The work of the birth control movement was here laid down in terms of “fight”; bitterness and tyranny were predicted; the picture of a long struggle was outlined. These were the days when Mrs. Sanger at her many meetings was saying, “I have dedicated my life to this fight.” The newspaper headlines were quick to reflect the tone of this kind of thought. It unconsciously became more or less the habit of mind of the thousands who read the newspapers, particularly of those whose reading was limited mostly to headlines. And it was not at all unnatural that it also became the view-point of many of those who were active in the movement. For, sad but true, the world not only “loves a lover,” but loves a fight. The instinct to dramatize life is so compelling and so universal that it often leads to the overstating and even mis-stating of a situation, and to action that produces excitement and complication, which tends to postpone rather than facilitate a solution. The leaders of movements as well as play-wrights are sometimes not immune to the temptation to make a four act play out of a one act plot. To appeal for preparations for a “long-fight” against the tyranny of the “man-made laws” before the law-makers had been so much as asked specifically to change the laws would seem to be not only the cart before the horse, but a fairly sure way of prejudicing the case in advance in the minds of the law-makers. And this tendency was strengthened by the fact that so much was read into the retention of these old Comstock laws that was not really there. Granted that the attitude of legislators on this subject has warranted severe criticism, ever since 1919, when it was first put squarely up to Congress to do the thing that was fundamentally needed, it was simply “seein’ things” in 1917 before any legislative effort had been made at all, except the feeblest sort of a beginning in New York legislature to describe the retention of the Comstock laws, as evidence of the “forces of oppression” which were “organizing their resistance and preparing their mighty engines of repression to stop the march of progress,” and to predict that “all the methods known to tyranny will be used to force the people back into the darkness from which they are striving to emerge.”