“Oh husband, only for good cause beat thou thy wife,
Not for little things.”
“Far away is my father dear, and farther still my mother.”
While demanding marital fidelity from wives, Russian husbands do not bind themselves to the same purity; and aside from wife-beating, the husband’s infidelities form the general subject of songs. Peter the Great, head of the Greek Church, not only beat his Empress Catherine, but while demanding marital fidelity from her, was notorious for his liaisons with women of low rank.[112] Women were not counted in the census of Russia until the reign of this monarch. So many “souls” no woman named. So long continued has been this treatment of woman, that the poet Nekrasof says:
Ages have rolled away, the whole face of the earth has brightened; only the somber lot of the Mowguk’s wife God forgets to change.
Man’s opinion of woman is shown in the proverb, “A hen is not a bird, neither is a woman a human being.” Nekrasof makes one of his village heroines say: “God has forgotten the nook where he hid the keys of woman’s emancipation,” which woman’s despair has changed to the proverb “God remembers everything but the Slavonian woman; he has forgotten where he hid the keys of her emancipation.” The system of indulgence is as marked in the Greek as in the Catholic Church, but under slightly different aspects. The worship of saints is an important part of the Byzantine religion. There are two saints, to whom if a person prays as he goes out to commit a crime, however heinous, he takes his pardon with him.[113] The present condition of Russian affairs is ascribed by Edmond Noble, to a long felt revolt in the minds of the people, against the social, political and religious system of that country. While the peasant implicitly obeys the czar, regarding his position as divine and all his commands as just, there is an element that recalls the former period of freedom, with intensity of desire for its re-establishment. To this class, permeated as it must be with the spirit of the age, the efforts for constitutional change, and what the world knows as Nihilism, are attributable. It is in reality a mighty protest against that christianity which in destroying political freedom, instituted a monstrous spiritual and material tyranny in its place. Nihilism is not wholly nor even chiefly a form of political change; it has a depth and a power much beyond mere social or governmental change; it looks to an entire overthrow of that religious system which permeates and underlies all moral and political tyranny in Russia.
Class legislation of extreme character is still constantly met in all christian lands. The English Bill of 1887, for extending Parliamentary Franchise to woman, as shown, having as its last clause, “Provided that nothing in this Act contained shall enable women under coverture to be registered or to vote at such elections.” In this Bill, the State recognized the marital subordination of woman, held by law as under her husband’s control not possessing freedom of thought, judgment, or action upon questions of vital importance to herself. Walter Besant declares:
That it is only by searching and poking among unknown pamphlets and forgotten books that one finds out the actual depth of the English savagery of the last century ... that for drunkenness, brutality and ignorance the Englishmen of the baser kind, reached the lowest depth ever reached by civilized men ... a drunkard, a brawler, a torturer of dumb beasts, a wife-beater, a profligate.
It is not necessary to search “unknown pamphlets and forgotten books,” in order to find out the depths of English or other christian savagery of the present century. Every newspaper report, every court decision, every Act of Parliament or Legislature, every decree of king, or czar, or other potentate; every canon, decree or decision of the church, proclaims the ignorance, brutality and savagery of Christendom. Nor is it among men of the baser kind with their infliction of corporal punishment upon wives, but in the subtler and more refined methods of torture made use of by men of the highest position, that we most truly find out the depths of the savagery of the nineteenth century. Profligacy among men of the highest position never flourished more luxuriantly than at the present time; drunkenness has by no means passed away; wife-beating is still a common amusement; the law still fails to extend a protecting arm around those most needing its defence; the church yet fails to recognize a common humanity in all classes of people. Old traditional customs of thought and action still prevail, and the men of a hundred years hence will look upon the present time with the same criticising astonishment that the historian of today looks upon the last century. Savagery instead of civilization is still the predominant power in christendom. In comparison with the treatment many wives receive in christian lands, that of women among the American Indians, or the most savage races of the old world, is far more humane than shown in England, America and other christian lands, where even maternity does not free woman from the coarsest brutality upon the part of husbands, nor the illness incident upon bringing a new being into the world, from writs of “contempt,” even though the death of mother or babe result. In 1890, the Press of New York City reported the case of Mrs. R. Bassman, who was summoned to appear before the Surrogate Court, for a funeral debt. Being in confinement she was unable to appear. Thereupon an order for her arrest for Contempt of Court was issued, and while still unrecovered from her illness, she was arrested and incarcerated in Ludlow Street jail. Her newly born babe deprived of its mother’s care sickened and died; and this is part of Christian civilization for woman, in nearly the two thousandth year of its existence.