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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons
+by Ellice Hopkins
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons
+       A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis
+
+Author: Ellice Hopkins
+
+Release Date: June 13, 2005 [EBook #16047]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE POWER OF WOMANHOOD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Janet Blenkinship and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+THE
+POWER OF WOMANHOOD
+OR
+MOTHERS AND SONS
+
+A BOOK FOR PARENTS, AND THOSE IN
+LOCO PARENTIS
+
+BY ELLICE HOPKINS
+
+AUTHOR OF "LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES HINTON,"
+"WARS AMONG WORKINGMEN," ETC.
+
+
+     Sow an act, and you reap a habit:
+     Sow a habit, and you reap a character:
+     Sow a character, and you reap a destiny.
+
+
+NEW YORK
+E.P. DUTTON & COMPANY
+31 West Twenty-Third Street
+1901 Copyright, 1899
+
+
+Copyright, 1899
+By
+E.P. DUTTON & CO.
+
+
+The Knickerbocker Press, New York
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+This little book has been written under great physical disabilities,
+chiefly while wandering about in search of health, and consequently far
+from the libraries which would have enabled me to give proper references
+to all my quotations. Often for a whole year I have been unable to touch
+it; but again and again I have returned to my task, feeling it worth any
+risk to mind or body if only in the end its words might prove of some
+service to the educated mothers of England and America.
+
+Under these circumstances, I know I may plead for indulgence as to any
+defects its pages may present.
+
+But now that, after six years, I have realized the pretty Eastern
+proverb, "By patience and perseverance, and a bottle of sweet-oil, the
+snail at length reaches Jerusalem,"--now that by God's unfailing help I
+have finished my difficult task, I can but commit the book into the
+hands of the women who have implanted in me, next to my faith in God,
+faith in the "Power of Womanhood," and whose faithful adherence and
+co-operation remain the deepest and most grateful memory of my life.
+Most of the ordinary means of circulation are closed to a book of this
+nature. The doors of circulating libraries are for the most part shut;
+notices in papers for the general public are necessarily few; nor can I
+any longer hope, as I once did, to visit America, and give it a wide
+circulation by my own efforts. I can but stretch out my hands to my many
+dear unknown friends in America,--hands which have grown too weak to
+hold the sword or lift the banner in a cause for which I have laid down
+my all,--and ask any mother who may find help or strength in this book
+to help me in return by placing it in the hands of other mothers of boys
+she may know, especially,--I would plead,--young mothers. Do not say
+they are too young to know. If they are not too young to be the mothers
+of boys, they are not too young to know how to fulfil the responsibility
+inherent in such motherhood. They at least can begin at the beginning,
+and not have occasion to say, as so many mothers have said to me, with
+tears in their eyes, "Oh, if I could only have heard you years ago, what
+a difference it would have made to me! But now it is too late."
+
+Enable me thus, by your aid, to do some helpful work for that great
+country which I have ever loved as my own; and which with England is
+appointed in the Providence of God to lead in the great moral causes of
+the world.
+
+If, indeed, each mother whom, either by word or deed, I may have helped
+would do me this service of love now that I am laid aside, not yielding
+to the first adverse criticism, which is so often only a cry of pain or
+prejudice, but patiently working on at enlightening and strengthening
+the hands of other mothers in her own rank of life, what vital work
+would be done:--work so precious in its very nature, so far-reaching in
+its consequences, that all the travail and anguish I have endured, all
+the brokenness of body and soul I have incurred, would not so much as
+come into mind for joy that a truer manhood is being born into the
+world, even the manhood of Him who--
+
+        "Came on earth that He might show mankind
+    What 'tis to be a MAN: to give, not take;
+    To serve, not rule; to nourish, not devour;
+    To help, not crush; if needs, to die, not live."
+
+2 BELLE VUE GARDENS,
+WALPOLE ROAD, BRIGHTON,
+    _Nov. 1, 1899_.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER                             PAGE
+
+I.--INTRODUCTORY      1
+
+II.--"WHY SHOULD I INTERFERE?"      13
+
+III.--FIRST PRINCIPLES      26
+
+IV.--THE SECRET AND METHOD      38
+
+V.--EARLY BOYHOOD      56
+
+VI.--BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL LIFE      69
+
+VII.--EARLY MANHOOD      131
+
+VIII.--THE INFLUENCE OF SISTERS      157
+
+IX.--THE MODERN WOMAN AND HER FUTURE      170
+
+X.--NATIONAL AND IMPERIAL ASPECTS       191
+
+XI.--THE DYNAMIC ASPECT OF EVIL      206
+
+  CONCLUSION      221
+
+  APPENDIX      231
+
+
+
+
+     "No advice, no exposure, will be of use until the right relation
+     exists between the father and mother and their son. To deserve his
+     confidence, to keep it as the chief treasure committed to them by
+     God;--to be, the father his strength, the mother his
+     sanctification, and both his chosen refuge, through all weakness,
+     evil, danger, and amazement of his young life."
+
+                                                             Rushkin.
+
+
+
+
+THE POWER OF WOMANHOOD
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+INTRODUCTORY
+
+
+In a banquet given in honor of Heinrik Ibsen by a Norwegian society
+known as the Woman's League, in response to a speech thanking him in the
+name of the society for all he had done for the cause of women, the
+poet, while disclaiming the honor of having consciously worked for the
+woman's cause--indeed, not even being quite clear as to what the woman's
+cause really was, since in his eyes it was indistinguishable from the
+cause of humanity--concluded his speech with the words:
+
+     "It has always seemed to me that the great problem is to elevate
+     the nation and place it on a higher level. Two factors, the man and
+     the woman, must co-operate for this end, and it lies especially
+     with the mothers of the people, by slow and strenuous work, to
+     arouse in it a conscious sense of culture and discipline. To the
+     woman, then, we must look for the solution of the problem of
+     humanity. It must come from them as mothers: that is the mission
+     that lies before them."
+
+Whether we are admirers of the great Norwegian poet or not, whether we
+are afflicted with Ibsenism, or regard his peculiar genius in a more
+critical and dispassionate light, no one would deny to him that deep
+intuitive insight which belongs to a poet, and which borders so closely
+on the prophet's gift.
+
+It is now some years since I have been laid aside, owing to the terrible
+strain and burthen of my ten years' conflict with the evils that are
+threatening the sanctity of the family, the purity of the home, and all
+that constitutes the higher life of the nation. But in those ten years
+the one truth that was burnt into my very soul was the truth enunciated
+by Ibsen, that it is to the woman that we must look for the solution of
+the deepest moral problems of humanity, and that the key of those
+problems lies in the hands of the mothers of our race. They, and they
+alone, can unlock the door to a purer and a stronger life. This, in
+Ibsen's words, "is the mission that lies before them." And it is this
+strong conviction which makes me feel that, even with broken powers and
+shattered health, I cannot rest from my labors without, at any cost to
+myself, placing the knowledge and experience gained in those years of
+toil and sorrow at the disposal of the educated women of the
+English-speaking world who, either as mothers or in other capacities,
+have the care and training of the young.
+
+No one recognizes more thankfully than I do the progress that the
+woman's movement has made during what have been to me years of inaction
+and suffering. The ever-increasing activity in all agencies for the
+elevation of women; the multiplication of preventive institutions and
+rescue societies; above all, that new sense of a common womanhood, that
+_esprit de corps_ in which hitherto we have been so grievously lacking,
+and which is now beginning to bind all our efforts together into one
+great whole--these I thankfully recognize. We no longer each of us set
+up in separate and somewhat antagonistic individuality our own little
+private burrow of good works, with one way in and one way out, and
+nothing else needed for the wants of the universe. We realize now that
+no one agency can even partially cover the ground, and conferences are
+now held of all who are working for the good of women and children, to
+enable the separate agencies to work more effectually into one another's
+hands and unite more fervently in heart and soul in a common cause.
+Beneath all this, apart from any external organization whatever, there
+is a silent work going on in the hearts of thoughtful and educated
+mothers, which never comes before the public at all, but is silently
+spreading and deepening under the surface of our life.
+
+But when all this is thankfully recognized and acknowledged, I still
+cannot help questioning whether the mass of educated women have at all
+grasped the depth and complexity of the problem with which we have to
+grapple if we are to fufil our trust as the guardians of the home and
+family, and those hidden wells of the national life from which spring up
+all that is best and highest in the national character. Nay, I sometimes
+fear lest even our increased activity in practical work may not have the
+effect of calling off our attention from those deep underlying causes
+which must be dealt with if we are not to engage in the hopeless task of
+trying to fill a cistern the tap of which has been left running. This
+absorption in the effect and inattention to the cause is to a certain
+degree bred in us by the very nature of the duties that devolve upon us
+as women. John Stuart Mill has compared the life of a woman to an
+"interrupted sentence." The mere fact that our lives are so interrupted
+by incessant home calls, and that we are necessarily so concerned in the
+details of life, is apt to make us wanting in grasp of underlying
+principles. Perhaps it is the fact of my having been associated all the
+early years of my life with eminent scientific men that has formed in me
+a habit of mind always to regard effects in relation to causes, so that
+merely to cure evil results without striking at the evil cause seems to
+me, to use a Johnsonian simile, "like stopping up a hole or two of a
+sieve with the hope of making it hold water."
+
+It is, therefore, on these deeper aspects that more especially bear upon
+the lives and training of our own sons that I want to write, placing
+before you some facts which you must know if you are to be their
+guardians, and venturing to make some suggestions which, as the result
+of much collective wisdom and prayer, I think may prove helpful to you
+in that which lies nearest your heart. Only, if some of the facts are
+such as may prove both painful and disagreeable to you, do not therefore
+reject them in your ignorance as false. Do not follow the advice of a
+politician to a friend whom he was urging to speak on some public
+question. "But how can I?" his friend replied; "I know nothing of the
+subject, and should therefore have nothing to say." "Oh, you can always
+get up and deny the facts," was the sardonic reply.
+
+Let me first of all give you my credentials, all the more necessary as
+my long illness has doubtless made me unknown by name to many of the
+younger generation, who may therefore question my right to impart facts
+or make any suggestions at all. Suffer me, therefore, to recount to you
+how I have gained my knowledge and what are the sources of my
+information.
+
+In the first place, I was trained for the work by a medical man--my
+friend Mr. James Hinton--first in his own branch of the London
+profession, and a most original thinker. To him the degradation of
+women, which most men accept with such blank indifference, was a source
+of unspeakable distress. He used to wander about the Haymarket and
+Piccadilly in London at night, and break his heart over the sights he
+saw and the tales he heard. The words of the Prophet ground themselves
+into his very soul, with regard to the miserable wanderers of our
+streets: "This is a people robbed and spoiled; they are all of them
+snared in holes and hid in prison-houses; they are for a prey, and none
+delivereth; for a spoil, and none saith, Restore."
+
+The very first time he came down to me at Brighton, to see if I could
+give him any help, speaking of all he had seen and heard, his voice
+suddenly broke, and he bowed his face upon my hands and wept like a
+child. That one man could suffer as he did over the degradation of this
+womanhood of ours has always been to me the most hopeful thing I know--a
+divine earnest of ultimate overcoming. The only thing that seemed in a
+measure to assuage his anguish was my promise to devote myself to the
+one work of fighting it and endeavoring to awake the conscience of the
+nation to some sense of guilt with regard to it. In order to fit me for
+this work he considered that I ought to know all that he as a medical
+man knew. He emphatically did not spare me, and often the knowledge that
+he imparted to me was drowned in a storm of tears. We were to have
+worked together, but his mind, already unhinged by suffering, ultimately
+gave way, and, with all that this world could give him--health, fame,
+wealth, family affection, devoted friends--he died prematurely of a
+broken heart.
+
+For ten years, therefore, after my friend's death I gave up everything
+for the purpose of carrying on the work he left me, and beat wearily up
+and down the three kingdoms, holding meetings, organizing practical
+work, agitating for the greater legal protection of the young,
+afterwards embodied in two Acts--one for removing children from dens of
+infamy and one known as the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which have done
+much to educate the public sentiment of the country; but always making
+it my chief object to rouse educated women to face the facts about their
+own womanhood, and, above all, to rouse mothers to realize the perils of
+their own boys and to be determined to know enough to enable them to act
+as their guardians.
+
+During those ten years of warfare, passing as I did from family to
+family, and always concerned with questions that touch upon the
+innermost shrine of our life, I necessarily became the recipient of many
+hidden sorrows. In fact, my fellow-creatures used me as a bottomless
+well into which they could empty their household skeletons; and I used
+often to reflect with sardonic satisfaction that I should never run dry
+like other old wells, but that death would come and fill me up with a
+good wholesome shovelful of earth, and I and my skeletons would lie
+quiet together. But in this way I gained a knowledge of what is going on
+under the surface of our life, whether we choose to ignore it or not,
+which possibly can only come to those who are set apart to be
+confessors of their kind; and the conclusion was forced upon me that
+this evil, in one form or another, is more or less everywhere--in our
+nurseries, in our public, and still more our private, schools,
+decorously seated on magisterial benches, fouling our places of
+business, and even sanctimoniously seated in our places of worship.
+
+After the first two years of work among women I found that it was
+absolutely hopeless attacking the evil from one side only, and I had to
+nerve myself as best I could to address large mass meetings of men,
+always taking care clearly to define my position--that I had not come
+upon that platform to help them, but to ask them to help me in a battle
+that I had found too hard for me, and that I stood before them as a
+woman pleading for women. The first of these meetings I addressed at the
+instance of the late revered Bishop of Durham, Dr. Lightfoot, who took
+the chair, and inaugurated the White Cross Movement, which has since
+spread over the civilized world. And throughout this most difficult side
+of my work I had his priceless co-operation and approval; besides the
+wise counsel, guidance, and unfailing sympathy of one whom but to name
+is to awake the deepest springs of reverence, Dr. Wilkinson, then the
+incumbent of St. Peter's, Eaton Square, afterwards Bishop of Truro, and
+now Bishop of St. Andrews. But so great was the effort that it cost me,
+that I do not think I could have done this part of my work but for my
+two favorite mottoes--the one, that "I can't" is a lie in the lips that
+repeat, "I believe in the Holy Ghost"; the other, received from the lips
+of Bishop Selwyn, that "If as soldiers of the Cross we stick at
+anything, we are disgraced forever."
+
+But lastly, and perhaps best of all, as giving weight to any suggestions
+that I may make, across the dismal mud swamp that I often trod with such
+an aching heart and faltering steps came to meet me God's best and
+highest, with outstretched hands of help and encouragement. It was the
+highly-cultivated and thoughtful women who, amidst the storm of obloquy
+that beat upon me from every quarter, first ranged themselves by my
+side, perceiving that the best way to avoid a danger is not to refuse to
+see it. Some were women already in the field in connection with Mrs.
+Butler's movement, to which our nation owes so much, some were roused by
+my words.
+
+In all our large towns where I formed Associations for the Care of
+Friendless Girls I was in the habit of reporting my work to the clergy
+of my own church, whose sympathy and cooperation I shall ever gratefully
+acknowledge. Ultimately, the leading laity, as well as some
+Nonconformist ministers, joined with us; often these conferences were
+diocesan meetings--to which, however, Nonconformists were invited--with
+the Bishop of the diocese in the chair; and after my address free
+discussion took place, so that I had the advantage of hearing the
+opinions and judgments of many of our leading men in regard to this
+difficult problem, and getting at men's views of the question.
+
+The matter that I lay before you, therefore, has been thoroughly and
+repeatedly threshed out at such conferences, as well as in long,
+earnest, private talks with the wisest and most experienced mothers and
+teachers of our day; and it is in their name, far more than in my own,
+that I ask you to ponder what I say.
+
+Do not, however, be under any fear that I intend in these pages to make
+myself the medium of all sorts of horrors. I intend to do no such thing.
+It is but very little evil that you will need to know, and that not in
+detail, in order to guard your own boys. We women, thank God, have to do
+with the fountain of sweet waters, clear as crystal, that flow from the
+throne of God; not with the sewer that flows from the foul imaginations
+and actions of men. Our part is the inculcation of positive purity, not
+the part of negative warning against vice. Nor need you fear that the
+evil you must know, in order to fulfil your most sacred trust, will
+sully you. This I say emphatically, that the evil which we have grappled
+with to save one of our own dear ones does not sully. It is the evil
+that we read about in novels and newspapers, for our own amusement; it
+is the evil that we weakly give way to in our lives; above all, it is
+the destroying evil that we have refused so much as to know of in our
+absorbing care for our own alabaster skin--it is _that_ evil which
+defiles the woman. But the evil that we have grappled with in a life and
+death struggle to save a soul for whom Christ died does not sully: it
+clothes from head to foot with the white robe, it crowns with the golden
+crown. Though I have had to know what, thank God! no other woman may
+ever again be called upon to know, I can yet speak of the great conflict
+that involved this knowledge as being the one great purifying,
+sanctifying influence of my life. But even if, as men would often
+persuade us, the knowledge of the world's evil would sully us, I know I
+utter the heart of every woman when I say that we choose the hand that
+is sullied in saving our own dear ones from the deep mire that might
+otherwise have swallowed them up, rather than the hand that has kept
+itself white and pure because it has never been stretched out to save.
+That hand may be white, but in God's sight it is white with the
+whiteness of leprosy. Believe, rather, the words of James Hinton,
+written to a woman friend: "You women have been living in a dreamland of
+your own; but dare to live in this poor disordered world of God's, and
+it will work out in you a better goodness than your own,"--even that
+purified womanhood, strong to know, and strong to save, before whose
+gracious loveliness the strongest man grows weak as a child, and, as a
+little child, grows pure.
+
+God grant that, in view of the tremendous responsibilities that devolve
+upon us women in these latter days, we may cry from our hearts:
+
+    "Let not fine culture, poesy, art, sweet tones,
+    Build up about my soothed sense a world
+    That is not Thine, and wall me up in dreams.
+    So my sad heart may cease to beat with Thine,
+    The great World-Heart, whose blood, forever shed,
+    Is human life, whose ache is man's dull pain."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+"WHY SHOULD I INTERFERE?"
+
+
+I am, of course, aware that at the very outset I shall be met by the
+question--far less frequently urged, however, by thoughtful mothers than
+it used to be--"Why need I interfere at all in a subject like this? Why
+may I not leave it all to the boy's father? Why should it be my duty to
+face a question which is very distasteful to me, and which I feel I had
+much better let alone?"
+
+I would answer at once, Because the evil is so rife, the dangers so
+great and manifold, the temptations so strong and subtle, that your
+influence must be united to that of the boy's father if you want to
+safeguard him. Every influence you can lay hold of is needed here, and
+will not prove more than enough. The influence of one parent alone is
+not sufficient, more especially as there are potent lines of influence
+open to you as a woman from which a man, from the very fact that he is a
+man, is necessarily debarred.
+
+You must bring the whole of that influence to bear for the following
+considerations.
+
+Let me take the lowest and simplest first. Even if you be indifferent
+to your boy's moral welfare, you cannot be indifferent to his physical
+well-being, nay, to his very existence. Here I necessarily cannot tell
+you all I know; but I would ask you thoughtfully to study for yourself a
+striking diagram which Dr. Carpenter, in one of our recognized medical
+text-books, has reproduced from the well-known French statistician,
+Quetelet, showing the comparative viability, or life value, of men and
+women respectively at different ages.
+
+[Illustration: DIAGRAM REPRESENTING THE COMPARATIVE VIABILITY OF THE
+MALE AND FEMALE AT DIFFERENT AGES.]
+
+
+The female line, where it differs from the male, is the dotted line, the
+greater or less probability or value of life being shown by the greater
+or less distance of the line of life from the level line at the bottom.
+Infant life being very fragile, the line steadily rises till it reaches
+its highest point, between thirteen and fourteen. In both cases there
+is then a rapid fall, the age of puberty being a critical age. But from
+fifteen, when the female line begins to right itself, only showing by a
+gentle curve downwards the added risks of the child-bearing period in a
+woman's life, the male line, which ought, without these risks, to keep
+above the female line, makes a sharp dip below it, till it reaches its
+lowest point at twenty-five, the age when the excesses of youth have had
+time to tell most on the system.[1] Here, at least, is evidence that
+none can gainsay. The more you ponder that mysterious sharp dip in the
+man's line of life at the very age which Nature intended should be the
+prime and flower of life, the more deeply you will feel that some deep
+and hidden danger lies concealed there, the more earnestly you will come
+to the conclusion that you cannot and will not thrust from you the
+responsibility that rests upon you as the boy's mother of helping to
+guard him from it. Keep him from the knowledge of evil, and the
+temptations that come with that knowledge, you cannot. The few first
+days at school will insure that, to say nothing of the miserable streets
+of our large towns. As Thackeray long ago said in a well-known passage,
+much animadverted on at the time:
+
+     "And by the way, ye tender mothers and sober fathers of Christian
+     families, a prodigious thing that theory of life is, as orally
+     learnt at a great public school. Why! if you could hear those boys
+     of fourteen who blush before their mothers, and sneak off in
+     silence in the presence of their daughters, talking among each
+     other, it would be the woman's turn to blush then. Before Pen was
+     twelve years old, and while his mother thought him an angel of
+     candour, little Pen had heard enough to make him quite awfully wise
+     upon certain points; and so, madam, has your pretty rosy-cheeked
+     son who is coming home from school for the ensuing Christmas
+     holidays. I don't say that the boy is lost, or that the innocence
+     has left him which he had 'from heaven, which is our home,' but
+     that the shades of the prison house are closing very fast round
+     him, and that we are helping as much as possible to corrupt
+     him."[2]
+
+But though you cannot keep him from the knowledge of evil, you can be a
+potent factor in teaching him the hidden dangers that beset him, in
+seeing that his young feet rest on the rock of true knowledge, and not
+on the shifting quagmire of the devil's lies; but above all, in
+inspiring him with a high ideal of conduct, which will make him shrink
+from everything low and foul as he would from card-sharping or sneaking,
+proving yourself thus to him as far as in you lies--
+
+    "A perfect woman, nobly planned,
+    To warn, to comfort, and command;
+    And yet a spirit still, and bright
+    With something of an angel light."
+
+The boy thus mothered is saved as a rule from all physical risk.
+
+And this in part anticipates my second point. You cannot let this
+question alone if you are to aim at the highest for your boy. High
+character is more to be accounted of than long life. And it is to you,
+as a woman, that the guarding of the higher springs of his nature is
+especially entrusted. My whole experience has gone to teach me, with
+ever-increasing force, that the proposition that purity is vitally
+necessary for the woman, but of comparatively small account for the man,
+is absolutely false. Granted that, owing to social ostracism, the
+outward degradation of impurity to the woman is far greater, I contend
+that a deeper inner debasement is its sure fruition in the man. Cruelty
+and lies are its certain accompaniment. As Burns, with a poet's insight,
+has truly said:
+
+    "But oh! it hardens a' within,
+       And petrifies the feeling."
+
+Yes, it is exactly that; "it hardens all within"--hardens and darkens.
+It is as our Lord says: only "the pure in heart" are capable of divine
+vision. Only the man who has kept himself pure, who has never sullied
+his white faith in womanhood, never profaned the sacred mysteries of
+life and love, never fouled his manhood in the stye of the beast--it is
+only that man who can see God, who can see duty where another sees
+useless sacrifice, who can see and grasp abiding principles in a world
+of expediency and self-interest, and discern
+
+    "In temporal policy the eternal Will,"
+
+who can see God in the meanest of His redeemed creatures. It is only
+the virginal heart that has kept itself pure, that grows not old, but
+keeps its freshness, its innocent gaiety, its simple pleasures. The
+eminent Swiss Professor, Aime Humbert, does but echo these words from
+the sadder side, when, speaking of the moral malady which is the result
+of impurity, he says:
+
+     "It does not attack any single organ of the human frame, but it
+     withers all that is human--mind, body, and soul. It strikes our
+     youth at the unhappy moment when they first cross the thresholds of
+     vice. For them the spring has no more innocent freshness; their
+     very friendships are polluted by foul suggestions and memories;
+     they become strangers to all the honorable relations of a pure
+     young life; and thus we see stretching wider and wider around us
+     the circle of this mocking, faded, worn-out, sceptical youth,
+     without poetry and without love, without faith and without joy."
+
+Too soon and too earnestly we cannot teach our boys that the flaming
+sword, turning all ways, which guards the tree of life for him, is
+purity.
+
+But thirdly, there are wider issues than the welfare, physical and
+moral, of our own boys which make it impossible for us to take up any
+neutral attitude on this question. We cannot remain indifferent to that
+which affects so deeply both the status and the happiness of women. We
+cannot accept a standard for men which works out with the certainty of a
+mathematical law a pariah class of women. We cannot leave on one side
+the anguish of working-class mothers just because we belong to the
+protected classes, and it is not our girls that are sacrificed. At
+least, we women are ceasing to be as base as that, and God forgive us
+that, from want of thought rather than from want of heart, educated
+women could be found even to hold that the degradation of their own
+womanhood is a necessity!
+
+Take but one instance out of the many that crossed my _via dolorosa_ of
+the anguish inflicted on the mothers of the poor. I take it, not because
+it is uncommon, but because it is typical.
+
+At one of my mass meetings of working women in the North I was told at
+its close that a woman wished to speak with me in private. As soon as I
+could disengage myself from the crowd of mothers who were always eager
+to shake hands with me, and to bless me with tears in their eyes for
+taking up their cause, I went down the room, and there, in a
+dimly-lighted corner of the great hall, I found a respectable-looking
+woman waiting for me. I sat down by her side, and she poured out the
+pent-up sorrow of her heart before telling me the one great favor she
+craved at my hands. She had an only daughter, who at the age of sixteen
+she had placed out in service, at a carefully-chosen situation. We all
+know what a difficult age in a girl's life is sixteen; but our girls we
+can keep under our own watchful care, and their little wilfulnesses and
+naughtinesses are got over within the four walls of a loving home, and
+are only the thorns that precede the perfect rose of womanhood. But the
+poor have to send their girls out into the great wicked world at this
+age to be bread-winners, often far away from a mother's protecting care.
+The girl, however, in this case was a good, steady girl, and for a time
+did well. Then something unsettled her, and she left her first place,
+and got another situation. For a time it seemed all right, when suddenly
+her letters ceased. The mother wrote again and again, but got no answer.
+She wrote to her former place; they knew nothing of her. At last she
+saved up a little money and went to the town where she believed her girl
+to be. She sought out and found her last address. The family had gone
+away, and left no address. She made inquiries of the neighbors, of the
+police. Yes, they remembered the girl--a nice-looking girl with a bright
+color; but no one had seen her lately. It was as if a trap-door had
+opened and let her through. She had simply disappeared. In all that
+crowded city her mother could find no trace of her. "It is now thirteen
+years, ma'am, since I lost her."
+
+But all through those thirteen years that poor mother had watched and
+waited for her. All through those weary years, whenever she read in the
+local paper of some poor girl's body being found in the river, some poor
+suicide, who had leapt,
+
+    "Mad from life's history,
+     Swift to death's mystery,
+     Anywhere, anywhere, out of the world,"
+
+that poor mother would get into her head it might be her dear girl that
+was lying there alone and unclaimed; and she would pay her fare--if she
+could afford it--or if not, trudge the distance on foot, creep,
+trembling, into the mortuary or the public-house where the body lay,
+blue from drowning, or with the ugly red gash across the throat, take
+one look, and then cry with a sigh of relief, "No, it ain't my child,"
+and return again to her watching and waiting.
+
+"Once, ma'am," she said, "I had a dream. I saw a beautiful place, all
+bright and shiny, and there were lots of angels singing so sweet, when
+out of the midst of the glory came my poor girl. She came straight to
+me, and said, 'Oh, mother, don't fret; I'm safe and I'm happy!' and with
+those words in my ears I awoke. That dream has been a great comfort to
+me, ma'am; I feel sure God sent it to me. But oh, ma'am," she exclaimed,
+with a new light of hope in her face, and clasping her hands in silent
+entreaty, "the thought came into my head whilst you were a-speakin', if
+you would be so kind as to ask at the end of every one of your meetin's,
+'Has anyone heard or seen anything of a girl of the name of Sarah
+Smith?' As you go all about the country, maybe I might get to hear of
+her that way."
+
+Ah me! the pathetic forlornness of the suggestion, the last hope of a
+broken-hearted mother, that I should go all over the three kingdoms
+asking my large audiences, "Have you seen or heard anything of Sarah
+Smith?" And I was dumb. I had not a word of comfort to give her. I had
+heard the words too often from the lips of outcast girls in answer to my
+question, "Does your mother know where you are?" "Oh, no; I couldn't
+bear that mother should know about me!"--not to know what the fate of
+that young girl had been. She had been trapped, or drugged, or enticed
+into that dread under-world into which so many of our working-class
+girls disappear and are lost. Possibly she had been sent out of the
+country, and was in some foreign den. One's best hope was that she was
+dead.
+
+But picture to yourselves the long-drawn anguish of that mother, with
+nothing but a dream to comfort her amid the dread realities of life.
+Picture her as only one of thousands and thousands of our working-class
+mothers on whose poor dumb hearts the same nameless sorrow rests like a
+gravestone; and I think no woman--no mother, at least--but will agree
+with me, that this is a matter from which we, as women, cannot stand
+off. Even if we had not the moral and physical welfare of our own boys
+to consider, we are baptized into this cause by the tears of women, the
+dumb tears of the poor. But there is one last consideration, exquisitely
+painful as it is, which I cannot, I dare not, pass over, and which more
+than any other has aroused the thoughtful women of England and America
+to face the question and endeavor to grapple, however imperfectly as
+yet, with the problem. For some strange reason the whole weight of this
+evil in its last resort comes crushing down on the shoulders of a little
+child--infant Christs of the cross without the crown, "martyrs of the
+pang, without the palm." The sins of their parents are visited on them
+from their birth, in scrofula, blindness, consumption. "Disease and
+suffering," in Dickens's words, "preside over their birth, rock their
+wretched cradles, nail down their little coffins, and fill their unknown
+graves." More than one-half of the inmates of our Great Ormond Street
+Hospital for Sick Children are sent there by vice. But would to God it
+were only innocent suffering that is inflicted on the children of our
+land. Alas! alas! when I first began my work, a ward in a large London
+penitentiary, I found, was set apart for degraded children! Or take that
+one brief appalling statement in the record of ten years of work--1884
+to 1894--issued by a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
+In the classification of the various victims it is stated that the
+society had dealt with 4460 pitiable child victims of debauchery! Alas
+for our England, and the debasement which a low moral standard for men
+has made possible in our midst! And, judging by the absence of proper
+legal protection and the extraordinarily low age of consent adopted by
+some of the States of the Union, I fear things are not much better in
+America.
+
+One of our sweetest poets, Charles Tennyson Turner, in an exquisite
+sonnet on a three-year-old child being presented with a toy globe, has
+portrayed the consecration of a child's innocence, bathing the world
+itself in its baptismal dew:
+
+    "She patted all the world; old empires peep'd
+     Between her baby fingers; her soft hand
+     Was welcome at all frontiers."
+
+And when at length they turn "her sweet unlearned eye" "on our own
+isle," she utters a little joyous cry:
+
+    "Oh yes, I see it! Letty's home is there!
+     And while she hid all England with a kiss,
+     Bright over Europe fell her golden hair."
+
+By the side of that exquisite picture of the beatitude of a child's
+innocence place the picture of that long procession of desecrated
+children, with no "sweet unlearned eye," but eyes learned in the worst
+forms of human wickedness and cruelty; and let any woman say, if she can
+or dare, that this is a subject on which she is not called to have any
+voice and which she prefers to let alone. Surely our womanhood has not
+become in these last days such a withered and wilted thing that our ears
+have grown too nice for the cry of these hapless children! As women, we
+are the natural guardians of the innocence of all children. The divine
+motherhood that is at the heart of every woman worthy of the name "rises
+up in wrath" within us and cries: "We _will_ fulfil our trust, not only
+to our own children, but to the helpless children of the poor." The day
+is at hand when every mother of boys will silently vow before God to
+send at least one knight of God into the world to fight an evil before
+which even a child's innocence is not sacred and which tramples under
+its swine's feet the weak and the helpless.
+
+Indeed, when one reflects that this great moral problem touches all the
+great trusts of our womanhood, the sanctity of the family, the purity of
+the home, the sacredness of marriage, the sweet innocence of children,
+it seems like some evil dream that women can ever have asked, "Why
+cannot I leave this matter to men? Why should I interfere?"
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: Dr. Carpenter does not hesitate to attribute this sharp dip
+in the male line of life to the indulgence of the passions in youth, and
+the subsequent rise to marriage and a more regular life.]
+
+[Footnote 2: _Pendennis_, vol. i., p. 16.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+FIRST PRINCIPLES
+
+
+"But what can we do?" will be the next question, uttered perhaps in the
+forlorn accents of a latent despair.
+
+Before answering this question in detail, I would endeavor to impress
+two cardinal points upon you.
+
+The first point I want you to recognize, though it may seem to minister
+to the very hopelessness which most lames and cripples for effective
+action, is the depth and magnitude of the problem we have to grapple
+with. All other great social evils, with the possible exception of greed
+or covetousness, which in Scripture is often classed with impurity, may
+be looked upon as more or less diseases of the extremities. But the evil
+which we are now considering is no disease of the extremities, but a
+disease at the very heart of our life, attacking all the great bases on
+which it rests. It is not only the negation of the sanctity of the
+family and the destroyer of the purity of the home, as I have already
+pointed out, but it is also the derider of the sacredness of the
+individual, the slow but sure disintegrator of the body politic, the
+dry-rot of nations, before which the mightiest empires have crumbled
+into dust. The lagoons of Venice mirror it in the departed grandeur of
+her palaces, overthrown by the licentiousness of her merchant princes.
+The mute sands that silt up the ruins of old empires are eloquent of it.
+The most brilliant civilization the world has even seen through it
+became the most transitory. Even the vast and massive structure of the
+Roman Empire, undermined by moral corruption, vanished before barbarian
+hordes like the baseless fabric of a dream. To think that we can solve a
+problem of this depth and magnitude by any mere external means--as so
+many good and earnest women seem to imagine--by any multiplication of
+Rescue Societies, Preventive Institutions, and other benevolent
+organizations--is to think that we can plug up a volcano with sticks and
+straws. The remedy, like the evil, must be from within, and must to a
+great degree revolutionize our life.
+
+My second cardinal point is, that the first step we have to take, the
+step which must precede all others, if anything is to be of the least
+avail, must be to restore the moral law and get rid of the double
+standard. I know well how much has been said and written on this point;
+it has been insisted on possibly _ad nauseam_. But even now I do not
+think we fully realize how completely we have been in the grasp of a
+"tradition of the elders," which has emphatically "made the law of God
+of none effect." Side by side with the ethics of Christianity have
+grown up the bastard ethics of society, widely divergent from the true
+moral order. Man has accepted the obligation of purity so far as it
+subserves his own selfish interests and enables him to be sure of his
+own paternity and safeguard the laws of inheritance. The precepts which
+were primarily addressed to the man, as the very form of the Greek words
+demonstrate, were tacitly transferred to the woman. When, in a standard
+dictionary of the English language, I look out the word "virtue," which
+etymologically means "manliness"--the manliness which would scorn to
+gratify its own selfish passions at the cost of the young, the poor, and
+the weak, at the cost of a _woman_--I find one of its meanings defined,
+not as male but as "female chastity." Long ago I suggested that as
+manliness thus goes by default, the word had better be changed from
+virtue to "muliertue."
+
+In a passage in one of our standard school-books, Green's _Short History
+of the English People_, the historian, alluding to the coarseness of the
+early Elizabethan drama, remarks that "there were no female actors, and
+the grossness which startles us in words which fall from a woman's lips
+took a different color when every woman's part was acted by a boy."[3]
+Why, in the name of all moral sense, should it be less dreadful that
+gross and obscene passages should be uttered at a public spectacle by
+young and unformed boys than by adult women, who at least would have
+the safeguard of mature knowledge and instincts to teach them their full
+loathsomeness? Do we really think that boys are born less pure than
+girls? Does the mother, when her little son is born, keep the old
+iron-moulded flannels, the faded basinette, the dirty feeding-bottle for
+him with the passing comment, "Oh, it is only a boy!" Is anything too
+white and fine and pure for his infant limbs, and yet are we to hold
+that anything is good enough for his childish soul--even, according to
+Mr. Green, the grossness of the early Elizabethan stage--because he is a
+boy? But I ask how many readers of that delightful history would so much
+as notice this passage, and not, on the contrary, quietly accept it
+without inward note or comment, possessed as we are, often without
+knowing it, by our monstrous double standard?
+
+If we want to see what is the final outcome of this moral code, of this
+one-sided and distorted ethic, we have only to turn our eyes to France.
+On the one hand we have "la jeune fille" in her white Communion robe,
+kept so pure and ignorant of all evil, that "une societe
+ecclesiastique," I am told, exists for the emendation of history for her
+benefit--Divine Providence, as conducting the affairs of men, being far
+too coarse for her pure gaze; and at the other end of the stick we find
+Zola, and a literature intended only for the eyes of men, of whose
+chastity, according to Renan, "Nature takes no account whatever,"--a
+literature which fouls with its vile sewage the very wellsprings of our
+nature, and which, whatever its artistic merit, I make bold to say is a
+curse to the civilized world.
+
+Now, I earnestly protest that while we have this social code, which is
+in direct violation of the moral law, we may set on foot any number of
+Rescue Societies, Preventive Agencies, Acts for the Legal Protection of
+the Young, etc., but all our efforts will be in vain. We are like a man
+who should endeavor to construct a perfect system of dynamics on the
+violation of Newton's first law of motion. The tacitly accepted
+necessity for something short of the moral law for men will--again I say
+it--work out with the certainty of a mathematical law a degraded and
+outcast class, with its disease, its insanity, its foul contamination of
+the young, its debasement of manhood, its disintegration of the State,
+its curse to the community. You cannot dodge the moral law; as Professor
+Clifford said, "There are no back-stairs to the universe" by which we
+can elude the consequences of our wrong, whether of thought or action.
+If you let in one evil premise by the back-door, be sure Sin and Death
+will come out at the front.
+
+Here, then, you must take a firm and watchful stand. As the mothers of
+the future generation of men, you must look upon it as your
+divinely-appointed task to bring back the moral law in its entirety,
+the one standard equally binding on men and women alike. Whatever your
+creed, you have got to hold fast to this great truth, which life itself
+forces upon you, and which is a truth of Christian ethics because first
+of all it is a truth of life. It is simply a moral Q.E.D., that if
+chastity is a law for women--and no man would deny that--it is a law for
+every woman without exception; and if it is a law for every woman, it
+follows necessarily that it must be for every man, unless we are going
+to indulge in the moral turpitude of accepting a pariah class of women
+made up of other women's daughters and other women's sisters--not our
+own, God forbid that they should be our own!--set apart for the vices of
+men.
+
+But perhaps, looking at our complicated civilization, which, at least in
+the upper classes, involves, as a rule, the deferring of
+marriage--looking at the strength of the passions which generations of
+indulgence have evolved beyond their natural limits, some women will
+feel constrained to ask, "Is this standard a possible one? Can men keep
+their health and strength as celibates? Is not my husband right when he
+says that this is a subject we women can know nothing about, and that
+here we must bow to the judgment of men?"
+
+I answer that a mother must know by what standard she is to educate her
+boy, and therefore must have the data supplied to her on which to form
+her own judgment, and be fully persuaded in her own mind what she is to
+aim at in the training she is to give him; and the mere fact that the
+current judgment of men involves the sacrifice in body and soul of a
+large class of our fellow-women lays a paramount obligation upon all
+women to search for themselves into the truth and scientific accuracy of
+the premises on which that judgment is based.
+
+"Can men keep their health and strength as celibates till such time as
+they have the means to marry?" is the question we have, then, to face.
+Is the standard of the moral law possible to men who have to maintain a
+high level of physical efficiency in the sharp competition of modern
+life?
+
+Primarily, the answer to this question must come from the acknowledged
+heads of the medical profession. Now, I am thankful to say, we have in
+England a consensus of opinion from the representative men of the
+faculty that no one can gainsay. Sir James Paget, Acton in his great
+text-book, Sir Andrew Clark, Sir George Humphrey, of Cambridge,
+Professor Millar, of the Edinburgh University, Sir William Gowers,
+F.R.S., have all answered the above question in the strongest
+affirmative. "Chastity does no harm to body or mind; its discipline is
+excellent; marriage may safely be waited for," are Sir James Paget's
+terse and emphatic words[4]. Still more emphatic are the words of Sir
+William Gowers, the great men's specialist, who counts as an authority
+on the Continent as well as here:
+
+     "The opinions which on grounds falsely called 'physiological'
+     suggest or permit unchastity are terribly prevalent among young
+     men, but they are absolutely false. With all the force of any
+     knowledge I possess, and any authority I have, I assert that this
+     belief is contrary to fact; I assert that no man ever yet was in
+     the slightest degree or way the worse for continence or better for
+     incontinence. From incontinence during unmarried life all are worse
+     morally; a clear majority, are, in the end, worse physically; and
+     in no small number the result is, and ever will be, utter physical
+     shipwreck on one of the many rocks, sharp, jagged-edged, which
+     beset the way, or on one of the banks of festering slime which no
+     care can possibly avoid. They are rocks which tear and rend the
+     unhappy being who is driven against them when he has yielded to the
+     tide of passion, they are banks which exhale a poison for which, no
+     true antidote exists."
+
+In face of such testimony as this, well might Mr. George Russell, in an
+address to young men, speak of "this exploded lie which has hitherto led
+so many astray."
+
+Turning now from knowledge to fact, we have only to look at the French
+clergy to see that even in the extreme case of life-long celibacy it is
+not injurious to health. I know, in taking this case, I am grating
+somewhat harshly against Protestant prejudice. But the testimony that
+Renan bears on this point is irrefutable. Himself a renegade priest, he
+certainly would not have hesitated to expose the Order to which he had
+once belonged, and vindicate his broken vows by the revelation of any
+moral rottenness known within the walls of its seminaries. Far from
+this, he bears the most emphatic testimony in his autobiography that
+there is enough virtue in St. Sulpice alone to convert the world; and
+owns so strong was the impress made on his own soul by his training as a
+priest that personally he had lived a pure life, "although," he adds,
+with an easy shrug of his shoulders, "it is very possible that the
+libertine has the best of it!" Another renegade priest, also eminent in
+literature, bears exactly the same testimony. Indeed, when we remember
+the argus-eyed hatred with which the French priesthood is watched by the
+anti-clerical party, and the few scandals that appear in the public
+prints only too anxious to give publicity to them, this unimpeachable
+testimony is borne out by fact. I believe this testimony to be equally
+true of the English and Irish Roman Catholic clergy. Yet few would
+dispute the vigor of the physique of the Roman Catholic priests, or
+their capacity for hard and often exhausting work.
+
+Let me, however, guard myself from misapprehension. That a celibate
+life, combined with rich feeding, French novels, and low thinking, does
+produce a great deal of physical harm goes almost without saying.
+Nature, like her Lord, requires truth in the inward parts, and takes but
+small care of outward respectabilities that are but the whitewashed
+graves of inward foulness. Surely Lowell is right when he says, "I hold
+unchastity of mind to be worse than that of body." To live the
+unmarried life one must, of course, fulfil its conditions of plain
+living and clean thinking.
+
+It is almost with a feeling of shame that I have dwelt at some length on
+the point we have been considering; but all through my ten years of work
+the sunken rock on which I was always making shipwreck was the necessity
+of the evil--often openly avowed by men, but haunting even the minds of
+women like a shadow--a shadow which gained solidity and substance from a
+sense of their helpless ignorance. I have even met with Christian women
+who have serenely averred to my face that they have been told, on
+authority that they could not question, that, were it not for the
+existence of an outcast class, no respectable woman would be safe and we
+could not insure the purity of the home! So low had the moral
+consciousness fallen, through ignorance and thoughtless acceptance of
+the masculine code, that women calling themselves Christians could be
+found who seemed wholly unconscious of the deep inner debasement of
+accepting the degradation of other women as a safeguard to our own
+virtue and of basing the purity of the Christian home on the ruined
+bodies and souls of the children of the poor. Truly the dark places of
+the world within, as well as of the world without, are full of cruelty!
+
+What can I do, in the face of such an experience as this, but humbly and
+earnestly beseech the women of England and America not to play fast and
+loose with the moral sense within them--- which is God's voice within
+us--but to hold fast to the moral law, one, equal, and indivisible, for
+men and women alike; and to know and feel sure that, whatever else is
+bound up with the nature of man or with an advancing civilization, the
+hopeless degradation of woman is not that something. It is God who has
+made us--not we ourselves, with our false codes, false notions, and
+false necessities; and God has made the man to love the woman and give
+himself for her, not to degrade her and destroy the very function for
+which she was made the blessed "mother of all living."
+
+Only be sure of this: that men will rise to the level of any standard
+that we set them. For the present standard of what Sainte Beuve calls
+"l'homme sensuel moyen," which we have accepted and tacitly endorsed, we
+women are largely to blame. In my conferences with the clergy and
+earnest laity held in all our large towns it was always this that men
+spoke of as the greatest stumbling-block in their way. With the utmost
+bitterness they would urge that men of known fast life were admitted
+into society, that women seemed to prefer them rather than not; and it
+seemed to make no difference to them what kind of life a man
+led--whether he reverenced their womanhood or not. How could I deny this
+bitter accusation in the face of facts? All I could urge in extenuation
+was that I believed it was due rather to the ignorance than to the
+indifference of women, owing to the whole of this dark side of life
+having been carefully veiled from their view; but now that this
+ignorance was passing away, I was only one of hundreds of women who ask
+nothing better than to lay down their lives in the cause of their own
+womanhood. Only when women learn to respect themselves; only when no
+woman worthy the name will receive into her own drawing-room in friendly
+intercourse with her own girls the man who has done his best to make her
+womanhood a vile and desecrated thing; only when no mother worthy the
+name will, for the sake of wealth or position,--what is called "a good
+match,"--give her pure girl to a man on the very common conditions, as
+things have been, that some other ten or twenty young girls--some poor
+mothers' daughters--have been degraded and cast aside into the gutter,
+that she, the twenty-first in this honorable harem, may be held in
+apparent honor as a wife; only when no woman worthy the name will marry
+under the conditions portrayed by our great novelist, George
+Eliot,--that of another woman being basely forsaken for her sake--then,
+and then only, will this reproach that men level at us drop off; then,
+and then only, shall we be able to save our own sons and bring in a
+better and purer state of things, enabling them to fight the battle of
+their life at less tremendous odds; then, and then only, shall we be
+able to evolve the true manhood, whose attitude is not to defile and
+destroy, but "to look up and to lift up."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 3: _Short History of the English People_, by J.R. Green, p.
+247.]
+
+[Footnote 4: See a little White Cross paper entitled, _Medical
+Testimony_.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE SECRET AND METHOD
+
+
+There is a simile of Herbert Spencer's, in his book on Sociology, which
+has often helped me in dealing with great moral problems. He says:
+
+     "You see that wrought-iron plate is not quite flat; it sticks up a
+     little here towards the left, 'cockles,' as we say. How shall we
+     flatten it? Obviously, you reply, by hitting down on the part that
+     is prominent. Well, here is a hammer, and I give the plate a blow
+     as you advise. Harder, you say. Still no effect. Another stroke.
+     Well, there is one, and another, and another. The prominence
+     remains, you see; the evil is as great as ever, greater, indeed.
+     But this is not all. Look at the warp which the plate has got near
+     the opposite edge. Where it was flat before it is now curved. A
+     pretty bungle we have made of it! Instead of curing the original
+     defect, we have produced a second. Had we asked an artisan
+     practised in 'planishing,' as it is called, he would have told us
+     that no good was to be done, but only mischief, by hitting down on
+     the projecting part. He would have taught us how to give variously
+     directed and specially adjusted blows with a hammer elsewhere, so
+     attacking the evil not by direct but by indirect actions. The
+     required process is less simple than you thought. Even a sheet of
+     metal is not to be successfully dealt with after those common-sense
+     methods in which you have so much confidence. 'Do you think I am
+     easier to be played on than a pipe?' asked Hamlet. Is humanity more
+     readily straightened than an iron plate?"[5]
+
+Now, in our moral "planishing" we need to know where and how to direct
+our blows, lest in endeavoring to lessen the evil we not only increase
+the evil itself, but produce other evils almost as great as the one we
+intended to cure. The mistake that we commit--and this is, I think,
+especially true of us women--is to rush at our moral problems without
+giving a moment's thought to their causes, which often lie deep hidden
+in human nature. Our great naturalist, Darwin, gave eight years' study
+to our lowly brother, the barnacle; he gave an almost equal amount of
+time to the study of the earthworm and its functions, revealing to us,
+in one of his most charming books, how much of our golden harvest, of
+our pastures, and our jewelled garden-beds, we owe to this silent and
+patient laborer. Yet we think that we can deal with our higher and more
+complex human nature without giving it any study at all. We hit down
+directly on its moral inequalities, without giving a thought to what has
+caused the imperfection, when constantly, as in the sheet of metal which
+has to be straightened, the moral disorder has to be met, not directly,
+but indirectly--not at the point of the disorder itself, but of its
+often unsuspected cause. Purity, like health, like happiness, like so
+many of the higher aims of our life, has to be attained altruistically.
+Seek them too directly, and they elude our grasp. Like the oarsman, we
+have often to turn our back upon our destination in order to arrive at
+our end.
+
+Do not, therefore, think impatiently that I am putting you off with
+vague theories when you want practical suggestions, if I ask you first
+to give some patient thought to the causes of the disorder which seems
+to mark the side of our human nature on which the very existence of the
+race depends, and which cannot, therefore, be evil in itself. To me the
+problem presented was almost paralyzing. It seemed as if Nature, in her
+anxiety to secure the continuance of the species, had taken no account
+whatever of the moral law, but had so overloaded the strength of passion
+as not only to secure the defeat of the moral law, but even of her own
+ends, by producing the sterility which results from vicious indulgence.
+It was not till I met with two wonderful sermons on "The Kingdom of
+God," by that great master of "divine philosophy," Dr. James Martineau,
+that I first got a clue to the moral difficulty and to that fuller
+understanding of our human nature which is so essential to all who have
+the training and moulding of the young. And, therefore, I ask you to let
+me enter at some length into this teaching, which will not only give us
+light for our own guidance, but enable us to grasp the right principles
+on which we have to act in the moral training of the coming
+generation.[6]
+
+Now, in trying to think out the laws of our own being, we are met at
+the very outset by the great crux in the moral world: What is the true
+relation of the material to the spiritual,--of the body, with its
+instincts and appetites, to the moral personality, with its conscience
+and will? On the one hand, seeing the fatal proneness of man to obey his
+appetites and run into terrible excesses, ascetics in all ages and of
+all creeds have taught that the body itself is evil and the seat of sin;
+that its instincts must be crushed and its appetites repressed and
+eradicated; and that it is only so far as you trample your animal nature
+under foot that you can rise to be a saint. "Brute," "blind," "dead,"
+have been the epithets bestowed on matter, which is a ceaseless play of
+living forces that rest not day nor night. To look down on the material
+pleasures with suspicion, to fly contact with the rude world and lose
+one's self in the unembodied splendors of the spiritual, to save souls
+rather than men and women, to preach abstract doctrines rather than
+grapple with hideous concrete problems--this has been the tendency of
+the religious spirit in all ages, a tendency of which positive
+asceticism, with its mortification of the body, and its ideal of
+virginity, and marriage regarded as more or less a concession to the
+flesh, is only an exaggeration.
+
+On the other hand, in disgust at the mutilation of human nature and
+under pretext of its consummation, has arisen the "fleshly school,"
+whose maxim is "obedience to Nature,"--leaving undefined what nature,
+the nature of the swine or the nature of the man,--which holds that
+every natural instinct ought to be obeyed, which takes the agreeable as
+the test of the right, and which goes in for the "healthy animal" with
+enlightened self-interest as the safeguard against excesses.
+
+Alas! the results are no happier. The healthy animal treads under his
+feet the helpless and the weak, who suffer that he may grow fat and
+kick. The attractive warmth and color and richness are found to be but
+rottenness and decay.
+
+When, dissatisfied with the teaching of men, one turns to the great
+world at large, to see whether some practical instinct may not have
+guided men to a right adjustment, one's first feeling is one of dismay
+at the spectacle presented. The bodily instincts and appetites that seem
+to work aright in the animal world, in man seem fatally overloaded, and,
+instead of hitting the mark, explode with disaster and death at the
+outset.
+
+Let us now turn to the teaching of Christ, and see whether it does not
+explain the deep disorder of the animal instincts in the world of man,
+and while saving us on the one hand from the self-mutilation of
+asceticism, and from the swinishness of the fleshly school on the
+other, whether it does not embrace the truth that is in both and teach
+us how to correlate the material and the spiritual.
+
+Now, Dr. Martineau points out that Christ teaches, in contradistinction
+to asceticism, that the animal body, with its instincts and appetites,
+is as good on its own plane as the higher and spiritual attributes of
+man are on theirs. Our Father knoweth that, in common with other
+creatures, we have need of physical good, and He has provided us with a
+self-acting mechanism for its attainment, which will work rightly if
+only it is left alone and not tampered with. There is the same
+provision in us as in them of unconscious instincts and appetites for
+carrying on the lower life which is necessary as the platform of the
+higher spiritual being, to set it free, as it were, for the pursuit of
+its legitimate ends--all those higher and wider interests in life which
+are comprised under the one comprehensive name of "the kingdom of God."
+And the teaching of Christ is: Neither hate nor fear this part of your
+nature with the ascetic, nor pamper and stimulate it with the Hedonist,
+but let it alone to act on its own plane; trust it, trust God who made
+it, while you throw all your conscious energies into the higher
+concerns of life; and you will find, when left to its own unconscious
+activity, it is neither an over-nor an under-provision for carrying on
+your subsistence and that of the race. "Take no anxious thought
+[(Greek: me merimnesete)] for the morrow." "Your Father knoweth that ye
+have need of these things," and has arranged your being accordingly.
+"Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added
+to you." "Behold the birds of the air; your heavenly Father feedeth
+them."
+
+"Oh," says the practical man at once, "that is all very fine as
+sentiment; it is very Eastern and poetical; but I should like to know
+how, in these overcrowded days, I could support myself and family if I
+am to trust God to feed me and them like the birds of the air, and only
+think about religion." But is not this wholly to misunderstand our
+Lord's teaching? How does God feed the birds of the air? Is it not by
+incessant and untiring effort on their part? Those who have watched a
+pair of birds flying backwards and forwards to the nest under the eave
+may well question whether industry can go further. But in the
+unconscious being of a bird it is toil without [Greek: merimna],
+without thought and worry, and becomes, therefore, the very picture to
+us of trust in a higher Power, who has thus adjusted an unerring
+instinct to an unfailing end. The insect and the bird provide for the
+morrow, while they take no anxious thought for the morrow. "The agility
+which achieves it is theirs, the skill and foresight absent from them
+remain with God. And thus the simple life of lower natures, in its
+unconscious surrender to involuntary though internal guidance, becomes
+the negative type of perfect trust."[7]
+
+But to leave his instincts and appetites to work, unimpeded and
+unconscious, on their own plane, while he concerns himself with matters
+of truly human interest, is just what man is not content to do. On the
+contrary, he takes his higher and spiritual nature down into them. He
+enhances their pleasure with all the powers of his imagination; he sets
+his intellect to work to plot and plan for their gratification; he loads
+them with the whole force of his spiritual will, and in so doing he
+overloads and maddens them. The instinct for food and drink, which in
+the animal is sufficient for the maintenance of health and activity, in
+the man becomes gluttony and drunkenness; the instinct for the
+preservation of the race becomes the licentiousness which produces
+sterility and defeats its own ends; the instinct of self-maintenance
+becomes the feverish greed and money-getting which leave no room for the
+higher life of beauty, and science, and worship, and disinterested
+service. "Seek ye first the material," says the world, "and all these
+things shall be added unto you when you get the time for them"--which
+will be probably never.
+
+Now, then, do we not begin to see why the animal instincts and
+appetites, which make for order and happiness, and fufil their end in
+the animal world, lead to such intolerable disorder in the world of
+man? Their laws, like all other laws in the Divine economy, are holy and
+just and good; but man by not observing their conditions makes them work
+evil and death. Do you not see that to be a healthy animal is just what
+man cannot be except by being a true and high-minded man, all his
+conscious energies taken up and absorbed on a higher plane, with none
+left over to filter down into and disorder the animal instincts, which
+only work aright when left to their own unconscious activity? Fix your
+consciousness long enough on the tip of your little finger, and you will
+feel a pricking sensation in it. The mind directed intently to any part
+of the frame will produce a flow of blood there. Any physician will tell
+you that this is one of the greatest difficulties he has to contend with
+in his patients; the mind being steadily directed to some disordered
+spot increases the congestion which is the result of disease.
+
+Unconsciousness, therefore, is the very channel in which our animal
+nature works healthily and undisturbed according to its own laws. But
+you are a self-conscious being, and not as the animals. God keeps the
+keys of their nature in His own hands. They are shut up to certain ends
+which are in His purpose rather than in their minds. They are locked
+within limits of their nature, which are absolute, and cannot,
+therefore, be transgressed. But man, in virtue of his self-consciousness,
+is emphatically "he who hath the keys, who openeth and no man
+shutteth, and who shutteth and no man openeth." All the secret recesses
+of your being lie open to you, and no man can close it to your vision.
+You can voluntarily shut the door of salvation and hamper the lock, and
+no man can open. A limit is no absolute limit to you because your very
+consciousness of the limit involves your consciousness of the beyond
+which makes it a limit. And therefore to you as a self-knowing
+existence, with your being necessarily surrendered into your own hands,
+two faculties have been given as a substitute for the unconscious
+necessity of an animal nature: First, a self-judging faculty which we
+call conscience, or a power of discerning between a lower and a higher,
+and a sense of obligation to the higher which enables you to correlate
+your faculties and functions in their true order of relative
+excellence; and secondly, a spiritual will, capable of carrying the
+decisions of conscience into practical execution and attaining to a
+necessity of moral law. The true function of man's will is not,
+therefore, to add itself on to any one of his instincts and give it a
+disordered strength, but, while throwing its chief conscious energies
+into the higher interests of life, to rule his instincts and appetites
+according to those higher interests. This, when the condition of that
+infinitely complex thing, modern civilized life, interferes, as at
+times it must do, with the legitimate exercise of his instincts, and
+his good has to be subordinated to the good of the greater number, may
+occasionally involve a hard struggle, even when the instincts have been
+left to their own healthy natural play; but at least it will be all the
+difference between a struggle with a spirited animal and a maddened and
+infuriated brute.
+
+"But," asks Dr. Martineau, "if the animal instincts and appetites are to
+be directed by conscience and ruled by the will in accordance with the
+dictates of conscience, what becomes of the unconsciousness which is
+necessary for their right action? Its place is gradually supplied by
+habit, which is the unconsciousness of a self-conscious being." The
+habit of plain living and spare food, so necessary to high thinking, at
+first acquired possibly by real effort of will, by real fasting and
+prayer, becomes a second nature, that sets the will free for higher
+conquests. The habit of purity, which at first may have resulted only
+from a sleepless watch of the will in directing the thoughts and
+imagination into safe channels, becomes an instinctive recoil from the
+least touch of defilement. The habit of unworldly simplicity, which may
+have had to be induced by deliberate self-denial, becomes a natural
+disposition which rejects superfluities from unconscious choice.
+
+This is what takes place where direct conflict is necessitated by the
+constant readjustment of the individual, with his instincts and
+appetites, to his social environment which so complex a state of society
+as that of modern civilization involves. But under ordinary
+circumstances, where the teaching of Christ is observed and all the
+conscious energies of the man are absorbed in seeking first the kingdom
+of God, there the need of conflict on the lower plane is at least
+partially done away with. The whole current of thought and will, flowing
+into higher channels, is drained away from the lower instincts and
+appetites, which are thus restored to their natural unconsciousness,
+with only an occasional interference on the part of the will to
+subordinate them to human ends and aims, or to those demands of a high
+and complex civilization in the benefits of which we all share, but for
+whose fuller and richer life we have in some directions to pay, and
+perhaps at times to pay heavily. The scientific man who in his
+passionate devotion to the search after truth--the kingdom of God as
+revealed in the order of the universe--exclaimed testily that he had no
+time to waste in making money, had no conflict with the instinct of
+self-subsistence maddened into greed. It worked out a sufficient
+quotient of bread and cheese to insure the healthy exercise of his
+brain, and that was enough. The Alpine climber, intent on mastering a
+printless snow-peak, has not to control an appetite sharpened by
+mountain air from sinking into the gluttony which would be fatal to the
+cool head and steady foot necessary for his enterprise. The man who has
+a noble passion for the weak and defenceless, who from the first has
+cultivated a chivalrous loyalty to women, putting far from him the
+lowering talk, the cynical expression, the moral lassitude of society,
+and guarding his high enthusiasm from the blight of worldly commonplace,
+has no need to fight against the lower instinct that would degrade them
+or wrong the weak and defenceless. The conflict is there, but it is
+removed to a nobler and higher battle-field, a battle against the
+sacrifice of the weak by the strong, whilst in him the lower life may be
+left to settle itself, as in the unconscious birds of the air. "Love
+God," as St. Augustine said, "and do what you will." "Be a child of the
+water, and you may be a child of the wind, blowing where it listeth."
+"Seek the kingdom of God first, and all these things shall be added to
+you."
+
+This, then, is the first great practical lesson that we learn from the
+study of the laws of our human nature, taken in their widest aspect,
+under the teaching of the Divine Master, the "open secret" of overcoming
+in man and woman alike, that which restores to us our whole nature, and
+vindicates it, even in the depths of disorder into which it has
+practically fallen, as originally bearing the Divine stamp. The more
+unconscious we are in the pursuit of physical good, the better for the
+ends of life; the more conscious we are in the pursuit of moral and
+spiritual good, the nearer we are to that kingdom of righteousness and
+peace and joy in the Holy Ghost which we seek. Get out of the narrow
+individualism or atomism--for let us never forget that individual and
+atom are the same word--which threatens to dwarf and pulverize us, which
+keeps within our view only the narrow range of our own interests and
+defeats their true pursuit by the very intensity of attention it
+concentrates upon them; and live, as Goethe says, "in the beautiful, the
+good, and the whole," the kingdom of the Eternal. Have the higher
+passion that casts out the lower. The physician whose conscious aim is
+the relief of human suffering and the enforcement of the laws of health,
+even though a large professional income may be added to him; the lawyer
+who regards himself as the minister of the Just One to uphold the law of
+right and equity, whose reputation does not rest on his skill in getting
+off a fraudulent company without costs, and who makes his money not by
+his "practices," but by his honest practice; the man of science who
+reverently devotes himself, as the servant of the truth, to "think God's
+thoughts after Him," in the words of Kepler's prayer, and establish the
+kingdom of law and order, in the humbleness of conscious limitation
+which forbids dogmatizing; the artist who is true to his art and does
+not subordinate the laws of the eternal Loveliness to the shifting laws
+of the temporary market; the capitalist who looks upon himself as the
+steward of the public good, and to whom material gain is the means and
+not the end; the workman who does good work for the kingdom of God's
+sake, knowing that every stroke of good work is a brick in the palace
+of the great King, and who scorns to scamp because it pays; and,
+generally speaking, every man who is so intent on helping and serving
+others that his thoughts are taken off himself and centred on
+another--these are the men who are seeking first a kingdom of God,
+wherein dwelleth righteousness; these are the men who, living in the
+higher life can rule the lower--the men whose feet are in the lilies,
+and to whom the floods of earthly passion, even when they beat hardest,
+end in the flight of a dove and in a triumphal arch of light.
+
+Now, you will see at once the intensely practical bearing of this
+teaching on the training of your boys. You are not called to hit down
+directly on the evil, to give warnings against vice, or to speak on
+things which your womanhood unspeakably shrinks from mentioning. What
+you are called to do is to secure, so far as you can, that the mind and
+soul moves on its own proper plane. It is more an attitude you have to
+form than a warning you have to give. And here it is that the imperative
+need of high positive teaching comes in. Till parents, and especially
+mothers, recognize their God-given functions as the moral teachers of
+their own children, till they cease to shunt off their responsibilities
+on the professional shoulders of the schoolmaster, we had better frankly
+give up the whole question in despair. Strange and sad it seems to me
+that at the end of the nineteenth century after the coming of our Lord
+I should have to plead that the moral law is possible under every
+condition to any man, and that parents are _ipso facto_ the moral
+teachers of their own children. And yet it is the denial, tacit or
+explicit, of these two primary truths that has been the greatest
+obstacle to the progress of my work.
+
+But I appeal to you: Who but a mother can bring such a constant and
+potent influence to bear as to secure the mind and character moving on
+its own higher plane in relation to the whole of this side of our
+nature? Who so well as a mother can teach the sacredness of the body as
+the temple of the Eternal? Who else can implant in her son that habitual
+reverence for womanhood which to a man is "as fountains of sweet water
+in the bitter sea" of life? Who like a mother, as he grows to years of
+sense and observation, and the curiosity is kindled, which is only a cry
+for light and teaching, can so answer the cry and so teach as to make
+the mysteries of life and truth to be for ever associated for him with
+all the sacred associations of home and his own mother, and not with the
+talk of the groom or the dirty-minded schoolboy? Who so well as a
+mother, as he passes into dawning manhood, can plead faithfulness to the
+future wife before marriage as well as after? Nay, as I hold by the old
+Spanish proverb "An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy," who
+like a mother, by her prayers and ever-present example and influence,
+can lead him to the Highest, and impress upon him that his life is
+given him for no lower end than, in the words of the Westminster
+Confession, "to know God and to glorify Him for ever"; and that
+therefore he is made on a very high plan--as Browning puts it, "Heaven's
+consummate cup," whose end is to slake "the Master's thirst"; and that
+the cup from which He drinks must be clean inside as well as out, and
+studded within and without with the pearl of purity?
+
+But refuse to give him this higher teaching and training; go on, as so
+many mothers have done, blankly ignoring the whole subject, because it
+is so difficult to speak to one's boys,--as if everything worth having
+in this life were not difficult!--leave him to the teaching of dirty
+gossip, of unclean classical allusions in his school-books, of scraps of
+newspaper intelligence, possibly of bad companions whom he may pick up
+at school or business, and be sure of it, as this side of his nature is
+awakened--in his search after gratified curiosity or pleasurable
+sensation, in utter ignorance of what he is doing, through your fault,
+not through his--he will use his imagination and his will to strengthen
+the animal instincts. What ought to have been kept on a higher plane of
+being will be used to stimulate functions just coming into existence,
+and pre-eminently needing to be let alone on their own plane to mature
+quietly and unconsciously. Thus dwelt upon and stimulated, these
+functions become in a measure disordered and a source of miserable
+temptation and difficulty, even if no actual wrong-doing results. If you
+only knew what those struggles are, if you only knew what miserable
+chains are forged in utter helpless ignorance, you would not let any
+sense of difficulty or shrinking timidity make you refuse to give your
+boy the higher teaching which would have saved him.
+
+It is told of the beautiful Countess of Dufferin, by her son and
+biographer, Lord Dufferin, that when the surgeons were consulting round
+her bedside which they should save--the mother or the child--she
+exclaimed, "Oh, never mind me; save my baby!" If you knew the facts as I
+know them, I am quite sure you would exclaim, in the face of any
+difficulties, any natural shrinking on your part, "Oh, never mind me,
+let me save my boys!"
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 5: _The Study of Sociology_, by Herbert Spencer (International
+Scientific Series), p. 270, fifth edition, 1876.]
+
+[Footnote 6: I quote here at some length from a White Cross paper called
+_Per Augusta ad Augusta_, in which I summarized and applied Dr.
+Martineau's teaching, as I do not think I can do it more clearly or in
+more condensed form. By some mistake it came out, not under my name, but
+under the initials of the writer of _True Manliness_ and several others
+of the White Cross Series. I only mention the mistake now to safeguard
+my own intellectual honesty.]
+
+[Footnote 7: _Hours of Thought_, by Dr. Martineau, vol. i., p. 35, third
+edition.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+EARLY BOYHOOD
+
+
+Having now laid down the general principles which we have to recognize
+in the moral training of the young, let me endeavor to make some
+practical suggestions how these principles may be carried out,
+suggestions which, as a matter of fact, I have found to be helpful to
+educated mothers in the great and responsible task of training the men
+of the future generation.
+
+All I would earnestly ask you to remember is, that in offering these
+suggestions I am in no way venturing to dictate to you, only endeavoring
+to place a wide experience at your service. Doubtless you will often
+modify and, in some cases, very possibly reverse my conclusions. All I
+ask is that you should weigh them thoughtfully and prayerfully and with
+an open and unprejudiced mind before you finally reject them.
+
+Let us, therefore, begin with the nursery. It is in the nursery that the
+roots of the evil we have to contend with are often first planted, and
+this in more senses than one. In the more obvious sense all experienced
+mothers know what I mean. But I am quite sure that there are a large
+number of young wives who become mothers without the smallest knowledge
+of the dangers to which even infant boys may be exposed. This ignorance
+is painfully shown by the frequent application for nursemaids from our
+penitentiaries. At one house where I held a small meeting my young
+hostess, an intelligent literary woman, came into my room after the
+household had retired to rest to ask me about some curious actions which
+she had noticed in her baby boy at night. There could not be a doubt or
+a question that her nurse was corrupting her little child before that
+hapless young mother's eyes, and forming in him habits which could only
+lead to misery hereafter, and only too possibly to idiocy and death; and
+that young mother was too ignorant to save her own baby boy! Indeed, I
+know of no greater instance of the cruelty of "the conspiracy of
+silence" than the fact that in all the orthodox medical manuals for
+young mothers the necessary knowledge is withheld.[8] But more
+marvellous still is the fact that women should ever have placidly
+consented to an ignorance which makes it impossible for them to save
+even baby boys from a corrupt nursemaid, who by some evil chance may
+have found her way into their service through a false character or under
+some other specious disguise, not seeing at once that the so-called
+delicacy which shrinks from knowing everything that is necessary in
+order to save is not purity but prurience.
+
+I would, therefore, beseech young mothers who are conscious of their own
+ignorance to see a lady doctor, if they do not like to consult their own
+family physician, and ask her to tell them plainly what they have to
+guard against and the best methods to pursue. All I can say here is to
+beseech every mother to be absolutely careful about the antecedents of
+her nursemaids, and only to admit those of unblemished character into
+the precincts of the nursery. Never, if possible, let your baby boy
+sleep with any one but yourself, if through illness or any other cause
+he cannot sleep in his own little cot. Pyjamas, I think, are generally
+recognized now to be the best form of night gear, as keeping the little
+limbs warm and covered, when in the restlessness of sleep the child
+throws off the bedclothes, as well as for other and more vital reasons.
+If through straitened means you cannot afford an experienced nurse--not
+that I should altogether allow that even the experienced nurse is to be
+implicitly and blindly trusted until she has been well tested--then I
+would entreat you not to let sleepiness or ill health or any other
+excuse prevent you from being always present at your boy's morning bath.
+Often and often evil habits arise from imperfect washing and consequent
+irritation; and many a wise mother thinks it best on this account to
+revert to the old Jewish rite of initiation by which cleanliness was
+secured. Teach them from the first self-reverence in touch, as in word
+and deed, and watch even their attitudes in sleep, that the little arms
+are folded lightly upwards. Even experienced nurses are not always nice
+in their ways. Be vigilantly watchful that the utmost niceness is
+observed between the boys and girls in the nursery, and that childish
+modesty is never broken down, but, on the contrary, nurtured and
+trained. Knowledge and watchfulness are the two cherubim with the
+flaming sword turning all ways to guard the young tree of life and bar
+the way of every low and creeping thing. If I may venture in some sort
+to reverse our Lord's words, I should say His word to all mothers is,
+"What I say unto all I say especially unto you, _Watch_."
+
+But there is another and a deeper sense in which the root of the evil is
+first planted and nourished in the nursery. If we are to contend with
+this deadly peril to soul and body, I cannot but feel that we must bring
+about a radical change in the training of our boys. There must be some
+radical defect in that training for men to take the attitude they do. I
+do not mean bad, dissipated men, but men who in all other relations of
+life would be designated fairly good men. Once let such a man be
+persuaded--however wrongly--that his health, or his prospect of having
+some day a family of his own, will suffer from delayed marriage and he
+considers the question settled. He will sacrifice his health to
+over-smoking, to excess in athletics, to over-eating or champagne
+drinking, to late hours and overwork; but to sacrifice health or future
+happiness to save a woman from degradation, bah! it never so much as
+enters his mind. Even so high-minded a writer as Mr. Lecky, in his
+_History of European Morals_,[9] deliberately proposes that the
+difficulty of deferred marriage which advanced civilization
+necessitates, at least for the upper classes, should be met by temporary
+unions being permitted with a woman of a lower class. The daughters of
+workingmen, according to this writer, are good enough as fleshly
+stop-gaps, to be flung aside when a sufficient income makes the true
+wife possible--an honorable proceeding indeed! to say nothing of the
+children of such a temporary union, to whom the father can perform no
+duty, and leave no inheritance, save the inestimable one of a mother
+with a tainted name. Verily there must be some fault in our training of
+men! Certainly an intelligent American mother put her finger on the
+blot, so far as we are concerned, when, speaking to me many years ago,
+she said what struck her so in our English homes was the way in which
+the girls were subordinated to the boys; the boys seemed first
+considered, the girls in comparison were nowhere. Doubtless our English
+homes are more at fault here than in America; but, as a mother's pride
+in her boys is the same all over the world, may not even American homes
+admit of a little improvement in this respect as well? And, if we choose
+to bring up our boys to look upon their mothers and sisters as more or
+less the devoted slaves of their selfishness, can we wonder that they
+should grow up to look upon all women as more or less the slaves of
+their needs, fleshly or otherwise?
+
+Now, what I want all boys taught from their earliest years is, roughly
+speaking, that boys came into the world to take care of girls. Whatever
+modification may take place in our view of the relation of the sexes,
+Nature's great fact will remain, that the man is the stronger--a
+difference which civilization and culture seem to strengthen rather than
+diminish; and from his earliest years he ought to be taught that he,
+therefore, is the one that has to serve. It is the strong that have to
+bear the burden of the weaker, and not to prostitute that strength by
+using it to master the weaker into bearing their loads. It is the man
+who has to give himself for the woman, not the other way on, as we have
+made it. Nay, this is no theory of mine; it is a truth implanted in the
+very heart of every true man. "Every true man," as Milton says, "is born
+a knight," diligently as we endeavor to stub up this royal root,
+constantly, as from the very nursery, we endeavor to train it out of
+him. You may deny the truth and go on some theory of your own in the
+training of your boys, but the truth cannot deny itself. It is _there_,
+whether you will have it or not, a root of the tree of life itself.
+
+Now there is not a day that need pass without opportunities of training
+your boys in this their true knightly attitude. You can see, as I have
+already said, that they learn in relation to their own sisters what in
+after years they have to practise towards all women alike. To give up
+the comfortable easy-chair, the favorite book or toy, the warmest place
+by the fire, to the little sister--this ought to become a second nature
+to a well-trained boy. To carry a parcel for her, to jump up and fetch
+anything she wants, to give in to her because he is a boy and the
+stronger--all this ought to be a matter of course. As he grows older you
+can place him in little positions of responsibility to his sisters,
+sending them out on an expedition or to a party under his care. In a
+thousand such ways you can see that your boy is not only born but grows
+up a knight. I was once in a house where the master always brought up
+the heavy evening water-cans and morning coal-scuttles for the maids.
+And if these were placed at the foot of the stairs so as to involve no
+running in and out of the kitchen, it might be no mean exercise for a
+boy's muscles.
+
+I was told only the other day of a little six-year-old boy whose mother
+had brought him up from babyhood on these principles. He was playing
+with his little sister on a bed, when suddenly he perceived that she
+was getting perilously near the edge which was farthest from the wall.
+Instantly he dismounted and went round to the other side, and, climbing
+up, pushed her gently into the middle of the bed, remarking
+sententiously to himself, "I think boys ought always to take the
+dangerous side of their sisters." Ah me! if only you mothers would but
+train your boys to "take the dangerous side of their sisters,"
+especially of those poor little sisters who are thrust forth at so early
+an age to earn their own living, alone and unprotected, on the perilous
+highways of the world, skirted for them by so terrible a precipice, what
+a different world would it be for us women, what a purer and better
+world for your sons!
+
+Surely the womanhood in our homes ought to enable us to bring up our
+boys in such an habitual attitude of serving a woman, of caring for her,
+of giving himself for her, that it would become a moral impossibility
+for him ever to lower or degrade a woman in his after-life.
+
+In concluding these suggestions there is one point I must emphasize, the
+more so as in treating of one particular moral problem it is difficult
+not to seem to ignore a truth which is simply vital to all moral
+training. Let us clearly recognize that there is no such thing as moral
+specialism. Our moral being, like Wordsworth's cloud, "moveth altogether
+if it move at all." You cannot strengthen one particular virtue except
+by strengthening the character all round. Cardinal Newman points out--I
+think in one of those wonderful Oxford sermons of his--that what our
+ancestors would have called "a bosom sin" will often take an underground
+course and come to the surface at quite an unexpected point in the
+character. Hidden licentiousness, which one would expect to evince
+itself in over-ripe sentiment and feeling, manifests itself instead in
+cruelty and hardness of heart. The little habit of self-indulgence which
+you in your foolish fondness have allowed in that boy of yours may, in
+after-life, come out as the very impurity which you have endeavored so
+earnestly to guard him against. This mystical interdependence and hidden
+correlation of our moral and intellectual being is a solemn thought, and
+can only be met by recognizing that the walls of the citadel must be
+strengthened at all points in order to resist the foe at one.
+Truthfulness, conscientiousness that refuses to scamp work, devotion to
+duty, temperance in food and drink, rectitude--these things are the
+bastions of purity of life, as well as of all high character.
+
+But in these days I think we have more especially to remember that the
+Beautiful Gate of all noble living rests, like the gate of the Jewish
+Temple, on two pillars, both of which show signs of being considerably
+out of repair. One of these pillars is obedience, or discipline. If you
+have not exacted prompt and unhesitating obedience in your boy, from his
+earliest childhood, to the parents whom he has seen, do you think that
+in after years he will obey the Father of Lights, whom he has not seen?
+Do you think, if you have let him set your authority at defiance, he
+will in future years, with temptation on one side and opportunity on the
+other, bow to the invisible authority of conscience? What is it, I ask,
+that makes the army the finest school for character, giving us our
+Lawrences, our Havelocks, our Gordons, our Kitcheners, but simply this
+habit of implicit obedience, of that discipline which has grown so
+grievously lax in so many of our English homes? In Carlyle's strong
+words, "Obedience is our universal duty and destiny, wherein whoso will
+not bend must break: too early and too thoroughly we cannot be trained
+to know that 'would,' in this world of ours, is as mere zero to
+'should,' and for most part as the smallest of fractions even to
+'shall.'"[10]
+
+The second great pillar of the portal of noble life seems to me to show
+still greater signs of being out of repair and in want of restoration,
+and that pillar is reverence,--that heaven-eyed quality which Dr.
+Martineau rightly places at the very top of the ethical scale. Let that
+crumble, and the character which might have been a temple sinks into a
+mere counting-house. When in these days children are allowed to call
+their father Dick, Jack, or Tom, and nickname their own mother; when
+they are allowed to drown the voice of the most honored guest at the
+table with their little bald chatter, so that even the cross-questioning
+genius of a Socrates would find itself at a discount; when they are
+allowed to criticise and contradict their elders in a way that would
+have appalled our grandmothers; when they are suffered to make remarks
+which are anything but reverent on sacred things--have I not some reason
+to fear that the one attribute which touches the character to fine
+issues is threatened with extinction? Do you think that the boy who has
+never been taught to reverence his own mother's womanhood will reverence
+the degraded womanhood of our streets, or hear that Divine Voice
+guarding all suffering manhood and all helpless womanhood from wrong at
+his hands, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have
+done it unto Me?"
+
+Oh, I would entreat you to set yourself firmly against this evil
+tendency of our day, to which I cannot but believe so much of its
+agnosticism is due,--that deadening down and stamping out of the
+spiritual instincts of our nature, those great intuitions of the soul,
+which lie both above and below all reasoning and logic and form their
+basis rather than their apex. Once let the springs of reverence be
+choked up, once let that window of the soul be overgrown with weeds and
+cobwebs, and your most careful training will only produce a character
+estimable in many respects, but for the most part without noble
+aspirations, without high ideals, with no great enthusiasms--a
+character, to use Saint Beuve's expressive phrase, "tout en facade sur
+la rue," whose moral judgments are no better than street cries; the type
+of man that accepts the degradation of women with blank alacrity as a
+necessity of civilization, and would have it regulated, like any other
+commodity for the market; that very common type of character which,
+whatever its good qualities, spreads an atmosphere of blight around it,
+stunting all upward growing things and flattening down our life to the
+dead level of desert sands.
+
+If you would not be satisfied at your boy rising no higher than this,
+then, again I say, guard the springs of reverence. Do not let your pride
+in your child's smartness or any momentary sense of humor make you pass
+over any little speech that savors of irreverence; check it instantly.
+Exact respect for yourself and for the boy's father, the respect which
+is no enemy, but the reverse, to the uttermost of fondness. Insist upon
+good manners and respectful attention to the guests of your house. Do
+not despise the good old fashion of family prayers because they do not
+rise to all that we might wish them to be. At least they form a daily
+recognition of "Him in whom the families of the earth are blessed"--a
+daily recognition which that keen observer of English life, the late
+American Ambassador, Mr. Bayard, pointed out as one of the great secrets
+of England's greatness, and which forms a valuable school for habits of
+reverence and discipline for the children of the family. Insist upon
+the boys being down in time for the worship of God, and do not allow
+them to get into the habit indulged in by so many young men of "sloping"
+down with slippered feet long after breakfast is done and prayers are
+over.
+
+Only let the springs of reverence well up in your child's soul, and
+then, and then only, will you be able to give your boy what, after all,
+must always be the greatest safeguard from shipwreck in this perilous
+world--religious faith, that stops him at the very threshold of
+temptation with the words: "How can I do this great wickedness and sin
+against God?" Your very attitude as you kneel by his side with bowed
+head and folded hands while he says his little evening and morning
+prayer will breathe into his soul a sense of a Divine Presence about our
+bed and about our path. Your love--so strong to love, and yet so weak to
+save--can lead his faltering childish feet to that Love which is deeper
+than our deepest fall, "which knows all, but loves us better than it
+knows." You can press your child against the very heart of God, and lay
+him in the Everlasting Arms, that faint not, neither are weary; and,
+with the mother of St. Augustine, you may know that the child of such
+prayers and such tears will never perish.
+
+                              "Happy he
+    With such a mother! faith in womankind
+    Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high
+    Comes easy to him, and though he trip and fall
+    He shall not blind his soul with clay."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 8: This is the case with our recognized medical manuals; I do
+not know whether it is equally true of American manuals.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Vol. ii. See chapter on "The Position of Women."]
+
+[Footnote 10: _Sartor Resartus_, by Thomas Carlyle, Book II., chap, ii.,
+p. 68. Chapman and Hall, 1831.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL LIFE
+
+
+I now come to what must always be the great moral crux in a boy's life,
+that on which all the higher issues of his character will, in all human
+probability, turn--his school life. One of our great educators took
+what, looked at superficially, seemed the somewhat retrograde step of
+giving up the mastership of a college at Oxford to take again the
+head-mastership of a great public school. But in a conversation I had
+with him he led me to infer that he had done so from the conviction
+forced upon him that the whole moral trend of the character must be
+given, if given at all, prior to university life, at the public school;
+and to him nothing less than the formation of high moral character
+seemed worth striving for. Fine scholarship and high mathematics are
+excellent, but after all, as the apostle of culture, Matthew Arnold, has
+told us, conduct, and not intellectual attainment, forms seven-tenths of
+life.
+
+Now, it is in connection with your boy's school life that you will have
+your greatest dangers to face, your hardest battle to fight.
+
+I am, of course, aware that your school system is in some respects
+different from ours. You have the mixed day school such as largely
+obtains in Scotland, but which does not exist, at least for the upper
+classes, in England. You have private boarding-schools, which with us
+are called preparatory schools, as they form the vestibule to the public
+school. And you have, lastly, a few large public schools somewhat on the
+model of Eton and Harrow.
+
+Let us begin with the boarding-school. I do not intend for one moment to
+deny the advantages of our great English public schools. They are
+excellent for discipline and the formation of strong character,
+especially for a ruling race like ours; and their very numerical
+strength and importance command a splendid set of men as masters. But
+both public and private boarding-schools labor under one great
+disadvantage: they remove a boy from all family influence and violate
+the order of our life, which can never be violated with impunity. Boys
+and girls are sent into the world in pretty equal proportions, and we
+were never intended to pile a lot of boys together without girls and
+largely without any feminine influence whatever. To do so is to insure
+moral disorder whether in our schools or yours. To quote from an
+excellent paper of Dr. Butler's: "In giving us sisters," says one of the
+Hares in _Guesses at Truth_, "God gave us the best moral antiseptic,"
+and it is their absence more than anything else that has produced the
+moral problems which our boarding-schools present. To be absent from
+sisters for the greater part of the year, at an age when their
+companionship is perhaps the most eloquent of silent appeals to purity,
+is undoubtedly one of the greatest evils to be set against the blessings
+of our public schools.[11]
+
+For my own part, I can only say that the one thing which has filled me
+at times with the darkness of despair has not been the facts about our
+back streets, not those facts to meet which we hold conferences and
+establish penitentiaries, refuges, preventive homes, etc.--I am full of
+hopefulness about them--but the facts about our public, and still more
+about our private, schools, which until lately have been met with dead
+silence and masterly inactivity on the part of English parents. On the
+part of mothers I feel sure it is ignorance, not indifference: if they
+knew what I know, it simply could not be the latter. Even now, when
+some, at least, of their ignorance has been dispelled, I doubt whether
+they realize the depth of moral corruption which is to be found in our
+public and private schools; the existence of heathen vices which by the
+law of our land are treated as felony, and which we would fain hope,
+after nineteen centuries of Christianity, might now be relegated to the
+first chapter of Romans. They do not realize the presence of other and
+commoner forms of impurity, the self-defilement which taints the moral
+nature and stimulates the lower nature into unhealthy and abnormal
+activity. They do not understand the essentially sporadic nature of the
+evil--that it may exist "as a pestilence that walketh in darkness" in
+one boarding-school, while another, owing to the influence of a good set
+of boys, is comparatively free from it; and they will, therefore, take a
+single denial of its existence, possibly from their own husbands, as
+conclusive. Even the affirmations of head-masters are not altogether to
+be trusted here, as mothers cannot betray the confidence of their own
+boys, and often fail in gaining their consent to let the head-master
+know what is going on, in the boy's natural dread of being found out as
+the source of the information and, according to the ruling code, cut, as
+having "peached." Once I obtained leave to expose an indescribable state
+of things which was going on in broad daylight in an unsupervised room
+at one of our great public schools, utterly unsuspected by the
+head-master, and his subordinate, the house-master. But another case
+which for long made my life a kind of waking nightmare remained
+unexposed to the last.
+
+Speaking of those commoner forms of impurity to which I have referred,
+and which are so mischievous as stimulating immature functions, needing,
+as Acton over and over again insists, absolute quiet and rest for
+healthy development, Dr. Dukes, the head physician of one of our best
+known public schools, states: "The reason why it is so widespread an
+evil"--computed in 1886 at eighty per cent. of boys at school, a
+computation accepted by a committee of public schoolmasters--"I believe
+to be, that the boy leaves home in the first instance without one word
+of warning from his parents that he will meet with bad boys who will
+tell him that everybody does it, and thus he falls into evil ways from
+his innocence and ignorance alone."[12]
+
+Dr. Dukes further states that as the results of his thirty years'
+experience he had come to the conclusion that only one per cent. of
+parents ever warned their boys at all before sending them to school.
+
+These statements were made some fifteen years ago, when first the
+conspiracy of silence was broken through and the question of the
+morality of our public and private schools was dragged into the light of
+day and boldly faced and grappled with, largely owing to the action of
+Dr. Pusey. Since then a mass of strenuous effort has been directed
+against the evil by our high-minded head-masters; and an immense
+improvement has been effected. It is too short a time for one to hope
+that the evil has been eradicated; but when parents learn to fulfil
+their moral duties of teaching and warning their own boys--as Dr. Dukes
+observes--I feel sure it could be so far removed as to cause the numbers
+to change places, so that we might obtain a percentage of ninety to
+ninety-five of those who lead pure lives while at school, as against
+five per cent, who are impure, reversing the lamentable ratio that now
+exists. But here again there has been progress, and I feel sure that the
+percentage of parents who do warn and teach their sons before sending
+them to school is now incomparably higher than Dr. Dukes's "one per
+cent." and is steadily rising.
+
+As to other deeper and nameless evils, they have been already reduced to
+a minimum, and if fathers could only be persuaded to do their duty by
+their own boys, they might be made wholly to disappear.
+
+I give you these facts about our English schools, that parents may see
+for themselves what are the consequences of refusing both teaching and
+warning to their boys, under the delusion that God's lilies will grow up
+in the weedy garden of the human heart without strenuous culture and
+training.
+
+Do not, therefore, I beseech you, take for granted that your
+boarding-schools are entirely free from such evils. You have the same
+conditions that we have. Till lately your boys have been as untaught and
+unwarned as ours. In your boarding-schools, as in ours, they are removed
+from the purifying influence of mother and sisters. They are just at the
+age which has neither the delicacy of childhood nor of early manhood.
+Rest assured that conditions will breed like results.
+
+     "My belief, not lightly formed," says Dr. Butler,[13] "is, that
+     none of the great schools can congratulate themselves on anything
+     like safety from this danger. And if this is true of the great
+     public schools, it is still more true of private schools, where the
+     evil is admittedly greater. Boys and masters alike may strangely
+     deceive themselves; the evil may hide very close. Many a boy has
+     been known to assert positively and honestly that nothing of the
+     kind was ever heard of in his time, and that any fellow suspected
+     of it would have been cut, and half killed, when all the time the
+     evil was actively at work even among the circle of his intimate
+     friends."
+
+And yet it is this evil, so pervasive in its influence, so certain to
+taint the fresh springs of young life with impure knowledge, if not to
+foul them with unclean acts, that parents still too often elect to
+ignore. The boy, full of eager curiosity, anxious, above all things, to
+catch up the ways of the other fellows, afraid, above all things, of
+being laughed at for his innocence, and elated at being taken up by one
+of the swells in the shape of an elder boy, and at first set-off wholly
+ignorant of the motive; exposed to suggestions about the functions of
+his own body which he has not the knowledge to rebut as the devil's
+lies--what wonder is it that so many boys, originally good and pure,
+fall victims? "They blunder like blind puppies into sin," a medical man
+who has had much to do with boys' schools exclaimed to me in the
+bitterness of his soul. The small house of the young boy's soul, full of
+the song of birds, the fresh babble of the voices of sisters, all the
+innocent sights and sounds of an English or American home, swept and
+garnished till now by such loving hands, but left empty, unguarded, and
+unwatched, for the unclean spirit to lift the latch and enter in and
+take possession--the pity of it! oh, the pity of it! What can the boy
+think? To quote Dr. Dukes again:
+
+     "He will say to himself: 'My father knows of all this vice at
+     schools, and yet has not said one word to me about it. He has
+     warned me about most things. He told me to be truthful, to keep my
+     temper, to be upright and manly, to say my prayers; he pressed me
+     never to get into debt, never to drink, and never to use bad
+     language; and he told me I ought to change my boots and clothes
+     when wet, so as not to get ill; and yet he has not said one
+     syllable about this. My father is a good man and loves me, and if
+     he wanted me not to do this he would surely have told me; it can't
+     be very wrong, else I am sure he would have protected me and told
+     me all about it."
+
+I remember a friend of mine, who had been greatly stirred on the whole
+subject, endeavoring, with tears in her eyes, to persuade a father to
+warn his boy before sending him to his first public school, and on his
+absolutely refusing to do any such thing, she said to him, "At least
+promise me that you will give him this book," placing in his hands Mr.
+George Everett's excellent little book, _Your Innings_. This he
+consented to do. The next morning my friend met him at breakfast, the
+boy having been already despatched by an early train. "Well," he said,
+"I sat up till past twelve last night reading your book; it is
+excellent, and I gave it to my lad before starting him off. But there
+is just one chapter in it, called a 'Strange Companion,' which I took
+the precaution of previously cutting out with my penknife; and my boy in
+his after years will thank me for not putting any such ideas in his
+head, but having kept him the pure and innocent lad that he is." I need
+not say that it was the one chapter that would have put the boy on his
+guard. Oh, befooled and purblind father! I happened to know that the
+school to which the boy was sent was swept at that time by a moral
+epidemic, and before that hapless lad had been a week in its corrupt
+atmosphere he would have had ideas put into his head with a vengeance.
+His father had handed over the ground of his boy's heart for the devil
+to sow the first crop, and as a rule the devil sows, not wild oats, as
+we say, but acorns--a dread sowing which it may take years to root up
+and to extirpate, even if, so far as after-taint is concerned, it can
+ever be wholly extirpated.
+
+In another case a widowed mother came to one of my meetings, and was
+profoundly alarmed at what I said about the dangers of our schoolboys.
+It had never occurred to her that her gentlemanly little lad of twelve
+could have any temptations of the kind. Unlike the father I have
+mentioned, she resolved to speak to him that same evening. She found
+that he was fighting a battle against the whole school, standing up
+alone for the right, guided by some blind instinct of purity to resist
+the foul suggestions which were inflicted upon him, threatening him
+with the most terrible consequences in after-life if he did not yield
+and do as the other boys did. Think of it, ye mothers! a child of twelve
+without a hand to guide him, without a voice to cheer him, refused the
+knowledge that would have saved him from his deadly peril, his own
+mother deaf and dumb and blind to his struggles, leaving him to fight
+his little forlorn hope absolutely alone. I need scarcely say how
+thankfully he poured forth his sore heart to his mother when once she
+had opened the door, till now kept locked by her own ignorance; and how
+she was able to explain to him that, far from reaping any evil
+consequences from doing what is right, like Sir Galahad, "his strength
+would be the strength of ten" if he kept himself pure. She probably took
+steps to remove him from so corrupt an atmosphere as prevailed in that
+preparatory school, but of this I do not know.
+
+But here let me guard myself from being misunderstood. I am not making
+out that every schoolboy is exposed to these temptations; there are boys
+so exceptionally endowed that they seem to spread a pure atmosphere
+around them which is respected by even the coarsest and loosest boys in
+the school. All I do maintain, with Dr. Butler, is that no school is
+safe from this danger, that at any time it may prove an active one in
+your boy's life, and that at the very least you have to guard him from
+impure knowledge being thrust upon him before nature has developed the
+instincts of manhood by which she guards her inner shrine.
+
+And now I come to the question of day schools. As I have already said, I
+cannot feel but they are more consonant with the order of our life as
+giving the discipline and competition of numbers without removing the
+boy from family life, nor do they lend themselves to some of the graver
+evils of our boarding-schools. But, alas! in themselves they form no
+panacea for the evils we are contemplating. On the contrary, I am told
+on authority I cannot question that in some places this plague spot is
+rife among them. In one case the evil had struck so wide and deep that
+the school had to be temporarily closed. Here, again, the same lesson is
+emphasized, viz.: that whatever is the form of the school, however
+excellent the teacher, there is no substitute in the moral life for the
+home teaching and training of mothers and fathers.
+
+No mother can read these statements unmoved--statements, remember, not
+my own, but made by men of the deepest and widest experience, and which,
+therefore, you are bound to weigh, ponder, and carefully consider. I
+know that straight from your heart again comes the cry, "What can I do?"
+
+I am inclined to answer this cry in one word, "Everything,"--with God's
+help.
+
+
+I
+
+And now let us enter into practical details. We will begin with the
+outworks, and work our way inwards to the shrine.
+
+First, as to the all-important choice of a school, should the boy's
+father decide, for reasons in which you concur to send him to a
+boarding-school.
+
+As to how to ascertain the real state of a school there is, of course,
+considerable difficulty. I have always found the best way is through
+mothers who have gained the confidence of their boys and who know
+through them what really goes on. In this way, as mothers wake up to the
+danger their boys run and to their own responsibility in guarding them,
+we shall be able to help one another more and more. But make a point of
+yourself, as well as the boy's father, personally seeing the master to
+whom you think of entrusting your lad, and talking over the matter with
+him. In this way you will not only satisfy yourself, but you will
+strengthen his hands by making him feel how vital the whole question is
+to your heart. What more than anything else weakens the high-minded men
+who have the tuition of the young is the utter unconcern that is evinced
+by the parents and the sense that, by the payment of a sum of money
+down, they can compound with a master for the performance of their
+inalienable duty of undertaking the moral education of their own
+children.
+
+Here let me give you two most earnest cautions. Do not attach too much
+importance to mere mechanical arrangements as moral safeguards. One of
+our most successful head-masters says:
+
+     "I would most seriously warn any parent anxious about the choice of
+     a school not to attach much weight to the apparent excellence of
+     arrangements. Some of the worst schools have these arrangements in
+     the highest perfection. They cannot afford to have them otherwise.
+     Neat cubicles and spotless dimity have beguiled an uninterrupted
+     sequence of mammas, and have kept alive, and even flourishing,
+     schools which are in a thoroughly bad moral state and are
+     hopelessly inefficient in every particular. Of course, many a
+     parent feels that he ought to judge for himself, and these
+     mechanical arrangements are too often the only material on which he
+     can form his judgment. Let me assure him that they are entirely
+     untrustworthy."
+
+Secondly, do not think to find safety in the choice of a so-called
+"religious" school, even though it reflect the exact shade of your own
+religious opinions. The worst evils I ever knew went on in a school
+where the boys implicated held a weekly prayer-meeting! We must boldly
+face the fact that there is some mysterious connection between the
+religious emotions and the lower animal nature; and the religious
+forcing-house, of whatever school of theology, will always be liable to
+prove a hot-bed of impurity. Choose a school with a high moral tone,
+with religion as an underlying principle--a practical religion, that
+inculcates duty rather than fosters emotion, and embodies the wise
+proverb of Solomon, "In all labor there is profit, but the talk of the
+lips tendeth to penury."
+
+Only let me beseech you to use your whole influence not to have your
+boy sent away at too early an age. Do you really think that the
+exclusive society of little boys, with their childish chatter, their
+foolish little codes, their crude and often ridiculously false notions
+of life, and their small curiosities, naturally inquisitive, but not
+always clean in the researches they inspire, and _always_ false in their
+results, is morally better for your child than, in Dr. Butler's words,
+
+     "the refining and purifying atmosphere of home, with the tenderness
+     of a mother, the grace and playfulness of sisters, the love and
+     loyalty of the family nurse, and lastly--scarcely to be
+     distinguished in its effects from these influences--the sweetness,
+     the simplicity, the flower-picking, the pony-patting of happy,
+     frolicsome younger brothers or sisters in the garden, the paddock,
+     or stable?"
+
+If the boy has got out of hand, I ask, Whose fault is that? and is it
+fair to the child that your fault should be remedied by sending him away
+from all that is best and most purifying in child life? I would plead
+earnestly that eleven or twelve is old enough for the private school,
+and that a boy should not be sent to a public school before fourteen. In
+this I think most of our English head-masters would agree with me. Till
+this age, a day school or a tutor should be had recourse to, and when
+the time comes for sending him off to school, at least we can refuse to
+place the boy anywhere, either at a private or public school, where
+there is not some woman to mother and look after the boys and exert a
+good womanly influence over them. A head-master keenly alive to moral
+dangers, with a capable wife ready to use her womanly influence in
+aiding and abetting his efforts, I have found the best possible
+combination.
+
+But if it is decided that the boys are to be brought up at the day
+school, your range of choice will probably be very small. You will have
+to look wholly to your home influence and teaching to counteract any
+evil influence they may encounter in their school life. But as your boys
+will never be separated from you, what may not that home influence and
+teaching, with knowledge and forewarning to direct it,--what may it not
+accomplish?
+
+
+II
+
+Let us, then, think out the best ways in which you can warn and guard
+your boy and fulfil your responsibility of being his moral teacher.
+
+Let us begin with the simplest measure which you can take, and which can
+present no difficulty to anyone. Before sending your boy to school get
+him quietly by himself and say to him some such words as these: "My boy,
+you know, or will come to know, that when boys get together they often
+talk of nasty things, and even do nasty things. Give me your word of
+honor as a Christian and a gentleman that you will never say or do
+anything that you know you would be ashamed to tell me, that you know
+would bring a blush to your sister's cheeks. Always remember that dirty
+talk, and still more dirty deeds, are only fit for cads. Promise me
+faithfully that you will never let any boy, especially an elder boy,
+tell you 'secrets.' If you were to consent through curiosity, or because
+you feel flattered at one of the elder fellows taking you up, be sure he
+means you no good. Whatever you want to know ask me, and so far as I can
+I will tell you." Some such words as these said solemnly to a boy the
+day before he leaves home for the first time, either for a
+boarding-school, or even a day school, will make your womanhood a sort
+of external conscience to your boy, to guard him from those first
+beginnings of impurity, in the shape of what are technically called
+"secrets," which lead on to all the rest. I know one mother who, from
+her boy's earliest years, has made a solemn pact with him, on the one
+hand, if he would promise never to ask any questions about life and
+birth of anyone but her, she, in her turn, would promise to tell him all
+he wanted to know; and from first to last there has been that perfect
+confidence and friendship between mother and son which is, and ever must
+be, a boy's greatest safeguard.
+
+Only remember that with young boys men who have had the greatest
+experience are generally agreed that it is better not to put the stress
+on religious motives. Practically, for a young boy, it is better to
+treat the whole thing as dirty, nasty, and blackguardly. And the whole
+subject must always be spoken of with reserve, without any emotion, and
+with much "dry light."
+
+With most lads I should go a step further; I should give the boy one of
+the White Cross papers, "A Strange Companion."[14] It is impossible to
+lay down hard and fast rules; it is impossible to make so many jam-pots
+of even young humanity, to be tied up and labelled and arranged upon the
+same shelf. Each individuality has to be dealt with in all its
+mysterious idiosyncrasy. One boy may be so reserved that it is better to
+write to him than to talk face to face; another may find the greatest
+possible strength and comfort in freedom of speech and the feeling that
+there is no barrier between him and his mother with regard to being able
+to tell her freely of any temptations that may assail him. Your mother's
+instincts will be your best guide as to what method to adopt with each
+of your boys.
+
+If the father of the lad can be induced, at any rate before he enters a
+boarding-school, to follow the advice of that remarkable man, Mr.
+Thring, the founder of Uppingham School, in his address to our Church
+Congress, and write a letter of plain warning and counsel to the lad, it
+would be an unspeakable help. "My first statement," says Mr. Thring,
+"is that all fathers ought to write such a letter to their sons. It is
+not difficult, if done in a common-sense way."[15]
+
+But now I come to what on all hands we must allow to be a point of
+extreme difficulty. I think all head-masters, deeply concerned in the
+moral welfare of the boys under their charge, would emphatically endorse
+the following words of Dr. Butler's:
+
+     "It is certain, it must needs be, that boys should, at an early
+     period of their boyhood, come to hear of the nature of sexual
+     relations. From whom should they first learn it? Should it be with
+     every accompaniment of coarseness, of levity, of obscenity? From
+     some ribald groom in the stables? From some impure maidservant who
+     has stolen into the household and the nursery? From some brother
+     only a year or two older, who has just received his first
+     initiation in impurity at a private school and is too young to
+     understand its danger? Worst of all, from the idlest, and most
+     corrupt, and most worthless set of boys at this same private
+     school, who surround the newcomer within a few days, perhaps a few
+     hours, of his first joining, and, with knowing looks and enticing
+     words, try to probe his childish knowledge, and leave him
+     half-ashamed of himself and keenly inquisitive for full initiation,
+     if he finds that he knows nothing of this engrossing mystery? Is it
+     right, is it fair, is it consistent with religious duty or with
+     common-sense, that a little boy of eight, or ten, or twelve, should
+     be sent at this impressionable age to hear for the first time of
+     facts of human nature which must ere long be known, and are part of
+     God's appointment? Does not every dictate of humanity and of reason
+     point to the conclusion that the dawn of this knowledge should be
+     invested with all that is tender, and loving, and pure, and sacred,
+     instead of being shrouded in the mists of innuendo or blazoned
+     forth in the shamelessness of bestiality? There is really no
+     answer but one to such a question, and the plain truth is that
+     fathers, perhaps still more mothers, must recognize the duty which
+     lies upon them to teach their children, at such times, in such
+     words, and with such reservations as the character of each child
+     may suggest, the elements at least of that knowledge which will
+     otherwise be learnt but a very little later from a widely different
+     set of instructors. I lay down the principle as admitting of no
+     exception--I do not anticipate even one dissentient voice from any
+     who now hear me--_that no boy ought ever to be allowed to go to
+     school without learning from his father or his mother, or from some
+     brother or tried friend considerably older than himself the simple
+     facts as to the laws of birth and the terrible danger of ever
+     coming to talk of these phenomena as matters of frivolous and
+     filthy conversation_."
+
+I can only beseech you to give due weight to these words of one who had
+many years' experience of a large public school. Over and over again, at
+all my meetings of educated mothers, I have reiterated his question in
+similar words, "Is it right, is it fair, that your boy should learn the
+sacred mysteries of life and birth from the sources which Dr. Butler
+enumerates, and to which you abandon him, if you refuse to speak;
+sources of unclean and lying information by which I have no hesitation
+in saying that the mind and conscience of many men are more or less
+permanently defiled, even when the life has been kept outwardly pure?"
+Can you hesitate for one moment to allow that the springs of the life
+which you will be the first to acknowledge comes from God should well up
+from a pure source, till, like Wordsworth's stream--
+
+                    "Crowned with flowers,
+    The mountain infant to the sun laughs forth,"
+
+and that the whole subject should be so bound up in the boy's mind with
+his father's love for his mother, his mother's love for his father, with
+his own existence, and that of his sisters, that he would shrink with
+utter loathing from the filthy so-called "secrets" that are bandied
+about among schoolboys? I know that the task of conveying this knowledge
+presents many difficulties, but again I ask, "What is there in our life
+that is worth doing which is not difficult?" Long ago the definition of
+a difficulty to me has become "a thing to be overcome." It is not in
+sitting down helplessly before a difficulty that the way will open. With
+us, as with the Israelites on the brink of that raging midnight sea, it
+is in a brave obedience to the Divine command, "Go forward!" that the
+path opens through the trackless sea, and we find that the great waters
+that seem ready to overwhelm us are in reality a baptism into new life.
+
+
+III
+
+Again I seem almost to hear the cry of your heart, "I know I ought to
+speak to my boy, but how am I to do it?"
+
+Now, it is here that I earnestly desire to give you, if I possibly can,
+some helpful, practical suggestions, for I feel that it is not in the
+recognition of a duty, but in its performance, that the difficulty lies
+which is arresting so many educated mothers at the present time.
+
+With very young children, whether girls or boys, there should be no
+difficulty whatever. They are too young to understand. Only, when they
+come to you asking their innocent little questions as to where the
+little baby brother or sister comes from, I would earnestly ask you
+never to allow yourself, or your nurse, to inflict on them the usual
+popular fables, that the baby was brought by the doctor or that it was
+found under the gooseberry-bush. A child is far quicker than we think to
+detect that mother is hiding something, and the first tiny seed of evil
+curiosity is sown. Make no mystery about it; look your child full in the
+face, and say, "My child, you have asked me a question about what is
+very, very sacred. If I were to try to explain it to you, you would not
+be old enough to understand; for the present you must be content to know
+that the baby comes from God; how it comes mother will tell you when you
+grow old enough to understand; only promise me that you will never ask
+any one but mother about it." The child will then see that you are
+hiding nothing, and will be satisfied to wait for the explanation that
+mother has promised.
+
+But what when the child is old enough to understand?--an age which
+doubtless varies in different children, but which with boys must come
+before their first school, if you are to occupy the ground of his heart
+with good seed, which leaves no room for the devil's sowing.
+
+Well, with regard to the facts of birth, I do not think we ought to find
+much difficulty. You can point out how the baby seed has a soft, downy
+place provided for it in the pod of the parent plant till it has ripened
+and is fit to be sown, when the pod opens and lets it fall to the earth,
+and it becomes a plant in its turn. You can point out that the egg in a
+similar way is carried in the mother bird's body till the shell has
+hardened and is fit to be laid, when she warms it with her own breast,
+patiently sitting on it for days, while the father bird feeds her, till
+the little chick is strong enough to break the walls of its tiny house,
+and come forth and peck and fend for itself. You can explain how the
+little kitten the child plays with has in the same way a safe place
+provided for it in the mother's body, where it grows and grows till all
+its organs are formed, and it can breathe and suck, when, like the seed
+from the pod, and the chick from the egg it leaves the mother's body,
+and is born, a blind and helpless baby kitten, to be fed and tenderly
+cared for by the mother cat. You will explain that the baby comes in
+just the same way so far as its infant body is concerned, growing like
+the kitten from a tiny cell--borne by the mother till all the organs are
+formed which it needs for its earthly life, when it also is born and
+laid in its mother's arms, to be nourished and cared for by the love of
+both father and mother, not for a few weeks, as with animals, but
+through long years of helplessness. And you mean to tell me that the
+sacred truth would not endear you to your child far more than the usual
+cock-and-bull story about the doctor and the gooseberry-bush?
+
+A friend of mine has three boys of widely opposite character and
+temperament. Owing to circumstances, the eldest lad had to be sent to
+school at an early age. Young as he was, she resolved to follow Dr.
+Butler's advice and tell him the facts of birth in the way I have
+suggested. On realizing the truth, the boy flung his arms round her neck
+and burst into tears. But though she felt that she had done right, she
+was not wholly without misgivings that she might have introduced some
+objectionable talk into her nursery. When the time came to send the
+second lad to school, she repeated the talk that she had had with his
+elder brother. But to her surprise she found him in total ignorance of
+the facts: his elder brother had never confided them to him. And so
+again with the third boy. Evidently the boys had considered it too
+sacred a thing to talk about--how much too sacred, then, to allow of
+their joining in with the unclean gossip of schoolboys! Its only result
+was to give them an added tenderness for their mother, and to make them
+resent all such unclean talk as so much mud flung at her.
+
+So far, so good. But we all of us realize that it is not the facts of
+birth, but the facts of the origination of life, that form the
+perennial source of obscene talk, and often of obscene action, among
+boys; and it is in explaining these, without violating those instincts
+of reserve and modesty with which nature herself surrounds the whole
+subject, that what often seems an insuperable difficulty arises. Yet
+these functions are, and must be, the very shrine of a body which is a
+temple of the Lord and Giver of life; and on the face of things,
+therefore, there must be some method of conveying pure knowledge to the
+opening mind with regard to them. The difficulty must be with ourselves,
+and not in the very nature of things themselves.
+
+Has it not been created in a great measure by a wrong method? We begin
+with human life instead of ending with it; we isolate it from a great
+system to which it belongs, and treat what is "the roof and crown of
+things" as a roof that tops no fair edifice, and is therefore anomalous;
+as a crown that rests on a head which has been severed from its body,
+and is therefore unmeaning. We obstinately refuse to live--to quote
+Goethe's words again--not only "in the beautiful and the good," but also
+"in the whole," which is equally necessary for a well-ordered life. What
+it seems to me we need is to teach the facts of life-giving, or, in
+other words, of sex, as a great, wide, open-air law, running right
+through animated creation, an ever-ascending progression forming a
+golden ladder leading up to man.
+
+In explaining the facts of reproduction, I would therefore suggest that
+you should begin with the lowest rung of the ladder, the simplest
+organisms, such as the amoeba or the volvox. I should show how these
+multiply by fission, the creature dividing into two, when it is
+impossible to tell which is the father and which is the mother. I would
+then pass upwards to more complex organisms, where two individuals are
+required to form the offspring. You could explain the whole process by
+the method of fertilization in plants, as urged in an excellent paper by
+a lady doctor, published in the _Parents' Review_.[16] Let me quote her
+words:
+
+     "The child can learn the difference of the names, color, and forms
+     of flowers as soon as it can learn anything. The next step would be
+     to simple lessons in the different parts of a plant--the vegetative
+     organs of roots, stem, leaves, passing on to the reproductive
+     organs in the flower--calyx, corolla, stamen, and pistil. Let the
+     child be taught to notice that all flowers have not quite the same
+     organs, some bearing stamens only, which shed the powdery pollen
+     and are the male, or little father flowers; while others have the
+     pistil only, furnished with the stigma to catch the pollen, and are
+     the females, or little mothers; that the one sort of flowers is
+     necessary to the other in producing the little seed or baby plant."
+
+Let us take a primrose. Here the mother and father elements are found in
+the same flower. At the base of the flower, packed in a delicate casket,
+which is called the ovary, lie a number of small white objects no larger
+than butterfly-eggs. These are the eggs or ova of the primrose. Into
+this casket, by a secret opening, filmy tubes thrown out by the pollen
+grains--now enticed from their hiding-place on the stamens and clustered
+on the stigma--enter and pour a fertilizing fluid, called "spermatozoa,"
+through a microscopic gateway, which opens in the wall of the egg and
+leads to its inmost heart. The ovule, or future seed, is now fertilized
+and capable of producing a future primrose. Covered with many protecting
+coats, it becomes a perfect seed. The original casket swells, hardens,
+is transformed into a rounded capsule or seed-vessel, opening by valves
+or a deftly constructed hinge. One day this seed-vessel, crowded with
+seeds, breaks open and completes the cycle of reproduction by dispersing
+them over the ground, where they sow themselves, and grow and become
+primrose plants in their turn, starring the grass with their lovely
+blossoms.[17]
+
+Sometimes the male and female elements grow upon different plants, as in
+the catkins children are so fond of gathering in the spring.
+
+     "More than two thousand years ago Herodotus observed a remarkable
+     custom in Egypt. At a certain season of the year the Egyptians went
+     into the desert, cut off branches from the wild palms, and bringing
+     them back to their gardens, waved them over the flowers of the
+     date-palm. Why they performed this ceremony they did not know; but
+     they knew that if they neglected it the date-crop would be poor or
+     wholly lost. But the true reason is now explained. Palm-trees,
+     like human beings, are male and female. The garden plants, the date
+     bearers, were females, the desert plants were males; and the waving
+     of the branches over the females meant the transference of the
+     pollen dust from the one to the other."[18]
+
+From these two elements, the spermatozoa, or male element, and the ova,
+or female element, all life, except in the lowest organisms, is
+produced.
+
+You could point out how it is by this marvellous process of
+reproduction, not only that the world is made green and beautiful, but
+all animal life is fed. Corn and rice, which are only fertilized seeds,
+form the staple food of a large proportion of mankind; while even the
+animal in order to live has first to be nourished on corn or grass
+before it can become meat for man.
+
+You could go on further to illustrate the facts of reproduction by bees
+and ants, so familiar to children, where the drone or male bee, or the
+male ant, in just the same way as in the plant, fertilizes the eggs of
+the queen bee or ant by bringing the spermatozoa into contact with the
+unfertilized egg in the insect's body, when the eggs thus fertilized are
+laid and carefully nurtured by the working bee or ant. All children have
+observed the little neuter,[19] or working ant, carrying in its
+mandibles an egg almost as large as itself with an air of extreme hurry
+and absorption, to lay it in the sun till the warmth hatches it into a
+baby ant.
+
+If it were further pointed out that not the male, but the female, as the
+mother of the species, is Nature's chief care; that among ants the male
+is sent into the world so imperfectly endowed that he cannot even feed
+himself, but is fed by his female relations, and that as soon as he has
+performed his function of fertilizing the queen ant, Nature apparently
+dismisses him with contemptuous starvation; or--to take the case of the
+drone or male bee--he is stung to death by the workers, it might help to
+modify the preposterous pretensions of the male, especially of the boy,
+in higher circles.
+
+You could then pass upwards through fish with the soft and hard roe, or
+male and female elements which are familiar to children, and through
+frogs with their spawn to birds. Here comes in an upward step indeed. "A
+world that only cared for eggs becomes," as Professor Drummond observes
+in his _Ascent of Man,_ "a world that cares for its young." The first
+faint trembling dawn, or at least shadowing forth, of a moral life, in
+the care of the strong for the weak, makes itself seen, which henceforth
+becomes as pervasive an element in Nature as the fierce struggle for
+existence in which the weak are destroyed by the strong.[20]
+
+In the bird--till now "the free queen of the air," living at her own
+wild will, suddenly fettered and brooding on her nest, and covering her
+helpless young with her tender wings--we see some faint image of the
+Divine tenderness. In the ceaseless toil of both the parent birds from
+morning till night to fill the little gaping throats we begin to feel
+the duty of the strong to serve and protect the weak; and in the little
+hen partridge, still clinging to her nest, when the flash of the scythe
+is drawing nearer and nearer, till reapers have told me they have feared
+the next sweep of the scythe might cut off her head, we see more than a
+shadow of that mother's love which is stronger than death. And when we
+pass lastly to the highest order of animals, the mammalia, we find them
+named after the mother's function of giving suck to her young from her
+own breast. They are no longer matured in an external egg, but are borne
+in her own body till they are able to breathe, and seek their
+nourishment from her, and then they are born so helpless that, as with
+kittens and puppies, they often cannot even see.
+
+In this higher order of animals nothing can exceed the devotion of the
+mother to her young in their helpless infancy. The fierce bear will
+recklessly expose her shaggy breast to the hunter in their defence.
+Here, too, we find, as the Duke of Argyle points out in his book on _The
+Unity of Nature_,
+
+     "that the equality of the sexes, as regards all the enjoyments as
+     well as the work of life, is the universal rule; and among those of
+     them in which the social instincts have been especially implanted,
+     and whose systems of polity are like the most civilized polities of
+     men, the females of the race are treated with a strange mixture of
+     love, loyalty, and devotion."
+
+"Man" as the Duke says, "is the Great Exception," and has been defined
+as the only animal that ill-treats and degrades his female.
+
+And when at length we come to the topmost step, "the roof and crown of
+things,"--Man, as you have already explained the physical facts of
+life-giving on the plane of plants, and ants, and bees, where they can
+excite no feeling of any kind, you will have no need to go over them
+again, but will find yourself free to express the physical in terms of
+the moral. Man, as a spiritual being, incarnate in an animal body, takes
+this great law of sex which we have seen running through the animated
+creation, and lifts it into the moral and the spiritual. The physical
+love which in animals only lasts for the brief time that is needed for
+the production and rearing of offspring--becomes in him a love which
+"inhabiteth eternity," and unites him to the mother of his children in
+the indissoluble union of marriage. His fatherhood becomes the very
+representative of the Father in heaven. The mother becomes the very type
+and image of the Love that has loved us with more than a mother's love,
+borne with us with more than a mother's patience, suffered for us, in
+the Cross and Passion, more than a mother's pangs, to bring us into a
+higher life. The love of brothers and sisters becomes the first faint
+beginning of the universal Church and the brotherhood of man; and the
+sweet babble of their voices grows choral at length in the songs of the
+Church triumphant, the unbroken family in heaven; while the Christian
+home shadows forth the eternal home which awaits us hereafter.[21]
+
+The only warning you would have to give your boy would be to point out
+that, as a cathedral takes longer to build than a shanty, so the human
+body, which is meant to be the temple of the "Lord and Giver of life,"
+takes much longer to mature than an animal's. Many an animal lives and
+dies of old age in the fourteen years that leave man still an immature
+boy. And you must earnestly impress upon him that the whole of this part
+of his nature which you have been explaining to him as a great law
+running through animated creation and finding its highest uses in Man,
+must be left to mature itself in absolute rest and quiet. All premature
+use of it is fatal to perfect health of soul and body. The less he
+thinks of it, and the more he thinks of his work and his athletics, the
+better for him. Above all, you hope, now that he knows the truth and his
+curiosity is satisfied, he will loathe all filthy jests and stories
+about that which is the source of all beautiful living things on the
+pleasant earth and, in his own little world, of all happy family life
+and innocent home love and joy.
+
+Let me quote here, in conclusion, a little poem, called "The Golden
+Ladder," which seems to me to embody some of the teaching of this
+exquisite page of the illuminated Word of Creation, which man has so
+blotted and defiled with his obscenities, but which to "open hearts and
+love-lit eyes" is the spring of all that is highest--the birth of the
+moral and the cradle of the divine.
+
+    "When torn with Passion's insecure delights,
+      By Love's dear torments, ceaseless changes worn,
+    As my swift sphere full twenty days and nights
+      Did make, ere one slow morn and eve were born;
+
+    "I passed within the dim, sweet world of flowers,
+      Where only harmless lights, not hearts, are broken,
+    And weep out the sweet-watered summer showers--
+      World of white joys, cool dews, and peace unspoken;
+
+    "I started, even there among the flowers,
+      To find the tokens mute of what I fled--
+    Passions, and forces, and resistless powers,
+      That have uptorn the world and stirred the dead.
+
+    "In secret bowers of amethyst and rose,
+      Close wrapped in fragrant golden curtains laid,
+    Where silver lattices to morn unclose,
+      The fairy lover clasps his flower-maid.
+
+    "Ye blessed children of the jocund day!
+      What mean these mysteries of love and birth?
+    Caught up like solemn words by babes at play,
+      Who know not what they babble in their mirth.
+
+    "Or of one stuff has some Hand made us all,
+      Baptized us all in one great sequent plan,
+    Where deep to ever vaster deep may call,
+      And all their large expression find in Man?
+
+    "Flowers climb to birds, and birds and beasts to Man,
+      And Man to God, by some strong instinct driven;
+    And so the golden ladder upward ran,
+      Its foot among the flowers, its top in heaven.
+
+    "All lives Man lives; of matter first then tends
+      To plants, an animal next unconscious, dim,
+    A man, a spirit last, the cycle ends,--
+      Thus all creation weds with God in him.
+
+    "And if he fall, a world in him doth fall,
+      All things decline to lower uses; while
+    The golden chain that bound the each to all
+      Falls broken in the dust, a linkless pile.
+
+    "And Love's fair sacraments and mystic rite
+      In Nature, which their consummation find,
+    In wedded hearts, and union infinite
+      With the Divine, of married mind with mind,
+
+    Foul symbols of an idol temple grow,
+      And sun-white Love is blackened into lust,
+    And man's impure doth into flower-cups flow,
+      And the fair Kosmos mourneth in the dust.
+
+    O Thou, out-topping all we know or think,
+      Far off yet nigh, out-reaching all we see,
+    Hold Thou my hand, that so the top-most link
+      Of the great chain may hold, from us to Thee;
+
+    "And from my heaven-touched life may downward flow
+      Prophetic promise of a grace to be;
+    And flower, and bird, and beast, may upward grow,
+      And find their highest linked to God in me."
+
+Possibly you will say at once, "Oh, my boy has no taste for natural
+history, and he would take no interest in this kind of thing." All the
+better his finding it a bit dry--it will rid the subject of some of its
+dangerous attraction. I have yet to find the boy for whom the Latin
+Grammar has the least interest; but we do not excuse him on that ground
+from grinding at it. Whether he takes an interest in it or not, you have
+to teach him that he has got to know about these things before going to
+school, to guard him from the danger of having all sorts of false, and
+often foul, notions palmed off on him. I do not say that pure knowledge
+will necessarily save, but I do say that the pitcher which is full of
+clear spring-water has no room for foul. I do say that you have gained a
+great step, if in answer to the offer of enlightenment which he is
+certain to receive, you have enabled your boy to acquit himself of the
+rough objurgation--forgive me for putting it in schoolboy language: "Oh,
+hold your jaw! I know all about that, and I don't want any of your rot."
+I do say that early associations are most terribly strong, and if you
+will secure that those early associations with regard to life and birth
+shall be bound up with all the sanctities of life--with home, with his
+mother, with family, with all that is best and highest in life; then his
+whole attitude in life will be different. But if these early
+associations are linked with all that is false and foul, some subtle
+odor of the sewer will still cling about the heart of the shrine, a
+nameless sense of something impure in the whole subject; an undefinable
+something in his way of looking at it, which has often made the purity
+of men--blameless in their outer life--- sadden and perplex me almost as
+much as the actions and words of confessedly impure men.
+
+
+IV
+
+But, whatever is the importance I attach to pure teaching, I return to
+my old position, that purity is an attitude of soul, or, perhaps I ought
+to say, the "snowy bloom" of the soul's perfect health, rather than
+anything you can embody in moral maxims or pure knowledge--that perfect
+bloom of spiritual health which may be as much the result of a mother's
+watchful care and training as the physical health of the body. It is for
+you to train your boy in that knightly attitude of soul, that reverence
+for womanhood, which is to men as "fountains of sweet water" in the
+bitter sea of life; that chivalrous respect for the weak and the
+unprotected which, next to faith in God, will be the best guard to all
+the finer issues of his character. Truth of truth are the golden words
+of Ruskin to young men:
+
+     "Whomsoever else you deceive, whomsoever else you injure,
+     whomsoever else you leave unaided, you must not deceive, nor
+     injure, nor leave unaided according to your power any woman
+     whatever, of whatever rank. Believe me, every virtue of the highest
+     phase of manly character begins and ends in this, in truth and
+     modesty before the face of all maidens, in truth and reverence or
+     truth and pity to all womanhood."
+
+Can we doubt or question this, we who worship Him who came to reveal the
+true man quite as much as to reveal the only true God--the real manhood
+beneath the false, perishable man with which it is so often overlaid by
+the influence of society and the world? Look at His attitude towards
+women, ay, even Eastern women, who had not been ennobled by centuries of
+Christian freedom and recognized equality of the sexes, but who, on the
+contrary, belonged to a nation tainted to some degree with that Eastern
+contempt for women which made a Hindu answer the question of the
+Englishman, perplexed by the multiplied of Indian gods and sects, "Is
+there _no_ point of belief in which you all unite?" "Oh, yes," the
+Pundit replied, "we all believe in the sanctity of cows and the
+depravity of women!"
+
+These Eastern women, therefore, had much to enslave and lower them; but
+see how instantly they rose to the touch of the true Man, just as they
+will rise, the women of to-day, to the touch of the true manhood of your
+sons, if you will train them to be to us such men as Jesus Christ was.
+See how He made women His friends, and deigned to accept their ministry
+to His human needs. Many severe rebukes are recorded from His lips to
+men, but not one to a woman. It was a woman, ay, even a degraded woman,
+who by her kisses and her tears smote the Rock of Ages and the water of
+life flowed forth for the world, who won for the world the words: "He
+who hath been forgiven much loveth much," and the burden of guilt is
+changed into the burden of Love. It was to a woman He first gave the
+revelation of life, that He first revealed Himself as the Water of Life,
+and first uttered the words, "I am the Resurrection and the Life." It
+was women who remained faithful when all forsook Him and fled. It was a
+woman who was the last to whom He spoke on the cross, to a woman that
+the first words were spoken of His risen life. It was a woman He made
+His first messenger of the risen life to the world. Nothing in the life
+of the true Man on earth stands out in more marked features than, if I
+may venture to use the words, His faith in women, as if to stamp it
+forever as an attribute of all true manhood, that without which a man
+cannot be a man.
+
+Now, side by side with this attitude of the true Man, this perfect
+loyalty to all womanhood as such, ay, even degraded womanhood, place the
+present debased attitude of men, even of some Christian men, which we
+are looking to you mothers of boys to change _in toto_. Is not a
+powerful writer in the _Westminster Review_ right when he says, "There
+is not found a chivalrous respect for womanhood as such. That a woman
+has fallen is not the trumpet call to every noble and wise-hearted man
+to raise her up again as speedily as may be; rather it is the signal to
+deepen her degradation and to doom her to moral death." Is it not a
+received code even among Americans as well as Englishmen that if a woman
+knows how to respect and protect herself men are to respect her--it is
+only a scoundrel that will dare to say an insulting word to her? But if
+she is a bit fast and giddy, if she has little or no respect for
+herself, if her foolish feet have slipped ever so little, then she is
+fair game. "She gave him encouragement; what else could she expect? It
+was her own fault." To expect that any man with an ounce of true manhood
+in him would at once say, "That young girl does not in the least realize
+the danger she is in, and I must get between her and the edge of the
+precipice, and see that she comes to no harm."--this would be to expect
+the wildly impossible. Have we not made up our mind that the beast and
+not the Christ is our master here; and does not every beast spring at
+once on a fallen prey? It is human nature, and you will never get men
+to think and act any differently. As to faith in man as such, not only
+in the church-going man, but in the rough-spoken fisherman, the
+contemned publican, the infidel Samaritan, faith in his power of
+recognizing and rising to the truth, the higher standard placed before
+him, _that_ I sometimes think lies buried in that Eastern garden--in the
+Sepulchre "wherein never man yet lay."[22] And yet it is the man as
+revealed in Jesus Christ, not the man as fashioned by the world, with
+its low traditions and low public opinion, that is true to human nature.
+In moments of excitement or danger he reverts to this true nature, which
+has been so warped and overlaid by the world. In the great mass meetings
+which I held for the purpose of pleading with men to come over on my
+side and help me in the work of saving women from the awful doom to
+which men sentence them, I used to bring this home by saying to them:
+"If a fire were to break out in this vast hall, who would be the first
+person that you would try to save? It would be me because I am a woman";
+and the roar of assent that burst forth from all parts of the building
+showed that I had struck home. I used to bring before them--and the
+sooner you bring it before your boys the better--the conduct of the men
+on the ill-fated _Birkenhead_--ah! dear men, voiceless and nameless,
+and lost in that "vast and wandering grave" into which they sank, what
+have they not done to raise the tone of England? You will possibly
+remember that the _Birkenhead_, with a troop of our soldiers on board,
+struck and foundered not far from land. The women and children were at
+once crowded into the boats, and it was only when, in a few minutes, the
+ship began to settle that the cry was heard among the men, "To the
+boats! to the boats! every man for himself!" But the officer in command
+stood up and shouted, "What! and swamp the women and children? Die
+rather!" And those men did die. Drawn up in military array, without
+moving a muscle, those men sank into the bitter waters of death, that
+the women and children might live.[23] That I contend is man's true
+nature, to love the woman, and, if needs be, to give himself for her.
+
+It is, therefore, to recognize and strengthen this true nature of man,
+to get it deeper into him, and not to get it out of him, as I cannot but
+feel we have hitherto more or less done, to train your boys in this
+perfect loyalty to all womanhood as such; and to send forth men into
+the world to "die rather" than save themselves at the cost of a woman,
+to "die rather" than drive a woman down into those deep waters of
+degradation and death, that we look to the mothers of the future as the
+sole hope of the world. I say again you have got to see that they learn
+in relation to their own sisters what they have to practise towards all
+women, however humble, ay, and however degraded, in their future life.
+As the great English oaks are built up of tiny cells, so this true
+manliness must be built up by a mother's watchful use of a thousand
+small daily incidents--by what Wordsworth rightly calls the best part of
+a good man's life--
+
+    "His little daily, unremembered acts
+      Of kindness and of love."
+
+In themselves they seem almost too trivial to mention:--the easy chair
+instinctively given up on the sister's entrance; the door opened for any
+woman passing out; the cap removed in the presence of ladies, even
+though those ladies are his own relatives; the deck-chair taken out by
+the seaside to make the mother comfortable; the favorite cricket-match
+given up if an expedition has been fixed in which his services are
+needed; the window raised and the door shut on leaving a
+railway-carriage in which women are travelling, so as not to expose them
+to draught; and, when men-servants are not kept, the sister's bicycle
+cleaned or the skates polished--all those "little daily, unremembered
+acts" of knightly service which the mere presence of a woman ought to
+inspire in a man.
+
+I am well aware that here again, as Mr. Philip Hamerton points out, the
+boarding-school presents a difficulty. As he says, "The worst of the
+distant school system is that it deprives the home residence that
+remains of all beneficial discipline; for the boys are guests during the
+holidays, and the great business is to amuse them."[24]
+
+But surely this needs only to be mentioned to be remedied. You do not
+make your boys happier during their holidays by making them selfish:
+what is really a novelty to a schoolboy, fresh from the association with
+boys only, is to have sisters to look after and a mother to depend upon
+him for all sorts of little services. A joyous exclamation on your part,
+"Oh, what a comfort it is to have a boy in the house to do things for
+one!" will make him swell with manly pride; and should he show the least
+tendency to put upon his sisters and make them fetch and carry for him,
+as they are only too willing to do, you can easily put a stop to that by
+a few caustic remarks that you don't want savages in your house; and a
+pointed use of that delightful story in one of the White Cross
+papers,[25] of the Zulu chief to whom the Government sent a propitiatory
+present of wagons and wheelbarrows, thinking that it would be sure to
+please him. But he gazed on them with fine scorn, exclaiming: "What's
+the use of those things for carrying our burdens when we have plenty of
+women!" Or you can use that equally good story, told by Sir John Lubbock
+at a sectional meeting of the British Association for the Promotion of
+Science, of a remote tribe of savages who had never seen a bullock, and
+when the white man arrived with his bullock wagons, after much perplexed
+discussion, they came to the conclusion that, as they were used for
+heavy loads, they must be the white man's wives!
+
+A little wholesome, if incisive, raillery on your part will quickly
+extinguish any tendency to make willing slaves of his sisters. If,
+however, you prefer to indulge your foolish fondness for him, that
+subtle self-indulgence which makes it easier for you to sacrifice
+yourself and his sisters to him rather than discipline him to work out
+his true nature, remember you gratify yourself at his most cruel cost.
+You produce the boy whose youth is marked by a tacit contempt for girls
+and whose manhood will be disfigured by a light estimation of the beauty
+and sanctity of womanhood.
+
+I know well I shall be told that all this is quite out of date; that
+modern girls are so independent that they stand in no need of brothers,
+but like to place themselves on a level with them and share as good
+comrades in all their rough-and-tumble games. Let us be of good cheer.
+Sex is a very ancient institution, the slow evolution of hundreds of
+centuries, and is in no danger of being obliterated by the fashion of a
+day. Take the most advanced "new woman"; yes, concealed under that
+virile shirt-front, unchoked by that manly necktie and turned-up collar,
+lurking beneath that masculine billy-cock; nay, hidden somewhere deeper
+down than the pockets of even those male knickerbockers, you will find
+the involuntary pleasurable thrill at a strong man's chivalrous
+attention, the delicious sense of a man's care and protection, which
+centuries and centuries of physical weakness have woven into the very
+tissues of her being, in however loud and strident a voice she may deny
+it. Whatever changes in the position of women may take place, the basic
+fact remains, and will always remain, the man is stronger than the
+woman, and his strength is given him to serve the weaker; and you have
+got to get your girls to be your fellow-helpers in developing all that
+is best and most chivalrous in their brothers, and not so to run riot in
+their independence as to substitute a boyish camaraderie for the
+exquisite relations of the true man to the true woman.
+
+There rises up now before me a boy, one of those delightful English boys
+overflowing with pluck and spirits. His mother had come to one of my
+meetings, and, like so many other mothers, I am thankful to say, had
+received a lifelong impression from what I said with regard to the
+training of boys, and she resolved, there and then, to act upon my
+advice with her own boys. She told me some two years after, that this
+boy had come in late one afternoon and explained to her that a little
+girl had asked him to direct her to rather an out-of-the-way house. "I
+thought she might ask that question of some one who would tell her
+wrong, or that she might come to some harm, so I thought I had better go
+with her and see her safe to the house." "But what of the cricket-match
+that you wanted so to see?" his mother asked. "Oh, I had to give that
+up. There wasn't time for both."
+
+On another occasion, when a Christmas-tree was being prepared in the
+schoolroom for some choristers, as he and his mother left at dusk a
+chorister tried to force himself past her and gain a private view; and
+when she refused him admittance, not recognizing who she was, called her
+a very disrespectful name. Instantly the boy flew at him like a little
+tiger, "How dare you speak to my mother like that!" "I didn't see it was
+your mother," the chorister pleaded, trying to ward off the blows. "But
+you saw it was a woman, and somebody's mother, and you dare to speak to
+her like that!" And such a storm of fisticuffs fell on every part of
+that hulking young chorister's person as forced him at last to cry for
+mercy and promise that he would never do so again. That boy's master
+wrote to his mother towards the end of his school-time--he was a
+Bluecoat boy--and said that he positively dreaded his leaving, as his
+influence on the side of everything good, and pure, and high was quite
+that of a master.
+
+And now I come to the question of religious teaching, which you may be
+surprised that I have not put first of all. First of all, in one sense,
+I do put it. There can be no greater safeguard to purity of life than
+vital religion. I do not go so far as some evangelical mothers who have
+told me that nothing less than the conversion of their boys would be of
+the least avail to keep them morally straight; on the contrary, I have
+known men who have never come under any strong religious influence, but
+have grown up sceptical scientific men, yet who have led lives as pure
+as any woman's. Common manhood, with the "Light that lighteth every man
+that cometh into the world"; common love for mother and sister, which
+for their sakes maketh it impossible to wrong their womanhood, even when
+fallen into the dust; common self-respect, which is so strong in some
+men, and makes them shrink from anything in the nature of mud, is often
+sufficient to accomplish this end. But still, when all is said, if in
+answer to your mother's prayers you can implant in your boy a sense of
+the Divine Presence and the cry of the quickened conscience, "How can I
+do this great sin and wickedness against God?" you have doubtless given
+him the best panoply against the fiery darts of temptation. Only I would
+again warn you that there must be no forcing of the religious emotions,
+no effort to gather the fruits of the spirit before the root, in the
+shape of the great cardinal virtues everywhere presupposed in Christian
+ethics, has been nourished, and strengthened, and watered into strong,
+healthy growth. We have to bear in mind our Lord's words, which it seems
+to me religious parents sometimes forget, that there is an order of
+growth in spiritual things as in natural--first the blade, then the ear,
+and then the full corn in the ear; and we are not to try to force the
+full corn in the ear before the stalk and the blade have grown. For the
+want of laying to heart these words of the great Teacher, I have known
+much pulpy, emotional religion engrafted on young souls--admirably
+adapted to exhaust the soil, but with the smallest possible bearing upon
+right conduct; a religion perfectly at its ease with much scamping of
+lessons and hard work in general; indulgent of occasional cribbing, and
+of skilful manipulation of awkward truth, of betting and small
+extravagances; and innocent of all sense of dishonesty in allowing a
+struggling parent to pay large sums for education while the school-time
+so purchased, often at the cost of home comforts and pleasant outings,
+is squandered in idleness.
+
+What a boy really needs, and, indeed, all immature things--for I found
+it equally true of immature men--is a simple, practical religion, based
+more on the facts of life and conscience than on doctrines and dogmas.
+To know God as his Father; to know that he has a Redeemer who laid down
+His life to save him from sin and who takes account of his smallest and
+most broken effort to do what is right; to realize that it is only so
+far as he is like Christ and in Christ that he can be really a man and
+work out what is highest in him; to know that he has been baptized into
+a Divine Society, binding him to fight against all wrong, both within
+and in the world without; above all, to know that there is a supreme
+spiritual Power within him and about him to enable him to do right, and
+that in the line of duty "I can't" is a lie in the lips that repeat, "I
+believe in the Holy Ghost"; this is as much as his young soul can
+assimilate, not as mere religious phrases, but as realities to live by.
+
+    "So nigh to glory is our dust,
+      So nigh to God is man,
+    When duty whispers low 'Thou must,'
+      The soul replies, 'I can.'"
+
+But see that beneath all this he has the special Christian teaching with
+regard to the sanctity of the body thoroughly instilled into him. If the
+Incarnation means anything, it means not the salvation and
+sanctification of a ghost, but the salvation and consecration of the
+whole man, of his body as well as his soul. True, the animal body to a
+spiritual being must always be a "body of humiliation," but nothing can
+be more unfortunate and misleading than the epithet in the Authorized
+Version of "vile" as a translation of the Greek word used by St. Paul.
+On the contrary, we are taught that even this mortal body is a temple of
+the Holy Ghost.
+
+In teaching this there can be no difficulty; you can make use of a
+child's natural reverence for a church. You can say, "What would you
+think if you heard of some loose lads breaking into a church, and just
+for the fun of the thing strewing the aisles with cinder dust and all
+sorts of loose rubbish; tearing out the pages of Bibles and hymn-books
+to light their pipes, and getting drunk out of the chalice? You would be
+honestly shocked at such profanity. Nay, even in the dire exigencies of
+war we do not think better of the Germans for having stabled their
+horses in one of the French churches and left their broken beer-bottles
+on the high altar and the refuse of a stable strewn up and down the
+nave. Yet a church is, after all, only a poor earthly building, built by
+human hands. But there is one temple which God has built for Himself,
+the temple of man's body; and of that the terrible words are written,
+and ever fulfilled, "If any man defile that temple, him will God
+destroy." God's great gift of speech is not to be defiled by dirty talk,
+by profane language, by lies, or evil speaking. The organs which are
+given us for its sustenance are not to be denied by gluttony and
+piggishness, either in food or drink. The boy is not to use any part of
+his body in defiling ways which he would be ashamed for his own mother
+to know of. To do so is not only to defile, but--with the double meaning
+of the Greek word, which we cannot render into English--to destroy; to
+weaken his brain-power, which he wants for his work in life, to weaken
+his nervous system, lessening his strength thereby and rendering him
+less able to excel in athletics, and often, if carried to excess, in
+after-life bringing results which are the very embodiment of the
+terrible words, "Him will God destroy." The full force and bearing of
+this teaching he may not apprehend. I have already said that with a
+young boy the lower appeal never to do anything that is low and dirty
+and blackguardly will have far more practical weight, and will also
+avoid laying undue stress on the religious emotions. But I am quite sure
+that the Christian teaching of the sanctity of the body must be laid
+deep and strong with all the force of early impression in a boy's inmost
+being, in order that it may lie ready for future use when Nature has
+developed those instincts of manhood which will teach him its full
+significance.
+
+If you are an Episcopalian, you will of course find the time of your
+boy's confirmation simply invaluable as one of those turning-points
+which will enable you to speak, or possibly write, more unreservedly
+than is possible on more ordinary occasions. I would earnestly ask you
+to give him a little White Cross confirmation paper called _Purity the
+Guard of Manhood_, a paper which an Eton master pronounced the best
+thing he had met with of the kind, and which has been widely used. Do
+not rest content with merely giving the paper in a perfunctory way, but
+follow it up with a few living, earnest words of your own.
+
+Of course I should do a wrong to your womanly instincts if I were to
+think it necessary to say that the inculcation of purity must be always
+in a mother's heart, but only on her lips on some marked occasions, such
+as the first going to school, the last day of the holidays, or when your
+boy himself gives the occasion by some question he may ask you, but
+above all when he reaches a critical age, when a few words from your own
+lips will be worth all the printed pages in the world. Only ever and
+always make it an essential element of his idea of manliness to be pure,
+and do not forget constantly to couple the words "brave and pure," or
+"manly and pure," or "pure and high character," in his hearing; that he
+may be endued, not with that pale, emasculate thing that passes muster
+for purity nowadays, which always seems to me chiefly conscious of its
+own indecency, full of the old nervous "touch not, taste not, handle
+not" spirit, bandaged up with this restriction and that lest it fall to
+pieces, and when it comes to saving another from defilement in body and
+soul shuffling uneasily into a pair of lavender kid-gloves and muttering
+something about its being "such a very delicate subject"--nay, not
+this, but that militant sun-clad power which Milton dreamed of, rushing
+down like a sword of God to smite everything low, and base and impure; a
+purity as of mountain water or living fire, whose very nature it is, not
+only to be pure itself, but to destroy impurity in others.
+
+
+V
+
+And now let me throw together two or three practical suggestions, which
+will probably be superfluous to the most experienced mothers, but may be
+useful to younger and more inexperienced parents.
+
+In the first place, I think there are few of the heads of the medical
+profession who would not agree with me that our English dietary is too
+stimulating and too abundant. Sir Andrew Clark certainly held that a
+large proportion of our diseases spring from over-eating and
+over-drinking. I don't suppose that for a boy it so much matters, as he
+is eating for "edification" as well as for sustenance, for the building
+up of his walls as well as for the nutrition of his existing frame. But
+"the boy is father to the man," and I would ask you not to accustom your
+boys to a rich dietary, as the habit once formed will be prolonged into
+early manhood, and undoubtedly such stimulating diet does greatly
+increase the temptations with which young men have to contend. It is
+perfectly unnecessary for the developing of strength and stature, as is
+shown by the splendid Scotchmen who yearly carry off some of our highest
+university distinctions and prizes--many of them farmer lads who have
+scarcely tasted meat in their boyhood, but have been brought up on the
+simple farinaceous food of the country. There was much force and meaning
+in the quaint congratulatory telegram sent by a friend to a Cambridge
+Senior Wrangler hailing from Scotland, "Three cheers for the parritge!"
+And that curious and most impressive fact which Mr. Bayard, the late
+American Ambassador, hunted up for our edification from various
+dictionaries of biography--the fact, namely, that a large proportion of
+our most eminent men spring from the homes of the poorer clergy, where
+certainly sumptuous fare and much meat do not obtain, is a proof that
+abstemious living, while forming a valuable discipline for the soul,
+does not injure but promotes the health of the body and the strength of
+the brain. Our having given up the religious uses of fasting I often
+think is a loss to young men; and it might, therefore, be as well if we
+were to imitate our "Corybantic" brethren, the Salvationists, and
+institute a week of self-denial, leaving the children to work out an
+economical dietary, with due care on our part that it should be fairly
+nutritious, and allowing them to give what they have saved from the
+ordinary household expenses to any cause in which they may be
+interested. It would give them a wholesome lesson in self-denial and
+cheap living; both lessons much needed in these luxurious days. But
+whether this suggestion finds favor or not, we have always to bear in
+mind that "plain living" is the necessary companion of "high
+thinking"--the lowly earth-born twin who waits upon her heavenly sister.
+
+On the vexed question of the use of alcohol there was but one point on
+which there was a consensus of opinion in the discussion by our leading
+medical men, which appeared some years ago in the pages of the
+_Contemporary Review_. The point upon which they were all agreed was
+that alcohol is injurious to children, and if the boy has been
+accustomed from his early youth to do without it, and, as he grows up,
+remains a total abstainer, there is no question that his abstinence will
+prove a great safeguard; though I cannot go as far as some of my
+abstaining friends, who seem to regard the use of alcohol as the root of
+what must, in the nature of things, be one of the strongest primal
+passions of human nature, and therefore liable to abuse, whether men are
+total abstainers or not. Anyhow, though a lad can be trained to strict
+moderation, abstinence in both alcohol and tobacco must after a time
+come of the lad's own free will; the last thing that answers is to
+multiply and enforce restrictions; the rebound is inevitable and often
+fatal. But I do say that where there is a great pinching in the home in
+order to afford the educational advantages of school and university, it
+does show some radical defect in the training of our boys that they
+should indulge in such expensive habits, especially the expensive and
+wholly unnecessary habit of smoking, when the dear mother and young
+sisters are doing without many a little home comfort in order to meet
+the expense of the young rascal's education. One rich old grandmother
+whom I met abroad promised each of her grandsons fifty pounds if they
+would give up smoking; and it was marvellous how that stern necessity of
+doing as other young men do disappeared like their own tobacco smoke
+before the promise of that fifty pounds for their own pockets! They were
+all able to claim it one after the other. If boys were not trained by
+their mothers to be systematically selfish, might not the home-claims in
+the heart be as strong as those fifty pounds in the pocket?
+
+Secondly, with regard to betting and gambling, which may be classed with
+drinking, as the fruitful parent of bad company, and a _descensus ad
+infernum_:--do you not think a boy may be best guarded against a habit
+of betting, which is so likely to lead on to gambling, by taking the
+same line as a boy of my acquaintance took with his mother when she was
+warning him against it: "Well, mother, you see, it always does seem so
+mean to me to get a fellow's money from him without giving him anything
+in return; it always does seem so like prigging, and some of our fellows
+are awfully hard up, and can't afford to lose a penny." Mr. Gladstone
+was evidently of the same opinion when he once said to his private
+secretary, Sir Edward Hamilton, that he "regarded gambling as nothing
+short of damnable. What can be the fun of winning other people's money?"
+This strikes me as a way of putting it which would appeal most forcibly
+to a boy; and if, in addition, we were to point out to him that, like
+all shady things, it has a tendency to grow and sharpen the man into a
+sharper and develop the blood-sucking apparatus of a leech, besides
+bringing wretchedness and misery on others, he might be led to resist
+the first beginnings of a betting habit which may lead on to gambling in
+after years.
+
+And here I would say that the absolute absence of any training given to
+a boy in the right use and value of money, which has obtained till
+lately in our English schools, is surely suicidal and must lend itself
+to every form of abuse. I do not know whether it is the same with you,
+but many of our boys know money only in the form of pocket-money, when
+it becomes to him a metal token mostly signifying so much "tuck";
+becoming, as he grows older, more and more deleterious "tuck" in the
+shape of billiards, betting, etc., and ending in a general going "on
+tick," which is worse still. But in this matter we are improving. I
+think most sensible parents nowadays place a small sum at their bank to
+the boy's account, with a check-book, making him responsible at first
+for small articles of clothing, neckties, shirt-collars, etc, and as
+soon as he shows himself trustworthy, for all his expenses except
+school bills. The boy is expected to keep accounts, get nothing without
+first asking the price, and to bring his receipted bills at the end of
+the term to his father, and see that they tally with his foils; and,
+above all, always to pay in ready money--unpaid bills being contemplated
+in the bald light of shop-lifting. To this I would add, if possible, the
+habit of giving the Jewish tenth, so as to make giving a steady
+principle, and not a hap-hazard impulse.
+
+Thirdly, it is a vital point to give your boys interesting pursuits.
+There is great force in the rough old saying, "Never give the devil an
+empty chair to sit down upon, and you won't be much troubled with his
+company." Vice is constantly only idleness which has turned
+bad,--idleness being emphatically a thing that will not keep, but turns
+rotten. It is not the great industrial centres of our population that
+are chiefly ravaged by vice; it is the fashionable watering-places, the
+fashionable quarters of large towns, where idle men congregate, in which
+it is a "pestilence that walketh in darkness," and slays its thousands
+of young girls. "Empty by filling," has always been a favorite motto of
+mine. How many a young man has been driven to betting, drinking, and the
+race-course from the want of something of interest to fill his
+unoccupied hours, because more wholesome tastes have never been
+developed in him! Of course, tastes must be to a certain degree inborn,
+but I am quite sure that many a taste perishes, like a frost-bitten bud,
+full of the promise of blossom and fruit, because it has never been
+given the opportunity to develop.
+
+Take a boy's innate love of collecting. Could you not develop it by the
+offer of a little prize for the best collection of dried flowers, of
+butterflies or insects, of birds' eggs, even, in some cases, of
+geological specimens, but, in any case, with the scientific and common
+names attached; so forming a healthy taste for natural history, which
+may be a source of perpetual interest and profit in after-life? Do not
+let your dislike of destroying life interfere; reverence for life can be
+as well, nay, better taught by insisting that only the necessary
+specimens should be given of each species, only one or two eggs taken
+from the nest, and the nest itself disturbed as little as possible.
+Chemistry and electricity also appeal to a boy's love of experimentizing
+and of making electrical contrivances, easily constructed of the
+commonest materials. As to hand-work, the lack of which in ill-health
+has made so many a man a torment both to himself and others, there ought
+to be no difficulty with regard to that. Carpentering, wood-carving,
+repousse-work in metal, bent-iron work, mosaic work, any of these,
+except possibly the last, may be set on foot with very little expense,
+besides drawing, modelling, etc. Where there are sufficient means it
+would be a good thing if boys were taught, as far as may be, how things
+are made and the amount of toil that goes into the simplest article. I
+remember giving a small printing-press to a boy of ours--an excellent
+gift, by the by, for a lad, and it can be had for five or six
+shillings--and his coming to me soon after with a match-box in his hand,
+exclaiming with wonderment, "Why, auntie, there are six different kinds
+of type on this match-box!" If they could learn how to build, how
+rafters and joists are put in, and construct as much as a miniature
+summer-house in the garden, how useful this being able to turn their
+hands to anything might prove to them in their after-life. And with what
+added respect they would look upon all labor if they had never looked
+upon it as the part of a "gentleman" to stand aloof from it.
+
+Lastly, but not least, I would plead most earnestly for the frequent
+home-letter, should your boy be sent to a boarding-school. If you would
+have him resist the temptations of school life, keep the home as close
+to his heart and as present to his mind as you can. Make it your first
+and paramount duty to write every day if you can, if not every other
+day, at least twice a week.
+
+Do not misunderstand me here. God knows I do not go in for the devoted
+mother who thinks of nothing but her boys and to whom the whole world
+besides is nothing but an empty flourish of the pen about their names.
+Such mothers are like Chinese teacups, with no perspective and
+everything out of proportion; where the Mandarin is as big as the
+Pagoda, and suffers from a pathetic inability to get in at his own door.
+You must see things in moral perspective in order to train character on
+large and noble lines. And it is from the rough quarry of the outside
+world, with its suffering and sin, that you must fetch the most precious
+stones for the building up of true manhood or womanhood. The sooner
+children are taught that their small concerns must be subordinated at
+times to the needs of the sick, the poor, and the suffering, the better
+for them. For a mother, therefore, to undertake _some_ outside work may
+and will prove the best element in their education, enabling them in
+their turn to live in relation with the world in which God has placed
+them and do their part in the service of humanity.
+
+All that I mean is, do not so crowd your life with outside work or
+social engagements as to have no time to spare for this daily or at
+least bi-weekly letter to the boys at school. Bear in mind that the most
+important work you can do for the world is the formation of noble
+character, building it up stone by stone as you alone can do. Do not be
+too busy to make yourself your boy's friend and throw yourself heartily
+into all that interests him. I have known philanthropic mothers to whom
+cricket was nothing but an unmeaning scurrying backwards and forwards,
+and who scarcely knew the stern of a boat from its bows!
+
+And what a liberal education a mother's home-letters to her boys at
+school might be made! The stirring incident in the newspapers, the fine
+passage in the book, a verse or two of a noble poem, as well as all the
+loving thought and prayer that is for ever flying like homing birds to
+the dear absent lads, and the inculcation of all things lovely and pure
+and manly, brightened by home jokes and the health of the last cherished
+pet--all these things might go to make up the home letters. Above all,
+what an opportunity it would give for pleading the cause of the little
+chaps who, by some strange insanity working in the brain of the British
+parent, are sent into the rough world of a large school when they are
+fitter for the nursery, and whom you might appeal to your boys to look
+after and protect, so far as they are able; and not only these, but to
+side with every boy who is being bullied for acting up to his conscience
+or because he has not the pluck to stand up for himself.
+
+In conclusion, I would earnestly ask you to believe in your own power
+when united to the knowledge which is necessary to direct it. "A man is
+what a woman makes him," says the old saw. Look back upon the men you
+have known who have been touched to finest issues, and you will find,
+with few exceptions, that they are the shaping of a noble woman's
+hands--a noble mother, a noble wife, a noble sister. Doubt not, but
+earnestly believe that with those wonderful shaping hands of yours you
+can mould that boy of yours into the manhood of Sir Galahad, "whose
+strength was as the strength of ten because his heart was pure"; that
+you can send him forth into the world like King Arthur, of whom our own
+poet, Spenser, says, that the poorest, the most unprotected girl could
+feel that
+
+    "All the while he by his side her bore
+    She was as safe as in a sanctuary."
+
+Nay, may I not go further still and say that by the grace of God you can
+send him forth "made of a woman" in the image of the strong and tender
+Manhood of Jesus Christ, to Whom even the poor lost girls out of the
+street could come and know that here was a Man who would not drag them
+down, but lift them up; believing in Whom, clinging to Whom, trusting in
+Whom, they grew no longer lost and degraded, but splendid saints of the
+Christian Church.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 11: _Morality in Public Schools_, by Dr. Butler, Master of
+Trinity College, Cambridge, and late Head-Master of Harrow.]
+
+[Footnote 12: _The Preservation of Health_, by Clement Dukes, M.D.,
+M.R.C.S., Howard Medallist, Statistical Society of London, p. 150.]
+
+[Footnote 13: _Ibid._, p. 157.]
+
+[Footnote 14: _A Confidential Talk with the Boys of America_, by J.M.
+Dick. Fleming H. Revell Co.]
+
+[Footnote 15: See Appendix.]
+
+[Footnote 16: See _Parents' Review_, No. 5, July, 1895, p. 351.]
+
+[Footnote 17: have quoted here from _The Ascent of Man_ by Professor
+Drummond, pp. 292, 293; but any standard work on botany will give you
+the method of the fertilization of plants in greater detail.]
+
+[Footnote 18: _Ibid._, p. 310.]
+
+[Footnote 19: Erroneously called neuter, as in reality it is an
+imperfectly developed female, and is only capable of producing males.]
+
+[Footnote 20: I owe my first clear apprehension of the gradual evolution
+of the preservative and altruistic elements in nature, arising from the
+struggle for existence, to a sermon of Dr. Abbott's called _The
+Manifestation of the Son of God_, now, I fear, out of print. Of course
+Darwin recognized these factors as a necessary complement to the
+survival of the fittest, else had there been no fittest to survive; but
+the exigencies of proving his theory of the origin of species
+necessitated his dwelling on the destructive and weeding-out elements of
+Nature--"Nature red in tooth and claw," rather than the equally
+pervasive Nature of the brooding wing and the flowing breast. Had not
+Professor Drummond unfortunately mixed it up with a good deal of
+extraneous sentiment, his main thesis would scarcely have been
+impugned.]
+
+[Footnote 21: In case this method of teaching should seem to some
+mothers too difficult, I intend to embody it in a simple "Mother's Talk
+on Life and Birth," which a mother can read with her boys.]
+
+[Footnote 22: See a White Cross paper of mine called _My Little Sister_.
+Wells Gardner, Darton and Co., London.]
+
+[Footnote 23: Twice since the wreck of the _Birkenhead_ has the same
+true manhood been evinced on the high seas in the face of almost certain
+death--once in the wreck of the troopship, the _Warren Hastings_, and
+again by the crew and the civilian passengers of the _Stella_. Perfect
+order was maintained, and though, ultimately all the men were saved, not
+a man stirred hand or foot to save himself till the women and children
+had first been safely got on shore.]
+
+[Footnote 24: _French and English_, by Philip Hamerton, p. 44.]
+
+[Footnote 25: _The British Zulu_. Wells Gardner, Darton and Co.,
+London.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+EARLY MANHOOD
+
+
+If, in the words of the great educator I have already quoted, the chief
+moral teaching and moral trend of the character must be given in the
+schoolboy days, yet early manhood presents its own fruitful field for
+the influence of a mother on the side of whatsoever things are pure and
+lovely. The methods of exerting this influence must change as your son
+grows from a boy into a man; the inevitable reticence, the exquisite
+reserve of sex, must interfere with the old boyish confidences and with
+your own freedom of speech. Other barriers, too, will most likely spring
+up as your son goes forth into the world and mixes freely with other
+young men of his own standing. Whether it be at college, or in the army,
+or in business, he will inevitably be influenced by the views of the men
+he associates with, which he will enlarge into the opinion of the world
+in general, and will probably come home, if not to contradict his
+mother, at least to patronize her and go his own way, smiling at her
+with an air of manly superiority and with a lofty consciousness that he
+knows a thing or two which lie beyond a woman's ken. Probably enough he
+takes up with views on religion, or politics, or social questions which
+are emphatically not yours, and which make you feel left very far
+behind, instead of the old familiar "walking together" which was so
+sweet. Worse still, he may evince for a time a cynical indifference to
+all great questions, and all your teaching may seem to be lost in a
+desert flat. The days of the latch-key and the independent life have
+come, and you often seem to stand outside the walls which once admitted
+you into their dearest recesses, left with but little clue as to what is
+going on within.
+
+But have patience. Early teaching and influence, though it may pass for
+a time into abeyance, is the one thing that leaves an indelible impress
+which will in the end make itself felt, only waiting for those eternal
+springs which well up sooner or later in every life to burst into upward
+growth; it may be a pure attachment, it may be a great sorrow, it may be
+a sickness almost unto death, it may be some awakening to spiritual
+realities. I often think of that pathetic yet joyful resurrection cry,
+"This is our God, we have waited for Him"--waited for Him, possibly
+through such long years of disappointment and heart hunger--only to cry
+at the last, "This is our God, we have waited for Him, and He has saved
+us."
+
+But it is not all waiting. If with early manhood the "old order" has to
+give place to new, and old methods and instruments have to be laid
+aside as no longer fitted for their task, God puts into the hands of the
+mother new instruments, new methods of appeal, which in some ways are
+more powerful than the old. In early manhood she can appeal to the
+thought of the future wife. I believe that this appeal is one of the
+strongest that you can bring to bear upon young men.
+
+I once had to make it myself under circumstances of unparalleled
+difficulty; and I was struck with the profound response that it evoked.
+It was on the occasion of the inaugural White Cross address to the
+students of the Edinburgh University, now one of the first medical
+schools in the world. The date of the address had been fixed, the hall
+taken, when an unforeseen difficulty arose. Eminent man after eminent
+man was asked to give the address, but all with one consent began to
+make excuse. Spirit and flesh quailed before so difficult and rowdy an
+audience on so difficult and perilous a subject. At last the professor
+who was chiefly interested implored me to give the address myself, or
+the whole thing would go by default. Under these circumstances I had no
+choice but to do so. But as I sat in the committee room while the order
+of the meeting was being arranged, and heard my audience shouting,
+singing, crowing like cocks, whistling like parrots, caterwauling like
+cats, and keeping up a continuous uproar, I thought to myself, "I have
+got to go into that, and control it somehow so as to be heard"; I
+confess I did feel wrecked upon God. Professor Maclagan, who took the
+chair, agreed that a prayer was impossible, a hymn was equally out of
+the question. The only thing was to push me at once to the front; and
+almost immediately after a few very brief words from the distinguished
+chairman I found myself face to face with an audience that evidently
+meant mischief. By some instinct I told them at once about James Hinton,
+whom, of course, they knew by name as the first aurist of his day; how,
+with all that this life could give him, he had died of a broken heart, a
+heart broken over the lost and degraded womanhood of England, the hosts
+of young girls slain in body and soul whom he met with at night in our
+terrible streets. This seemed to strike and sober them, that a man
+should actually die over a thing which to all of them was so familiar
+and to many had been only the subject of a coarse jest. Fortunately,
+there is a stage of nervous terror which rounds again on desperate
+courage, and having once got hold of my audience, I determined to use
+the occasion to the uttermost and venture on the most perilous ground.
+In the course of my address I asked them to take notice of a great
+silent change that was taking place all round them in the position of
+women, the full significance of which they might not have grasped.
+Everywhere women were leaving the seclusion of their homes and were
+quietly coming forward and taking their place by their side in the great
+work of the world. I thanked them for the generous welcome that they
+had accorded them. But had they seized the full meaning, the ulterior
+bearings of this changed attitude in women, and the wider knowledge of
+the world that it brought with it? Not so long ago it was an understood
+thing that women should know nothing of the darker side of life; and
+there was nothing dishonorable in a man keeping the woman he loved in
+ignorance of the darker side of his own past, if such there were. But in
+the greater knowledge that has come to women, and the anguish some of
+them feel over the misery and degradation of their lost sisters, can
+this attitude any longer be maintained without conscious deception?
+"What would you say," I asked, "if the woman you loved with the whole
+strength of your soul passed herself off as an undamaged article upon
+you, and let you worship her as the very embodiment of all that is white
+and pure, when something unspeakably sad and sinful had happened in her
+past life? You know you would be half mad at the wrong done to you if
+after marriage you found it out. And what are you going to do, I ask
+some of you who are so careless as to the life you lead, are _you_ going
+to pass yourself off as an undamaged article on the woman who loves and
+worships you, and who gives herself so unreservedly to you that she
+loses her very name and takes yours? Is it fair, is it honorable, is it
+even manly? No, I see by your faces you are saying, 'I don't think it
+is, I should have to confess.' Well, that is better than basing your
+life on a dishonorable lie. But, alas! it is no way out of the misery.
+At the very moment when you would give all you possess to be worthy of
+that great love she gives you, you have to prove that you are unworthy;
+and the whole of the only last gleam of Eden that is left to this poor
+life of yours, the pure love of a man to a pure woman, is blotted out
+with bitter and jealous tears; the trail of the serpent is over it all.
+I know well that women can love, and love passionately, impure men; but
+every woman will tell you that there is _a_ love that a woman can only
+give to a man who has been faithful to her before marriage as well as
+after; and for ever and for ever there will be a shut door at the very
+heart of your Eden of which you have flung away the key, a love that
+might have been yours had you kept yourself worthy of it. There is but
+one way out of the difficulty, now that in the changed position of women
+you can no longer honorably keep them in the dark--to make up your mind
+that you will come to the woman you love in the glory of your unfallen
+manhood, as you expect her to come to you in the beauty of her spotless
+maidenhood."
+
+I did not know for one moment whether they would not break out into
+cooing like doves; but, on the contrary, they listened to me with
+profound attention, and I could see that none of my words went so home
+to them as those. When I had finished my address a member of the
+committee said to one of the professors, "I think if she had asked them
+to go off and storm Edinburgh Castle they would have marched off in a
+body and done it." So great is the power of a woman pleading for women.
+
+If I could use this sacred plea with effect under circumstances of--I
+think you will allow--such unspeakable difficulty, must it not be
+possible to you, the mother from whom such an appeal would come so
+naturally, to use this same influence, and in the quiet Sunday walk
+through the fields and woods where Nature herself seems to breathe of
+the sanctity of life in every leaf and flower, or in the quiet talk over
+the winter fireside before he leaves home, to plead with your son to
+keep himself faithful to his future wife, so that when he meets the
+woman he can love and make his wife, he may have no shameful secrets to
+confess, or, worse still, to conceal from her, no base tendencies to
+hand down to his unborn children after him? Thank God! how many an
+American and English wife and mother can speak here from personal
+experience of the perfect love and perfect trust which have been bred of
+a pure life before marriage, and a knowledge that the sacraments of love
+and life had never been desecrated or defiled, so that no shadow of
+distrust or suspicion can ever darken the path of her married happiness.
+How powerful the pleading of such a mother may become with her son, to
+give his future wife the same perfect trust and unclouded happiness in
+her husband's love!
+
+I remember in a series of allegorical pictures by an old master in the
+Baptistery at Florence, how, with the divine instinct of poets and
+artists, in the beautiful symbolic figure of Hope, the painter has
+placed a lily in her hands. Cannot we teach our sons that if they are to
+realize their dearest hope in life, that divine hope must ever bear a
+lily in her hand as the only wand that can open to them the paradise of
+the ideal, the divine vision which is "the master light of all our
+seeing," the deepest and most sacred joys of our life?
+
+    He safely walks in darkest ways
+      Whose youth is lighted from above,
+    Where, through the senses' silvery haze,
+      Dawns the veiled moon of nuptial love.
+
+    "Who is the happy husband? He
+      Who, scanning his unwedded life,
+    Thanks God, with all his conscience free,
+      'Twas faithful to his future wife."[26]
+
+Again, could we not give our boys a little more teaching about the true
+nature and sacredness of fatherhood? It always strikes me that the true
+ethics of fatherhood are not yet born. Were the true nature, the
+sacredness, and the immense responsibilities of fatherhood really and
+duly recognized, men could not look with the appalling lightness with
+which they do on providing some substitute for marriage, when they have
+not the means to marry in early life, and are under the very prevalent
+illusion that continent men who marry late run the risk of a childless
+marriage--a notion which so great an authority as Acton pronounces to be
+absolutely false physiologically, and without foundation in fact. To
+bring a child into the world to whom he can perform no one of the duties
+of a father, and to whom he deliberately gives a mother with a tarnished
+name--a mother who, from the initial wrong done to her and the stigma
+which deprives her of the society of women, will only too probably not
+stay her feet at the first wrong step, but be drawn down that dread
+winding stair which ends in the despair of a lost soul--this, I urge,
+would be utterly abhorrent to every even fairly right-thinking man,
+instead of the very common thing it is. Did we see it truly, it would be
+a not venial sin, but an unpardonable crime.
+
+Now, surely mothers can supply some teaching here which must be wanting
+for public opinion to be what it is. A quiet talk about the high nature,
+the duties and responsibilities of fatherhood cannot present any great
+difficulties.
+
+I remember many years ago hearing Canon Knox Little preach a sermon in
+York Cathedral to a large mixed congregation, in which he touched on
+this subject. At this distance of time I can only give the freest
+rendering of his words, the more so as I have so often used them in my
+own meetings that I may have unconsciously moulded them after my own
+fashion. "Look," he said, "at that dying father--dying in the faith,
+having fought the good fight, and all heaven now opening before his
+dying gaze. Yet he withdraws his thoughts from that great hereafter to
+centre them upon the little lad who stands at his bedside. His hands
+wander over the golden head with
+
+    "'The vast sad tenderness of dying men.'
+
+He triumphs over pain and weakness that he may plot and plan every
+detail of the young life which he can no longer live to guide and
+direct. And when at length he seems to have passed into the last
+darkness, and they hold up the child to see if he will yet recognize
+him, suddenly the spirit seems to sweep back again over the dark river
+which it has almost crossed, and an ineffable light illumines the dying
+face as his lips meet the lips of his little son in one last supreme
+kiss--the father's love for one moment vanquishing death itself. And
+what, I ask," said the preacher, in tones that thrilled that vast
+audience, "must be the sin of desecrating and defiling such a function
+as this, this function of fatherhood in which man seems to touch upon
+God Himself and become the representative of the Father in heaven--what
+must be the guilt of turning it into a subject of filthy jests and a
+source of unclean actions?"
+
+The friend with whom I was staying had brought with her her Bible class
+of Industrial School lads, and when the next day she asked what had
+struck them most in the sermon, they answered promptly, "What he said
+about fathers," Let us go and teach likewise.
+
+But perhaps the most precious sphere of influence is that which comes to
+a mother last and latest of all--too late, unless the moral training of
+all preceding years has been made one long disciplinary preparation in
+self-mastery and pureness of living, for the higher and more difficult
+self-control, the far sterner discipline, of true marriage pure and
+undefiled. But if through her training and influence "the white flower
+of a blameless life" has been worn
+
+    "Through all the years of passion in the blood,"
+
+then this is the time when her long patient sowing comes to its golden
+fruitage. It is to his mother that a young man turns as his confidant in
+his engagement; it is to her that he necessarily turns for counsel and
+advice with regard to his young wife in the early years of his marriage.
+A young man in love is a man who can receive divine truth even of the
+hardest, for love is of God, and its very nature is self-giving.
+
+    "Love took up the harp of life, and smote upon its chords with might--
+    Smote the chord of self, that trembling passed in music out of sight."
+
+A pure affection is an almost awful revelation in itself to a young man
+of the true nature of sensual sin. He would gladly die for the woman he
+loves. And we look, therefore, to you mothers to bring into the world
+that Christian ideal of marriage which at present is practically shut up
+between the covers of our Bibles, that the man is to love the woman, the
+husband the wife,[27] "as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for
+it"; not our ideal of the self-sacrificing woman--our patient Griseldas
+and Enids and all the rest of it--but the self-sacrificing man, who is
+but poorly represented in our literature at all,--the man who loves the
+woman and gives himself for her, holding all the strongest forces and
+passions of his nature for her good, to crown her with perfect wifehood
+and perfect motherhood.
+
+This Christian ideal was doubtless intended to fulfil those restrictions
+of the Levitical Law which were to safeguard the health of the wife and
+secure the best conditions for the unborn child; laws and regulations to
+the observance of which the Jew doubtless owes his splendid physique and
+his still more splendid mental endowments, which, though he is the
+fewest of all peoples, bring him everywhere to the forefront,--in
+finance, in literature, in music, in general capacity,--and to which, I
+should be inclined to add, he owes his comparatively slow rate of
+increase, else it is difficult to understand the small numerical
+strength of this extraordinary race; but I know that this is a disputed
+point. No jot or tittle of these laws and regulations can pass away
+until they are fulfilled in some larger truth; for ignore them or not,
+they are founded on physiological laws; and it is on mothers'
+recognizing this larger truth in the advice they give, and on their
+bringing in the Christian ideal, that the future of marriage mainly
+depends, and its being made more consonant with the higher and more
+independent position of women than it at present is.
+
+Whilst the sight is so familiar of wives with health broken down and
+life made a burden, possibly even premature death incurred, by their
+being given no rest from the sacred duties of motherhood, to say nothing
+of the health of the hapless child born under such circumstances, can we
+wonder that the modern woman often shows a marked distaste to marriage
+and looks upon it as something low and sensual? Or can we wonder that
+married men, with so sensual an ideal of so holy a state, should, alas!
+so largely minister to the existence of an outcast class of women?
+
+On the other hand, the remedy resorted to is often worse than the
+disease. I confess I have stood aghast at the advice given by Christian
+mothers, often backed up by a doctor whom they affirm to be a Christian
+man, in order to save the health of the wife or limit the increase of
+the family. The heads of the profession, in England, I believe, are
+sound on this point, a conference having been held some years ago by our
+leading medical men to denounce all such "fruits of philosophy" as
+physically injurious and morally lowering.
+
+But if we want to know what their practical results are, the moral
+gangrene they are to the national life when once they have firmly taken
+hold of a nation, we have only to look across the channel at
+France--France with her immense wealth, but rapidly declining
+population, which in less than a century will reduce her from a
+first-rate to a second-or third-rate power, so that her statesmen have
+actually debated the expediency of offering a premium on illegitimacy in
+the shape of free nurture to all illegitimate children,--illegitimate
+citizens being better in their estimation than no citizens at all.
+
+Would we have the Anglo-Saxon race enter on this downward grade? If not,
+then let us women silently band together to preserve the sanctity of the
+family, of the home, and sternly to bar out the entrance of all that
+defileth--all that sensualizes her men and enfeebles their self-mastery,
+all that renders the heart of her women too craven to encounter the
+burdens of being the mothers of a mighty race, flowing out into all the
+lands to civilize and Christianize, and "bear the white man's burthen."
+
+One word more, a sad and painful one, but one which comes from my inmost
+heart. Do not pass by the sadder aspects of this great moral question
+and refuse "to open thy mouth for the dumb," for those "who are
+appointed unto destruction."
+
+You cannot keep your son in ignorance of the facts; the state of our
+miserable streets, every time he walks out in the evening in any of our
+large towns, absolutely forbids that possibility. But you can place him
+in the right attitude to meet those facts whether in the streets or
+among his own companions. It is by fighting the evils without that we
+can best fight the evils within. It is in dragging them down that we are
+lifted up. A noble passion for the wronged, the weak, the sinful, and
+the lost is the best means for casting out the ignoble passions which
+would destroy another in order to have a good time one's self. At
+present the stock phrase of a virtuous young man is, "I know how to take
+care of myself." You have to put into his lips and heart a stronger and
+a nobler utterance than that: "I know how to take care of the weakest
+woman that comes in my path." Surely it is requiring no impossible moral
+attitude in our sons, rather mere common manliness, to expect that when
+spoken to by some poor wanderer, he should make answer in his heart if
+not with his lips, "My girl, I have got a sister, and it would break my
+heart to see her in your place, and I would rather die than have any
+part in your degradation." One mother I know, who had been much engaged
+in rescue work, and into whose heart the misery and degradation of our
+outcast girls had entered like iron, taught her young son always to
+take off his hat before passsing on, whenever he was accosted. He told a
+friend of mine that he had scarcely ever known it to fail. Either the
+poor girl would say, "Sir, I am very sorry I spoke to you"; or more
+frequently still that little mark of human respect would prove too much,
+and she would silently turn away and burst into tears. If our sons
+cannot bare their heads before that bowed and ignoble object on whom the
+sins of us all seem to have met--the wild passions of men, as well as
+the self-righteousness of the Church--then our young men are not what I
+take them to be,--nay, thank God! what I know them to be, sound of head
+and sound of heart. They get hold of facts by the wrong end; they cut
+into the middle of a chain, and look upon the woman as the aggressor,
+and contemplate her as an unclean bird of prey. They do not in the least
+realize the slight and morally trivial things that cast too many of our
+working-class girls down into the pit of hell that skirts their daily
+path--often as mere children who know not what they do, often from
+hunger and desperation, often tricked and drugged, and always heavily
+bribed. But let them know the facts, let them read a little paper such
+as the _Black Anchor_, the _Ride of Death_, or _My Little Sister_,[28]
+and they will feel the whole thing to be, in their own rough but
+expressive words, "a beastly shame," and fight it both in themselves
+and in others, for our sakes as well as their own. For the misery as
+things are is this:--that men divide us into two classes--we pure women
+for whom nothing is too good; and those others, whom they never
+associate with us, for whom nothing is too bad. And what we have to
+teach them is this--that our womanhood is ONE that a sin against them is
+a sin against us, and so to link the thought of us to them that for the
+sake of their own mothers, for the sake of their own sisters, above all,
+for the sake of the future wife, they cannot wrong or degrade a woman or
+keep up a degraded class of women.
+
+I am aware that, besides the suggestions I have made, young men require
+a plain, emphatic warning as to the physical dangers of licentiousness
+and of the possibility of contracting a taint which medical science is
+now pronouncing to be ineradicable and which they will transmit in some
+form or other to their children after them. We want a strong cord made
+up of every strand we can lay hold of, and one of these strands is
+doubtless self-preservation, though in impulsive youth I do not think it
+the strongest. But to give these warnings is manifestly the father's
+duty, and not the mother's; and I hope and believe that the number of
+fathers who are beginning to recognize their duty in this matter, as
+moral teachers of their boys, is steadily increasing. In the case of
+widowed mothers, or where the father absolutely refuses to say anything,
+perhaps the paper I have already mentioned, _Medical Testimony_,[29]
+would be the best substitute for the father's living voice.
+
+And now let me conclude this chapter, as I concluded the last, with a
+few scattered practical suggestions which may prove of use. My
+experience has been that the vast majority of our young men go wrong not
+from any vicious tendencies, but from want of thought, want of
+knowledge, and a consequent yielding to the low moral tone of so-called
+men of the world, and the fear of being chaffed as "an innocent." See
+that your boy is guarded from this want of thought and want of
+knowledge. When your son is a Sixth Form boy--it is impossible to give
+the age more definitely, as it must depend upon the character of the
+boy--place in his hands the White Cross paper, _True Manliness_ which
+will give him the facts about his own manhood. This paper was carefully
+revised by the late Bishop of Durham, Dr. Lightfoot, whose specialty was
+young men; and upwards of a million copies have been sold, which in
+itself guarantees it as a safe paper. Nor need you as a mother of sons
+fear to read over any of the White Cross papers, since they concern
+themselves, as their name denotes, with purity and a high ideal of
+life--not with the sewer, but with the fountain of sweet waters.
+
+Should your boys be so inclined, you might suggest their joining that
+band of modern knights, the White Cross Society.[30] It is a great thing
+to give a young man a high ideal to act up to, and the White Cross would
+certainly give him this, as well as save him, with its definite
+obligations, from evil that is incurred from sheer thoughtlessness and
+animal spirits, enforcing a respectful and chivalrous treatment of
+women, even when by their fast ways those women show that they have no
+respect for themselves. But more especially is this the case with regard
+to the second obligation, to discountenance coarse jests and allusions
+and the by no means nice sort of talk that often goes on in
+smoking-rooms, and by which, I am convinced, more than by any other
+agency the mind and conscience of young men is gradually deadened and
+defiled, but in which they are apt to join from sheer thoughtlessness
+and sense of fun. Their White Cross obligation might screw up their
+moral courage to utter some such pointed rebuke as Dr. Jowett's to a
+lot of young men in a smoking-room, "I don't want to make myself out
+better than you are, but is there not more dirt than wit in that story?"
+or that other still more public rebuke which he administered at his own
+dinner-table when, the gentlemen having been left to their wine, a
+well-known diplomat began telling some very unsavory stories, till the
+still, small, high-pitched voice of the Master made itself heard,
+saying, "Had we not better adjourn this conversation till we join the
+ladies in the drawing-room?" At least they can keep silence and a grave
+face; and silence and a grave face are often the best damper to coarse
+wit. Why, I ask, should men when they get together be one whit coarser
+than women? It is simply an evil fashion, and as an evil fashion can and
+will be put down as "bad form."
+
+I think also that joining the White Cross will make young men more
+active in trying to influence other young men and to guard and help
+their younger brothers, with all the other priceless work that they can,
+if they will, do for our womanhood among men, but which, from shyness
+and reserve and the dread of being looked upon as moral prigs, they are
+apt to let go by default.
+
+But whether you agree with me or not with regard to your sons' joining
+an organization, see that they assume their rightful attitude of
+guardians of the purity of the home. We women cannot know anything about
+the inner secrets of men's lives, or know whom to exclude and whom to
+admit to the society of our girls. This ought to be the part of the
+brothers. God knows we do not want to make a pariah class of men on the
+same lines as are meted out to women. The young man who wants to do
+better we are bound to help, and no better work can be done in our large
+cities than to open our homes to young men in business or in Government
+offices, etc. But men who are deliberately leading a fast life and who
+are deeply stained with the degradation of our own womanhood, with no
+wish to rise out of their moral slough, these must be to us as moral
+lepers, to be gilded by no wealth, to be cloaked by no insignia of noble
+birth, or we stand betrayed as hypocrites and charlatans in our own
+cause. If our position in society is such as obliges us to receive such
+men, we all know the moral uses of ice, and under the guise of the most
+frigid politeness we can make them feel their absolute exclusion from
+the inner circle of our friends and intimates. There need be no
+discussion between you and your son--just the hint: "Oh, mother, I would
+not ask that fellow if I were you," and you will know what is meant.
+
+Much may also be done by keeping up the general high tone of the home.
+One mother of eight sons, who all turned out men of high, pure life, if
+ever they used in her presence such expressions as "a well-groomed
+woman," or commended their last partner at a ball as "a pretty little
+filly," would instantly interrupt them and ask incisively, "Are you
+talking of a horse or a woman? If you are talking of a woman, you will
+be pleased to remember that you are speaking in the presence of your
+mother and your sisters." And if any scandal about a woman was mooted,
+the conversation was at once quietly turned into another and more
+profitable channel.
+
+A word of homely advice from you to your sons with regard to our streets
+at night: never to loiter, but to trudge on quickly, when they would be
+rarely molested, may be advisable and useful.
+
+As to absolute watchfulness with regard to the young maid-servants in
+your house, this is so obvious a point that it scarcely needs
+mentioning; though at the same time I have known the most culpably
+careless arrangements made when the family are away for their summer
+holidays, young maid-servants being left alone in the house while the
+young men are still going backwards and forwards to their business; or
+the whole family going out and no older woman being left in charge of
+the young domestics. What can one expect but that, having sown moral
+carelessness, we shall reap corruption?
+
+But even with no such culpable neglect of our responsibilities, I do
+wish we would cultivate more human relations with our servants, and so
+get them to work more consciously with us in maintaining a high
+Christian tone in our homes. If we would but take a more individual
+interest in them and their belongings, as we should do with those we
+count our friends; getting a good situation for the younger sister who
+is just coming on, possibly giving her a few weeks of good training in
+our own household; giving the delicate child of the family change of air
+and good food, even taking in a baby to enable a sick mother to go for a
+short time into a hospital. All these things I have found possible in my
+own household. And surely such thought and care for those they hold dear
+would form a living bond between mistress and servant. If we would take
+the same thought and care for pleasant breaks in the monotony of our
+young servants' lives as we do for our own girls, would the servant
+difficulty press upon us to the same degree? Nay, if we could set going
+a weekly or fortnightly working party with our own servants in some
+cause which would interest us both, reading out some interesting
+narrative in connection with it, could we not even in this small way
+establish a bond of common service and make us feel that we were all
+working together for the same Master, so that our servants might become
+our helpers, and not, as they sometimes are, our hinderers, in bringing
+up our children in a high and pure moral atmosphere?
+
+But when all things are said and done, I know that with every mother
+worthy the name there must be moments of deep discouragement and sense
+of failure--a sense of mistakes made with some difficult nature to
+which her own gives her but little clue; a sense of difficulties in
+vain grappled with, of shortcomings in vain striven against. Which of us
+have not had such moments of despondency in the face of a great task? In
+such moments I have often called to mind one of those parables of Nature
+which are everywhere around us, unseen and unheeded, like those
+exquisite fresco angels of the old masters, in dim corners of ancient
+churches, blowing silent trumpets of praise and adoration and touching
+mute viols into mystic melodies which are lost to us. So thin has the
+material veil grown under the touch of modern science that everywhere
+the spiritual breaks through. Often in that nameless discouragement
+before unfinished tasks, unfulfilled aims, and broken efforts, I have
+thought of how the creative Word has fashioned the opal, made it of the
+same stuff as desert sands, mere silica--not a crystallized stone like a
+diamond, but rather a stone with a broken heart, traversed by hundreds
+of small fissures which let in the air, the breath, as the Spirit is
+called in the Greek of our New Testament; and through these two
+transparent mediums of such different density it is enabled to refract
+the light and reflect every lovely hue of heaven, while at its heart
+burns a mysterious spot of fire. When we feel, therefore, as I have
+often done, nothing but cracks and desert dust, we can say, "So God
+maketh his precious opal." Our very sense of brokenness and failure
+makes room for the Spirit to enter in, and through His strength made
+perfect in human weakness we are made able to reflect every tender hue
+of the eternal Loveliness and break up the white light of His truth into
+those rays which are fittest for different natures; while that hidden
+lamp of the sanctuary will burn in your heart of hearts for ever a guide
+to your boy's feet in the devious ways of life.
+
+In conclusion, I should like to record an incident full of encouragement
+to mothers. A young fellow of eighteen or nineteen, whom his widowed
+mother had brought up on the principles which I have been advocating,
+said to her one day, "Mother, you know that men don't always think like
+you about poor girls." "Alas!" she replied, "I know that but too well;
+but what makes you say so?" "Well, mother, I was with a lot of college
+fellows yesterday, and they were giving one another the best addresses
+in the West End to go to." "But didn't you say anything?" "No, I only
+kept silence. Had I said anything, they would only have called me a
+confounded prig. There were three other fellows who kept silence, and I
+could see they did not approve, but we none of us spoke up." "Oh, my
+son," exclaimed his mother in great distress, "how are we to help you
+young fellows? Do you think if the clergy were more faithful, they could
+help you more than they do?" "I don't think they would listen to what a
+parson says." "Then if doctors were to warn you more plainly than they
+do?" "I don't think it would be of much use; they would not heed; and
+then a fellow generally goes to a doctor too late." "Then what can we
+do, what can we do?" "Well, I think there is only one person who can
+really help, and that's a fellow's mother--she can save him, if she
+would only try."
+
+Doubt not, but earnestly believe. "In every man's breast is to be found
+a lotus-blossom," says the pretty old Indian saying, and, watered by
+your prayers and your tears, be sure it will blossom into "the white
+flower of a blameless life."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 26: Coventry Patmore.]
+
+[Footnote 27: The word in Greek is the same for woman and wife.]
+
+[Footnote 28: White Cross Publications, E.P. Dutton & Co., 31 West
+Twenty Third Street, New York.]
+
+[Footnote 29: Office of White Cross league, 7 Dean's Yard, Westminster
+Abbey, London.]
+
+[Footnote 30: THE WHITE CROSS OBLIGATIONS. I. To treat all women with
+respect, and endeavor to protect them from wrong and degradation.
+
+II. To endeavor to put down all indecent language and coarse jests.
+
+III. To maintain the law of purity as equally binding upon men and
+women.
+
+IV. To endeavor to spread these principles among my companions, and to
+try and help my younger brothers.
+
+V. To use every possible means to fulfil the command,
+
+"Keep thyself pure."]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE INFLUENCE OF SISTERS
+
+
+Hitherto I have dealt exclusively with the moral training of boys and
+young men, but I am aware that I have left out one of the great shaping
+influences of a boy's life, which certainly comes next to the mother's
+where it exists--the influence of sisters. The childish hand that he
+clasps in his is the hand that unconsciously moulds him to higher ends
+or the reverse. For if the man is the director, the ruler, and defender,
+"the builder of the house" as he is called in the grand old word
+husband,[31] the woman is the shaping and moulding influence of life;
+and if God has placed her in the power of the man, both through the
+weakness of her frame and the strength of her affections, on the other
+hand He has given into her hands the keys of his being, and according as
+he fulfils or abuses his trust towards her, she opens or closes the door
+of higher life to him.[32]
+
+I often wonder whether we women sufficiently realize this truth for
+ourselves or our girls. Walter Bagehot used to say in his blind,
+masculine way, "It's a horrid scrape to be a woman,"--a sentiment which,
+I fear, will find some echo in the hearts of a good many women
+themselves. But is it so? If to the man chiefly belongs power in all its
+forms, does not the woman wield as her portion that far more potent but
+wholly silent, and often unnoticed thing, influence? Not the storm, or
+the earthquake, or the strong wind, but the still, small voice: the
+benediction of dews and gentle rains, the mute beatitudes of still
+waters flowing through sun-parched lands and transforming them into
+"fruitful fields that the Lord hath blest"; the silent but irresistible
+influence of the sunlight, which in the baby palm of a little leaf
+becomes a golden key to unlock the secret treasures of the air and build
+up great oaks out of its invisible elements; the still, small voice of
+the moral sense, so still, so small, so powerless to enforce its
+dictates, but before which all the forces of the man do bow and obey,
+choosing death rather than disobedience--are not all these silent
+influences emblems of the supreme, shaping, moulding influence that is
+given to the woman as the "mother of all living," coming without
+observation, but making far more strongly than any external power for
+the kingdom of love and light? Truly we have a goodly heritage if only
+we had eyes to see it. Alas! that we should have made so little
+comparative use of it in these great moral questions. Alas! that we
+should have to acknowledge the truth and justice of the poet's words:
+
+    Ah, wasteful woman! she who may
+    On her sweet self set her own price,
+    Knowing he cannot choose but pay--
+    How has she cheapen'd Paradise,
+    How given for nought her priceless gift,
+    How spoiled the bread and spilt the wine,
+    Which, spent with due respective thrift,
+    Had made brutes men, and men divine!"[33]
+
+But even here is there not place for a hopeful thought, that if women
+have made so little comparative use of their well-nigh irresistible
+influence in setting a high standard and shaping men to a diviner and
+less animal type, it has been, as I have already said, chiefly owing to
+ignorance? The whole of one of the darkest sides of life has been
+sedulously kept from us. Educated mothers, till lately, have been
+profoundly ignorant of the moral evils of schools, and have never dreamt
+that that young, frank, fresh-faced lad of theirs had any temptations of
+the kind. Their moral influence, which the poet blames them so strongly
+for misusing, has been largely, at least with good women, not so much a
+misused as an undirected force, and we know not, therefore, what that
+force may accomplish when a larger and truer knowledge enables it to be
+persistently directed to a conscious aim. This fact, at least, has been
+stamped into my inmost being, that men will rise to any moral standard
+which women choose to set them.
+
+I ask, therefore, cannot we get our girls to help us here more than we
+do, without being crippled by the fear of initiating them too much in
+the evil of the world or destroying that unconscious virginal purity
+which is, even as things are, so strong and pathetic an influence for
+good over young men?
+
+In the addresses that I have given to large numbers of educated girls, I
+used often to begin by quoting a passage from the Jewish Prayer-Book. In
+a general thanksgiving for the mercies of life, the men say: "We thank
+Thee, O Lord of heaven and earth, that Thou hast not made us a woman."
+One a little wonders how the poor women could join in this thanksgiving.
+But in one corner of the page there is a little rubric in very small
+print which directs, "Here shall the women say: 'We thank Thee, O Lord
+of heaven and earth, that Thou hast made us according unto Thy will!'"
+And, looking upon that bed of spring flowers before me, I used to tell
+them that it made me feel what a fair and gracious and beautiful thing
+it was to be made according unto God's will, to be made a woman.
+
+Now, in the first place, could we not get them to realize this great
+truth a little more than they do, and not in their heart of hearts to
+wish that they were men? Could we not get them to realize a little more
+the divine possibilities of their womanhood, and instead of making it
+their ambition to figure as a weaker form of man, and become lawyers,
+stockbrokers, and other queer things the modern woman is striving after,
+to make it their ambition to become stronger and truer women?
+
+But how is this to be done? I remember on one occasion, when I was going
+in the evening to address a mass meeting of working-class girls, a
+stout, middle-aged lady bustling up to me in a morning conference we
+were holding, and exclaiming: "And what are you going to say to them?
+What can you say to them, except to tell them to take care of themselves
+and keep the men at arm's length?"
+
+Now, this old-fashioned method, which we have adopted in dealing with
+the girls of the poor, I contend traverses the central and most
+fundamental facts of a woman's being. A woman will never find salvation
+in being told to take care of herself, and least of all for the purpose
+of keeping the man, for whom she was created to be a helpmate, at arm's
+length. Gospels of self-culture may take seeming root here and there in
+the exotic woman; but even in her, at some moment of swift passion or
+strong emotion, they will crumple up and fall off from her like a
+withered leaf. James Hinton knew a woman's nature but too well when he
+said that she would respond to the appeal "Lay down your life" more
+readily and more surely than to the appeal "Take up your rights." She
+certainly has a most divine power of flinging herself away, whether
+nobly or ignobly, which forms both her strength and her weakness. But I
+have never yet known a woman who would not, at any rate to some degree,
+respond to an appeal to save, not herself, but another: "Do not let him
+do this wrong thing, for his sake. You can do anything you like with a
+man who loves you. God has given him body and soul into your hands, and
+you can lift him up into something of His image and make a true man of
+him; or you can let his love for you sink him into a selfish beast of
+prey. Do not let him do anything that will for ever lower his manhood,
+but use your power over him to keep him true to all that is best and
+highest in him." I have never yet known the woman who will not be moved
+by such an appeal as this. In other words, the central motive force of a
+woman's nature, the key of her whole being, is, and must ever be, the
+mother in her, that divine motherhood which is at the heart of every
+woman worthy of the name, married or unmarried. It is this divine
+motherhood, which all evolution, the whole "process of the suns," has
+gone to strengthen, and which Christianity has enshrined at her very
+heart--it is this that makes her for ever the Christ factor in the
+world, the supreme expression of the redeeming Love--that care of the
+strong for the weak which even in Nature comes trembling into existence
+beneath the tender wing of the nesting bird, or forces itself into
+notice in the fierce lioness's care for her whelps, and which we
+believe will work out the ultimate consummation of the "whole creation
+that groaneth and travaileth in pain until now." And I contend that if
+we are to have in the future such women as Lady Augusta Stanley, round
+whose lifeless form were united in one common sorrow the Queen on her
+throne and the poorest of the poor, such women as Browning's wife and
+Browning's mother, of whom he used to say, with a slight tremor in his
+voice, "She was a divine woman," it will be by strengthening and
+appealing to this element of divine motherhood in a woman's nature.
+
+What I would, therefore, teach the girls is this: that they have got to
+mother the boys, that they are the guardians of all that is best and
+highest in them, of all that makes for the chivalrous American
+gentleman, and that their womanhood should therefore be to them a
+fountain of fine manners, of high thoughts, and noble actions. I would
+rub into their very bones, if I could, the old saw I have already
+quoted: "A man is what a woman makes him"; that if there were more high
+womanhood there would be less low manhood; and that if the boys are rude
+and rough and slangy, and loutish in their manner to women, the blame
+lies with their sisters who, in their foolish fondness and indulgence,
+or in their boyish camaraderie, have allowed them to slouch up into a
+slovenly manhood. The man at most is the fine prose of life, but the
+woman ought to be its poetry and inspiration. It is her hand that sets
+its key, whether
+
+    "To feed the high tradition of the world,"
+
+or add to its low discords. Surely Ruskin's noble words apply here: "It
+is the type of an eternal truth that the soul's armor is never well set
+to the heart unless a woman's hand has braced it; and it is only when
+she has braced it loosely that the honor of manhood fails"; or those
+other still stronger and nobler words of Frederick Robertson's: "There
+are two rocks in a man's life on which he must either anchor or split:
+God and Woman."
+
+And could we not appeal to our girls to make their womanhood a rock
+which bears a light to all in peril on the rough sea of life--a light to
+save from moral shipwreck and lead to the safe haven beneath the Rock of
+Ages? Surely we might appeal to them, in the name of their own brothers
+and others with whom they are intimately thrown, to work out these
+higher possibilities of their own womanhood; not to lower it by picking
+up slang words from their brothers--a woman ought to be above coarsening
+and vulgarizing God's great gift of speech--not to engage in games or
+romps that involve a rude rough-and-tumble with boys, which may develop
+a healthy hoyden, but is utterly destructive of the gracious dignity of
+the true woman; not to adopt fast ways of either dress or bearing which
+lead to young men making remarks behind their backs which they ought
+not to make on any woman; above all, never in girlish flightiness, or,
+worse still, in order to boast of the number of offers they have
+received, to flirt or trifle in any way with a man's affections; but to
+remember that to every man they have to make a woman only the other name
+for truth and constancy. God only knows the number of young men who have
+received their first downward bent from what to a young girl, in the
+wilfulness of her high spirits and her ignorance of life, has been only
+a bit of fun, but which to the young man has been the first fatal break
+in his faith in woman--that faith which in his soul dwells so hard by
+his faith in the Divine that in making shipwreck of the one is only too
+likely to make shipwreck of the other.
+
+As to the mothers who send out their young girls into society the
+victims of their fashionable dressmakers, to be a fountain, not of high,
+pure thoughts to young men, but a spring of low temptations and impure
+suggestions, I do not blame the young girls here; but surely the
+severest blame is due to the criminal folly, or worse, of their mothers,
+who must know what the consequences of immodest dressing necessarily are
+to the inflammable mind of youth.
+
+But that that unlovely phenomenon "the girl of the period," is also
+deeply to blame for the lowered traditions of English society, and
+consequently of English manhood, I have only too sorrowfully to
+acknowledge. I remember Mrs. Herbert of Vauxhall telling a very
+fashionable audience how on one occasion she had to rebuke a young man
+moving in the first London society for using some contemptuous
+expression with regard to women, and was led to appeal very earnestly to
+him to reverence all women for his mother's sake. He turned upon her
+with a sort of divine rage and said: "I long to reverence women, but the
+girls I meet with in society won't let me. They like me to make free
+with them; they like me to talk to them about doubtful subjects, and
+they make me"--and he ground his teeth as he said it--"what I just hate
+myself for being." Alas! alas! can sadder words knell in a woman's ears
+than these?
+
+But side by side with this desecrating womanhood there rises up before
+me the vision of a young girl, not English, nor American, but
+French--now a mature woman, with girls and boys of her own, but who in
+her young days was the very embodiment of all that I have been urging
+that our girls might become to their brothers. She was a daughter of the
+great French preacher, Frederick Monod, and had an only brother who was
+all in all to her. She knew enough of the evil of the world to know that
+a medical student in Paris was exposed to great temptations; and she was
+resolved, so far as she could, to make her womanhood a crystal shield
+between him and them. She entered into all his pursuits; she took an
+interest in all his friends and companions; she had always leisure for
+sympathy and counsel in his difficulties and troubles. She had a little
+room of her own to which she used to get him to come every evening and
+talk over the day with her, so that she might keep herself heart to
+heart with him in all that concerned him. She even overcame her girlish
+reserve, and would get him to kneel down by her side and pour out her
+sweet girlish heart in prayer that God would guide him in all his ways,
+and keep him unspotted from the world. Years after, when he was a
+married man, with boys of his own, he said to her: "You little know all
+that you were to me as a young man. My temptations were so maddening
+that I used sometimes to think that I must yield to them and do as other
+young men did all round me. But then a vision of you used to rise up
+before me, and I used to say to myself: 'No; if I do this thing, I can
+never go and sit with her in her own little room; I can never look into
+her dear face again.'" And the thought of that young girl, the angel of
+her presence in the midst of the furnace, kept that young man unspotted
+from the world through all the gutters of Paris life. Could not our
+sweet English and American girls be to their brothers what that young
+French girl was to hers?
+
+But perhaps some pessimistic mother will exclaim, "What is the use of
+making these old-fashioned appeals to our modern girls? They are so
+taken up with the delights of their freedom, so absorbed in the pleasure
+of cycling and athletic games, so full of manly ambitions, so persuaded
+that the proper cultivated attitude is to be an agnostic, and to look at
+God and the universe through a sceptical and somewhat supercilious
+eyeglass, that if we did make an appeal to them such as you suggest they
+would only laugh at such old-fashioned notions." I can only say that I
+have not found it so. I can bear the highest testimony at least to our
+English girls, of whom I have addressed thousands, all over the three
+kingdoms. Occasionally it has happened that maturer women have left me
+stranded, stretching out hands of vain appeal to them; but my girls, my
+dear girls, never once failed me. Not only could I see by the expression
+of their faces how deeply they responded to my appeal to work out the
+latent possibilities of their womanhood, and be the uplifting influence
+to their brothers, and other young men with whom they were thrown, that
+a true woman can be; but they came forward in troops to take up the
+position I assigned to them in our woman's movement towards a higher and
+purer life. Nobly did those young girls respond, joining a movement for
+opening club-rooms and classes for working girls, a movement initiated
+not by me, but by educated girls like themselves, and which has since
+spread all over England and Scotland.
+
+And if this is true of our English girls, still more would it be true
+of the American girl, who has a unique position and influence of her
+own, and is dowered with that peculiar capacity and graciousness which
+seem to belong by divine right to the American woman.
+
+I cannot but think that if we were to teach our girls less in religious
+phraseology and more from the great realities of life; if they were
+taught that Christianity is only human life rightly seen and divinely
+ordered, that the Cross is only the uncovering of what is going on all
+round us, though hidden to a careless gaze,--the sin, the pain, the
+misery, which are forever crucifying and forever calling forth that
+great passion of redeeming Love to which, through the motherhood that is
+in us, "one touch of nature makes us kin"; and that the central truth of
+Christianity is not, as we have too often taught, saving our own souls,
+but a life poured out for the good of others, and personal salvation as
+a means for having a life to pour forth--I cannot but think that much
+fashionable girlish agnosticism would disappear, and the true woman
+would reach forth to that divine humanity to which she belongs.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 31: Husband is derived from two words--"house" and the Saxon
+word to "build," German _bauen_.]
+
+[Footnote 32: See a little White Cross paper called _My Little Sister_,
+which I wish mothers would get into the hands of their sons just
+entering into manhood to read, mark, learn, digest. (Wells Gardner,
+Darton and Co.)]
+
+[Footnote 33: Coventry Patmore.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE MODERN WOMAN AND HER FUTURE
+
+
+Up to this point I have dealt only with the great shaping and moulding
+principles of life, with indirect influence rather than direct. How far
+direct teaching on matters of sex should be given to our girls has been
+a far greater perplexity to me than in the case of boys. In the present
+state of our schools and our streets our boys must get to know evil.
+Hitherto it was possible to say that our girls _might_ get to know evil,
+and between that "must" and "might" lay a great and perplexing chasm. We
+do not want our garden lilies to smell of anything but pure dews and
+rains and sun-warmed fragrance. But is this ideal possible any longer,
+except in a few secluded country homes, where, hidden like Keats's
+nightingale "among the leaves," they may remain innocent and ignorant of
+the world's evil?
+
+But with the ordinary conditions of the present day, with the greater
+freedom accorded to women, the wider range of education, involving a
+wider range of reading, with modern newspapers left about, I ask, How is
+it possible for a mother to keep her girls in ignorance and unconscious
+innocence? A volume of short stories comes into the house from the
+circulating library; they are clever and apparently absolutely harmless.
+Yet embedded in the heart of one such volume, which shall be nameless, I
+came upon a story almost as vile as anything in a French novel, and
+conveying the most corrupt knowledge. How, I ask, can a busy mother read
+through every book of short stories before letting it fall into the
+hands of her girls; or how, if they are to read Latin and Greek, or even
+carefully to study our own old literature, is she to guard them from a
+knowledge of evil conveyed in classical allusions, or in the coarse
+plainness of speech of an earlier age? I know as a fact, whether we
+recognize it or not, that behind our mature backs our girls are
+discussing these moral problems with quite an alarming amount of
+freedom, and some at least, guided by no teaching, and with no practical
+knowledge of the great laws of human life, are coming to quite startling
+conclusions, which would make their mothers' hair stand on end. And one
+most undesirable, and I may add unnatural, result noticeable among the
+more advanced section is a certain distaste for marriage, a tendency to
+look upon it as something low and animal, which strikes me as simply a
+fatal attitude for women to take up.
+
+Have we not, therefore, got clearly to recognize that the old order has
+changed, giving place to new, and requiring, therefore, new methods. We
+may or we may not like the new order, but it is _there_. Under the
+changed conditions of modern life it is inevitable; therefore it must be
+in the providence of God; it cannot be wholly bad, and if we will work
+in with it loyally, and not thrust it aside for some old order of our
+own, it may be, nay, it will be, wholly for good. Let us remember that
+the two most conservative organic forms, the two that have most resisted
+progressive evolution, are the donkey and the goose. To ignore the new
+order, to cling to the old views and methods, is to court moral
+extinction as a living force. As well think to find safety in escaping
+from the advance of an express engine by adopting the stately pace of
+our grandmothers, which was perfectly adapted for getting out of the way
+of a lumbering stage-coach. May not He
+
+    "Whose large plan ripens slowly to a whole"
+
+be working out a progressive ideal such as we trace in the great
+spiritual records of our race? The Bible, thank God! neither begins nor
+ends with sin; but it begins with a sinless garden, it ends with a
+strong city of God, with evil known and recognized, but cast out beyond
+its walls. May He not be leading us to form a wiser, deeper, stronger
+ideal; to aim for our girls not so much at Innocence, with her fading
+wreath of flowers--fading, as, alas! they must ever fade in a world like
+this--but to aim at Virtue, with her victor's crown of gold, tried in
+the fire? May it not be that His divine providence is constraining us to
+take as our ideal for our womanhood, not the old sheltered garden, but a
+strong city of God, having foundations, whose very gates are made of
+pearl, through which nothing that defileth is suffered to enter, and
+whose common ways are paved with pure gold, gold of no earthly temper,
+but pure and clear as crystal;--a city of refuge for all who are
+oppressed with wrong, and from which all foul forms of evil are banned
+by the one word "_Without_"? Sure I am that if we will accept this
+deeper and larger ideal, and endeavor, however imperfectly, to work it
+out on the earth, in the midst of it, as in the old garden ideal, will
+be found the tree of life; but then its very leaves will be for the
+healing of the nations.
+
+But whether you go with me as far as this or not, I think you will agree
+with me that we must not leave our girls to their own crude notions on
+the deepest matters of life. Still less must we leave them to get their
+teaching on marriage and matters of sex from some modern novels, which I
+can only characterize as tuberculosis of the moral sense, but from
+which, as I have already pointed out, we cannot always guard them. We
+must give them direct teaching of some kind.
+
+First, I think our girls, as well as our boys, need far more direct
+teaching than has been customary as to the sanctity of the body. This is
+especially true of girls who are sent to boarding-schools, as some of
+the moral evils of boys' schools are not, I am sorry to say, altogether
+unknown in girls' schools, though, as far as I can ascertain, the evil
+is much less in extent, and in some is non-existent. Still, all girls
+need to be taught that the body is the temple of the Lord and Giver of
+life, and that from the crown of their heads to the sole of their feet
+those bodies belong to Christ.
+
+Secondly, I think that they ought to have some such teaching about life
+and birth as that which I have already recommended for boys, that they
+may see how through the marital tie and the consequent rise of the
+parental relation, a world of blind mechanical force gradually developed
+into a world of life and beauty, and at last crowned itself with a
+conscious love in an indissoluble union, which makes marriage the very
+type of the union of the soul with God, of Christ with His Church.
+
+Thirdly, they need to be taught that much in their own physical
+constitution, which they rebel against as handicapping them in the
+struggle of life, is Nature's provision for them that no merely physical
+function should press upon them as we see it do in the animal creation
+at certain periods of the year, but that they should be free to serve
+God, whether in the married or in the unmarried state, in quietness and
+godly living.
+
+Fourthly, above all they need definite teaching on the true nature, the
+sanctity, and the beauty of marriage. It appears that the line of
+progress is always a spiral, and it would seem as if we were in the
+backward sweep of the spiral which looks like retrogression, but will
+doubtless bring us out further up in the end. The masculine view that
+marriage is the one aim and end of a woman's existence, adopted also by
+some careful mothers, is now exploded. Young men are no longer led to
+look upon every girl that they meet as furtively, to use a vulgarism,
+"setting her cap for him," and only too ready to fling herself at his
+feet. So far so good. But have we not suffered our girls to drift into
+the opposite extreme? In the heyday of their bright young life, with so
+many new interests and amusements open to them, in the pride of their
+freedom and independence, they are no longer so inclined to marry, and
+are even apt to look down upon the married state. They form so high an
+ideal of the man to whom they would surrender their independence--an
+ideal which they fortunately do not apply to their fathers and brothers,
+whom they find it quite possible to love on a far lower and more human
+level--that because a man does not fulfil this ideal, and is not a fairy
+prince dowered with every possible gift, they refuse men who, though not
+angels, would have made them happy as wife and mother. Would not a
+little sound, sensible teaching be of great good here? Could we not
+point out that, though in so vital and complex a union as the family
+there must be some seat of ultimate authority, some court of final
+appeal somewhere, and that the woman herself would not wish it to rest
+anywhere else than in the man, if she is to respect him; yet there is no
+subservience on the part of the wife in the obedience she renders, but
+rather in South's grand words, "It is that of a queen to her king, who
+both owns a subjection and remains a majesty"? Cannot we contend against
+this falsehood of the age which seems so to underlie our modern life,
+and which inclines us to look upon all obedience as a slavish
+thing--that obedience which "doth preserve the stars from wrong," and
+through which "the most ancient heavens are fresh and strong"; that
+obedience which when absolute and implicit to the Divine will is "a
+service of perfect freedom"? It is the profession which exacts
+unquestionable obedience that forms the finest school for character, as
+I have already pointed out. We do not hear of a Wellington or a Roberts
+refusing to enter the service because they could not give up their
+independence. Our military heroes at least know that it is through
+discipline and obedience that they gain their real independence--the
+independence of a strong character.
+
+Again, our girls need to be taught not only that there is nothing
+derogatory in the married relation to the freest and fullest
+independence of character, but surely in these days of open advocacy by
+some popular writers of "les unions libres" and a freedom of divorce
+that comes to much the same thing, they need to be taught the sanctity
+of marriage--those first principles which hitherto we have taken for
+granted, but which now, like everything else, is thrown into the
+crucible and brought into question. They need definite teaching as to
+the true nature of marriage; that it is no mere contract to be broken or
+kept according to the individual contractor's convenience--I never yet
+heard of a contract for bringing into existence, not a successful
+machine, but a moral and spiritual being with infinite possibilities of
+weal or woe, of heaven or hell--but a sacramental union of love and
+life, with sacramental grace given to those who will seek it to live
+happily and endure nobly within its sacred bounds--a union so deep and
+mystical that even on its physical side our great physiologists are
+wholly at a loss to account for some of its effects;[34] a union of
+which permanence is the very essence, as on its permanence rests the
+permanence and stability of the whole fabric of our life. It can never
+be treated on an individualistic basis, though that is always the
+tendency with every man and woman who has ever loved. In Mrs. Humphry
+Ward's words:
+
+     "That is always the way; each man imagines the matter is still for
+     his deciding, and he can no more decide it than he can tamper with
+     the fact that fire burns or water drowns. All these centuries the
+     human animal has fought with the human soul. And step by step the
+     soul has registered her victories. She has won them only by feeling
+     for the law and finding it--uncovering, bringing into light the
+     firm rocks beneath her feet. And on these rocks she rears her
+     landmarks--marriage, the family, the State, the Church. Neglect
+     them and you sink into the quagmire from which the soul of the race
+     has been for generations struggling to save you."[35]
+
+Fall on this rock, stumble into unhappiness and discontent, as so many
+do in marriage, and you will be broken. But be faithful to it and to the
+high traditions which generations of suffering men and women have worked
+out for you, and you will be broken as the bud is broken into the
+blossom, as the acorn is broken into the oak--broken into a higher and
+stronger life. On the other hand rebel against it, attempt to drag it
+down or cast it from its place, and it will crush you, and grind some
+part of your higher nature to powder. How strangely and sadly is this
+shown in the case of one of our greatest writers, who thought that the
+influence of her writings would far outweigh the influence of her
+example, but whose name and example are now constantly used by bad men
+to overcome the virtue of young educated girls struggling alone in
+London, and often half starving on the miserable pittance which is all
+they can earn. But still more is it shown in the life of the nation
+which tampers with the laws of marriage and admits freedom of divorce.
+Either such suits must be heard _in camera_ without the shame of
+exposure, when divorce is so facilitated that the family and the State
+rest rather on a superstructure of rickety boards than on a rock; or
+they must be heard in public court and form a moral sewer laid on to the
+whole nation, poisoning the deepest springs of its life, and through
+that polluted life producing far more individual misery than it
+endeavors to remedy in dissolving an unhappy marriage. God only knows
+what I suffered when a _cause celebre_ came on, and I felt that the
+whole nation was being provided with something worse and more vitally
+mischievous than the most corrupt French novel.
+
+Deeply do I regret--and in this I think most thoughtful minds will agree
+with me--that the Reformers in their inevitable rebound from the
+superstitions of Rome, rejected her teaching of the sacramental nature
+of marriage, which has made so many Protestant nations tend to that
+freedom of divorce which is carried to so great an extent in some parts
+of America, and is spreading, alas! to many of our own colonies--a
+laxity fatally undermining the sanctity and stability of the family. If
+marriage be not a sacrament, an outward and visible sign of an inward
+and spiritual life and grace, I ask what is?
+
+I would therefore earnestly beseech you to oppose your direct teaching
+to the whole tendency of modern life, and to much of the direct teaching
+of modern fiction--even of so great a novelist as George Meredith--which
+inculcates the subordination of the marriage bond to what is called the
+higher law of love, or rather, passion. In teaching your sons, and
+especially your girls, who are far more likely to be led astray by this
+specious doctrine, base marriage not on emotion, not on sentiment, but
+on duty. To build upon emotion, with the unruly wills and affections of
+sinful men, is to build, not upon the sand, but upon the wind. There is
+but one immovable rock on which steadfast character, steadfast
+relations, steadfast subordination of the lower and personal desires,
+to the higher and immutable obligations and trusts and responsibilities
+of life can be built--duty. When this rock has been faithfully clung
+to, when in the midst of disillusionment and shattered ideals the noble
+resolution has been clung to never to base personal happiness on a
+broken trust or another's pain, I have over and over again known the,
+most imperfect marriage prove in the end to be happy and contented.
+Here again I quote some words of Mrs. Humphry Ward, which she puts into
+the mouth of her hero: "No," he said with deep emphasis--"No; I have
+come to think the most disappointing and hopeless marriage, nobly
+borne, to be better worth having than what people call an 'ideal
+passion'--if the ideal passion must be enjoyed at the expense of one of
+those fundamental rules which poor human nature has worked out, with
+such infinite difficulty and pain, for the protection and help of its
+own weakness,"[36] I am aware that neither Mr. Grant Allen with his
+"hill-top" novels, nor Mrs. Mona Caird need be taken too seriously, but
+when the latter says, "There is something pathetically absurd in this
+sacrifice to their children of generation after generation of grown
+people,"[37] I would suggest that it would be still more pathetically
+absurd to see the whole upward-striving past, the whole noble future of
+the human race, sacrificed to their unruly wills and affections, their
+passions and desires. If as Goldwin Smith says in his rough, incisive
+way, "There is not much union of heart in marriage, I do not see that
+there would be any more union of heart in adultery."
+
+I have dwelt thus earnestly upon this point because the sooner we
+realize for ourselves and our girls that any relaxation of the marriage
+bond will in its disastrous consequences fall upon us, and not upon men,
+the better. It is the woman who first grows old and loses her personal
+attractions, while a man often preserves his beauty into extreme old
+age. It is the burdened mother of a family who cannot compete in
+companionship with the highly cultured young unmarried lady, with the
+leisure to post herself up in the last interesting book or the newest
+political movement. It is the man who is the more variable in his
+affections than the woman; more constant as she is by nature, as well
+as firmly anchored down by the strength of her maternal love. It is
+therefore on the woman that any loosening of the permanence of the
+marriage tie will chiefly fall in untold suffering. "Le mariage c'est la
+justice," say the French, who have had experience enough of "les unions
+libres"--justice to the wife and mother, securing her the stability of
+her right to her husband's affections, the stability to her right of
+maintenance after she has given up her means of support, above all, the
+stability of her right to the care of her own children. If we want to
+study the innate misery to women arising from the relaxation of the
+married tie, or transient unions, we had better read Professor Dowden's
+_Life of Shelley_--misery not the result of public stigma, for there was
+no such stigma in the circle in which Shelley moved, but misery brought
+about by the facts themselves, and producing state of things which
+Matthew Arnold could only characterize by the untranslatable French word
+"_sale_." But nearer home, one of your most brilliant writers, Mr. Henry
+James, has given us an equally profitable study in his novelette, _What
+Maisie Knew_, which I presume is intended as a satire on freedom of
+divorce, but which again can only be characterized by the French word
+"_sale_."
+
+I confess it does fill me with sardonic laughter to find this oldest and
+stalest of all experiments, this oldest and flattest of failures,
+paraded as a brand new and original panacea for all the woes of our
+family life,--woes which, if nobly borne, at least make "perfect through
+suffering."
+
+There is but one great rock-hewn dam successfully reared against the
+lawless passions of men and women, and that is Christian marriage. It
+has at least given us the Christian home, and pure family life. And
+sometimes it fills me with despair to see enlightened nations, like
+America and Australia, whittling away and slowly undermining this great
+bulwark against the devastating sea of human passion. If only I could
+feel that any poor words of mine could in any faint measure rouse
+American women to set themselves against what must in the end affect the
+depth and steadfastness of those family affections on which the beauty
+and solidity of the national character mainly rest, I should feel indeed
+I had not lived in vain.
+
+At least I can claim that one of your greatest women, Frances Willard,
+was heart and soul with me on this point.
+
+And now to descend to lower levels. Could we not do a little more to
+save our young girls from sacrificing their happiness to false ideals by
+opportunely obtruding a little mature common-sense into their day
+visions and their inexperienced way of looking at things? It is all very
+well in the heyday of life, when existence is full of delight and home
+affection, to refuse a man who could make them happy, because they don't
+quite like the shape of his nose, or because he is a little untidy in
+his dress, or simply because they are waiting for some impossible
+demigod to whom alone they could surrender their independence. But could
+we not mildly point out that darker days must come, when life will not
+be all enjoyment, and that a lonely old age, with only too possible
+penury to be encountered, must be taken into consideration?
+
+God knows I am no advocate for loveless, and least of all for mercenary
+marriages, but I think we want some _via media_ between the French
+_mariage de convenance_ and our English and American method of leaving
+so grave a question as marriage entirely to the whimsies and romantic
+fancies of young girls. We need not go back to the old fallacy that
+marriage is the aim and end of a woman's existence, and absolutely
+necessary for her happiness. Some women are doubtless called to be
+mothers of the race, and to do the social work which is so necessary to
+our complex civilization. Some women may feel themselves called to some
+literary or artistic pursuit, or some other profession, for which they
+require the freedom of unmarried life. But I think I shall carry most
+women with me in saying that for the ordinary woman marriage is the
+happiest state, and that she rarely realizes the deepest and highest in
+her nature except in wifehood and motherhood. Rarely, indeed, can any
+public work that she can do for the world equal the value of that
+priceless work of building up, stone by stone, the temple of a good
+man's character which falls to the lot of his mother. Truly is she
+called the wife, the weaver, since day and night, without hasting and
+without resting, she is weaving the temple hangings, wrought about with
+pomegranates and lilies, of the very shrine of his being. And if our
+girls could be led to see this, at least it would overcome that
+adverseness to marriage which many are now so curiously showing, and
+which inevitably makes them more fastidious and fanciful in their
+choice, And, on the other hand, without falling back into the old
+match-making mamma, exposing her wares in the marriage market to be
+knocked down to the highest bidder, might not parents recognize a little
+more than they do how incumbent on them it is to make every effort to
+give their daughters that free and healthy intercourse with young men
+which would yield them a wider choice, and which forms the best method
+for insuring a happy marriage?
+
+At least, let us open our eyes to the fact that we are face to face with
+some terrible problems with regard to the future of our girls. With safe
+investments yielding less and less interest, it must become more and
+more difficult to make a provision for the unmarried daughters; and if
+the money is spent instead on training them to earn their own bread, we
+are still met by the problem of the early superannuation of women's
+labor, which rests on physical causes, and cannot therefore be removed.
+This at least is no time to despise marriage, or for women of strong and
+independent character to adopt an attitude which deprives the nation of
+many of its noblest mothers.
+
+But if we are to facilitate marriage, which must form, at any rate, the
+main solution of the problems of the near future to which I have
+alluded, if we are to prevent, or even lessen, the degradation of women,
+if we are to extinguish this pit of destruction in our midst, into which
+so many a fair and promising young life disappears, and which
+perpetually threatens the moral and physical welfare of our own sons, if
+we are to stay the seeds of moral decay in our own nation, we must be
+content to revolutionize much in the order of our own life, and adopt a
+lower and simpler standard of living. It is we, and not men, who set the
+standard; it is we who have been guilty of the vulgar ambition of
+following the last social fashion, and doing as our richer neighbors do,
+until in England we have made our girls such expensive articles that
+many young men simply dare not indulge in them, and are led to seek in
+their luxurious clubs the comfort which they should find in a home of
+their own, with all that relaxation of moral fibre which comes from club
+life. Do we seriously think that we are likely successfully to contend
+against the degradation of women by our Rescue Societies and our Refuges
+when we are deliberately bringing about a social condition that
+ministers to it? "Oh, of course," said a near relative of my own, "no
+girl can marry comfortably and live in London with less than a thousand
+a year." All I can answer is that if this be so, it means the
+degradation of women writ large.
+
+And have we even secured the happiness of our own daughters by this high
+standard of living which prevents so many of them from marrying at all?
+These unmarried girls, with no worthy object in life to call out the
+noble energies that lie dormant within them, "lasting" rather than
+"living,"--are they really happy? Is not Robert Louis Stevenson right
+when he says that "the ideal of the stalled ox is the one ideal that
+will never satisfy either man or woman"? Were not the hardships of a
+smaller income and a larger life--a life that would at least satisfy a
+woman's worst foe, heart hunger,--more adapted to their true nature,
+their true happiness?
+
+And to what further admirable results have we attained by this high
+standard of comfort and luxury? Nature has carefully provided for the
+equality of the sexes by sending rather more boys than girls into the
+world, since fewer boys are reared; but we have managed to derange this
+order. We have sent our boys out into the world, but we have kept our
+girls at home, refusing to allow them to rough it with husbands and
+brothers or to endure the least hardness. The consequence is that we
+have nearly a million of surplus women in the old country, while in
+America, and in our own colonies, we have a corresponding surplus of
+men, with all the evil moral consequences that belong to a disproportion
+between the sexes. Truly we may congratulate ourselves!
+
+I would therefore urge that if we are really to grapple with these moral
+evils, we should simplify our standard of living, and educate our girls
+very differently to what, at least in England, we are doing. Culture is
+good, and the more we have of it the better; it gives a woman a wider
+sphere of influence, as well as more enlightened methods of using that
+influence. But if dead languages are to take the place of living
+service; if high mathematics are to work out a low plane of cooking and
+household management; if a first class in moral science is to involve
+third class performance of the moral duties involved in family life,
+then I deliberately say it were better that, like Tennyson's mother, we
+should be
+
+    "Not learned save in gracious household ways."
+
+I protest with the uttermost earnestness against the care of human life,
+of human health, and of human comfort being considered a lower thing and
+of less importance than good scholarship; or that, when we recognize
+that months and even years will have to be devoted to the attainment of
+the one, the arts by which we can fulfil those great human trusts which
+devolve more or less upon every woman can be practised without ever
+having been learnt at all.
+
+Do not misunderstand me. Do not think I am decrying a classical
+education; and, as the daughter of a great mathematician, it is not
+likely that I should underrate mathematics as a mental discipline. I am
+only urging that they should be subordinated to higher and more
+practical issues.
+
+I am thankfully aware that these remarks do not apply to American women
+to the same degree in which they apply to our English girls. The paucity
+of domestic servants, and the consequent pressure of necessity, have
+saved you from the fine lady ideal which we have adopted for our girls
+and the exclusively book education into which we have almost
+unconsciously drifted. You have been constrained to choose some nobler
+type on which to mould your scheme of female education than that of the
+tadpole, which is all head, no hands, a much active and frivolous tail.
+Your girls are brought up not to consider it beneath them to take part
+in the work of the house; and something of the all round capability of
+American women which so strikes us is doubtless owing to their not
+having incurred "this Nemesis of disproportion," and therefore to their
+combining intellectual culture with practical efficiency.
+
+Why we should have taken this fine lady ideal for our girls, when we
+take such a much more practical standard for our boys, has always
+puzzled me. If an excellent opening offered itself to one of our sons at
+a bank, we should agree with his father in expecting him to take it,
+though it would involve the drudgery of sitting in a cramped attitude on
+a tall stool for hours and hours every day. Why should we accept life's
+necessary drudgery for our boys and refuse it for our girls? No life
+worth living can be had without drudgery,--the most brilliant as well as
+the dullest. Darwin spent eight of the best years of his life in an
+exhaustive investigation into the organization of a barnacle--labor
+accompanied, as all intellectual work was with him, by a constant sense
+of physical nausea from which he suffered, till, from sheer weariness
+and disgust at the drudgery, he ends his researches in his emphatic way
+with the exclamation, "D---- the barnacles!" At least a woman's
+household drudgery does not end in a barnacle, or in dead coin, but in a
+living and loved personality whose comfort and health it secures.
+Blessed is drudgery, the homely mother of Patience, "that young and
+rose-lipped cherubim," of quiet endurance, of persistency in well-doing,
+of all the stablest elements of character.
+
+Do not let us refuse to our girls the divine hardness which is the very
+heart of a diviner joy and of that "fuller life" of "which our veins are
+scant," nor refuse for them and for ourselves the words of life: "As the
+Father hath sent Me into the world, even so send I you"; but be content
+to send them into the world to love, to suffer, to endure, to live and
+die for the good of others.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 34: See some curious facts given in Darwin's _Origin of
+Species_.]
+
+[Footnote 35: _David Grieve_, by Mrs. Humphry Ward, sixth edition, p.
+401.]
+
+[Footnote 36: _David Grieve_, p. 524.]
+
+[Footnote 37: _Nineteenth Century_, May, 1892.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+NATIONAL AND IMPERIAL ASPECTS
+
+
+I cannot conclude these imperfect suggestions as to how we may best
+carry up the moral training of our children, and especially of our boys,
+to a higher level, without touching on the wider and national aspect of
+the problems we have been considering. Especially is this necessary in
+relation to that attribute which, in common parlance, arrogates to
+itself the name that covers the vast sweep of all moral obligation and
+calls itself emphatically "morality." "Language," Dr. Martineau has
+finely said, "is the great confessional of the human heart"; and it may
+be in some instinctive sense that this question of personal purity or
+the reverse is the determining force for good or evil to the nation, as
+well as to the family, that has given this restricted sense to the words
+"morality" and "immorality." Yet we are possessed with an inveterate and
+almost irreclaimable tendency to look at the question of purity of life
+from a purely individualistic standpoint, and to regard it as a matter
+concerning the individual rather than the social organism. In electing a
+member for the Legislature how often have we not been told that we are
+only concerned with his public career, and have nothing whatever to do
+with his private life, though the private life is only another
+expression for the man himself; and how can we be called upon to entrust
+the destinies of our country to a libertine who habitually violates the
+obligations of his own manhood and does his best to lower and degrade
+the womanhood of the people he is called as a member of the Legislature
+to protect and to raise? When shall we learn that whatever touches the
+higher life and well-being of the family still more vitally affects the
+wider family of the State, and threatens its disintegration? The family
+in some lower form will survive in the most corrupt form of society; but
+the State, as an organized polity, capable of embodying, preserving, and
+promoting the higher life of the nation, perishes.
+
+I am the more led to dwell earnestly on these wider aspects, since that
+great epoch-making commemoration which marked the sixtieth year of the
+reign of our Queen, and which brought home to the consciousness of the
+nation, as nothing else has ever done, its vast world-wide
+responsibilities. That great national festival, with its proud imperial
+note, in which we celebrated the rise and progress of that "larger
+Venice with no narrow 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.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+White Cross Series of Tracts.
+
+White Cross Manual. Containing an Account of the Origin and Progress of
+the Movement, A Statement of its Objects and Methods, Plan of
+Organization, Suggestions on the Conduct of the Work, Devotional
+Offices, etc. Paper, 64 pages ... $0.05
+
+1. AN ADDRESS TO THE MEMBERS OF THE WHITE CROSS ARMY.
+   By the Right Rev. the BISHOP OF DURHAM.
+
+2. THE WHITE CROSS ARMY.
+   A Statement of the Bishop of Durham's Movement. BY ELLICE HOPKINS.
+
+3. PER ANGUSTA AD AUGUSTA. BY J.E.H.
+
+7. THE RIDE OF DEATH. By ELLICE HOPKINS.
+
+8. THE BLACK ANCHOR. By ELLICE HOPKINS.
+
+9. THE AMERICAN ZULU. By ELLICE HOPKINS.
+
+Price, 3 cents each. $2.00 a hundred, direct from the Publishers.
+
+
+Shorter papers.
+
+$1.00 a hundred.
+
+LOST IN QUICKSAND. By J.E.H.
+
+IS IT NATURAL? By J.E.H.
+
+MORAL MONEY CLIPPERS. By J.E.H.
+
+WHO HOLDS THE ROPE? By J.E.H.
+
+ROLLING AWAY THE STONE. By ELLICE HOPKINS.
+
+TOUCHING PITCH. By ELLICE HOPKINS.
+
+THE DEFACED IMAGE RESTORED. By ELLICE HOPKINS.
+
+POWER TO LET. By ELLICE HOPKINS.
+
+
+E.P. DUTTON & CO., PUBLISHERS.
+
+31 West 23d Street, New York.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and
+Sons, by Ellice Hopkins
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