Responding somewhat late but in case your still there, this may be applicable
by
My wife Lisa had recently read the Sins of Parents by Charles Hugo Doyle and pointed me to a quote from Will Durant. According to the author, “It was made by Durant before a group of bankers--- the New York State League of Savings and Loan Associations--- at their fifty-third annual convention, held at Lake Placid, June 12-14, 1940. Mr. Durant spoke on the Crisis in American Civilization,”
Page 67 of Sins of Parents
Quoting Durant
I remember, in the first private school that I taught,having among my pupils two little boys whose name was Sanger. They were the children of Margaret Sanger, whom at that time I knew as a modest nurse in a hospital in New York. During that woman’s brief maturity she has changed the whole biological face of the western world… She taught the human beings of this country to make parentage voluntary, discriminating, and perhaps dangerously sparse.
As I contemplate the movement, I must congratulate it on its victory. It has won almost completely and perhaps today that movement stands in the midst of its victory, wondering if it was good. It is a terrible thing –isn’t it? – to give your life, to an enterprise of human liberation and then, having won all the goals that you set out for, to stand in doubt as to whether this was what you sought. For today the people of America who could bring up fine children, whose homes are equipped to give education and civilization and health, keep those homes more and more empty. And the homes that are not equipped either biologically or socially to give civilization and health and education are the homes that are making the future citizens of America.
Sometimes, when I look at America today, I wonder: Are all our victories defeats? And perhaps some of our defeats might be victories.
I, too, worked for this birth control movement--- preached it, shouted it almost from the housetops shamelessly; and today I see America breeding from the bottom and dying from the top because we won so thoroughly. I am not sure that it was good. We have solved one problem and we have created another that is immeasurably profounder.
I know what happened to Athens. Infantacide was raised to such a point that nobody raised children in Athens except the lowest of the low and the most barbaric of the immigrants. I know what happened to Rome. I know how Caesar almost scratched his head bald thinking how he could induce the Roman women to have children. He decreed that they should have no diamonds if they had no children—that they should have no jewels of one kind if they had none of the other. I know that Augustus passed law after law in the first decade of our Christian era almost two thousand years ago, trying to stop this current of family limitation. I know too that all that legislation failed. I know that Rome at last had to till her soil with barbarians and with slaves; and that finally the rapidly breeding immigrant Germans overran Italy. It was the end of the Western Roman Empire.
Civilization has to kill itself before it can be conquered… You will be conquered from within, not from without.
