The woman’s cause is man’s: they rise or sink
Together, dwarf’d, or godlike, bond or free:
· · · · ·
If she be small, slight-natured, miserable,
How shall men grow?
—Tennyson.
Adolescence is a critical period in the life of an individual. At that period, character, speaking generally, fully manifests, and the life is decided for good or evil. What advanced ethics requires is that each adult generation should deliberately examine its inheritance from the previous, less conscious, less informed epoch, in order to detect and destroy every social snare that entangles unwary feet in adolescence; and to devise the best methods of bringing to the young the wisdom and sympathy of their seniors.
In the autobiography of the late Anthony Trollope (vol. 1, p. 69), some facts of his own adolescence are stated in a spirit as generous as it is candid. His fate, like that of thousands of young men in his day, and in the present day, was to live at that critical time in a town, surrounded by all the attractions that a keen competitive commercialism has created to supplement profits—though at the expense of young men’s money and morals—and with no private retreat save a solitary lodging, a shelter, but in no sense a home. “No allurement to decent respectability,” he says, “came in my way.” For the spending of his evenings, the choice lay between what he calls “questionable resorts” and sitting alone reading or drinking tea. “There was no house in which I could habitually see a lady’s face and hear a lady’s voice, and in these circumstances the temptations of loose life will almost certainly prevail with a young man; at any rate they prevailed with me.”[[9]] Similar evidence may be found in a realistic, powerful novel, Jude the Obscure. Mr. Thomas Hardy there depicts the tragedy of unfulfilled aims, the shipwreck of what might have been a noble life; and the cause of shipwreck is pointed out in the words of the dying Jude: “My impulses and affections were too strong ... a man without advantages should be as cold-blooded as a fish and as selfish as a pig to have a really good chance of being one of his country’s worthies.” Now, affection and the impulse to love purely can never be too strong for the interests of general evolution, therefore we are entitled to assume that the environment is at fault. The fact that thousands of young men deprived of healthy home-life succumb to the temptations of city-life, condemns our industrial competition. Public consciousness has not grasped the needs and dangers of adolescence, and the slowly evolving community-conscience disregards the terrible penalty paid in general degradation for retaining a system of industry that produces among other evils “questionable resorts where young men see life in false, delusive colours.” These and all other injurious outcomes of our tragic struggle for the necessaries and amenities of life, will persist until the individualistic system of industry disappears, i.e. is superseded by a rational collectivist system. Standing as we do on the verge of conscious evolution, that time is not yet, but something may be done by parents and guardians of youth to counteract the evils of a transitional epoch.
[9]. More recently still the world has been afforded a glance into the inner history of a life destined to noble uses and high achievements. In the meridian of his fame Professor Huxley wrote thus to Charles Kingsley: “Kicked into the world a boy without guide or training, or with worse than none, I confess to my shame that few men have drunk deeper of all kinds of sin than I. Happily my course was arrested in time—before I had earned absolute destruction—and for long years I have been slowly and painfully climbing, with many a fall, towards better things.”—Life of Professor Huxley, vol. 1, p. 220.
Progress in an evolving society largely depends upon true union, i.e. mental, emotional and spiritual union of the sexes. But a careful examination of the prominent movements in society, and especially the various divisions of the woman’s emancipation movement, reveals that all are defective through inattention to this fundamental need. They do not aim at social conditions in which solidarity of heart and soul will naturally ensue.