Part 8

There is a certain psychological aspect of the labour question that has, I think, been overlooked. A generation or two of oppressive conditions tends to produce a race that loses national consciousness. The worker learns to take the view that he is no longer a part of Great Britain, that his interests are exclusively personal, like those of his employers, that he has no status in the country and that his business is to get the most tolerable conditions of life that he can secure by combination and agitation, and to ignore the trend of politics, religion, social progress, and the rest of the life forces of civilisation. He knows himself for one who hews wood and draws water, it suffices him to carry a minimum of logs to the pile and buckets from the spring. He knows that there is for him no glimpse of the larger life and that because he is collectively a multitude there will be keen competition to batten on his small savings or surpluses. He has the feeling that if he loses his job he will take his place in the ranks of a submerged tenth, ranks easy to slip into, almost impossible to rise from. My long intercourse with those who fast that others may feast has revealed this attitude to me in a hundred shapes, all tragic, some dangerous. It has been the despair of those who are working for the people and know that if they would but combine to grasp the sorry state of things environing them they could "shatter it to pieces and remould it nearer to the heart's desire." Unhappily it is impossible to fight what is called _vis inertiæ_, you cannot bruise a feather pillow or hurt a sack of sand by striking it, and while long hours, scanty holidays, mean pleasures and continual anxiety dogged the footsteps of the working classes, it seemed impossible to secure the unity of action, the collective wisdom that would not only enable labour to find its place in the sun, but would destroy the parasites that thrive upon it. I think that the careful observer who noted the social condition of England down to the late summer of 1914 will be disposed to agree that I have not overstated the case or put the ugly lighting unfairly on the foreground of the picture.

Then came war with its strange, unmistakable revelation to the working man and working woman. In the blinding light born of battle they saw their country assaulted by an enemy completely trained and organised. Women saw that their own rulers had been too immersed in the great games of party politics and business development to give proper thought for the safety of the country. They saw, too, that the limitations of capitalism and capitalist were visible in the eyes of the world. They could help, they could leaven the dough of profit-making with the yeast of personal sacrifice, some have done so, but for the salvation of the country they appealed to the working man. Government adopted some of his own panaceas, they accepted schemes of pure socialism as props for the pillars of the State, they taxed riches and laid sacrilegious hands upon the Dagon of wealth to the infinite rage of certain Philistines who are still grieving for the god's lost hands and feet, but it was to the working classes Government turned in the hour of their distress, and Labour responded nobly. Those into whose souls the iron of corruption, disappointment and indifference had not entered, set themselves to labour seven days a week for long hours in evil atmosphere, or left their sweethearts and wives to strike a blow for the country that had displayed to them more of the qualities of a step-mother than a mother. Many have laid down their lives, and in the hearts of those who survive national consciousness has been re-born.

The democratic comradeship of the battlefield, embracing all classes, has taught the working man that his foe in times of peace is not so much the class whose representatives are of his own blood brotherhood, but the system that dominates those who serve and those who accept service. This lesson learned exclusively on the fields of war will permeate the factories when war is over. One stumbling-block to progress remained. It was, I venture to say, the presence in our midst of hundreds of thousands of men who have been rendered listless and apathetic by life conditions too easy or too hard. Now compulsion has reached this class it will give them in return for unsought risks and labour a sense of their place in the body politic. It will teach them that whether they will or no they have a part to play in shaping the destinies of Great Britain and that the reward will be in proportion to the sacrifice. We must not forget that a new Britain, a new Empire, a new Imperial outlook is being shaped over the far-flung area of war. It will not be only to the British Empire that change will come, but to all belligerent nations. The upheaval, sure as the succession of day and night, is one we dare hardly contemplate, not by reason of fear, but by reason of hope. To take advantage of the change as it will affect our nation, all classes of the community must prepare, and nothing could have clogged the wheels of progress in the near future than the presence in our midst of so many thousands of men whose inactivity would have been bitterly resented by those who have borne the heat and burden of the day. Unity of action is a condition precedent to the close and merciless revision of existing conditions, the ending of privilege, the widening of the powers of democracy, the whole peaceful solution of a question that two years ago promised to develop into a war worse than this we are waging, a war of brother against brother.

I repeat that I am opposed to conscription, particularly to a conscription that picks and chooses, and does not demand capital as freely as it demands life; equally am I opposed to the action of the young and unattached men who shrink from assuming their proper responsibilities. That they would have held back if the conditions of their life, whether favourable or unfavourable, had been the true conditions of an enlightened citizenship, I sincerely doubt, that they should have been forced to undertake as a duty what they should have embraced as a privilege is matter for regret. Happily they will not go unrewarded, they will see their errors, and they will come back to a country they have helped to save with the keenest determination to make it worth living in as well as worth fighting for.

XIV

WOMEN AND WAR

"Why is it," wrote an editor, criticising a view of women that I had put forward, "why is it that woman is actually a war lover at heart, an inciter to and encourager of war? Can you explain why, while some women condemn fighting, the great majority do not shrink from it, and even regard the fighting man as the proper object of their admiration?" It was a challenge, that I will answer to the best of my ability.

In the first place, I must admit that the statement is true about countless women. Only yesterday I had a letter from a friend to whom I had written my sympathy; her only son was killed in the British advance. "I need no more consolation," she wrote. "Harry's colonel has sent me a letter telling me of my poor boy's bravery. I am proud to think that he has lived up to our tradition--ours has always been a fighting family, you know."

I would not criticise a bereaved mother; I can never forget that my eldest son has been in the fighting line, that my other boy gave up Cambridge for the aviation school, and is now flying in France, that my son-in-law is a soldier, and that of many friends and a few relatives only the memory remains. But I feel, from the bottom of my heart, that the death and glory idea is wrong; that the attraction of medals, ribbons, stars, orders, titles and uniforms and brass buttons is false, and that an ever-increasing number of women are conscious of the truth, not only here but in France, Germany, Austria, Russia and Italy.

That consciousness cannot become fully articulate until the war is over. For each belligerent nation the duty at this moment is clear--it must fight for what it holds to be right, must struggle for victory until the end. When that end comes I believe that the reign of the old ideas will end with it, and that all women will recognise the truth that is already clear as daylight to the minority.

Why is woman actually a war lover at heart? The question stings me. I am almost reluctant to answer. Yet though the fault is woman's, the responsibility is man's. Down to only a few years ago woman was no more than man's toy. She existed for his pleasure and convenience. If he covered her with pretty dresses and radiant jewels it was because she was his chattel. It seems only yesterday that a married woman's property became her husband's when he married her; that she could not bring an action at law. It needed the celebrated Jackson case, familiar to students of the feminist movement, to decide that a man might not lock his wife up in his house.

I believe that the law enabling a man to administer "moderate chastisement" to his wife has never been repealed. A woman cannot divorce her drunken, dissolute husband unless he ill-uses her physically; the law, unable to deny that woman has a body, will not grant her the possession of a soul. Trashy novels, trivial amusement, unending decoration, freedom from the development of mentality and personality--these are the things that have been held to suffice women, and though there have always been a few great women in the world, the vast majority has been compelled to accept the conditions offered.

I cannot help thinking that if there had not been a surplus of women over men in countries where monogamy rules, change would have been longer still in coming; but there have always been tens of thousands of women for whom there is neither mate, domestic inactivity nor child-bearing, and the educational progress, though leaden footed, has moved.

From the Garden of Eden to Ibsen's "Dolls' House" is a far cry, but it was left to the great Scandinavian dramatist to open woman's eyes. That is, I think, why he was greeted by male critics with such howls of execration--they saw the foundation of the old order being sapped. Man had appealed to woman's vanity, and had consequently developed it enormously; but the motive was little higher than that which inspires the male baboon when he goes courting. Ibsen showed woman the result of her submission.

Only the historian, looking at our social history when the youngest of us "has lain for a century dead," will realise the strength and progress of the feminist movement in the last decade or two; the barriers it has surmounted or swept away; the barbed wire entanglements of prejudice and convention against which it has flung itself. Yet I am bold enough to declare that had universal war been mooted in 1934 instead of 1914 woman throughout all the countries of potential combatants would have combined instantly to prevent it.

At present the ranks of the thinkers are too thin; woman is divided against herself. The worst foes of feminism are women; it is the anti-feminists who parade the streets in khaki, who band themselves into wholly unnecessary and sometimes disreputable anti-German leagues, who labour as though war were a glory rather than a curse. You will not find militarists or anti-feminists among the glorious sisterhood of the hospitals, for they almost alone among women know what war really is. If the propaganda of feminism could have spread, if it could have invaded Germany, where the Church, the nursery and the kitchen are expected to fill every woman's life, what a very different answer would have been given to the ambitions of rulers and the blundering of politicians! In how many million homes, where sadness reigns supreme, would there have been the simple, harmless happiness that is the birthright of us all?

Is it the irony of fate that man must pay the terrible price for having made woman what she is; for having stifled or sought to stifle her common sense; for robbing her of the rights that she possesses by reason of being a human being; for distracting her with gawds and frivolities, and seeking to keep her merely as a minister to his pleasures and a mother to his children? He has paid for the supreme folly of generations with the price of the lives of millions of his best and bravest, with the ruin of flourishing cities and fair country, with the poverty of the generation to come, and with many another bitter offering of which he is not yet fully aware.

Doubtless there are still in our midst countless women who accept all that is happening as inevitable; who look upon it without realising that had the sex responded to the ideals of feminism and become one sisterhood without boundaries and without a limited patriotism conditioned by the accident of birth, these things could not have been. I say, without hesitation, that the future of the world demands the elimination of some existing types of women, the education of others, and, in the end, the union of all.

Man was not born merely for glorious death, he was born for glorious life, and in the systematic and universally condoned slaughter of man by man there is neither honour nor glory. The world, properly administered, can produce enough food and clothing for all; it has work and a measure of happiness for all. Our enemies are not Englishmen or Germans, Frenchmen or Turks; they are ignorance and poverty, disease and vice. Woman recognises the truth--that is to say, thinking and emancipated woman recognises it--and she knows that all the strife that tears the older world asunder is fratricidal, that a million times Cain strikes down a million times Abel, and in so doing deliberately obscures the Divine Event toward which all creation moves.

Woman falters, she is young in mental growth and still very weak, though growing stronger hour by hour. She sees nothing of war, but she hears of moving incidents by flood and field and hairbreadth 'scapes in the imminent deadly breach, and her sense of romance so largely fostered by pernicious or trivial literature is stirred to its depths. She wants for her son or her husband or her lover some of the dust of praise, some of the ribbons and medals, some of the glory in which she will discern some pale reflection of herself.

She falls in love with war because she has not the least inkling of its realities; her mourning garments are edged with pride. It has been left to this terrible struggle to tear some of the bandages from her eyes and to rob her of an unworthy ideal. What a supreme misfortune that world tragedy has supervened while she is growing up, before she has learned to grasp the power that lies to hand! In instances beyond numbering she has passed the feminist movement by, quite content to hug her chains as long as they are heavily gilded. She does not realise and does not believe in her own powers, and in Central Europe, at least, she has been kept under surveillance all the time.

England, France, and America are the great Powers that have given feminism a chance. Russia was beginning to follow suit, but the oak that will in years to come defy so many storms and shelter so many lives is as yet a sapling. We must face the bitter truth that had all our sisters accepted feminism we would have saved man from his worst enemy, we could have saved him from himself.

We could have said--

"_We brought you into the world, we fed you at the breast, we guarded your tender years. When you grew older we gave you inspiration and the love that is the romance of life. We bore you children through agonies of which you know nothing; we loved you with the love that is woman's whole existence. You shall not destroy yourself, for you are ours and we are yours, and we are placed on this earth to lift it nearer to heaven, not to drag it down into hell. Your bits of shining metal or ribbons, your uniforms, your personal bravery are as nothing to us, if to earn the one or prove the other you are to kill and maim our husbands and sons, our fathers and brothers. There are greater fights to be fought, nobler victories to be won, and in the only war worth waging we can move by your side. Love and not hate must rule the world._"

The time will come when woman will speak to man in this wise, and he will listen because he must, even though in listening he remove the strange, obscene gods of strife from his Pantheon. That the truth is known already to noble-minded women throughout the world is to me the most vitalising comfort that these days can yield. That so many women still pass it by, that they praise war and magnify personal courage and "martial glory," that they still foster and encourage the meanest hatreds born of war, is I think worse than many a disaster. But the lesson it enforces is plain. The time is not ripe; before she can handle the power to which she lays claim woman must abjure her idols, she must follow the path of pain and suffering a little longer, she must learn for herself through bitter experience how great a curse war is. I believe she is learning her lesson; I believe that the hosts of the unthinking are melting, and that as the real meaning of glory, heroism and the rest is brought home to her she will understand.

Even men in the lands of death and desolation have been vouchsafed a glimpse of the truth. There is nothing quite so pathetic in modern history as that mingling of foes on Christmas Day, 1914, in a brief truce of God. Truly the light was brief and soon withdrawn, not to be rekindled a year later, but it was strong enough to testify to the brotherhood of man obscured so long by kings and statesmen.

Women can rekindle the light so that it will not be suddenly put out; they have no nobler purpose under heaven. And in the days when they are come to their full stature the memory of those who applauded strife and were dazzled by some of its exterior aspects will be utterly and happily forgotten.

XV

RACE SUICIDE

I was visiting the north of England in connection with an Industrial Congress, and I called upon a woman whose husband worked in a mine. Her small house was scrupulously clean, she was young, vigorous, swift in thought and movement, and gave me the impression that nothing came into her life in the form of obstacle and surprise without finding her ready to deal with it effectively. She showed me with a certain pride the small collection of books on social subjects bought in second-hand shops by her and her husband. I remember seeing John Stuart Mill, Ruskin, William Morris, Rowntree, Henry George, and many another familiar name. "We have read them together," she told me, "we have educated one another since the time we first met at evening classes." I remarked that her married life seemed to lack one thing only, and that was a family, and I quoted the Eastern aphorism that a house without children is a garden without flowers. She smiled a little sadly, and then I noted how some faint lines about her mouth tightened and hardened, robbing her of a certain charm. "Lady Warwick," she said, "we earn between us by hard work from day to day between four and five pounds a week. It has taken many years to reach that figure, and there is no chance of passing beyond it. What we have endured on the road to this comparative comfort we alone know, and we don't talk about it. But we both believe that the game is not worth the candle. The conditions of life in England are not worth perpetuating, and neither of us would willingly bring children into the world to take their chance and run their horrible risks as we did." She stopped for a moment in order to be sure of her self-control, and then she told me that in her view, though all her heart cried out for little children, sterility was the only protest that could be made against the cruel conditions of modern life under capitalism. "I know that my husband and I are desirables from the employer's standpoint. We earn far more than we receive, we are temperate, hard-working, punctual, reliable. But when we have settled our rent and rates, clubs, and insurances, dressed ourselves, paid tram fares and bought a few books, there is nothing left but a slender margin that a few months' illness would sweep away. For a week or ten days a year we may learn that England is not all as hideous as this corner of it, but we shall die without a glimpse of the world beyond and of its treasures that our books tell us about. If we stop to think, our life is full of unsatisfied longings, and though we don't give them free play we can't ignore them altogether. So we will not produce any more slaves for the capitalist, _and I can tell you that there is not one decently educated, young married woman of my acquaintance who is not of the same mind_. You could go into a score of houses known to me in this town alone and find strong, vigorous women whose childlessness is their one possible protest against the existing wage slavery."

Years have passed since, in that gloomy little northern town with its congeries of mean streets looking meaner than ever under the rain, I met the speaker whose name has passed from me. She may well be approaching the time when Nature will confirm her resolve irrevocably, but the memory of that conversation has haunted me with the vision of thousands of lost souls and unhappy lives.

I know now, if I did not know it then, that the music of little voices and the patter of little feet would have brought into that poor worker's life many of the joys for which she sighed in vain. She did not know, nor at that time did I, that obedience to natural law ensures a happiness that is independent of external circumstances, while disobedience brings in its train an ever-growing mental discord and sows the seeds of disease and decay. Statistics can be fascinating friends even though they be formidable acquaintances; they have a rough eloquence of their own that is more effective than honeyed speech.

The birth-rate of England, France, and the United States, associated as it is in all these countries with the death-rate of the newly born, is to me one of the most depressing signs of the times. I cannot help realising that in many cases sterility is not the deliberate protest of the wage slave, it is the selfish protest of the pleasure seeker, and in a small minority of cases the genuine, yet narrow, fear of the eugenist and his following whose enthusiasms have outrun both knowledge and faith. Tolstoy went so far as to say that the man who enjoys association with his wife for any purpose save procreation is guilty of a crime. While many childless women live celibate lives, particularly in America, the great majority do not. In Milton's stately words they "of love and love's delight take freely," as though the power that rules and guides the world could in the long run be outwitted by what it has created.

To-day the civilised world is at the parting of the ways. War has riven asunder the ranks of the best and bravest, and has left in the hearts of the survivors so vivid a sense of the horrors of life that many a man will hesitate to become a father lest his sons have to take their place in time to come on the fields of war and his daughters chance to be among the dwellers in a conquered city. All classes have been gathered to battle, one and all will feel the responsibility attending the failure of our civilisation. While many will believe they are responding to a high instinct when they elect to follow the line of least resistance and leave the world a little poorer, the cumulative effect of such a decision is positively terrible to contemplate.

There are some lines in _Coriolanus_ that might have been addressed not to those who banished him from Rome, but to the women of the world's most highly civilised countries:--