burden of unspeakable suffering both on his contemporaries and on his offspring, whilst, on the other hand, means for preventing a birth are offered for sale in every chemist’s shop, and even by street hawkers, even when the parents are perfectly healthy. In this orderly latter-day State—as those who defend it assert—in this brave world of nationalist bourgeois, prevention of fecundity in sufferers from syphilis, tuberculosis, and hereditary diseases, cripples and cretins, counts as a crime, whereas what is in practice a cessation of fecun¬ dity in millions of our best people is not regarded as an evil or an offence against the morals of this sancti¬ monious society ; it is instead a sop to its short-sighted slackness of thought. For if it were otherwise, they would have to rack their brains and consider how to make provision for nourishing and conserving the healthy representatives of our nation, who should perform a similar service for the benefit of generations to come.
How greatly lacking in ideals and honour is this whole system ! No one is making an effort to cultivate what is best for the sake of posterity, but things are let go on just as they are going now.
It is the duty of the National State to recover all MY STRUGGLE *59 that is being let drop now on all sides. It must put the race in the central position in the general life of the nation and see to its being kept pure. It must declare childhood to be the most precious possession of the nation. It must see to it that only the healthy beget children—that it is nothing but disgraceful for persons diseased or with personal disabilities to send children into the world, but, on the other hand, an honourable action to refrain from doing so. On the other hand, it must be considered a reproach to deprive the nation of healthy children. The State must place the most modern medical aids at the service of these accepted facts. It must declare unfit to beget children anyone who is clearly diseased or has hereditary dis¬ abilities, and back it up with action. It must also see that the fruitfulness of a healthy woman is not blocked by the damnable finance of a regime which makes the blessing of children into a curse for the parents.