honey, to name what our American friends would call "a side line," when
we have a wealth of flowers and fruit blossom that would not only yield
all that is required, but would even enable us to substitute honey for
much of the sugar that is only sold to us when it has been chemically
treated to improve appearance at the expense of quality? Why must we
gather eggs from the far ends of the earth, and bacon from countries
where pigs are fed as they are said to be fed in China? When I think
of the thousands of women who are ready, willing, and, if properly
trained, able to take a hand in the great task of feeding the people,
it seems to me that the seed I sowed in 1898, to the accompaniment of
much amusement, derision, and hostile criticism, has grown into a very
sturdy and healthy tree. I even venture to think that the fruits will
be more refreshing than those of the Insurance Act itself. As far
as the records I have been able to examine teach me, there have been
very few failures to achieve success among the women who have taken
resolutely and completely to this comparatively new walk in life. The
students have done more than merely earn a comfortable living. They
have been the disseminators of the new ideas, the modern theories of
agriculture, horticulture, and apiculture, the introducers of order
and method into realms where chaos ruled amiably and ineffectively. In
many cases they have even succeeded so far as to disarm prejudice and
to persuade omniscient man that a method is not good merely because it
is customary or easy to follow. And what they have done is small by the
side of what they may hope to do.
What is needed just now, when the Government is really awake to
the importance of woman's work on the land, is an extension of the
agricultural colleges and a series of State grants. At present the
work is costly. The upkeep of a big institution is expensive, because
you cannot treat the land precisely as you would for utility farming.
It is there to teach pupils, to carry out demonstrations. So it is
with the glass, that is so costly to build and to heat. Then, again,
professors--the best in the country--must be asked to lecture; and
while agricultural colleges are in the heart of the country, the
professors are probably living in distant university towns, so that
their lectures are bound to be costly. Let us remember, too, quite
frankly, that there is not much money for the girl who is not able to
start a little establishment of her own or to go into partnership.
There is a happy, healthy, useful life, there is valuable service,
quite unrecorded, to the public at large, but the monetary reward is of
the slightest and the training is long.
It is necessary, then, in view of the growing demand for the work
of woman's hands, that the Government should make grants to the
established colleges as they make grants to other educational bodies,
and it would be well if every County Council that does not conduct an
agricultural college of its own would give a few scholarships annually
in the college nearest to its county town. These steps are needed to
give an impetus to the work that is now being done. Had they been taken
when first I pleaded for them, we should have been in quite a different
position to-day. There would, at least, have been enough capable
workers to meet the most pressing demands. At present they tell me
that at Studley every post brings applications for gardeners and dairy
workers, for women competent to train others, but there is not a single
disengaged pupil. Doubtless a similar state of things obtains at the
other colleges in Kent, Worcestershire, Sussex, and elsewhere.
It has been seen that properly trained women can do all the work of
farm and garden. Even ploughing is not beyond them, save on very stiff
clay soils. They are entirely successful in handling animals; horses,
cows, bullocks, sheep, pigs, and goats are all tractable when cared
for by women. They are taught at all well-conducted institutions to
substitute knack for force, and they have, as is admitted on all
hands, the right temperament for tasks that demand not only time,
but patience. As beekeepers they do very well, the gift of delicate
handling standing them in good stead, and in the glasshouses they
are easily first. Dr. Hamilton, the energetic and gifted Warden of
Studley, tells me that she finds that the health of girls engaged upon
the land, whether in the garden or on the farm, is good, and that many
who arrive at the College in a delicate state of health grow very much
stronger. She finds that the work makes women not only healthy, but
happy--presumably because happiness is largely a product of good health.
Perhaps the needs of the country will be the determining factor in
sending women to the land in the summer-times before us; but we may
take it for granted that one of the results of war will be the large
extension of the realm of the woman-worker of the field and garden. We
cannot shut our eyes to the sad truth that there will be war widows in
their thousands, and countless girls whose chances of married happiness
have been destroyed. To many of these the land will supply the only
anodyne that life has to offer. In hard work and the open air they will
learn to forget; in the development of garden, or farm, or orchard they
will find something to interest them. With their advent we may look to
find a great addition to the national food supply, a great saving of
money that has gone hitherto across the Channel or the Atlantic Ocean.
I am inclined to think that women are more likely than men to take
advantage of the homeland opportunities. Men who have lived strenuously
and dangerously may not be found content with a handful of acres and
a cartload of restrictions at home, when the far-flung Dominions
overseas have so much more with which to tempt them. I see that Sir
Harry Verney's Committee, appointed to consider the question of land
settlement for soldiers and sailors, suggested holdings of twenty-five
acres for dairy-farming, and four-acre holdings for pigs, poultry,
fruit, etc. These last are to cost £24 per annum. Consider as against
this the one hundred and sixty acre grant of the Canadian Government,
the additions made by the Canadian Pacific Railway and, perhaps, other
great corporations, whereby a settler finds a house, farm buildings,
fifty acres broken up and planted with wheat. There the rent is part
payment of the purchase price. I do not think the Government is going
to hold soldiers and sailors with anything Sir Harry Verney and his
committee-men propose to offer, but I do think that if the Government
will make a like offer to the women of England, and will arrange to
do for them what it proposes to do for the men, this latest scheme of
small holdings might well be a success. Women could and would make an
agricultural colony. They delight in doing small things well; they are
frugal and temperate; they can make much out of very little. Whatever
their war experiences and suffering, it will not have developed in them
the spirit of unrest. Their ambitions do not seek the particular kind
of achievement that appeals most to men; they find happiness where
a man might find boredom. They love the sense of independence, the
freedom and simplicity that country life affords and enjoins.
Above all else that concerns woman's career on the land, it has clearly
been shown now that in times of crisis the men who work on the land may
be called away, and our home food supplies may be jeopardised by their
absence. In these circumstances the movement must spread. The flower
and market garden, the field, the conservatory, and the outhouse must
be recognised as providing a pleasant sphere of activity for girls and
women, and there is more than enough land in these islands to provide
small holdings for many years to come for all who have the will and the
capacity to develop them. In conclusion, let me utter a warning that
demands the attention of all who love their country. At the present
time we only produce about twenty per cent. of the food we eat. For
the rest we depend upon our mercantile marine and our power to hold,
not only the seas, but the skies above and the depths beneath. Without
any comment, it seems to me that this simple and undeniable statement
should suffice to settle the career of many a sturdy country-loving
English girl.
XI
GERMAN WOMEN AND MILITARISM
Reading the record of Germany's war methods, even those of us who are
endeavouring to think sanely through these evil days must be impressed
by the overwhelming evidence of their complete ruthlessness.
We who have travelled in Germany not once, but many times, know full
well that harshness and cruelty are not associated with the majority.
There are countless Germans who could only be cruel in obedience to
orders, and, of course, every German will do what he is told, just as
the Children of Israel did when Joshua, who appears to have invented
"frightfulness," was carrying out his merciless campaign. If we admit
that the simple German of the south is not cruel at heart, that he is
rather a dreamer and a sentimentalist with strong love for domestic
pleasures, we find that the policy of "frightfulness" must be ascribed
to the military party, consisting for the most part of Prussians, with
headquarters in Berlin.
These men are the organisers of war, and speak through the mouths
of writers like Treitschke, Bernhardi, and the rest. It is they who
have torn up the treaties and conventions that were, humanity hoped,
to decide the conduct of war. They are responsible for the curious
outburst of national hatred against this country that is at once so
startling and so silly, a revelation of the sad truth that Germany is
suffering from neurosis.
I have been trying to trace "frightfulness" to its source, not through
the medium of books or papers, but in the light of my own knowledge
of the country and my past acquaintance with some of its leading men,
and I think that the philosophic historian of the times to come,
whose vision is not obscured by the smoke of battle or the fury of
combatants, will not hesitate to declare that the worst and saddest
features of war as waged by the Germans are due to the fact that in
their country women are kept more in the background than in the country
of any other great Power.
The fault, as I will point out later on, is not that of the women,
but of the leaders of German faction who have deliberately suppressed
woman, and of nearly all the leaders of German thought who, being
dependent on Government favour, have subscribed to their policy of
deliberate suppression. Here and there an independent thinker has
arisen nearly always from the ranks of Social Democracy. Bebel's book
on women, for example, is a standard work, but the few lights do no
more than emphasise the surrounding darkness.
Look round Europe for a moment. Russia is a backward empire and the
spirit of progress moves over it with slow feet, but Russia is making
vast strides, and the plough that will trace deep furrows in the virgin
soil of its social life is drawn by man and woman together. All the
professions are open to women, even those in which women are not found
here. The Russian engineer who planned the newest bridge over the
Neva was a woman. Men and women students work side by side on terms
of absolute equality, and compete for honours that often fall to the
gentler sex.
Russian women of the educated classes are more than merely well
informed, they are brilliant. Linguists, women of affairs, they have
a grip of actualities of the empire of which they form a significant
part. In spite of autocratic rule and limited freedom there is such a
full life for the Russian woman as her German sister has never known,
except in dreams of emancipation. In Finland, be it remembered, women
sit in Parliament.
Turn to France, and it may be declared emphatically that woman rules.
Women are doctors, barristers, and scientists; they are members of the
Goncourt Academy; they are the heads of some of the most important
business institutions; they give the most exclusive _salons_ their
distinction. Public opinion is moulded by them; their influence makes
and breaks Cabinets. Feminism is one of the strongest forces in France.
Quiescent to-day or working in quietness, this force will dominate a
France released from war.
Even in Belgium, of whose progress we hear little, women have been
largely responsible for the organisation of the middle and working
classes, an organisation that was well-nigh complete before war broke
out, and in the slow rebuilding that is to come we may look with
confidence to the Belgian woman to play a leading _rôle_. Turn to
a group of neutral countries--Denmark, Norway, Sweden--and it will
be seen that feminism is moving with vast strides along the path
of national progress. Woman is asserting herself in all of them,
contributing her thought to her country's problems, taking an ever
important place in its councils.
Alone of the great Powers Germany has elected to forget or to disregard
as a negligible quantity the opinion of woman, and the reason is not
far to seek. For years past the German has forgotten the respect and
reverence he owes to his own womenfolk. _Küche, Kinder, Kirche_--he
calls alliteration to his aid to express a growing contempt for the sex
and the narrowest possible view of its world function. Intoxicated
with the vision of imperial domination, he has regarded his own sex as
the one motive force in the universe.
He has not watched the slow awakening of women in the countries around
him; he has not noted how bonds of sympathy, light as gossamer, yet
strong as steel, have stretched from country to country, binding
our sex in a large and ever widening sisterhood, inarticulate now,
or at least hardly coherent, but only waiting for their appointed
hour to assume a fuller share of the glories, the burdens and the
responsibilities of life. Woman's influence, silent, world-wide,
pervasive, has been treated by the evangels of Kultur as though it
were nonexistent, and in the hour of crisis woman as a united force
has avenged herself for years of neglect, scorn and brutality. She is
everywhere a belligerent.
I do not know the country in Europe where women are treated as they are
in Germany. Not many countries can vie with the United States in the
attention bestowed upon the gentler sex, but as I have endeavoured to
show, they are respected more in every belligerent country than they
are in the one that sought to rest supreme in Europe. Even in Italy,
Spain, and Portugal, where women must often work as hard as men, they
stand upon a secure footing of affection and respect. The smaller
courtesies, the greater services of life are theirs. In some definite
measure they complete the home. But you cannot bring an indictment
against a whole nation, and I do not seek to do so.
In tens of thousands of German homes the wife and daughters are loved
and honoured, but in the rank and file of military circles, even among
the men who hold official positions and boast a certain standing, woman
has been dethroned--she is regarded as an incumbrance necessary for the
production of further generations of supermen, who shall inherit the
earth. This attitude of mind reveals itself in the action that speaks
louder than words. The toleration and the contempt to which I refer are
everywhere apparent. No good-looking woman is safe in Germany from the
ill-bred stares and comments of the men with whom she must travel in
train or tram.
If women enter a theatre or restaurant their own friends and relatives
do not rise to receive them. They are liable to be elbowed into the
road if men walking abreast can occupy the whole of the pavement.
The politeness of the few cultured Germans (pardon the discredited
adjective) merely emphasises the boorishness of the vast majority.
It might be that the German is waiting for women to be officially
recognised as human beings to whom some measure of courtesy or even
decency is due. Only when rudeness is "_verboten_" will rudeness cease.
The country is governed by men for men and women, but according to the
marriage rubric woman is actually man's servant. The effect of these
conditions upon the morals of the country is deplorable. They give a
cachet to vices, even the most odious, and the rate of illegitimacy,
about 10 per cent. for the whole empire, is about doubled in Berlin,
where the military caste is supreme. The morals of the army are
the morals of Berlin, and account not only for the hideous stories
published about what took place in Belgium and northern France, but for
the recitals not less appalling that one gathers from officers home on
leave who have seen sights in the area of German occupation that cannot
be set down in print.
Undoubtedly these recitals, if they could reach the heart of Germany,
would thrill tens of thousands of honest men with indignation and
disgust. I do not believe for a moment that they represent the
inclinations of the whole nation. They are rather the action of that
section of the nation which, while war endures, must have the upper
hand, and during all the years of war-like preparations has reigned
supreme. Against this aspect of German national life the women of
belligerent and neutral countries alike are arrayed. Whatever their
resources or their influence in the councils of their husbands, sons,
and brothers, it will be devoted without cease to the destruction of a
militarism that degrades and shames womankind. The German woman knows
in her heart that her men have in countless instances become perverts,
but she is dumb because she is forbidden to speak. In Prussia no woman
may organise a union that has political aims; she may not even join one.
It is the purpose of the dominant caste to keep woman in subjection,
to restrict her activities to the kitchen, the cradle and the Church,
even to deny her the mental and the physical development that might
tend to lead her to revolt. Woman may find a limited salvation in the
conduct of a business; throughout the German Empire not far short of a
million women conduct commercial enterprises of one kind or another,
and collectively they strive with some success to better the physical
and moral conditions under which their sisters live. No effort of which
they have yet been capable has accomplished more than this, their
condition of tutelage remains complete.
I do not pretend to be satisfied with the position of women in England:
far from it; but here, as in the countries already enumerated, it
is better far than in Germany. Women mould public opinion to an
appreciable extent; they are able to modify the life of their sex in
many important particulars, the best of them exercise sane influence,
and all are sufficiently well treated to establish a definite attitude
of mind in men. We know that no British or French troops would behave
in Germany as Germans behaved in Belgium; we know that the honour of
honourable women and of helpless children would be safe in the keeping
of the French and British officer, and that he would not be called upon
to restrain his men from acts of lust and savagery.
We know that there is a public opinion the wide world over among free
women and women struggling to be free that will not submit to the
domination of any race that does not hold woman in respect. It is on
this account, in my opinion, that the unbridled and tolerated savagery
of the worst class of German conscript in Belgium and France has cost
Germany more than the loss of half a dozen pitched battles. Whatever
the irritation caused by the incidents of the war, the Allies know
that women the world over are and will remain on their side, for the
hegemony of a nation that treats women in peace with contempt and in
war with "frightfulness" cannot be contemplated by our sex. We know
that in fighting for the cause of the Allies we are fighting for the
most downtrodden of the highly civilised women in Europe. At present
they would resent our aid--they are patriotic--they have suffered
terribly, and in the hour of their trials they mourn and forgive those
who treated them ill.
Later on, when peace returns, when the world is purged of violence and
its wounds begin their slow and painful process of healing, the German
women will recognise that we have been fighting for a larger cause than
our own; that we helped to force the doors that have remained barred so
long and to break the chains that bound the women of a great but erring
nation. Only the ultimate triumph of the Allies can free the women of
Germany, and in time they will realise the truth.
The views of the wisest men are narrow, and few among them will realise
or admit even now the truth that woman is now a factor in the world's
affairs. When this war is over we shall tell in no uncertain words what
is in our hearts. At present we must needs be silent. If those dreamers
of world empire had but remembered that women, too, have minds and are
learning to use them, the story of the great world tragedy, even if it
had to be set down, would have been widely different in many of its
incidents.
It was Germany's fatal mistake that, not content with dominating its
own womankind and suppressing them whenever and wherever possible, it
believed that the rest of the world was equally indifferent to the
treatment of its mothers, wives, and daughters.
Every known outrage has raised fresh fighters, has strengthened the
Allies with the sure force of moral sympathy and encouragement, has
thinned the ranks of those whose sympathies were with a country whose
marvellous progress provides so much material for admiration. Who can
measure the responsibility of those guides and teachers who taught the
German to develop along material lines and to forget that woman is the
proper spiritual guide, and that as man loves and reverences her he
sees farther and deeper into the heart of things--sees life sanely and
sees it whole?
Whatever the limitations of our knowledge we know that the one sex
completes the other; that man enlarges the vision of woman and woman
enlarges the vision of man, and that it is the peculiar gift of our sex
to control man's passions, to stimulate his humanity, to direct his
ambitions away from dangerous paths. We do not all strive as we might;
we do not always succeed as we deserve, but man is woefully incomplete
without us, and the spectacle of a nation that has despised womanhood
waging war shows that this contempt corrodes his moral fibre, leaves
him at the mercy of his worst instincts and raises up against him all
the spiritual forces against which none may strive victoriously.
We women who have never handled weapons, whose only place in the area
of strife is among the maimed and helpless, know even better than men
that the race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong.
When history has recorded the story of the world war that darkens our
lives to-day, future generations will ask how it was that Germany
could find no friends among the neutral nations. Her Ambassadors,
official and unofficial, her publicists and those of neutral countries
who were not ashamed to accept her subsidies, worked with true
German thoroughness. Truth was never allowed to stand in the way of
propaganda. No lie that might serve a useful purpose went unsanctioned,
for the great end was to sanctify all means, however vile, and yet in
the hour when even moral support and silent sympathy would have been of
the greatest value, Germany looked for it in vain.
It was easy to declare that the whole world was jealous and
misinformed; such an excuse could hardly deceive the responsible people
who fathered it. My own view is that the women of Europe and the United
States turned against Germany when the manner in which she waged war
was first revealed to a disgusted world. Their hostility was not
merely sentimental--it was psychological. The German attitude toward
women, already questioned, was revealed as in the glare of searchlight,
and womanhood from London to Petrograd and from Copenhagen to New York
was completely, irrevocably antagonised.
XII
YOUTH IN THE SHAMBLES
It becomes increasingly difficult to speak one's mind in England
to-day, even though one has no peace scheme to propound and no
efficient public servant to criticise.
Liberty has vacated her throne, or as much of it as Privilege would
ever allow her to occupy, and the Defence of the Realm Act has taken
her place.