To expect aid or even intelligent understanding of birth control from the typical Albany politician; to be disappointed because of the ignorance of these so-called “legislators”; to be discouraged because of their failure to remove the coercive and criminally obscene insult to American womanhood from the statute books[3]—this would be to succumb to emotion rather than to profit by the invaluable knowledge we have gained from our experience at Albany. The great fact is this. We can expect nothing from the politician of today. If we must use the weapon of politics to further the progress of birth control, it must be the politics created by ourselves. When the first birth control clinic in America was declared a “public nuisance” by the courts, we were advised by well-meaning friends that the legal way, the political way, the legislative way, was the only safe and sane method of propaganda. This has now been put to the test. And we discover that the successful politician is not only mentally unable to understand the aim of birth control, but moreover he himself is the very product of those sinister forces we are aiming to eradicate from human society. Your successful politician is the demagogue who knows the best tricks to catch the greatest number of votes. He is the hypnotist of great, docile, submissive, sheep-like majorities. He is interested in number, not intelligence. Therefore to expect such masters, who by hook or crook, ride roughshod into public office or slide into seats of the State Legislature to understand or support a program which aims at the creation of self-reliant, self-governing,[4] independent men and women, would be to neglect one of the most important factors among the resources of our opponents. But we did expect something more among men elected to public office than the embarrassed giggle of the adolescent, the cynical indecency of the gangster, in the consideration of a serious sexual and social problem. Perhaps, moreover, we failed to take into consideration the vast power wielded today by the politician in control and administration of the public charities, hospitals, and “correctional” institutions for the support and maintenance of the victims of compulsory motherhood. “Our politicians today profit from human misery. They have an interest, direct or indirect, in the production through uncontrolled fecundity, of the unfit, the underfed, the feebleminded and the incurably diseased. Their interest, financially, is in the increase of our institution populations, with their insistent demands for appropriations from the City and State. Most eugenists dub the victims of our legal and social barbarism “the unfit.” The victims are not the “unfit” but these blind leaders of the blind—the politician, the profiteer, the war-making patriot, the criminal moralist, who is urging men and women to “increase and multiply.”