anything that I can to dissuade men dependent upon them had multiplied

from engaging in it.

I first saw your church edifice about 1930. At that time, the notion of my standing here, with my bare face hanging out, and saying the things that I'm saying would have been fantastic. The thing that has made the difference is a growing concern among thoughtful people with the population explosion. The crisis of the crowd has been the event of the greatest importance to the world that has occurred in my lifetime--and I was born in 1900. The two big wars that I lived through have been mere incidents of that crowdedness. Medication has been able to cope, extraordinarily in the last century, with many diseases that used to offset human fecundity. People are being born today as they were never born before.

Competition for the means of subsistence and for the good things of life has sharpened measuralbly in my time. Life has become fearfully insecure. A hundred years ago a man scorned to spend his whole life as somebody else's hired man: today, getting a life-long hired-man status is the preoccupation of every college student. Realization of the appalling difficulty of being self-sustaining has impelled an increasing number of citizens to turn wistfully in the direction of one sort or other of collectivism. Seeing that he can't support as many women as he can marry and as many children as he can breed, a man demands that somebody else help him.

And yet, when you mention the population explosion to your neighbor he is liable to say, "I didn't hear anything."

Pressure of population has, of course, been with us for a long time. In the time of Hammurabi, king of Babyon, who flourished about 1900 b.c., we read in the Bible's first book, Genesis, chapter 13, verses 5 to 11, how men's cattle and the tribesmen

until strife occurred; and similar cases of overloaded land can be found all through history.

Historically, half-a-dozen measures have been taken to cope with redundant people. You know what those measures are; but it may be useful if we run through some of the expedients on the list.

Infanticide has always been common. Anciently it phased into exposure, which is worse than the infliction of a quick and comparatively painless death. Today's infanticide masquerades as neglect or as child abuse; and we may say fairly that the laws promote it. Children's fatal neglect and their outright murder occur all over the country all of the time. Laws there are that are imagined to punish parents' mistreatment of their children, but those laws are a dead letter. Consistently, when infanticide has been clearly proved against parents, it is punished far more lightly than is other murder. I don't think an American parent has ever suffered the death penalty for murdering his child.

Children often get a dirty deal from their parents and from the law in another way. You can miseducate your child and keep him in ignorance about as badly as you like, and hardly anybody can stop you. The law is extremely solicitous to keep anybody from dispelling your child's ignorance if you want that ignorance maintained. Young people hunger and thirst for knowledge, especially for knowledge about sex. That is their dire needthe knowledge, I mean, not necessarily the sexual expression.

Abortion is another measure that has been tried in the effort to thin out the surfeit of people. Abortion is practiced all over the world, but it does not work well, ever. It involves great inconvenience, expense, suffering and danger. As you look at certain persons, the notion strikes you that their moth-

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