The third and most vital thing asked of women in these dread days is self-sacrifice. They must give their share of help, they must bear their share of sorrow. They cannot dignify their reluctance to do this by calling it moral revolt, or moral courage, or any other high-sounding name. They cannot claim for themselves a loftier virtue on the score of their lower hardihood. Civic morality consists in putting the good of the state above the good of the individual. It has no other test. If women are, as they say, responsible for the conservation of human life, they should hold themselves responsible for the ennobling of human life, for the cherishing of some finer instinct than that of self-preservation. On the body of a young French lieutenant who was killed at Vermelles, there was found a letter to his wife, which contained this pregnant sentence: “Promise not to begrudge me to France, if she takes me altogether.” These few words are an epitome of patriotism. Husband and wife gave to their country all they had to give; the one his life, the other her love; and both knew that there is something better than human life and love.
In the genial reign of Henry the Eighth, a docile Parliament passed, at the desire of the King, an “Act to abolish Diversity of Opinion.” President Wilson, less despotic, has recommended something of the same order as a mental process, a soul-smothering, harmony-preserving, intellectual anodyne. It is called neutrality, and if it has failed to save us from shameful insults and repeated wrongs, it has kept us fairly quiet under provocation. The only authorized outlet for our emotions has been a prayer (conditions not mentioned) for peace. Because we have schooled ourselves to witness injustice—and occasionally suffer it—without undue resentment, and without reprisal, our reward in money has been very great; and we have kept on terms with our own souls by giving back to desolate Europe a little of the wealth we drew from her. Our position has always been a tenable one, and no nation has had any ground on which to censure us; but we have found in it scant encouragement for self-esteem. Even the flowers of domestic oratory, the oft-repeated assertion that our prudence and our wealth make us respected on earth, and blessed in the sight of Heaven, fail to quicken our sad hearts. For, from over the sea, comes a cry which sounds like the echo of words with which we were once familiar, of which we were once proud. “With firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in.”
This is the potent voice of humanity, never to be silenced while men stay men. The “work” was bloody work; brother slaying brother on the battlefield. The women of the North and the women of the South bore their share of sorrow. They did not assert that they were victims of men’s unbridled ambition, and they never intimated to one another that the final victory was to them a matter of unconcern. Theirs was the “solemn pride” of sacrifice; and that fine phrase, dedicated by Mr. Lincoln to the woman who had sent five sons to the conflict, is applicable to thousands of mothers to-day. The writer knows a young Frenchman who, when the war broke out, had lived for some years in this country, and hoped to make it his permanent home. To him his mother wrote: “My son, your two brothers are at the front. Are you not coming back to fight for France?” The lad had not meant to go. Perhaps he coveted safety. Perhaps he held life (his life) to be a sacred thing. Perhaps he thought to comfort his mother’s old age. But when that letter came, he sailed on the next steamer. It was a summons that few men, and certainly no Frenchman, could deny.
When the women of France refused to participate in the International Congress of Women at The Hague, they defined their position in a document so dignified, so lucid, and so logical, that it deserves to be handed down to future ages as an illustration of inspired common sense lifted to the heights of heroism. Let no one who reads it ever deny that women are capable of clear thinking, of sane and balanced judgment. In contrast to the vague and formless peace-talk which came floating over to us from Holland, and has been re-echoed ever since; talk which starting from no definite premises has reached no just conclusions, the clear utterances of these French women rang with insistent exactitude. They rejected all sentimental abstractions, and presented in a concrete form the circumstances which had pushed France into the conflict, and which held her still at bay. “It were treason to think of peace, until that peace can consecrate the principles of right.”
The rationality of the French mind, the essentially practical nature of the French genius, are responsible for the form of this historic document; but back of the form lies the spirit, and the spirit is one of sustained self-sacrifice. “To-day it is with pride we wear our weeds; it is with gratitude that we perpetuate the memory of our dead.” At a time when every franc could buy some sorely needed supply, when every hour could be filled with some sorely needed service, sensible Frenchwomen refused to spend both money and time in journeying to The Hague for the dear delights of talking. But deeper than their reluctance to do a wasteful thing was their reluctance to do a treasonable thing, to put the comforts of peace above the sacrifices entailed by war, to refuse by word or deed their share of a common burden.
It is absurd to suppose that these brave and suffering women do not feel a moral revolt against the cruelty and the waste of war quite as sharply as does Miss Addams, or any Hague delegate, or any one of Mr. Ford’s tourists. The “basic foundation of home and of peaceful industry” is as dear to them as to the American women who talk so much about it. As a matter of fact, it is their devotion which holds together the shattered homes of France, their industry which preserves economic safety, and gives food and shelter to the destitute. And through terrible months of pain and privation, we have heard from the lips of Frenchwomen no wild and weak complaints. Never once have they assumed that they were better and nobler than their husbands and sons who died for the needs of France.
When the late Justice Brewer said that “since the beginning of days” women have been opposed to blood-shed, we wondered—without doubting the truth of his assertion—how he came to find it out. Certainly not from the pages of history, which afford little or no evidence on the subject. This may be one reason why feminists are protesting stoutly against the way in which history has been written, its indiscreet revelations, its disconcerting silences. At a meeting of the Women’s Political Union in New York, October, 1914, it was boldly urged that history should be re-written on a peace basis; less emphasis placed upon nationalism, less space devoted to wars. At a meeting of the National Municipal League in Baltimore the same year, it was urged that history should be re-written on a feminine basis; less emphasis placed upon men, less space devoted to their achievements. One revolutionist complained with exceeding bitterness that President Wilson hardly makes mention of women in his five volumes of American history. The “knell” of that kind of narrative, she intimated, had “rung.”
The historian of the future will find his task pleasantly simplified. He will be a little like two young Americans whom I once met scampering blithely over southern Europe, and to whom I ventured to say that they covered their ground quickly. “No trouble about that,” answered one of them. “We draw the line at churches and galleries, and there’s nothing left to see.” So, too, the chronicler who eliminates men and war from his pages can move swiftly down the centuries. Even an earnest effort to minimize these factors suggests that blight of my girlhood, Miss Strickland, who forever strove to withdraw her wandering attention from warrior and statesman, and fix it on the trousseau of a queen.
History is, and has always been trammelled by facts. It may ignore some and deny others; but it cannot accommodate itself unreservedly to theories; it cannot be stripped of things evidenced in favour of things surmised. Perhaps instead of asking to have it remodelled in our behalf, we women might take the trouble to read it as it is; dominated by men, disfigured by conflict, but not altogether ignoble or unprofitable, and always very enlightening. We might learn from it, for example, that war may be wicked, and war may be justifiable; that wife and child, far from being unconsidered trifles, have nerved men’s arms to strike; and that when home, country, freedom and justice are at stake, “it were treason to think of peace, until that peace can consecrate the principles of right.”