A New Zealander once wrote home to a friend in England advising him to fight hard against woman suffrage. "Don't ever let the wimmin vote, Bill," he wrote. "They are good servants, but bad masters. Over there you can knock your wife about for five shillings, but here we does jail for it!"
The man who "knocks his wife about" or feels that he might some day want to knock her about, is opposed to further liberties for women, of course.
But that is the class of man from whom we never expected anything. He has his prototype, too, in every walk of life. Don't make the mistake of thinking that only ignorant members of the great unwashed masses talk and feel this way. Silk-hatted "noblemen" have answered women's appeals for common justice by hiring the Whitechapel toughs to "bash their heads," and this is another sore thought that women will carry with them for many a day after the suffrage has been granted. I wish we could forget the way our English sisters have been treated in that sweet land of liberty!
The problems of discovery have been solved; the problems of colonization are being solved, and when the war is over the problem of world government will be solved; and then the problem will be just the problem of living together. That problem cannot be solved without the help of women. The world has suffered long from too much masculinity and not enough humanity, but when the war is over, and the beautiful things have been destroyed, and the lands laid desolate, and all the blood has been shed, the poor old bruised and broken heart of the world will cry out for its mother and nurse, who will dry her own eyes, and bind up its wounds and nurse it back to life once more. Perhaps the old earth will be a bit kinder than it has ever been to women, who knows? Men have been known to grow very fond of their nurse, and bleeding has been known to cure mental disorders!
CHAPTER X
THE LAND OF THE FAIR DEAL
Lord, take us up to the heights, and show us the glory,
Show us a vision of Empire! Tell us its story!
Tell it out plain, for our eyes and our ears have grown holden;
We have forgotten that anything other than money is golden.
Grubbing away in the valley, somehow has darkened our eyes;
Watching the ground and the crops—we've forgotten the skies.
But Lord, if Thou wilt Thou canst take us today
To the Mount of Decision
And show us the land that we live in
With glorified Vision!
Every nation has its characteristic quality of mind; we recognize Scotch thrift, English persistency and Irish quickwittedness wherever we see it; we know something, too, of the emotional, vivacious nature of the French, and the resourcefulness of the American; but what about the Canadian—what will be our distinguishing feature in the years to come? The cartoons are kind to us—thus far—and in representing Canada, draw a sturdy young fellow, strong and well set, full of muscle and vim, and we like to think that the representation is a good one, for we are a young nation, coming into our vigor, and with our future in our own hands. We have an area of one-third of the whole British Empire, and one-fifth of that of Asia. Canada is as large as thirty United Kingdoms and eighteen Germanys. Canada is almost as large as Europe. It is bounded by three oceans and has thirteen thousand miles of coast line, that is, half the circumference of the earth.
Canada's land area, exclusive of forest and swamp lands, is 1,401,000,000 acres; 440,000,000 acres of this is fit for cultivation, but only 36,000,000 acres, or 2.6 per cent of the whole, is cultivated, so it would seem that there are still a few acres left for anyone who may happen to want it. We need not be afraid of crowding. We have a great big blank book here with leather binding and gold edges, and now our care should be that we write in it worthily. We have no precedents to guide us, and that is a glorious thing, for precedents, like other guides, are disposed to grow tyrannical, and refuse to let us do anything on our own initiative. Life grows wearisome in the countries where precedents and conventionalities rule, and nothing can happen unless it has happened before. Here we do not worry about precedents—we make our own!