It is a wretched reflection that these delightful women will one day be as respectable as the female natives of Stoke Newington.
A lady novelist writes that every English woman is a savage at heart. Does she not pay her sisters too high a compliment? The enforced clothing of the Curumbas women of Malabar, at the instigation of the "respectable English ladies" at Calcutta, is one of the pitiful examples of the indecency of thought born of our ideas of respectability. These damsels of the Curumbas tribe wore aprons of leaves suspended from a bead waistband. Such garb was not only suited to the climate, but it was charming as well as healthy. The Calcutta British Matrons thought such wear abominable. How could these women be respectable in such scanty drapery? Accordingly, by direction of Bumble, four corporals and two sergeants of infantry were told off with a company to drag the leaf aprons from the front and behind, and to put the women into petticoats. The greenery was then burned in a bonfire. What a glorious triumph of Respectability! How thoroughly British matronly and indelicate in conception was this compulsory clothing of innocent modest women by Tommy Atkins and his "pals." Is there the least need to dwell upon the contrast of decency that these Curumbas women present to the "respectable English ladies" of Calcutta?
Our insular arrogance is the twin sister of respectability. When we are not taking pride in the personal possession of a pot-hat and a frock coat, we go about bragging of national respectability and superiority. "Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud," says Schopenhauer, "adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and glad to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his inferiority. For example, if you speak of the stupid and degrading bigotry of the English nation with the contempt it deserves, you will hardly find one Englishman in fifty to agree with you; but if there should be one, he will generally happen to be an intelligent man!"
Nothing can destroy Respectability but a gradual extirpation of the bourgeoisie. I say gradual advisedly, and in a double sense; first, because we have many respectable relatives and friends whom we would be grieved to asphyxiate; and, second, because gradual processes in social evolution have more permanent resultants than cataclysms. Diderot, with wonderful prescience, asserted that a scientific anarchism is the extreme goal of social progress. This was in 1776. In 1897 a thousand sociologists recognise this fact, this "diablement idéal," as Diderot termed it.
CHAPTER II.
THE PATHOLOGY OF THE DISEASE.
"The evil is not merely a stagnation of blood, but a stagnation of spirit. Many, no doubt, are well disposed, but sluggish by constitution and by habit, or they cannot conceive of a man who is actuated by higher motives than they are."
Thoreau.