In Times Like These Part 8

Every department of life, every profession in which men and women engage, has certain qualifications which must be complied with, except the profession of homemaking. A young man and a young woman say: "I believe we'll get married" and forthwith they do. The state sanctions it, and the church blesses it. They may be consumptive, epileptic, s.h.i.+ftless, immoral, or with a tendency to insanity. No matter. They may go on and reproduce their kind. They are perfectly free to bring children into the world, who are a burden and a menace to society.

Society has to bear it--that is all! "Be fruitful and multiply!"

declares the church, as it deplores the evils of race suicide. Many male moralists have cried out for large families. "Let us have better and healthier babies if we can," cried out one of England's bishops, not long ago, "but let us have more babies!"

Heroic and n.o.ble sentiment and so perfectly safe! It reminds one of the dentist's advertis.e.m.e.nt: "Teeth extracted without pain"--and his subsequent explanation: "It does not hurt me a bit!"

Martin Luther is said to have stood by the death-bed of a woman, who had given birth to sixteen children in seventeen years, and piously exclaimed: "She could not have died better!"

"By all means let us have more babies," says the Bishop. Even if they are anemic and rickety, ill-nourished and deformed, and even if the mothers, already overburdened and underfed, die in giving them birth?

To the average thinking woman, this wail for large families, coming as it always does from men, is rather nauseating.

When the cry has been so persistently raised for more children, the women naturally wonder why more care is not exerted for the protection of the children who are already here. The reason is often given for not allowing women to have the free grants of land in Canada on the same conditions as men, that it would make them too independent of marriage, and, as one commissioner of emigration phrased it: "It is not independent women we want; it is population."

Granting that population is very desirable, would it not be well to save what we have? Six or seven thousand of our population in Canada drop out of the race every year as a direct result of the liquor traffic, and a higher percentage than this perish from the same cause in some other countries. Would it not be well to save them? Thousands of babies die every year from preventable causes. Free milk depositories and district nurses and free dispensaries would save many of them. In the Far West, on the border of civilization, where women are beyond the reach of nurses and doctors, many mothers and babies die every year. How would it be to try to save them? Delegations of public-spirited women have waited upon august bodies of men, and pleaded the cause of these brave women who are paying the toll of colonization, and have asked that Government nurses be sent to them in their hour of need. But up to date not one dollar of Government money has been spent on them notwithstanding the fact that when a duke or a prince comes to visit our country, we can pour out money like water!

It does not seem to the thoughtful observer that we need more children nearly so much as we need better children, and a higher value set upon all human life. In this day of war, when men are counted of less value than cattle, it is a doubtful favor to the child to bring it into life under any circ.u.mstances, but to bring children into the world, suffering from the handicaps caused by the ignorance, poverty, or criminality of the parents, is an appalling crime against the innocent and helpless, and yet one about which practically nothing is said.

Marriage, homemaking, and the rearing of children are left entirely to chance, and so it is no wonder that humanity produces so many specimens who, if they were silk stockings or boots, would be marked "Seconds."

The Bishop's cry has found many an echo: "Let us have more."

Women in several of the states have inst.i.tuted campaigns for "Better Babies," and by offering prizes and disseminating information, they have given a better chance to many a little traveler on life's highway.

But all who have endeavored in any way to secure legislation or government grants for the protection of children, have found that legislators are more willing to pa.s.s laws for the protection of cattle than for the protection of children, for cattle have a real value and children have only a sentimental value.

If children die--what of it? "The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away." Let us have more. This is the sore thought with women. It is not that the bringing of children into the world is attended with pain and worry and weariness--it is not that: it is that they are held of such small value in the eyes of this man-made world. This is the sorest thought of all!

Even as I write these words, I hear the bugle calling, and down the street our brave boys in khaki are marching. Today I pa.s.sed on the street a mother and her only son, who is now a soldier and going away with the next contingent. The lad was trying to cheer her as they walked along. She held him by the hand:--he was just a little boy to her.

"It was not for this that I raised him," she said to me bitterly. "It was not for this! The whole thing is wrong, and it is just as hard on the German women as on us!"

Even in her sorrow she had the universal outlook--the very thing that so many philosophers declare that women have not got!

I could not help but think that if there had been women in the German Reichstag, women with authority behind them, when the Kaiser began to lay his plans for the war, the results might have been very different.

I do not believe women with boys of their own would ever sit down and wilfully plan slaughter, and if there had been women there when the Kaiser and his brutal war-lords discussed the way in which they would plunge all Europe into bloodshed, I believe one of those deep-bosomed, motherly, blue-eyed German women would have stood upon her feet and said: "William--forget it!" But the German women were not there--they were at home, raising children! So the preparations for war went on unchecked, and the resolutions pa.s.sed without a dissenting voice. In German rule, we have a glorious example of male statecraft, uncontaminated by any feminine foolishness.

No doubt, it is because all our statecraft has been one-sided, that we find that human welfare has lagged far behind material welfare. We have made wonderful strides in convenience and comfort, but have not yet solved the problems of poverty, crime or insanity. Perhaps they, too, will yield to treatment when they are better understood, and men and women are both on the job. As it is now, criminals have only man's treatment, which is the hurry-up method--"hang him, and be done with him," or "chuck him into jail, and be quick about it, and let me forget him." Mothers would have more patience, more understanding, for they have been dealing with bad little boys all their lives.

The little family jars which arise in every home, are settled nine out of ten times by the mother, unless she is the sort of spineless, anemic woman, who lies down on the job, and says, "I'll tell your father,"

which acts as a threat, and sometimes is effective, though it solves no difficulty.

To hang the man who commits a crime is a cheap way to get out of a difficulty; a real masculine way. It is so much quicker and easier than trying to reform him, and what is one man less after all? Human life is cheap--to men--and of course there is always the Bishop crying: "Let us have more."

The conditions which prevail at the present time are atrocious and help to make criminals. The worst crimes have not even a name yet, much less a punishment. What about the crime of working little children and cheating them out of an education and a happy childhood? There is no name for it! What about misrepresenting land values and selling lots to people who have never seen them and who simply rely upon the owner's word; taking the hard-earned money from guileless people and giving them swamp land, miles out of the city limits, in return! They tell a story about a real-estate man who sold Edmonton lots to some people in the East, a.s.suring them that the lots were "close in," but when the owner of the lots went to register them, he found they could not be registered in Alberta--they belonged in British Columbia, the next province!

This sort of thing is considered good business, if you can "get away with it." According to our masculine code of morals--it's "rather clever"--they say. "You cannot help but admire his nerve!" But not long since a hungry man stole a banana from a fruit stand and was sent to jail for it, for the dignity of the law has to be upheld, and the small thief is the easiest one to deal with and make an example of.

Similarly Chinamen are always severely dealt with. Give it to him! He has no friends!

What about the crime of holding up the market, so that the price of bread goes up, causing poor men's children to go hungry? There is no name for it!

What about allowing speculators to hold great tracts of land uncultivated, waiting for higher prices, while unemployed men walk the streets, hungry and discouraged, cursing the day they were born: big strong fellows many of them, willing to work, craving work, but with work denied them. Yesterday one of them jumped from the High Level Bridge into the icy waters of the Saskatchewan, leaving a note behind him saying simply he was tired of it all, and could stand no more--he "would take a chance on another world." The idle land is calling to the idle man, and the world is calling for food; and yet these great tracts of wheat lands lie just outside our cities, untouched by plow or harrow, and hungry men walk our streets. The crime which the state commits in allowing such a condition to prevail is as yet unnamed.

Women have carried many a sore thought in their hearts, feeling that they have been harshly dealt with by their men folk, and have laid the blame on the individual man, when in reality the individual has not been to blame. The whole race is suffering from masculinity; and men and women are alike to blame for tolerating it.

The baby girl in her cradle gets the first cold blast of it. "A girl?"

says the kind neighbor, "Oh, too bad--I am sure it was quite a disappointment!"

Then there is the old-country reverence for men, of which many a mother has been guilty, which exalts the boys of the family far above the girls, and brings home to the latter, in many, many ways, the grave mistake of having been born a woman. Many little girls have carried the sore thought in their hearts from their earliest recollection.

They find out, later, that women's work is taken for granted. A farmer will allow his daughter to work many weary unpaid years, and when she gets married he will give her "a feather bed and a cow," and feel that her claim upon him has been handsomely met. The gift of a feather bed is rather interesting, too, when you consider that it is the daughter who has raised the geese, plucked them, and made the bed-tick. But "father" gives it to her just the same. The son, for a corresponding term of service, gets a farm.

There was a rich farmer once, who died possessed of three very fine farms of three hundred and twenty acres each. He left a farm to each of his three sons. To his daughter Martha, a woman of forty years of age, the eldest of the family, who had always stayed at home, and worked for the whole family--he left a cow and one hundred dollars.

The wording of the will ran: "To my dear daughter, Martha, I leave the sum of one hundred dollars, and one cow named 'Bella.'"

How would you like to be left at forty years of age, with no training and very little education, facing the world with one hundred dollars and one cow, even if she were named "Bella"?

To the poor old mother, sixty-five years of age, who had worked far harder than her husband, who had made b.u.t.ter, and baked bread, and sewed carpet rags, and was now bent and broken, and with impaired sight, he left: "her keep" with one of the boys!

How would you like to be left with "your keep" even with one of your own children? Keep! It is exactly what the humane master leaves to an old horse. When the old lady heard the will read which so generously provided for her "keep," she slipped away without a word. People thought it was her great grief at losing such a kind husband which made her pine and droop. But it wasn't. It was the loss of her independence. Her son and his family thought it strange that "Grandma"

did not care to go to church any more. Of course her son never thought of giving her collection or money to give to the funds of the church, and Grandma did not ask. She sat in her corner, and knit stockings for her son's children; another pitiful little broken bit of human wreckage cast up by the waves of the world. In two months Grandma had gone to the house of many mansions, where she was no longer beholden to anyone for "keep"--for G.o.d is more merciful than man!

The man who made his will this way was not a bad man, but he was the victim of wrong thinking; he did not realize that his wife had any independence of soul; he thought that all "mother" cared about was a chance to serve; she had been a quiet, una.s.sertive woman, who worked along patiently, and made no complaint. What could she need of money?

The "boys" would never see her want.

A man who heard this story said in comment: "Well, I don't see what the old lady felt so badly about, for what does a woman of sixty-five need of money anyway?"

He was not a cruel man, either, and so his remark is illuminative, for it shows a certain att.i.tude of mind, and it shows women where they have made their mistake. They have been too patient and una.s.sertive--they have not set a high enough value on themselves, and it is pathetically true that the world values you at the value you place on yourself. And so the poor old lady, who worked all her life for her family, looking for no recompense, nor recognition, was taken at the value she set upon herself, which was nothing at all.

That does not relieve the state of its responsibility in letting such a thing happen. It is a hard matter, I know, to protect people from themselves; and there can be no law made to prevent women from making slaves of themselves to their husbands and families. That would be interfering with the sanct.i.ty of the home! But the law can step in, as it has in some provinces, and prevent a man from leaving his wife with only "her keep." The law is a reflection of public sentiment, and when people begin to realize that women are human and have human needs and ambitions and desires, the law will protect a woman's interest. Too long we have had this condition of affairs: "Ma" has been willing to work without any recompense, and "Pa and the boys" have been willing to let her.

Of course, I know, sentimental people will cry out, that very few men would leave their wives in poverty--I know that; men are infinitely better than the law, but we must remember that laws are not made to govern the conduct of good men. Good men will do what is right, if there were never a law; but, unfortunately, there are some men who are not good, and many more who are thoughtless and unintentionally cruel.

The law is a schoolmaster to such.

There are some places, where a law can protect the weak, but there are many situations which require more than a law. Take the case of a man who habitually abuses and frightens his family, and makes their lives a periodic h.e.l.l of fear. The law cannot touch him unless he actually kills some of them, and it seems a great pity that there cannot be some corrective measure. In the states of Kansas and Was.h.i.+ngton (where women vote) the people have enacted what is known as the "Lazy Husband's Act," which provides for such cases as this. If a man is abusive or disagreeable, or fails to provide for his family, he is taken away for a time, and put to work in a state inst.i.tution, and his money is sent home to his family. He is treated kindly, and good influences thrown around him. When he shows signs of repentance--he is allowed to go home. Home, very often, looks better to him, and he behaves himself quite decently.

Women outlined this legislation and it is in the states where women vote that it is in operation. There will be more such legislation, too, when women are given a chance to speak out!

A New Zealander once wrote home to a friend in England advising him to fight hard against woman suffrage. "Don't ever let the wimmin vote, Bill," he wrote. "They are good servants, but bad masters. Over there you can knock your wife about for five s.h.i.+llings, but here we does jail for it!"

The man who "knocks his wife about" or feels that he might some day want to knock her about, is opposed to further liberties for women, of course.

But that is the cla.s.s of man from whom we never expected anything. He has his prototype, too, in every walk of life. Don't make the mistake of thinking that only ignorant members of the great unwashed ma.s.ses talk and feel this way. Silk-hatted "n.o.blemen" have answered women's appeals for common justice by hiring the Whitechapel toughs to "bash their heads," and this is another sore thought that women will carry with them for many a day after the suffrage has been granted. I wish we could forget the way our English sisters have been treated in that sweet land of liberty!

The problems of discovery have been solved; the problems of colonization are being solved, and when the war is over the problem of world government will be solved; and then the problem will be just the problem of living together. That problem cannot be solved without the help of women. The world has suffered long from too much masculinity and not enough humanity, but when the war is over, and the beautiful things have been destroyed, and the lands laid desolate, and all the blood has been shed, the poor old bruised and broken heart of the world will cry out for its mother and nurse, who will dry her own eyes, and bind up its wounds and nurse it back to life once more. Perhaps the old earth will be a bit kinder than it has ever been to women, who knows? Men have been known to grow very fond of their nurse, and bleeding has been known to cure mental disorders!

CHAPTER X

THE LAND OF THE FAIR DEAL

Lord, take us up to the heights, and show us the glory, Show us a vision of Empire! Tell us its story!