Just as human beings through wrong religious beliefs torture one another, and wreck their lives and happiness; just as through wrong eating and other physical habits they make disease and misery for themselves; just so they suffer and perish for lack of the most elementary knowledge concerning the sex relationship. The difference is that in the field of religious ideas it is now permissible to impart the truth one possesses. If I tell you there is no devil, and that believing this will not cause you to suffer in an eternity of sulphur and brimstone, no one will be able to burn me at the stake, even though he might like to do so. If I advise you that it is not harmful to eat beefsteak on Friday, or to eat thoroughly cooked pork any day of the week, neither the archbishops nor the rabbis nor the vegetarians will be able to lock me in a dungeon. But if I should impart to you the simplest and most necessary bit of knowledge concerning the facts of your sex life--things which every man and woman must know if we are to stop breeding imbecility and degeneracy in the world--then I should be liable, under federal statutes, to pay a fine of $5,000, and to serve a term of five years in a federal penitentiary. Scarcely a week passes that I do not receive a letter from someone asking for information about such matters; but I dare not answer the letters, because I know there are agencies, maintained and paid by religious superstition, employing spies to trap people into the breaking of this law. I shall tell you here as much as I am permitted to tell, in the simplest language and the most honest spirit. I believe that human beings are meant to be happy on this earth, and to avoid misery and disease. I believe that they are given the powers of intelligence in order to seek the ways of happiness, and I believe that it is a worthy work to give them the knowledge they need in order to find happiness.