The Pivot of Civilization | Page 5

depends. The old tradition insists upon
its ancient blood-letting of war; the new knowledge carries that war to
undreamt of levels of destruction. The ancient system needed an
unrestricted breeding to meet the normal waste of life through war,
pestilence, and a multitude of hitherto unpreventable diseases. The new
knowledge sweeps away the venerable checks of pestilence and disease,
and confronts us with the congestions and explosive dangers of an
over-populated world. The old tradition demands a special prolific class
doomed to labor and subservience; the new points to mechanism and to
scientific organization as a means of escape from this immemorial
subjugation. Upon every main issue in life, there is this quarrel between
the method of submission and the method of knowledge. More and

more do men of science and intelligent people generally realize the
hopelessness of pouring new wine into old bottles. More and more
clearly do they grasp the significance of the Great Teacher's parable.
The New Civilization is saying to the Old now: ``We cannot go on
making power for you to spend upon international conflict. You must
stop waving flags and bandying insults. You must organize the Peace
of the World; you must subdue yourselves to the Federation of all
mankind. And we cannot go on giving you health, freedom,
enlargement, limitless wealth, if all our gifts to you are to be swamped
by an indiscriminate torrent of progeny. We want fewer and better
children who can be reared up to their full possibilities in
unencumbered homes, and we cannot make the social life and the
world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained
swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict upon us.'' And there at the
passionate and crucial question, this essential and fundamental question,
whether procreation is still to be a superstitious and often disastrous
mystery, undertaken in fear and ignorance, reluctantly and under the
sway of blind desires, or whether it is to become a deliberate creative
act, the two civilizations join issue now. It is a conflict from which it is
almost impossible to abstain. Our acts, our way of living, our social
tolerance, our very silences will count in this crucial decision between
the old and the new.
In a plain and lucid style without any emotional appeals, Mrs. Margaret
Sanger sets out the case of the new order against the old. There have
been several able books published recently upon the question of Birth
Control, from the point of view of a woman's personal life, and from
the point of view of married happiness, but I do not think there has
been any book as yet, popularly accessible, which presents this matter
from the point of view of the public good, and as a necessary step to the
further improvement of human life as a whole. I am inclined to think
that there has hitherto been rather too much personal emotion spent
upon this business and far too little attention given to its broader
aspects. Mrs. Sanger with her extraordinary breadth of outlook and the
real scientific quality of her mind, has now redressed the balance. She
has lifted this question from out of the warm atmosphere of troubled
domesticity in which it has hitherto been discussed, to its proper level
of a predominantly important human affair.

H.G. Wells Easton Glebe, Dunmow, Essex., England

THE PIVOT OF CIVILIZATION


CHAPTER I
: A New Truth Emerges
Be not ashamed, women, your privilege encloses the rest, and is the
exit of the rest, You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of
the soul.
Walt Whitman
This book aims to be neither the first word on the tangled problems of
human society to-day, nor the last. My aim has been to emphasize, by
the use of concrete and challenging examples and neglected facts, the
need of a new approach to individual and social problems. Its central
challenge is that civilization, in any true sense of the word, is based
upon the control and guidance of the great natural instinct of Sex.
Mastery of this force is possible only through the instrument of Birth
Control.
It may be objected that in the following pages I have rushed in where
academic scholars have feared to tread, and that as an active
propagandist I am lacking in the scholarship and documentary
preparation to undertake such a stupendous task. My only defense is
that, from my point of view at least, too many are already studying and
investigating social problems from without, with a sort of Olympian
detachment. And on the other hand, too few of those who are engaged
in this endless war for human betterment have found the time to give to
the world those truths not always hidden but practically unquarried,
which may be secured