Part 3
Miss Jane Addams, in her careful study of the Chicago streets, speaks of the “pleasure-loving girl who demands that each evening shall bring her some measure of recreation.” Miss Addams admits that such a girl is beset by nightly dangers, but does not appear to think her attitude an unnatural or an unreasonable one. A very able and intelligent woman who has worked hard for the establishment of decently conducted dance-halls in New York,--dance-halls sorely needed to supplant the vicious places of entertainment where drink and degradation walk hand in hand,--was asked at a public meeting whether the girls for whose welfare she was pleading never stayed at home. “Never,” was the firm reply, “and will you pardon me for saying, Neither do you.” The retort provoked laughter, because the young married woman who had put the question probably never did spend a night at home, unless she were entertaining. She represented a social summit,--a combination of health, wealth, beauty, charm and high spirits. But there were scores of girls and women in the audience who spent many nights at home. There are hundreds of girls and women in what are called fashionable circles who spend many nights at home. There are thousands of girls and women in more modest circumstances who spend many nights at home. If this were not the case, our cities would soon present a spectacle of demoralization. They would be chaotic on the surface, and rotten at the core.
It is claimed that the nervous exhaustion produced by hours of sustained and monotonous labour sends the factory girl into the streets at night. She is too unstrung for rest. That this is in a measure true, no experienced worker will deny, because every experienced worker is familiar with the sensation. Every woman who has toiled for hours, whether with a sewing machine or a typewriter, whether with a needle or a pen, whether in an office or at home, has felt the nervous fatigue which does not crave rest but distraction, which makes her want to “go.” Every woman worth her salt has overcome this weakness, has mastered this desire. It is probable that many men suffer and struggle in the same fashion. Dr. Johnson certainly did. With inspired directness, he speaks of people who are “afraid to go home and think.” He knew that fear. Many a night it drove him through the London streets till daybreak. He conquered it, conquered the sick nerves so at variance with his sound mind and sound principles, and his example is a beacon light to strugglers in the gloom.
Naturally, the working girl knows nothing about Dr. Johnson. Unhappily, she knows little of any beacon light or guide. But, if she be a reasonable human being, she _does_ know that to expect every evening to “bring her some measure of recreation” is an utterly unreasonable demand, and that it can be gratified only at the risk of her physical and moral undoing. She has been taught to read in our public schools; she is provided with countless novels and story-books by our public libraries; the lightest of light literature is at her command. Is this not enough to tide her over a night or two in the week? If her clothes never need mending or renovating, she is unlike any other woman the world has got to show. If there is never any washing, ironing, or housework for her to do, her position is at once unusual and regrettable. If she will not sometimes read, or work, or, because she is tired, go early to bed; if her craving for amusement has reached that acute stage when only the streets, or the moving pictures, or the dance-hall will satisfy it, she has so completely lost nerve that she has no moral stamina left. She may be virtuous, but she is an incapable weakling, and the working man who marries her ruins his life. Such girls swell the army of deserted wives which is the despair of all organized charities.
The sincere effort to regenerate the world by amusing it is to be respected; but it is not the final word of reform. The sincere effort to regenerate the world by a legal regulation of wages is a new version of an old story,--the shifting of personal obligation, the search for somebody’s door at which to lay the burden of blame. It is also a denial of human experience, inherited and acquired, and a rejection of the only doctrine which stands for self-respect: “Temptations do not make the man, but they show him for what he is.” Qualities nourished by this stern and sane doctrine die with the withering of faith.
So much well-meant, but not harmless nonsense--nonsense is never harmless--has been preached concerning women and their wages, that we are in the predicament of Sydney Smith when Macaulay flooded him with talk. We positively “stand in the slops.” A professor of economics in an American college offers out of the fulness of his heart the following specific and original remedy for existing ills: “My idea is that one of the best ways to get an increased remuneration for women is to make them worth it.”
“My idea!” This is what it means to have the scientific mind at work. A unique proposition (what have we been thinking about with our free schools for the past hundred years?), unclogged by detail, unhampered by ways and means. And if we do not see salvation in truisms, if we are daunted by the gulf between people who are theorizing and people who are merely living, we can take refuge with the reformers who demand “increased remuneration for women” whether they are worth it or not; who would make the need of the worker, and not the quality of the work, the determining factor in wages. We may “protect women from themselves,” by prohibiting them from accepting less than their legal hire.
The only real peril of a minimum wage-law is that it has a tendency to relegate the incompetent to beggary. It cannot, as some economists claim, discourage efficiency. Nothing can discourage efficiency, which scorns help and defies hindrance. But, by the same ruling, nothing can command more than it is worth in the markets of the world. We do wrong when we release the worker from any incentive to good work. We do wrong when we release her from a sense of personal responsibility. We do wrong when we give her a plausible excuse for following the line of least resistance, when we blight her courage by permitting her to think that her moral welfare lies in any hands but her own. The choice between poverty and dishonesty, the choice between poverty and prostitution is not an “open question.” It is closed, if human reason and human experience can speak authoritatively upon any subject in the world.
The injury done by loose thinking and loose talking is irremediable. When the State Senate Vice Investigating Committee of Illinois permitted and encouraged an expression of what it was pleased to call the “shop-girl’s philosophy,” it sowed the seeds of mischief deep enough to insure a heavy crop of evil. I quote a single episode, as it was reported in the newspapers of March 8th, 1913,--a report which, if inaccurate in detail, must be correct in substance. A young woman who had been in the employ of Sears, Roebuck & Co. was on the stand. She was questioned by Lieutenant-Governor O’Hara.
“‘If a girl were getting $8 a week, and had to support a widowed mother, would you blame that girl if she committed a crime?’
“The witness looked up frankly, and replied, ‘No, I wouldn’t.’
“‘Would you blame her if she killed herself?’
“‘No, I wouldn’t,’ came the emphatic reply.
“‘And would you blame her, if she committed a greater crime?’
“The young Lieutenant-Governor’s meaning was in his embarrassed tones and in his heightened colour. The girl was the more composed of the two. She paused a moment, and then repeated distinctly, ‘No, I wouldn’t.’
“The room had been painfully quiet, but at this there was a round of applause, led by the women spectators. It was the first general spontaneous outburst of the session. ‘Emily’ was then dismissed.”
Dismissed with the “round of applause” ringing in her ears, and in her mind the comfortable assurance that her theory of life was a sound one. Also that a warm-hearted public was prepared to exonerate her, should she find a virtuous life too onerous for endurance. Is it likely that this girl, and hundreds of other Emilys, thus encouraged to let down the walls of resistance, can be saved from the hopeless failure of nerve which will relegate them to the ranks of the defeated? Is it likely that the emotional hysteria of the applauding audience, and of hundreds of similar audiences, can be reduced to reason by such sober statistics as those furnished by the Bureau of Social Hygiene in New York, or by the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills? Less than three per cent of seven hundred girls examined at the Bedford Hills reformatory pleaded poverty, as a reason for their fall; and, of this three per cent, more than half had been temporarily out of work. On the other hand, twenty per cent were feeble-minded, were mentally incapacitated for self-control, and as much at the mercy of their instincts as so many animals. These are the blame-less unfortunates whom vice commissioners seem somewhat disposed to ignore. These are the women who should be protected from themselves, and from whose progeny the public should be protected.
It is evident that triumphant virtue must have strong foundations. Income and recreation are but slender props. Becky Sharp was of the opinion that, given five thousand pounds a year, she could be as respectable as her neighbours; but, in our hearts, we have always doubted Becky. “Where virtue is well rooted,” said the watchful Saint Theresa, “provocations matter little.” All results are in proportion to the greatness of the spirit which has nourished them. When Cromwell made the discomforting discovery that “tapsters and town apprentices” could not stand in battle against the Cavaliers, he said to his cousin, John Hampden, that he must have men of religion to fight with men of honour. He summoned these men of religion, fired them with enthusiasm, hardened them into consistency, and within fourteen years the nations which had mocked learned to fear, and the name of England was “made terrible” to the world.
For big issues we must have strong incentives and compelling measures. “Where the religious emotions surge up,” says Mr. Gilbert Murray, “the moral emotions are not far away.” Perhaps the mighty forces which have winnowed the world for centuries may still prove efficacious. Perhaps the illuminating principles of religion, the ennobling spirit of patriotism, the uncompromising standards of morality, may do more to stiffen our powers of resistance than lectures on “Life as a Fine Art,” or papers on “The Significance of Play,” and “Amusement as a Factor in Man’s Spiritual Uplift.” Perhaps the stable government which ensures to the Industrious Apprentice the reward of his own diligence is more bracing to citizenship than the zealous humanity which protects the Idle Apprentice from the consequences of his own ill-doing.
Christianity and War
There are two disheartening features in the attitude of Americans toward the ruthless war which has been waged in Europe for the past two years. One is the materialism of pacifists who ignore, and have steadily ignored, the crucial question of right and wrong, justice and injustice. The other is the materialism of pious Christians who lament the failure of Christianity to reconcile the irreconcilable, to preserve the long-threatened security of nations.
When, at the request of President Wilson, the first Sunday of October, 1914, was set aside as a day of prayer for peace,--a day of many sermons and of many speeches,--prayers and sermons and speeches all alluded to the war as though it were the cholera or the plague, something simple of issue, the abatement of which would mean people getting better, the cure of which would mean people getting well. The possibility of a peace shameful to justice and disastrous to civilization was carefully ignored. The truth that death is better than a surrender of all that makes life morally worth the living, was never spoken. This may be what neutrality implies. We addressed the Almighty in guarded language lest He should misunderstand our position. We listened respectfully when Secretary Bryan told us that our first duty was to use what influence we might have to hasten the return of peace, without asking him to be more explicit, to say what on earth he would have had us do, and how--without moving hand or foot--he would have had us do it.
Since then, men of little faith have kept dinning in our ears that religion is eclipsed, that Gospel law lacks the substance of a dream, that Christian principles are bankrupt in the hour of need, that the only God now worshipped in Europe is the tribal God who fights for his own people, and that the structure of love and duty, reared by centuries of Christianity, has toppled into ruin. To quote Professor Cramb’s classic phrase, “Corsica has conquered Galilee.” Some of these sad-minded prophets had fathers and grandfathers who fought in the Civil War, and they seem in no wise troubled by this distressful fact. Some of them had great-great-grandfathers who fought in the Revolutionary War, and _they_ join high-sounding societies out of illogical pride. Yet the colonists who defended their freedom and their new-born national life were not more justified in shedding blood, than were the French and Belgians and Serbians who heroically defended their invaded countries and their shattered homes.
When Mr. Carnegie thanked God (through the medium of the newspapers) that he lived in a brotherhood of nations,--“forty-eight nations in one Union,”--he forgot that these forty-eight nations, or at least thirty-eight of them, were not always a brotherhood. Nor was the family tie preserved by moral suasion. What we of the North did was to beat our brothers over the head until they consented to be brotherly. And some three hundred thousand of them died of grievous wounds and fevers rather than love us as they should.
This was termed preserving the Union. The abiding gain is visible to all men, and it is not our habit to question the methods employed for its preservation. No one called or calls the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” a cry to a tribal God, although it very plainly tells the Lord that his place is with the Federal, and not with the Confederate lines. And when the unhappy Belgians crowded the Cathedral of St. Gudule, asking Heaven’s help for defenceless Brussels, imploring the intercession of our Lady of Deliverance (pitiful words that wring the heart!), was this a cry to a tribal God, or the natural appeal of humanity to a power higher and more merciful than man? Americans returning from war-stricken Europe in the autumn of 1914 spoke unctuously of their country as “God’s own land,” by which they meant a land where their luggage was unmolested. But it is possible that nations fighting with their backs to the wall for all they hold sacred and dear are as justified in the sight of God as a nation smugly content with its own safety, living its round of pleasures, giving freely of its superfluity, and growing rich with the vast increase of its industries and trade.
What influence has been at work since the close of the Franco-Prussian War, shutting our eyes to the certainty of that war’s final issue, and debauching our minds with sentiment which had no truth to rest on? We knew that the taxes of Europe were spent on armaments, and we talked about International Arbitration. We knew that science was devotedly creating ruthless instruments of destruction, and we turned our pleased attention to the beautiful ceremonies with which the Peace Palace at The Hague was dedicated. We knew, or we might have known, that the strategic railway built by Germany to carry troops to the Belgian frontier was begun in 1904, and that the memorandum of General Schlieffen was sanctioned by the Emperor (there was no pretence of secrecy) in 1909. Yet we thought--in common with the rest of the world--that a “scrap of paper” and a plighted word would constitute protection. We knew that Germany’s answer to England’s proposals for a mutual reduction of navies was an increase of estimates, and a double number of dreadnoughts. Did we suppose these dreadnoughts were playthings for the Imperial nurseries?
“A pretty toy,” quoth she, “the Thunderer’s bolt! My urchins play with it.”
When in 1911 President Taft’s “message” was hailed as a prophecy of peace, Germany’s reply was spoken by Bethmann-Hollweg: “The vital strength of a nation is the only measure of a nation’s armaments.”
And now the good people who for years have been saying that war is archaic, are reproaching Christianity for not making it impossible. Did not the “American Association for International Conciliation” issue comforting pamphlets, entitled “The Irrationality of War,” and “War Practically Preventable”? That ought to have settled the matter forever. Did we not appoint a “Peace Day” for our schools, and a “Peace Sunday” for churches and Sunday schools? Did not Mr. Carnegie pay ten millions down for international peace,--and get a very poor article for his money? There were some beautiful papers read to the Peace Congress at The Hague, just twelve months before Europe was in flames; and there is the report of a commission of inquiry which the “World Peace Foundation,” formerly the “International School of Peace,” informed us three years ago was “a great advance toward assured peaceful relations between nations.”
With this sea of sentiment billowing about us, and with Nobel prizes dropping like gentle rain from Heaven upon thirsty peace-lovers, how should we read the signs of war, written in the language of artillery? It is true that President Nicholas Murray Butler, speaking in behalf of the Carnegie Peace Foundation, observed musingly in November, 1913, that there was no visible interest displayed by any foreign government, or by any responsible foreign statesman, in the preparations for the Third Hague Conference, scheduled for 1915; but this was not a matter for concern. It was more interesting to read about the photographs of “educated and humane men and women,” which the “World Conference for Promoting Concord between all Divisions of Mankind” (a title that leaves nothing, save grammar, to be desired) proposed collecting in a vast and honoured album for the edification of the peaceful earth.
And all this time England--England, with her life at stake--shared our serene composure. Lord Salisbury, indeed, and Lord Roberts cherished no illusions concerning Germany’s growing power and ultimate intentions. But then Lord Roberts was a soldier; and Lord Salisbury, though outwitted in the matter of Heligoland, had that quality of mistrust which is always so painful in a statesman. The English press preferred, on the whole, to reflect the opinions of Lord Haldane. They were amiable and soothing. Lord Haldane knew the Kaiser, and deemed him a friendly man. Had he not cried harder than anybody else at Queen Victoria’s funeral? Lord Haldane had translated Schopenhauer, and could afford to ignore Treitschke. None of the German professors with whom he was on familiar terms were of the Treitschke mind. They were all friendly men. It is true that Germany, far from talking platitudes about peace, has for years past defined with amazing lucidity and candour her doctrine that might is right. She is strong, brave, covetous, she has what is called in urbane language “the instinct for empire,” and she follows implicitly
“The good old rule, ... the simple plan, That they should take who have the power, And they should keep who can.”
It was forlornly amusing to see, three months after the declaration of war, our book-shops filled with cheap copies of General von Bernhardi’s bellicose volume; to open our newspapers, and find column after column of quotation from it; to pick up our magazines, and discover that all the critics were busy discussing it. That book was published in 1911, and the world (outside of Germany which took its text to heart) remained “more than usual calm.” Its forcible and closely knit argument is defined and condensed in one pregnant sentence: “The notion that a weak nation has the same right to live as a powerful nation is a presumptuous encroachment on the natural law of development.”
This is something different from the suavities of peace-day orators. It is also vastly different from the sentiments so gently expressed by General von Bernhardi in his more recent volume, dictated by German diplomacy, and designed as a tract for the United States and other neutral nations. Soothing syrup is not sweeter than this second book; but its laboured explanations, its amiable denials, even the pretty compliment paid us by a quotation from “A Psalm of Life” (why ignore “Mary had a little lamb”?), have failed to obliterate the sharp, clear outlines of his pitiless policy. Being now on the safe side of prophecy, we wag our heads over the amazing exactitude with which Bernhardi forecast Germany’s impending war. But there was at least one English student and observer, Professor J. A. Cramb of Queen’s College, London, who gave plain and unheeded warning of the fast-deepening peril, and of the life-or-death struggle which England would be compelled to face. Step by step he traced the expansion of German nationalism, which since 1870 has never swerved from its stern military ideals. A reading people, the Germans. Yes, and in a single year they published seven hundred books dealing with war as a science,--not one of them written for a prize! If the weakness of Germany lies in her assumption that there is no such thing as honour or integrity in international relations, her strength lies in her reliance on her own carefully measured efficiency. Her contempt for other nations has kept pace with the distrust she inspires.
The graceful remark of a Prussian official to Matthew Arnold, “It is not so much that we dislike England, as that we think little of her,” was the expression of a genuine Teutonic sentiment. So, too, was General von Bernhardi’s characteristic sneer at the “childlike” confidence reposed by Mr. Elihu Root and his friends in the Hague High Court of International Justice, with public opinion at its back. Of what worth, he asked, is law that cannot be converted by force into government? What is the weight of opinion, unsupported by the glint of arms? Professor Cramb, seeing in Bernhardi, and in his great master, Treitschke, the inspiration of their country’s high ambition, told England in the plainest words he could command that just as the old German Imperialism began with the destruction of Rome, so would the new German Imperialism begin with the destruction of England; and that if Englishmen dreamed of security from attack, they were destined to a terrible and bloody awakening. Happily for himself,--since he was a man too old and ill to fight,--he died nine months before the fulfilment of his prophecy.