Winter Russell
FIRST SPEECH
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 dealor I am, and I assume my adversary is, toowith ideals and principles and not with persons. I want you to realize that I consider myself speakingand I trust reverentlyon 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 unbornthose 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 dont 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 isnt an authority,) and others as authorities. I could quote from Lamb and Roosevelt and the Biblethe great religions of the earthscriptural authority that comes from the very depths of the spiritual, and what I believe to be the very mouth of God itselfof Natureif 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 childrenalthough I think she has once stated that the most immoral thing a person can do is to bring a large family into the worldso we have thought, for exampleand 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 psychologyin other words that you take the law of compensation and try to solve it. It is false from every point of viewfrom 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 ithusbands 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 propositionit is that you cant have pleasure in this world without paying for itthat 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.
