Foreign News: Joyous Boys & Girls

In London last week the Most Rev. Dr. Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of all England, spoke in open, frank, explicit terms upon a secular subject which some Protestants and nearly all Catholics consider unmentionable.

“We must deplore,” said Dr. Lang, “the increasing use by young, unmarried people of birth control knowledge; but we must welcome freedom of the sexes in other directions.”

A bachelor himself, the Primate continued: “We want to liberate the sex impulse, which is part of the heritage of humanity, from the impression that it is always to be surrounded by negative warnings and restraints, and put in its rightful place among the great creative and formative things of every healthy, joyous boy and girl. I would rather have all the risks from free discussion of sex than the greater risks run by a conspiracy of silence.”

On the day of Dr. Lang’s address several delegations from a large number of public bodies waited upon Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald, urged him to put through Parliament a bill permitting the widest possible dissemination of birth control information “as an economic measure . . . as a most effective means of relieving unemployment . . . the population of Great Britain has increased beyond the country’s resources. . . .”