When this is put down on paper, I feel as though it would be ridiculous to begin to point out the monstrous cruelty and the monstrous folly of such an action as that doctor’s. Yet such action was not isolated, it did not depend on one man’s warped conceptions of loyalty to another unknown man, “the husband.” Since the war a public realization of the racial destructiveness of such diseases has been increased and the woman and her husband would to-day be more likely to receive medical treatment. But even to-day if a mother is truly told that there is “something wrong with her man,” would she also certainly be told how in wise and healthy fashion she can herself supplement what his criminal negligence neglected? If a husband is careless and callous a woman must save herself and the community from the waste and the misery of irretrievably doomed births. She will indeed be an exceptionally lucky woman if she to-day finds in public hospitals doctors to whom she could turn for knowledge how _best_ to control conception, though such knowledge is not only essential to her private well-being, but essential to her in the fulfilment of her duties as a citizen. This little incident is but one illustration of many aspects of the subject. It is not only _disease_ which necessitates restraint on parenthood. No healthy woman can bear a long series of infants in rapid succession without loss both to them and to herself. This is discussed in my _Wise Parenthood_. Any one who thinks will see clearly that no civilized country, not even the richest in the world, can afford babies’ coffins. Though they are smaller than grown-up people’s they are more costly, for they are waste and nothing but waste. A grown-up individual, man or woman, has, we hope at any rate, given some return to the community in work or in ideas for all that his life has cost. But the infant’s death is sheer unmitigated waste. If all the mothers who realize this and who feel their need for the best help that science can give them, would insist and persist in their enquiries for a knowledge of the most reliable results of modern science, they would in the end succeed in getting them. There is enough knowledge now in the world for the race to transform itself in a couple of generations. CHAPTER XX The Creation of a New and Irradiated Race Ah, Love! could thou and I with fate conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits--and then Remould it nearer to the Heart’s desire. OMAR KHAYYAM. On parents’ love for the helpless child depends the existence of our race. Human parenthood necessitates not only the desire for offspring, but the willing care of them during the long years while they are helpless and dependent. Were this desire and willingness not deeply implanted in us our race would become extinct, as in some strange way, the higher type of ancient Greeks vanished from the world.