The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons Part 9

At least I can claim that one of your greatest women, Frances Willard, was heart and soul with me on this point.

And now to descend to lower levels. Could we not do a little more to save our young girls from sacrificing their happiness to false ideals by opportunely obtruding a little mature common-sense into their day visions and their inexperienced way of looking at things? It is all very well in the heyday of life, when existence is full of delight and home affection, to refuse a man who could make them happy, because they don't quite like the shape of his nose, or because he is a little untidy in his dress, or simply because they are waiting for some impossible demiG.o.d to whom alone they could surrender their independence. But could we not mildly point out that darker days must come, when life will not be all enjoyment, and that a lonely old age, with only too possible penury to be encountered, must be taken into consideration?

G.o.d knows I am no advocate for loveless, and least of all for mercenary marriages, but I think we want some _via media_ between the French _mariage de convenance_ and our English and American method of leaving so grave a question as marriage entirely to the whimsies and romantic fancies of young girls. We need not go back to the old fallacy that marriage is the aim and end of a woman's existence, and absolutely necessary for her happiness. Some women are doubtless called to be mothers of the race, and to do the social work which is so necessary to our complex civilization. Some women may feel themselves called to some literary or artistic pursuit, or some other profession, for which they require the freedom of unmarried life. But I think I shall carry most women with me in saying that for the ordinary woman marriage is the happiest state, and that she rarely realizes the deepest and highest in her nature except in wifehood and motherhood. Rarely, indeed, can any public work that she can do for the world equal the value of that priceless work of building up, stone by stone, the temple of a good man's character which falls to the lot of his mother. Truly is she called the wife, the weaver, since day and night, without hasting and without resting, she is weaving the temple hangings, wrought about with pomegranates and lilies, of the very shrine of his being. And if our girls could be led to see this, at least it would overcome that adverseness to marriage which many are now so curiously showing, and which inevitably makes them more fastidious and fanciful in their choice, And, on the other hand, without falling back into the old match-making mamma, exposing her wares in the marriage market to be knocked down to the highest bidder, might not parents recognize a little more than they do how inc.u.mbent on them it is to make every effort to give their daughters that free and healthy intercourse with young men which would yield them a wider choice, and which forms the best method for insuring a happy marriage?

At least, let us open our eyes to the fact that we are face to face with some terrible problems with regard to the future of our girls. With safe investments yielding less and less interest, it must become more and more difficult to make a provision for the unmarried daughters; and if the money is spent instead on training them to earn their own bread, we are still met by the problem of the early superannuation of women's labor, which rests on physical causes, and cannot therefore be removed.

This at least is no time to despise marriage, or for women of strong and independent character to adopt an att.i.tude which deprives the nation of many of its n.o.blest mothers.

But if we are to facilitate marriage, which must form, at any rate, the main solution of the problems of the near future to which I have alluded, if we are to prevent, or even lessen, the degradation of women, if we are to extinguish this pit of destruction in our midst, into which so many a fair and promising young life disappears, and which perpetually threatens the moral and physical welfare of our own sons, if we are to stay the seeds of moral decay in our own nation, we must be content to revolutionize much in the order of our own life, and adopt a lower and simpler standard of living. It is we, and not men, who set the standard; it is we who have been guilty of the vulgar ambition of following the last social fas.h.i.+on, and doing as our richer neighbors do, until in England we have made our girls such expensive articles that many young men simply dare not indulge in them, and are led to seek in their luxurious clubs the comfort which they should find in a home of their own, with all that relaxation of moral fibre which comes from club life. Do we seriously think that we are likely successfully to contend against the degradation of women by our Rescue Societies and our Refuges when we are deliberately bringing about a social condition that ministers to it? "Oh, of course," said a near relative of my own, "no girl can marry comfortably and live in London with less than a thousand a year." All I can answer is that if this be so, it means the degradation of women writ large.

And have we even secured the happiness of our own daughters by this high standard of living which prevents so many of them from marrying at all?

These unmarried girls, with no worthy object in life to call out the n.o.ble energies that lie dormant within them, "lasting" rather than "living,"--are they really happy? Is not Robert Louis Stevenson right when he says that "the ideal of the stalled ox is the one ideal that will never satisfy either man or woman"? Were not the hards.h.i.+ps of a smaller income and a larger life--a life that would at least satisfy a woman's worst foe, heart hunger,--more adapted to their true nature, their true happiness?

And to what further admirable results have we attained by this high standard of comfort and luxury? Nature has carefully provided for the equality of the s.e.xes by sending rather more boys than girls into the world, since fewer boys are reared; but we have managed to derange this order. We have sent our boys out into the world, but we have kept our girls at home, refusing to allow them to rough it with husbands and brothers or to endure the least hardness. The consequence is that we have nearly a million of surplus women in the old country, while in America, and in our own colonies, we have a corresponding surplus of men, with all the evil moral consequences that belong to a disproportion between the s.e.xes. Truly we may congratulate ourselves!

I would therefore urge that if we are really to grapple with these moral evils, we should simplify our standard of living, and educate our girls very differently to what, at least in England, we are doing. Culture is good, and the more we have of it the better; it gives a woman a wider sphere of influence, as well as more enlightened methods of using that influence. But if dead languages are to take the place of living service; if high mathematics are to work out a low plane of cooking and household management; if a first cla.s.s in moral science is to involve third cla.s.s performance of the moral duties involved in family life, then I deliberately say it were better that, like Tennyson's mother, we should be

"Not learned save in gracious household ways."

I protest with the uttermost earnestness against the care of human life, of human health, and of human comfort being considered a lower thing and of less importance than good scholars.h.i.+p; or that, when we recognize that months and even years will have to be devoted to the attainment of the one, the arts by which we can fulfil those great human trusts which devolve more or less upon every woman can be practised without ever having been learnt at all.

Do not misunderstand me. Do not think I am decrying a cla.s.sical education; and, as the daughter of a great mathematician, it is not likely that I should underrate mathematics as a mental discipline. I am only urging that they should be subordinated to higher and more practical issues.

I am thankfully aware that these remarks do not apply to American women to the same degree in which they apply to our English girls. The paucity of domestic servants, and the consequent pressure of necessity, have saved you from the fine lady ideal which we have adopted for our girls and the exclusively book education into which we have almost unconsciously drifted. You have been constrained to choose some n.o.bler type on which to mould your scheme of female education than that of the tadpole, which is all head, no hands, a much active and frivolous tail.

Your girls are brought up not to consider it beneath them to take part in the work of the house; and something of the all round capability of American women which so strikes us is doubtless owing to their not having incurred "this Nemesis of disproportion," and therefore to their combining intellectual culture with practical efficiency.

Why we should have taken this fine lady ideal for our girls, when we take such a much more practical standard for our boys, has always puzzled me. If an excellent opening offered itself to one of our sons at a bank, we should agree with his father in expecting him to take it, though it would involve the drudgery of sitting in a cramped att.i.tude on a tall stool for hours and hours every day. Why should we accept life's necessary drudgery for our boys and refuse it for our girls? No life worth living can be had without drudgery,--the most brilliant as well as the dullest. Darwin spent eight of the best years of his life in an exhaustive investigation into the organization of a barnacle--labor accompanied, as all intellectual work was with him, by a constant sense of physical nausea from which he suffered, till, from sheer weariness and disgust at the drudgery, he ends his researches in his emphatic way with the exclamation, "D---- the barnacles!" At least a woman's household drudgery does not end in a barnacle, or in dead coin, but in a living and loved personality whose comfort and health it secures.

Blessed is drudgery, the homely mother of Patience, "that young and rose-lipped cherubim," of quiet endurance, of persistency in well-doing, of all the stablest elements of character.

Do not let us refuse to our girls the divine hardness which is the very heart of a diviner joy and of that "fuller life" of "which our veins are scant," nor refuse for them and for ourselves the words of life: "As the Father hath sent Me into the world, even so send I you"; but be content to send them into the world to love, to suffer, to endure, to live and die for the good of others.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 34: See some curious facts given in Darwin's _Origin of Species_.]

[Footnote 35: _David Grieve_, by Mrs. Humphry Ward, sixth edition, p.

401.]

[Footnote 36: _David Grieve_, p. 524.]

[Footnote 37: _Nineteenth Century_, May, 1892.]

CHAPTER X

NATIONAL AND IMPERIAL ASPECTS

I cannot conclude these imperfect suggestions as to how we may best carry up the moral training of our children, and especially of our boys, to a higher level, without touching on the wider and national aspect of the problems we have been considering. Especially is this necessary in relation to that attribute which, in common parlance, arrogates to itself the name that covers the vast sweep of all moral obligation and calls itself emphatically "morality." "Language," Dr. Martineau has finely said, "is the great confessional of the human heart"; and it may be in some instinctive sense that this question of personal purity or the reverse is the determining force for good or evil to the nation, as well as to the family, that has given this restricted sense to the words "morality" and "immorality." Yet we are possessed with an inveterate and almost irreclaimable tendency to look at the question of purity of life from a purely individualistic standpoint, and to regard it as a matter concerning the individual rather than the social organism. In electing a member for the Legislature how often have we not been told that we are only concerned with his public career, and have nothing whatever to do with his private life, though the private life is only another expression for the man himself; and how can we be called upon to entrust the destinies of our country to a libertine who habitually violates the obligations of his own manhood and does his best to lower and degrade the womanhood of the people he is called as a member of the Legislature to protect and to raise? When shall we learn that whatever touches the higher life and well-being of the family still more vitally affects the wider family of the State, and threatens its disintegration? The family in some lower form will survive in the most corrupt form of society; but the State, as an organized polity, capable of embodying, preserving, and promoting the higher life of the nation, perishes.

I am the more led to dwell earnestly on these wider aspects, since that great epoch-making commemoration which marked the sixtieth year of the reign of our Queen, and which brought home to the consciousness of the nation, as nothing else has ever done, its vast world-wide responsibilities. That great national festival, with its proud imperial note, in which we celebrated the rise and progress of that "larger Venice with no narrow ca.n.a.ls, but the sea itself for streets," will forever form a landmark in English history. None who witnessed it will ever forget that spectacle, of men of all races and color, of all creeds and traditions, a.s.sembled together as brothers and fellow-subjects, to do honor to a woman's gracious sway of sixty years. And is there not a deep significance in the fact that these men of warring creeds and opposed traditions came together to do homage to no commanding personality, no Semiramis or Boadicea of old, no Catherine of Russia or Elizabeth of England; but to a sovereign whose chief characteristic has been that of being a true woman, with a true woman's instinctive sagacity and wisdom of the heart: a woman with no glamour of youth and beauty, but bowed with the weight of years and widowhood and cares of State; a Queen who, on the morning of her crowning triumph, sent forth no royal proclamation couched in set and pompous periods, but laid her trembling hands on the bowed head of her people, and gave them a simple mother's blessing: "Tell my beloved people that I pray from the bottom of my heart that G.o.d may bless them"?

May I not take it as the very embodiment of all that I have been urging on the women of this day, the immense possibilities of good that lie latent in our womanhood, the vast issues of good to the nation, and through it to the world, if that womanhood is only true to itself?

For let us clearly realize that this great moral question is no question confined to the narrow limits of the home, but a question of the rise and fall of nations. This is a truism of history. All history teaches us that the welfare and very life of a nation is determined by moral causes; and that it is the pure races that respect their women and guard them jealously from defilement that are the tough, prolific, ascendant races, the n.o.blest in type and the most fruitful in propagating themselves. You will never find a permanently progressive race where the position of women is low, the men libertine, and the state of society corrupt. What was it that made the most brilliant civilization the world has ever seen--the civilization which still gives us the inexhaustible wells of our intellectual life--what was it that made it the shortest-lived? Few, I think, would deny that the rapid decadence of Greece, despite her splendid intellectual life, was due to moral causes.

Not the pure, but the impure--the brilliant Hetairae--were the companions of men, and the men themselves were stained with nameless vices.

Speaking of the decay of the Athenian people, Mr. Francis Galton says: "We know, and may guess something more, of the reason why this marvellously gifted race declined. Social morality grew exceedingly lax; marriage became unfas.h.i.+onable and was avoided; many of the more ambitious and accomplished women were avowed courtesans, and consequently infertile; and the mothers of the incoming population were of a heterogeneous cla.s.s."[38] What was it that made the Egyptian civilization one of the longest-lived of ancient civilizations? Was it not, as we now find by her monuments, that the position of women was high; the wife was enthroned by the side of her husband, and impurity was condemned by the moral sense of the nation? What was it that enabled our barbaric ancestors, the Teutons, to overthrow the whole power of civilized Rome? On the authority of Tacitus, we know that they were singularly pure. Their women were held in the highest reverence, and believed to have something divine about them, some breath of prophetic insight. Their young men were not allowed to marry till they were five-and-twenty--in other words, till their frame was thoroughly matured. Impurity before marriage was strongly discountenanced in both s.e.xes. Therefore the whole power of Rome, honeycombed as it was by moral corruption and s.e.xual vice, could not stand before these pure barbarians.

And if these mighty civilizations have perished from moral causes, do we really think that the moral law--will

"Of which the solid earth and sky Are but the fitful shadows cast on high"--

suspend its operation out of compliment to the greatness of the British empire or of the American Republic, if they, too, become morally corrupt; or will not those old vanished nations, in the magnificent words of the Hebrew prophet, greet the phantom of their departed greatness in the land of shadows: "What, art thou, also, become weak as we? Art thou also like unto us? Thy pomp is brought down to the grave; the worm is spread under thee, and the worms cover thee."

"We talk of our greatness," says Mr. Froude; "do we really know in what a nation's greatness consists? Whether it be great or little depends entirely on what sort of men and women it is producing. A sound nation is a nation that is made up of sound human beings, healthy in body, strong of limb, true in word and deed, brave, sober, temperate, and chaste, to whom morals are of more importance than wealth or knowledge; where duty is first and the rights of man are second; where, in short, men grow up, and live, and work, having in them what our ancestors called 'the fear of G.o.d.' It is to form a character of this kind that human beings are sent into the world. Unless England's greatness in this sense has the principle of growth in it, it were better for us that a millstone were hanged about our neck, and that we were drowned in the midst of the sea."

"I feel more and more," said Mrs. Fawcett in words addressed to a great meeting of men in the Manchester Free Trade Hall--words that I wish could be written upon every heart--" that the great question whether the relations of men and women shall be pure and virtuous or impure and vile lies at the root of all national well-being and progress. The main requisite towards a better state of things than now exists cannot be brought about by any outside agency. There is no royal road to virtue and purity. Law can do something to punish wickedness, but improvement in the law is mainly valuable as an indication that the public standard of morality is raised. Let us get good laws if we can; but there is only one way of really obtaining a n.o.bler national existence, and that is by each of us individually learning to hate and detest the vile self-indulgence that covers the life of those who are the victims of it with shame and degradation. Self-control and respect for the rights of others are the only cure for the terrible national danger which threatens us. If men and women would learn never to take pleasure in what brings pain, shame, misery, and moral death to others, earth would be turned into a heaven. It would be incredible if it were not true that for mere selfish indulgence thousands of men are willing to drag women down to what even these men themselves recognize as the lowest dregs of humanity. Where is their chivalry? Where is their common humanity? Some would say that such men do not possess either. For my part, I do not believe this. Let women thankfully acknowledge that, so far as other matters are concerned, they are constantly indebted to the chivalrous self-sacrifice of men.

Chivalry is not dead; generous self-sacrifice is not dead; but in far too many cases, with regard to the all-important question of personal purity, they are sleeping. Our efforts must be directed to awakening them. We must try and make men realize the callous cruelty of all actions which lower the womanhood of even the poorest and most degraded of women."

And if we refuse, sunk in our own selfish interests and pleasures, and content that the daughters of the people should perish as long as our own are safe, then it will not be by an European coalition that the British Empire will perish, it will be by moral decay from within; in Blake's rough, strong words:

"The harlot's curse from street to street Shall be old England's winding sheet."

The British Empire, the great American Republic, the two greatest civilizing, order-spreading, Christianizing world-powers ever known, can only be saved by a solemn league and covenant of their women to bring back simplicity of life, plain living, high thinking, reverence for marriage laws, chivalrous respect for all womanhood, and a high standard of purity for men and women alike.

Suffer me to lay before you three considerations, which will prove to you at once that this great moral question is more vital to our two nations than to any other, and that we are peculiarly vulnerable to the action of moral causes.

Firstly, England, and in one sense England alone, is the mighty mother of nations. Three great nations have already sprung from her loins; a fourth in Africa is already in process of consolidation. From the narrow confines of our sea-girt island our people pour into all quarters of the globe; and if we suffer England to know corruption we send forth polluted waters into all lands. Your great Republic, on the other hand, is a mother of nations in another sense, since she receives into her mighty bosom vast numbers drawn from the suffering peoples of the old world, and gives them a mother's welcome. According as your civilization is high and pure, or low and corrupt, so will those naturalized citizens be. Decay with great empires, as with fish, sets in at the head; and the moral decadence of England and America will sensibly lower the moral standard of nearly one-third of the population of the world.[39] The heart of the two nations is still sound. It is not too late. We are at least free from the continental system, by which the degradation of women is reduced to a systematized slavery, to meet what is openly called a necessity of nature. The comparative purity of Englishmen and Americans is still a wonder, and often a derision to foreigners. Our women are a greater power than in any other country. We still start from a good vantage-ground.

England, certainly through no merit of her own, has been called by the providence of G.o.d to lead in great moral causes. We led in the matter of slavery--the open sore of the world. We English and American women are now called to lead, in this its hidden sore, for the healing of the nations.

Secondly, since you have elected to go beyond your own confines and have dependencies, and so take up the white man's burden of civilizing and Christianizing the world, your men as well as ours will be exposed to that dangerously lowering influence, contact with lower races and alien civilizations. An Englishman in India, if he be not a religious man, is apt to blind himself to wrongs done to womanhood, because those wrongs are often done to a pariah caste who are already set apart for infamy; though I have not yet heard of an Englishman possessing himself of slaves on the ground that they were slaves already to their native masters. Worse still, in savage or semi-civilized countries the native girl, far from feeling herself degraded, considers that she is raised by any union, however illicit, with a white man. It is the native men who are furious. Which of us in England did not feel an ache of shame in our hearts over the plea of the Matabele to the white man: "You have taken our lands, and our hunting-grounds are gone. You have taken our herds, and we want for food. You have taken our young men, and made them slaves in your mines. You have taken our women _and done what you like with them_." How many of our native wars may not have had as their cause that last sentence in the plaint of the Matabele, a cause carefully concealed from the public eye? For G.o.d's sake, let mothers teach their sons that first rudiment in manly character, the recognition that the girls of a conquered race, or of a barbarian tribe inhabiting one of our spheres of influence, from the very fact that they are a conquered race, or, if not conquered, hopelessly and piteously in our power, are _ipso facto_ a most sacred trust to us, which it is both unmanly and b.e.s.t.i.a.l to violate. Especially I would plead with mothers to send us pure men for our army--officers who will set their men a high example of chivalry towards the weakest native woman, and who will so influence them by example and personal influence that they may look upon voluntarily disabling themselves from active service, while still taking the government pay, as unmanly and unsoldierly. Give us men who can say with a non-commissioned officer writing home to one of our White Cross secretaries: "I have been out in India now eleven years and have never had a day's illness; and I think the whole secret of my good health is total abstinence from all that intoxicates, and that I honor all women as I honor my mother or any of my sisters."

Thirdly, the hardest thing on earth is not to slay a sin, but to get it buried; and the hardest of all sins to get under ground is the sin of impurity. It is largely due to the low standard of purity among men that we owe the almost insoluble problem presented by the existence of the large Eurasian population in India, and of the half-caste generally.

"The universal unanimity of the popular verdict on the half-caste is remarkable," says Olive Schreiner in some powerful articles published in _Blackwood_ on the problems presented by our Colonial Empire. "The half-caste, it is a.s.serted in every country where he is known, whether it be in America, Asia, or Africa, and whether his ancestors be English and negroid Spanish and Indian, or Boer and Hottentot,--the self-caste is by nature anti-social. It is always a.s.serted that he possesses the vices of both parent races and the virtues of neither: that he is born especially with a tendency to be a liar, cowardly, licentious, and without self-respect."

Olive Schreiner herself is the first to admit that there are exceptions.

She says:

"The fact that amongst the most despised cla.s.s of our laboring half-castes we have all met individuals, not only of the highest integrity, but of rare moral beauty and of heroic and fully developed social feelings, does not impugn the theory of his unfortunate position. If you should sow human seed inside the door of h.e.l.l, some of it would yet come up white lilies. But as a rule the popular verdict on the half-caste is not overdrawn."

I strongly agree with Mrs. Schreiner that this lamentable result is not due solely, or even chiefly, to the admixture of races, but far more to the circ.u.mstances in which he has been born and bred. He has originated in almost all cases, not from the union of average individuals of the two races uniting under average conditions, but as the result of a s.e.xual union between the most helpless and enslaved females of the dark race and the most recklessly dominant males of the white. "He enters a world in which there was no place prepared for him." His father was about as sensible of his parental obligations towards him as a toad towards its sp.a.w.n in the next ditch. To him he "was a broken winegla.s.s from last night's feast." "Often without a family, always without a nation or race, without education or moral training, and despised by the society in which he was born," is it any wonder that the half-caste is the curse of the community in which he is found;--one of those whips, as Shakespeare reminds us, that "heaven makes out of our pleasant vices" to "scourge" us into some sense of their seriousness?

If you would not incur that curse, that insoluble problem of the half-caste, then in both your civil and military services send out men of clean hearts and lives into your dependencies, Alas! in your great military camps during your Spanish war a moral laxity was allowed, which, had it been attempted in the Egyptian campaign, Lord Kitchener would have stamped out with a divine fury. I had it from an eyewitness, but the details are wholly unfit for publication.