Something awful would happen to me if I wrote all the things I think. To suggest one finds it actually sinful to incubate miserable seedlings—the offspring of poverty, children conceived in drink, immorality, insanity, epilepsy, children doomed from birth—brings down denunciation. One hardly dare espouse such views, while it is considered more good, more noble, more moral to foster a population of degenerates than to prevent it. Our prisons are largely filled by drink or insanity, but we feed and keep the creatures and send them out to propagate their species, who in their turn fall upon the rates. Degenerates should never be allowed to marry.
We court adultery by our Separation Acts, tie unfortunate men and women to lunatics, instead of clearing the air by cheap divorce. We positively suggest infidelity by not making equal laws for men and women. We force women to work or starve, and then abuse them for entering men’s professions; but we hardly dare speak or write openly on these subjects, oh dear, no!
We see women neglecting their homes for bridge or men scattering their wits by wrongful indulgences, and yet Society does not revolt. Still we are waking up, and why? Simply because women are beginning to take an interest in the big questions of life; and once they take a thing up they generally manage to sift it to the bottom.
This is woman’s century. She is playing a bold game for the equality of the sexes, but she will win; and the world will be the purer and better for the part she plays.
Women don’t faint nowadays, and have vapours and migraine. They no longer make jams or weep. They are up and doing. They do things instead of talking of them. They are becoming the comrades of men. It is the women of the twentieth century who are going to revise Society.
Lord Emmott, the late Deputy Speaker, was one day pretending to me that all evil came through women.
“Look at the apple,” he cited.
“Oh, come now, that chestnut is too old,” I replied.
“Old but nevertheless evergreen,” he answered promptly.
If men are creating unrest and Socialism, women are spurring their sons to work and instilling into them morality. The immoral man will find every decent door shut in his face before another century dawns, just as the drunkard has been hounded from Society. Who would tolerate drunkenness at a dinner-party to-day? Men and women both shrink from it, and the same will be felt towards loose living. Women are free, no longer the slaves of men, and they are exercising their freedom in the purification of all things, ably helped by their comrades.