"WHY SHOULD I INTERFERE?"
I am, of course, aware that at the very outset I shall be met by the
question--far less frequently urged, however, by thoughtful mothers than
it used to be--"Why need I interfere at all in a subject like this? Why
may I not leave it all to the boy's father? Why should it be my duty to
face a question which is very distasteful to me, and which I feel I had
much better let alone?"
I would answer at once, Because the evil is so rife, the dangers so
great and manifold, the temptations so strong and subtle, that your
influence must be united to that of the boy's father if you want to
safeguard him. Every influence you can lay hold of is needed here, and
will not prove more than enough. The influence of one parent alone is
not sufficient, more especially as there are potent lines of influence
open to you as a woman from which a man, from the very fact that he is a
man, is necessarily debarred.
You must bring the whole of that influence to bear for the following
considerations.
Let me take the lowest and simplest first. Even if you be indifferent
to your boy's moral welfare, you cannot be indifferent to his physical
well-being, nay, to his very existence. Here I necessarily cannot tell
you all I know; but I would ask you thoughtfully to study for yourself a
striking diagram which Dr. Carpenter, in one of our recognized medical
text-books, has reproduced from the well-known French statistician,
Quetelet, showing the comparative viability, or life value, of men and
women respectively at different ages.
[Illustration: DIAGRAM REPRESENTING THE COMPARATIVE VIABILITY OF THE
MALE AND FEMALE AT DIFFERENT AGES.]
The female line, where it differs from the male, is the dotted line, the
greater or less probability or value of life being shown by the greater
or less distance of the line of life from the level line at the bottom.
Infant life being very fragile, the line steadily rises till it reaches
its highest point, between thirteen and fourteen. In both cases there
is then a rapid fall, the age of puberty being a critical age. But from
fifteen, when the female line begins to right itself, only showing by a
gentle curve downwards the added risks of the child-bearing period in a
woman's life, the male line, which ought, without these risks, to keep
above the female line, makes a sharp dip below it, till it reaches its
lowest point at twenty-five, the age when the excesses of youth have had
time to tell most on the system.[1] Here, at least, is evidence that
none can gainsay. The more you ponder that mysterious sharp dip in the
man's line of life at the very age which Nature intended should be the
prime and flower of life, the more deeply you will feel that some deep
and hidden danger lies concealed there, the more earnestly you will come
to the conclusion that you cannot and will not thrust from you the
responsibility that rests upon you as the boy's mother of helping to
guard him from it. Keep him from the knowledge of evil, and the
temptations that come with that knowledge, you cannot. The few first
days at school will insure that, to say nothing of the miserable streets
of our large towns. As Thackeray long ago said in a well-known passage,
much animadverted on at the time:
"And by the way, ye tender mothers and sober fathers of Christian
families, a prodigious thing that theory of life is, as orally
learnt at a great public school. Why! if you could hear those boys
of fourteen who blush before their mothers, and sneak off in
silence in the presence of their daughters, talking among each
other, it would be the woman's turn to blush then. Before Pen was
twelve years old, and while his mother thought him an angel of
candour, little Pen had heard enough to make him quite awfully wise
upon certain points; and so, madam, has your pretty rosy-cheeked
son who is coming home from school for the ensuing Christmas
holidays. I don't say that the boy is lost, or that the innocence
has left him which he had 'from heaven, which is our home,' but
that the shades of the prison house are closing very fast round
him, and that we are helping as much as possible to corrupt
him."[2]
But though you cannot keep him from the knowledge of evil, you can be a
potent factor in teaching him the hidden dangers that beset him, in
seeing that his young feet rest on the rock of true knowledge, and not
on the shifting quagmire of the devil's lies; but above all, in
inspiring him with a high ideal of conduct, which will make him shrink
from everything low and foul as he would from card-sharping or sneaking,
proving yourself thus to him as far as in you lies--
"A perfect woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a spirit still, and bright
With something of an angel light."
The boy thus mothered is saved as a rule from all physical risk.
And this in part anticipates my second point. You cannot let this
question alone if you are to aim at the highest for your boy. High
character is more to be accounted of than long life. And it is to you,
as a woman, that the guarding of the higher springs of his nature is
especially entrusted. My whole experience has gone to teach me, with
ever-increasing force, that the proposition that purity is vitally
necessary for the woman, but of comparatively small account for the man,
is absolutely false. Granted that, owing to social ostracism, the
outward degradation of impurity to the woman is far greater, I contend
that a deeper inner debasement is its sure fruition in the man. Cruelty
and lies are its certain accompaniment. As Burns, with a poet's insight,
has truly said:
"But oh! it hardens a' within,
And petrifies the feeling."
Yes, it is exactly that; "it hardens all within"--hardens and darkens.
It is as our Lord says: only "the pure in heart" are capable of divine
vision. Only the man who has kept himself pure, who has never sullied
his white faith in womanhood, never profaned the sacred mysteries of
life and love, never fouled his manhood in the stye of the beast--it is
only that man who can see God, who can see duty where another sees
useless sacrifice, who can see and grasp abiding principles in a world
of expediency and self-interest, and discern
"In temporal policy the eternal Will,"
who can see God in the meanest of His redeemed creatures. It is only
the virginal heart that has kept itself pure, that grows not old, but
keeps its freshness, its innocent gaiety, its simple pleasures. The
eminent Swiss Professor, Aimé Humbert, does but echo these words from
the sadder side, when, speaking of the moral malady which is the result
of impurity, he says:
"It does not attack any single organ of the human frame, but it
withers all that is human--mind, body, and soul. It strikes our
youth at the unhappy moment when they first cross the thresholds of
vice. For them the spring has no more innocent freshness; their
very friendships are polluted by foul suggestions and memories;
they become strangers to all the honorable relations of a pure
young life; and thus we see stretching wider and wider around us
the circle of this mocking, faded, worn-out, sceptical youth,
without poetry and without love, without faith and without joy."
Too soon and too earnestly we cannot teach our boys that the flaming
sword, turning all ways, which guards the tree of life for him, is
purity.
But thirdly, there are wider issues than the welfare, physical and
moral, of our own boys which make it impossible for us to take up any
neutral attitude on this question. We cannot remain indifferent to that
which affects so deeply both the status and the happiness of women. We
cannot accept a standard for men which works out with the certainty of a
mathematical law a pariah class of women. We cannot leave on one side
the anguish of working-class mothers just because we belong to the
protected classes, and it is not our girls that are sacrificed. At
least, we women are ceasing to be as base as that, and God forgive us
that, from want of thought rather than from want of heart, educated
women could be found even to hold that the degradation of their own
womanhood is a necessity!
Take but one instance out of the many that crossed my _via dolorosa_ of
the anguish inflicted on the mothers of the poor. I take it, not because
it is uncommon, but because it is typical.
At one of my mass meetings of working women in the North I was told at
its close that a woman wished to speak with me in private. As soon as I
could disengage myself from the crowd of mothers who were always eager
to shake hands with me, and to bless me with tears in their eyes for
taking up their cause, I went down the room, and there, in a
dimly-lighted corner of the great hall, I found a respectable-looking
woman waiting for me. I sat down by her side, and she poured out the
pent-up sorrow of her heart before telling me the one great favor she
craved at my hands. She had an only daughter, who at the age of sixteen
she had placed out in service, at a carefully-chosen situation. We all
know what a difficult age in a girl's life is sixteen; but our girls we
can keep under our own watchful care, and their little wilfulnesses and
naughtinesses are got over within the four walls of a loving home, and
are only the thorns that precede the perfect rose of womanhood. But the
poor have to send their girls out into the great wicked world at this
age to be bread-winners, often far away from a mother's protecting care.
The girl, however, in this case was a good, steady girl, and for a time
did well. Then something unsettled her, and she left her first place,
and got another situation. For a time it seemed all right, when suddenly
her letters ceased. The mother wrote again and again, but got no answer.
She wrote to her former place; they knew nothing of her. At last she
saved up a little money and went to the town where she believed her girl
to be. She sought out and found her last address. The family had gone
away, and left no address. She made inquiries of the neighbors, of the
police. Yes, they remembered the girl--a nice-looking girl with a bright
color; but no one had seen her lately. It was as if a trap-door had
opened and let her through. She had simply disappeared. In all that
crowded city her mother could find no trace of her. "It is now thirteen
years, ma'am, since I lost her."
But all through those thirteen years that poor mother had watched and
waited for her. All through those weary years, whenever she read in the
local paper of some poor girl's body being found in the river, some poor
suicide, who had leapt,
"Mad from life's history,
Swift to death's mystery,
Anywhere, anywhere, out of the world,"
that poor mother would get into her head it might be her dear girl that
was lying there alone and unclaimed; and she would pay her fare--if she
could afford it--or if not, trudge the distance on foot, creep,
trembling, into the mortuary or the public-house where the body lay,
blue from drowning, or with the ugly red gash across the throat, take
one look, and then cry with a sigh of relief, "No, it ain't my child,"
and return again to her watching and waiting.
"Once, ma'am," she said, "I had a dream. I saw a beautiful place, all
bright and shiny, and there were lots of angels singing so sweet, when
out of the midst of the glory came my poor girl. She came straight to
me, and said, 'Oh, mother, don't fret; I'm safe and I'm happy!' and with
those words in my ears I awoke. That dream has been a great comfort to
me, ma'am; I feel sure God sent it to me. But oh, ma'am," she exclaimed,
with a new light of hope in her face, and clasping her hands in silent
entreaty, "the thought came into my head whilst you were a-speakin', if
you would be so kind as to ask at the end of every one of your meetin's,
'Has anyone heard or seen anything of a girl of the name of Sarah
Smith?' As you go all about the country, maybe I might get to hear of
her that way."
Ah me! the pathetic forlornness of the suggestion, the last hope of a
broken-hearted mother, that I should go all over the three kingdoms
asking my large audiences, "Have you seen or heard anything of Sarah
Smith?" And I was dumb. I had not a word of comfort to give her. I had
heard the words too often from the lips of outcast girls in answer to my
question, "Does your mother know where you are?" "Oh, no; I couldn't
bear that mother should know about me!"--not to know what the fate of
that young girl had been. She had been trapped, or drugged, or enticed
into that dread under-world into which so many of our working-class
girls disappear and are lost. Possibly she had been sent out of the
country, and was in some foreign den. One's best hope was that she was
dead.
But picture to yourselves the long-drawn anguish of that mother, with
nothing but a dream to comfort her amid the dread realities of life.
Picture her as only one of thousands and thousands of our working-class
mothers on whose poor dumb hearts the same nameless sorrow rests like a
gravestone; and I think no woman--no mother, at least--but will agree
with me, that this is a matter from which we, as women, cannot stand
off. Even if we had not the moral and physical welfare of our own boys
to consider, we are baptized into this cause by the tears of women, the
dumb tears of the poor. But there is one last consideration, exquisitely
painful as it is, which I cannot, I dare not, pass over, and which more
than any other has aroused the thoughtful women of England and America
to face the question and endeavor to grapple, however imperfectly as
yet, with the problem. For some strange reason the whole weight of this
evil in its last resort comes crushing down on the shoulders of a little
child--infant Christs of the cross without the crown, "martyrs of the
pang, without the palm." The sins of their parents are visited on them
from their birth, in scrofula, blindness, consumption. "Disease and
suffering," in Dickens's words, "preside over their birth, rock their
wretched cradles, nail down their little coffins, and fill their unknown
graves." More than one-half of the inmates of our Great Ormond Street
Hospital for Sick Children are sent there by vice. But would to God it
were only innocent suffering that is inflicted on the children of our
land. Alas! alas! when I first began my work, a ward in a large London
penitentiary, I found, was set apart for degraded children! Or take that
one brief appalling statement in the record of ten years of work--1884
to 1894--issued by a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
In the classification of the various victims it is stated that the
society had dealt with 4460 pitiable child victims of debauchery! Alas
for our England, and the debasement which a low moral standard for men
has made possible in our midst! And, judging by the absence of proper
legal protection and the extraordinarily low age of consent adopted by
some of the States of the Union, I fear things are not much better in
America.
One of our sweetest poets, Charles Tennyson Turner, in an exquisite
sonnet on a three-year-old child being presented with a toy globe, has
portrayed the consecration of a child's innocence, bathing the world
itself in its baptismal dew:
"She patted all the world; old empires peep'd
Between her baby fingers; her soft hand
Was welcome at all frontiers."
And when at length they turn "her sweet unlearned eye" "on our own
isle," she utters a little joyous cry:
"Oh yes, I see it! Letty's home is there!
And while she hid all England with a kiss,
Bright over Europe fell her golden hair."
By the side of that exquisite picture of the beatitude of a child's
innocence place the picture of that long procession of desecrated
children, with no "sweet unlearned eye," but eyes learned in the worst
forms of human wickedness and cruelty; and let any woman say, if she can
or dare, that this is a subject on which she is not called to have any
voice and which she prefers to let alone. Surely our womanhood has not
become in these last days such a withered and wilted thing that our ears
have grown too nice for the cry of these hapless children! As women, we
are the natural guardians of the innocence of all children. The divine
motherhood that is at the heart of every woman worthy of the name "rises
up in wrath" within us and cries: "We _will_ fulfil our trust, not only
to our own children, but to the helpless children of the poor." The day
is at hand when every mother of boys will silently vow before God to
send at least one knight of God into the world to fight an evil before
which even a child's innocence is not sacred and which tramples under
its swine's feet the weak and the helpless.
Indeed, when one reflects that this great moral problem touches all the
great trusts of our womanhood, the sanctity of the family, the purity of
the home, the sacredness of marriage, the sweet innocence of children,
it seems like some evil dream that women can ever have asked, "Why
cannot I leave this matter to men? Why should I interfere?"
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Dr. Carpenter does not hesitate to attribute this sharp dip
in the male line of life to the indulgence of the passions in youth, and
the subsequent rise to marriage and a more regular life.]
[Footnote 2: _Pendennis_, vol. i., p. 16.]