Echoes of my visit to Japan had permeated throughout the colony of Japanese, who aimed to give me an extra-cordial welcome, trying their best to make up for what they thought had been an unpleasant experience in their country. I had not realized the power of ancient feudalism over the Japanese woman until I met her away from home, where she blossomed into an intelligent, outspoken human being. I noticed she expressed herself much more frankly in the presence of men, but underneath the conversation I often sensed a propaganda which had resulted in deep prejudice; from the horrible stories you heard of the savagery of the Chinese you received the impression all were cannibals. Since my plans to include China in my itinerary had been made so late, I had few letters of introduction there. Consequently, to my regret I did not see many Chinese women. I had not expected to do much speaking and had had very little press in Peking. Dr. Hu-Shih, however, had arranged for me to meet about fifteen newspaper men and women in Shanghai. We sipped our tea, nibbled our cakes, and then they began to ask questions, taking down the answers with the utmost care. They wanted to set forth the pros and cons of birth control in their own vernacular, but unfortunately could not reach the illiterate masses. They asked me to speak at the Family Reformation Association, an organization which was under missionary auspices. The rules were no smoking, no drinking, no gambling. Its membership, therefore, remained small. The young woman who interpreted paragraph by paragraph had just returned from America, but did not prove the expert her traveling had indicated. The chairman said I was to give both theory and practice, but when I came to the latter my translator’s courage took flight entirely. She whispered, “I’ll get a doctor to say that.” I gave up and switched to something simpler. My audience, however, knew without her assistance what I had been trying to convey, and was much diverted by her predicament. Of all lands China needed knowledge of how to control her numbers; the incessant fertility of her millions spread like a plague. Well-wishing foreigners who had gone there with their own moral codes to save her babies from infanticide, her people from pestilence, had actually increased her problem. To contribute to famine funds and the support of missions was like trying to sweep back the sea with a broom. China represented the final act in an international tragedy of overpopulation, seeming to prove that the eminence of a country could not be measured by numbers any more than by industrial expansion, large standing armies, or invincible navies. If its sons and daughters left for the generations to come a record of immortal poetry, art, and philosophy, then it was a great nation and had attained the only immortality worth striving for. But China, once the fountainhead of wisdom, had been brought to the dust by superabundant breeding.