A Birthday Greeting from Prison – Moses Harman, 1895

Dear Light Bearers:—May I bore you a little? May I catechise you? A pedagogue’s privilege, is it not? Taking silence
to mean consent, here goes. Could the horoscope of their prospective, or possible, children be made to pass before
the vision of all conjugal mates, how many children, think you, would be launched upon the sea of mortal life? For
instance: Could the parents of C. J. Guiteau have had the curtain lifted and the tragic fate of their future son revealed
to them, would they, for the sake of a fleeting moment of sensuous enjoyment, have committed the awful crime of
inflicting life upon this helpless victim of bad heredity and unfortunate environment? Or take the case of Wilkes Booth,
or of the “boy fiend Pomeroy,” or of any one of the millions whose invasive acts, written or unwritten, have filled the
world with horror and woe. Or take the case of the parents of the passive or innocent victims of these invaders, the
victims of man’s inhumanity to man, and especially of man’s inhumanity to woman—the countless thousands of
abused women—outside the marriage pale, and the far greater number of abused women inside the pale. To come
a little nearer home for illustration—as home production, home industry, are now the watchwords of the patriotic
“home ruler”—if the immediate progenitors of the writer of these lines could have foreseen that the child whose
initial impulse towards separate incarnate existence was given him by them about January 12, 1830—common
calendar—could they have seen that this child would spend the sixty-second and the sixty-fifth anniversaries of
the date of his birth behind penitentiary bars, is it probable, think you, that the eyes that now guide the pen over
these closely crowded lines would ever have seen the light of day? Behind every human act there is an adequate,
an efficient, a compelling cause, or causes. Is it worth while to look for the causes that underlie what seems
reckless human propagation?

Our legislators are called upon to take measures to prevent unwelcome additions to the census from foreign sources.
If prohibitions against the immigration of undesirable foreigners be right and proper, why would it not be right to take
a little thought and care in regard to additions to the population from native sources? To remove or prevent an evil—
assuming this to be such—the first thing is to look for the causes. Prominent among the causes of reckless propagation
may be named the following: 1st. Amative passion, the propagative instinct, the race-preserving instinct—one of the
strongest and least amenable to reason of all the human or animal passions and appetites. 2nd. Wifely submission to
the demands of the husband. “Marital rights” means husband’s rights. The marriage bed belongs to him. He is monarch
there, and usually the amative appetite is monarch over him. 3rd. Reliance on Providence. Many men, and still more
women, perhaps, who use common sense or prudence in all other matters, think it wrong to use prudence or foresight
in the matter of increase of family. This is pre-eminently “the Lord’s” business. The Lord sends babies, and when it
pleases him he takes them away. After the priest has pronounced the fateful words that make the twain one flesh,
the responsibility of children or no children rests with the Lord, and it is simple blasphemy to try to limit or regulate the
size of families by using human discretion—by abstinence or preventives of any kind. 4th. Woman’s dependence upon
man for support of self and children,—besides her sense of wifely duty derived from Theology, makes it hard for her
to exercise prudence as against her husband’s wishes or arbitrary will; and this economic dependence—largely the
result of man’s love of power, is strengthened by woman’s instinctive desire to be supported and protected in order
that she may the better perform her maternal functions. In extenuation of the reckless propagation of our progenitors
fifty or sixty years ago, it should be remembered that conditions then were very different from what they now are.

Then there was no lack of good land for homes for all, no matter how large the family, and no lack of employment
for all. The demand for workers always exceeded the supply. Steam, electricity and mechanical invention had not
combined to drive the hand-worker to the highways to beg or starve. Monopoly of any kind was practically unknown.
Another important difference between then and now, when forecasting the probable fate of children, is this: Then
men were imprisoned and fined for real crimes only, not for law-created offenses, as now. Legislators, congressmen,
judges, had not entered upon the task of defining what morality is and what it is not, and had not undertaken to make
people moral and keep them so by fear of punishments other than those inflicted by nature itself. Consequently, the
prospect that a child then born would get into prison for a technical or a law-made offense was small as compared
to such prospect now. And therefore, I argue, from the foregoing considerations and others that could be named—
prominent among which are the vast increase in physiologic and psychic knowledge—facts in regard to heredity,
prenatal impression, etc., etc., from all these I infer that parental responsibility has greatly increased in the past
half century and that reckless propagation today, of human beings, is incomparably more reprehensible, not to say
criminal, than it was when the now old men and women received their moulding in nature’s matrix. Number 1. of
Our New Humanity, has at last seen the light. Very few opinions regarding it have reached me; and so I know not
what the consensus of judgment is. That the magazine meets anticipations I can scarcely hope. I do hope, however,
that the verdict will be a little better than that said to have been given concerning a certain township in Massachusetts
viz: “It has good roads, if nothing more.” That is, if you cannot live there you can, at least, get away! It is hoped our
new Magazine has something to its credit besides—”There is room for improvement!” But “tall oaks from little acorns
grow,” etc. Will our subscribers and readers help the acorn to become an oak? Again my half sheet is full, very
full. Again, to my dear Luciferians—Harbingers of a better day—whether you live in the frozen north or in the
torrid south; the far Orient or in the distant sunset lands—to all of you once more, from my perch on the bluff
overlooking the longest river in the world, I send you a hearty fraternal greeting—a birthday “Hail and Farewell.”