Leaving now the Middle-class man of to-day, the great representative of modern civilization, and the triumphant outcome of so many centuries of human progress, to enjoy his distinctions—we may turn for a moment to the only other great body of men who are of any importance: the more capable and energetic manual workers.
In the man of this class we have a type superior in many ways to the other. In the first place he knows something of what Life is; from an early age probably he has had to do something towards his own living. Anyhow he has been called upon in a thousand ways to help his parents, or his brothers and sisters, and has developed a fair capacity of sympathy and affection—a thing which can hardly be said of the public school boy; while his work, narrow though it may be, has given him a certain definite ability and grasp of actual fact. If, as is now happening in hundreds of thousands of cases, there is superadded to all this some of the general culture which arises from active reading and study, it is clear that the result is going to be considerable. It may not count much to-day, but it will to-morrow.
On the other hand this class is lamentably wanting in the very point where the other man excels—the organizing faculty. Take a workman from the bench, where he has never so to speak had to look beyond his nose, and place him in a position of responsibility and command, and he is completely at sea. He turns out hopelessly slattern and ineffectual, or a martinet or a bully; he has no sense of perspective and stickles absurdly over little points while he lets the great ones go; and it is almost impossible for him to look before and after as he should do, or bring to a proper focus a whole field of considerations. In all this he is a mere child: and evidently by himself unfit to rule the world.
In many respects the newer Women and the Workmen resemble each other. Both have been bullied and sat upon from time immemorial, and are beginning to revolt; both are good at detailed and set or customary work, both are bad at organization; both are stronger on the emotional than on the intellectual side; and both have an ideal of better things, but do not quite see their way to carry it out. Their best hope perhaps lies in their both getting hold of the Middle-class Man and thumping him on each side till they get him to organize the world for them. The latter has no ideal, no object, no enthusiasm, of his own. He cannot set himself to work; and consequently he is just made use of by the commercial spirit of the day. It is really lamentable to think how this great organizing capacity—which might create a holy Human empire of the world—is simply at present the tool of the Jew and the Speculator. In Parliamentary, Military, Indian, Home or Colonial politics, the quondam public school-boy is just led by the nose by the money-grubbing interest, to serve its purposes; and half the time has not the sense to see that he is being so led.
It might seem that it would be the greatest blessing and benefit to the man of this class to find him an ideal to work to. Certainly it is his only real and conceivable function to form an alliance with the two other great classes of the modern nations—the women and the workmen—and organize for them. Whether he will see it so, we know not; but if this might come about great things would happen in the world.
WOMAN
THE SERF
A half-grown man is of course a tyrant. And so it has come about that the rule of Man in the world has for many ages meant the serfdom of Woman.
Far back in History, at a time when in the early societies the thought of inequality had hardly arisen, it would appear that the female in her own way—as sole authenticator of birth and parentage, as guardian of the household, as inventress of agriculture and the peaceful arts, as priestess or prophetess or sharer in the councils of the tribe—was as powerful as man in his, and sometimes even more so. But from thence, down to to-day, what centuries of repression, of slave-hood, of dumbness and obscurity have been her lot!
There is much to show that the greed of Private Property was the old Serpent which brought about the fall of our first parents; for as this sentiment—the chief incentive to modern Civilization—rose and spread with a kind of contagion over the advancing races of mankind, the human Male, bitten by it, not only claimed possession of everything he could lay hands upon, but ended by enslaving and appropriating his own mate, his second self—reducing her also to a mere chattel, a slave and a plaything.
Certainly it is curious that, with whatever occasional exceptions, the periods of man’s ascendancy have been the periods of so much sadness and degradation of women. He, all through, more and more calmly assuming that it must be her province to live and work for him; shutting her more and more into the seclusion of the boudoir and the harem, or down to the drudgery of the hearth; confining her body, her mind; playing always upon her sex-nature, accentuating always that—as though she were indeed nought else but sex; yet furious if her feelings were not always obedient to his desire; arrogating to himself a masculine license, yet revenging the least unfaithfulness on her part by casting her out into the scorned life of the prostitute; and granting her more and more but one choice in life—to be a free woman, and to die, unsexed, in the gutter; or for creature-comforts and a good name to sell herself, soul and body, into life-long bondage. While she, more and more, has accepted as inevitable the situation; and moved, sad-eyed, to her patient and uncomplaining work, to the narrow sphere and petty details of household labor and life, of patience and self-effacement, of tenderness and love, little noticed and less understood; or twisted herself into a ridiculous mime of fashion and frivolity, if so she might find a use for her empty head, and some favor with her lord; her own real impulses and character, her own talents and genius, all the while smothered away and blighted, her brain dwarfed, and her outlook on the world marred by falsity and ignorance.