He arose and handed her the rolled cylinder. She accepted it a bit awkwardly and ran the tip of her pink tongue along the edge of the paper to moisten it. With the toe of his heavy high-laced boot he scraped a burning twig from the fire and supplied her with a light.
“Women who smoke not being looked upon with favour,” he remarked, as he squatted over his coffee cup again, “strikes me as only another example of the slavery to which woman has been subjected from the beginning of history. Laying aside any harm that may come from the practice, why shouldn’t she smoke? It may stain her teeth and work havoc with her digestive apparatus, but her teeth and digestive apparatus are identical with man’s. So we can’t justly prohibit her from smoking on those grounds. The smoking woman is looked upon with disfavour, then, merely because tradition has it that she cannot smoke and remain in the good graces of conservative society. To the bourgeois mind, she is not a lady. Now, the act of smoking is in itself absolutely no more unmoral than spinning a top. If men derived pleasure from top-spinning, doubtless women would be permitted to likewise enjoy themselves. Men eat candy, and women may do so too without losing caste. Just why they can’t smoke without getting in bad is beyond me.”
“It’s simply another of our stupid taboos,” said Charmian, puffing grandly to show her independence, and choking just a little now and then. “We’re hemmed in with taboos on all sides. They are grounded in our conservative minds from childhood, and we can’t shake them off. Years ago some one decided that women ought not to smoke. Some one agreed with him. Others took it up, perhaps; and finally it became the accepted rule. So in childhood we were taught that women shouldn’t smoke—that good women didn’t smoke. We grew up unaccustomed to see women smoking. Therefore when we encountered an occasional individual who did smoke, she was considered immoral. But why immoral? What is there immoral about placing a cigarette between one’s lips, lighting it, and inhaling and exhaling the smoke? Injurious it may be, but we’re not discussing that phase of the subject. A man may thus injure himself with impunity, but if a woman does so she is immoral. Now isn’t that illogical?”
“Logic plays a small part in our lives,” said Shonto. “We’re not on very friendly terms with logic. Logic means thinking and shaking off the old ideas that are handed down to us from the ancients, and we’re too lazy to do that. Logic calls for reasoning, and why reason when our beliefs and our behaviour have been regulated for us for seventeen or eighteen hundred years? Why think for ourselves, when the ancients went to so much trouble to prescribe for us our taboos and our religious beliefs and our standard of morals? Why think, in short? It’s such hard work. And it has a tendency to uproot old beliefs in which we are quite comfortable. We might feel the urge to clean house if we sat down and thought a little, and everybody knows how upsetting is house-cleaning day!”
“And isn’t there any hope for us, Doctor Shonto? Will nothing make us think?”
Shonto’s dull eyes brightened. “Yes, we’re beginning to think. The great war did that much for us here in America, anyway. I really believe there is a serious attempt being made to-day to think. People are at least trying to think. They are at least reading more thoughtful books than ever before, and, thank God, we have a few men who are capable of writing thoughtful books! There’s a whisper going along the line, a faint and timorous suggestion that maybe all is not as it should be on this earth—that maybe we are selling our heritage for a mess of pottage—that perhaps we are trampling life’s riches under our feet, like swine trampling into the mud nuggets of gold as they rush to the swill trough.
“But as yet only the people who have been trying for some time to think are absorbing the books which will help them to think. These books are beyond the masses. The authors of many of them are slaves to style and big-sounding words. The newspapers are the unthinking man’s school—and what a farce, what a seedbed of corruption they are! Reporters and editors must remain loyal to the policies of their papers, regardless of their own opinions. They who could help us to think are forbidden to do so on the penalty of losing their jobs.
“And the children of this country, and doubtless every other so-called civilized country, must depend upon the schools to learn to think. And every thinking teacher who takes the rostrum is fired for his attempt to break down the walls of superstition and slash the hedges of tradition. But for all that, the youth of this country at least are gradually—no, pretty swiftly—breaking away. The world-old conflict between Age and Youth is at its hottest now. In the past thirty years the world has made revolutionary discoveries which are daily changing our lives and methods of thinking. All this came about after Age had settled down to an acceptance of life without any changes. At forty or fifty one does not readily change his views. The sutures of his skull are closed, and it is difficult for him to learn new ideas. He is beyond the plastic period, and his head is as hard as his arteries. He is entirely unable to accept the electron theory in the place of ‘in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is.’ Simply because he never heard of the electron theory at the age when his brain was capable of accepting a new idea. It’s too late for him—he’s hopeless. But he’s dying off! To-morrow he won’t be running the world. His sons and his daughters will be in the saddle.
“And they have come upon the earth and grown to young manhood and young womanhood while these radical changes were taking place. They are able to consider, even accept, the findings of modern science because they are presented to them while their brains are still in the receptive period of life. What seems most plausible to them they accept, and they naturally will laugh at the old traditions, superstitions, taboos, and beliefs that have come down to us from the days of savagery, and which were ingrained in the lives of their parents when they were of a receptive age. Fifty years, I think, will show many a mossy institution crumbled to ashes. The Aged of to-day will be gone, without having been able to force their lifelong beliefs on Youth. Then Youth will become Old Age, and if we have progressed at all, the coming generation will refuse to accept what their fathers and mothers believed in and made the ruling factor in their lives. So the conflict between Age and Youth, between conservatism and change, between receptive minds and locked minds, goes on to the end of time.”
“My stars!” cried Charmian. “You’re more pessimistic about it—more hopeless—than I am, even!”