This is surely the case once man, in order to control the chronic distress, no longer attaches any value to an increase of his number, and resorts on his own to birth control. For then he himself immediately embarks upon a road opposite to that taken by nature. Whereas nature, out of the multitude of beings who are born, spares the few who are most fitted in terms of health and resistance to wage life’s struggle, man limits the number of births, and then tries to keep alive those who have been born with no regard to their real value or to their inner worth. Here his humanity is only the handmaiden of his weakness, and at the same time it is actually the cruellest destroyer of his existence. If man wants to limit the number of births on his own, without producing the terrible consequences which arise from birth control, he must give the number of births free rein but cut down on the number of those remaining alive. At one time the Spartans were capable of such a wise measure, but not our present, mendaciously sentimental, bourgeois patriotic nonsense.

The rule of six thousand Spartans over three hundred and fifty thousand Helots was only thinkable in consequence of the high racial value of the Spartans. But this was the result of a systematic race preservation; thus Sparta must be regarded as the first Folkish State. The exposure of sick, weak, deformed children, in short their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject, and indeed at any price, and yet takes the life of a hundred thousand healthy children in consequence of birth control or through abortions, in order subsequently to breed a race of degenerates burdened with illnesses.