It leaves the control of conception still classed with obscenity but makes the information or means mailable under certain limitations, or as the bill puts it, makes them “not non-mailable.” The Cummins-Vaile bill entirely removes the subject, per se, from all legal connections with obscenity. The article in the Birth Control Review announcing the bill makes no mention of the fact that the proposed new bill leaves the subject still classed with indecency. Great emphasis is laid upon the advantages of making the doctors free to give the information, but nothing is said about the fact that while the bill would permit the doctor to dispense the obscene information without penalty, the person who received it could not send that same information to anyone else without being criminally indecent. This is frankly a “doctors only” bill of a most extreme sort, as it would not only render illegal for circulation all contraceptive information or means except such as were obtained personally from a physician or on his direct prescription, but would create a complete medical monopoly of the dispensing of the information; would give doctors an economic privilege denied to anyone else; would treat this one phase of science as no other is treated, that is, make it inaccessible to the public, except as doled out via a doctor’s prescription, as if the need for the knowledge were a disease. It is the greatest possible contrast to the Cummins-Vaile Bill which requires medical certification of methods, but creates no medical monopoly to teach or sell, and which frees this item of science so it can take its place in the world of science, like any other phase of hygiene. The editor of the Birth Control Review sets forth the reasons for preferring fences to freedom as follows: The American Birth Control League, from its inception, has set itself against the indiscriminate dissemination of so-called Birth Control information. It holds that responsible controlled motherhood can only be attained if women first receive practical scientific education in the means of Birth Control. Scientific education implies the individual treatment of each woman according to her physiological needs, and this is impossible if she depends on advertisements or printed matter which may or may not have been written with a thorough knowledge of anatomy and physiology, of the biological factors in conception, and of the nature and action of drugs and medicines. The implication seems to be that the repeal of the Federal ban would release _only_ unreliable information, whereas it would likewise release all the best and most authoritative information. All knowledge has to compete with ignorance, and no laws can prevent the struggle. What knowledge needs is an open field in which to make its effort to overcome ignorance.