The first of these we have considered at some length. A part of the process of social revolution is personal conversion; the giving up by every individual of the worldly ideal, the surrender of luxury and self-indulgence, the consecrating of one's life to self education and the cause of social justice. And do not think that that is an easy thing, or an unimportant thing, a thing to be taken for granted. On the contrary, it is something that most of us have to struggle with at every hour of our lives, because respect for property and worldly conventions has become one of our deepest instincts; our whole society is poisoned with it, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the people I have known in my life who have completely escaped from it. It is not merely a question of refusing to marry except for love, it is a question of refusing to love except for honest and worthy qualities. It is a question of saving our children from the damnable forces of snobbery, which lay siege to their young minds and destroy the best impulses of their hearts, while we in our blindness are still thinking of them as babies. Of the other three topics that I have suggested, I begin with birth control, because it is the most fundamental and most important. Without birth control there can be no freedom, no happiness, no permanence in love, and there can be no mastery of life. Birth control is one of the great fundamental achievements of the human reason, as important to the life of mankind as the discovery of fire or the invention of printing. Birth control is the deliverance of womankind, and therefore of mankind also, from the blind and insane fecundity of nature, which created us animals, and would keep us animals forever if we did not rebel.