Chapter III: Part 3

It is a very simple incident, and it holds all the elements which make for national life. A cause to support, a man to support it, a woman to call for help when the supreme moment comes. Something like it must have happened over and over again in the blood-soaked land of Belgium. Yet we find women to-day talking and writing as if none of their sex had anything at stake in the defence of their violated homes, as if they had no sacred rights bound up with the sacred rights of men. The National American Woman Suffrage Association sent an appeal to organized suffragists all over the world, urging them to “arise in protest, and show war-crazed men that between the contending armies there stand thousands of women and children who are the innocent victims of man’s unbridled ambitions.”

There was no word in this appeal to indicate that any nobler--and humbler--sentiment than unbridled ambition (which, after all, is for the very few) animates the soldier’s heart. There was no distinction drawn between aggressive and defensive warfare. There was no hint that men bear their full share of the sufferings caused by war. The assumption that women endure all the pain is in accordance with the assumption that men enjoy all the pleasure. To write as though battle were a game, played by men at the expense of women, is childish and irrational. We Americans are happily spared the sight of mangled soldiers lying in undreamed-of agony on the frozen field. We do not see the ghastly ambulance trains jolting along with their load of broken, tortured men; or the hospitals where these wrecks are nursed back to some poor remnant of life, or escape through the merciful gates of death. But we might read of these things; we might visualize them in moments of comfortable leisure, and take shame to our souls at the platform eloquence which so readily assumes that the sorrows of war are hidden in women’s hearts, that the burdens of war are laid upon women’s shoulders, that women are sacrificed in their helplessness to the hatred and the ambitions, the greed and the glory of men.

If by any chance a word of regret is expressed for the soldier who dies for his country, it is always because he is the son of his mother, or the husband of his wife, or the father of his child. He is never permitted an entity of his own. It is curious that the same women who clamour for a recognition of their individual freedom should assume these property rights in men. Dr. Anna Shaw has commented sarcastically upon a habit (one of many bad habits) which she has observed in the unregenerate sex. They speak of their womenkind in terms of relationship; they use the possessive case. They say, “my wife,” “my sister,” “my daughter,” “my mother,” “my aunt,” instead of “Jane,” “Susan,” “Mary Ann,” “Mrs. Smith,” “Miss Jones.” Apparently Dr. Shaw does not hear women say, “my husband,” “my brother,” “my son,” “my father,” “my uncle”; or, if she does, this sounds less feudal in her ears. Advanced feminists have protested against the custom of “branding a woman at marriage with her husband’s name.” Even the convenience of such an arrangement fails to excuse its arrogance.

Yet we are bidden to protest against the wickedness of all war, not because men die, but because wives are widowed; not because men slay, but because mothers are childless; not because men do evil, or suffer wrong, but because, in either case, women share the consequences. For the sake of these women, war must cease, is the cry; as though the vast majority of men would not be glad enough to be rid of war for their own sake. They do not covet loss of income and destruction of property. They do not gladly aspire to an armless or legless future. Not one of them really wants a shattered thigh, or a bullet in his abdomen. And, in addition to these (perhaps selfish) considerations, we might do them the justice to remember that they are not destitute of natural affection for their wives and children; but that, on the contrary, the safeguarding of the family is, and has always been, a powerful factor in war. It lent a desperate courage to the Belgian soldier who saw his home destroyed; it nerved the arm of the French soldier who knew his home in peril. The killing of the first women and children at Scarborough sent a host of tardy volunteers into the British army. Such indiscriminate slaughter, though it represents a negligible loss to a nation, is about the only thing on earth which the least valiant men cannot stomach.

“The Turk, not squeamish as a rule,
No special glee betrayed,
And even Mr. Bernard Shaw
Failed to commend the raid.”

The Lusitania children, lying in pitiful rows to await identification in Queenstown, little meek and sodden corpses buffeted out of comeliness by the waves, awoke in the hearts of the men who looked at them a passion of anger and hate which life is too short to appease. The brutal shooting of an English nurse was followed by an illogical rush of young Englishmen to the colours. And the mere fact that scores of writers, commenting on Edith Cavell’s death, harkened back to the beheading of Alice Lisle, proves the imperishable nature of the infamy attached to a deed, which to Judge Jeffreys, as to General Baron von Bissing, seemed the most reasonable thing in the world.

The outbreak of the war was seized upon as a strong argument for diametrically opposite views. A small and hardy minority kicked up its heels and shouted, “Women cannot fight. Why should they control a land they are powerless to defend?” A large and sentimental majority lifted up its eyes to Heaven, and answered, “If women had possessed their rights, all would now be smiling and at peace.” And neither of these contending factions took any trouble to ascertain and understand the rights and wrongs of the conflict. People who pin their faith to a catchword never feel the necessity of understanding anything.

Here, for example, is a violent pacifist in the “Woman’s Journal,” who, to the oft-repeated assertion that women, when they have the vote, “will compel governments to settle their disputes before an international court of arbitration,” adds this unwarranted statement: “The women of the world have no quarrel with one another. They do not care whether or not Austria maintains its power over the Balkan States; whether or not France obtains revenge for the defeats of 1870; whether Germany or England gains supremacy in the world market.”

This good lady does not seem to know what happened in August, 1914. France did not proclaim war upon Germany. Germany proclaimed war upon France. France did not attack,--for revenge, or for any other motive. She was attacked, and has been fighting ever since with her back to the wall in defence of her own soil.

It is possible for an American woman to have no quarrel with any one, no knowledge of what Europe is quarrelling about, and no human concern as to which nations win. But she should not think, and she certainly should not say, that the women of the warring lands are equally ignorant, and equally unconcerned. To the Serbian woman the freedom of Serbia is a precious thing. The French woman cares with her whole soul for the preservation of France. The Belgian woman can hardly be indifferent to the ultimate fate of Belgium. It is even possible that the English and German women are not prepared to clasp one another’s hands and say, “We are sisters, and it matters nothing to us whether England or Germany wins.” The pitfall of the feminist is the belief that the interests of men and women can ever be severed; that what brings suffering to the one can leave the other unscathed.

What are the qualities demanded of women in every great national crisis? First of all, intelligence. They should have some accurate knowledge of what has happened, some clear understanding of the events they so glibly discuss. There are documents in plenty to enlighten them. Those tense summer months in which the war was nursed in secrecy, are now no longer secret. We know where the bantling was cradled, we know what ambitions speeded it on its evil way, and we have watched every step of its progress. To condemn all Europe in terms of easy reprobation, to clamour for peace without recognition of justice, is but inconsequent chatter. It leaves vital issues untouched, and rational minds unmoved. The sternest words uttered since the beginning of the war were spoken by the London “Tablet,” in reprobation of those American peace-mongers who could not be brought to understand that the hope of the Englishwoman’s heart is that the man whom she has lost,--husband, son, or brother,--should not have died in vain.

Next to intelligence, a woman’s most valuable asset is a reasonable modesty. She is terribly hampered by a conviction of her own goodness. It gets in her way at every step, clouding her naturally clear perceptions, and clogging her naturally keen conscientiousness. She is wrong in assuming with Miss Addams that she feels a “peculiar moral passion of revolt against both the cruelty and the waste of war.” She is wrong in assuming with Madame Schwimmer that she “supplants physical courage with moral courage,” when she calls noisily for peace. There are men in plenty who feel the moral passion of revolt quite as keenly as do the most sensitive of women; but who also feel the moral responsibility of defending the safety of their country, the sacredness of their homes. The moral courage demanded of every soldier is fully as great as the physical courage, at which women dare to sneer. It is not a light thing to give up life,--“Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends;”--yet death is the least of the horrors which soldiers daily face.

The third and most vital thing asked of women in these dread days is self-sacrifice. They must give their share of help, they must bear their share of sorrow. They cannot dignify their reluctance to do this by calling it moral revolt, or moral courage, or any other high-sounding name. They cannot claim for themselves a loftier virtue on the score of their lower hardihood. Civic morality consists in putting the good of the state above the good of the individual. It has no other test. If women are, as they say, responsible for the conservation of human life, they should hold themselves responsible for the ennobling of human life, for the cherishing of some finer instinct than that of self-preservation. On the body of a young French lieutenant who was killed at Vermelles, there was found a letter to his wife, which contained this pregnant sentence: “Promise not to begrudge me to France, if she takes me altogether.” These few words are an epitome of patriotism. Husband and wife gave to their country all they had to give; the one his life, the other her love; and both knew that there is something better than human life and love.

In the genial reign of Henry the Eighth, a docile Parliament passed, at the desire of the King, an “Act to abolish Diversity of Opinion.” President Wilson, less despotic, has recommended something of the same order as a mental process, a soul-smothering, harmony-preserving, intellectual anodyne. It is called neutrality, and if it has failed to save us from shameful insults and repeated wrongs, it has kept us fairly quiet under provocation. The only authorized outlet for our emotions has been a prayer (conditions not mentioned) for peace. Because we have schooled ourselves to witness injustice--and occasionally suffer it--without undue resentment, and without reprisal, our reward in money has been very great; and we have kept on terms with our own souls by giving back to desolate Europe a little of the wealth we drew from her. Our position has always been a tenable one, and no nation has had any ground on which to censure us; but we have found in it scant encouragement for self-esteem. Even the flowers of domestic oratory, the oft-repeated assertion that our prudence and our wealth make us respected on earth, and blessed in the sight of Heaven, fail to quicken our sad hearts. For, from over the sea, comes a cry which sounds like the echo of words with which we were once familiar, of which we were once proud. “With firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in.”

This is the potent voice of humanity, never to be silenced while men stay men. The “work” was bloody work; brother slaying brother on the battlefield. The women of the North and the women of the South bore their share of sorrow. They did not assert that they were victims of men’s unbridled ambition, and they never intimated to one another that the final victory was to them a matter of unconcern. Theirs was the “solemn pride” of sacrifice; and that fine phrase, dedicated by Mr. Lincoln to the woman who had sent five sons to the conflict, is applicable to thousands of mothers to-day. The writer knows a young Frenchman who, when the war broke out, had lived for some years in this country, and hoped to make it his permanent home. To him his mother wrote: “My son, your two brothers are at the front. Are you not coming back to fight for France?” The lad had not meant to go. Perhaps he coveted safety. Perhaps he held life (his life) to be a sacred thing. Perhaps he thought to comfort his mother’s old age. But when that letter came, he sailed on the next steamer. It was a summons that few men, and certainly no Frenchman, could deny.

When the women of France refused to participate in the International Congress of Women at The Hague, they defined their position in a document so dignified, so lucid, and so logical, that it deserves to be handed down to future ages as an illustration of inspired common sense lifted to the heights of heroism. Let no one who reads it ever deny that women are capable of clear thinking, of sane and balanced judgment. In contrast to the vague and formless peace-talk which came floating over to us from Holland, and has been re-echoed ever since; talk which starting from no definite premises has reached no just conclusions, the clear utterances of these French women rang with insistent exactitude. They rejected all sentimental abstractions, and presented in a concrete form the circumstances which had pushed France into the conflict, and which held her still at bay. “It were treason to think of peace, until that peace can consecrate the principles of right.”

The rationality of the French mind, the essentially practical nature of the French genius, are responsible for the form of this historic document; but back of the form lies the spirit, and the spirit is one of sustained self-sacrifice. “To-day it is with pride we wear our weeds; it is with gratitude that we perpetuate the memory of our dead.” At a time when every franc could buy some sorely needed supply, when every hour could be filled with some sorely needed service, sensible Frenchwomen refused to spend both money and time in journeying to The Hague for the dear delights of talking. But deeper than their reluctance to do a wasteful thing was their reluctance to do a treasonable thing, to put the comforts of peace above the sacrifices entailed by war, to refuse by word or deed their share of a common burden.

It is absurd to suppose that these brave and suffering women do not feel a moral revolt against the cruelty and the waste of war quite as sharply as does Miss Addams, or any Hague delegate, or any one of Mr. Ford’s tourists. The “basic foundation of home and of peaceful industry” is as dear to them as to the American women who talk so much about it. As a matter of fact, it is their devotion which holds together the shattered homes of France, their industry which preserves economic safety, and gives food and shelter to the destitute. And through terrible months of pain and privation, we have heard from the lips of Frenchwomen no wild and weak complaints. Never once have they assumed that they were better and nobler than their husbands and sons who died for the needs of France.

When the late Justice Brewer said that “since the beginning of days” women have been opposed to blood-shed, we wondered--without doubting the truth of his assertion--how he came to find it out. Certainly not from the pages of history, which afford little or no evidence on the subject. This may be one reason why feminists are protesting stoutly against the way in which history has been written, its indiscreet revelations, its disconcerting silences. At a meeting of the Women’s Political Union in New York, October, 1914, it was boldly urged that history should be re-written on a peace basis; less emphasis placed upon nationalism, less space devoted to wars. At a meeting of the National Municipal League in Baltimore the same year, it was urged that history should be re-written on a feminine basis; less emphasis placed upon men, less space devoted to their achievements. One revolutionist complained with exceeding bitterness that President Wilson hardly makes mention of women in his five volumes of American history. The “knell” of that kind of narrative, she intimated, had “rung.”

The historian of the future will find his task pleasantly simplified. He will be a little like two young Americans whom I once met scampering blithely over southern Europe, and to whom I ventured to say that they covered their ground quickly. “No trouble about that,” answered one of them. “We draw the line at churches and galleries, and there’s nothing left to see.” So, too, the chronicler who eliminates men and war from his pages can move swiftly down the centuries. Even an earnest effort to minimize these factors suggests that blight of my girlhood, Miss Strickland, who forever strove to withdraw her wandering attention from warrior and statesman, and fix it on the trousseau of a queen.

History is, and has always been trammelled by facts. It may ignore some and deny others; but it cannot accommodate itself unreservedly to theories; it cannot be stripped of things evidenced in favour of things surmised. Perhaps instead of asking to have it remodelled in our behalf, we women might take the trouble to read it as it is; dominated by men, disfigured by conflict, but not altogether ignoble or unprofitable, and always very enlightening. We might learn from it, for example, that war may be wicked, and war may be justifiable; that wife and child, far from being unconsidered trifles, have nerved men’s arms to strike; and that when home, country, freedom and justice are at stake, “it were treason to think of peace, until that peace can consecrate the principles of right.”

The Repeal of Reticence

There is nothing new about the Seven Deadly Sins. They are as old as humanity. There is nothing mysterious about them. They are easier to understand than the Cardinal Virtues. Nor have they dwelt apart in secret places; but, on the contrary, have presented themselves, undisguised and unabashed, in every corner of the world, and in every epoch of recorded history. Why then do so many men and women talk and write as if they had just discovered these ancient associates of mankind? Why do they press upon our reluctant notice the result of their researches? Why this fresh enthusiasm in dealing with a foul subject? Why this relentless determination to make us intimately acquainted with matters of which a casual knowledge would suffice?

Above all, why should our self-appointed instructors assume that because we do not chatter about a thing, we have never heard of it? The well-ordered mind knows the value, no less than the charm, of reticence. The fruit of the tree of knowledge, which is now recommended as nourishing for childhood, strengthening for youth, and highly restorative for old age, falls ripe from its stem; but those who have eaten with sobriety find no need to discuss the processes of digestion. Human experience is very, very old. It is our surest monitor, our safest guide. To ignore it crudely is the error of those ardent but uninstructed missionaries who have lightly undertaken the re-building of the social world.

Therefore it is that the public is being daily instructed concerning matters which it was once assumed to know, and which, as a matter of fact, it has always known. When “The Lure” was played three years ago at the Maxine Elliott Theatre in New York, the redoubtable Mrs. Pankhurst arose in Mrs. Belmont’s box, and, unsolicited, informed the audience that it was the truth which was being nakedly presented to them, and that as truth it should be taken to heart. Now, it is probable that the audience--adult men and women--knew as much about the situations developed in “The Lure” as did Mrs. Pankhurst. It is possible that some of them knew more, and could have given her points. But whatever may be the standard of morality, the standard of taste (and taste is a guardian of morality) must be curiously lowered, when a woman spectator at an indecent play commends its indecencies to the careful consideration of the audience. Even the absurdity of the proceeding fails to win pardon for its grossness.

It is not so much the nature of the advice showered upon us to which we reasonably object, but the fact that a great deal of it is given in the wrong way, at the wrong time, by the wrong people. Who made Mrs. Pankhurst our nursery governess, and put us in _her_ hands for schooling? We might safely laugh at and ignore these unsolicited exhortations, were it not that the crude detailing of matters offensive to modesty is as hurtful to the young as it is wearisome to the old. Does it never occur to the women, who are now engaged in telling the world what the world has known since the days of Nineveh, that more legitimate, and, on the whole, more enlightened avenues exist for the distribution of such knowledge?

“Are there no clinics at our gates,
Nor any doctors in the land?”

The “Conspiracy of Silence” is broken. Of that no one can doubt. The phrase may be suffered to lapse into oblivion. In its day it was a menace, and few of us would now advocate the deliberate ignoring of things not to be denied. Few of us would care to see the rising generation as uninstructed in natural laws as we were, as adrift amid the unintelligible, or partly intelligible things of life. But surely the breaking of silence need not imply the opening of the floodgates of speech. It was never meant by those who first cautiously advised a clearer understanding of sexual relations and hygienic laws that everybody should chatter freely respecting these grave issues; that teachers, lecturers, novelists, story-writers, militants, dramatists, and social workers should copiously impart all they know, or assume they know, to the world. The lack of restraint, the lack of balance, the lack of soberness and common sense were never more apparent than in the obsession of sex, which has set us all a-babbling about matters once excluded from the amenities of conversation.

Knowledge is the cry. Crude, undigested knowledge, without limit and without reserve. Give it to boys, give it to girls, give it to children. No other force is taken into account by the visionaries who--in defiance, or in ignorance, of history--believe that evil understood is evil conquered. “The menace of degradation and destruction can be checked _only_ by the dissemination of knowledge on the subject of sex-physiology and hygiene,” writes an enthusiast in the “Forum,” calling our attention to the methods which have been employed by some public schools, noticeably the Polytechnic High School of Los Angeles, for the instruction of students; and urging that similar lectures be given to boys and girls in the grammar schools. It is noticeable that while a woman doctor was employed to lecture to the girl students of the Polytechnic, a “science man” was chosen by preference for the boys. Doctors are proverbially reticent,--except, indeed, on the stage, where they prattle of all they know; but a “science man”--as distinct from a man of science--may be trusted, if he be young and ardent, to conceal little or nothing from his hearers. The lectures were obligatory for the boys, but optional for the girls, whose inquisitiveness could be relied upon. “The universal eagerness of under-classmen to reach the serene upper heights” (I quote the language of the “Forum”) “gave the younger girls increased interest in the advanced lectures, if, indeed, a girl’s natural curiosity regarding these vital facts needs any stimulus.”

Perhaps it does not, but I am disposed to think it receives a strong artificial stimulus from instructors whose minds are unduly engrossed with sexual problems, and that this artificial stimulus is a menace rather than a safeguard. We hear too much about the thirst for knowledge from people keen to quench it. Dr. Edward L. Keyes advocates the teaching of sex-hygiene to children, because he thinks it is the kind of information that children are eagerly seeking. “What is this topic,” he asks, “that all these little ones are questioning over, mulling over, fidgeting over, imagining over, worrying over? Ask your own memories.”

I do ask my memory in vain for the answer Dr. Keyes anticipates. A child’s life is so full, and everything that enters it seems of supreme importance. I fidgeted over my hair, which would not curl. I worried over my examples, which never came out right. I mulled (though unacquainted with the word) over every piece of sewing put into my incapable fingers, which could not be trained to hold a needle. I imagined I was stolen by brigands, and became--by virtue of beauty and intelligence--spouse of a patriotic outlaw in a frontierless land. I asked artless questions which brought me into discredit with my teachers, as, for example, who “massacred” St. Bartholomew. But vital facts, the great laws of propagation, were matters of but casual concern, crowded out of my life, and out of my companions’ lives (in a convent boarding-school) by the more stirring happenings of every day. How could we fidget over obstetrics when we were learning to skate, and our very dreams were a medley of ice and bumps? How could we worry over “natural laws” in the face of a tyrannical interdict which lessened our chances of breaking our necks by forbidding us to coast down a hill covered with trees? The children to be pitied, the children whose minds become infected with unwholesome curiosity, are those who lack cheerful recreation, religious teaching, and the fine corrective of work. A playground or a swimming-pool will do more to keep them mentally and morally sound than scores of lectures upon sex-hygiene.

The point of view of the older generation was not altogether the futile thing it seems to the progressive of to-day. It assumed that children brought up in honour and goodness, children disciplined into some measure of self-restraint, and taught very plainly the difference between right and wrong in matters childish and seasonable, were in no supreme danger from the gradual and somewhat haphazard expansion of knowledge. It unconsciously reversed the adage, “Forewarned, forearmed,” into “Forearmed, forewarned”; paying more heed to the arming than to the warning. It held that the workingman was able to rear his children in decency. The word degradation was not so frequently coupled with poverty as it is now. Nor was it anybody’s business in those simple days to impress upon the poor the wretchedness of their estate.

If knowledge alone could save us from sin, the salvation of the world would be easy work. If by demonstrating the injuriousness of evil, we could insure the acceptance of good, a little logic would redeem mankind. But the laying of the foundation of law and order in the mind, the building up of character which will be strong enough to reject both folly and vice,--this is no facile task.

The justifiable reliance placed by our fathers upon religion and discipline has given place to a reliance upon understanding. It is assumed that youth will abstain from wrong-doing, if only the physical consequences of wrong-doing are made sufficiently clear. There are those who believe that a regard for future generations is a powerful deterrent from immorality, that boys and girls can be so interested in the quality of the baby to be born in 1990 that they will master their wayward impulses for its sake. What does not seem to occur to us is that this deep sense of obligation to ourselves and to our fellow creatures is the fruit of self-control. A course of lectures will not instil self-control into the human heart. It is born of childish virtues acquired in childhood, youthful virtues acquired in youth, and a wholesome preoccupation with the activities of life which gives young people something to think about besides the sexual relations which are pressed so relentlessly upon their attention.

The world is wide, and a great deal is happening in it. I do not plead for ignorance, but for the gradual and harmonious broadening of the field of knowledge, and for a more careful consideration of ways and means. There are subjects which may be taught in class, and subjects which commend themselves to individual teaching. There are topics which admit of _plein-air_ handling, and topics which civilized man, as apart from his artless brother of the jungles, has veiled with reticence. There are truths which may be, and should be, privately imparted by a father, a mother, a family doctor, or an experienced teacher; but which young people cannot advantageously acquire from the platform, the stage, the moving-picture gallery, the novel, or the ubiquitous monthly magazine.

Yet all these sources of information are competing with one another as to which shall tell us most. All of them have missions, and all the missions are alike. We are gravely assured that the drama has awakened to a high and holy duty, that it has a “serious call,” in obedience to which it has turned the stage into a clinic for the diagnosing of disease, and into a self-authorized commission for the intimate study of vice. It advertises itself as “battling with the evils of the age,”--which are the evils of every age,--and its method of warfare is to exploit the sins of the sensual for the edification of the virtuous, to rake up the dunghills with the avowed purpose of finding a jewel. The doors of the brothel have been flung hospitably open, and we have been invited to peep and peer (always in the interests of morality) into regions which were formerly closed to the uninitiated. It has been discovered that situations, once the exclusive property of the police courts, make valuable third acts, or can be usefully employed in curtain-lifters, unclean and undramatic, but which claim to “tell their story so clearly that the daring is lost in the splendid moral lesson conveyed.” Familiarity with vice (which an old-fashioned but not inexperienced moralist like Pope held to be a perilous thing) is advocated as a safeguard, especially for the young and ardent. The lowering of our standard of taste, the deadening of our finer sensibilities, are matters of no moment to dramatist or to manager. They have other interests at stake.

For depravity is a valuable asset when presented to the consideration of the undepraved. It has coined money for the proprietors of moving-pictures, who for the past few years have been sending shows with attractive titles about “White Slaves,” and “Outcasts,” and “Traffic in Souls,” all over the country. Many of these shows claimed to be dramatizations of the reports of vice-commissioners, who have thus entered the arena of sport, and become purveyors of pleasure to the multitude. “Original,” “Authentic,” “Authorized,” are words used freely in their advertisements. The public is assured that “care has been taken to eliminate all suggestiveness,” which is in a measure true. When everything is told, there is no room left for suggestions. If you kick a man down stairs and out of the door, you may candidly say that you never suggested he should leave your house. Now and then a particularly lurid revelation is commended to us as having received the endorsement of leading feminists; and again we are driven to ask why should these ladies assume an intimate knowledge of such alien matters? Why should they play the part of mentors to such an experienced Telemachus as the public?

It is hard to estimate the harm done by this persistent and crude handling of sexual vice. The peculiar childishness inherent in all moving-picture shows may possibly lessen their hurtfulness. What if the millionaires and the political bosses so depicted spend their existence in entrapping innocent young women? A single policeman of tender years, a single girl, inexperienced but resourceful, can defeat these fell conspirators, and bring them all to justice. Never were villains so helpless in a hard and virtuous world. But silliness is no sure safeguard, and to excite in youth a curiosity concerning brothels and their inmates can hardly fail of mischief. To demonstrate graphically and publicly the value of girls in such places is to familiarize them dangerously with sin. I can but hope that the little children who sit stolidly by their mothers’ sides, and whom the authorities of every town should exclude from all shows dealing with prostitution, are saved from defilement by the invincible ignorance of childhood. As for the groups of boys and young men who compose the larger part of the audiences, and who snigger and whisper whenever the situations grow intense, nobody in his senses could assert that the pictures convey a “moral lesson” to them.

Nor is it for the conveying of lessons that managers present these photo-plays to the public. They are out to make money, and they are making it. Granted that when M. Brieux wrote “Les Avariés,” he purposed a stern warning to the pleasure-loving world. No one can read the simple and sober words with which he prefaced the work, and doubt his absolute sincerity. Granted, though with some misgivings, that the presentation of “Damaged Goods” in this country--albeit commercialized and a smart business venture--had still a moral and scientific significance. It was not primarily designed as an exploitation of vice. But to tell such a story in moving pictures is to rob it of all excuse for being told at all. To thrust such a theme grossly and vulgarly before the general public, stripping it of nobility of thought and exactitude of speech, and leaving only the dull dregs of indecency, is an uncondonable offense,--the deeper because it claims to be beneficent.

In one respect all the studies of seduction now presented so urgently to our regard are curiously alike. They all conspire to lift the burden of blame from the woman’s shoulders, to free her from any sense of human responsibility. It is assumed that she plays no part in her own undoing, that she is as passive as the animal bought for vivisection, as mute and helpless in the tormentors’ hands. The tissue of false sentiment woven about her has resulted in an extraordinary confusion of outlook, a perilous nullification of honesty and honour.

To illustrate this point, I quote some verses which appeared in a periodical devoted to social work, a periodical with high and serious aims. I quote them reluctantly (not deeming them fit for publication), and only because it is impossible to ignore the fact that their appearance in such a paper makes them doubly and trebly reprehensible. They are entitled “The Cry to Christ of the Daughters of Shame.”

“Crucified once for the sins of the world,
O fortunate Christ!” they cry:
“With an Easter dawn in thy dying eyes,
O happy death to die!

“But we,--we are crucified daily,
With never an Easter morn;
But only the hell of human lust,
And worse,--of human scorn.

“For the sins of passionless women,
For the sins of passionate men,
Daily we make atonement,
Golgotha again and again.

“O happy Christ, who died for love,
Judge us who die for lust.
For thou wast man, who now art God.
Thou knowest. Thou art just.”

Now apart from the offence against religion in this easy comparison between the Saviour and the woman of the streets, and apart from the deplorable offence against good taste, which might repel even the irreligious, such unqualified acquittal stands forever in the way of reform, of the judgment and common sense which make for the betterment of the world. How is it possible to awaken any healthy emotion in the hearts of sinners so smothered in sentimentality? How is it possible to make girls and young women (as yet respectable) understand not only the possibility, but the obligation of a decent life?

There would be less discussion of meretricious subjects, either in print or in conversation, were it not for the morbid sensibility which has undermined our judgment, and set our nerves a-quivering. Even a counsellor so sane and so experienced as the Reverend Honourable Edward Lyttelton, Headmaster of Eton, who has written an admirable volume on “Training of the Young in Laws of Sex,” drops his tone of wholesome austerity as soon as he turns from the safeguarding of lads to the pensive consideration of women. Boys and men he esteems to be captains of their souls, but the woman is adrift on the sea of life. He does not urge her to restraint; he pleads for her to the masters of her fate. “The unhappy partners of a rich man’s lust,” he writes, “are beings born with the mighty power to love, and are endowed with deep and tender instincts of loyalty and motherhood. When these divine and lovely graces of character are utterly shattered and foully degraded, the man, on whom all the treasure has been lavished, tries to believe that he has made ample reparation by an annuity of fifty pounds.”

This kind of sentiment is out of place in everything save eighteenth-century lyrics, which are not expected to be a guiding force in morals. A woman with “lovely graces of character” does not usually become the mistress even of a rich man. After all, there is such a thing as triumphant virtue. It has an established place in the annals and traditions, the ballads and stories of every land.

“A mayden of England, sir, never will be
The wench of a monarcke,” quoth Mary Ambree.

It is like a breath of fresh air blowing away mists to hear this gay and gallant militant assert the possibilities of resistance.

Forty years ago, a writer in “Blackwood’s Magazine” commented upon the amazing fact that in Hogarth’s day (more than a century earlier) vignettes representing the “Rake’s Progress,” and the “Harlot’s Progress,” were painted upon fans carried by young women. “English girls,” said this sober essayist, “were thus, by way of warning, made familiar with subjects now wisely withheld from their consideration.”

The pendulum has swung backward since 1876. Even Hogarth, who dealt for the most part with the robust simplicities of sin, would have little to teach the rising generation of 1916. Its sources of knowledge are manifold, and astoundingly explicit. Stories minutely describing houses of ill-fame, their furniture, their food, their barred windows, their perfumed air, and the men with melancholy eyes who visit them. Novels purporting to be candid and valuable studies of degeneracy and nymphomania. Plays and protests urging stock-farm methods of breeding the human race. Papers on venereal diseases scattered broadcast through the land. Comment upon those unnatural vices which have preceded the ruin of cities and the downfall of nations, and veiled allusions to which have marked the deepest degradation of the French stage. All these horrors, which would have made honest old Hogarth turn uneasily in his grave, are offered for the defence of youth and the purifying of civilized society.

The lamentable lack of reserve is closely associated with a lamentable absence of humour. We should be saved from many evils, if we could laugh at more absurdities. We could clearly estimate the value of reform, if we were not so befuddled with the sensationalism of reformers, and so daunted by the amazing irregularity of their methods. What can be thought of a woman who goes to a household of strangers, and volunteers to instruct its members in sex-hygiene! In the case which came under my notice, the visitor chanced upon a family of spinsters, discreet, retiring, well-conducted gentlewomen, the eldest of whom was eighty, and the youngest sixty years of age. But while this circumstance added to the humour of the situation, it in no wise lessened its insolent impropriety.

The enthusiasm for birth-control has carried its advocates so fast and so far from the conventions of society that two of them have been arrested in the State of New York for circulating indecent matter through the mails, and one has been convicted on this charge. To run amuck through the formalities of civilization, and then proclaim yourself a martyr to science and the public good, is one way of acquiring notoriety. To invite the selfish and the cowardly to follow the line of least resistance is one way, and a very easy way, of ensuring popularity. Thirty years ago, Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the story of a Spanish girl, born of a decadent and perishing race, to whom comes the promise of love, and of escape from her dire surroundings. Both these boons she rejects, knowing that the line from which she springs is fit for nothing but extinction, and knowing also that lesson hard to learn,--“that pain is the choice of the magnanimous, that it is better to suffer all things, and do well.” Twenty years ago, Miss Elizabeth Robins gave us her solution of a similar problem. The heroine of her novel, fully aware that she comes of a stock diseased in mind and body, and that her lover, who is near of kin, shares this inheritance, forces upon him (he is a quiescent gentleman, more than willing to be let alone) first marriage, and then suicide. We must have our hour of happiness, is her initial demand. We must pay the price, is her ultimate decision. In our day, the noble austerity commended by Mr. Stevenson, the passionate wilfulness condoned by Miss Robins, are equally out of date. The International Neo-Malthusian Bureau has easier methods to propose, and softer ways to sanction.

It is touching to hear Mr. Percy MacKaye lament that “Mendelism has as yet hardly begun to influence art or popular feeling”; but he must not lose hope,--not, at least, so far as popular feeling is concerned. “Practical eugenics” is a phrase as familiar in our ears as “intensive farming.” “How can we make the desirable marry one another?” asks Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, and answers his own question by affirming that every community should take a hand in the matter, giving the “support of public opinion,” and the more emphatic support of “important and well-paid positions” to a choice stock of men, provided always that, “in the interests of the race,” they marry and have offspring.

This is practical eugenics with a vengeance, but it is not practical business. Apart from the fact that most men and women regard marriage as a personal matter, with which their neighbours have no concern, it does not follow that the admirable and athletic young husband possesses any peculiar ability. Little runts of men are sometimes the ablest of citizens. When Nature is in a jesting mood, her best friends marvel at her blunders.

The connection between Mendelism and art is still a trifle strained. It is an alliance which Mendel himself--good abbot of Brünn working patiently in his cloister garden--failed to take into account. The field of economics is not Art’s chosen playground; the imparting of scientific truths has never been her mission. Whether she deals with high and poignant emotions, or with the fears and wreckage of life, she subdues these human elements into an austere accord with her own harmonious laws. She is as remote from the crudities of the honest but uninspired reformer who dabbles in fiction and the drama, as she is remote from the shameless camp-followers of reform, for whose base ends, no less than for our instruction and betterment, the Seven Deadly Sins have acquired their present regrettable popularity. Liberated from the unsympathetic atmosphere of the catechism, they are urged upon the weary attention of adults, embodied in the lessons of youth, and explained in words of one syllable to childhood. Yet Hogarth never designed his pictures to decorate the fans of women. Suetonius never related his “pleasant atrocities” to the boys and girls of Rome.

Popular Education

This is so emphatically the children’s age that a good many of us are beginning to thank God we were not born in it. The little girl who said she wished she had lived in the time of Charles the Second, because then “education was much neglected,” wins our sympathy and esteem. It is a doubtful privilege to have the attention of the civilized world focussed upon us both before and after birth. At the First International Eugenics Congress, held in London in the summer of 1912, an Italian delegate made the somewhat discouraging statement that the children of very young parents are more prone than others to theft; that the children of middle-aged parents are apt to be of good conduct, but of low intelligence; and that the children of elderly parents are, as a rule, intelligent, but badly behaved. It seems to be a trifle hard to bring the right kind of a child into the world. Twenty-seven is, in this eugenist’s opinion, the best age for parentage; but how bend all the complicated conditions of life to meet an arbitrary date; and how remain twenty-seven long enough to insure satisfactory results? The vast majority of babies will have to put up with being born when their time comes, and make the best of it. This is the first, but by no means the worst, disadvantage of compulsory birth; and compulsory birth is the original evil which scientists and philanthropists are equally powerless to avert.

If parents do not know by this time how to bring up their children, it is not for lack of instruction. A few generations ago, Solomon was the only writer on child-study who enjoyed any vogue. Now his precepts, the acrid fruits of experience, have been superseded by more genial, but more importunate counsel. Begirt by well-wishers, hemmed in on every side by experts who speak of “child-material” as if it were raw silk or wood-pulp, how can a little boy, born in this enlightened age, dodge the educational influences which surround him? It is hard to be dealt with as “child-material,” when one is only an ordinary little boy. To be sure, “child-material” is never thrashed, as little boys were wont to be, it is not required to do what it is told, it enjoys rights and privileges of a very sacred and exalted character; but, on the other hand, it is never let alone, and to be let alone is sometimes worth all the ministrations of men and angels. The helpless, inarticulate reticence of a child is not an obstacle to be overcome, but a barrier which protects the citadel of childhood from assault.

We can break down this barrier in our zeal; and if the child will not speak, we can at least compel him to listen. He is powerless to evade any revelations we choose to make, any facts or theories we choose to elucidate. We can teach him sex-hygiene when he is still young enough to believe that rabbits lay eggs. We can turn his work into play, and his play into work, keeping well in mind the educational value of his unconscious activities, and, by careful oversight, pervert a game of tag into a preparation for the business of life. We can amuse and interest him until he is powerless to amuse and interest himself. We can experiment with him according to the dictates of hundreds of rival authorities. He is in a measure at our mercy, though nature fights hard for him, safeguarding him with ignorance of our mode of thought, and indifference to our point of view. The opinions of twelve-year-old Bobby Smith are of more moment to ten-year-old Tommy Jones than are the opinions of Dr. and Mrs. Jones, albeit Dr. Jones is a professor of psychology, and Mrs. Jones the president of a Parents’ League. The supreme value of Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson’s much-quoted “Lantern Bearers” lies in its incisive and sympathetic insistence upon the aloofness of the child’s world,--an admittedly imperfect world which we are burning to amend, but which closed its doors upon us forever when we grew into knowledge and reason.

My own childhood lies very far away. It occurred in what I cannot help thinking a blissful period of intermission. The educational theories of the Edgeworths (evolved soberly from the educational excesses of Rousseau) had been found a trifle onerous. Parents had not the time to instruct and admonish their children all day long. As a consequence, we enjoyed a little wholesome neglect, and made the most of it. The new era of child-study and mothers’ congresses lay darkling in the future. “Symbolic education,” “symbolic play,” were phrases all unknown. The “revolutionary discoveries” of Karl Groos had not yet overshadowed the innocent diversions of infancy. Nobody drew scientific deductions from jackstones, or balls, or gracehoops, save only when we assailed the wealth of nations by breaking a window-pane. Nobody was even aware that the impulses which sent us speeding and kicking up our heels like young colts were “vestigial organs of the soul.” Dr. G. Stanley Hall had not yet invented this happy phrase to elucidate the simplicities of play. How we grasped our “objective relationship” to our mothers without the help of bird’s-nest games, I do not know. Perhaps, in the general absence of experimentation, we had more time in which to solve the artless problems of our lives. Psychologists in those days were frankly indifferent to us. They had yet to discover our enormous value in the realms of conjectural thought.

The education of my childhood was embryonic. The education of to-day is exhaustive. The fact that the school-child of to-day does not seem to know any more than we knew in the dark ages, is a side issue with which I have no concern. But as I look back, I can now see plainly that the few things little girls learned were admirably adapted for one purpose,--to make us parts of a whole, which whole was the family. I do not mean that there was any expression to this effect. “Training for maternity” was not a phrase in vogue; and the short views of life, more common then than now, would have robbed it of its savour. “Training for citizenship” had, so far as we were concerned, no meaning whatsoever. A little girl was a little girl, not the future mother of the race, or the future saviour of the Republic. One thing at a time. Therefore no deep significance was attached to our possession of a doll, no concern was evinced over our future handling of a vote. If we were taught to read aloud with correctness and expression, to write notes with propriety and grace, and to play backgammon and whist as well as our intelligence permitted, it was in order that we should practise these admirable accomplishments for the benefit of the families of which we were useful, and occasionally ornamental features.

And what advantage accrued to _us_ from an education so narrowed, so illiberal, so manifestly unconcerned with great social and national issues? Well, let us admit that it had at least the qualities of its defects. It was not called training for character, but it was admittedly training for behaviour, and the foundations of character are the acquired habits of youth. “Habit,” said the Duke of Wellington, “is ten times nature.” There was precision in the simple belief that the child was strengthened mentally by mastering its lessons, and morally by mastering its inclinations. Therefore the old-time teacher sought to spur the pupil on to keen and combative effort, rather than to beguile him into knowledge with cunning games and lantern slides. Therefore the old-time parent set a high value on self-discipline and self-control. A happy childhood did not necessarily mean a childhood free from proudly accepted responsibility. There are few things in life so dear to girl or boy as the chance to turn to good account the splendid self-confidence of youth.