[ [40] In this chapter I have quoted some passages from an article of mine, "The Apocalypse of Evil," which appeared in the Contemporary Review, and received the strong commendation of Dr. Lightfoot, then Bishop of Durham. Many of the thoughts I owe to my friend, James Hinton, to whom my obligations on this subject are absolute.
[ [41] We must be careful, however, in urging this difficulty, to remember Dr. Martineau's teaching, which I have given in the third chapter, and bear in mind that the evil here is due to man's disorder, and not to Nature's order. In the animal world the reproductive instincts work out as orderly results as all other natural instincts, and are no stronger than is necessary for the preservation of the race.
CONCLUSION
And it is this great upward movement, lifting man to a higher level, which is given into the hands of us women, touching, as it does, all the great trusts of our womanhood. What are we women going to do in the face of such vast issues for good or evil?
Undoubtedly we stand at the parting of the ways. In England undoubtedly the old high traditions of English society have, at least in what is called the "Upper Ten," been lowered and vulgarized. Our literature is no longer as clean and wholesome as it was. The greater freedom that women enjoy has not always been put to high uses. And all around us in both countries the old order is changing, and the new order is not yet born. Old positions are becoming untenable, with the higher position and culture of women. It is becoming an impossibility for intelligent women with a knowledge of physiology and an added sense of their own dignity to accept the lower moral standard for men, which exposes them to the risk of exchanging monogamy for a peculiarly vile polygamy—polygamy with its sensuality, but without its duties—bringing physical risks to their children and the terrible likelihood of an inherited moral taint to their sons. It is an impossibility, now that mothers know, that they should remain indifferent as to what sort of manhood they send out into the world—the so-called manhood that either makes and maintains the miserable sinner of our streets or is content to give a tainted name to the mother of his child, or the true manhood lifted into God, whose marriage is the type of the eternal union of God and the soul, of Christ and the Church, and whose fatherhood claims kinship with the Father of lights. It is impossible for women who are agitating for the enfranchisement of their sex to accept as a necessary class in the midst of a democratical society a class of citizens who, in Dr. Welldon's[42] words, addressed to the University of Cambridge, "have lost once for all time the rights of citizenship—who are nobody's wives, nobody's sisters, nobody's friends, who live a living death in the world of men. There are one hundred and fifty thousand such citizens,—perhaps far more, in England and Wales—and all are women."
These old positions are simply impossible, each a moral reductio ad absurdam. We must institute a new and higher order. To do so we women must unite in a great silent movement, a temple slowly rising up beneath our hands without sound of axe or hammer. It will not make itself heard on platforms; its cry will not be heard in our streets. It will go on beneath the surface of our life, probably unheeded and unnoticed of men. Women must educate women; those who know must teach those who are in ignorance. Let mothers who have been roused to the greatness of the issues at stake take as their field of labor the young mothers whom they may know—possibly their own married daughters or nieces, possibly those who are only bound to them by ties of friendship. Use this book, if you will. If there are things in it which you don't approve of—and oh, how much of the divine patience of our Lord do we need with one another in dealing with this difficult question—cut out those pages, erase that passage, but do not deny those young mothers the necessary knowledge to guard the nursery or save their boys at school. And then try and follow it up by quietly talking over the difficulties and the best method of encountering them. Let us deny ourselves in order to give to associations or institutions for the elevation of women, as well as to that excellent society for men, the White Cross, which is spreading its purifying work through both countries.[43] Let us do what we can to help in organizing women's labor, so that a living wage may be secured and no woman be driven by starvation into selling herself for a morsel of bread. Let us endeavor to secure the franchise that we may have the power of legislating for the protection of women on the one point on which we stand in sharp opposition to all but good men; especially such measures as raising the age of consent, so deplorably low in some of your States, that your children are almost without legal protection; resisting State regulation of vice in the army; cleansing the streets by an Act pressing equally on men and women, and many others which will suggest themselves to you. But let us, at the same time, clearly recognize that the remedy must lie deeper than any external agency—must be as deep as life itself, and must be worked out in the silence of our own hearts and of our own homes. We must restore the law of God, quietly but firmly insisting on the equal moral standard for men and women alike; and we must maintain the sanctity and permanence of the marriage bond as ordained by Christ himself.
I say again I do not think, I simply know, by my own experience, that men will rise to any standard which women choose to set them. Ruskin's noble words are the simple truth: