THE EIGHTIETH MILESTONE AND THE END.
On October 31, 1905, I celebrated my eightieth birthday. Twelve months
earlier, writing to a friend, I said:--"I entered my eightieth year on
Monday, and I enjoy life as much as I did at 18; indeed, in many
respects I enjoy it more." The birthday gathering took place in the
schoolroom of the Unitarian Church, the church to which I had owed so
much happiness through the lifting of the dark shadows of my earlier
religious beliefs. Surrounded by friends who had taken their share in
the development of my beloved State, I realized one of the happiest
times of my life. I had hoped that the celebration would have helped
the cause of effective voting, which had been predominant in my mind
since 1859. By my interests and work in so many other directions--in
literature, journalism, education, philanthropy, and religion--which
had been testified to by so many notable people on that occasion, I
hoped to prove that I was not a mere faddist, who could be led away by
a chimerical fantasy. I wanted the world to understand that I was a
clear-brained, commonsense woman of the world, whose views on effective
voting and other political questions were as worthy of credence as her
work in other directions had been worthy of acceptance. The greetings
of my many friends from all parts of the Commonwealth on that day
brought so much joy to me that there was little wonder I was able to
conclude my birthday poem "Australian spring" with the lines:--
With eighty winters o'er my head,
Within my heart there's Spring.
Full as my life was with its immediate interests, the growth and
development of the outside world claimed a good share of my attention.
The heated controversies in the motherland over the preachings and
teaching of the Rev. R. J. Campbell found their echo here, and I was
glad to be able to support in pulpit and newspaper the stand made by t
he courageous London preacher of modern thought. How changed the
outlook of the world from my childhood's days, when Sunday was a day of
strict theological habit, from which no departure could be permitted!
The laxity of modern life, by comparison is, I think, somewhat
appalling. We have made the mistake of breaking away from old beliefs
and convictions without replacing them with something better. We do not
make as much, or as good, use of our Sundays as we might do. There is a
medium between the rigid Sabbatarianism of our ancestors and the
absolute waste of the day of rest in mere pleasure and frivolity. All
the world is deploring the secularizing of Sunday. Not only is
churchgoing perfunctory or absent, but in all ranks of life there is a
disposition to make it a day of rest and amusement--sometimes the
amusement rather than the rest. Sunday, the Sabbath, as Alex McLaren
pointed out to me, is not a day taken from us, but a day given to us.
"Behold, I have given you the Sabbath!" For what? For rest for man and
beast, but also to be a milestone in our upward and onward progress--a
day for not only wearing best clothes, but for reading our best books
and thinking our best thoughts. I have often grieved at the small
congregations in other churches no less than in my own, and the grief
was aggravated by the knowledge that those who were absent from church
were not necessarily otherwise well employed. I derived so much
pleasure from the excellent and cultured sermons of my friend the Rev.
John Reid during his term of office here that I regretted the fact that
others who might gain equally from them were not there to hear them. I
would like to see among the young people a finer conception of the
duties of citizenship, which, if not finding expression in church
attendance, may develop in some way that will be noble and useful to
society.
In the meantime the work of the Effective Voting League had been rather
at a standstill. Mrs. Young's illness had caused her resignation, and
until she again took up the work nothing further was done to help Mr.
Coombe in his Parliamentary agitation. In 1908, however, we began a
vigorous campaign, and towards the close of the year the propaganda
work was being carried into all parts of the State. Although I was then
83, I travelled to Petersburg to lecture to a good audience. On the
same night Mrs. Young addressed a fine gathering at Mount Gambier, and
from that time the work has gone on unceasingly. The last great effort
was made through the newspaper ballot of September, 1909, when a public
count of about 10,000 votes was completed with all explanations during
the evening. The difficulties that were supposed to stand in the way of
a general acceptance of effective voting have been entirely swept away.
Tasmania and South Africa have successfully demonstrated the
practicability, no less than the justice, of the system. Now we get to
the bedrock of the objections raised to its adoption, and we find that
they exist only in the minds of the politicians themselves; but the
people have faith in effective voting, and I believe the time to be
near when they will demand equitable representation in every
Legislature in the world. The movement has gone too far to be checked,
and the electoral unrest which is so common all over the world will
eventually find expression in the best of all electoral systems, which
I claim to be effective voting.
Among the many friends I had made in the other States there was none I
admired more for her public spiritedness than Miss Vida Goldstein. I
have been associated with her on many platforms and in many branches of
work. Her versatility is great, but there is little doubt that her
chief work lies in helping women and children. Her life is practically
spent in battling for her sex. Although I was the first woman in
Australia to become a Parliamentary candidate, Miss Goldstein has since
exceeded my achievement by a second candidature for the Senate. It was
during her visit here last May-June as a delegate to the State
Children's Congress that she inaugurated the Women's Non-party
Political Association, which is apparently a growing force. In a
general way the aims of the society bear a strong resemblance to those
of the social students' society, many of its members having also
belonged to the earlier association. It was a hopeful sign to me that
it included among its members people of all political views working
chiefly in the interests of women and children. Of this Society also I
became the first President, and the fact that on its platform was
included proportional representation was an incentive for me to work
for it. The education of women on public and social questions, so that
they will be able to work side by side with the opposite sex for the
public good will, I think, help in the solution of social problems that
are now obstacles in the path of progress. In addition to other
literary work for the year 1909 I was asked by Miss Alice Henry to
revise my book on State children in order to make it acceptable and
applicable to American conditions. It was a big undertaking, but I
think successful. The book, as originally written had already done good
work in Western Australia, where the conditions of infant mortality
were extremely alarming, and in England also; and there is ample scope
for such a work in America, which is still far behind even the most
backward Australian State in its care for dependent children.
As a President of three societies, a Vice-President of two others, a
member of two of the most important boards in the State for the care of
the destitute, the deserted, and the dependent, with a correspondence
that touches on many parts of the Empire, and two continents besides,
with my faculty for the appreciation of good literature still
unimpaired, with my domestic interests so dear to me, and my constant
knitting for the infants under the care of the State Inspector--I find
my life as an octogenarian more varied in its occupations and interests
than ever before. Looking back from the progressive heights of 1910
through the long vista of years, numbering upwards of four-fifths of a
century, I rejoice at the progress the world has made. Side by side
with the development of my State my life has slowly unfolded itself. My
connection with many of the reforms to which is due this development
has been intimate, and (I think I am justified in saying) oftentimes
helpful. While other States of the Commonwealth and the Dominion of New
Zealand have made remarkable progress, none has eclipsed the rapid
growth of the State to which the steps of my family were directed in
1839. Its growth has been more remarkable, because it has been
primarily due to its initiation of many social and political reforms
which have since been adopted by other and older countries. "Australia,
lead us further," is the cry of reformers in America. We have led in so
many things, and though America may claim the honour of being the
birthplace of the more modern theory of land values taxation, I rejoice
that South Australia was the first country in the world with the
courage and the foresight to adopt the tax on land values without
exemption. That she is still lagging behind Tasmania and South Africa
in the adoption of effective voting, as the only scientific system of
electoral reform, is the sorrow of my old age. The fact that South
Australia has been the happy hunting ground of the faddist has
frequently been urged as a reproach against this State. Its more
patriotic citizens will rejoice in the truth of the statement, and
their prayer will probably be that not fewer but more advanced thinkers
will arise to carry this glorious inheritance beneath the Southern
Cross to higher and nobler heights of physical and human development
than civilization has yet dreamed of or achieved. The Utopia of
yesterday is the possession of today, and opens the way to the Utopia
of to-morrow. The haunting horror of older civilizations--divorcing the
people from their natural inheritance in the soil, and filling the
towns with myriads of human souls dragged down by poverty, misery, and
crime--is already casting its shadow over the future of Australia; but
there is hope in the fact that a new generation has arisen untrammelled
by tradition, which, having the experience of older countries before
it, and benefiting from the advantages of the freer life and the
greater opportunities afforded by a new country, gives promise of
ultimately finding the solution of the hitherto unsolved problem of
making country life as attractive to the masses as that of the towns
and cities. As time goes on the effect of education must tell, and the
generations that are to come will be more enlightened and more
altruistic, and the tendency of the world will be more and more, even
as it is now, towards higher and nobler conceptions of human happiness.
I have lived through a glorious age of progress. Born in "the wonderful
century," I have watched the growth of the movement for the uplifting
of the masses, from the Reform Bill of 1832 to the demands for adult
suffrage. As a member of a church which allows women to speak in the
pulpit, a citizen of a State which gives womanhood a vote for the
Assembly, a citizen of a Commonwealth which fully enfranchises me for
both Senate and Representatives, and a member of a community which was
foremost in conferring University degrees on women, I have benefited
from the advancement of the educational and political status of women
for which the Victorian era will probably stand unrivalled in the
annals of the world's history. I have lived through the period of
repressed childhood, and witnessed the dawn of a new era which has made
the dwellers in youth's "golden age" the most important factor in human
development. I have watched the growth of Adelaide from the condition
of a scattered hamlet to that of one of the finest cities in the
southern hemisphere; I have seen the evolution of South Australia from
a province to an important State in a great Commonwealth. All through
my life I have tried to live up to the best that was in me, and I
should like to be remembered as one who never swerved in her efforts to
do her duty alike to herself and her fellow-citizens. Mistakes I have
made, as all are liable to do, but I have done my best. And when life
has closed for me, let those who knew me best speak and think of me as
One who never turned her back, but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.
No nobler epitaph would I desire.
End of Project Gutenberg's An Autobiography, by Catherine Helen Spence