FIRST PRINCIPLES
"But what can we do?" will be the next question, uttered perhaps in the
forlorn accents of a latent despair.
Before answering this question in detail, I would endeavor to impress
two cardinal points upon you.
The first point I want you to recognize, though it may seem to minister
to the very hopelessness which most lames and cripples for effective
action, is the depth and magnitude of the problem we have to grapple
with. All other great social evils, with the possible exception of greed
or covetousness, which in Scripture is often classed with impurity, may
be looked upon as more or less diseases of the extremities. But the evil
which we are now considering is no disease of the extremities, but a
disease at the very heart of our life, attacking all the great bases on
which it rests. It is not only the negation of the sanctity of the
family and the destroyer of the purity of the home, as I have already
pointed out, but it is also the derider of the sacredness of the
individual, the slow but sure disintegrator of the body politic, the
dry-rot of nations, before which the mightiest empires have crumbled
into dust. The lagoons of Venice mirror it in the departed grandeur of
her palaces, overthrown by the licentiousness of her merchant princes.
The mute sands that silt up the ruins of old empires are eloquent of it.
The most brilliant civilization the world has even seen through it
became the most transitory. Even the vast and massive structure of the
Roman Empire, undermined by moral corruption, vanished before barbarian
hordes like the baseless fabric of a dream. To think that we can solve a
problem of this depth and magnitude by any mere external means--as so
many good and earnest women seem to imagine--by any multiplication of
Rescue Societies, Preventive Institutions, and other benevolent
organizations--is to think that we can plug up a volcano with sticks and
straws. The remedy, like the evil, must be from within, and must to a
great degree revolutionize our life.
My second cardinal point is, that the first step we have to take, the
step which must precede all others, if anything is to be of the least
avail, must be to restore the moral law and get rid of the double
standard. I know well how much has been said and written on this point;
it has been insisted on possibly _ad nauseam_. But even now I do not
think we fully realize how completely we have been in the grasp of a
"tradition of the elders," which has emphatically "made the law of God
of none effect." Side by side with the ethics of Christianity have
grown up the bastard ethics of society, widely divergent from the true
moral order. Man has accepted the obligation of purity so far as it
subserves his own selfish interests and enables him to be sure of his
own paternity and safeguard the laws of inheritance. The precepts which
were primarily addressed to the man, as the very form of the Greek words
demonstrate, were tacitly transferred to the woman. When, in a standard
dictionary of the English language, I look out the word "virtue," which
etymologically means "manliness"--the manliness which would scorn to
gratify its own selfish passions at the cost of the young, the poor, and
the weak, at the cost of a _woman_--I find one of its meanings defined,
not as male but as "female chastity." Long ago I suggested that as
manliness thus goes by default, the word had better be changed from
virtue to "muliertue."
In a passage in one of our standard school-books, Green's _Short History
of the English People_, the historian, alluding to the coarseness of the
early Elizabethan drama, remarks that "there were no female actors, and
the grossness which startles us in words which fall from a woman's lips
took a different color when every woman's part was acted by a boy."[3]
Why, in the name of all moral sense, should it be less dreadful that
gross and obscene passages should be uttered at a public spectacle by
young and unformed boys than by adult women, who at least would have
the safeguard of mature knowledge and instincts to teach them their full
loathsomeness? Do we really think that boys are born less pure than
girls? Does the mother, when her little son is born, keep the old
iron-moulded flannels, the faded basinette, the dirty feeding-bottle for
him with the passing comment, "Oh, it is only a boy!" Is anything too
white and fine and pure for his infant limbs, and yet are we to hold
that anything is good enough for his childish soul--even, according to
Mr. Green, the grossness of the early Elizabethan stage--because he is a
boy? But I ask how many readers of that delightful history would so much
as notice this passage, and not, on the contrary, quietly accept it
without inward note or comment, possessed as we are, often without
knowing it, by our monstrous double standard?
If we want to see what is the final outcome of this moral code, of this
one-sided and distorted ethic, we have only to turn our eyes to France.
On the one hand we have "la jeune fille" in her white Communion robe,
kept so pure and ignorant of all evil, that "une société
ecclésiastique," I am told, exists for the emendation of history for her
benefit--Divine Providence, as conducting the affairs of men, being far
too coarse for her pure gaze; and at the other end of the stick we find
Zola, and a literature intended only for the eyes of men, of whose
chastity, according to Renan, "Nature takes no account whatever,"--a
literature which fouls with its vile sewage the very wellsprings of our
nature, and which, whatever its artistic merit, I make bold to say is a
curse to the civilized world.
Now, I earnestly protest that while we have this social code, which is
in direct violation of the moral law, we may set on foot any number of
Rescue Societies, Preventive Agencies, Acts for the Legal Protection of
the Young, etc., but all our efforts will be in vain. We are like a man
who should endeavor to construct a perfect system of dynamics on the
violation of Newton's first law of motion. The tacitly accepted
necessity for something short of the moral law for men will--again I say
it--work out with the certainty of a mathematical law a degraded and
outcast class, with its disease, its insanity, its foul contamination of
the young, its debasement of manhood, its disintegration of the State,
its curse to the community. You cannot dodge the moral law; as Professor
Clifford said, "There are no back-stairs to the universe" by which we
can elude the consequences of our wrong, whether of thought or action.
If you let in one evil premise by the back-door, be sure Sin and Death
will come out at the front.
Here, then, you must take a firm and watchful stand. As the mothers of
the future generation of men, you must look upon it as your
divinely-appointed task to bring back the moral law in its entirety,
the one standard equally binding on men and women alike. Whatever your
creed, you have got to hold fast to this great truth, which life itself
forces upon you, and which is a truth of Christian ethics because first
of all it is a truth of life. It is simply a moral Q.E.D., that if
chastity is a law for women--and no man would deny that--it is a law for
every woman without exception; and if it is a law for every woman, it
follows necessarily that it must be for every man, unless we are going
to indulge in the moral turpitude of accepting a pariah class of women
made up of other women's daughters and other women's sisters--not our
own, God forbid that they should be our own!--set apart for the vices of
men.
But perhaps, looking at our complicated civilization, which, at least in
the upper classes, involves, as a rule, the deferring of
marriage--looking at the strength of the passions which generations of
indulgence have evolved beyond their natural limits, some women will
feel constrained to ask, "Is this standard a possible one? Can men keep
their health and strength as celibates? Is not my husband right when he
says that this is a subject we women can know nothing about, and that
here we must bow to the judgment of men?"
I answer that a mother must know by what standard she is to educate her
boy, and therefore must have the data supplied to her on which to form
her own judgment, and be fully persuaded in her own mind what she is to
aim at in the training she is to give him; and the mere fact that the
current judgment of men involves the sacrifice in body and soul of a
large class of our fellow-women lays a paramount obligation upon all
women to search for themselves into the truth and scientific accuracy of
the premises on which that judgment is based.
"Can men keep their health and strength as celibates till such time as
they have the means to marry?" is the question we have, then, to face.
Is the standard of the moral law possible to men who have to maintain a
high level of physical efficiency in the sharp competition of modern
life?
Primarily, the answer to this question must come from the acknowledged
heads of the medical profession. Now, I am thankful to say, we have in
England a consensus of opinion from the representative men of the
faculty that no one can gainsay. Sir James Paget, Acton in his great
text-book, Sir Andrew Clark, Sir George Humphrey, of Cambridge,
Professor Millar, of the Edinburgh University, Sir William Gowers,
F.R.S., have all answered the above question in the strongest
affirmative. "Chastity does no harm to body or mind; its discipline is
excellent; marriage may safely be waited for," are Sir James Paget's
terse and emphatic words[4]. Still more emphatic are the words of Sir
William Gowers, the great men's specialist, who counts as an authority
on the Continent as well as here:
"The opinions which on grounds falsely called 'physiological'
suggest or permit unchastity are terribly prevalent among young
men, but they are absolutely false. With all the force of any
knowledge I possess, and any authority I have, I assert that this
belief is contrary to fact; I assert that no man ever yet was in
the slightest degree or way the worse for continence or better for
incontinence. From incontinence during unmarried life all are worse
morally; a clear majority, are, in the end, worse physically; and
in no small number the result is, and ever will be, utter physical
shipwreck on one of the many rocks, sharp, jagged-edged, which
beset the way, or on one of the banks of festering slime which no
care can possibly avoid. They are rocks which tear and rend the
unhappy being who is driven against them when he has yielded to the
tide of passion, they are banks which exhale a poison for which, no
true antidote exists."
In face of such testimony as this, well might Mr. George Russell, in an
address to young men, speak of "this exploded lie which has hitherto led
so many astray."
Turning now from knowledge to fact, we have only to look at the French
clergy to see that even in the extreme case of life-long celibacy it is
not injurious to health. I know, in taking this case, I am grating
somewhat harshly against Protestant prejudice. But the testimony that
Renan bears on this point is irrefutable. Himself a renegade priest, he
certainly would not have hesitated to expose the Order to which he had
once belonged, and vindicate his broken vows by the revelation of any
moral rottenness known within the walls of its seminaries. Far from
this, he bears the most emphatic testimony in his autobiography that
there is enough virtue in St. Sulpice alone to convert the world; and
owns so strong was the impress made on his own soul by his training as a
priest that personally he had lived a pure life, "although," he adds,
with an easy shrug of his shoulders, "it is very possible that the
libertine has the best of it!" Another renegade priest, also eminent in
literature, bears exactly the same testimony. Indeed, when we remember
the argus-eyed hatred with which the French priesthood is watched by the
anti-clerical party, and the few scandals that appear in the public
prints only too anxious to give publicity to them, this unimpeachable
testimony is borne out by fact. I believe this testimony to be equally
true of the English and Irish Roman Catholic clergy. Yet few would
dispute the vigor of the physique of the Roman Catholic priests, or
their capacity for hard and often exhausting work.
Let me, however, guard myself from misapprehension. That a celibate
life, combined with rich feeding, French novels, and low thinking, does
produce a great deal of physical harm goes almost without saying.
Nature, like her Lord, requires truth in the inward parts, and takes but
small care of outward respectabilities that are but the whitewashed
graves of inward foulness. Surely Lowell is right when he says, "I hold
unchastity of mind to be worse than that of body." To live the
unmarried life one must, of course, fulfil its conditions of plain
living and clean thinking.
It is almost with a feeling of shame that I have dwelt at some length on
the point we have been considering; but all through my ten years of work
the sunken rock on which I was always making shipwreck was the necessity
of the evil--often openly avowed by men, but haunting even the minds of
women like a shadow--a shadow which gained solidity and substance from a
sense of their helpless ignorance. I have even met with Christian women
who have serenely averred to my face that they have been told, on
authority that they could not question, that, were it not for the
existence of an outcast class, no respectable woman would be safe and we
could not insure the purity of the home! So low had the moral
consciousness fallen, through ignorance and thoughtless acceptance of
the masculine code, that women calling themselves Christians could be
found who seemed wholly unconscious of the deep inner debasement of
accepting the degradation of other women as a safeguard to our own
virtue and of basing the purity of the Christian home on the ruined
bodies and souls of the children of the poor. Truly the dark places of
the world within, as well as of the world without, are full of cruelty!
What can I do, in the face of such an experience as this, but humbly and
earnestly beseech the women of England and America not to play fast and
loose with the moral sense within them--- which is God's voice within
us--but to hold fast to the moral law, one, equal, and indivisible, for
men and women alike; and to know and feel sure that, whatever else is
bound up with the nature of man or with an advancing civilization, the
hopeless degradation of woman is not that something. It is God who has
made us--not we ourselves, with our false codes, false notions, and
false necessities; and God has made the man to love the woman and give
himself for her, not to degrade her and destroy the very function for
which she was made the blessed "mother of all living."
Only be sure of this: that men will rise to the level of any standard
that we set them. For the present standard of what Sainte Beuve calls
"l'homme sensuel moyen," which we have accepted and tacitly endorsed, we
women are largely to blame. In my conferences with the clergy and
earnest laity held in all our large towns it was always this that men
spoke of as the greatest stumbling-block in their way. With the utmost
bitterness they would urge that men of known fast life were admitted
into society, that women seemed to prefer them rather than not; and it
seemed to make no difference to them what kind of life a man
led--whether he reverenced their womanhood or not. How could I deny this
bitter accusation in the face of facts? All I could urge in extenuation
was that I believed it was due rather to the ignorance than to the
indifference of women, owing to the whole of this dark side of life
having been carefully veiled from their view; but now that this
ignorance was passing away, I was only one of hundreds of women who ask
nothing better than to lay down their lives in the cause of their own
womanhood. Only when women learn to respect themselves; only when no
woman worthy the name will receive into her own drawing-room in friendly
intercourse with her own girls the man who has done his best to make her
womanhood a vile and desecrated thing; only when no mother worthy the
name will, for the sake of wealth or position,--what is called "a good
match,"--give her pure girl to a man on the very common conditions, as
things have been, that some other ten or twenty young girls--some poor
mothers' daughters--have been degraded and cast aside into the gutter,
that she, the twenty-first in this honorable harem, may be held in
apparent honor as a wife; only when no woman worthy the name will marry
under the conditions portrayed by our great novelist, George
Eliot,--that of another woman being basely forsaken for her sake--then,
and then only, will this reproach that men level at us drop off; then,
and then only, shall we be able to save our own sons and bring in a
better and purer state of things, enabling them to fight the battle of
their life at less tremendous odds; then, and then only, shall we be
able to evolve the true manhood, whose attitude is not to defile and
destroy, but "to look up and to lift up."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 3: _Short History of the English People_, by J.R. Green, p.
247.]
[Footnote 4: See a little White Cross paper entitled, _Medical
Testimony_.]