Читать книгу Debate on birth control. Margaret Sanger and Winter Russell - Margaret Sanger - Страница 4

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Mr. Russell: Ladies and gentlemen. I am very glad to have the opportunity of speaking to you this afternoon, and I may say at the outset that it is obvious that my adversary and I agree upon one thing, and that is that we are discussing what is absolutely the most vital question before the American people today. (Applause.) We are absolutely in accord on that, and we are just as far opposed in our method of approach as it is possibly probable to be.

I want to say at the outset that we are going to deal—or I am, and I assume my adversary is, too—with ideals and principles and not with persons. I want you to realize that I consider myself speaking—and I trust reverently—on the most important subject that I have ever advocated.

I heard one of the greatest psychologists this country has ever produced who said “When you conceive of the mere handful of people that inhabit all the globe, and you think of the vast river of humanity that is flowing on this planet, and you think of the billions of unborn, you wonder if man sometimes transcends the impossible and thinks and considers the unborn as God himself,” and I believe today I am speaking in behalf of the great unborn—those who are being murdered by the thousands, if not millions, in a manner that far transcends the method of our warfare.

Now, I said that we are going to speak of ideals and principles and not of persons. It is very difficult oftentimes not to attack a person or hurt his feelings when you characterize the principle of an act, and you sometimes have to be assailing a person. I hope and I try to love every human being on the face of the earth. There are principles and ideals I abominate and abhor with every drop of blood and feeling that I have. I never want that abhorrence of the principle or ideal of the person to adhere to that person.

I heard a minister the other day speaking of the French and Germans who were having some conferences, and he was asked “did they still hate one another?” and he said they did not hate one another because they broke bread together and you could not hate a person with whom you have broken bread, and he could not hate anybody that he knew.

I hate and abominate the principles that I am fighting, but I trust that you will take the sting, fumigate it, take the anti-toxin, if you will, because I don’t want any allusions to personality to be taken from any of the statements that I make.

Another thing I want to say about my opponent, and I hope she will say the same about me, is that I want to bow in sincere respect and admiration for what I conceive to be her utter and absolute sincerity, and to her devotion to the cause which she advocates. I question that in no degree. I hope she will give me the same consideration.

We are going to deal with these principles. I am not going to concern myself much with authorities. I suppose she can quote from Dr. Robinson and apparently Dr. Knopf (he says he isn’t an authority,) and others as authorities. I could quote from Lamb and Roosevelt and the Bible—the great religions of the earth—scriptural authority that comes from the very depths of the spiritual, and what I believe to be the very mouth of God itself—of Nature—if you do not like to admit the existence of Providence.

I am not concerned with Scripture or authorities. I am going to deal with this question with what I believe are the cold, inevitable facts of life as we know them, and meet them every day.

Now I am going to admit in the first place that there are many families with too many children. It would be foolish to gainsay that. They are a burden to the mother. They are a hardship to the father who tries to provide for them. They make conditions unfair and unjust for the other children. The question is, and I hope that she will admit it also, that there are thousands of homes in the United States of America that are too lacking in children—although I think she has once stated that the most immoral thing a person can do is to bring a large family into the world—so we have thought, for example—and the question is, how are we going to meet it?

I propose that we should meet this problem by the measure of self-control. I believe by that means that we can solve the problem thusly, and at the same time we gain one of the greatest advantages that you can possibly win on the face of the earth. Sex control is the best path to self-control and to self-discipline. It is the key to wisdom. It is the key to power. It is the key to intellectual and mental development; indeed, she has once stated that only those people who are mentally developed are capable of self-control and I want to say that they got a large measure of their mental development by self-control. She is looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

And so we come to this method. I want as another part of my platform upon which I am to stand to say that I conceive and hold marriage to be more than physical. It is not a purely sensual relationship. It borders on the aesthetic, spiritual, mental, and modern aspects of life, and when you try to take the physical by itself you find a condition of naked sensuality, which is disastrous in the extreme.

My contentions are these: In the first place, fundamentally, virtually, universally, infinitely from every point of view; it is vicious, it is false from every scientific construction that you can possibly conceive of; it is one of the most vitiating things that you can conceive of from every point of philosophy, and physiology and psychology—in other words that you take the law of compensation and try to solve it. It is false from every point of view—from the practical point of view.

I believe it is disastrous intellectually, mentally, and spiritually. It is disastrous and perpetrates a great wrong upon the unborn millions who are waiting for entrance upon this great amphitheatre of life. It is disastrous physically, mentally, and spiritually upon the future. It is disastrous to the same degree upon the people who practice it—husbands and wives who resort to these measures and then I hold that it perpetrates the greatest crime of all the ages, namely, race suicide.

Let me approach the first method, and that is this question of whether it is right from the point of view of the philosophy of man, if you will, and I want you to consider it simply from the practical living point of view. I want to lay down this proposition—it is that you can’t have pleasure in this world without paying for it—that there are certain laws that sweep through the entire universe from the furtherest star to the tiniest atom and molecule that you can find in existence.

I am a member of the bar of the State of New York. I trust that I have due regard and respect for the statutes, the constitution and the laws of this great city, state and nation. But I hold them as the veriest trash when they come up against the laws of Nature. The laws of Nature cannot be revised. They cannot be repealed. There is no power in this whole universe that can change these laws and you have to deal with that.

That means you can’t get pleasure without paying for it. Nature is inexorable in bringing about her retribution. It does not need any balance book. You can never embezzle. You can’t cheat. You can’t get away from it.

Emerson has said that “the ingenuity of man has always been dedicated to the solution of one problem—how to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the sensual bright from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral fair—that is again to contrive to cut clean off this upper surface so thin as to leave it bottomless to get a one end without an other end. The soul says eat, the body would feast. The soul says, ‘The man and woman shall be one flesh and one soul.’ The body would join the flesh only.”

“All things are double, one against another,” continued Emerson. “Tit for tat. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, blood for blood, measure for measure, love for love. Give it and it shall be given you. He that watereth shall be watered himself. What will you have, quoth God, pay for it and take it. Nothing ventured, nothing have. Thou shalt be paid exactly for what thou hast done, no more, no less. Who doth not work, doth not eat. Harm watch, harm catch. Curses always recoil on the head of him who imprecates them. If you chain a slave, one end chains you. Bad counsel confounds the adviser. The devil is an ass.”

You must pay at last your own debt. Those are the laws. Now we recognize it in physics. Energy cannot be annihilated. Birth control says “yes” you shall pay the price. You can annihilate that energy and drink from the cup of pleasure, but you don’t take the responsibility—the duty and the care. You recognize it in physics. You recognize it in chemistry, in every law of life. When Ponzi in Boston said, “I will give you 50 percent”—the world laughed because it can’t be done. Birth control advocates like the Ponzis say they will give you 50 percent and 100 percent on your investment, but it can’t be done. It is frenzied finance. It is along the lines of the people who are alchemists, who think they can turn the baser metals into gold. It is an age-long dream. It is a belief that has been held from the beginning of time. That thing cannot be done. That is the law of life—of God—that you have to pay.

And so that is the thing you are confronted with. I don’t say that you don’t seem to gain, but for every gain you seem to grasp you have lost the life of it. He who does not work shall not eat. The trouble is that we are bound by the fetish of money, of gold, and lose sight. In other words we have eyes literally that see not, and ears that hear not.

And that is the thing that we must consider. So I want you to have in mind, that by the very law of life, the very theory of science of our being, we have to pay, and if we take that, if we try to grasp that we are going to pay the penalty. In my next opportunity to address you I shall take up that to show you how we pay. (Applause.)