fact that fear is the dominant human motive. What the race would do if
fear were conquered, or at least faced sternly eye to eye, is staggering
to contemplate. Perhaps God looks upon that vision. It may be that which
gives Him patience. But man at best gives it one terrified squint in a
lifetime. All behavior must take fear into account.
The man who lately brought back from the Amazon Basin news of a
fear-dispelling drug used there by a savage tribe, would have been
carried home from the steamer on the shoulders of his compatriots if for
one moment he had been believed. His drug may do all he claimed for it,
but a country which boasts a Volstead in full stride cannot force itself
to take him seriously. The only likely part of his story was that the
tribes who prepared the drug would put to instant death any woman who
happened either to learn how to prepare it or did actually get some of
it into her.
We recognize that part as familiar. We have made the same fight here
against the fearless woman as the savages made on the Amazon. The only
thing we were never smart enough to apply was the moral of the Kipling
story about the two greatest armies in the world: the men who believed
that they could not die till their time came, against those who wanted
to die as soon as possible. It was from one or the other of these two
kinds of fearlessness that women have trained themselves in wisdom. This
is the wisdom which moves them to secret laughter when they find their
brothers in the throes of Volstead and Krafts. And it is from this
wisdom that they will teach them all to be happy, though prohibited.
It is an unfortunate fact that humanity will not behave itself. It
does not really warm to any of the current virtues. When the Eighteenth
Amendment says it must not drink hard liquors, its inner heart's
desire is to drink them, even beyond its normal, and usual capacity.
Prohibition is, it is true, one of the strikingly superimposed virtues.
It has nothing whatever to recommend it in man's true feelings, and this
is not true of many of the civilized traits, though probably not any
of them meets with entire approval. We do think that before anything
approaching a real art of living is perfected among us, the present
ethical system will be wholly outmoded. Meanwhile, pressure brought to
bear on the least welcome of all virtues is merely going to make bad
behavior worse. But that is Volstead's business, not ours. Let him
do battle with that octopus, while we bring up reinforcements to his
enemies. Women know all about how to be bad and comfortable while the
law goes on trying to make them good and otherwise. Just look at a few
of the things on which they have cut their teeth.
We do not know, unfortunately, just at what point in her history woman
went under the long siege of her taboos. Whether the system of keeping
her publicly helpless and interdicted goes before church and state,
or was the result of them, there is now no history to tell us. But
certainly she always had one supreme power and one supreme weakness, and
somewhere in time, her more neutrally equipped male companion played the
one against her, to save his own skin from being stripped by the other.
But if the past is foggy, the present is not. We do know what is now,
and has for a long time been, a shocking list of what she must not be
allowed to do.
She cannot own and control her own property, for instance, except here
and there in the world. Perhaps the theory was that she could not create
property. But one would have said that such of it as she inherited she
had as sound a right to as that that her brother inherited. But no such
common sense notion prevailed. No matter how she came by it, it became
her husband's as soon as she married. The law has always behaved as if
a woman became a half-wit the moment she married. Seeing what she
deliberately lost by it, perhaps the law is right. She lost control of
her possessions, including herself. She lost her citizenship, and she
lost her name, though this by custom and not by law. And finally, she
never could acquire control even over her own children, which certainly
she did create. We do not know how many of these disabilities would have
been excused on the ground that they were for her own good. It seems
likelier that they came under the head of that fine old abstraction, the
general good. No longer back than 1914, H. G. Wells, in "Social Forces
in England and America" observed that they would probably never be
able to give women any real freedom because there were the children
to consider. Mr. Wells did not appear to know that he was bridging a
horrible conflict in terms with a pretty fatuity. Nor did he later give
himself pause when, towards the end of the book, he complained that all
the babies were being had by the low grade women, while the high grade
ones were quite insensible to their duties.
It was possibly with an unruliness of this kind in contemplation that
the law decided that women should know nothing of birth control.
Now there's a taboo for you. Many of our very best people--the moral
element, so called--will not even speak the words. But that prohibition,
like all the others, has its side door--may one say its small-family
entrance? The women who do not know all there is to know about it are
just those poor, isolated, and ignorant women economically starved who
should be the first to be told.
Consider the quaintest, we think, of all the proscriptions against
women--that they cannot have citizenship in their own right. What is
citizenship if it is not the assumption, made by the State, that because
you were born within it, and had grown used to it and fond of it, and
were attached to it by all the associations of blood ties, friendships,
and what not, you were therefore entitled to take part in it, and could
be called on to give it service? If citizenship is a mere legal figment,
by what right do States send their citizens to war? Yet women are
theoretically transferred, body and bone, heart, memory, and soul, to
whatever country or nation their husbands happen to give allegiance to.
Isadora Duncan, born in California, of generations of Californians,
and American all her life, has lately married a young Russian poet.
Hereafter she must enter her country as an alien immigrant--if it so
happens that the quota is not closed. Does anybody in his senses imagine
that Isadora Duncan has been changed, or could be changed, for better
or worse? An opera singer who was in danger during the war of losing her
position at the Metropolitan Opera House because she was an enemy alien,
went forth and married an American. By that means she was actually
supposed to have been made over into an American. Can naïveté go
further?
For our present purposes we merely want to point out that what is done
to one woman in the name of the public good is craftily used by the next
one to serve her own ends. There is a terrifying proportion of women
in America today who can vote, without knowing a word of our language,
without participating in one particle of our common life, because their
husbands have taken on American citizenship. They wouldn't be allowed to
become American citizens if they wanted to, by any other means.
There are scores and scores of these legal absurdities conscripting
the activities of women. Twenty books could be written about them, and
probably will be. But we must leave them, with such representation as
these few instances afford, and go from, the body of taboos that are
done in the name of the good of the State, to that collection done for
Woman's own personal good.
Some of these are legal and some are not, but they are all operative.
They are all things she has to go around, or under. She cannot serve on
juries. She is always righteously barred from courtrooms when there
is to be testimony concerning sex. Woman, the mother of children, the
realist of sex compared to whom the most sympathetic of males is at best
an outsider, is to be "protected" from a few scandalous narratives. Of
course all women know that they are barred from juries not because the
happenings in court would shock or even surprise them, but because they
would embarrass their far more sensitive and finicky men. So what they
wish to know of court proceedings, they learn from their good men, in
the pleasant privacy of their homes. If the juries are so much the worse
for this sort of thing, and they are, the matter cannot be helped by the
ladies, dear knows, and the men would die almost any death liefer than
that of ravaged modesty.
Probably the most ungrateful of the restrictions on females is that
forbidding them to hold office in churches. This has been put on all
sorts of high grounds, chief among them being that women could do so
much abler work in little auxiliaries of their own. This contention was
challenged about two years ago in the House of Commons, by Maud Royden,
the English Lay Evangelist to whom the pulpits of London are forbidden,
with one or two exceptions. Miss Royden, whose preaching was being
bitterly opposed by several members of the House, annoyed them all
considerably by saying that the Church of England had already had two
women as its absolute head. This was denied in a great sputter, to which
Miss Royden replied, "How about Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria?"
Well, this happened to be something that nobody could gainsay, but into
the wrathy silence which followed, one member of the House rose to his
feet and let the cat right out of the bag. If women were given church
authority, he said, they would refuse to accept their husbands'
authority in their homes, and England would go to rack and ruin. This is
one of the few recorded occasions when a taboo-er so far forgot himself,
and American church potentates do not like to be reminded of it. Within
a month, one of the Protestant sects in this country has given women the
right to hold minor offices, but three others, in general convention,
refused even to consider it.
Again we are going to rest our case on selected instances, and return
to a consideration of how these walled-in women have learned to live
comfortably and with some self-respect behind the garrison wall. It is
this, after all, which they must now teach their men.
The first thing that happened to the woman who married was that she
became legally non-existent. But though she was scratched off the public
books, she couldn't exactly be scratched out of her husband's scheme of
general well-being. Neither could the race make great strides without
her. After everything in the world had been done to make her as harmless
as possible, she still remained non-ignorable. Two courses were open to
her; and she has always used whichever of the two was necessary at the
time. She could be so sweet and beguiling, so full of blandishments,
that man rushed out to bring her all and more than she had been
prohibited from having. Or she could terrify him, both by her temper and
her biological superiority, into stopping his entire precious machinery
against her, and thanking his stars that he could get off with a whole
skin.
Of course these things have not always worked out just so. There have
been the tragic mischances. But in the main, an oppressed people learn
how to outsmile or outsnarl the oppressor. The Eighteenth Amendment may
yet live to wish it was dead. Mr. Volstead seems to have believed that
the nonsenseorship game was new and exciting, and could be trusted to
carry itself by storm. Not while the ancient wisdom of long-borne bans
and communicadoes looked out of the female eye. There was a body of
experts in existence of whom, apparently, he had never even heard.
He never once thought how the twentieth century was to become known
as the Century of The Home, with the home brew, and the subscription
editions, and the sagacities of women. If he should complain that there
is no honor and fine living in all of this, we shall have to agree with
him. But we can answer that by guile we have preserved our joys, and
cleared our way out from the shadows of his big totem pole. If we have
but little magnificence, we have as much as anybody can ever have who
is hounded by the legal virtues. And if we may keep a little gaiety for
life, by that much do we make him bite the dust. It isn't pretty, but
it's art.
OWED TO VOLSTEAD
[Illustration: Wallace Irwin composing under the influence of synthetic
gin and Andrew Volstead.]
WALLACE IRWIN
I--_First Round_
Prune extract and bright alcohol, so wooden
One kills its flavor in rank fusel oil!
C2-H3-HO--a rather good 'un
To mix with fruity syrups in our toil
To give our social meetings after dark
Their necessary spark!
And you, most heavenly twins,
Born of one mother--
Although our woe begins
When, through our mortal sins,
We can't tell which from 'tother--
Ethyl
And Methyl!
Like Ike
And Mike
Strangely you look alike.
Like sisters I have met
You're very hard to tell apart--and yet
The one consoles more gently than a wife;
The other turns and cripples you for life.
Such spirits as these, and many more I summon
From many a poisoned tin,
Or many a bottle falsely labelled "Gin."
Or many a vial pathetic,
Yclept "Synthetic."
Like Dante on his joy-ride Seeing Hell,
Fain would I take you down
Through sulphurous fires and caverns bilious brown
Into the Land of Mystery and Smell
Where Satan steweth
And home-breweth
While thirsty hooch-hounds yell
Their blackest curse,
Or worse:
"Vol-darn our souls with each Vol-blasted dram
That burns our throats and isn't worth a dam!
We drink, yet how we dread it--
Vol-stead it!"
They've said it.
II--_Short Intermission to Change Meter_
In Eighteen Hundred and Sixty-three
A. Lincoln set the darkies free;
In Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen
A. Volstead muzzled the canteen
And freed the millions, great and small,
From bondage to King Alcohol.
Was it not thoughtful, good and kind
For such a man of such a mind
To show an interest so grand
In his misguided native land?
And don't these statements illustrate
Our Nation's progress up to date?
We're freedom-loving and we're brave
And simply cannot stand a slave.
And when a crisis needs a man
From Mass, or Tex. or Conn, or Kan.
That man steps forward, firm of chin--
So Andrew Volstead came from Minn.
He came from Minn, to show the world
That gin is wrong
And rye is strong
And Scotch to limbo should be hurled.
Thus with his spotless flag unfurled
He went against the Demon Rum
Who snarled, "I vum!"
Got sort of numb,
Rolled up his eyes, lay down and curled
While all the saints of heaven above
(Including Mr. Bryan's Dove)
Cried "Rah-rah-rah!
And siss-boom-ah!
Three cheers for Health and Christian Love!
But, Andrew dear--
Say, now, look here!
You're not including wine and beer!"
Then Andrew Volstead squared his chin
And answered briefly, "Sin is sin."
No compromise
With the King of Lies!
Both liquor thick and liquor thin
We'll cease to tax
And use the axe
Invented by the Man from Minn.
For right is right and wrong is wrong--
A spell has cursed the world too long.
The curse of drink--
Stop, friends, and think
How, reft of spirits weak or strong,
My Nation will be purified
Of all corruptions vile.
The lamb and lion, side by side,
Will smile and smile and smile.
The workman when his day is o'er
Will hurry to his cottage door
To kiss his loving wife;
He'll lay his wages in her hand
And peace will settle on the land
Without a trace of strife.
The criminals will cease to swarm,
Forgers and burglars will reform
And minor crimes will so abate
That lower courts--now open late--
Will close and let the magistrate
Go to the zoo
Or read _Who's Who_.
In short I do anticipate
A thinner, cooler human race,
Its system cleansed of every trace
Of inner fire
And hot desire
And passions spurring to disgrace.
"'Tis simple," said the Man from Minn.,
"To cure the world of mortal sin--
Just legislate against it."
Then up spake Congress with a roar,
"We never thought of that before.
Let's go!"
And they commenced it.
III--_Tone Picture's Suggesting Conditions in U. S. A. Some Two Years
After Alcoholic Stimulants Had Been Legislated out of Business_
1
Grandma's sitting in her attic,
Oiling up her automatic.
Mid-Victorian is her style,
Prim yet gentle is her smile
As she fits the cartridges
One by one, and softly says:
"Grandson is a Dry Enforcer.
Grandpa is a Legger--
All for one and one for all--
I'll never die a beggar.
Bill brings booze from Montreal,
Grandpa lets him through--
Oh, life's been rosy for us folks
Since the red-light laws went blue."
2
Pretty Sadie, aged fourteen,
To a lamp-post clings serene.
"What's the matter?" some may ask.
On her hip she wears a flask
Labelled "Tonic for the Hair"--
"Hic," says Sadie, "we should care!"
"Father is a corner druggist--
Why should I abstain?
Brother is a counterfeiter,
Printing labels plain.
I can buy grain alcohol
As all the neighbors do;
And if you treat me right I'll lend
My formula to you."
3
Sits the plumber, man of metal.
Joining gas-pipes to a kettle.
'Neath the bed his wife is lying
Rather silent--she is dying
From some gin her husband gave her.
He's too busy now to save her.
"Things," he sings, "are looking upward;
I am making stills.
Soon we'll cook the stuff by wholesale,
Running twenty 'mills.'
What we make and how we make it
Doesn't cut no ice.
Anything you sell in bottles
Brings the standard price."
4
In the gutter, quite besotted,
Lies the drunkard, sadly spotted.
People pass with unmoved faces--
Why remark such commonplaces?
Just another Volstead duckling,
Rolling in the gutter chuckling:
"Over seas of milk and water,
Angels' wings a-flappin',
Now we're purified and holy,
Things like me can't happen.
Liquor's gone and gone forever--
Even the word is lewd:
Otherwise there's somethin' makes me
Feel like I was stewed."
IV--_Finale--A Short Interview with the Human Stomach_
Last night as I lay on my pillow,
Last night when they'd put me to bed
I spoke to my dear little tummy
And wept at the words that I said:
"My sensitive, beautiful tummy
That once was so rosy and pure!
My dainty, fastidious tummy--
O what have you had to endure?
"You once were inclined to be fussy;
You turned at inferior rye;
You moped at a dubious vintage
And shrieked if the gin wasn't dry.
"But now you are covered with bunions
And spongy and morbid and blue;
You bite in the night like an adder--
O say, what has happened to you?"
Then my sullen and sinister tummy
Rose slowly and spoke to my brain;
"Say, boss, what's the stuff you've been drinking
That fills me with nothing but pain?
"Today you had 'cocktails' for luncheon--
They tasted like sulphured cologne.
They--were followed by poisonous highballs
That fell in my depths like a stone.
"I am dripping with bootlegger brandy,
I ooze with synthetical gin;
And the beer that you make in the kitchen--
Ah, dire are the wages of sin!
"The cursed saloon has departed,
And well we are rid of the plague;
But I'm weary of furniture polish
With the counterfeit label of Haig.
"Yea, gone is the old-fashioned brewery
And the gilded cafe is no more...."
Here my tummy jumped over the pillow
And fell in a fit on the floor,
THE CENSORSHIP OF THOUGHT
[Illustration: Robert Keable urging the Automaton called Citizen to turn
on his oppressor.]
ROBERT KEABLE
I knew a man, about a year ago, who published a novel upon which the
critics fell with such fury this side the water at least, that whether
in the body or out of the body, such was ultimately his state
of bewilderment, he could not tell, and if I am asked to discuss
"Prohibitions, Inhibitions and Illegalities" it is natural that
the incident should be foremost in my mind. True, it is becoming
increasingly the fashion for a parson to preach a sermon without
announcing text, but modern preaching, like brief bright brotherly
breezy modern services, does not seem to cut much ice. Therefore we will
hark back to the manner of our forefathers and take the incident for a
text. It affords an admirable example of nonsenseorship.
As is always done in approved sermons (but humbly entreating your
forbearance, which is less common) let us consider the context, let
us review the circumstances of the case in point. Our author left the
lonely heart of Africa for the theatre of war in France. He left a
solitude, a freedom, a beauty, of which he had become enamoured, for
that assemblage of all sorts of all nations, in a cockpit of din and
fury, known as the Western Front. He expected this, that, and the other;
mainly he found the other, that, and this. Being desirous of serving
the God of things as they are, he pondered, he observed, and, his
heart burning within him, he wrote. He had no opportunity of writing in
France, so he wrote on his return, away up in the Drakensberg mountains,
alone, with the clean veld wind blowing about him and the nearest town
an hour's ride away, and that but three houses when he reached it. He
had seen vivid things and it chanced he was able to write vividly. There
were twenty chapters in his novel and he wrote them in twenty days.
The novel finished, the MS. of it was despatched to nine publishing
firms in succession, who silently but swiftly refused it. It only went
to the tenth at all because there is luck in a round number, and it
found a home because it found a free man. On the eve of its appearance,
it was hung up for a month because it was felt that whereas the
booksellers might display a book containing a certain passage which
referred to a woman's bosom, they would not do so if it contained a
plural synonym. (I offer abject apologies for these dreadful details.)
And when it finally appeared, the main portion of the English Press
cried to heaven against it, and a smaller section clamoured for
disciplinary action. For a hectic month the author, who had simply and
plainly written of things as they were, honestly without conception that
anyone existed who would doubt their truth or the obvious necessity for
saying them, sat amazed before the storm.
Now that incident, unimportant to the world at large as it is, does
afford an admirable example of that censorship which is about us at
every turn. True, in this case, the official censor remained silent.
Although prepared to read passages from Holy Scripture in the
witness-box, and challenge a denial of the facts, the author was not
called upon to do so. He had previously given slight hints of the truth
about the racial situation in South Africa in another book and had had
that volume censored out of existence, but perhaps because this present
work merely touched on morals the official censor decided to give him
rope with which to hang himself.
He was hung, of course, rightly and convincingly, hung by the neck
till he was dead. Thus a clergyman who took the book from a circulating
library because of its Scriptural title, and whose daughters wrapped it
in _The Church Times_ and read it over the week-end, declined to meet
him at dinner. A bishop cut him in the street. Very rightly and properly
too. The book honestly, simply, undisguisedly, told the truth. Since
then America has been good enough to recognise it.
But this is at least the first consideration of British censorship
today: it must suppress the truth about most of the important things in
life. Take the allied case of the Unknown Warrior. We are told that
he was a crusader, that he was glad to die in a noble cause, that his
valour deserved the Victoria Cross and his religion Westminster Abbey.
In short he was a saint. But, one protests (a bit bewildered because it
sounds so good) that was not the man I knew. The man I knew lived next
door and was a damned good chap. The man I knew chucked up his business
and left his home and risked his life because everybody was doing it,
because it seemed there was a real mess-up, because one had to.