It was the crown of blessings in Biblical times; and it is
the crown of blessings now. The greatest of all curses is the curse of
sterility, and the severest of all condemnations should be that
visited upon wilful sterility. The first essential in any civilization
is that the man and the woman shall be father and mother of healthy
children, so that the race shall increase and not decrease. If this is
not so, if through no fault of the society there is failure to
increase, it is a great misfortune. If the failure is due to
deliberate and wilful fault, then it is not merely a misfortune, it is
one of those crimes of ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from
pain and effort and risk, which in the long run Nature punishes more
heavily than any other. If we of the great republics, if we, the free
people who claim to have emancipated ourselves from the thraldom of
wrong and error, bring down on our heads the curse that comes upon
the wilfully barren, then it will be an idle waste of breath to
prattle of our achievements, to boast of all that we have done. No
refinement of life, no delicacy of taste, no material progress, no
sordid heaping up of riches, no sensuous development of art and
literature, can in any way compensate for the loss of the great
fundamental virtues; and of these great fundamental virtues, the
greatest is the race's power to perpetuate the race.
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