“I, too, believe we have no right to offer more than material assistance, and such an example as our own efforts, towards the best we know, may afford.”
“It is a great deal, if given in the right spirit. My own idea of ‘service’ is to try and understand the East, to prevent such terrible blunders as our ignorance of them have brought about, which may even involve us in the horrors of another war.
“Why should we ask Orientals to accept our civilisation and ‘look at life’ through our eyes. It is no wiser or juster than asking a woman to see nothing except through a man’s eyes; and to work in his way. She cannot do that, and has suffered in the attempt. Your work is even a great peril. It is only too probable that you will be ‘starting’ them on the wrong road, and you must soon leave them to find their own way.
“If I am wrong, at least I speak in all sincerity; and I have studied the question for many years. As I see it, our Western civilisations have much to learn from the East in pity and humanity.”
“Osman Nyzami Pasha said to me once, in Rome, ‘you must not judge a nation by its Government but by the gods it creates for itself in its own image.’ The ancient Greeks peopled Olympus with gods of revolting immorality; but you in Oxford forget that chapter of the story. The God of the North——”
He paused, and I took up the challenge.
“The cold, harsh, and unforgiving Deity; the bogeyman of my childhood, always ready with some awful punishment for the least shortcoming.
“Why are our Puritan countries, whose God is love, so unjust to women, keeping them down under cruel and illogical laws. It is idle for men to say that no laws can diminish the deep respect they accord to women, which, in fact, is seldom shown to any of us except their wives, certainly not to woman as a woman.
“I certainly hold no brief for ‘irregularity,’ but there is something wrong with a conception of God which has produced the immeasurable gulf between the married and the unmarried mother. Humanity is not of our making; the ‘imperfect’ man has no right to demand ‘perfection’ from all women. Has he not made and tolerated War that has overthrown every standard of morality, changed all our ‘values,’ shattered every ideal, leaving religion nowhere, and two million women without a mate?
“Such is the civilisation that dares to point a finger of scorn at the unmarried mother; and, by dismissing her, characterless and unpensioned, from every respectable avenue of support, dares to brand a child as unwanted, and push the innocent young life into secret and shameful surroundings. Those who should help, with all the power of their sheltered purity, prefer to keep themselves ‘too respectable for any knowledge of these uncomfortable problems,’ since they are good and faithful servants of One who said, ‘Let him who is without sin amongst you cast the first stone!’