If, above all, it were once clearly understood, that it was not disreputable for married persons to avail themselves of such precautionary means as would, without being injurious to health, or destructive of female delicacy, prevent conception, a sufficient check might at once be given to the increase of population beyond the means of subsistence; vice and misery, to a prodigious extent, might be removed from society, and the object of Mr. Malthus, Mr. Godwin, and of every philanthropic person, be promoted. Place had educated himself on Adam Smith, Locke, Hume, Thomas Paine, and Burke. To his remarkable library came many notable thinkers and men of letters. Among them was Robert Owen, the textile industrialist, who, in his _Moral Physiology_, offered openly a method of contraception: I sit down to write a little treatise, which will subject me to abuse from the self-righteous, to misrepresentation from the hypocritical, and to reproach even from the honestly prejudiced. He spoke to young men and women who still believed in virtue and happiness. “A human being is a puppet, a slave, if his ignorance is to be the safeguard of his virtue.” In reply to the accusation that coitus interruptus was unnatural, he pointed out that the thwarting of any human wish or impulse might be so termed. “If this trifling restraint is to be called unnatural, what shall be said of celibacy?” Owen in his youth had been impressed by the sufferings of the working classes, and, in a first effort to lighten the burden of his employees, had instituted many reforms in the New Lanark Mills, himself prospering materially in so doing; he was less successful when he emigrated to the United States and at New Harmony, Indiana, established a short-lived communal colony. However, his coming to America had at least one important result. His book influenced Doctor Charles Knowlton of Boston to write a tract entitled _Fruits of Philosophy_ in which he recommended a chemical formula and other methods to prevent conception. I had not found a trace of this in my previous research, even in Boston where it had been published. Knowlton’s reaffirmation of the desirability both from a political and social point of view for mankind to be able to limit at will the number of offspring without sacrificing the attendant gratification of the reproductive instinct, would have been little noticed had it not been for the repercussion in England forty years later. During the early Victorian uprush of industrialism a man’s children had been breadwinners, and family limitation had naturally lapsed. But when humanitarian legislation had begun to rescue children from factories, the population specter had shown itself once more.