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 canals, 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, assembled 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 God 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 noblest 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 unfashionable 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 class."[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 sexes. Therefore the whole power of Rome, honeycombed as it was by moral corruption and sexual 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 God.' 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 nobler 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 God 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 God'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 bestial 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 asserted 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 asserted 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 class 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 hell, 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 circumstances 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 sexual 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 spawn in the next ditch. To him he "was a broken wineglass 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.

I do not hold with our "little Englanders" that the possession of an empire is a disaster; on the contrary, I hold that it constitutes 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 nobility of soul to the whole nation; while even the wars it may involve prove the vultures of God 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 shipwreck, 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 ship, 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 shipwreck 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 passion and selfish lust, but by the eternal stars, the heavenly lights of God, 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 God.

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 passionate sense of the wrong done to women, the degraded class 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 passions 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 God 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 quantity 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-shells; 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 shore That tumbles in a godless 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 God 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 hell, 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 accumulated 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 grass 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 shirt. 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 godliness.

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 lust 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 bloody 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 passed 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 classes 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 passage, 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 sanctity 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 passion 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 God 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 God 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 associated monogamic love with monotheistic worship, teaching us by the history of all ancient idolatries that the race which is impure spawns 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 passions 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 hell without a chance in this life, in a degradation that has no name, but which, in its very depth, measures the height of the sanctity 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 nobler 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 God'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 passion 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 God 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 God, they are beginning to take hold, with a remorseful passion, that passion 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 passion 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 God'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 noble 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 God?" 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 Passion and the Lord of Love, the manhood lifted into God.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 40: In this chapter I have quoted some passages 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 God, whose marriage is the type of the eternal union of God and the soul, of Christ and the Church, and whose fatherhood claims kinship with the Father of lights. It is impossible for women who are agitating for the enfranchisement of their sex to accept as a necessary class in the midst of a democratical society a class of citizens who, in Dr. Welldon's[42] words, addressed to the University of Cambridge, "have lost once for all time the rights of citizenship—who are nobody's wives, nobody's sisters, nobody'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 institute 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 friendship. 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 passage, 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 associations or institutions 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 God, quietly but firmly insisting on the equal moral standard for men and women alike; and we must maintain the sanctity and permanence of the marriage bond as ordained by Christ himself.

I say again I do not think, I simply know, by my own experience, that men will rise to any standard which women choose to set them. Ruskin's noble words are the simple truth:

"Their whole course and character are in your hands; what you would have them be they shall be, if you not only desire to have them so, but deserve to have them so, for they are but mirrors in which you will see yourselves imaged.... You fancy, perhaps, as you have been told so often, that a wife's rule should only be over her husband's house, not over his mind. Ah no! the true rule is just the reverse of that: a true wife, in her husband's house, is his servant; it is in his heart that she is queen. Whatever of best he can conceive, it is her part to be; whatever of highest he can hope, it is hers to promise. All that is dark in him she must purge into purity; all that is failing in him she must strengthen into truth; from her, through all the world's clamor, he must win his praise; in her, through all the world's warfare, he must find his peace."

Last, but not least, we must set ourselves to make our lives simpler and plainer, and oppose the ever-increasing luxury and love of pleasure, with its sure and certain result, a relaxed moral fibre, which, to a race called to such high destinies and difficult tasks as our Anglo-Saxon race, is simply fatal. It can, and it must be done. As Philip Hammerton remarks:

"It is entirely within the power of public opinion to relieve the world from the weariness of this burthen of expensive living; it has actually been done to a great extent with regard to the costliness of funerals, a matter in which public opinion has always been very authoritative. If it will now permit a man to be buried simply when he is dead, why cannot it allow him to exist simply whilst he is living?"

To lessen the expense of dress, which has risen twenty per cent, within the last thirty years; to restore amusements to their proper place, as recreation after hard work for the good of others; to resist the ever-increasing restlessness of our day, leading to such constant absences from home as seriously to threaten all steady work for the amelioration of the stay-at-home classes, and use up the funds which are needed for that work; to keep a simple table, so that the future Sir Andrew Clark may no longer have to say that more than half of our diseases come from over-eating; to resist the vulgar tendency to compete with our richer or more fashionable neighbors in their style of living—surely these sacrifices are not beyond us, to attain a great end, both for ourselves and our empire. If indeed we think we can meet this evil without making sacrifices amounting to a silent revolution in our life; if we think, as I have sometimes thought some women do think, that we can quench this pit of perdition in our midst by, as it were, emptying our scent-bottles upon it,—shedding a few empty tears, heaving a few sentimental sighs: "It is very sad! of course I can't do anything, but I am sure I wish all success to your noble work"—possibly even giving a very little money, say a guinea a year, to a penitentiary—all I can say is, God is not mocked. I know but one thing in heaven or earth that will quench it, and that is life-blood. Sometimes I have asked in anguish of spirit: "Will women give it?" I believe they will. But, whether we give it or not, what Matthew Arnold called "the noblest of religious utterances" holds good here: "Without shedding of blood there is no remission of this sin."

And it is because I know that mothers will spend their heart's blood in saving their sons, and because I believe that women, with their new-born position and dignity, will not go on accepting as a matter of course that their womanhood should be fashioned like the Egyptian sphinx, half pure woman, crowned with intellectual and moral beauty, dowered with the homage of men; and half unclean beast of prey, seeking whom it may slay, outcast and abandoned and forced to snare or starve—it is because of this, my rooted faith in women, that I have hope.

As long ago as 1880 Professor Max Mueller, ever anxious for the interests of his Indian fellow-subjects, when Mr. Malabari came to ask him how he could rouse English public opinion with regard to the injuries inflicted on young girls by Hindu child-marriages, answered him at once, "Write a short pamphlet and send it to the women of England. They begin to be a power, and they have one splendid quality, they are never beaten."[44] And if this can be said of English women, still more may it be said of the women of America.

But, further, to strengthen us in this splendid quality, have we sufficiently recognized the new moral forces that are coming into the world? Have our eyes been opened to see "the horses and chariots of fire" which are silently taking up their position around us, to guard us and fight for us, that we may not be beaten; the deepened sense of moral obligation, the added power of conscience, the altogether new altruistic sense which makes the misery and degradation of others cling to us like a garment we cannot shake off, a sense of others' woes for which we have had to invent a new word? Lord Shaftesbury's legislation does not date so very far back; and yet when his Bill for delivering women and children from working in our mines was hanging in the balance, and the loss of a single vote might wreck it—women, be it remembered, who were working naked to the waist in the coal-mines, and little children of eight or nine who were carrying half a sack of coals twelve times a day the height of St. Paul's Cathedral—the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London left the House of Lords without voting, as the subject did not interest them; while in the lower House Bright and Gladstone both voted against the Bill, Gladstone being the only member who, when the Bill was passed by a bare majority, endeavored to delay its coming into operation! I ask, Would such a state of things be possible in these days? Am I not right in saying that new moral forces and sensibilities have been born within us which make such a state of things not only impossible, but simply incomprehensible?

Why then should we despair? What! Has God built up His everlasting marble of broken shells, and will He not build up his temple of the future out of these broken efforts of ours? Has He made His pure and splendid diamond out of mere soot, and shall we refuse to see in the blackest and foulest moral problem the possibilities of the diamond, of a higher life worked out in the process of its solution, reflecting His light and His love? Has He made His precious sapphire of the mere mud that we tread under our feet, and, when we insist on our little sisters' being no longer trodden like mud "under foot of vicious men," may they not in the course of their redemption bring an added hue of heaven to our life, an added purity to home and family, and behold, instead of the old mud, a sapphire throne, and above it the likeness as of a divine man?[45]

But to those who still hang back with a feeling of almost angry repulsion from the whole subject which makes them refuse even to face the perils and temptations of their own boys, I would address no hard words, remembering but too well the terrible struggle it cost me to make this my life work. Only I would remind them of that greatest act in all history, by which the world was redeemed. The Cross to us is so associated with the adoration of the ages, so glorified by art, and music, and lofty thought, that we have ceased to realize what it was in actual fact such as no painter has ever dared to portray it; the Cross, not elevated as in sacred pictures, but huddled up with the jeering crowd; the Cross with its ribald blasphemies, its shameful nakedness, its coarse mockeries, its brutal long-drawn torture. Do you think it cost the women of that day nothing to bear all this on their tender hearts? Yet what was it that made men draw nearer and nearer, till the women who at first "stood afar off, beholding these things," we are told, at last "stood by the cross of Jesus"; and, when all men forsook Him and fled, placed themselves heart to heart with the Divine Love bearing the sins of the world and casting them into the abysmal depths of its own being, deeper even than the depths of man's sin? What was it but their faithfulness to the Highest that they had known which made them endure the Cross, despising the shame?

And now, when at the end of the ages He once again calls us women to stand heart to heart with Him in a great redemptive purpose, shall we hang back? Shall we not rather obey the Divine call, enduring the Cross, despising the shame, and, like those women of old, winning for ourselves, by faithfulness unto death, the joy of being made the messengers of a higher and risen life to the world?

God grant that the power of the Holy Ghost may overshadow us and enable us to make answer with her whom all generations have called blessed: "Behold the hand-maiden of the Lord!"

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 42: Late Head-Master of Harrow; now Metropolitan of India.]

[Footnote 43: I would especially commend this modern order of knighthood to the prayers and support of women. It is bravely fighting our battle for us and doing the public work among men. As it attacks what is especially the sin of the moneyed classes, it is unpopular, men resenting its interference with what they call their private life, and it is always in peril for want of funds. The White Cross league admits women associates for intercessory prayer—and what mother will not be thankful for that?—for any work where women's aid is needed, and for raising funds for what is so emphatically our own cause. I would earnestly suggest to women who have incomes of their own that they should leave the White Cross a small legacy, so as to place it on a firmer basis. I hope myself to leave the English branch L2000.]

[Footnote 44: From an article in the Nineteenth Century on "Meddling with Hindu Marriages."]

[Footnote 45: Ezek. i., 26.]



APPENDIX

In Mr. Edward Thring's address to the Church Congress at Carlisle in 1841, he said:

"Curiosity, ignorance, and lies form a very hot-bed of impurity. We pay heavily for our civilized habits in false shame and the mystery in which sex is wrapped.

"I confess that for curiosity I have no remedy to propose. Ignorance and lies are on a different footing. I suppose everyone is acquainted with some of the current lies about the impossibility of being pure. The only answer to this is a flat denial from experience. I know it is possible, and, when once attained, easy. The means, under God, in my own case, was a letter from my father. A quiet, simple statement of the sinfulness of the sin and a few of the plain texts from St. Paul saved me. A film fell from my eyes at my father's letter. My first statement is that all fathers ought to write such a letter to their sons. It is not difficult if done in a common-sense way. Following out this plan at Uppingham in the morning Bible lessons, I have always spoken as occasion arose with perfect plainness on lust and its devil-worship, particularly noting its deadly effect on human life and its early and dishonored graves. Ignorance is deadly, because perfect ignorance in a boy is impossible. I consider the half-ignorance so deadly that once a year, at the time of confirmation, I speak openly to the whole school, divided into three different sets. First I take the confirmees, then the communicants and older boys, then the younger boys, on three following nights after evening prayers. The first two sets I speak very plainly to, the last only warn against all indecency in thought, word, or deed, whether alone or with companions. Thus no boy who has been at school a whole year can sin in ignorance, and a boy who despises this warning is justly turned out of the school on conviction."

Finally, he dwelt upon the necessity of school life having joined to it a home life. The purifying influence of a good woman and a fuller recognition of woman's work and place in the world he looked upon as that which promised most for lifting mankind into a higher atmosphere of pure life.

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