Part 6
The first thing to be considered is so to train the students that they are able gradually to develop a measure of physical strength, and at the same time to teach them how to obtain a maximum of result from a minimum of effort. Many an untrained man could only accomplish with great exertion what a trained woman can do without difficulty. In a little while not only do the spade and the wheelbarrow lose all their terrors, but the comparatively light modern plough can be handled, even on fairly heavy land, without excessive fatigue. Then the balance must be preserved between practice and theory. You will remember that the method of combining the two is not new. Mr. Wackford Squeers taught it at Dotheboys Hall. "W-I-N-D-E-R, a casement. Now go and clean them." Perhaps this was the germ of the idea--who knows? The lecturer in the college is supplemented by the expert in the field, dairy, and garden, and the student is not limited to the grounds of the institution, ample though they be. On outlying farms, in private gardens, market gardens, at country flower shows and exhibitions, the pupils of this and other colleges are expected to demonstrate their efficiency, thereby learning how the familiar problems may vary in their incidents and application. There is no element of secrecy. All that is taught and all that is learned is open to the inspection of the section of the public that is interested. The college has terms similar to those of school and university--thirty-nine weeks of work and thirteen of holiday--and while girls are admitted as soon as their school education is finished, at the age of sixteen or thereabouts, women can join at any age. If they have the energy and determination, they are never too late to learn. For school-girls over twelve years of age who intend to take up agricultural or garden work when school days are over, there are holiday classes at which the 'prentice work may be studied under the most pleasant conditions possible. Most of the school-girls who take this course regard it as an ideal holiday.
For the benefit of adults who desire a special study, short courses can be arranged at all times, but it is, of course, well understood that such courses do not make the student truly representative of the college tuition. It has long been recognised that you cannot make agriculturists or horticulturists in a hurry. The minimum period of complete study is two years, but the complete course that turns out the finished student is a full three years. It is in view of this hard truth that I have eyed askance the suggestion that a course that is to be practical can be crowded into three months. Such a term would hardly avail a genius. As far as I have been able to see, the not very considerable percentage of failures associated with agricultural colleges is due to the inability of students to distinguish between enthusiasm and staying power. They have not realised that work must be done at every season and in nearly all weather, that the sun is not always shining, and that the novelty of association with Nature will wear away from all who are not Nature-lovers at heart and by instinct. That is why I am afraid of short-term training. Two or three years develop not only aptitude, but character; enthusiasms have time to take a fresh and long lease of life. Training brings confidence too. Girls who wish to be gardeners, agriculturists, poultry-farmers, estate managers, and the rest, will do well to remember that the new or the modern methods they are taught in an up-to-date institution are not necessarily followed in the place where they get their first engagement. If they have to control men, they must expect to find a certain intolerance of change, a certain resentment of direction. Unless they are thoroughly sure of themselves they cannot supervise the work of others.
What the student has to remember is that most of the methods she will find outside her training college are wasteful, obsolete, or second rate. Scientific training is unknown to the average gardener, market gardener, dairy-farmer, and poultry-keeper. Our old countryside is run on amasingly inept lines. Foolishness of any kind that has behind it the sanction of a single generation is sacrosanct. If a father has farmed or gardened foolishly, that special manner of foolishness is sacred to his son. We have always relied upon "the foreigner." He sends us fruit, eggs, honey, vegetables, corn, cattle food; while the seas are open, we need never go hungry. I do not pretend that we can do without him for everything, but we can certainly do very much more in the future than we have done in the past, and we have been warned by our Government to do it. That is why I have so much hope for the future of the woman on the land. I feel that her work is no longer concerned with hobbies and private profit; henceforward it is, in effect, a kind of public service. The Government is avowedly anxious for the future of the land, frankly concerned to check the annual outlay of millions of pounds for foodstuffs that we are well able to raise at home.
Why, for example, should we spend forty thousand pounds a year upon honey, to name what our American friends would call "a side line," when we have a wealth of flowers and fruit blossom that would not only yield all that is required, but would even enable us to substitute honey for much of the sugar that is only sold to us when it has been chemically treated to improve appearance at the expense of quality? Why must we gather eggs from the far ends of the earth, and bacon from countries where pigs are fed as they are said to be fed in China? When I think of the thousands of women who are ready, willing, and, if properly trained, able to take a hand in the great task of feeding the people, it seems to me that the seed I sowed in 1898, to the accompaniment of much amusement, derision, and hostile criticism, has grown into a very sturdy and healthy tree. I even venture to think that the fruits will be more refreshing than those of the Insurance Act itself. As far as the records I have been able to examine teach me, there have been very few failures to achieve success among the women who have taken resolutely and completely to this comparatively new walk in life. The students have done more than merely earn a comfortable living. They have been the disseminators of the new ideas, the modern theories of agriculture, horticulture, and apiculture, the introducers of order and method into realms where chaos ruled amiably and ineffectively. In many cases they have even succeeded so far as to disarm prejudice and to persuade omniscient man that a method is not good merely because it is customary or easy to follow. And what they have done is small by the side of what they may hope to do.
What is needed just now, when the Government is really awake to the importance of woman's work on the land, is an extension of the agricultural colleges and a series of State grants. At present the work is costly. The upkeep of a big institution is expensive, because you cannot treat the land precisely as you would for utility farming. It is there to teach pupils, to carry out demonstrations. So it is with the glass, that is so costly to build and to heat. Then, again, professors--the best in the country--must be asked to lecture; and while agricultural colleges are in the heart of the country, the professors are probably living in distant university towns, so that their lectures are bound to be costly. Let us remember, too, quite frankly, that there is not much money for the girl who is not able to start a little establishment of her own or to go into partnership. There is a happy, healthy, useful life, there is valuable service, quite unrecorded, to the public at large, but the monetary reward is of the slightest and the training is long.
It is necessary, then, in view of the growing demand for the work of woman's hands, that the Government should make grants to the established colleges as they make grants to other educational bodies, and it would be well if every County Council that does not conduct an agricultural college of its own would give a few scholarships annually in the college nearest to its county town. These steps are needed to give an impetus to the work that is now being done. Had they been taken when first I pleaded for them, we should have been in quite a different position to-day. There would, at least, have been enough capable workers to meet the most pressing demands. At present they tell me that at Studley every post brings applications for gardeners and dairy workers, for women competent to train others, but there is not a single disengaged pupil. Doubtless a similar state of things obtains at the other colleges in Kent, Worcestershire, Sussex, and elsewhere.
It has been seen that properly trained women can do all the work of farm and garden. Even ploughing is not beyond them, save on very stiff clay soils. They are entirely successful in handling animals; horses, cows, bullocks, sheep, pigs, and goats are all tractable when cared for by women. They are taught at all well-conducted institutions to substitute knack for force, and they have, as is admitted on all hands, the right temperament for tasks that demand not only time, but patience. As beekeepers they do very well, the gift of delicate handling standing them in good stead, and in the glasshouses they are easily first. Dr. Hamilton, the energetic and gifted Warden of Studley, tells me that she finds that the health of girls engaged upon the land, whether in the garden or on the farm, is good, and that many who arrive at the College in a delicate state of health grow very much stronger. She finds that the work makes women not only healthy, but happy--presumably because happiness is largely a product of good health.
Perhaps the needs of the country will be the determining factor in sending women to the land in the summer-times before us; but we may take it for granted that one of the results of war will be the large extension of the realm of the woman-worker of the field and garden. We cannot shut our eyes to the sad truth that there will be war widows in their thousands, and countless girls whose chances of married happiness have been destroyed. To many of these the land will supply the only anodyne that life has to offer. In hard work and the open air they will learn to forget; in the development of garden, or farm, or orchard they will find something to interest them. With their advent we may look to find a great addition to the national food supply, a great saving of money that has gone hitherto across the Channel or the Atlantic Ocean.
I am inclined to think that women are more likely than men to take advantage of the homeland opportunities. Men who have lived strenuously and dangerously may not be found content with a handful of acres and a cartload of restrictions at home, when the far-flung Dominions overseas have so much more with which to tempt them. I see that Sir Harry Verney's Committee, appointed to consider the question of land settlement for soldiers and sailors, suggested holdings of twenty-five acres for dairy-farming, and four-acre holdings for pigs, poultry, fruit, etc. These last are to cost £24 per annum. Consider as against this the one hundred and sixty acre grant of the Canadian Government, the additions made by the Canadian Pacific Railway and, perhaps, other great corporations, whereby a settler finds a house, farm buildings, fifty acres broken up and planted with wheat. There the rent is part payment of the purchase price. I do not think the Government is going to hold soldiers and sailors with anything Sir Harry Verney and his committee-men propose to offer, but I do think that if the Government will make a like offer to the women of England, and will arrange to do for them what it proposes to do for the men, this latest scheme of small holdings might well be a success. Women could and would make an agricultural colony. They delight in doing small things well; they are frugal and temperate; they can make much out of very little. Whatever their war experiences and suffering, it will not have developed in them the spirit of unrest. Their ambitions do not seek the particular kind of achievement that appeals most to men; they find happiness where a man might find boredom. They love the sense of independence, the freedom and simplicity that country life affords and enjoins.
Above all else that concerns woman's career on the land, it has clearly been shown now that in times of crisis the men who work on the land may be called away, and our home food supplies may be jeopardised by their absence. In these circumstances the movement must spread. The flower and market garden, the field, the conservatory, and the outhouse must be recognised as providing a pleasant sphere of activity for girls and women, and there is more than enough land in these islands to provide small holdings for many years to come for all who have the will and the capacity to develop them. In conclusion, let me utter a warning that demands the attention of all who love their country. At the present time we only produce about twenty per cent. of the food we eat. For the rest we depend upon our mercantile marine and our power to hold, not only the seas, but the skies above and the depths beneath. Without any comment, it seems to me that this simple and undeniable statement should suffice to settle the career of many a sturdy country-loving English girl.
XI
GERMAN WOMEN AND MILITARISM
Reading the record of Germany's war methods, even those of us who are endeavouring to think sanely through these evil days must be impressed by the overwhelming evidence of their complete ruthlessness.
We who have travelled in Germany not once, but many times, know full well that harshness and cruelty are not associated with the majority. There are countless Germans who could only be cruel in obedience to orders, and, of course, every German will do what he is told, just as the Children of Israel did when Joshua, who appears to have invented "frightfulness," was carrying out his merciless campaign. If we admit that the simple German of the south is not cruel at heart, that he is rather a dreamer and a sentimentalist with strong love for domestic pleasures, we find that the policy of "frightfulness" must be ascribed to the military party, consisting for the most part of Prussians, with headquarters in Berlin.
These men are the organisers of war, and speak through the mouths of writers like Treitschke, Bernhardi, and the rest. It is they who have torn up the treaties and conventions that were, humanity hoped, to decide the conduct of war. They are responsible for the curious outburst of national hatred against this country that is at once so startling and so silly, a revelation of the sad truth that Germany is suffering from neurosis.
I have been trying to trace "frightfulness" to its source, not through the medium of books or papers, but in the light of my own knowledge of the country and my past acquaintance with some of its leading men, and I think that the philosophic historian of the times to come, whose vision is not obscured by the smoke of battle or the fury of combatants, will not hesitate to declare that the worst and saddest features of war as waged by the Germans are due to the fact that in their country women are kept more in the background than in the country of any other great Power.
The fault, as I will point out later on, is not that of the women, but of the leaders of German faction who have deliberately suppressed woman, and of nearly all the leaders of German thought who, being dependent on Government favour, have subscribed to their policy of deliberate suppression. Here and there an independent thinker has arisen nearly always from the ranks of Social Democracy. Bebel's book on women, for example, is a standard work, but the few lights do no more than emphasise the surrounding darkness.
Look round Europe for a moment. Russia is a backward empire and the spirit of progress moves over it with slow feet, but Russia is making vast strides, and the plough that will trace deep furrows in the virgin soil of its social life is drawn by man and woman together. All the professions are open to women, even those in which women are not found here. The Russian engineer who planned the newest bridge over the Neva was a woman. Men and women students work side by side on terms of absolute equality, and compete for honours that often fall to the gentler sex.
Russian women of the educated classes are more than merely well informed, they are brilliant. Linguists, women of affairs, they have a grip of actualities of the empire of which they form a significant part. In spite of autocratic rule and limited freedom there is such a full life for the Russian woman as her German sister has never known, except in dreams of emancipation. In Finland, be it remembered, women sit in Parliament.
Turn to France, and it may be declared emphatically that woman rules. Women are doctors, barristers, and scientists; they are members of the Goncourt Academy; they are the heads of some of the most important business institutions; they give the most exclusive _salons_ their distinction. Public opinion is moulded by them; their influence makes and breaks Cabinets. Feminism is one of the strongest forces in France. Quiescent to-day or working in quietness, this force will dominate a France released from war.
Even in Belgium, of whose progress we hear little, women have been largely responsible for the organisation of the middle and working classes, an organisation that was well-nigh complete before war broke out, and in the slow rebuilding that is to come we may look with confidence to the Belgian woman to play a leading _rôle_. Turn to a group of neutral countries--Denmark, Norway, Sweden--and it will be seen that feminism is moving with vast strides along the path of national progress. Woman is asserting herself in all of them, contributing her thought to her country's problems, taking an ever important place in its councils.
Alone of the great Powers Germany has elected to forget or to disregard as a negligible quantity the opinion of woman, and the reason is not far to seek. For years past the German has forgotten the respect and reverence he owes to his own womenfolk. _Küche, Kinder, Kirche_--he calls alliteration to his aid to express a growing contempt for the sex and the narrowest possible view of its world function. Intoxicated with the vision of imperial domination, he has regarded his own sex as the one motive force in the universe.
He has not watched the slow awakening of women in the countries around him; he has not noted how bonds of sympathy, light as gossamer, yet strong as steel, have stretched from country to country, binding our sex in a large and ever widening sisterhood, inarticulate now, or at least hardly coherent, but only waiting for their appointed hour to assume a fuller share of the glories, the burdens and the responsibilities of life. Woman's influence, silent, world-wide, pervasive, has been treated by the evangels of Kultur as though it were nonexistent, and in the hour of crisis woman as a united force has avenged herself for years of neglect, scorn and brutality. She is everywhere a belligerent.
I do not know the country in Europe where women are treated as they are in Germany. Not many countries can vie with the United States in the attention bestowed upon the gentler sex, but as I have endeavoured to show, they are respected more in every belligerent country than they are in the one that sought to rest supreme in Europe. Even in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, where women must often work as hard as men, they stand upon a secure footing of affection and respect. The smaller courtesies, the greater services of life are theirs. In some definite measure they complete the home. But you cannot bring an indictment against a whole nation, and I do not seek to do so.
In tens of thousands of German homes the wife and daughters are loved and honoured, but in the rank and file of military circles, even among the men who hold official positions and boast a certain standing, woman has been dethroned--she is regarded as an incumbrance necessary for the production of further generations of supermen, who shall inherit the earth. This attitude of mind reveals itself in the action that speaks louder than words. The toleration and the contempt to which I refer are everywhere apparent. No good-looking woman is safe in Germany from the ill-bred stares and comments of the men with whom she must travel in train or tram.
If women enter a theatre or restaurant their own friends and relatives do not rise to receive them. They are liable to be elbowed into the road if men walking abreast can occupy the whole of the pavement. The politeness of the few cultured Germans (pardon the discredited adjective) merely emphasises the boorishness of the vast majority. It might be that the German is waiting for women to be officially recognised as human beings to whom some measure of courtesy or even decency is due. Only when rudeness is "_verboten_" will rudeness cease.
The country is governed by men for men and women, but according to the marriage rubric woman is actually man's servant. The effect of these conditions upon the morals of the country is deplorable. They give a cachet to vices, even the most odious, and the rate of illegitimacy, about 10 per cent. for the whole empire, is about doubled in Berlin, where the military caste is supreme. The morals of the army are the morals of Berlin, and account not only for the hideous stories published about what took place in Belgium and northern France, but for the recitals not less appalling that one gathers from officers home on leave who have seen sights in the area of German occupation that cannot be set down in print.
Undoubtedly these recitals, if they could reach the heart of Germany, would thrill tens of thousands of honest men with indignation and disgust. I do not believe for a moment that they represent the inclinations of the whole nation. They are rather the action of that section of the nation which, while war endures, must have the upper hand, and during all the years of war-like preparations has reigned supreme. Against this aspect of German national life the women of belligerent and neutral countries alike are arrayed. Whatever their resources or their influence in the councils of their husbands, sons, and brothers, it will be devoted without cease to the destruction of a militarism that degrades and shames womankind. The German woman knows in her heart that her men have in countless instances become perverts, but she is dumb because she is forbidden to speak. In Prussia no woman may organise a union that has political aims; she may not even join one.
It is the purpose of the dominant caste to keep woman in subjection, to restrict her activities to the kitchen, the cradle and the Church, even to deny her the mental and the physical development that might tend to lead her to revolt. Woman may find a limited salvation in the conduct of a business; throughout the German Empire not far short of a million women conduct commercial enterprises of one kind or another, and collectively they strive with some success to better the physical and moral conditions under which their sisters live. No effort of which they have yet been capable has accomplished more than this, their condition of tutelage remains complete.