Read Ebook: Following a Chance Clew; Or Nick Carter's Lucky Find by Carter Nicholas House Name

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 2382 lines and 53365 words, and 48 pages

We have permitted heavy and nerve-exhausting work to be done in just the years when the adolescent was making the always difficult passage of the boy to the man, of the girl to the woman. And for this reason their suppressed, not-understood, thwarted instincts have broken out in unpleasing and often dangerous ways. Is it any wonder if in such circumstances boys turn to petty robberies and other unsocial acts, while girls display some of the less estimable characteristics of the prostitute?

Our ideal is to ignore sex in industry; to deny the strong and necessary separations that nature's wisdom places as barriers between boy and girl, between man and woman. We make our sons and daughters compete in education and in industry. No doubt education and industry are ill-fitted for males, but at any rate they were intended for males. Intellectually inferior to the boy or the man, the girl or woman is not. She is exasperatingly observant, often understands character with unconsidered quickness, feels spontaneously; but it does not follow that there is any value for her in the collection of dead facts, stored by abstract-minded professors--all the futile things we call education, which show in every direction the most coarse lack of understanding of the needs of the child and of life. And the girl suffers more than the boy, for the girl-student does as she is told much more conscientiously than boys. Similarly in industry: tapping or pushing at a machine until she taps or pushes on in her dreams; all the more monotonous kinds of machine-tending will wear feminine nerves, naturally more irritable than those of men, more than the same work will wear the male nerves. Not that I believe in subordinating the worker of either sex to the machine. What I want to prevent is the same stupid sacrifice of girls and women in industry as has been permitted in the case of boys and men. There has been in our commercialized society no kind of effective tradition for the care and guidance of adolescent workers, and, there is no escaping from the condemning proofs of our neglect: there has been, and, indeed, is still going on, in many directions a vast range of betrayal and baseness in the way we have shirked our duties to the young. As the writer, from whose Report I have quoted, says, with a rather grim irony: "a strain has been put on the character of young persons which might have corrupted the integrity of a Washington and have undermined the energy of Samuel Smiles."

The war is over, and with it the special and pressing need for women's and girls' work, but the consequences of the war period are far, indeed, from nearing their end. Following all the industrial confusion of the war, we are now facing the certainty of wide-spread unemployment among women and girls. We have condemned thousands of them to unemployment with the same thoughtlessness with which they were called into industry; and in the less skilled ranges of employment, the always existing competition between men and women and boys and girls is certain to be fiercely accentuated.

It is officially stated that the number of women and girls who took out-of-work donation policies during the period between the Armistice and February 14th was 633,318. Of these the large majority 630,874 were civilians, while 2444 belonged to the forces. Thousands of women and girls who during the war proved themselves most capable at engineering and wood-work are now ruled out of those occupations. There was a girl of twenty, for instance, at Loughborough who showed real genius at gauge-making, work that required accuracy to the ten thousandth part of an inch. Although she took to the work only during the war, she became so good that instead of being sent to a factory she was kept to instruct others. This is the type of girl who now has to seek other employment. There can be no question of the difficulties of the situation.

Many workers are holding out to get the same level of work and pay as they have left. Strongest of all is the aversion shown to domestic work: many girls who have been engaged on munitions during the war have thrown up their unemployment pay rather than again enter domestic service. Factory work has bitten into girl's lives; they do not want to do any other kind of work.

Look at the girl-workers you may see everywhere in such numbers to-day; they are of all ages and they belong to all classes of society. Watch them as they fight for an entrance into motor omnibuses and trams, as they crowd the station platforms. See them parading the streets in their unemployed hours; they are the companions of every soldier; they crowd the cinemas, music-halls, and theaters. Who has altered the fashions about every three months? and this has been going on in war time. Why, the munition workers and the forty-shilling-a-week girls. No longer was finery always bought out of men's earnings, but out of their own; put on to give some man a treat or to fire the envy of other girls. The factory girl has taken to silk stockings and fine lingerie and the lady to Balbriggan and calico.

The vast change that has come into the daily lives of women, possibly, in no direction is more startling than it has been in this matter of dress. Many shops which are near the factories where munition girls have been employed have organized war-clubs, in which, on payment of a small weekly sum, the girls could buy articles of attire far in advance even of their high wages. Shops festooned with furs of every description, where coats costing ten, twenty, and even thirty and more guineas, were frequently bought; shops whose windows were a clutter of tissue-like crepe-de-chine underclothes and blouses; boot-clubs and jewelry-clubs, these last, garish establishments, secure in the glamour of irresistible imitations--all have urged to extravagance and a madness for ornament.

The West-end tradesmen and the shareholders of the big drapery shops have been chuckling and rubbing their hands. Dividends have sprung up to a figure they have never before reached. Never before has so much money been wasted on adornment.

Our young women have little thought beyond the present use of what they buy. But I believe that much of this extravagance--the delight in self-gratification which finds other expression in jazzing, in sweet-eating, in card playing, smoking and similar pleasures--is not so much the outcome of the thoughtlessness of youth as a way of escape from Self, a misdirected effort toward safety, unconscious no doubt, but terribly real.

Notice these girls. You will see them best in a walk down Oxford street or in Leicester Square, where, snared by each displayed window, they hover and cluster like wasps drawn to a trap of sweet food. All the biggest shops in London are devoted to women's clothes. Do you realize that? And it is not only that they are the biggest, but there are more of them than any other half a dozen trades put together--the only exception being the drink trade. During the war their number has multiplied, indeed in some districts shops have sprung up like mushrooms in the night.

There is a much deeper importance in this question of dress than usually is allowed. Irresponsible spending does encourage irresponsible living.

Almost everyone has at one time or another thought of some reform they would wish to be made in the society in which they live. Now, if I could have my choice as to any one reform I would choose to be done, it would be to make it illegal for a tradesman to display for sale any kind of wearing apparel, dress goods or articles connected with a woman's toilet, either in shop windows or inside the shops. Nothing must be shown to any customer until it is asked for. I do really believe this simple reform would do more to emancipate women, and, through their emancipation, to liberate men, than any other reform. We pray in our churches "lead us not into temptation," and everywhere we permit in our shops the display of goods to tempt the young and the foolish.

An orgy of adornment has been claiming a veritable sacrifice of comfort and health, possibly even of life. All-night vigils in search of bargains are frequent at the bi-annual sale-festivals. Policemen have to restrain the ardent votaries, as they press forward and struggle and fight to obtain entrance to certain shops, like caged animals fighting for food. Fashions are followed passionately and with little variety. Dark heads and golden heads have the hair bobbed or dressed in the same way, with the same plastered side-curls, and adorned with hats alarmingly alike, weighted with queer and polychrome ornaments of beads, wool, tassels, and I know not what, while the face beneath shows one color of yellowish white, the result of the excessive and unskillful use of cheap powder. In the snow and slush of the spring, I have seen girls dressed in a way fit only for the hottest indoor room. The gauze silk-stockings offering no protection to the tortured feet even when the boots and shoes were made of more than paper stoutness; while the fashionable woolen wrap, even the fur collar or coat could not counterbalance the danger to health from blouses, low-necked and fashioned of stuff scarcely thicker than cobwebs. Here and there the many girls, beautiful in quiet uniforms, have served to throw into sharper contrast the absurdities of the dress of their sisters.

I ask myself how this taste for spending money on dress and ornament--a taste very little different from the instinct which causes savages to adorn their half-naked bodies with feathers, beads and shells--is to be satisfied when women's wages fall? There would seem to be nothing too useless or too expensive for girls to buy. Work has failed in teaching them the simple lesson that not only is it wrong to waste money, but it is wrong to waste labor for the gratification of whims. We are having the need for economy preached and shouted at us from every quarter. Surely it is right to think about this wild spending on adornment, and give at least a few glances to the future.

What is likely to happen now when the full years of war change to empty years of peace? No longer able to spend in the way to which their high wages have made them accustomed, girls will seek to get presents from men; they will want excitement and the dress and pleasures to satisfy that need, also to hold the envy of their friends. This must lead to prostitution. The weaker sort of girl will prefer to sell her body rather than go back to a humdrum life of drudgery in back-kitchens. It is well that we should remember that, if women are to suffer through men's passions, men will suffer no less from women's greed.

I desire to be quite fair. Almost all girls, I think, are better looking since 1914, more confident, more brightly attractive; sometimes they are deliriously gay, more often cheaply aggressive and noisy. Yet, at other times, they seem deadened and slow in response. None of them are shy. Their eyes say things that are hard to read; they exhibit no end of energy, but there is a curious kind of contradiction--a confusion and difficult defiance, with much nervous weakness. I can find no steadfast happiness.

I would ask my readers, as often I have asked myself, a question: Have these modern girls not lost much of the tender, waiting, indefiniteness of youth? I have seen so many among them who, to me at least, appear at odds with the world, and their passionate, unbalanced and over-excited natures. Their faces at sixteen, fifteen, and even at fourteen years, already are old, with hard confidence showing in the bold gaze, but no happiness. How many bear an expression of almost tired disappointment, a disappointment, not of the senses, but of the soul. And this expression is so common. To my eyes, girls far more and far oftener look alike now than formerly they did. So often they seem acting, struggling almost against something in themselves; something they don't understand that draws them into many bewildered actions. Can't you see, they are all so unconsciously dissatisfied, so unable to possess themselves in peace, that nothing they do matters? You will, I am sure, deny this statement. You will tell me again of the splendid work done by these girls and young women, you will speak of their recognition as citizens of the State, of how life has opened to them, and of the new liberty they have gained in so many directions. I do not mind. I care nothing for the liberty in outside things that leaves the soul in chains. I tell you they are dissatisfied because the soul of woman is crushed, unable to come up from its dark hiding, and breathe the sun and light to see that life is good. Why cannot the old faith come back? Why cannot it come back?

It is, of course, easy to write of these evils, the difficult thing is to find a remedy. Many attempts are being made; much discussion is taking place about the future position of women in industry; training is being given to adolescent girls; even schools for wives have been formed. The newly established Ministry of Health has wide schemes for maternity and child welfare. Never was so much expended to right things that are wrong. Yet, I cannot think the remedies offered are likely to be satisfactory.

Let me here pause for a moment to compare my view of the true remedy for the present unsatisfactoriness of women's lives, and the consequent wastage of baby lives, with those remedies now so commonly put forward by the reformers. I assert that women are trying in vain to transfer their affection from babies to machines, and to take care of their babies, if they have them, in the few hours left over after days seriously devoted to business. I will test the results in a way fairer to my opponents than to myself, comparing the effects of their method at its best with my system in circumstances little favorable to human life.

Bradford is a wealthy town: spending some ?40,000 annually on the care of infants in a total population of 300,000. Its institutions and arrangements for this purpose are famous; its infant department, its graded municipal milk, its free-feeding for expectant mothers--all are as nearly perfect as is possible; and the men who have developed and direct its municipal system of protection for infants are well known for their ability and enthusiasm. The birth-rate is as low as Malthusians could desire. But all its care is but an attempt to lessen evils brought about by a wrong system; for the mothers of Bradford are not in their homes, but in woolen factories.

County Roscommon is a poor district in Ireland, with a primitive and superstitious population of agriculturists; the birth-rate is very high, and there is practically no public provision for the safeguarding of infant life. But its backward ignorant mothers tend and feed their babies after the manner of the earliest ages.

You will see what I wish to make plain. Those whom I criticize are dealing with symptoms instead of working to remove the real cause of the disease. They work hard and achieve little. Of course their efforts are praiseworthy, and, under present conditions, frightfully necessary. But they are just about as lastingly useful as trying to mend a badly broken china cup at home with cheap cement. You know what happens: as soon as you succeed in getting two pieces to stick together another piece tumbles away, and, at last, if by excessive patience the work gets done and the cup is mended, the first shock of hot water makes all the pieces again fall apart. It is a solution that gives great opportunity of employment, one indeed that goes on forever; perhaps that is why it fascinates the child-like minds of the feminists. I want something very different.

The modern conception of personal rights is essentially individualistic, and has arisen only under industrial values of life; the result of its further application as a social criterion for women, must logically be exactly what it has been in the experience of the past century: a bitter and brutal struggle for self-aggrandizement, with the failures remorselessly crushed underfoot, and the very idea of a fixed common responsibility and common good for all forgotten or denied. My plea for women is, therefore, based not upon the notion of equal rights, but rather upon that of equal duties. Moral equality means equality in the will to serve--not self, but all. And the practical correlative of this conception must be a social organization which secures equalities of opportunity for service to women and men. The only rights I desire to claim for my sex are those necessary to the discharge of its own duties; the fulfillment of the instinctive maternal craving; the realization of the deepest impulses of a woman's nature.

The pitiless war of every individual against his, or her, fellow waged with gold or with steel, can never make life other than mean and empty. Women and men must learn again to regard themselves as part of a mightier whole, one of the human race, and, as we feel in moments of deeper insight, of the universe, which is a unity in spite of all the discords it contains.

You see, in my view of life, such freedom can lead only to a more degraded slavery. And because I am certain about this, I do not desire success for women in the blind struggle based on the doctrine of personal rights. A doctrine which results inevitably in separations, in hatreds, in disorders and struggling one with another. Unity of ideals and of conduct becomes impossible. The general life is driven about in this way or the other, directed by this purpose or by that, but always by individualistic principles, and not to serve the good of all, but by each person for his own, or her own, ends. How can order come out of such a way of life? Do you think you are going to improve things in the old selfish ways. I tell you the result can be nothing but a further failure of vision. The mountain heights become obscured by the mists going up from the damp valleys, and the soul loses its way.

FOOTNOTES:

The statistics show the situation up to April, 1918.

The words I have italicized are not mine, but are quoted from the Report.

It is worth noting that, as far as I know, no word of protest has been made by women against these statements. The Report, since I wrote this chapter, has been widely commented on in the daily papers, in some of the weeklies, and in all the suffrage papers, but these passages have been passed over. Surely this is very significant.

Since published by the Fabian Society as a small book.

Since writing this, the Government, backed by the Labor Party, has passed its Pre-war Practices Bill, which will exclude women from many of the trades which they have entered during the war; trades in which they have done skilled work and received high wages. On August 15, The Sex Disqualification Bill, after a promising early career, went by default.

THE COVENANT OF GOD

WAR MARRIAGES AND ROMANTIC LOVE, WHICH CONTRASTS THE ENGLISH IDEAL OF PERSONAL HAPPINESS IN MARRIAGE WITH THAT HELD BY THE JEWS OF MARRIAGE AS A RACIAL DUTY.

"Which forsaketh the guide of her youth, and forgetteth the covenant of her God."--Prov. ii. 17.

A few weeks ago I read a book about a war-marriage, entitled the "Wife of a Hero"; it was not a good novel, but the situation it presented was of great interest. We witness the manifold conflicts resulting from a marriage entered into in haste and under superficial emotions, between a war-hero and the more complicated type of modern woman--the woman of brains and nerves, fastidious, intellectually passionate and at the same time swayed by a sensuality, which is neither acknowledged nor understood. Hence this woman's marriage with a man, who, sufficiently a hero to die magnificently was quite unfitted to live decently. You see, his ideals did not get any further than his vanity. In his view a woman--whether wife or mistress, it did not signify which she was--was only a chattel, an object to give enjoyment to him, in fact, a prostitute. He did not know he felt this, could not know it, in fact. It would have needed a revolution of his character to turn his vision to something other than himself. Neither did the wife realize her egoism, an egoism more agreeable certainly than was his, because on a less crude plane, but equally reprehensible, as spiritually barren and limited to Self as was that of the man.

Now, Miss Netta Syrett, the writer of the book, seems to be unaware of such a failure on the woman's part. All the blame is shoveled on to the hero, all the sympathy wrapped like a thick woolen cloud about the heroine. Miss Syrett is a great feminist. As we should expect, the marriage is broken in the Divorce Court. The returned and invalided hero, decorated with his Victoria Cross, seeks happiness with an earlier love, and a marriage is made of a frankly sensual character. Meanwhile the heroine finds a spiritual mate in the person of an old friend, and a second marriage is made. We are led to believe that all the wrong is set right. Now, I doubt this. I believe the cause which brought the first marriage to such painful disaster was not dependent only on the evident unsuitability of the partners to live with one another; the grossness of the man and the believed refinement of the woman need not necessarily have failed in finding happiness in union. No, the cause of failure was deeper, within themselves, dependent on the blind egoism of both the husband and the wife and their wrong understanding of the institution of marriage. I do not think that in either case the second marriages were likely to be much happier than the first marriage.

The love-story of to-day differs in one essential way from the love-story of yesterday. Yesterday's love story always ended with marriage bells; to-day's, which is a far harder love-story to write, begins with them. Earlier authors, in short, shirked the real problem of marriage, they ended where they should have begun. For the main difficulties do not lie in the period of falling in love, in the courtship or the honeymoon, but in the preservation of love after these passionate preliminaries are over.

Now, I would like to be able to say that the modern love-story affords a sure sign of a change that has taken place in our attitude towards marriage. I am not, however, at all certain. We talk a great deal, I fear, that is all. The innumerable tragedies of marriage among us to-day are witness to our failure; they have a far closer connection than often is recognized with the romantic and vulgar poverty of our point of view.

Our romances are slightly vulgar. Vulgarity is a sign of confusion and weakness of spirit. We still far too much associate romance with courtship and not with marriage; that is one reason English marriages so often are unhappy. "Thank God that our love-time is ended!" cried a north country bride on the day that marriage terminated her long engagement.

Now, I do not know whether this delightful story is true, but it does illustrate the attitude of many ordinary couples, whose love adventure ends at the very hour it should begin. Every true marriage ought to be a succession of courtships.

Marriage has not escaped the general disturbances of the past five years. The causes are many and obvious. Man is generally guided, not directly by the automatic instincts, working through the lower nerve centers, but rather by ideas acting in the higher nerve centers of his brain. Instincts with him are not instinctive, but are checked and supervised by intelligence. Only when a great shock, a sudden fear or joy, occurs does the instinctive working replace the consciously planned action: the man or the woman find themselves speaking in an unaccustomed voice, saying what they did not know they would say; doing unaccustomed things, which they had never intended to do, sometimes they lose control of their body--they rage, their speech descends to inarticulate cries. Then the old system of instinctive response to the outer world, which generally is inactive and so imperceptibly becomes disused, becomes by the sudden generation of excessive emotion stocked with energy, so that it exceeds in power the energy of which the intelligence makes use. Impulses leap into being, and very often there is a sudden response to adventure and more primitive actions.

This is what the War did in many departments of life. Normal control, conventional standards, old careful habits of conduct, were broken through at a time of excessive emotionalism. The many hasty marriages were a sign of the nervous condition of the times. The customary criticisms of reason were not heard, or not until the emotional storm had subsided. This is, of course, a condition not infrequent in marriage; but now it was exaggerated; such marriages may not, unfortunately, bear the scrutiny of minds restored to sobriety.

We have called these war marriages real romances. But are they? What does the husband know of the girl he has taken to be one with his own flesh? What does she know of him? Never have they had one real talk, never stood the test of a quarrel, never passed unexciting days with one another.

I want to labor that point. The most frequent causes of trouble in marriage are born of the daily fret of common living, of minor habits, of omissions and stupidities. Romantics may protest, but what most strains and tears our love are just trifles, so insignificant that rarely is their adverse action even noticed.

The safe and right consideration in any relationship that is to last into marriage is not only--are our persons agreeable to each other? But, can we live together and continue to love one another? It needs a lot of grit and a lot of duty to keep in love with daily life. But war turned men into heroes, while women thought the war was going to be so fine they could do anything to help; they wanted their share, each one to have a stake for herself, and the easiest way to gain this was the ownership of a soldier-lover. It prevented the feeling of "being left out." A new friendliness sprang up between the sexes. Advances were made, perfectly natural, but quite unusual; and the men in khaki and in blue found themselves diligently pursued, and it must be owned they liked it.

Thus many men have taken girls for wives who are everything they don't want their wives to be. There is no fitness of disposition and character, no unity of ideals, no passionate surrender of the Self in devotion, no fixed purpose of duty, no harmony in tastes or outlook. Such love must come to disaster; it is like a damp squib, it is never properly alight and fades out swiftly in noisy splutters. Then, when the first desire goes, no friend but an enemy is discovered.

A man falls in love very readily, and girls have used, quite unconsciously sometimes, very consciously in some cases, the man's undisciplined impulses for his own subjection. I need not recall incidents that all among us must have witnessed. I do not wish to pass any censure upon women. The sensualist within most of us is stronger than we women admit, and the primitive fact forces us to take risks, sending us headlong into a thousand dangers.

Can we ever find perfect love? Is it not like exercise of the body? You can develop it to a certain point, but not beyond without danger and very slowly with continued patient work. Do we not need exercise of the soul? I do not know. Often I feel I know nothing. To some men and women it is all simple enough, a woman is just a woman and a man is a man. The trouble begins when any woman becomes the one desired woman and any man the one desired man.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet