THE GREAT CONSPIRACY
One morning, after six weeks of this pleasant life, Lord Chester, who
had made excellent use of his time, and was now as completely a man as
his companions, was summoned to the Bishop's study, and there received a
communication of the greatest importance.
The Professor was the only other person present.
'I have thought it prudent, Lord Chester,' said the Bishop gravely, 'to
acquaint you with the fact that the time is now approaching when the
great Attempt will be made. Are you still of the same mind? May we look
for your devotion--even if we fail?'
'You may, my lord.' The young man held out his hand, which the aged
Bishop clasped.
'It is good,' he said, 'to see the devotion of youth ready to renounce
life and its joys; to incur the perils of death and dishonour. This
seems hard even in old age, when life has given all it has to give. But
in young men---- Yet, my son, remember that the martyr does but change a
lower life for a higher.'
'I give you my life, if so it must be,' Lord Chester repeated.
'We take what is offered cheerfully. You must know then, my lord, that
the ground has been artfully prepared for us. This conspiracy, which you
have hitherto thought confined to one old man's house and half a dozen
young men living with him, is in reality spread over the whole country.
We have organisations, great or small, in nearly every town of England.
Some of them have as yet only advanced to the stage of discontent;
others have been pushed on to learn that the evil condition of men is
due chiefly to the government of women; others have learned that the sex
which rules ought to obey; others, that the worship of the Perfect Woman
is a vain superstition: none have gone so far as you and your friends,
who have learned more--the faith in the Perfect Man. That is because you
are to be the leaders, you yourself to be the Chief.
'Now, my lord, the thing having so far advanced, the danger is, that one
or other of our secret societies may be discovered. True, they do not
know the ramifications or extent of the conspiracy. They cannot,
therefore, do us any injury by treachery or unlucky disclosures; yet the
punishment of the members would be so severe as to strike terror into
the rest of our members. Therefore, it is desirable to begin as soon as
possible.'
'To-day!' cried the young Chief.
'No--not to-day, nor to-morrow. The difficulty is, to find some
pretext,--some reasonable pretext--under cover of which we might rise.'
'Can we not invent something.'
'There are the convicts. We might raise a force, and liberate those of
the prisoners who are victims of the harsh laws of violence and the
refusal to take a husband's evidence when accused by a wife. Then the
country would be with us. But I shrink from commencing this great
rebellion with bloodshed.'
He paused and reflected for a time.
'Then there is the labour cry. We might send our little force into the
towns, and call on the workmen to rise for freedom. But suppose they
would not rise? Then--more bloodshed.
'Or we might preach the Faith throughout the land, as Clarence Veysey
wants to do. But I incline not to the belief in wholesale miracles, and
the age of faith is past, and the number of our preachers is very
small.'
'You will be helped,' said the Professor, 'in a quarter where you least
suspect. I, too, with my girls, have done my little.'
She proceeded to open a packet of papers, which she laid before the
young Chief.
'What are these?' he asked.
'They are called Tracts for the Times,' she replied. 'They are addressed
to the Women of England.'
He took them up and read them carefully one by one.
'Who wrote these?'
'The girls and I together. We posted them wherever we could get
addresses--to all the undergraduates, to all the students of hospitals,
Inns of Court, and institutions of every kind; to quiet country
vicarages; to rich people and poor people,--wherever there was a
chance, we directed a tract.'
'You have done well,' said the Bishop.
'They have been found out, and a reward is offered for the printers. As
they were printed in the cellars of this house, the reward is not likely
to be claimed. They were all posted here, which makes the Government the
more uneasy. They believe in the spread of what they call irreligion
among the undergraduates. Unfortunately, the undergraduates are as yet
only discontented, because all avenues are choked.'
The Bishop took up one of the tracts again, and read it thoughtfully. It
was headed, _Tracts for the Times: For Young Women_, and was the first
number. The second title was _Work and Women_.
The writer, in brief telling paragraphs, very different from the
long-winded, verbose style everywhere prevalent, called upon women
seriously to consider their own position, and the state that things had
been brought to by the Government of the Peeresses. Every profession was
crowded: the shameful spectacle of women begging for employment, even
the most ill-paid, was everywhere seen; the law in both branches was
filled with briefless and clientless members; there were more doctors
than patients; there were more teachers than pupils; there were artists
without number who produced acres of painted canvas every year and found
no patrons; the Church had too many curates; while architects,
journalists, novelists, poets, orators, swarmed, and were all alike
ravenous for work at any rate of pay, even the lowest. The happiest
were the few who could win their way by competitive examination into the
Civil Service; and even there, the Government having logically applied
the sound political axioms of supply and demand to the hire of their
servants, they could hardly live upon their miserable pay, and must give
up all hopes of marriage. There was a time, the tract went on, when men
had to do all the work, including the work of the professions. In those
days all kinds of work were considered respectable, so that there was
not this universal run upon the professions. And in those days, said the
writer, the axiom of open competition in professional charges was not
acted up to, insomuch that physicians, barristers, and solicitors
charged a sum agreed upon by themselves--and that an adequate sum--for
services rendered; while the pay of the Service was given in
consideration to the amount required for comfortable living. The only
way out of the difficulty, concluded the author, was to limit the number
of those who entered the professions, to regulate the charges on a
liberal scale, and to increase the pay of the Services. As for the rest,
if women must work, they must do the things which women can do
well--sew, make dresses, cook, and, in fact, perform all those services
which were thought menial, unless, indeed, they preferred the hard work
of men in the fields and at the looms.
The second tract treated of the Idleness of Men.
By the wisdom of their ancestors, it had been ordained that every man
should be taught a handicraft, by means of which to earn his own living.
This wholesome rule had been allowed to fall into abeyance; for while
some sort of carpenter's work was nominally and officially taught in
boys' schools, it had long been considered a mark of social inferiority
for man to do any work at all. 'We educate our men,' the tract went on,
'in the practice of every gymnastic and athletic feat; we turn them out
strong, active, able to do and endure, and then we find nothing for them
to do. Is it their fault that they become vacuous, ill-tempered,
discontented, the bane of the house which their virtues ought to make a
happy home? What else can we expect? Whence the early falling off into
fat cheeks and flabby limbs? whence the love of the table--that vice
which stains our manhood? whence the apathy at Church services?--whence
should they come but from the forced idleness, the lack of interest in
life?'
The tract went on to call for a reform in this as in other matters. Let
the men be set to work; let men of all classes have to work. Why should
women do all, as well as think for all? 'It must be considered, again,
that every man cannot be married; indeed, under the present state of
things few women can think of marriage till they have arrived at middle
age, and therefore most men must remain single. Why should we doom them
to a long life of forced inaction? Happier far the rustic who ploughs
the field, or the cobbler who patches the village boots.' Then there
followed an artful and specious reference to old times: 'Under the
former régime, men worked, and women, in the freedom of the house,
thought. The nominal ruler was the Hand; the actual, the Head. In those
days, the flower of woman's life was not wasted in study and
competition. The maidens were wooed while they were young and beautiful;
their lovers worked for them, surrounded them with pleasant things,
lapped them in warmth, brought them all that they could desire, made
their lives a restful dream of love. It has come to this, O women of the
New Faith, that you have thrown away the love of men, and with it the
whole joy of creation! You worship the Woman; your mothers, happier in
their generation, were contented each to be worshipped by a man.'
'That is very good,' said the Bishop.
Then the Professor produced another and a more dangerous manifesto,
addressed to the young men of England. It was dark and mysterious: it
bade them be on the watch for a great and glorious change; they were to
remember the days when men were rulers; they were to distrust their
teachers, and especially the priestesses; they were to look with
loathing upon the inaction to which they were condemned; they were told
to ask themselves for what end their limbs were strong if they were to
do nothing all their lives; and they were taught how, in the old days,
the men did all the work, and were rewarded by marrying young and lovely
women. This tract had been circulated from hand to hand, none of the
agents in its distribution knowing anything of the plot.
There were others, all turning upon the evils of the times, and all
recalling the old days when women sat at home.
'We want,' said the Bishop, 'a pretext,--we want a spark which shall set
fire to this mass of discontent.'
That very night there was a stormy debate in the House of Peeresses. The
Duchess of Dunstanburgh, whose Ministry was kept in power by nothing but
the stern will of their leader, because it had never commanded the
confidence or even the respect of the House, came down with a bundle of
papers in her hand. They were these very tracts. She read them through,
one by one. She informed the House that these tracts had been circulated
wholesale: from every town in the country she received intelligence that
they had been taken from some girl's hands,--in many cases from the
innocent hands of young men. She said that it had been ascertained so
far that the tracts were posted from Cambridge; it was believed they
were the work of certain mischievous and infidel undergraduates. She had
taken the unusual course of instituting a college visitation, so far
without effect. Meantime she assured the House that if the author of
these tracts could be discovered, no punishment would be too severe to
meet the offence.
The Countess of Carlyon rose to reply. She said that no one regretted
more than herself the tone of these tracts. At the same time there was,
without doubt, ample cause for discontent. The professions were crammed;
thousands of learned young women were asking themselves where they were
to look for even daily bread. In the homes, the young men, seeing the
misery, were, for their part, asking why they should not work, if work
of any kind were to be got. To sit at home, and starve in gentility, was
a hard thing to do, even by the most patient and religious young man;
while for a girl to see the days go by barren and unprofitable, while
her beauty withered,--to have no hope of marriage; to see the man she
might have loved taken from her--here the Countess faced the Duchess
with indignant eyes--taken from her by one old enough to be his
grandmother,--surely here was cause enough for discontent! She urged the
appointment of a commission for the consideration of grievances; and she
urged, further, that the evidence of men, old and young, should be
received--especially on two important points: first, whether they really
_liked_ a life of inaction; and secondly, whether they really _liked_
marrying their grandmothers.
The scene which followed this motion was truly deplorable. The following
of Lady Carlyon consisted of all the younger members of the House--a
minority, but full of life and vigour; on the opposite side were the old
and middle-aged Peeresses, who had been brought up in the doctrine of
woman's divine right of authority, and of man's divine rule of
obedience. The elders had a tremendous majority, of course; but not the
less, the fact that such a motion could be made was disquieting. The
debate was not reported, but it got abroad; and while the tracts
circulated more widely than ever, no more were seized, because they
were all kept hidden, and circulated underhand.
From end to end of the country, the talk was of nothing but of the old
times. Was it true, the girls asked, that formerly the women ruled at
home, while the men did all the work? If that was so, would no one find
a compromise by which they could restore that part, at least, of the
former régime? Oh, to end these weary struggles,--these studies, which
led to examinations; these examinations, which led to diplomas; these
diplomas which led to nothing; these agonising endeavours to trample
upon each other, to push themselves into notoriety, to snatch the scraps
of work from each other's hands! Oh, to rest, to lie still, to watch the
men work! Oh--but this they whispered with clasping of hands--oh, to be
worshipped by a lover young and loyal! What did the tract say? Happy
women of old, when there was no Perfect Woman, but each was the goddess
of one man!