Among the arguments used by those in favor of spreading contraceptive information is that large families keep the laboring classes down to low living standards, and it would be better for those families and the state that these children were not born. Large families as such do not keep the laboring classes down to low standards of living; bad legislation which allows profiteering, which criminally permits extortion in the prices of food, clothing, in taxes, rents, the cost of coal, and the like, which does not force employers to give laborers an honest price for labor, or check the extortions of monopolists, and a hundred similar economic deeds of injustice, together with a parental shiftlessness, unthrift, alcoholism, lack of education through neglect, and so on indefinitely, are the causes. Big families have more wages than small families, and as a rule they do better than the small families when the children are old enough to work. Society is at fault, not the size of the family; the active and the passive selfish are at fault, not the babies; the liars, hypocrites, and the buttoned pockets are at fault, not the holy innocents; the professional meddlers in the business of better folk are the nuisance, not the blessed children, who are the brightest things in this darkened world until we spoil them, and make them like ourselves instead of better. One decent mother is worth a hundred shirkers who raise nothing but lap dogs. The children of large families, the birth controllers say, are more afflicted by infectious diseases than those of small families. I was for years in charge of the infectious diseases Bureau of the Washington Health Department, and I have had ample opportunity here and in Europe to study this matter. Large families in proper economic positions are not different from small families as regards the infectious diseases. These diseases spread among the poor because the houses of the poor are commonly owned by land sharks and politicians who laugh at health regulations; our health departments can not get enough money away from the political ringleaders in power to employ capable sanitary experts; our laws for the regulation of medical practice and education are a disgrace to our civilization, and every town is swarming with quacks who can not recognize even smallpox when they see it. The fault here is in ourselves not in the large families. Control the professional politicians and quacks and there will be no occasion for foolish talk about birth control.