Part 9

"Have the power still To banish your defenders; till at length Your ignorance, which finds not till it feels, Making not reservation of yourselves, Still your own foes, deliver you as most Abated captives to some nation That won you without blows."

If these lines are really as appropriate as they seem to me, it is because the women of the civilised world and the more leisured section of it are on their trial. There is going to be an unimagined shortage among the best elements of the most highly civilised population, a shortage due in part to the fashion in which responsible women have neglected their duties hitherto. If the pleasure lovers decline their share of child-bearing on the ground that it robs them of long periods of amusement, and if the finest type of women workers refuse on the other grounds raised earlier in this paper, what will be the result? There will be a sharp social cleavage, the few clever exploiters will enchain the unfit who are produced so rapidly, we shall develop a small class that governs and a large class that is ruled, all progress will come to an end, while the conditions obtaining when the industrial era was opened by steam power will be revived with all the attendant horrors in some new and unsuspected guise.

It is well to remember how, following the first trumpet call of war, our hard-won liberties were stripped from us. Some of my American friends say it is because our free institutions were not very deeply rooted, but I am well convinced that if the United States were involved, the results would be much the same. War always dethrones Liberty, and the nation that can set her up again when peace is restored may be congratulated. As a rule the struggle has to begin all over again, for the State advances claims that are incompatible with any kind of freedom that is worth having. Only the will of the people can gain liberty, and to make that will sufficiently strong and effective it must be expressed by the best human material, the children of the best types. So it seems to me that race suicide, evil at all times, becomes in seasons like this an act of treason, not only to the nation but to civilisation and all those ideals upon which civilisation waits.

In the town to which I referred on the first page of this paper, the women who deliberately discarded motherhood might between them have raised a strong company to fight for the rights of the next generation. They were shocked to consider the travail that brought them beyond the reach of want, had they lost sympathy with those who succumbed by the way? Is not the fate of these last the more tragic?

The faults and failures of life are not a divine dispensation. Providence has placed us in a marvellous world, capable of raising far more than is needed to supply the reasonable wants of one and all. That there are misery, injustice, want and inequality must not be charged to the account of Providence, but to the foolishness and immortal greed of man, who cannot deal equitably with the resources of which he is the trustee. The world waxes richer year by year, for we are gathering the power to increase production and to distribute the surplus of one region to supply the deficiency of another. It is a very fair and beautiful world, and we need no more than that all should be permitted to share what is produced. To enforce this distribution, to see that it is enjoyed in peace and tranquillity is the appointed task of a strong and vigorous democracy. The primal duty of women is to give this democracy to the world and keep its strength renewed.

Some may fear that women "condemned to fertility" as one phrased it in my hearing recently, may be unable to take their part in the struggle for emancipation. But surely motherhood enforces the qualifications of women, justifies their claims and provides them with the material to train for future triumphs. Olive Schreiner, in her magnificent book "Woman and Labour," in which, however, she wrote of the birth-rate and its incidents without visualising the possibilities of world war, says that some birds have raised the union of the sexes to a far higher level than humanity has reached. The male and the female share the nest building, the incubation and the feeding of the young, and it was impossible for that fine observer to note any difference in the task of the sexes. So it should be with us and will be when we have developed to that standard. The labours and responsibilities of the home, and the daily work will be a part of the common contract and bond of men and women, and no woman will be disqualified by the fulfilment of her duties in the home more than the man is disqualified by reason of his labours beyond it. We are all conscious of evils that throng the world, we all strive to better them in a degree, few of the most careless fail altogether to be kind in some fashion, however haphazard, but if the women who take life seriously will not only fulfil the commandment to be fruitful and multiply, but will do their best to urge their reluctant sisters, a single generation may avail to restore the balance of sanity, equity and progress throughout civilisation.

This social disease of race suicide has not been long established. It came into France, I believe, as a result of the law that divides the inheritance of the parents among the children equally, it has crept into England and America chiefly as a product of overmuch luxury and wealth. Apart from such a reason as calculated protest against social inequalities, it is due to the methods of life that soften women and make child-bearing a terror. I have been told by my travelled friends, the men and women who have been to the far ends of the earth, that in the lands where women are hardy, healthy, and vigorous, there is no trouble for the mother at these critical times. She recovers her full strength in a few days. At Easton, in Essex, where I was born and brought up, and at Warwick, where I have lived so much since my marriage, I have seen that the workers' wives who live frugally and actively are able to rear large families and retain not only their health, but their good looks. Casting my memory back I can recall the time when great families were the rule, and not the exception, among the leisured classes. The women who entertained in great houses that they administered in every detail, brought their six, eight, or ten children into the world and lived long, healthy, happy lives. The modern fashion is of recent date, and now that the war has stirred the heights and depths of human consciousness the old bad custom should pass, for the sake of a world that the madmen of mankind have made desolate. At no period in the history of Western civilisation, has it been more necessary for the women who count as factors in world progress to consider their duty and fulfil it to the extreme limit of their power.

I think that the need of the United States is not less than our own, for it sees the influx day by day of the most diverse elements, and knows well enough that the genius of rule belongs to the Anglo-Saxon. The negroid element does not forget its duty, and the honest class of immigrant that seeks to share the benefit of an enlightened civilisation is hardly less prolific. Against all the problems that my American friends, and they are many, have set out, there is no surer safeguard than an ever increasing birth-rate of the best elements.

I have never felt disposed to join in the cry of the Yellow Peril, nor to think well of those who raise it wantonly, but certain facts stand out in a very bright light shed upon them by the war. In the first place the Allied powers of the Entente have sought the services of both yellow and black races, and have by so doing proclaimed the dawn of a new era in which all questions of equality must come to the front. Japan is very wide awake, and China is still a slumbering giant. Given sanitary science and a great gift of organisation, she might rule all Asia. The Berbers, Arabs, and negroid races of Africa have lined our trenches and taken part in our attacks; one and all, to say nothing of the Indian soldiers, have learned more of war in the past year or so than they had ever known before. They have seen the weakness as well as the strength of the white man.

Black and yellow races alike are extraordinarily prolific; there is among their women no shirking of duty in that regard. Very soon the white man will realise that he cannot maintain his old position unless he is fully prepared to accept responsibilities far greater than those of his forebears. If the rate of his progression falls while that of the other races rises, there can only be one solution in the end, such a solution as "Coriolanus" speaks of in the scathing lines I have quoted. In short, if the white man's burden is to be borne there must be sufficient white men to bear it. Statesmen will labour in vain and the friends of progress will strive to no end if the start that the other races have gained is to be increased, and the white women of the world must decide whether or no they are content that not only their own nation but the whole standard of life for which they stand is to be submerged, or whether by a generous interpretation of the duties of motherhood they will enable their people to remain in the future as they have been in the past. We cannot tell what the final harvest of war will amount to, but with the dead, the diseased and the disabled, it will probably run into ten figures, more than five times the measure of human sacrifice demanded by all the great wars that shook the world from Blenheim to Omdurman. Even these monstrous figures do not tell the whole tale, for there will be among the dead, thousands of men whose talent might have developed into genius, and there will be hundreds of thousands of widows left in the full flush of womanhood, with all their possibilities unfulfilled, and, in countless cases, beyond the reach of fulfilment. To put it brutally, our civilisation that stands in bitter need of its best breeding stock has deliberately slaughtered a very large percentage of it.

This, indeed, is race suicide in its worst form, and just as woman hopes by her emancipation to dam the tide of war, so she must step into the breach and dam the tide of loss. Emancipation will do very little for women if when they have obtained it they find the best elements of the white races increasingly unable to stand the strain imposed by war. They will not forget that the black man's women are bought to tend his land and enable him to live in ease or that the Mohammedan in the enforced seclusion of the harem may share his favours among four lawful wives and as many concubines as his purse can furnish. As the standard of civilisation declines, woman, by reason of her physical weakness, must pay an ever increasing penalty; only when it has risen to heights unreached before the war may she hope to come into her own and to realise ambitions that, dormant or active, have been with her through the centuries. The whole question of her future has been brought by the war outside the domain of personal or even national interests, suddenly it has become racial.

Down to a little while ago the solution was not in woman's hands, to-day it belongs to her, she has to decide not only for herself, but for all white mankind. It is not too much to say that civilisation, as we know it, will soon be waiting upon her verdict. If this statement seems too far reaching, if it seems to challenge probability, let those who think so turn to any good history of the world and see for themselves how each civilisation has been overwhelmed as soon as it reached the limits of its efficiency and endurance. In the history of this planet, changes no less sweeping than that which I have indicated have been recorded, the Providence that has one race or colour in its special keeping is but the offspring of our own conceit. The real Providence that dominates the universe treats all the races on their merits. If, and only if, the best types of women will embrace motherhood ardently, bravely content to endure the discomforts and discover for themselves the infinite pleasure, can the earth, as we know it, survive the terrible shock it has received. Even then the recovery will be slow, and the price to be paid will be bitter beyond imagining, but we shall in the end win through, though I who write and you who read may well have settled our account with mortality before the season of full recovery dawns upon a wasted world. Should we fail in our duty then we must pass as Babylon and Egypt and Rome passed before us, to become no more than mere shadows of a name.

The least among us may dream dreams and see visions. My own dream and my own vision are of woman as the saviour of the race. I see her fruitful womb replenish the wasted ranks, I hear her wise counsels making irresistibly attractive the flower-strewn ways of peace. I see the few women who encourage war turning from the error of their ways, and those who have spurned motherhood realising before it is too late the glory of their neglected burden. And I believe with a faith that nothing can shake that with these two changes and a wise recognition that the fruits of the earth were given to us all not in accordance with our gifts, but in the measure of our needs, a new season may come to this distracted world. Should all the high hopes of our noblest suffer eclipse, should all the travail of the Christian era be brought to nothingness? I have too much faith in my sex to believe it will let the world perish if the real meaning and significance of its duty can be brought home to it. We have been ill educated, we have been spoilt, we have been corrupted, but for all that there is a certain soundness at the heart of woman. She has not shrunk from the duties she understands, even the lapse from grace that recent years have revealed will not outlive this understanding.

The responsibility for spreading the truth rests upon all who recognise it. There are countless women throughout the world who by sheer force of character can influence their women friends and have learned that the vital problem of sex is not rightly to be treated as though it were not fit for discussion. They are scattered over all the cities of the world; the cumulative effect of their labours would be immense, irresistible. I am sure that the perils I have outlined are known and feared in the Old World and the New, that they are mentioned in the highest quarters of London, Paris, and Washington, and that the transitional period separating words from deeds must needs be brief because the problem does not brook delay. Many women will respond without questioning to the call of duty. Some, whose life struggle can be understood only by those who share it, may ask first that their offspring shall be treated as what they are, State assets, and not abandoned to all the evils of poverty. Others will want to know that they are not raising sons to become the "cannon fodder" of kings and statesmen. In the light of the needs of the white man's world, and the weight of the white man's burden, are even these assurances too much to ask?

XVI

THE LESSONS OF THE PICTURE THEATRE

It came upon me with a sudden sense of revelation, for when I went into the theatre my thoughts were heavy with the weight of war. The friend with whom I had dined had insisted, and though at first I had refused, she had compromised with my objections. "Come and see some pictures, if you cannot face a three-act play," she had said. "I can promise you something quite remarkable, and when you have had enough, just rise and I will follow." But in the end it was my friend who suggested leaving, because she had a long day's work before her and knew that I too had an engagement nearly two hundred miles from town. And when I told her that she had shown me more than she herself had seen, and that I would not have missed that couple of hours' illumination on any account, she merely said she would not attempt to understand, but was very glad.

I have been greatly concerned with problems of peace and war from the woman's view-point. So many women have written to me about the question, some from far-away corners of the States, others from remote English country-sides. I feel the ferment in the blood of every thinking woman; I know how surely and inevitably the time is coming when men and women must face the problem of world control side by side. It has seemed to me that only one force can avail to end war, and that is the force of education supplementing the efforts and strengthening the bands of brotherhood. But how should one make the dry bones of education live for those to whom education is now no more than dry bones? We can reach the children whose imagination is yet immature, how reach the grown up, immersed in the struggle for life and bringing even to their leisure the harassed mind and tired brain? How make the path clear, how stir to the depths their slumbering sense of the world that lies beyond their working day? When I went into the Scala Theatre in London the problem was a baffling one, when I had seen "The Birth of a Nation" I realised the truth that such pictures in the hands of men with insight and vision may yet move the world.

We of England may well forget the follies of our forebears, and the American with Anglo-Saxon blood in his veins may well forgive them, while both tingle with pride at the accomplishment of those "Mayflower" Pilgrims who paved the way for the coming of a nation destined I think in the near future to become the wealthiest, most powerful, and, one hopes, the most progressive on the face of the earth. But who realised, save in a vague and uncertain fashion, the true glory of America's brief history? Who could visualise the scenes to which statesmen and orators recur from time to time? Of the general public few indeed if any, to the rank and file the experience of seeing the past flower into life before them must have been such a one as Keats describes--

"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken, Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise Silent, upon a peak in Darien."

A few deep thinkers, men with vivid minds, must of course have seen beyond the limited vision of the multitude, or nothing so sweepingly comprehensive, so splendidly realistic, so artistically complete as "The Birth of a Nation" could have been devised. It is poetry almost in the sense that Hardy's "Dynasts" is poetry, while its educational value, appealing as it can to young and old, learned and illiterate alike, is very real. Whatever the commercial value, and this I am glad to think must be great, the value of the spectacle as a force for the promotion of the highest order of patriotism is greater still. I can only feel delighted to think that such a task could be so carefully undertaken and so satisfactorily achieved.

A picture play may not seem at first sight a very great medium for presenting the truth about history or even a single facet of the great diamond of life; at least if I am honest with myself this would have been my own opinion down to the date of my visit to "The Birth of a Nation." I had misjudged the scope of the picture play in the light of the hoardings, vulgar, fantastic, or silly, that make the streets of even the small provincial towns more than necessarily offensive. I did not understand that in the hands of capable and imaginative artists, not only the present can be put before us, but the past can be reconstructed, and the future suggested. How it would help us to understand not only ourselves, but others of the great group of nations if we could see the history of all countries presented with something of the skill and sincerity that have gone to these graphic outlines of America's past! Often in Warwick Castle, as I have pondered some of the records of bygone time and half-forgotten history, I have marvelled at the pageant that is suggested, but never realised by the pages before me. If we could bring our history before ourselves would it not teach us more of our triumphs and mistakes than any book? And if the history of the struggles and endeavours of other nations could be faithfully presented, would there not be in the vision something to make us more sympathetic, more ready to realise that we are all passing along the same road, a narrow bridge of consciousness spanning the river of life that flows through eternity, with dreamless sleep or life beyond our ken on either hand? Would it not help to teach us that for the people of every race that brief spell of consciousness is associated with so many self-made troubles that the hell of the obsolete theologians is rendered quite superfluous? We cannot in normal times hate the men, women, and children of another race merely because they are not of our own. The same virtues, the same strivings, the same uprising towards the elusive light are shared in common. So, too, are the prejudices and errors with which we strive. Presented with sympathy, and, above all, with humility, the history of the birth and subsequent struggle of all the nations would be a potent force for peace, because it would be the first aid to understanding.