present laws as they stand now? I personally consider the control of conception rightly classed as indecency. I have no knowledge on the subject, and I don’t want any. Moreover, I wish my ignorance legally perpetuated because I do not think I should be trusted with it. I need to have my Government protect me from the temptation to misuse it.” No citizen, I take it, has thus far come to you with that plea on his own behalf. The protests—and you have received some against this measure—have seemed to be wholly on the ground that access to this forbidden knowledge would be dangerous for somebody else, not for the people who themselves protest. Unless it can be proved that there are more citizens who deliberately ask to be kept in ignorance than there are those who want access to this knowledge there can be no justification for not passing this measure. In view of the proof which the birth rate gives, that the majority believe in, because they achieve family limitation, it is hardly likely that those who want to be kept in ignorance can be anywhere near a majority. Asking that others be kept in ignorance is not a valid argument for any legislation. The abuse of knowledge should be handled in some other way than attempting to maintain ignorance on the part of the population. The present laws as they stand are predicated on distrust by the Government of the mass of its citizens, which is an intolerable principle for laws in a supposed democracy. It is a principle, for instance, which no Member of Congress would care to expound, I think, let us say, in a pre-election campaign. Fancy a Senator or Congressman making a campaign address in which he would state that he deemed his constituents too weak morally to be trusted with scientific knowledge about sex matters. It is incredible. We do not ordinarily cast a wholesale insult upon our fellow citizens. We think too well of the average American to do that, and certainly no such insult should be found in our laws. _Reverend John A. Ryan_, speaking on behalf of Catholics in general said: We regard these practices about which information is proposed to be given as immoral—everlastingly, essentially, fundamentally immoral, quite as immoral as adultery, for instance, or rather a little more so, because adultery, whatever may be its vicious aspects, does not commit any outrage upon nature, nor pervert nature’s functions.