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THE first thing to be noted about collegians is not the difference between them and the rest of society, but their extraordinary likeness to it. They are usually quite normal human beings, between the ages of 18 and 25, more or less earnestly studying about themselves and the world. Probably seven eighths of all undergraduates are children of their time, accepting without question current opinions, prejudices, standards. All youths are conservative, collegiate youths not excepted. They are shy, self-conscious, overmodest, fearful of being considered eccentric. The few with really questioning minds are so rare that the discovery of one of them is an event in the college professor's year.

The average undergraduate is, in other words, a creature of the general public opinion of his time, an intensely conformist person, a moral young man. For what are morals? Morality means conformity to whatever is considered socially useful in the group to which the individual happens to belong-any who find this definition shocking are respectfully referred to a good dictionary. To be moral is to do what one's social group considers necessary for common welfare. It is moral for a Turk to have three wives at once; moral for a citizen of Nevada to have three wives seriatim; immoral for a monk to have any wives at all. All depends on the group to which one belongs.

Public opinion presses in upon the colleges with a force which most of the students never think of resisting. Does the collegian disregard the Volstead Act? He does it, not because he is in revolt, but because he wishes to conform to

current middle-class custom. His ideas of purity he derives from conversations, books, magazines, prepared not for him but for the world of which he is a part. Is he complacent and self-centered? Yes, but no more than the people around him. Does he cheat in examinations and defend the practice? He learns it from the worship of success at any price which characterizes our entire age. In short, for better or worse, he is a moral young man. It is this very morality which interferes with his apprehension of what the Christian religion is all about.

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What is the Christian Church? usual undergraduate has only the vaguest idea, and that erroneous. He thinks what almost everybody else thinks. To some students the Church means a collection of long-faced persons who anemically admire one another. To others it is something behind the Antisaloon League. To a third group it seems to be a loose society of those who are interested in listening, semioccasionally, in an atmosphere of intense respectability, to discussions of the good, the true, the beautiful, phrased with sufficient vagueness to disturb nobody. But to an even larger group the Church is supposed to be a collection of puritanical joy killers who have, for some unexplained reason, retained into this enlightened age a considerable group of antiquated personal inhibitions.

Ordinarily the collegian cannot help observing that the standards of the Church are no longer the standards of society about him. Usually he jumps to the easy conclusion that the difference between the two codes of ethics is that the Church's ethics are outworn and outmoded. Ergo, the teachings of the

Church as to conduct seem to him, at the best, negligible; at the worst, a positive hindrance to reasonable progress.

Because he does not understand that the Christian Church involves a life lived for supernatural ends, admittedly different from those of the world at large, he almost always fails to understand the real basis for Christian morals. He ought to be helped to see that the aim of the two codes are different. The good offered by the world of our day is a good limited essentially to a life soon to end in death. It consists chiefly in food, shelter, opportunity for procreation, distraction from too probing thought, comfort, security, admiration from one's fellows. If these seem adequate ends, the game may well be played according to the rules laid down by the world. But there are those who are persuaded that these goods are relatively unimportant; that what the wise man seeks is nothing less than such personal unity with reality as makes the possession of all things else of second-rate importance; that man is really thirsty for God, lonely for God. If Christianity is based, as historically it has always been based, upon such convictions as these, then it is not unreasonable that the mystical Body of Christ should claim, as the price of the bread of life, a moral living quite its own. If the undergraduate can only get it through. his head that Christian morals and natural morals are two quite different things, get it out of his head that one is merely old-fashioned while the other is up-todate, get it into his head that they differ in aim and purpose, a vast confusion may be resolved.

Take as an example that subject which is now almost always mentioned whenever morality is discussed-the Seventh Commandment. Christian morality regards man as an immortal soul lodged within a body, and believes that sex matters are of less interest than the destiny of man's soul. In the present world most people hardly admit that there is a soul, unless in the sense of a higher function of the body. Man may

be a superbeast, but he is essentially a beast. And because they think this, the impulse toward chastity and monogamy loses force, for the simple reason that chastity is not an animal virtue and never was. If man is only a socialized beast, there is little reason why promiscuity should not prevail.

What is the Christian to do about it? Nothing so long as people believe that man is a higher animal and nothing more. When the Church or her ecclesiastics thunder against divorce and demand monogamy and fidelity, unless they make it plain that they are speaking of wisdom for those who as Christians are seeking God, and not for people who care nothing for Christ or His definition of man, their arguments have doubtful application.

We may as well abandon the attempt to make people live like Christians when they are not Christians, to preserve a Christian civilization without belief in that God-search which alone justifies Christian civilization. To ask people who worship Mammon to live lives of sacrifice, to expect devotees of Venus to be chaste, to hope that people whose real God is comfort at any price will suffer gladly for truth, is grotesque.

We live in a pagan world, as did the Hebrew prophets, as did Christ, as did His early disciples. Christians are now

they probably always have been and always will be a chosen people, set apart. What is right or wrong for others may not be right or wrong for them.

It would help the undergraduate a good deal if the Church would plainly say: "If you wish Christ's grace, if you believe that He is the Way, the Truth, the Life, the Sustainer of souls, then you must try to live according to that morality which is of Him. If you are satisfied by lesser aims, then the Church's morality cannot hold you, and she can not be held responsible for your eventual, or present, happiness or unhappiness."

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E who choose the number of our children are criticized for keeping our families down to a "miserly minimum," and warned that we are "selfishly sacrificing our birthright, the greatest influence in character development, for what usually turns out to be a mess of pottage." It is high time that some of us should rise to defend our course.

Unquestionably, birth control does enable selfish individuals to escape their responsibility, but that the majority of us are actuated by any such motive I utterly deny. The young married people of today are not shirking parenthood because they prefer material comforts and a carefree existence to the blessings of family life. They are eager to have children, but they face obstacles their forbears were never called upon to meet.

Most generally recognized among these is the present high cost of living. That in itself makes for later marriages and hence, even without voluntary limitation, smaller families. Before Gareth and I were married, we worked out a budget to make sure that we could carry it through. When we had listed rent, heat and light, food (60 cents a day per person), commutation, taxes and insurance, dentist and doctor, church and charity, personal expenses and clothing (a ridiculously small allowance), we had exceeded our income by more than $60-and our savings column was still a blank!

"What if there is a baby?" inquired two alarmed mothers when we laughingly confided our plight. "There just can't be a baby at first," we replied, and there wasn't. But what if we hadn't known how to avoid it?

Did we do wrong to marry? There are those who would answer yes. I cannot feel so. In the two years before our first little daughter was born, Gareth and I gained an understanding, an appreciation of each other that would have been impossible, I believe, had the adjustments entailed by the advent of children been added to the manyphysical, emotional, intellectual-that must be made by every husband and wife during the first year.

Every man who sets out to found a home these days ought, for his peace of mind, to have a sum of money set aside as a safety margin, yet that is an exceedingly difficult thing for a young man to accomplish if he marries early. Moreover, few men in their early twenties are convinced that they have found their life work, and hesitate to renounce the search in order to provide for wife and children. Is it to be wondered at that many postpone marriage till later years or, marrying (when the cost of babies is so great) insist on birth control?

The scarcity of domestic labor, too, is important. Whereas our mothers were rarely without competent assistance during the early childhood of their families, we have to pay three times what our mothers paid for a servant.

Health is a factor the mother cannot overlook. Without it housekeeping becomes drudgery, and child training an almost intolerable burden. The strain of our high speed civilization is desperately hard on the nervous system. Many a mother simply has not the strength to mother a large brood. Last autumn I gave birth to my third child and I want no more, because I have not

the vitality to mother four or five adequately, maintain a standard of housekeeping which makes our home a pleasant place to live, and still give to my husband the companionship which is our mutual joy.

"It is too bad that you are a college woman," commented a noted obstetrician when my first baby was coming. "They make fine mothers when their children begin to grow up; but they certainly do have a time getting their families. They're bundles of nerves, and the prenatal and postnatal adjustments cause them a lot more hardship than they do the average girl. The athletic girl is also apt to have a harder time at childbirth. Physical training may benefit girls in some ways, but not when it comes to bearing children."

I was discharged, a perfectly normal case, with this advice: "For the highest good of herself and her children, a woman shouldn't bear a child oftener than once in four years."

Last of all, there has been a change, since our mothers' day, as regards the function of a wife. Then a woman was thought to be doing her full duty if she honored her husband, fed and clothed her family adequately, and kept a neat and orderly house. Now that satisfies neither the average husband nor his wife. The modern woman does not thrive on a daily diet of manual labor and emotion. The modern husband infinitely prefers his wife's companionship to a well ordered house if he must choose between the two. Comradeship is regarded as an essential of marriage nowadays. But comradeship demands a degree of leisure and energy. If babies come fast, neither is possible.

Desire to render service to the community influences the size of families among the better educated classes. Colleges emphasize the need for unselfish activity, for thoughtful citizenship; many young people recognize a duty beyond the family circle.

In every community are to be found married women who for one reason or another must practice birth control and who, because they are acquainted only

with that method which is both uncertain and injurious to the woman's nervous system, never find in marriage the contentment they should. Their outlook is warped. The physical side of the union, instead of being subordinate to the spiritual as it ought to be, becomes of major importance. They fear their husbands' very caresses as a possible prelude to something they have come to abhor because of a mental conflict. As one young wife confessed: "At the end of six months I was wondering if all the married people had been lying who assured me that there was no joy on earth comparable to wedded love."

Marriage founded on love ought to bring out all that is best in man and wife, set free energies and powers scarcely guessed before, weld the many sides of their natures into a unified whole, and make each capable of finer living, greater accomplishment, than either could have achieved singly. Yet how can marriage hope to attain this when fear destroys one major foundation of the union? Eminent physicians state that maladjustment in the marital relation is the cause of more domestic unhappiness than all the other factors combined. The major portion of these "maladjustments," I believe, spring from a fear that could be assuaged by knowledge of birth control methods.

Of the thousands of inquiries received by birth control clinics yearly, the majority are from women who have already borne more children than their health or family incomes warrant and who see only disaster ahead if they conceive again, or from wives who hold motherhood so sacred they are unwilling to have children who are certain to be the victims of a bad inheritance, either physical or mental.

Because these considerations affect a large proportion of the populace and because the need for accurate knowledge of the best contraceptive methods is so widespread and urgent, a great number of us are convinced that a law which forbids the dissemination of information about it is a bitter injustice.

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is easy for us Westerners to criticize the Chinese because their standards of right and wrong are not our standards. They put family loyalty and private welfare far ahead of patriotism and the public welfare. In fact only an infinitesimal part of the Chinese people appear to have the slightest conception of what is meant by the term "the public welfare." Το them whatever will benefit the family and its members is right. Whatever hurts the family is wrong. Consequently the Chinese official who looks after his relatives at the expense of the state is right, while the Chinese official who permits the members of his family to suffer while he serves the state is wrong, wholly wrong, inconceivably

wrong.

The same ethical attitude makes it practically impossible for Chinese jointstock enterprises or business corporations to succeed. It is ethically the duty of the directors to look after their families. Similarly it is the "duty" of the employes to provide for their family needs. Neither directors nor employes have any conception of the Western attitude of loyalty to a corporation. The same thing was true of our own ancestors during the Middle Ages.

This fundamental difference between the orientals and the occidentals of today virtually makes it impossible for the Chinese Republic to copy successfully the political institutions of Europe or America. Our government is possible only because good citizens are willing to serve it honestly and faithfully, even when this service requires the subordination of family interests. Since that concept is virtually non-existent in

China it is easy to see why the Chinese Republic does not function successfully, has no president, no legislative body, and has not had for several years.

The nations of Europe and America are partly responsible for the present condition of affairs in China. We have introduced Western methods of trade and commerce based on conceptions quite at variance with those of the Chinese. In America there are more jobs than hands to do it; consequently we have invented labor-saving machinery. China has more hands to do it with than things to do, consequently when laborsaving machinery is introduced it means unemployment, starvation, and disaster to thousands of people.

Furthermore, we have taught visiting Chinese students the art of government based on a wholly different habit of mind and thought than that to which the Chinese have been accustomed for centuries. Their efforts to put our theories into practice have failed.

We have taught them political "science" when politics is really an art, not a science. A science is something which is true in all lands, like the multiplication table or the laws of gravity, while that form of government which works in Connecticut will not necessarily work in Nicaragua or even in North Dakota; and not at all in China.

An able student of Chinese politics who has lived in China for a quarter of a century told me that the basic fact in the Chinese political problem is the apathy of at least 400 million Chinese, who not only are not democratic in their political thinking and practices but have no conceptions and no conscious interest such as could lead them