The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons Part 10

I do not hold with our "little Englanders" that the possession of an empire is a disaster; on the contrary, I hold that it const.i.tutes a splendid school for the formation of strong character,--of men who are the very salt of the earth,--and that the sense of a great mission to be fulfilled tends to give a n.o.bility of soul to the whole nation; while even the wars it may involve prove the vultures of G.o.d swooping down on the hidden social rottennesses which in prolonged peace may breed unnoticed and unreproved. We have never forgotten the bitter lessons of the Crimean war which laid bare our miserable incompetence in organizing, and the moral rottenness of our English firms that could supply our soldiers with paper-soled boots and bayonets that bent at a thrust, when the very life of our brave fellows depended on their being well armed and well shod.

America will never forget the sufferings of her wounded in the Spanish war, sufferings caused by the like dishonesty in the goods supplied and the like criminal incompetency which failed to provide them even with necessaries.

But I do say that an empire presents many difficult problems, and that the men who accept its responsibilities need a sound head, clean hands, and above all a pure heart.

Let me in conclusion relate an incident which happened in the wreck of the _Warren Hastings_, to which I have already alluded,--an incident which I can never tell without a breaking voice and eyes full of tears.

In that awful night of storm and darkness and iminent s.h.i.+pwreck, the officer in command, after ordering his men below to lighten the crowded deck, stationed two of his men at a narrow gangway through which he feared an ugly rush for life might be made, while the women and children were being embarked, bidding them on no account to leave their post till he gave them the word of command. At length the women and the sick had all been saved in the boats. This done, and not till then, the men had saved themselves, some by boats, some by life preservers; and last of all the captain and officer in command were proceeding to leave the fast foundering s.h.i.+p, when the latter heard a voice close to him, saying, "Colonel, may we leave now?" It was the voice of one of his two sentinels. In the stress and strain of the awful scenes of that night he had for the moment forgotten that he had ordered them not to leave their post until he gave the word of command. And he said that _the water was almost up to their lips_!

Oh ye mothers of America and of our great Empire! send us such men as these,--men who will mount guard over women and children in all lands, and see, as far as in them lies, that they do not make s.h.i.+pwreck of what is dearer than life;--men who, even with the bitter waters of temptation up to their own lips, will still hold their post and see that no man, to save himself, drives them down into that dread sea of perdition which never gives up its dead.

Then East, West, North, South, the American flag will witness in the face of all nations to the true manhood that steers its course by no earth-born fires of pa.s.sion and selfish l.u.s.t, but by the eternal stars, the heavenly lights of G.o.d, and mother, and duty, and home.

East, West, North, South, by its side our flag, twice scored with the White Cross, will float wide in the face of all nations the Englishman's faith, reverence for womanhood, self-giving manhood, and the pure heart that sees G.o.d.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 38: _Hereditary Genius_, by Francis Galton, p. 331.]

[Footnote 39: Great Britain, since the conquest of the Soudan, rules one-fourth of the population of the world.]

CHAPTER XI

THE DYNAMIC ASPECT OF EVIL[40]

There remains yet one other way in which I earnestly desire to help you if I can. I would fain afford you some light on this difficult problem and give you a spring of hope within by enabling you to see what it is working out in the world without. Some, I know, do not need this help.

Some wholesome souls seem to gaze on all evil with sun-dazzled eyes--eyes that see Him in whom they walk, and not it, and in His light they see light. They are the "naturally Christian" souls who lead melodious days amid all the jars and discords of the world around them.

Others there are who seem to look upon these great social evils as especially provided to afford a sphere for their beneficent activities; and who if, by some sudden rise in public opinion, some pa.s.sionate sense of the wrong done to women, the degraded cla.s.s should almost cease to exist, would in their heart of hearts secretly regret so many empty beds in their little Rescue Home and the possibility that it might have to be shut up, when "the girls did turn out so well." Others, again, there are who never trouble their heads or hearts about the misery and sin of the world, or any social problem, however dark, as long as their own house is comfortable, their own bed soft, and their own children healthy and well cared for, never dreaming how those social evils may press upon those children in their after-life. These are in no need of this kind of help. But there are many thoughtful mothers, possibly an increasing number with the increase of knowledge that is coming to all women, from whose heart there is going up a bitter cry, "Why, oh why is all this evil permitted?" Why is there this nameless moral difficulty at the very heart of our life which our whole soul revolts from contemplating? Why has Nature made these pa.s.sions so strong that she seems wholly regardless of all considerations of morality?[41]

Some there are who feel that all infidel books are mere curl-paper in comparison with the terrible facts of life, some who are in danger of having all faith crushed out of them--

"Beneath the weary and the heavy weight Of all this unintelligible world."

It is these who need, like myself, as a first step to strong action, to see something of what G.o.d is working out by the evil and suffering of the world, to see it as a part of a vast redemptive whole, not as a great exception in our life, but working under the same law by which, in the words of the ancient collect, "things which are cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and all things are returning to perfection through Him from whom they had their origin."

Now, do not think that I am going to indulge in a dissertation on the origin of evil or why the world is so full of sin and misery. This is insoluble. You cannot solve a problem which has only one term. Your unknown quant.i.ty must have some known factor or factors related to it, or you cannot resolve it into the known. In this great claim of cause and effect, where all things are related and interdependent, you can only know a related thing through its relations. Try to account for a bit of chalk, for instance, and consider all you must know in order to enable you to do so. To account for its weight you must know something about the motion of the whole planetary system and the law of gravity that controls that system; to account for the weather-stains upon it, you must know something about chemical reaction; to account for its being chalk and not flint, you must know something of the geological ages of the earth, and how it comes to be built up of little sea-sh.e.l.ls; to account for its hardness, you must know something of the intricacies of molecular physics. All this you must know to account for a mere bit of chalk. How, then, can we expect to understand the problem of the world when we know absolutely nothing of its relations with the great moral and spiritual whole to which it belongs, and without the knowledge of which it must for ever remain an insoluble problem, presenting one term only, an enigma of which we do not possess the key?

But though we cannot understand the origin of evil and why the world is as it is, we can understand something of the processes which are at work for good or ill. We can in a measure trace whether these processes are making slowly but surely for righteousness, or whether all the sin and the suffering are aimless and purposeless, a voice that cries "believe no more,"

"An ever breaking sh.o.r.e That tumbles in a G.o.dless deep."

Now, I contend that the only ground of despair, the only thing that might-shut us up to pessimism and to "a philosophy only just above suicide mark," would be not the presence but the absence of these great world evils. If this world presented a dead-level of comfortable selfishness that on the whole answered fairly well all round, an economy of petty self-interests in stable equilibrium, a world generally wrong, but working out no evil in particular to set it right, a society in which every man was for himself, and not the devil, as at present, but G.o.d for us all--then indeed we might despair. But who can contemplate humanity as it is, that broken stair of the Divinity, whose top is in the unapproachable light of heaven and whose lowest step rests not on earth but in h.e.l.l, without feeling that it is destined for an infinite progress, destined for the ascending feet of angels? Who that gazes on this world, with its infinite depths of pain, its heavy weight of evil, its abysmal falls, its stupendous pressures of wrong and misery, but feels that here, if anywhere, we are in the presence of kinetic energies, of immense moral and spiritual forces, capable of raising the whole of fallen humanity to the heights of the Divine. For let us remember that in the moral and spiritual world, as well as in the physical, no fall but carries with it the force that can be converted into a rise; no dread resistance of wrong to the right but creates an acc.u.mulated force which once let loose can transform an empire; no weight of evil but, in pulling it down, can be made to raise the whole bent of our life.

"Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be."

He is "no finite and finished clod." Progress, as Browning says, is his distinctive mark, and these deep evils are the gigantic steps by which he rises as he treads them under foot. Once recognize the fact that he is a fallen being--and by that I mean no theological dogma, but a truth of life, which, whatever our creed may be, must stare us in the face--the fact that he is a being knowing good but choosing evil, capable of an ideal but habitually falling below it, no mere automaton, but possessed of a spiritual will and an accusing conscience--I ask how else can he be educated, in the true sense of the word, and raised from death unto life except by being made to educe his own results and work out his evil premiss to the bitter end, till he is forced to go back upon himself, and recognize the right principle which he has violated?

The very law of his being, of every being who is being raised from death unto life, is, that he can only know life through death, only grasp good by grappling with evil, only gain knowledge by knowing ignorance; his highest must be sown in weakness before it can be raised in power, must be sown in dishonor before it can be raised in glory.

Look back over the past and see if it is not in conflict with these great world evils, themselves the results of man's moral blindness and sin, that we have worked out the true principles of our life, the higher possibilities of our humanity.

Take the most elementary case first, man's disobedience to the physical laws under which he must live to have a sound mind in a sound body. Man in his primitive stages is emphatically not a clean animal. On the contrary, he is a very dirty one. He has none of the cat's dainty neatness and cleanliness, none of her instinctive recognition of the deodorizing and purifying power of the earth, that makes the foulest thing once buried spring up in fresh gra.s.s and fragrant flowers. He has nothing of the imperative impulse of the little ant which he treads under his lordly feet to shampoo his brother, let alone himself. It has needed the discipline and the suffering of the ages to evolve that great banner of progress, the clean s.h.i.+rt. From what great world pestilences has he not had to suffer as the consequences of his own uncleanliness!

Cholera has been rightly called the beneficent sanitary inspector of the world. With what foul diseases, the very details of which would sicken, has he not had to be scourged withal to get him to recognize and obey the one Divine injunction, "Wash and be clean"! Truly his knowledge and recognition of sanitary law, his "physical righteousness," has had to be sown in the weakness and corruption of disease before it could be raised to the power of a recognized law of life, insuring that cleanliness which is next to G.o.dliness.

Again, take the great principle of national freedom,--that a nation has a right to govern its own destinies. With what world tyrannies and oppressions, the outcome of man's selfish l.u.s.t of power and wealth, have not the peoples had to fight and struggle in order at length to win and get recognized that principle of freedom without which a nation can be neither strong nor holy, neither a citadel nor a temple! The Iron Duke used to say, "There is but one thing worse than a battle gained, and that is a battle lost." Yet what battles lost and what battles gained, with all their sickening sights and sounds--

"Oaths, insults, filth, and monstrous blasphemies, Sweat, writhings, anguish, laboring of lungs, In that close mist, and cryings for the light, Moans of the dying and voices of the dead";

what b.l.o.o.d.y conflicts through the long ages have not had to be fought out to gain this freedom! Truly we might apostrophize Freedom in the words of the Hebrew prophet: "Who is this that cometh with her garments dyed in blood?" Through what long centuries did not what Sir John Seeley called the "mechanical theory of government" survive, the theory which recognized no vital bond of blood and historical tradition between a people and its government, but looked upon nations as royal appanages, to be banded about with royal alliances and pa.s.sed under an alien sway without consent on its own part! Did it not require a Napoleon to work out this false premiss to its bitter end, drenching Europe in blood to gratify his own greed of power, and reducing nation after nation to his alien and despotic rule, till it was felt to be intolerable, and with a convulsive struggle Europe threw off the yoke? Truly a struggle which was the birth-throes of national sentiment and the recognition that the tie between the governed and the governing must be an organic one, a tie of blood from within, not a force from without--in one word, the recognition of the great principle of national freedom which, when the nation is sufficiently developed and self-disciplined to be fit for it, is the great mother of progress. Sown in the corruption of those mangled and decaying corpses on many an awful battle-field, freedom is raised to the glory of an incorruptible truth of national life.

Once again, was it not in his age-long conflict with the great world evil of slavery that man worked out the true nature of a moral personality? Man started at the outset with the evil premiss of the right of the strong to possess himself of the weak and the conquered, and enslave him for his own use, shunting the toil and burden of life upon his bowed shoulders. Through long ages he had to work out this wrong premiss in disaster to empires through the laziness and worthlessness of their ruling cla.s.ses engendered by slave labor, in the dumb suffering and bitter wrongs of millions of enslaved men and women.

Through centuries the Church protested against these wrongs in vain, since the evil root, in the face of all protests, will go on bearing the evil fruit. England, herself the mother of free peoples, was stained with the guilt of being one of the first to originate the worst form of slavery that the world has ever seen, the African slave-trade, her great Queen Elizabeth not scorning to enrich her royal coffers out of the profits of slave-raiding expeditions conducted by her sea-captains. It needed the horrors of this latest development of the principle of slavery, the horrors of the middle pa.s.sage, of whole regions of Africa decimated to supply the slave market, of mothers torn from their children, or, worse still, compelled to bear them to their slave masters, only to see them in their turn sold to some far-off station; of the degradation of men and women brought up in heathen ignorance lest they should use their knowledge to rebel--it needed all this weight of evil and disaster at last to rouse the conscience of Europe to recognize that slavery was wrong in itself and to cast out the evil premiss on which it rested. By the mere force of moral revulsion in England, by the throes of a great civil war engendered by slavery in America, at last the true nature of a moral personality got itself recognized,--the inviolability of personal responsibility, the sanct.i.ty of the individual, the sacredness of freedom,--those great principles on which the whole of our public and political life are founded. And I make bold to say that these principles were gained as a heritage for all time, not by the preaching of abstract justice, not by any consideration of the moral beauty of liberty, but mainly by a remorseful pa.s.sion over the wrongs and the degradation of the slave. These great principles were sown in weakness and dishonor, to be raised in honor and in the power of an endless life.

When, therefore, the Church of the living G.o.d awakes, as she is just beginning to do, and closes in a life and death struggle with this far deeper and more pervasive evil of the degradation of women and children, which she has too long accepted as a melancholy necessity of human nature, may we not find in the course of that conflict that wholly new powers and new principles are being evolved, and that the apparent impossibilities of our nature are only its divine possibilities in disguise? May we not work out the true principles, not now of our public and political life, but of the home, of the family, of personal conduct and character--all those great moral bases on which the whole social structure rests for its stability? Granted that this is the deepest and strongest of all our world evils, that which is the most firmly based on the original forces of our nature, and of that part of our nature which has shown the deepest disorder--does not all this point to some great issue? That which has been sown in such deep dishonor, will it not be raised in some glory that excelleth?

If G.o.d has suffered mighty empires and whole kingdoms to be wrecked on this one evil; if He has made it throughout the Old Scriptures the symbol of departure from Himself, and closely a.s.sociated monogamic love with monotheistic wors.h.i.+p, teaching us by the history of all ancient idolatries that the race which is impure sp.a.w.ns unclean idols and Phrygian rites; if Nature attaches such preciousness to purity in man that the statistics of insurance offices value a young man's life at twenty-five, the very prime of well-regulated manhood, at exactly one-half of what it is worth at fourteen, owing, Dr. Carpenter does not hesitate to say, to the indulgence of the pa.s.sions of youth; if the tender Father, "who sits by the death-bed of the little sparrow," has not thought it too great a price to pay that countless women and children should be sunk to h.e.l.l without a chance in this life, in a degradation that has no name, but which, in its very depth, measures the height of the sanct.i.ty of womanhood; do we think that all these stupendous issues are for no end and to work out no purpose? Do we not feel at once that we stand here at the very centre of the mighty forces that are moulding men to n.o.bler shape and higher use?

Here, at least, is a force, if we will only use it, so weighted with public disaster, with national decay, with private misery, that it insists on making itself felt if there be a spark of life left and the nation has not become mere dead carcase for the vultures of G.o.d's judgments to prey upon. Here alone is a power strong enough to compel us to simplify our life and restore its old divine order of marriage and hard work, of "plain living and high thinking," which luxury and self-ease are fast undermining. Here, in the slain of the daughters of our people, is a stinging wrong that will goad us into seeing that the people are so housed that a human life is possible to them. Here, if anywhere, is a pa.s.sion of conscience, and pity, and duty, and interest combined, strong enough, a heaped-up weight of evil heavy enough, to raise us to a self-giving manhood and a self-reverencing womanhood.

And from this secret place of thunder is not G.o.d now calling His chosen ones to come forward and be fellow-workers with Him? And when that call is obeyed, when, to summarize what I have already said, the wrongs and degradation of women and hapless children take hold of men, as, thank G.o.d, they are beginning to take hold, with a remorseful pa.s.sion, that pa.s.sion for the weak, the wronged, and the defenceless, which surely is the divine in flower in a human soul; when women rise up in a wild revolt against

"The law that now is paramount, The common law by which the poor and weak Are trampled under foot of vicious men, And loathed forever after by the good";

when the Christian Church at length hears the persistent interrogation of her Lord, "Seest thou this woman?" and makes answer, "Yea, Lord, I see that she is young, and poor, and outcast, and degraded," and speaks to young men with something of the pa.s.sion of the true Man--"It were better for you that a millstone were hanged about your neck and you cast into the depths of the sea, than that you should cause one of these little ones to stumble"; when the fact that a foolish, giddy girl's feet have slipped and fallen is no longer the signal for every man to look upon her as fair game, and to trample her deeper into the mire, but the signal to every man calling himself a man to hasten to her side, to raise her up again and restore her to her lost womanhood; when boys are taught from their earliest years that if they would have a clear brain, a firm nerve, and a strong muscle, they must be pure, and purity is looked upon as manly, at least, as much as truth and courage; when women are no longer so lost to the dignity of their own womanhood as to make companions of the very men who insult and degrade it; when the woman requires the man to come to her in holy marriage in the glory of his unfallen manhood, as he requires her to come to him in the beauty of her spotless maidenhood; then, when these things begin to be, will not G.o.d's order slowly evolve itself out of our disorder, and the man will become the head of the woman, to guard her from all that makes her unfit to be the mother of the race, and the woman will be the heart of the man, to inspire him with all n.o.ble purpose? As we stand by this great world-sepulchre of corruption our unbelieving heart can only exclaim: "It stinketh." But the Christ meets us with the words, "Said I not unto thee that if thou wouldst believe, thou shouldst see the glory of G.o.d?"

That which has been sown in human weakness must be raised in divine power; that which has been sown in deep dishonor must be raised in glory. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, even the self-giving manhood of Him who is the Prince of Pa.s.sion and the Lord of Love, the manhood lifted into G.o.d.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 40: In this chapter I have quoted some pa.s.sages from an article of mine, "The Apocalypse of Evil," which appeared in the _Contemporary Review_, and received the strong commendation of Dr.

Lightfoot, then Bishop of Durham. Many of the thoughts I owe to my friend, James Hinton, to whom my obligations on this subject are absolute.]

[Footnote 41: We must be careful, however, in urging this difficulty, to remember Dr. Martineau's teaching, which I have given in the third chapter, and bear in mind that the evil here is due to man's disorder, and not to Nature's order. In the animal world the reproductive instincts work out as orderly results as all other natural instincts, and are no stronger than is necessary for the preservation of the race.]

CONCLUSION

And it is this great upward movement, lifting man to a higher level, which is given into the hands of us women, touching, as it does, all the great trusts of our womanhood. What are we women going to do in the face of such vast issues for good or evil?

Undoubtedly we stand at the parting of the ways. In England undoubtedly the old high traditions of English society have, at least in what is called the "Upper Ten," been lowered and vulgarized. Our literature is no longer as clean and wholesome as it was. The greater freedom that women enjoy has not always been put to high uses. And all around us in both countries the old order is changing, and the new order is not yet born. Old positions are becoming untenable, with the higher position and culture of women. It is becoming an impossibility for intelligent women with a knowledge of physiology and an added sense of their own dignity to accept the lower moral standard for men, which exposes them to the risk of exchanging monogamy for a peculiarly vile polygamy--polygamy with its sensuality, but without its duties--bringing physical risks to their children and the terrible likelihood of an inherited moral taint to their sons. It is an impossibility, now that mothers know, that they should remain indifferent as to what sort of manhood they send out into the world--the so-called manhood that either makes and maintains the miserable sinner of our streets or is content to give a tainted name to the mother of his child, or the true manhood lifted into G.o.d, whose marriage is the type of the eternal union of G.o.d and the soul, of Christ and the Church, and whose fatherhood claims kins.h.i.+p with the Father of lights. It is impossible for women who are agitating for the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of their s.e.x to accept as a necessary cla.s.s in the midst of a democratical society a cla.s.s of citizens who, in Dr. Welldon's[42]

words, addressed to the University of Cambridge, "have lost once for all time the rights of citizens.h.i.+p--who are n.o.body's wives, n.o.body's sisters, n.o.body's friends, who live a living death in the world of men.

There are one hundred and fifty thousand such citizens,--perhaps far more, in England and Wales--_and all are women_."

These old positions are simply impossible, each a moral _reductio ad absurdam_. We must inst.i.tute a new and higher order. To do so we women must unite in a great silent movement, a temple slowly rising up beneath our hands without sound of axe or hammer. It will not make itself heard on platforms; its cry will not be heard in our streets. It will go on beneath the surface of our life, probably unheeded and unnoticed of men. Women must educate women; those who know must teach those who are in ignorance. Let mothers who have been roused to the greatness of the issues at stake take as their field of labor the young mothers whom they may know--possibly their own married daughters or nieces, possibly those who are only bound to them by ties of friends.h.i.+p. Use this book, if you will. If there are things in it which you don't approve of--and oh, how much of the divine patience of our Lord do we need with one another in dealing with this difficult question--cut out those pages, erase that pa.s.sage, but do not deny those young mothers the necessary knowledge to guard the nursery or save their boys at school. And then try and follow it up by quietly talking over the difficulties and the best method of encountering them. Let us deny ourselves in order to give to a.s.sociations or inst.i.tutions for the elevation of women, as well as to that excellent society for men, the White Cross, which is spreading its purifying work through both countries.[43] Let us do what we can to help in organizing women's labor, so that a living wage may be secured and no woman be driven by starvation into selling herself for a morsel of bread. Let us endeavor to secure the franchise that we may have the power of legislating for the protection of women on the one point on which we stand in sharp opposition to all but good men; especially such measures as raising the age of consent, so deplorably low in some of your States, that your children are almost without legal protection; resisting State regulation of vice in the army; cleansing the streets by an Act pressing equally on men and women, and many others which will suggest themselves to you. But let us, at the same time, clearly recognize that the remedy must lie deeper than any external agency--must be as deep as life itself, and must be worked out in the silence of our own hearts and of our own homes. We must restore the law of G.o.d, quietly but firmly insisting on the equal moral standard for men and women alike; and we must maintain the sanct.i.ty and permanence of the marriage bond as ordained by Christ himself.