An impressive and tragic poster by Käthe Kollwitz was displayed on various corners. It showed a woman with head thrown back, eyes closed, arms crossed over breast, and was captioned simply, “Waiting.” The human figures you saw on the streets looked out of eyes dried by suffering and deepened by hunger. They had no faith, no hope, no philosophy; they were resigned to love or hatred, peace or war, a living death or a sudden end. Throughout Europe, governments were clamoring for bigger populations; France was offering bonuses for large families. “Our babies are dying; give us more babies.” Among European labor groups only the syndicalists of France had recognized excessive population as detrimental to the working classes. The deficiency in Germany of two million lives sacrificed in the War had been made up by the thousands returned from Alsace-Lorraine, from the former province of Posen, and the deportees from England, France, and Italy. There were not nearly enough positions to go round. Yet the nationalists, who had tried to cover the bitter pill of imperialistic ambitions with a sugar-coating of patriotism, still estimated the world in terms of numerical greatness and women as mere machines in the cradle competition of human production. Even the German Socialists, following in the footsteps of Marx, opposed Malthusianism vigorously in and out of season. A Neo-Malthusian congress had been held in Dresden in 1912, but the movement then organized by Maria Stritt had practically gone out of existence and its place taken by a more popular demand for the right to abortion. For a single year the statistics of Berlin indicated that out of forty-four thousand known pregnancies twenty-three thousand were terminated by this means, though it was technically illegal. Women were now campaigning for a bill before the Reichstag to permit operations to be performed lawfully in hospitals, where fatalities could be reduced by proper sanitary care. Not one of those with whom I talked believed in abortion as a practice; it was the principle for which they were standing. They were resolved to have no more babies for cannon fodder, nor until they could rear them properly. Most of the doctors whom I interviewed said that what Germany needed was children and lots of them. I asked one if the medical profession, as a whole, were doing anything to prevent entrance into the world of those children whose backs were so weak that they could never sit up straight, whose bones were too soft to hold the weight of their bodies. He answered abruptly, “By aborting the mothers we are doing our best to cope with conditions as we find them. It is not our work to change them.”