that blooms on the fair stem of marriage. Yet it is the very citadel of
ignorance, when it should be the school in which are taught the
beautiful phenomena of physical life. Home! where the simplest, purest
facts of life are converted into a nasty mystery and deliberately
endowed with the characteristics of impurity and sin; for what else is
the meaning of that solemn formula, which most of us have been taught,
that we were conceived in sin? What else is the meaning of the hush and
blush that go to any reference to sex, sign or manifestation of sex? Is
it not awful beyond the power of words to express that a man and a woman
come together in ignorance and beget children who are not even to obtain
the benefit of such knowledge as their unfortunate parents pick up by
the way, but must themselves begin the most responsible functions of
life, not only in equal ignorance, but with an added load of
misconceptions, sex-superstitions, immoral dogmas and probably physical
disabilities? A short time since a father was speaking to me of his son,
fourteen years of age, and plainly at an age when some of the beautiful
phenomena of sex-life were beginning to crowd upon him for notice. I
asked the man if he had talked with his son about the matter. His answer
was peculiar only in that he put into words a description of the
attitude of the average parent: "Talked to him about that? Not I. Let
him learn as I did. No one ever told me." But some one had told him, as
his unpleasantly reminiscent smile advised me! He had been told by
ignorant companions, by ignorant servants, and, quite likely, by books,
whose grossness would have been harmless but for the child's piteous
ignorance. No, the man would not talk with his son about such things,
but he would go into his club and talk into the small hours over a glass
of whiskey with his friends there, turning the beauty and purity of sex
manifestation into shabby jest and impure ridicule. He would exchange
stories based on sex relation with any stranger with whom he might ride
for two hours in a smoking car. Every man knows that I speak well within
bounds.
And the girl child! what of her? Does her mother, the victim of
misinformation and no information, of misuse and self-mutilation, in the
sweet privacy of this home, which is called the cradle of peace and the
nestling place of purity, save her by taking warning of her own ruined
life and giving her the benefit of such little knowledge as she has
gained in physical, mental and moral misery? We know she does not. On
the contrary, the same terrible old lies are told, the same hideous
practices are resorted to; and another poor creature is launched into
that awful life of legalized prostitution which is called marriage.
Motherhood is woman's highest function, and, moreover, it is a function
which it is unwise not to exercise; for it is infinitely more perilous
for a healthy woman not to be a mother than it is for her to bear
children. Motherhood, too, is the most markedly indicated function of a
woman's body. She is specialized for it; it is the thing indicated. And
yet we never say to a woman, Be a mother when you will; we hold up our
hands in horror at the very thought of motherhood itself, and we say,
Marry; marry anything; get another name for yourself; merge your very
identity into that of some man; get a home; never mind about children;
you don't have to have them; they have nothing to do with your
respectability. Is it not so? Is it not so that that woman who prefers
her own name and her freedom, and who exercises her highest function of
motherhood, thereby becomes a thing of scorn and contumely?
And yet, how in this world can a woman do a finer, wiser, braver, truer
thing than to bear a child in freedom by a carefully chosen father? It
is true that we have moralists who urge wives to breed for the good of
the country, but even they, while declaring that it is the duty of women
to have large families, roll their eyes in horror at the thought of a
woman exercising her plainest right, without first having some man,
whose only interest in the matter is his fee, say some magic words over
her and her master.
Oh, that marriage ceremony! And is it not pathetic to hear the women,
dimly conscious of their backbones, declaring that they will not promise
to obey? They will promise vehemently to love and honor, which they
absolutely cannot be sure of doing, but they refuse to obey--the only
thing they could safely promise to do, and which, in fact, most of them
do. For, writhe and twist as they may, defy never so bravely, the
conventions of the world are against them, and conform they must. Down,
down they sink until they are on their knees in the mire of tradition,
their heads bowed to the ugly little fetish. A woman may be a thousand
times the superior of her husband, and yet she must be his slave.
And what puerile fables, what transparent lies are told to reconcile the
poor slave to her lot! A man's rib! And she is the weaker vessel!
Nevertheless, she is the power behind the throne. And if the man
possess her, does she not equally possess him? Is not monogamy the
mainstay of our morals? Is not God to be thanked that he has given us
light to see the horrors of polygamy? Oh, that shocking thing, polygamy!
How the husbands of the land rise up to defend their firesides from it!
No Smoots shall get into our Senate. That virtuous Senate!
Why if every practising polygamist went home from the Congress there
would not be a quorum left to do business. Monogamy! Why it is the most
shocking phase of the hypocrisy due to marriage. There is no such
condition known in this country. Of course, there may be sporadic cases
of it, but that is all. If monogamy be the practice of the men of this
country, why the hundreds of thousands of prostitutes, why divorces for
adultery, why those secret establishments where unhappily married men
indemnify themselves for the appearance of monogamy by an association
which can be ended at will? Whence come the mulattoes and the
half-breeds of all sorts? Who so credulous as to believe the fable of
monogamy?
What has monogamy or polygamy or polyandry to do with this matter? I
assume that it is undeniable that motherhood is woman's most manifest
function. If that be so, how can there be any more immorality in the
exercise of it than in the process of digestion? What can be clearer
than that a woman has the inherent right to bear children if she wish?
And there is nothing in experience or morals which demands one father
for all her children. It should be for her to say whether she will have
one father for all her children or one for each. And if the question be
asked how, under such conditions, the interests of the children would be
safe-guarded, I ask if they are safe-guarded now. The right-minded man
provides as he can for them; as would be the case always; while the
wrong-minded man does not now provide properly for them. Besides, is the
mother not to be considered? Do we not all know of women who in
widowhood take care of their families? Do we not know of women who take
care of their husbands as well as of their children? Women, of course,
should, in any case, be economically free. But at least let them be sex
free; let them decide for themselves whether they will have many or few
or no children. Teach woman to be economically independent, give her the
opportunity for full knowledge of all that pertains to motherhood; make
the motherhood a pure and beautiful manifestation of physical activity
if you will, but without forgetting that it is only simple and natural;
avoiding that hysterical glorification of the function in poetry and the
hiding of it in actual life as if it were an unclean thing. But the
important matter is to understand that a woman has a right to bear a
child if she wish. Nothing is more distinctly pointed out by the
constitution of her body, and therefore it is impossible that there can
be any immorality in the exercise of the function. To put my idea in as
few and as bold words as I can: Motherhood is a right and has no proper
relation to marriage. Marriage is a purely artificial relation, and not
only is it not justified by its results, but distinctly it is
discredited by them. By it a man becomes a vile hypocrite since he
loudly avows a moral standard and a course of conduct which in private
by his acts he denies and puts to scorn; by it a woman becomes a slave,
giving up her rights in her own body; submitting to ravishment, and
becoming the accidental mother to unwished, unwelcome children; by it
children are robbed of their plain right to the best equipment that can
be given them; and which cannot be given them under the prevailing
system. It is only when a woman is free to choose the father of her
child that the child can hope for even a partial payment of the debt
that was due it from its parents from the moment they took the
responsibility of calling it from the nowhere into the here. This
doctrine of the responsibility of the parent to the child is
comparatively new and goes neither with marriage nor with the home. The
old and current notion is that the child is a chattel.
Abraham never offers an apology for making little Isaac carry wood and
then mount the sacrificial pile. Indeed we are asked to marvel at the
heroism of the father. Then we are told that God so loved the world that
he gave his only begotten son. As if the child were the property of the
parent. And yet there must always have been naughty children asking
pointed questions, for it was long ago found necessary to try to scare
them by a divine fulmination. Honor thy father and thy mother that thy
days may be long! It seems that even so long ago parents were afraid
they could not win honor from their children. Abraham's place was on the
pile, just as it is the place of the modern parent who looks upon his
child as his chattel; disposing of him as he will; arbitrarily making
rules for his conduct which he would not dream of observing for himself;
stifling his natural demands for knowledge; converting what is pure and
most beautiful in the world into a mire of filth and ignorance; wilfully
robbing him of his birthright of individuality by forcing him to conform
to methods of thought and conduct which his own experience tells him no
man can or does conform to from the moment he wins his freedom or learns
the hideous lesson of that hypocrisy which he is sure in the end to
discover that his father practices. What right has any father to make a
sacrifice of his child? What is his title to the love or gratitude or
self-abnegation of his child? Is it that the child is the unconsidered
consequence of the legal rape of some poor woman who has been unfitted
for the office forced upon her, by a life mentally dwarfed, morally
twisted and physically mutilated? Is it that the child is haled out of
nothingness to be inoculated, perhaps, with germs of disease in the
first instance and then half nourished for nine months in a body which
has been robbed of its vitality by the mutilation and torture to which
it has been subjected at the behest of fashion?
The highest duty of a parent is to so treat his child that it will enter
upon the struggle of life prepared to obtain the utmost happiness from
it.
If anyone fancies I have been too severe in my strictures I would ask
him to read what Mrs. Gilman has to say on the subject of home. It is
true that she does not come to the same conclusion that I do. She would
have women economically independent, and she would have children taken
care of by those especially fitted for the task, leaving mothers and
fathers free to go their separate ways. But how could there be separate
ways so long as the slavery of marriage remained? Woman must be not only
economically free, but altogether free. As I have said, motherhood is
not an affair of morals; it is a function. Marriage, on the other hand,
is a matter of morals; and hideously immoral it is, too. Then why not
have motherhood without its immoral, artificial adjunct, marriage?
You see I do not ask for easy divorce as a solution of the problem of
marriage. I set my face sternly against divorce. I am one with the
church in that. I only demand that there shall be no marriage at all,
that there shall be no fastening of life-long slavery on woman. Let
woman mother children or not, as she will. Let her say who shall be the
father of her child and of each child. Let motherhood be deemed not even
honorable, but only natural.
Can anyone believe that if men and women were free to decide whether or
not they would be parents, they would not in the end, seeing their duty
in the light of their knowledge, fit themselves for parenthood before
taking upon themselves its responsibilities?
I would like to say that I have no fear of the odium of the designation
of iconoclast. Nor do I quake lest some one triumphantly ask me what I
will put in the place of marriage and the home. As well might one demand
what I would give in the place of smallpox if I were able to eradicate
it. I am not concerned to find a substitute for such perversion of sex
activity. If men and women choose to live together in freedom, fathering
and mothering their children according to a rule grown out of freedom,
and directed by expediency, I fancy they would be, at least, as happy as
they can be now, tied together by a hard, unpleasant knot. And if an
economically free woman chose to have six children by six different
fathers, as a wise woman might well do, I believe she could be trusted
to secure those children from want quite as well as the mother-slave of
to-day, who bears her children at the will of an irresponsible man, and
then, often enough, has to take care of them and him too.
[Illustration]
"Wealth protects and animates art and literature, as the dew enlivens
the fields."
Nonsense! Wealth animates art and literature, as the whistle of the
master animates the dog and makes him wag his tail.
THE MODERN NEWSPAPER.
Let me describe to you, very briefly, a newspaper day.
Figure first, then, a hastily erected, and still more hastily designed,
building in a dirty, paper-littered back street of London, and a number
of shabbily dressed men coming and going in this with projectile
swiftness. Within this factory companies of printers, tensely active
with nimble fingers--they were always speeding up the printers--ply
their typesetting machines, and cast and arrange masses of metal in a
sort of kitchen inferno, above which, in a beehive of little, brightly
lit rooms, disheveled men sit and scribble. There is a throbbing of
telephones and a clicking of telegraph instruments, a rushing of
messengers, a running to and fro of heated men, clutching proofs and
copy. Then begins a roar of machinery catching the infection, going
faster and faster, and whizzing and banging. Engineers, who have never
had time to wash since their birth, fly about with oil cans, while paper
runs off its rolls with a shudder of haste. The proprietor you must
suppose arriving explosively on a swift motor car, leaping out before
the thing is at a standstill, with letters and documents clutched in his
hand, rushing in, resolute to "hustle," getting wonderfully in
everybody's way. At the sight of him even the messenger boys who are
waiting get up and scamper to and fro. Sprinkle your vision with
collisions, curses, incoherencies. You imagine all the parts of this
complex, lunatic machine working hysterically toward a crescendo of
haste and excitement as the night wears on. At last, the only things
that seem to travel slowly in those tearing, vibrating premises, are the
hands of the clock.
Slowly things draw on toward publication, the consummation of all those
stresses. Then, in the small hours, in the now dark and deserted streets
comes a wild whirl of carts and men, the place spurts paper at every
door; bales, heaps, torrents of papers, that are snatched and flung
about in what looks like a free fight, and off with a rush and clatter
east, west, north and south. The interest passes outwardly; the men from
the little rooms are going homeward, the printers disperse, yawning, the
roaring presses slacken. The paper exists. Distribution follows
manufacture, and we follow the bundles.
Our vision becomes a vision of dispersal. You see those bundles hurling
into stations, catching trains by a hair's breadth, speeding on their
way, breaking up, smaller bundles of them hurled with a fierce accuracy
out upon the platforms that rush by, and then everywhere a division of
these smaller bundles into still smaller bundles, into dispersing
parcels, into separate papers. The dawn happens unnoticed amidst a great
running and shouting of boys, a shoving through letter-slots, openings
of windows, spreading out upon book-stalls. For the space of a few
hours, you must figure the whole country dotted white with rustling
papers. Placards everywhere vociferate the hurried lie for the day. Men
and women in trains, men and women eating and reading, men by study
fenders, people sitting up in bed, mothers and sons and daughters
waiting for father to finish--a million scattered people are
reading--reading headlong--or feverishly ready to read. It is just as if
some vehement jet had sprayed that white foam of papers over the surface
of the land.
Nonsense! The whole affair is a noisy paroxysm of nonsense, unreasonable
excitement, witless mischief, and waste of strength--signifying nothing.
--From H. G. Wells "In the Days of the Comet."
[Illustration]
A VISIT TO SING SING.
By A MORALIST.
I was ennuyé; the everlasting decency and respectability of my
surroundings bored me. On whichever side of me I looked, I saw people
doing the same things for the same reasons; or for the same lack of
reasons. And they were uninteresting.
"Oh," said I to myself, "these are the people of the ruts; they go that
way because others have gone; they are conforming. But there must be
some persons who do not conform. Where are they?"
Now you can understand why it was that my thoughts turned toward that
monument of our civilization on the Hudson River, and why finally I
made up my mind to visit it.
I knew that neither my citizenship, nor yet my philosophic and human
interest in the working of that great school would avail to obtain me
entrance there, so I sought out one of the politicians of my district,
who at that time at least exercised his activities outside of the walls
of the building, and I exchanged with him a five-dollar bill for an
order to admit me.
"I suppose," I said to the attendant who did the honors of the place for
me, "that these persons who are garbed alike and who affect the same
tonsorial effect are those who have been unskillful in their
non-conformity."
"They are prisoners," he replied. I bit my lip and looked as smug as I
remembered one should who as yet has the right of egress as well as
ingress in an institution of that character.
At that moment my eyes fell on a face that seemed familiar to me, and as
I studied it I saw with surprise that I had come upon a man who had once
been a schoolmate of mine.
Now I had always believed that if a person had done wrong, he would be
conscious of it; and that if he were found out he would at least try to
appear penitent. But in this case my theory did not seem to be working;
for my former chum, whom I remembered as a quiet, unobtrusive fellow,
met my startled glance with a twinkle of suppressed humor. I confess
that such a blow to my theory filled me with indignation.
I stepped toward him, all my moral superiority betraying itself in the
self-satisfied smirk which fixed itself on my face in accordance with
the sense of duty which the Philistine feels so keenly in his relations
with others.
"Why are you here?" I asked him.
"Are you not a little impertinent?" he asked. "I do not inquire of you
why you are here."
"That is obvious, to say the least," I answered loftily.
"Obvious from your pharisaical expression, perhaps," he said
good-naturedly. "But never mind! We look at the matter from different
points of view. To me it is a greater indiscretion to annoy a helpless
prisoner with 'holier-than-thou' questions than it would be to attend
the Charity Ball in pajamas. But of course you do not see it in the same
light."
"Pardon me if I annoyed you," I said stiffly.
"Don't mention it," he replied, with the humorous twinkle still playing
in his eyes. "And to prove that I bear no hard feeling, I will ask you
some questions."
Naturally I was embarrassed at such an exhibition of hardihood in one in
his situation, but I said I would be pleased to answer him to the best
of my ability.
"It is some time since I was away from this retreat on a vacation," he
said, with an easy assurance that was indescribably shocking to one of
correct principles, "and I would like to know if all the rascals have
yet been put in prison."
I pushed my insurance policy a little deeper into my pocket and replied,
with conviction:
"Certainly not; but you must not forget that no man is guilty until he
has been proven so."
"Ah, yes," he said; "and that a man may pride himself on his honesty on
the secure ground that he has not yet reached the penitentiary. Yes, of
course, you are right. But, tell me, is it true, according to a rumor
which has reached us in our seclusion, that these good Christians _pro
tem_, are considering the advisability of having rat poison served to us
in place of the delicious stale bread and flat water which now comprise
our bill of fare?"
"Oh," I answered vaguely, "there are still reformers of all sorts in the
world."
"Reformers!" he cried, his face lighting up with a new interest. "Ah!
you mean those profound thinkers who seek to cure every disease of the
social body by means of legislation. Yes, yes! tell me about them!
Society still believes in them?"
"Believes in them!" I cried indignantly. "Surely it does. Why, the great
political parties are responding to the cry of the downtrodden masses,
and--"
"Oh," he said dreamily, "they are still responding?"
"What do you mean by still responding?" I demanded curtly.
"Why, I remember that in my time, too, the people always responded. The
party leaders would say to them that they were in a bad way and needed
help. The people would cry out in joy to think their leaders had
discovered this. Then the leaders would wink at each other and jump upon
the platforms and explain to the people that what was needed was a new
law of some sort. The people would weep for happiness at such wisdom and
would beg their leaders to get together and make the law. And the law
that the leaders would make when they got together was one that would
put the people still more in their power. So that is still going on?"
I recognized that he was ironical, but I answered with a sneer:
"The people get what they deserve, and what they wish. They have only to
demand through the ballot box, you know."
"Ah, yes," he murmured with a grin, "I had forgotten the ballot box.
Dear me! how could I have forgotten the ballot box?"
Providentially the keeper came to notify me that my time was up, and I
turned away.
"One thing more," cried the prisoner; "is it still the case that the
American people enjoy their freedom best when they are enslaved in some
way?"
"You are outrageous," I exclaimed; "the American people are not enslaved
in any way. It is true they are restricted for their own good by those
more capable of judging than they. That must always be the case."
"I don't know about must," he sighed, "but I am sure it will always be
the case as long as a man's idea of freedom is his ability to impose
some slavish notion on his brother."
"Good-bye," I said, with a recurrence to my smirk of pharisaical pity,
"I am sorry to see you here."
"Oh, don't be troubled on my account," he answered; "on the whole, I am
satisfied."
"Satisfied! Impossible!" I cried.
"Why impossible? Consider that I shall never again be compelled to
associate with decent, honest folk. Oh, I have cause to be satisfied; I
am here on a life sentence."
THE OLD AND THE NEW DRAMA.
By MAX BAGINSKI.
The inscription over the Drama in olden times used to be, "Man, look
into this mirror of life; your soul will be gripped in its innermost
depths, anguish and dread will take possession of you in the face of
this rage of human desire and passion. Go ye, atone and make good."