Woman and Labour
by
Olive Schreiner
Part 3 out of 3
linen in a day, should therefore desire less the fellowship of her
corresponding male than had she toiled at a spinning-wheel with hand and
foot to produce one yard; that the male should desire less of the
companionship of the woman who spends the morning in doctoring babies in
her consulting-room, according to the formularies of the pharmacopoeia,
than she who of old spent it on the hillside collecting simples for
remedies; that the woman who paints a modern picture or designs a modern
vase should be less lovable by man, than her ancestor who shaped the first
primitive pot and ornamented it with zigzag patterns was to the man of her
day and age; that the woman who contributes to the support of her family by
giving legal opinions will less desire motherhood and wifehood than she who
in the past contributed to the support of her household by bending on hands
and knees over her grindstone, or scrubbing floors, and that the former
should be less valued by man than the latter--these are suppositions which
it is difficult to regard as consonant with any knowledge of human nature
and the laws by which it is dominated.
On the other hand, if it be supposed that the possession of wealth or the
means of earning it makes the human female objectionable to the male, all
history and all daily experience negates it. The eager hunt for heiresses
in all ages and social conditions, make it obvious that the human male has
a strong tendency to value the female who can contribute to the family
expenditure; and the case is yet, we believe, unrecorded of a male who,
attracted to a female, becomes averse to her on finding she has material
good. The female doctor or lawyer earning a thousand a year will always,
and today certainly does, find more suitors than had she remained a
governess or cook, labouring as hard, earning thirty pounds.
While, if the statement that the female entering on new fields of labour
will cease to be lovable to the male be based on the fact that she will
then be free, all history and all human experience yet more negates its
truth. The study of all races in all ages, proves that the greater the
freedom of woman in any society, the higher the sexual value put upon her
by the males of that society. The three squaws who walk behind the Indian,
and whom he has captured in battle or bought for a few axes or lengths of
tobacco, and over whom he exercises the despotic right of life and death,
are probably all three of infinitesimal value in his eyes, compared with
the value of his single, free wife to one of our ancient, monogamous German
ancestors; while the hundred wives and concubines purchased by a Turkish
pasha have probably not even an approximate value in his eyes, when
compared with the value which thousands of modern European males set upon
the one comparatively free woman, whom they may have won, often only after
a long and tedious courtship.
So axiomatic is the statement that the value of the female to the male
varies as her freedom, that, given an account of any human society in which
the individual female is highly valued, it will be perfectly safe to infer
the comparative social freedom of woman; and, given a statement as to the
high degree of freedom of woman in a society, it will be safe to infer the
great sexual value of the individual woman to man.
Finally, if the suggestion, that men and women will cease to be attractive
to one another if women enter modern fields of labour, be based on the fact
that her doing so may increase her intelligence and enlarge her
intellectual horizon, it must be replied that the whole trend of human
history absolutely negates the supposition. There is absolutely no ground
for the assumption that increased intelligence and intellectual power
diminishes sexual emotion in the human creature of either sex. The
ignorant savage, whether in ancient or modern societies, who violates and
then clubs a female into submission, may be dominated, and is, by sex
emotions of a certain class; but not less dominated have been the most
cultured, powerful, and highly differentiated male intelligences that the
race has produced. A Mill, a Shelley, a Goethe, a Schiller, a Pericles,
have not been more noted for vast intellectual powers, than for the depth
and intensity of their sexual emotions. And, if possible, with the human
female, the relation between intensity of sexual emotion and high
intellectual gifts has been yet closer. The life of a Sophia Kovalevsky, a
George Eliot, an Elizabeth Browning have not been more marked by a rare
development of the intellect than by deep passionate sexual emotions. Nor
throughout the history of the race has high intelligence and intellectual
power ever tended to make either male or female unattractive to those of
the opposite sex.
The merely brilliantly attired and unintelligent woman, probably never
awakened the same intensity of profound sex emotion even among the men of
her own type, which followed a George Sand; who attracted to herself with
deathless force some of the most noted men of her generation, even when,
nearing middle age, stout, and attired in rusty and inartistic black, she
was to be found rolling her cigarettes in a dingy office, scorning all the
external adornments with which less attractive females seek to supply a
hidden deficiency. Probably no more hopeless mistake could be made by an
ascetic seeking to extirpate sex emotion and the attraction of the sexes
for one another, than were he to imagine that in increasing virility,
intelligence, and knowledge this end could be attained. He might thereby
differentiate and greatly concentrate the emotions, but they would be
intensified; as a widely spread, shallow, sluggish stream would not be
annihilated but increased in force and activity by being turned into a
sharply defined, clear-cut course.
And if, further, we turn to those secondary manifestations of sexual
emotion, which express themselves in the relations of human progenitors to
their offspring, we shall find, if possible more markedly, that increase of
intelligence and virility does not diminish but increases the strength of
the affections. As the primitive, ignorant male, often willingly selling
his offspring or exposing his female infants to death, often develops, with
the increase of culture and intelligence, into the extremely devoted and
self-sacrificing male progenitor of civilised societies; so, yet even more
markedly, does the female relation with her offspring, become intensified
and permanent, as culture and intelligence and virility increase. The
Bushwoman, like the lowest female barbarians in our own societies, will
often readily dispose of her infant son for a bottle of spirits or a little
coin; and even among somewhat more mentally developed females, strong as is
the affection of the average female for her new born offspring, the
closeness of the relation between mother and child tends rapidly to shrink
as time passes, so that by the time of adolescence is reached the relation
between mother and son becomes little more than a remembrance of a close
inter-union which once existed. It is, perhaps, seldom, till the very
highest point of intellectual growth and mental virility has been reached
by the human female, that her relation with her male offspring becomes a
permanent and active and dominant factor in the lives of both. The
concentrated and all-absorbing affection and fellowship which existed
between the greatest female intellect France has produced and the son she
bore, dominating both lives to the end, the fellowship of the English
historian with his mother, who remained his chosen companion and the sharer
of all his labours through life, the relation of St. Augustine to his
mother, and those of countless others, are relations almost inconceivable
where the woman is not of commanding and active intelligence, and where the
passion of mere physical instinct is completed by the passion of the
intellect and spirit.
There appears, then, from the study of human nature in the past, no ground
for supposing that if, as a result of woman's adopting new forms of labour,
she should become more free, more wealthy, or more actively intelligent,
that this could in any way diminish her need of the physical and mental
comradeship of man, nor his need of her; nor that it would affect their
secondary sexual relations as progenitors, save by deepening,
concentrating, and extending throughout life the parental emotions. The
conception that man's and woman's need of each other could be touched, or
the emotions binding the sexes obliterated, by any mere change in the form
of labour performed by the woman of the race, is as grotesque in its
impossibility, as the suggestion that the placing of a shell on the
seashore this way or that might destroy the action of the earth's great
tidal wave.
But, it may be objected, "If there be absolutely no ground for the
formation of such an opinion, how comes it that, in one form or another, it
is so often expressed by persons who object to the entrance of woman into
new or intellectual fields of labour? Where there is smoke must there not
also be fire?" To which it must be replied, "Without fire, no smoke; but
very often the appearance of smoke where neither smoke nor fire exist!"
The fact that a statement is frequently made or a view held forms no
presumptive ground of its truth; but it is undoubtedly a ground for
supposing that there is an appearance or semblance which makes it appear
truth, and which suggests it. The universally entertained conception that
the sun moved round the world was not merely false, but the reverse of the
truth; all that was required for its inception was a fallacious appearance
suggesting it.
When we examine narrowly the statement, that the entrance of woman into the
new fields of labour, with its probably resulting greater freedom of
action, economic independence and wider culture, may result in a severance
between the sexes, it becomes clear what that fallacious appearance is,
which suggests this.
The entrance of a woman into new fields of labour, though bringing her
increased freedom and economic independence, and necessitating increased
mental training and wider knowledge, could not extinguish the primordial
physical instinct which draws sex to sex throughout all the orders of
sentient life; and still less could it annihilate that subtler mental need,
which, as humanity develops, draws sex to sex for emotional fellowship and
close intercourse; but, it might, and undoubtedly would, powerfully react
and readjust the relations of certain men with certain women!
While the attraction, physical and intellectual, which binds sex to sex
would remain the same in volume and intensity, the forms in which it would
express itself, and, above all, the relative power of individuals to
command the gratification of their instincts and desires, would be
fundamentally altered, and in many cases inverted.
In the barbarian state of societies, where physical force dominates, it is
the most muscular and pugilistically and brutally and animally successful
male who captures and possesses the largest number of females; and no doubt
he would be justified in regarding any social change which gave to woman a
larger freedom of choice, and which would so perhaps give to the less
brutal but perhaps more intelligent male, whom the woman might select, an
equal opportunity for the gratification of his sexual wishes and for the
producing of offspring, as a serious loss. And, from the purely personal
standpoint, he would undoubtedly be right in dreading anything which tended
to free woman. But he would manifestly not have been justified in
asserting, that woman's increased freedom of choice, or the fact that the
other men would share his advantage in the matter of obtaining female
companionship, would in any way lessen the amount of sexual emotion or the
tenderness of relation between the two halves of humanity. He would not by
brute force possess himself of so many females, nor have so large a circle
of choice, under the new conditions; but what he lost, others would gain;
and the intensity of the sex emotions and the nearness and passion of the
relation between the sexes be in no way touched.
In our more civilised societies, as they exist today, woman possesses (more
often perhaps in appearance than reality!) a somewhat greater freedom of
sexual selection; she is no longer captured by muscular force, but there
are still conditions entirely unconnected with sex attractions and
affections, which yet largely dominate the sex relations.
It is not the man of the strong arm, but the man of the long purse, who
unduly and artificially dominates in the sexual world today. Practically,
wherever in the modern world woman is wholly or partially dependent for her
means of support on the exercise of her sexual functions, she is dependent
more or less on the male's power to support her in their exercise, and her
freedom of choice is practically so far absolutely limited. Probably
three-fourths of the sexual unions in our modern European societies,
whether in the illegal or recognised legal forms, are dominated by or
largely influenced by the sex purchasing power of the male. With regard to
the large and savage institution of prostitution, which still lies as the
cancer embedded in the heart of all our modern civilised societies, this is
obviously and nakedly the case; the wealth of the male as compared to the
female being, with hideous obtrusiveness, its foundation and source of
life. But the purchasing power of the male as compared with the poverty of
the female is not less painfully, if a little less obtrusively, displayed
in those layers of society lying nearer the surface. From the fair, effete
young girl of the wealthier classes in her city boudoir, who weeps
copiously as she tells you she cannot marry the man she loves, because he
says he has only two hundred a year and cannot afford to keep her; to the
father who demands frankly of his daughter's suitor how much he can settle
on her before consenting to his acceptance, the fact remains, that, under
existing conditions, not the amount of sex affection, passion, and
attraction, but the extraneous question of the material possessions of the
male, determines to a large extent the relation of the sexes. The
parasitic, helpless youth who has failed in his studies, who possesses
neither virility, nor charm of person, nor strength of mind, but who
possesses wealth, has a far greater chance of securing unlimited sexual
indulgence and the life companionship of the fairest maid, than her
brother's tutor, who may be possessed of every manly and physical grace and
mental gift; and the ancient libertine, possessed of nothing but material
good, has, especially among the so-called upper classes of our societies, a
far greater chance of securing the sex companionship of any woman he
desires as wife, mistress, or prostitute, than the most physically
attractive and mentally developed male, who may have nothing to offer to
the dependent female but affection and sexual companionship.
To the male, whenever and wherever he exists in our societies, who depends
mainly for his power for procuring the sex relation he desires, not on his
power of winning and retaining personal affection, but, on the purchasing
power of his possessions as compared to the poverty of the females of his
society, the personal loss would be seriously and at once felt, of any
social change which gave to the woman a larger economic independence and
therefore greater freedom of sexual choice. It is not an imaginary danger
which the young dude, of a certain type which sits often in the front row
of the stalls in a theatre, with sloping forehead and feeble jaw, watching
the unhappy women who dance for gold--sees looming before him, as he lisps
out his deep disapproval of increased knowledge and the freedom of
obtaining the means of subsistence in intellectual fields by woman, and
expresses his vast preference for the uncultured ballet-girl over all types
of cultured and productive labouring womenhood in the universe. A subtle
and profound instinct warns him, that with the increased intelligence and
economic freedom of woman, he, and such as he, might ultimately be left
sexually companionless; the undesirable, the residuary, male old-maids of
the human race.
On the other hand, there is undoubtedly a certain body of females who would
lose, or imagine they would lose, heavily by the advance of woman as a
whole to a condition of free labour and economic independence. That
female, wilfully or organically belonging to the parasite class, having
neither the vigour of intellect nor the vitality of body to undertake any
form of productive labour, and desiring to be dependent only upon the
passive performance of sex function merely, would, whether as prostitute or
wife, undoubtedly lose heavily by any social change which demanded of woman
increased knowledge and activity. (She would lose in two directions: by
the social disapprobation which, as the new conditions became general,
would rest on her; and yet more by the competition of the more developed
forms. She would practically become non-existent.)
It is exactly by these two classes of persons that the objection is raised
that the entrance of woman into the new fields of labour and her increased
freedom and intelligence will dislocate the relations of the sexes; and,
while from the purely personal standpoint, they are undoubtedly right,
viewing human society as a whole they are fundamentally wrong. The loss of
a small and unhealthy section will be the gain of human society as a whole.
In the male voluptuary of feeble intellect and unattractive individuality,
who depends for the gratification of his sexual instincts, not on his power
of winning and retaining the personal affection and admiration of woman,
but on her purchaseable condition, either in the blatantly barbarous field
of sex traffic that lies beyond the pale of legal marriage, or the not less
barbarous though more veiled traffic within that pale, the entrance of
woman into the new fields of labour, with an increased intellectual culture
and economic freedom, means little less than social extinction. But, to
those males who, even at the present day, constitute the majority in our
societies, and who desire the affection and fellowship of woman rather than
a mere material possession; for the male who has the attributes and gifts
of mind or body, which, apart from any weight of material advantage, would
fit him to hold the affection of woman, however great her freedom of
choice, the gain will be correspondingly great. Given a society in which
the majority of women should be so far self-supporting, that, having their
free share open to them in the modern fields of labour, and reaping the
full economic rewards of their labour, marriage or some form of sexual sale
was no more a matter of necessity to them; so far from this condition
causing a diminution in the number of permanent sex unions, one of the
heaviest bars to them would be removed. It is universally allowed that one
of the disease spots in our modern social condition is the increasing
difficulty which bars conscientious men from entering on marriage and
rearing families, if limited means would in the case of their death or
disablement throw the woman and their common offspring comparatively
helpless into the fierce stream of our modern economic life. If the woman
could justifiably be looked to, in case of the man's disablement or death,
to take his place as an earner, thousands of valuable marriages which
cannot now be contracted could be entered on; and the serious social evil,
which arises from the fact that while the self-indulgent and selfish freely
marry and produce large families, the restrained and conscientious are
often unable to do so, would be removed. For the first time in the history
of the modern world, prostitution, using that term in its broadest sense to
cover all forced sexual relationships based, not on the spontaneous
affection of the woman for the man, but on the necessitous acceptance by
woman of material good in exchange for the exercise of her sexual
functions, would be extinct; and the relation between men and women become
a co-partnership between freemen.
So far from the economic freedom and social independence of the woman
exterminating sexual love between man and woman, it would for the first
time fully enfranchise it. The element of physical force and capture which
dominated the most primitive sex relations, the more degrading element of
seduction and purchase by means of wealth or material good offered to woman
in our modern societies, would then give place to the untrammelled action
of attraction and affection alone between the sexes, and sexual love, after
its long pilgrimage in the deserts, would be enabled to return at last, a
king crowned.
But, apart from the two classes of persons whose objection to the entrance
of woman to new fields of labour is based more or less instinctively on the
fear of personal loss, there is undoubtedly a small, if a very small,
number of sincere persons whose fear as to severance between the sexes to
result from woman's entrance into the new field, is based upon a more
abstract and impersonal ground.
It is not easy to do full justice in an exact statement to views held
generally rather nebulously and vaguely, but we believe we should not
mistake this view, by saying that there are a certain class of perfectly
sincere and even moderately intelligent folk who hold a view which,
expressed exactly, would come to something like this--that the entrance of
woman into new fields would necessitate so large a mental culture and such
a development of activity, mental and physical, in the woman, that she
might ultimately develop into a being so superior to the male and so widely
different from the man, that the bond of sympathy between the sexes might
ultimately be broken and the man cease to be an object of affection and
attraction to the woman, and the woman to the man through mere
dissimilarity. The future these persons seem to see, more or less vaguely,
is of a social condition, in which, the males of the race remaining
precisely as they are today, the corresponding females shall have advanced
to undreamed of heights of culture and intelligence; a condition in which
the hand-worker, and the ordinary official, and small farmer, shall be
confronted with the female astronomer or Greek professor of astonishing
learning and gifts as his only possible complementary sex companion; and
the vision naturally awakens in these good folk certain misgivings as to
sympathy between and suitability for each other, of these two widely
dissimilar parts of humanity.
It must of course at once be admitted, that, were the two sexual halves of
humanity distinct species, which, having once entered on a course of
evolution and differentiation, might continue to develop along those
distinct lines for countless ages or even for a number of generations,
without reacting through inheritance on each other, the consequences of
such development might ultimately almost completely sever them.
The development of distinct branches of humanity has already brought about
such a severance between races and classes which are in totally distinct
stages of evolution. So wide is the hiatus between them often, that the
lowest form of sex attraction can hardly cross it; and the more highly
developed mental and emotional sex passion cannot possibly bridge it. In
the world of sex, kind seeks kind, and too wide a dissimilarity completely
bars the existence of the highest forms of sex emotion, and often even the
lower and more purely animal.
Were it possible to place a company of the most highly evolved human
females--George Sands, Sophia Kovalevskys, or even the average cultured
females of a highly evolved race--on an island where the only males were
savages of the Fugean type, who should meet them on the shores with matted
hair and prognathous jaws, and with wild shouts, brandishing their
implements of death, to greet and welcome them, it is an undoubted fact
that, so great would be the horror felt by the females towards them, that
not only would the race become extinct, but if it depended for its
continuance on any approach to sex affection on the part of the women, that
death would certainly be accepted by all, as the lesser of two evils.
Hardly less marked would be the sexual division if, in place of cultured
and developed females, we imagine males of the same highly evolved class
thrown into contact with the lowest form of primitive females. A Darwin, a
Schiller, a Keats, though all men capable of the strongest sex emotion and
of the most durable sex affections, would probably be untouched by any
emotion but horror, cast into the company of a circle of Bushmen females
with greased bodies and twinkling eyes, devouring the raw entrails of
slaughtered beasts.
But leaving out even such extreme instances of diversity, the mere division
in culture and mental habits, dividing individuals of the same race but of
different classes, tends largely to exclude the possibility of at least the
nobler and more enduring forms of sex emotion. The highly cultured denizen
of a modern society, though he may enter into passing and temporary and
animal relations with the uncultured peasant or woman of the street, seldom
finds awakened within him in such cases the depth of emotion and sympathy
which is necessary for the enjoyment of the closer tie of conjugal life;
and it may be doubted whether the highest, most permanent, and intimate
forms of sexual affection ever exist except among humans very largely
identical in tastes, habits of thought, and moral and physical education.
(In Greece at a certain period (as we have before noted) there does appear
to have been a temporary advance of the male, so far in advance of the
female as to make the difference between them almost immeasurable; but he
quickly fell back to the level of the woman.) Were it possible that the
entrance of woman into the new fields of labour should produce any
increased divergence between man and woman in ideals, culture, or tastes,
there would undoubtedly be a dangerous responsibility incurred by any who
fostered such a movement.
But the most superficial study of human life and the relation of the sexes
negates such a conception.
The two sexes are not distinct species but the two halves of one whole,
always acting and interacting on each other through inheritance, and
reproducing and blending with each other in each generation. The human
female is bound organically in two ways to the males of her society:
collaterally they are her companions and the co-progenitors with her of the
race; but she is also the mother of the males of each succeeding
generation, bearing, shaping, and impressing her personality upon them.
The males and females of each human society resemble two oxen tethered to
one yoke: for a moment one may move slightly forward and the other remain
stationary; but they can never move farther from each other than the length
of the yoke that binds them; and they must ultimately remain stationary or
move forward together. That which the women of one generation are mentally
or physically, that by inheritance and education the males of the next tend
to be: there can be no movement or change in one sex which will not
instantly have its co-ordinating effect upon the other; the males of
tomorrow are being cast in the mould of the women of today. If new ideals,
new moral conceptions, new methods of action are found permeating the minds
of the women of one generation, they will reappear in the ideals, moral
conceptions, methods of action of the men of thirty years hence; and the
idea that the males of a society can ever become permanently farther
removed from its females than the individual man is from the mother who
bore and reared him, is at variance with every law of human inheritance.
If, further, we turn from an abstract consideration of this supposition,
and examine practically in the modern world men and women as they exist
today, the irrationality of the supposition is yet more evident.
Not merely is the Woman's Movement of our age not a sporadic and abnormal
growth, like a cancer bearing no organic relation to the development of the
rest of the social organism, but it is essentially but one important phase
of a general modification which the whole of modern life is undergoing.
Further, careful study of the movement will show that, not only is it not a
movement on the part of woman leading to severance and separation between
the woman and the man, but that it is essentially a movement of the woman
towards the man, of the sexes towards closer union.
Much is said at the present day on the subject of the "New Woman" (who, as
we have seen, is essentially but the old non-parasitic woman of the remote
past, preparing to draw on her new twentieth-century garb): and it cannot
truly be said that her attitude finds a lack of social attention. On every
hand she is examined, praised, blamed, mistaken for her counterfeit,
ridiculed, or deified--but nowhere can it be said, that the phenomenon of
her existence is overlooked.
But there exists at the present day another body of social phenomena, quite
as important, as radical, and if possible more far-reaching in its effects
on the present and future, which yet attracts little conscious attention or
animadversion, though it makes itself everywhere felt; as the shade of a
growing tree may be sat under year after year by persons who never remark
its silent growth.
Side by side with the "New Woman," corresponding to her, as the two sides
of a coin cast in one mould, though differing from each other in
superficial detail, are yet of one metal, one size, and one value; old in
the sense in which she is old, being merely the reincarnation under the
pressure of new conditions of the ancient forms of his race; new in the
sense in which she is new, in that he is an adaptation to material and
social conditions which have no exact counterpart in the past; more diverse
from his immediate progenitors than even the woman is from hers, side by
side with her today in every society and in every class in which she is
found, stands--the New Man!
If it be asked, How comes it to pass, if, under the pressure of social
conditions, man shows an analogous change of attitude toward life, that the
change in woman should attract universal attention, while the corresponding
change in the man of her society passes almost unnoticed?--it would seem
that the explanation lies in the fact that, owing to woman's less
independence of action in the past, any attempt at change or readaptation
on her part has had to overcome greater resistance, and it is the noise and
friction of resistance, more than the amount of actual change which has
taken place, which attracts attention; as when an Alpine stream, after a
long winter frost, breaks the ice, and with a crash and roar sweeps away
the obstructions which have gathered in its bed, all men's attention is
attracted to it, though when later a much larger body of water silently
forces its way down, no man observes it. (An interesting practical
illustration of this fact is found in the vast attention and uproar created
when the first three women in England, some thirty odd years ago, sought to
enter the medical profession. At the present day scores of women prepare
to enter it yearly without attracting any general attention; not that the
change which is going on is not far more in volume and social importance,
but that, having overcome the first obstruction, it is now noiseless.)
Between the Emilias and Sophy Westerns of a bygone generation and the most
typical of modern women, there exists no greater gap (probably not so great
a one) as that which exists between the Tom Joneses and Squire Westerns of
that day and the most typical of entirely modern men.
The sexual and social ideals which dominated the fox-hunting, hard-
drinking, high-playing, recklessly loose-living country squire, clergyman,
lawyer, and politician who headed the social organism of the past, are at
least as distinct from the ideals which dominate thousands of their male
descendants holding corresponding positions in the societies of today, as
are the ideals of her great-great-grand mother's remote from those
dominating the most modern of New Women.
That which most forces itself upon us as the result of a close personal
study of those sections of modern European societies in which change and
adaptation to the new conditions of life are now most rapidly progressing,
is, not merely that equally large bodies of men and women are being rapidly
modified as to their sexual and social ideals and as to their mode of life,
but that this change is strictly complementary.
If the ideal of the modern woman becomes increasingly one inconsistent with
the passive existence of woman on the remuneration which her sexual
attributes may win from man, and marriage becomes for her increasingly a
fellowship of comrades, rather than the relationship of the owner and the
bought, the keeper and the kept; the ideal of the typically modern man
departs quite as strongly from that of his forefathers in the direction of
finding in woman active companionship and co-operation rather than passive
submission. If the New Woman's conception of parenthood differs from the
old in the greater sense of the gravity and obligation resting on those who
are responsible for the production of the individual life, making her
attitude toward the production of her race widely unlike the reckless,
unreasoning, maternal reproduction of the woman of the past, the most
typical male tends to feel in at least the same degree the moral and social
obligation entailed by awakening lifehood: if the ideal which the New
Woman shapes for herself of a male companion excludes the crudely animal
hard-drinking, hard-swearing, licentious, even if materially wealthy
gallant of the past; the most typically modern male's ideal for himself
excludes at least equally this type. The brothel, the race-course, the
gaming-table, and habits of physical excess among men are still with us;
but the most superficial study of our societies will show that these have
fallen into a new place in the scale of social institutions and manners.
The politician, the clergyman, or the lawyer does not improve his social or
public standing by violent addictions in these directions; to drink his
companions under the table, to be known to have the largest number of
illicit sex relations, to be recognised as an habitual visitant of the
gambling saloon, does not, even in the case of a crowned head, much enhance
his reputation, and with the ordinary man may ultimately prove a bar to all
success. If the New Woman's conception of love between the sexes is one
more largely psychic and intellectual than crudely and purely physical, and
wholly of an affection between companions; the New Man's conception as
expressed in the most typical literature and art, produced by typically
modern males, gives voice with a force no woman has surpassed to the same
new ideal. If to the typical modern woman the lifelong companionship of a
Tom Jones or Squire Western would be more intolerable than death or the
most complete celibacy, not less would the most typical of modern men
shrink from the prospect of a lifelong fetterment to the companionship of
an always fainting, weeping, and terrified Emilia or a Sophia of a bygone
epoch.
If anywhere on earth exists the perfect ideal of that which the modern
woman desires to be--of a labouring and virile womanhood, free, strong,
fearless and tender--it will probably be found imaged in the heart of the
New Man; engendered there by his own heighest needs and aspirations; and
nowhere would the most highly developed modern male find an image of that
which forms his ideal of the most fully developed manhood, than in the
ideal of man which haunts the heart of the New Woman.
Those have strangely overlooked some of the most important phenomena of our
modern world, who see in the Woman's Movement of our day any emotional
movement of the female against the male, of the woman away from the man.
We have called the Woman's Movement of our age an endeavour on the part of
women among modern civilised races to find new fields of labour as the old
slip from them, as an attempt to escape from parasitism and an inactive
dependence upon sex function alone; but, viewed from another side, the
Woman's Movement might not less justly be called a part of a great movement
of the sexes towards each other, a movement towards common occupations,
common interests, common ideals, and towards an emotional sympathy between
the sexes more deeply founded and more indestructible than any the world
has yet seen.
But it may be suggested, and the perception of a certain profound truth
underlies this suggestion; How is it, if there be this close reciprocity
between the lines along which the advanced and typical modern males and
females are developing, that there does exist in our modern societies, and
often among the very classes forming our typically advanced sections, so
much of pain, unrest, and sexual disco-ordination at the present day?
The reply to this pertinent suggestion is, that the disco-ordination,
struggle, and consequent suffering which undoubtedly do exist when we
regard the world of sexual relationships and ideals in our modern
societies, do not arise in any way from a disco-ordination between the
sexes as such, but are a part of the general upheaval, of the conflict
between old ideals and new; a struggle which is going on in every branch
the human life in our modern societies, and in which the determining
element is not sex, but the point of evolution which the race or the
individual has reached.
It cannot be too often repeated, even at the risk of the most wearisome
reiteration, that our societies are societies in a state of rapid evolution
and change. The continually changing material conditions of life, with
their reaction on the intellectual, emotional, and moral aspects of human
affairs, render our societies the most complex and probably the most mobile
and unsettled which the world has ever seen. As the result of this
rapidity of change and complexity, there must continually exist a large
amount of disco-ordination, and consequently, of suffering.
In a stationary society where generation has succeeded generation for
hundreds, or it may be for thousands, of years, with little or no change in
the material conditions of life, the desires, institutions, and moral
principles of men, their religious, political, domestic, and sexual
institutions, have gradually shaped themselves in accordance with these
conditions; and a certain harmony, and homogeneity, and tranquillity,
pervades the society.
In societies in that rapid state of change in which our modern societies
find themselves, where not merely each decade, but each year, and almost
day brings new forces and conditions to bear on life, not only is the
amount of suffering and social rupture, which all rapid, excessive, and
sudden change entails on an organism, inevitable; but, the new conditions,
acting at different angles of intensity on the different individual members
composing the society, according to their positions and varying
intelligence, are producing a society of such marvellous complexity and
dissimilarity in the different individual parts, that the intensest rupture
and disco-ordination between individuals is inevitable; and sexual ideals
and relationships must share in the universal condition.
In a primitive society (if a somewhat prolix illustration may be allowed)
where for countless generations the conditions of life had remained
absolutely unchanged; where for ages it had been necessary that all males
should employ themselves in subduing wild beasts and meeting dangerous
foes, polygamy might universally have been a necessity, if the race were to
exist and its numbers be kept up; and society, recognising this, polygamy
would be an institution universally approved and submitted to, however much
suffering it entailed. If food were scarce, the destruction of superfluous
infants and of the aged might also always have been necessary for the good
of the individuals themselves as well as of society, and the whole society
would acquiesce in it without any moral doubt. If an eclipse of the sun
had once occurred in connection with the appearance of a certain new
insect, they mighty universally regard that insect as a god causing it; and
ages might pass without anything arising to disprove their belief. There
would be no social or religious problem; and the view of one man would be
the view of all men; and all would be more or less in harmony with the
established institution and customs.
But, supposing the sudden arrival of strangers armed with superior weapons
and knowledge, who should exterminate all wild beasts and render war and
the consequent loss of male life a thing of the past; not only would the
male be driven to encroach on the female's domain of domestic agriculture
and labour generally, but the males, not being so largely destroyed, they
would soon equal and surpass in numbers the females; and not only would it
then become a moot matter, "a problem," which labours were or were not to
be performed by man and which by woman, but very soon, not the woman alone
nor the man alone, but both, would be driven to speculate as to the
desirability or necessity of polygamy, which, were men as numerous as
women, would leave many males without sex companions. The more intelligent
and progressive individuals in the community would almost at once arrive at
the conclusion that polygamy was objectionable; the most fearless would
seek to carry their theory into action; the most ignorant and unprogressive
would determinately stick to the old institutions as inherited from the
past, without reason or question; differences of ideal would cause conflict
and dissension in all parts of the body social, and suffering would ensue,
where all before was fixed and determinate. So also if the strangers
introduced new and improved methods of agriculture, and food became
abundant, it would then at once strike the most far-seeing and readily
adaptable members of the community, both male and female, that there was no
necessity for the destruction of their offspring; old men and women would
begin seriously to object to being hastened to death when they realised
that starvation did not necessarily stare them in the face if they survived
to an extreme old age; the most stupid and hide-bound members of the
community would still continue to sacrifice parents and offspring long
after the necessity had ceased, under the influence of traditional bias;
many persons would be in a state of much moral doubt as to which course of
action to pursue, the old or the new; and bitter conflict might rage in the
community on all these points. Were the strangers to bring with them
telescopes, looking through which it might at once clearly be seen that an
eclipse of the sun was caused merely by the moon's passing over its face,
the more intelligent members of the community would at once come to the
conclusion that the insect was not the cause of eclipses, would cease to
regard it as a god, and might even kill it; the more stupid and immobile
section of the community might refuse to look through the telescope, or
looking might refuse to see that it was the moon which caused the eclipse,
and their deep-seated reverence for the insect, which was the growth of
ages, would lead them to regard as impious those individuals who denied its
godhead, and might even lead to the physical destruction of the first
unbelievers. The society, once so homogeneous and co-ordinated in all its
parts, would become at once a society rent by moral and social problems;
and endless suffering must arise to individuals in the attempt to co-
ordinate the ideals, manners, and institutions of the society to the new
conditions! There might be immense gain in many directions; lives
otherwise sacrificed would be spared, a higher and more satisfactory stage
of existence might be entered on; but the disco-ordination and struggle
would be inevitable until the society had established an equilibrium
between its knowledge, its material conditions, and its social, sexual, and
religious ideals and institutions.
An analogous condition, but of a far more complex kind, exists at the
present day in our own societies. Our material environment differs in
every respect from that of our grandparents, and bears little or no
resemblance to that of a few centuries ago. Here and there, even in our
civilised societies in remote agricultural districts, the old social
conditions may remain partly undisturbed; but throughout the bulk of our
societies the substitution of mechanical for hand-labour, the wide
diffusion of knowledge through the always increasing cheap printing-press;
the rapidly increasing gathering of human creatures into vast cities, where
not merely thousands but millions of individuals are collected together
under physical and mental conditions of life which invert every social
condition of the past; the increasingly rapid means of locomotion; the
increasing intercourse between distant races and lands, brought about by
rapid means of intercommunication, widening and changing in every direction
the human horizon--all these produce a society, so complex and so rapidly
altering, that social co-ordination between all its parts is impossible;
and social unrest, and the strife of ideals of faiths, of institutions, and
consequent human suffering is inevitable.
If the ancient guns and agricultural implements which our fathers taught us
to use are valueless in the hands of their descendants, if the samplers our
mothers worked and the stockings they knitted are become superfluous
through the action of the modern loom, yet more are their social
institutions, faiths, and manners of life become daily and increasingly
unfitted to our use; and friction and suffering inevitable, especially for
the most advanced and modified individuals in our societies. This
suffering, if we analyse it closely, rises from three causes.
Firstly, it is caused by the fact that mere excessive rapidity of change
tends always easily to become painful, by rupturing violently already
hardened habits and modes of thought, as a very rapidly growing tree
ruptures its bark and exudes its internal juices.
Secondly, it arises from the fact that individuals of the same human
society, not adapting themselves at the same rate to the new conditions, or
being exposed to them in different degrees, a wide and almost unparalleled
dissimilarity has today arisen between the different individuals composing
our societies; where, side by side with men and women who have rapidly
adapted or are so successfully seeking to adapt themselves to the new
conditions of knowledge and new conditions of life, that, were they to
reappear in future ages in more co-ordinated societies, they might perhaps
hardly appear wholly antiquated, are to be found men and women whose
social, religious, and moral ideals would not constitute them out of
harmony if returned to the primitive camps of the remote forbears of the
human race; while, between these extreme classes lies that large mass of
persons in an intermediate state of development. This diversity is bound
to cause friction and suffering in the interactions of the members of our
societies; more especially, as the individuals composing each type are not
sorted out into classes and families, but are found scattered through all
classes and grades in our societies. (One of the women holding the most
advanced and modern view of the relation of woman to life whom we have met
was the wife of a Northamptonshire shoemaker; herself engaged in making her
living by the sewing of the uppers of men's boots.) Persons bound by the
closest ties of blood or social contiguity and compelled to a continual
intercourse, are often those most widely dissevered in their amount of
adaptation to the new conditions of life; and the amount of social friction
and consequent human suffering arising from this fact is so subtle and
almost incalculable, that perhaps it is impossible adequately to portray it
in dry didactic language: it is only truly describable in the medium of
art, where actual concrete individuals are shown acting and reacting on
each other--as in the novel or the drama. We are like a company of chess-
men, not sorted out in kinds, pawns together, kings and queens together,
and knights and rooks together, but simply thrown at haphazard into a box,
and jumbled side by side. In the stationary societies, where all
individuals were permeated by the same political, religious, moral, and
social ideas; and where each class had its own hereditary and fixed
traditions of action and manners, this cause of friction and suffering had
of necessity no existence; individual differences and discord might be
occasioned by personal greeds, ambitions, and selfishnesses, but not by
conflicting conceptions of right and wrong, of the desirable and
undesirable, in all branches of human life. (Only those who have been
thrown into contact with a stationary and homogeneous society such as that
of primitive African tribes before coming in contact with Europeans; or
such as the up-country Boers of South Africa were twenty years ago, can
realise adequately how wholly free from moral and social problems and
social friction such a society can be. It is in studying such societies
that the truth is vividly forced on one, that the key to half, and more
than half, of the phenomena in our own social condition, can be found only
in our rapidly changing conditions necessitating equally rapid change in
our conceptions, ideals, and institutions.)
Thirdly, the unrest and suffering peculiar to our age is caused by conflict
going on within the individual himself. So intensely rapid is the change
which is taking place in our environment and knowledge that in the course
of a single life a man may pass through half a dozen phases of growth.
Born and reared in possession of certain ideas and manners of action, he or
she may, before middle life is reached, have had occasion repeatedly to
modify, enlarge, and alter, or completely throw aside those traditions.
Within the individuality itself of such persons, goes on, in an intensified
form, that very struggle, conflict, and disco-ordination which is going on
in society at large between its different members and sections; and
agonising moments must arise, when the individual, seeing the necessity for
adopting new courses of action, or for accepting new truths, or conforming
to new conditions, will yet be tortured by the hold of traditional
convictions; and the man or woman who attempts to adapt their life to the
new material conditions and to harmony with the new knowledge, is almost
bound at some time to rupture the continuity of their own psychological
existence.
It is these conditions which give rise to the fact so often noticed, that
the art of our age tends persistently to deal with subtle social problems,
religious, political, and sexual, to which the art of the past holds no
parallel; and it is so inevitably, because the artist who would obey the
artistic instinct to portray faithfully the world about him, must portray
that which lies at the core of its life. The "problem" play, novel, and
poem are as inevitable in this age, as it was inevitable that the artist of
the eleventh century should portray tournaments, physical battles, and
chivalry, because they were the dominant element in the life about him.
It is also inevitable that this suffering and conflict must make itself
felt in its acutest form in the person of the most advanced individual of
our societies. It is the swimmer who first leaps into the frozen stream
who is cut sharpest by the ice; those who follow him find it broken, and
the last find it gone. It is the man or woman who first treads down the
path which the bulk of humanity will ultimately follow, who must find
themselves at last in solitudes where the silence is deadly. The fact that
any course of human action leading to adjustment, leads also to immediate
suffering, by dividing the individual from the bulk of his fellows; is no
argument against it; that solitude and suffering is the crown of thorns
which marks the kingship of earth's Messiahs: it is the mark of the
leader.
Thus, social disco-ordination, and subjective conflict and suffering,
pervade the life of our age, making themselves felt in every division of
human life, religious, political, and domestic; and, if they are more
noticeable, and make themselves more keenly felt in the region of sex than
in any other, even the religious, it is because when we enter the region of
sex we touch, as it were, the spinal cord of human existence, its great
nerve centre, where sensation is most acute, and pain and pleasure most
keenly felt. It is not sex disco-ordination that is at the root of our
social unrest; it is the universal disco-ordination which affects even the
world of sex phenomena.
Also it is necessary to note that the line which divides the progressive
sections of our communities, seeking to co-ordinate themselves to the new
conditions of life, from the retrogressive, is not a line running
coincidentally with the line of sex. A George Sand and a Henrik Ibsen
belong more essentially to the same class in the order of modern
development, than either belongs to any class composed entirely of their
own sex. If we divide humanity into classes according to type, in each
division will be found the male with his complementary female. Side by
side with the old harlot at the street corner anxious to sell herself,
stands the old aboriginal male, whether covered or not with a veneer of
civilisation, eager and desiring to buy. Side by side with the parasitic
woman, seeking only increased pleasure and luxury from her relations with
man, stands the male seeking only pleasure and self-indulgence from his
relations with her. Side by side with the New Woman, anxious for labour
and seeking from man only such love and fellowship as she gives, stands the
New Man, anxious to possess her only on the terms she offers. If the
social movement, through which the most advanced women of our day are
attempting to bring themselves into co-ordination with the new conditions
of life, removes them immeasurably from certain types of the primitive
male; the same movement equally removes the new male from the old female.
The sexual tragedy of modern life lies, not in the fact that woman as such
is tending to differ fundamentally from man as such; but that, in the
unassorted confusion of our modern life, it is continually the modified
type of man or woman who is thrown into the closest personal relations with
the antiquated type of the opposite sex; that between father and daughter,
mother and son, brother and sister, husband and wife, may sometimes be
found to intervene not merely years, but even centuries of social
evolution.
It is not man as man who opposes the attempt of woman to readjust herself
to the new conditions of life: that opposition arises, perhaps more often,
from the retrogressive members of her own sex. And it is a fact which will
surprise no one who has studied the conditions of modern life; that among
the works of literature in all European languages, which most powerfully
advocate the entrance of woman into the new fields of labour, and which
most uncompromisingly demand for her the widest training and freedom of
action, and which most passionately seek for the breaking down of all
artificial lines which sever the woman from the man, many of the ablest and
most uncompromising are the works of males.
The New Man and Woman do not resemble two people, who, standing on a level
plain, set out on two roads, which diverging at different angles and
continued in straight lines, must continue to take them farther and farther
from each other the longer they proceed in them; rather, they resemble two
persons who start to climb a spur of the same mountain from opposite sides;
where, the higher they climb the nearer they come to each other, being
bound ultimately to meet at the top.
Even that opposition often made by males to the entrance of woman into the
new fields of labour, of which they at present hold the monopoly, is not
fundamentally sexual in its nature. The male who opposes the entrance of
woman into the trade or profession in which he holds more or less a
monopoly, would oppose with equal, and perhaps even greater bitterness, the
opening of its doors to numbers of his own sex who had before been
excluded, and who would limit his gains and share his privileges. It is
the primitive brute instinct to retain as much as possible for the ego,
irrespective of justice or humanity, which dominates all the lower moral
types of humanity, both male and female, which acts here. The lawyer or
physician who objects to the entrance of women to his highly fenced
professional enclosure, would probably object yet more strenuously if it
were proposed to throw down the barriers of restraint and monetary charges,
which would result in the flooding of his profession by other males: while
the mechanic, who resists the entrance of woman into his especial field, is
invariably found even more persistently to oppose any attempt at entrance
on the part of other males, when he finds it possible to do so.
This opposition of the smaller type of male, to the entrance of woman into
the callings hitherto apportioned to himself, is sometimes taken as
implying the impossibility of fellowship and affection existing between the
men and women employed in common labour, that the professional jealousy of
the man must necessitate his feeling a hatred and antagonism towards any
one who shares his fields of toil. But the most superficial study of human
life negates such a supposition. Among men, in spite of the occasional
existence of the petty professional jealousies and antagonism, we find,
viewing society as a whole, that common interests, and above all common
labours, are the most potent means of bringing them into close and friendly
relations; and, in fact, they seem generally essential for the formation of
the closest and most permanent human friendships. In every walk of human
life, whether trade, or profession, we find men associating by choice
mainly with, and entertaining often the profoundest and most permanent
friendships for, men engaged in their own callings. The inner circle of a
barrister's friendships almost always consists of his fellow-barristers;
the city man, who is free to select his society where he will, will be
oftenest found in company with his fellow-man of business; the medical
man's closest friendship is, in a large number of cases, for some man who
was once his fellow-student and has passed through the different stages of
his professional life with him; the friends and chosen companions of the
actor are commonly actors; of the savant, savants; of the farmer, farmers;
of the sailor, sailors. So generally is this the case that it would almost
attract attention and cause amusement were the boon companion of the sea
captain a leading politician, and the intimate friend of the clergyman an
actor, or the dearest friend of the farmer an astronomer. Kind seeks kind.
The majority of men by choice frequent clubs where those of their own
calling are found, and especially as life advances and men sink deeper into
their professional grooves, they are found to seek fellowship mainly among
their fellow-workers. That this should be so is inevitable; common
amusements may create a certain bond between the young, but the performance
of common labours, necessitating identical knowledge, identical habits, and
modes of thought, forms a far stronger bond, drawing men far more
powerfully towards social intercourse and personal friendship and affection
than the centrifugal force of professional jealousies can divide them.
That the same condition would prevail where women became fellow-workers
with men might be inferred on abstract grounds: but practical experience
confirms this. The actor oftenest marries the actress, the male musician
the female; the reception-room of the literary woman or female painter is
found continually frequented by men of her own calling; the woman-doctor
associates continually with and often marries one of her own confreres; and
as women in increasing numbers share the fields of labour with men, which
have hitherto been apportioned to them alone, the nature and strength of
the sympathy arising from common labours will be increasingly clear.
The sharing by men and women of the same labours, necessitating a common
culture and therefore common habits of thought and interests, would tend to
fill that painful hiatus which arises so continually in modern conjugal
life, dividing the man and woman as soon as the first sheen of physical
sexual attraction which glints only over the unknown begins to fade, and
from which springs so large a part of the tragedy of modern conjugal
relations. The primitive male might discuss with her his success in
hunting and her success in finding roots; as the primitive peasant may
discuss today with his wife the crops and cows in which both are equally
interested and which both understand; there is nothing in their order of
life to produce always increasingly divergent habits of thought and
interest.
In modern civilised life, in many sections, the lack of any common labour
and interests and the wide dissimilarity of the life led by the man and the
woman, tend continually to produce increasing divergence; so that, long
before middle life is reached, they are left without any bond of co-
cohesion but that of habit. The comradeship and continual stimulation,
rising from intercourse with those sharing our closest interests and
regarding life from the same standpoint, the man tends to seek in his club
and among his male companions, and the woman accepts solitude, or seeks
dissipations which tend yet farther to disrupt the common conjugal life. A
certain mental camaraderie and community of impersonal interests is
imperative in conjugal life in addition to a purely sexual relation, if the
union is to remain a living and always growing reality. It is more
especially because the sharing by woman of the labours of man will tend to
promote camaraderie and the existence of common, impersonal interests and
like habits of thought and life, that the entrance of women into the very
fields shared by men, and not into others peculiarly reserved for her, is
so desirable. (The reply once given by the wife of a leading barrister,
when reference was made to the fact that she and her husband were seldom
found in each other's society, throws a painful but true light on certain
aspects of modern life, against which the entire woman's movement of our
age is a rebellion. "My husband," she said, "is always increasingly
absorbed in his legal duties, of which I understand nothing, and which so
do not interest me. My children are all growing up and at school. I have
servants enough to attend to my house. When he comes home in the evening,
if I try to amuse him by telling him of the things I have been doing during
the day, of the bazaars I am working for, the shopping I have done, the
visits I have paid, he is bored. He is anxious to get away to his study,
his books, and his men friends, and I am left utterly alone. If it were
not for the society of women and other men with whom I have more in common,
I could not bear my life. When we first met as boy and girl, and fell in
love, we danced and rode together and seemed to have everything in common;
now we have nothing. I respect him and I believe he respects me, but that
is all!" It is, perhaps, only in close confidences between man and man and
woman and woman that this open sore, rising from the divergence in
training, habits of life, and occupation between men and women is spoken
of; but it lies as a tragic element at the core of millions of modern
conjugal relations, beneath the smooth superficial surface of our modern
life; breaking out to the surface only occasionally in the revelations of
our divorce courts.)
It is a gracious fact, to which every woman who has achieved success or
accomplished good work in any of the fields generally apportioned to men
will bear witness, whether that work be in the field of literature, of
science, or the organised professions, that the hands which have been most
eagerly stretched our to welcome her have been those of men; that the
voices which have most generously acclaimed her success have been those of
male fellow-workers in the fields into which she has entered.
There is no door at which the hand of woman has knocked for admission into
a new field of toil but there have been found on the other side the hands
of strong and generous men eager to turn it for her, almost before she
knocks.
To those of us who, at the beginning of a new century, stand with shaded
eyes, gazing into the future, striving to descry the outlines of the
shadowy figures which loom before us in the distance, nothing seems of so
gracious a promise, as the outline we seem to discern of a condition of
human life in which a closer union than the world has yet seen shall exist
between the man and the woman: where the Walhalla of our old Northern
ancestors shall find its realisation in a concrete reality, and the
Walkurie and her hero feast together at one board, in a brave fellowship.
Always in our dreams we hear the turn of the key that shall close the door
of the last brothel; the clink of the last coin that pays for the body and
soul of a woman; the falling of the last wall that encloses artificially
the activity of woman and divides her from man; always we picture the love
of the sexes, as, once a dull, slow, creeping worm; then a torpid, earthy
chrysalis; at last the full-winged insect, glorious in the sunshine of the
future.
Today, as we row hard against the stream of life, is it only a blindness in
our eyes, which have been too long strained, which makes us see, far up the
river where it fades into the distance, through all the mists that rise
from the river-banks, a clear, a golden light? Is it only a delusion of
the eyes which makes us grasp our oars more lightly and bend our backs
lower; though we know well that long before the boat reaches those
stretches, other hands than ours will man the oars and guide its helm? Is
it all a dream?
The ancient Chaldean seer had a vision of a Garden of Eden which lay in a
remote past. It was dreamed that man and woman once lived in joy and
fellowship, till woman ate of the tree of knowledge and gave to man to eat;
and that both were driven forth to wander, to toil in bitterness; because
they had eaten of the fruit.
We also have our dream of a Garden: but it lies in a distant future. We
dream that woman shall eat of the tree of knowledge together with man, and
that side by side and hand close to hand, through ages of much toil and
labour, they shall together raise about them an Eden nobler than any the
Chaldean dreamed of; an Eden created by their own labour and made beautiful
by their own fellowship.
In his apocalypse there was one who saw a new heaven and a new earth; we
see a new earth; but therein dwells love--the love of comrades and co-
workers.
It is because so wide and gracious to us are the possibilities of the
future; so impossible is a return to the past, so deadly is a passive
acquiescence in the present, that today we are found everywhere raising our
strange new cry--"Labour and the training that fits us for labour!"
Back to Full Books
|