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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 42329 ***
+
+David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+FACTS AND FICTIONS OF LIFE
+
+By Helen Hamilton Gardener
+
+Third Edition
+
+            "But something may be done, that we will not:
+            And sometimes we are devils to ourselves,
+            When we will tempt the frailty of our powers,
+            Presuming on their changeful potency."
+
+            --Shakespeare.
+
+BOSTON Arena Publishing Company Copley Square
+
+1895
+
+Copyright 1893
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+There are at least two sides to every question. Usually there are
+several times two sides; or at least there are several phases in which
+the question has a different aspect.
+
+I am led to state these seemingly unnecessary truisms because I have
+been confronted by hearers or readers who assumed, since I had presented
+a certain phase or manifestation of heredity in a given article
+or lecture, that I was intending to argue that a fixed rule of
+transmission would necessarily follow the line I had then and there
+drawn.
+
+Nothing could be farther from my idea of the workings of the law of
+heredity.
+
+Nothing could be more absurdly inadequate to the solution and
+comprehension of a great basic principle.
+
+Again; an auditor or critic remarks that "We must not forget that we,
+also, get our heredity from God;" which is much as if one were to say,
+in teaching the multiplication table, "Remember that three times three
+is nine except, only, the times when God makes it fifteen." So absolute
+a misconception of the very meaning of the word heredity could hardly be
+illustrated in any other way as in the idea of "getting it from God."
+
+Scientific terms and facts of this nature cannot be confounded with
+metaphysical and religious speculation without hopeless confusion as
+to ideas, and absolute worthlessness as to the results of the
+investigation.
+
+The very foundation principle of Evolution, itself, depends upon the
+persistence of the laws of hereditary traits, habits and conditions,
+modified and diversified by environment and by the introduction of other
+hereditary strains from other lines of ancestry.
+
+Of course, there are people who do not believe that Evolution evolves
+with any greater degree of regularity and persistence than is consistent
+with the idea of a Deity who is liable to change his plans to meet the
+prayers or plaints of aspiration or repentance of those who chance to
+beg or demand of him certain immunities from the workings of the laws of
+nature. But with this type of mentality--with this grade of intellectual
+grasp--it were fruitless to pause to argue. They must be left to an
+education and an evolution of a less emotional and imaginative cast
+before they will be able to take part intelligently in a scientific
+discussion even where the merest alphabet of the science is touched, as
+is the case in these essays. They must learn a method of thought which
+keeps inside of what is, or can be, known and demonstrated, and cease
+to vitiate the very basic premises by injecting into them what is merely
+hoped or prayed for. The two phases of thought are quite distinct and
+totally dissimilar in method.
+
+The essays here collected, which do not deal directly with heredity
+and its possibilities, have been included in the book because of the
+repeated calls for them upon the different magazines in which they
+appeared and because they are rightly classed among the facts and
+fictions of life with which we wish here to deal.
+
+That most of them touch chiefly the dark side of the topics discussed
+is due to the fact that they were one and all written for a purpose in
+which that method of handling seemed most effective. That there is a
+brighter side goes without saying; but when a physician is writing a
+lecture upon cholera or consumption he does not devote his time and
+space to pointing out the indubitable fact that many of us have not, and
+are not likely to contract, either one.
+
+In pointing out and commenting upon certain social and hereditary
+conditions and evils, which it is desirable to correct or to guard
+against, and which it is all-important we shall first recognize as
+existing and as in need of improvement, I have, it is true, dwelt
+chiefly upon the evil possibilities contained in these conditions. I am
+not, therefore, a pessimist. I do not fail to recognize the fact that
+both men and conditions are undoubtedly evolving into better and higher
+states than of old. If one may so express it, these essays are the
+expressions of a pessimistic optimist,--one who is pessimistic upon
+certain phases of the present for the present, and optimistic as to and
+for the future. Let me illustrate: The housewife who does not have the
+house cleaned because it stirs up a dust to do it, is in the position
+of those critics who insist that it is all wrong to call attention to
+abuses because abuses are not pleasant things to have held up to public
+gaze. Or like a physician who would say: "For heaven's sake don't remove
+that bandage from the broken skull to dress the wound or you will see
+something even uglier than this soiled and ill-arranged cloth. Trust to
+luck. Some people have recovered from even worse conditions than this
+without intelligent care and treatment. Let him do it."
+
+I have often been asked how and why I ever chanced to think or to write
+upon these topics. "How can a woman in your station and of your type
+know about them?" It is always difficult to say just how or why one mind
+_does_ and another does _not_ grasp any given thing.
+
+When I was a very young girl I heard a famous Judge read and discuss
+a series of papers which were then appearing in the Popular Science
+Monthly, and which were called "The Relations Of Women To Crime." I was
+the only person admitted to the Club, where the consideration of the
+papers took place, who was not mature in years and connected with one of
+the learned professions. I was admitted because I begged the privilege
+as the guest of the family of the Judge at whose house the Club met.
+More than any other one thing, perhaps, the thoughts and suggestions
+that came to me--a silent and unnoticed child--while listening to the
+discussions of those papers which hinted at the various possibilities of
+inherited criminal tendencies--hearing the lawyers comment upon it from
+the point of view furnished by their court-room experiences, and the
+medical men from their side of the topic, as practitioners upon those
+who had inherited mental or physical diseases, and the educators from
+their outlook and experience with children and youths who had not yet
+begun an open criminal course but who showed in their tendencies
+the need of intelligent training to modify or correct their faulty
+inheritance,--more than any other one thing, perhaps, this experience
+of my childhood led me into the study of anthropology and heredity. That
+other people have been interested in what I have written from time
+to time upon this subject, and that I was, for this reason, asked
+to present certain phases of it at the recent World's Congress of
+Representative Women, accounts for the publication of this book at this
+time. I presume it will be said that it is not "pleasant reading for the
+summer season." It is not intended for that purpose. It has been
+asked for by many teachers, college professors, students and medical
+practitioners, the latter of whom have shown extraordinary interest in
+its early issue and wide circulation, and for whose kind encouragement
+and aid I am glad to offer here renewed thanks.
+
+I had intended to elaborate and enlarge and republish in book form "Sex
+IN Brain," but since there have been hundreds of calls made for it and
+since I have not yet found the time to combine, verify and arrange
+the large amount of additional material which I have been steadily
+collecting through correspondence with leading Anthropologists and brain
+Anatomists in England, Scotland, Germany, France and the United States
+and other countries, ever since they received, with such cordial and
+kindly recognition, the within printed essay, which they have had
+translated into several languages, I have concluded to include it
+with these, leaving it as it was abridged and delivered before the
+International Council in Washington in 1888.
+
+Later on I hope to find time to arrange and verify and issue the new
+material on the subject. It has grown in confirmatory evidence as it has
+grown in bulk, with steady and assuring regularity.
+
+Helen Hamilton Gardener.
+
+
+
+
+THE FICTIONS OF FICTION
+
+I read--on a recent railway journey--a popular magazine. Its leading
+story was labeled as a "story for girls." In it the traditional
+gentleman of reduced fortunes continued to still further deplete the
+family-resources by speculation, and the three daughters who figure in
+most such stories went through the regular paces, so to speak.
+
+One taught music; one painted well and sold her bits of canvas for ten
+dollars each; but the third girl had no talent except that of a cheerful
+temperament and the ability to drape curtains and arrange furniture
+attractively. These girls talked over the fact, that they were now
+reduced to their last ten dollars and the pantry was empty, father ill,
+and mother--not counted. They joked a little, wept a few tears, and
+prayed devoutly. Then the talentless one received an invitation in the
+very nick of time to visit the richest lady in town (a cripple with a
+grand house). She went, she saw, and, of course, she conquered--earned
+money by giving artistic touches to the houses of all the rich people in
+town, and eight months later married the nephew of the opulent cripple.
+No more mention is made of the empty pantry, the sick father, and the
+two talented girls whose labor did not previously keep the wolf from
+the door. But it is only fair to suppose that the new husband was to
+be henceforth the head of the entire establishment--surely a warning to
+most young men contemplating matrimony under such trying circumstances.
+All is supposed to move on well, however, and every hapless girl who
+reads such a story, is led to believe that _she_ is the household fairy
+who will meet the prince and somehow (not stated) redeem her father's
+family from want and despair. For it is the object of such stories to
+convey the impression that everything is quite comfortable and settled
+after the wedding. The young girl who reads these stories looks out upon
+life through the absurd spectacle thus furnished her. She sees nothing
+as it is. Such little plans as she can make, are based upon wholly
+incorrect data. Her whole existence is unconsciously made to bend to the
+idea of matrimony as a means of salvation for herself and such persons
+as may be in any way objects of care to her.
+
+Indeed, what are commonly known as "safe stories for girls," are made up
+of just such rubbish, which if it were only rubbish, might be tolerated;
+but the harm all this sort of thing does can hardly be estimated. I
+do not now refer to the harm of a more vicious sort that is sometimes
+spoken of as the result of story reading. I am not considering the
+deliberately scheming nor the consciously self-sacrificing girl who
+struts her day on the stage and in fiction marries to save the farm or
+her father or any one else. I am thinking of the every-day girl, who
+is simply led to see life exactly as it is likely _not_ to be, and is
+therefore disarmed at the outset. She is filled with all sorts of
+dreamy ideas of rescue by prayer or by means of some suddenly
+developed--previously undreamed-of--rich relation or lover or, I had
+almost said--fairy. And why not? Literature used to bristle with these
+intangible aids to the helpless or stranded author. The name is changed
+now, it is true, but the fairy business goes bravely on at the old
+stand, and the young are fed with views of life, and of what they will
+be called upon to meet, which are none the less harmful and visionary
+because of the changed nomenclature.
+
+A gentleman of middle age said to me not long ago: "I grew up with the
+idea that people were like those I met in books. I went out into life
+with that belief. I measured myself by those standards, and I have spent
+much time in my later years re-adjusting myself to fit the facts. It
+placed me at a great disadvantage. I saw people and deeds as they were
+not--as they are never likely to be in this world--and I could not
+believe that my own case was not wholly exceptional. I began to look at
+myself as quite out of the ordinary. My experiences were such as belied
+my reading, and it was a very long time and after serious struggle,
+that I discovered that it was my false standards, derived from reading
+popular fiction, that had deceived me and that, after all, life had to
+be met upon very different lines from the ones laid down by the ordinary
+writers of fiction. I really believe I was unfitted for life as I found
+it, more by the fictions of fiction than by any other one influence."
+
+Another gentleman--a writer of renown--said to me: "We may not 'hold the
+mirror up to nature' as nature is. The critics will not have it. We must
+hold it up to what we are led to think nature _ought_ to be."
+
+Now that would be all very well, no doubt, if the picture were labeled
+to fit the facts. If it were distinctly understood by the reader that
+in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the outcome of real life would be
+wholly different, that the right man would not turn up, in the nick of
+time, to point out to the defenseless widow that there was a flaw in
+the deed; if the reader was warned that honest effort often precedes
+failure; that virtue and vice not only may, but do, walk hand in hand
+down many a life-long path and sometimes get the boundary lines quite
+obliterated between them; if he understood that in life the biggest
+scoundrel often wears the most benign countenance and does not go about
+with a leer and a scowl that labels him, all might be well.
+
+A prominent woman, an authority on social topics, who is also a writer,
+a short time ago announced to her audience of ladies who gave the
+smiling response of a thoughtless yes, that "no one ever committed a
+despicable act with the head erect and the chest well out." "A dishonest
+man, a criminal, a mean woman," she said, always carry themselves so and
+so!
+
+If that were true--if it bore only the relationship of probability to
+truth--courts of law to determine upon questions of guilt or innocence,
+would be quite unnecessary. A photograph and an anatomical expert would
+do the business. The doing of a wrong act would become impossible to a
+gymnast, and the graceful "bareback lady" in the circus would be farther
+removed from all meanness of soul than any other woman living.
+
+Yet some such idea--stated a little less absurdly--runs through fiction,
+the drama, and poetry.
+
+Ferdinand Ward or Carlyle Harris would figure in orthodox fiction with
+" furtive eyes," "a hunted look," and with very hard and repellant
+features, indeed; yet those who knew them well never discovered any such
+expressions. Jesse James would look like a ruffian and treat his old
+mother like a brute. But in life he was a mild, quiet, fair-appearing
+man who adored his mother, and was shot in the back (while tenderly
+wiping the dust from her picture) by a despicable wretch who was living
+upon his bounty at the time and accepted a bribe to murder him. Young
+girls do not need to be warned against "mother Frouchards." No girl of
+fair sense would require such warning; but the plausible, good-looking,
+and often nobly-acting man or woman who lapses from rectitude in
+one path while carefully treading the straight and narrow way in all
+earnestness and with honest intent in others are the ones for whom the
+fictions of fiction leave us unprepared.
+
+In short the people who do not exist--the villain who is consistently
+and invariably villainous, the woman who is an angel, the people who
+never make mistakes, or who are able and wise enough to rectify them
+nobly, and all the endless brood are familiar enough. We know all of
+them, and are prepared for them when we meet them--which we never do.
+But for the real people we are not prepared. For the exigencies of life
+that come; for the decisions and judgments we are called upon to make,
+the fictions of fiction have contributed to disarm us. We are hampered.
+There is no precedent. We feel ourselves imposed upon; we are face to
+face, so we believe--with a condition that no one ever met before. We
+are dazed; we wait for the orthodox denouement. It does not come. We
+pray. There is no angel visitant who cools our fevered brow with gentle
+wings and lulls our fears with promise of help from other than human
+agencies--which promises are straightway fulfilled, of course, in
+fiction. We sit down and wait but no rich relation dies and leaves us a
+legacy, nor does the prince appear and wed us. Nothing is orthodox, but
+we have lost much valuable time, and strength, and hope in waiting for
+it to be so. We have failed to adjust ourselves to life as it is. We do
+not measure ourselves nor others by standards that have a par value. We
+are discouraged and we are at sea.
+
+A short time ago I read a story of the late war. The burden of it was
+that, if a soldier had been brave and loyal, he could also be depended
+upon to be honest. I happened to read the story while under the same
+roof with an old soldier who was at that time a judge on the bench. He
+had served faithfully while in the army; he was brave and he, no doubt,
+deserved the honorable discharge he received, and yet while he sat on
+the bench, he applied for a pension on the ground of incurable
+disease "contracted in active service." While those papers were being
+investigated and one doctor was examining him for his pension, he also
+applied and was examined for life insurance as a perfectly sound man and
+healthy risk, _and he got both_.
+
+The fact is, human nature is very much mixed. Good and bad is
+not divided by classes but is pretty well distributed in the same
+individual. Weakness and strength, wisdom and ignorance, impulse and
+reason, play their part in the same life with all the other attributes,
+passions, and conditions, and the literature which makes any individual
+the personification of good or of evil leads astray its confiding
+readers. Woman has been represented in literature as emotion culminating
+in self-sacrifice and matrimony. That was all. And even unto this day
+many persons can conceive of her in no other light. The idea has always
+been productive of infinite misery to woman whose whole book of life was
+read by these pages only, as well as to man who had carefully to spell
+out the other pages in the characters of wife or daughter when it was
+too late for him to learn new lessons, or to develop a taste for an
+unknown language.
+
+Man has been known as pure reason touched with chivalry and devotion,
+or else as a dangerous animal who preys upon his kind. There may be--IN
+some other life or world--representatives of both of these classes,
+but they are not the men with whom we live, and, therefore, whose
+acquaintance it is desirable we should make as early as possible.
+
+That a large family is a crown of glory to the parents and an
+inestimable boon to the state, is an idea running through literature. Is
+it a fact or is it one of the fictions of fiction which it were well to
+stimulate and galvanize into life less persistently? What is the answer
+from reform schools and penal institutions, filled by ignorance and
+passion held in bondage by poverty; from cemeteries where mothers and
+babies of the poor and ill-nurtured are strewn like leaves; from,
+the homes of the educated and well to do where small families are the
+rule--large ones the deplored exception? What is the logical reply
+in countries whose sociological students sigh over the struggle for
+existence and a scarcity of supplies; "over population" and desperate
+emigration? Misery and vice bearing strict proportion to density of
+population and poverty, surely offer a hint that at least one of the
+fictions of fiction has gone far to do a serious injury to man.
+
+But the fiction of fictions which has done more real harm to the human
+race than any other, perhaps, is the one which dominates it--the idea
+that woman was created for the benefit and pleasure of man, while man
+exists for and because of himself.
+
+Fiction has utilized even her hours of leisure and amusement to sap the
+self-respect of womanhood while it helped very greatly to brutalize and
+lower man by keeping--in this insidious form--the thought ever before
+him that woman is a function only and not a person, and that even in
+this limited sphere she is and should be proud to be man's subject. "He
+for God only, she for God in him."
+
+It is true that since the advent of women writers fiction has shown
+a tendency to modify, to a limited extent, this previously universal
+dictum, but the thought still dominates literature greatly to the
+detriment of morals and of the dignity of both men and women.
+
+"The woman who has no history is the woman to be envied," says
+literature--and yet people do not envy her any more than they do the man
+of like inconspicuous position. No one wishes that she might go down to
+history, if one may so express it, as history less. No one points with
+pride to Jane Smith as his illustrious ancestor any more than if Jane
+had chanced to be John. To have been a Mary Somerville, or an Elizabeth
+Barrett Browning, or a George Eliot, most historyless women would be
+willing to change places even now, and as for "those who come after,"
+can there be a question as to which would give more pride or pleasure
+to man or woman, to say--"I am the son, or the brother, or the niece of
+Mrs. Browning," or to say, "Jane Smith, of Amityville, is my most famous
+relative?"
+
+I have my suspicions that even * Mr. Fitzgerald would waver in favor of
+Elizabeth in case both women were his cousins. In public, at least, he
+would mention Jane less frequently and with less of a touch of pride.
+Personally he might like her quite as well. That is aside from the
+question. I have no doubt that he might like John Smith as well as
+Shakespeare, personally, too, and John may have led a happier life than
+William, but is a man with no history to be envied for that reason? The
+application is obvious.
+
+One of the most insidious fictions of fiction, which it seems to me
+is harmful, is the theory that the good are so because they resist
+temptation, while the bad are vicious because they yield easily--make a
+poor fight.
+
+Leaving out heredity and its tremendous power, it is likely that you
+would have yielded under as strong pressure as it took to carry your
+neighbor down. I say as strong pressure--not the _same_ pressure--for
+your tastes not being the same, your temptations will take different
+forms. **
+
+     * Fitzgerald "thanked God" when Mrs. Browning died. See
+     reply by Robert Browning in Athenaeum.
+
+     ** "Our lives progress on the lines of least resistance."
+         --Van Dbr Waukr, M. D.
+
+If you had been born of similar parents and on Cherry Hill; if you had
+been one of a family of ten; if you had been stunted in mind and in body
+by want of nourishment; if you had been given little or no education;
+if you had helped to get bread for the family almost from the time you
+could remember; your record in the police court would not differ very
+greatly from that of those about you. In nine cases out of ten you would
+be where you sent that convict last year. Your pretty daughter would be
+the associate of toughs. She might be pure--in the sense in which the
+word is applied to women--but she would have a mind muddy and foul with
+the murk and odors of a life fit only for swine. She would marry a
+brute who honestly believes that so soon as the words of a priest or a
+magistrate are said over them, she belongs to him to abuse if he sees
+fit, to impose upon, lie to, or to let down into the valley of death
+for his pleasure whenever he sees fit, and quite without regard to her
+opinions or desires in the matter. She would be an old and broken woman
+at thirty, ugly, misshapen, and hopeless, with hungry-faced children
+about her, whose next meal would be a piece of bread, whose next word
+would be too foul to repeat, whose next act would disgrace a wolf.
+
+In turn they would perpetuate their kind in much the same fashion, and
+some of your grandchildren would be in the poor-house, some in
+prison, some in houses of ill-repute, and perchance some doing honest
+work--sweeping the streets or making shirts for forty cents a dozen for
+the patrons of a literature that goes on promoting the theory that the
+chief duty of the poor is to irresponsibly bring more children into the
+world--to work for them as cheaply as possible. To the end that they may
+restrict their own families to smaller limits and--by means of cheaper
+labor caused largely by over population from below--clothe their loved
+ones in purple and build untaxed temples of worship, where poverty
+and crime is taught to believe in that other fiction of fictions--the
+"providence" that places us where we deserve to be and where a loving
+God wishes us to be content.
+
+Indeed, this supernatural finger in literature has gone farther,
+perhaps, to place and keep fiction where it is, as a misleading picture
+of life and reality, than has any other influence. It has dominated
+talent and either starved or broken the pen of genius. "Oh, if I might
+be allowed to draw a man as he is!" exclaims Thackeray, as he leaves the
+office of his publisher, with downcast eyes and bowed head. He goes home
+and "cuts out most of his facts," and returns the manuscript which is
+acceptable now, because it is _not_ true to life!
+
+Because it is now fiction based upon other fiction and has eliminated
+from it the elements of probability which might have been educative or
+stimulating or prophetic. Now, Thackeray was not a man who would have
+mistaken preachments for novels if he had been left to his own judgment;
+neither would he have painted vice with a hand that made it attractive,
+but he chafed under the dictum that he must not hold the mirror up to
+the face of nature, but must adjust it carefully so as to reflect a
+steel engraving of a water color from a copy of the "old masters."
+
+It might be well if silver dollars grew on trees and if each person
+could step out and gather them at his pleasure; but since they do
+not, what good purpose could it serve if fiction were to iterate and
+reiterate that such is the case, until people believed that it was their
+trees which were at fault and not their fiction?
+
+It might be a good idea, too, if babies were born with a knowledge of
+Latin and Mathematics, but to convince young people that such is the
+case and that they are pitiful exceptions to a general rule, is to place
+them at a humiliating disadvantage from the outset.
+
+It is one of the most firmly rooted of these fictions of fiction, that
+such tales as I have mentioned above are "good reading--safe, clean
+literature" for girls. Nothing could be farther from the facts. Indeed,
+the outcry about girls not being allowed to read this or that, because
+it deals with some topic "unfit" for the girls' ears, is another fiction
+of fiction which robs the girl of her most important armor--the armor of
+truth and the ability to adjust it to life.
+
+A famous man once said in my presence--"The theory that to keep a girl
+pure you must keep her ignorant of life--of real life--is based upon
+a belief degrading to her and false as to facts. Some people appear to
+believe that if they keep girls entirely ignorant of all truth, they
+will necessarily become devotees of truth, and if you could succeed in
+finding a girl who is a perfect idiot, you would find one who is also a
+perfect angel."
+
+"We are a variegated lot at best and worst," said a lady to me the other
+day, when discussing the character of a man who is in the public eye, "I
+know a different side of his character. The side I know I like. The side
+the public knows is so different." But in fiction he would be all one
+way. He would be a scamp and know it, or he would be a saint--and know
+that too. The fact is he is neither; and we _are_ a variegated set at
+best and worst. Why not out with it in fiction and be armed and equipped
+for character and life as it is?
+
+There is a school of critics who will say this is not the province of
+fiction. Fiction is to entertain, not to instruct. With this I do not
+agree--only in part. But accepting the standard for the moment, I am
+sure that a picture of life as it is, is far more entertaining than is
+that shadowy and vague photograph of ghosts taken by moonlight, which
+"safe stories for the young" generally present.
+
+But to enumerate the fictions of fiction would be to undertake an
+arduous task--to comment upon them all would be impossible.
+
+How much remorse--how many heartbreaks--have been caused by the one
+of these which may be indicated briefly in a sentence thus--"Stolen
+pleasures are always the sweetest."
+
+"She sullied _his_ honor," "He avenged his sullied honor," and all the
+brood of ideas that follows in this line have built up theories and
+caused more useless bloodshed and sorrow than most others. No wife
+can stain the honor of her husband. He, only, can do that, and it is
+interesting to note the fact that he who struts through fiction with a
+broken heart and a drawn sword "avenging" said honor (in the sense
+in which the word is used), seldom had any to avenge, having quite
+effectively divested himself of it before his wife had the chance.
+
+"She begged him to make an honest woman of her." What fiction of fiction
+(and, alas, of law) could be more degrading to womanhood--and hence
+to humanity--than the thought here presented? The whole chain of ideas
+linked here is vicious and vicious only. Why sustain the fiction that a
+woman can be elevated by making her the permanent victim of one who has
+already abused her confidence, and now holds himself--because of his own
+perfidy--as in a position to confer honor upon his victim? He who is not
+possessed of honor cannot confer it upon another. "The purity of family
+life" is another fiction of fiction which never did and never can exist,
+while based upon a double standard of morals. That there ever was or
+ever will be a "union of souls" in a family where a double standard
+holds sway, or that women are truthful or frank with men upon whom they
+are dependent, are fictions which it were time to face and controvert
+with facts. Dependence and frankness never co-existed in this world in
+an adult brain--whether it were the dependence of the serf or of the
+wife or daughter, the result is ever the same. The elements of character
+which tend to self-respect and hence to open and truthful natures, are
+not possible in a dependent--or in a social or political inferior. Do
+the peasants tell the lord exactly what they think of him, or do they
+tell him what they know he wishes them to think?
+
+Did the black men, while yet slaves, give to the master their own
+unbiased opinion of the institution of slavery? Not with any degree of
+frequency. The application is obvious.
+
+Another of the fictions of fiction upon which the vicious build, and
+which has disarmed thousands before the battle, is the insistency with
+which the idea is presented that a man (or woman) who is honestly and
+truly and conscientiously religious, is therefore necessarily moral or
+honorable; that he is a hypocrite in his religion if he is a knave in
+his life. Observation and history and logic are all against the theory.
+Some of the most exaltedly religious men have been the most wholly
+immoral. It was honest religion that burned Servetus and Bruno. They
+were not hypocrites who hunted witches. It is not hypocrisy that draws
+its skirts aside from a "fallen" sister, and immorally marries her
+companion in illicit love to purity and innocence. Do you know any
+religious father (or many mothers) in this world who would refuse to
+allow their son, whom they know to be of bad character, to marry a girl
+who is as pure and spotless and suspicion-less as a flower? "She will
+reform him," they say. "It will be good for him to marry such a girl."
+And how will it be for her? Does the religious man or woman not take
+this view of morals? Has right and wrong, sex? Is honor and truthfulness
+toward others limited in application? Have you a right to deceive
+certain people for the pleasure or benefit of other people? If so where
+is the boundary line? Would the girl marry you or your son if she knew
+the exact truth--if she were to see with her own and not with your
+eyes--_all_ of your life? Would you be willing to take her with you, or
+for her to go unknown to you, through all the experiences of your past
+and present? No? Would you be willing to marry her if she had exactly
+your record? No? You truly believe then that she is worthy of less than
+you are? Honor does not demand as much of you for her as it does of her
+for you? You would think she had a right--you would not resent it if
+her life had been exactly what yours was and is, and if she had deceived
+you? Is that which is coarse or low for women not so for men? Why is
+it that men will not submit to, if it comes from women, that which they
+impose upon women whom they "adore" and "truly respect?"
+
+Would women accept this sort of respect and adoration if they were not
+dependents? Does literature throw a true or a fictitious light on such
+questions as these?
+
+To whose advantage is it to sustain such fictitious standard of morals,
+of justice, of love, of right, of manliness, of honor, of womanly
+dignity and worth? To whose advantage is it to teach by all the arts of
+fiction that contentment with one's lot--whatever the lot may be--is a
+virtue? Yet it is one of the fictions of fiction that the contented man
+or woman is the admirable person. All progress proves the contrary. To
+whose advantage is it to insist that virtue is always rewarded--vice
+punished? We know it is not true. Is it not bad enough to have been
+virtuous and still have failed, without having also the stigma which
+this failure implies under such a code? We all know that vicious success
+is common--that often vice and success are partners for life and that
+in death they are not divided; that the wicked flourish like a green
+bay-tree--why blink it in fiction? Why add suspicion to failure
+and misfortune, and gloss success with the added glory that it is
+necessarily the result of virtue? To those who know how false the theory
+is, it is a bad lesson--to those who do not know it, it is a disarmament
+against imposition.
+
+Some of the fictions of fiction have their droll side in their nâive
+contradictions of each other. These examples occur to me:
+
+"Women are timid and secretive." "They can't keep a secret." "They are
+the custodians of virtue." "They are the 'frailer' sex." "Frailty, thy
+name is woman." "With the passionate purity of woman."
+
+"Abstract justice is an attribute of the masculine mind." "Man's
+inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn."
+
+"No class was ever able to be just to--to do justly by another
+class--hence the need of popular representation." "Women should take no
+part in politics."
+
+"Women are harder upon women than men are." "He disgraced his honored
+name by actually marrying his paramour."
+
+"We are happy if we are good."
+
+"He was one of the best and therefore one of the saddest of men."
+
+But why multiply examples. Many--and different ones--will occur to
+every thinking mind, while illustrations of the particular fictions of
+fiction, which have gone farthest to cripple you or your neighbor, will
+present themselves without more suggestions.
+
+
+
+
+A DAY IN COURT
+
+
+
+
+I. CRIMINAL COURT.
+
+To those accustomed to the atmosphere and tone of a court room, it is
+doubtful if its message is impressive. To one who spends a day in
+a criminal court for the first time after reaching an age of
+thoughtfulness, it is more than impressive; it is a revelation not
+easily forgotten. The message conveyed to such an observer arouses
+questions, and suggests thoughts which may be of interest to thousands
+to whom a criminal court room is merely a name. I went early. I was
+told by the officer at the door that it was the summing up of a homicide
+case. "Are you a witness?" he asked when I inquired if I was at liberty
+to enter. "Were you subpoenaed?"
+
+"No," I replied, "I simply wish to listen, if I may, to the court
+proceedings. I am told that I am at liberty to do so."
+
+He eyed me closely, but opened the door. Just as I was about to pass in
+he bent forward and asked quickly:
+
+"Friend of the prisoner?"
+
+"No."
+
+He said something to another officer and I was taken to an enclosed
+space (around which was a low railing) and given a chair. I afterward
+learned that it was in this place the witnesses were seated. He had
+evidently not believed what I said.
+
+There was a hum of quiet talk in the room, which was ill-ventilated and
+filled with men and boys and a few women. Of the latter there were but
+two who were not of the lower grades of life. But there were all grades
+of men and boys. The boys appeared to look upon it as a sort of matinee
+to which they had gained free admission.
+
+The trial was one of unusual interest. It had been going on for several
+days. The man on trial (who was twenty-four years of age and of a
+well-to-do laboring class,) had shot and killed his rival in the
+affections of a girl of fourteen. Some months previous, he had been cut
+in the face, and one eye destroyed, by the man he afterward killed,
+who was at the time of the killing out on bail for this offense. I had
+learned these points from the scraps of conversation outside the court
+room, and from the court officer. This was the last day of the trial.
+There was to be the summing up of the defense, the speech of the
+prosecutor, the charge of the judge, and the verdict of the jury.
+
+The prisoner sat near the jury box, pale and stolid looking. The
+spectators laughed and joked. Court officers and lawyers moved about
+and chaffed one another. There was nothing solemn, nothing dignified,
+nothing to suggest the awful fact that here was a man on trial for his
+life, who, if found guilty, was to be deliberately killed by the State
+after days of inquiry, even as his victim had been killed, in the heat
+of passion and jealousy, by him.
+
+The State was proposing to take this man's life to teach other men _not_
+to commit murder.
+
+"Hats off!"
+
+The door near the Judge's dais had been opened by an officer, who had
+shouted the command as a rotund and pleasant-faced gentleman, with
+decidedly Hibernian features, entered.
+
+He took his seat on the raised platform beneath a red canopy. The buzz
+of voices had ceased when the order to remove hats was given. It now
+began again in more subdued tones. In a few moments the prisoner's
+lawyer--one of the prominent men of the bar--began his review of
+the case. He pointed out the provocation, the jealousy, the previous
+assault--the results of which were the ghastly marks and the sightless
+eye of the face before them. He plead self defense and said over and
+over again, "If I had been tried as he was, if I had been disfigured for
+life, if I had had the girl I loved taken from me, I'd have killed the
+man who did it, _long_ ago! We can only wonder at this man's forbearance!"
+
+I think from a study of the faces that there was not a boy in the room
+who did not agree with that sentiment--and there were boys present who
+were not over thirteen years of age.
+
+The lawyer dwelt, too, upon the fact that the prosecutor would say this
+or that against his client. "He will try to befog this case. He will
+tell you this and he will try to make you think that; but every man on
+this jury knows full well that _he_ would have done what my client did
+under the same conditions." "The prosecutor told you the other day so
+and so. He lied and he knew it." The defender warmed to his work and
+shook his finger threateningly at the prosecutor. Every one in the room
+appeared to think it an excellent bit of acting and a thoroughly good
+joke. No one seemed to think it at all serious, and when he closed and
+the State's attorney arose to reply there was a smile and rustle of
+quiet satisfaction as if the audience had said:
+
+"Now the fur will fly. Look out! It is going to be pretty lively for he
+has to pay off several hard thrusts."
+
+There was a life at stake; but to all appearances no one was controlled
+by a trifle like that when so much more important a thing was risked
+also--the professional pride of two gentlemen of the bar. In the speech
+which followed, it did not dawn upon the State's attorney--if one may
+judge from his words--that he was "attorney for the people," and that
+the prisoner was one of "the people." It did not appear in his attitude
+if he realized that the State does not elect him to convict its
+citizens, but to see that they are properly protected and represented.
+
+Surely the State is not desirous of convicting its citizens of crime. It
+does not employ an attorney upon that theory; but is this not the theory
+upon which the prosecutor invariably conducts his cases? Does he not
+labor first of all to secure every scrap of evidence against the accused
+and to make light of or cover up anything in his favor? Is not the State
+quite as anxious that he--its representative--find citizens guiltless,
+if they are so, as that he convict them if they are offenders against
+the law? Is not the prosecutor offending against the law of the land
+as well as against that of ordinary humanity when he bends all the
+vast machinery of his office to collect evidence against and refuses to
+admit--tries to rule out--evidence in favor of one of "the people" whose
+employee he is?
+
+These questions came forcibly to my mind as I listened to the prosecutor
+in the trial for homicide. He not only presented the facts as they were,
+but he drew inferences, twisted meanings, asserted that the case had but
+one side; that the defendant was a dangerous animal to be at large;
+that his witnesses had all lied; that his lawyer was a notorious special
+pleader and had wilfully distorted every fact in the case. He waxed
+wroth and shook his fist in the face of his antagonist and appealed to
+every prejudice and sentiment of the jury which might be played upon
+to the disadvantage of the accused. He sat down mopping his face and
+flashing his eyes. The Judge gave his charge, which, to my mind, was
+clearly indicative of the fact that he, at least, felt that there were
+two very serious sides to the case. The audience which had so relished
+the two preceding speeches, found the Judge tame, and when the jury
+filed out, half of the audience went also. Most of them were laughing,
+highly amused by "the way the prosecutor gave it to him" as I heard
+one lad of seventeen say. The moment the Judge left the stand there was
+great chaffing amongst the lawyers, and much merry-making. The prisoner
+and his friends sat still. The prosecutor smilingly poked his late legal
+adversary under the ribs and asked in a tone perfectly audible to
+the prisoner, "Lied, did I? Well, I rather think I singed your bird a
+little, didn't I?" When he reached the door, he called back over his
+shoulder--making a motion of a pendant body--"Down goes McGinty!"
+Everyone laughed. That is to say, everyone except the white-faced
+prisoner and his mother. He turned a shade paler and she raised a
+handkerchief to her eyes. Several boys walked past him and stopped to
+examine him closely. One of them said, so that the prisoner could not
+fail to hear, "He done just right. I'd 'adone it long before, just like
+his lawyer said."
+
+"Me too. You bet," came from several other lads--all under twenty years
+of age.
+
+And still we waited for the jury to return. The prisoner grew restless
+and was taken away by an officer to the pen. There was great laughter
+and joking going on in the room. Several were eating luncheons
+abstracted from convenient pockets. I turned to an officer, and asked:
+
+"Do you not think all this is bad training for boys? It must show them
+very clearly that it is a mere game of chance between the lawyers with
+a life for stakes. The best player wins. They must lose all sense of the
+seriousness of crime to see it treated in this way."
+
+"Upon the other hand," said he, "they learn, if they stay about criminal
+courts much, that not one in ten who is brought here escapes conviction,
+and not one in ten who is once convicted, fails to be convicted and sent
+up over and over again. Once a criminal, always a criminal. If they get
+fetched here once they might as well throw up the sponge."
+
+"Is it so bad as that?" I asked. He nodded. "Is there not something
+wrong with the penal institutions then?" I queried.
+
+"How?"
+
+"You told me a while ago," I explained, "that almost all first crimes or
+convictions were of boys under seventeen years of age. Now you say that
+not one in ten brought here, accused, escapes conviction, and not one in
+ten of these fails to be convicted over and over again. Now it seems to
+me that a boy of that age ought not to be a hopeless case even if he has
+been guilty of one crime; yet practically he is convicted for life if
+found guilty of larceny, we will say. Is there not food for reflection
+in that?"
+
+"I do' know," he responded, "mebby. If anybody wanted to reflect. I
+guess most boys that hang around here don't spend none too much time
+reflectin' though--till _after_ they get sent up. They get more time for
+it then," he added, dryly.
+
+"Another thing that impresses me as strange," I went on, "is the
+apparent determination of the prosecutor to convict even where there is
+a very wide question as to the degree of guilt."
+
+"I don't see anything queer in that. He's human. He likes to beat the
+other lawyer. Why, did you know that the prosecutor you heard just now
+is cousin to a lord? His first cousin married Lord--------."
+
+This was said with a good deal of pride and a sort of proprietary
+interest in both the lord and the fortunate prosecutor. I failed
+to grasp just its connection with the question in point to which I
+returned.
+
+"But the public prosecutor is not, as I understand it, hired to convict
+but to represent the 'people,' one of whom is the accused. Now, is the
+State interested in convictions only--does it employ a man to see that
+its citizens are found guilty of crime, or is it to see that justice
+is done and the facts arrived at in the interest of _all_ the people,
+including the accused?"
+
+"I guess that is about the theory of the State," he replied, laughing as
+he started for the door, "but the practice of the prosecuting attorney
+is to convict every time if he can, and don't you forget it."
+
+I have not forgotten that nor several other things, more or less
+important to the public, since my day in a Criminal Court.
+
+It may be interesting to the reader to know that the jury in the case
+cited, disagreed. At a new trial the accused was acquitted on the
+grounds of self defense and the prosecutor no doubt felt that he was in
+very poor luck, indeed: "For," as I was told by a court officer, "he has
+lost his three last homicide cases and he's bound to convict the next
+time in spite of everything, or he won't be elected again. I wouldn't
+like to be the next fellow indicted for murder if he prosecutes the
+case, even if I was as innocent as a spring lamb," said he succinctly.
+
+Nor should I.
+
+But aside from this thought of the strangely anomalous attitude of the
+State's attorney; aside from the thought of the possible influence of
+such court room scenes upon the boys who flock there--who are largely of
+the class easily led into, and surrounded by, temptation; aside from
+the suggestions contained in the officer's statement--which I cannot but
+feel to be somewhat too sweeping, but none the less illustrative, that
+only one in ten brought before the Criminal Court escapes conviction,
+and only one in that ten fails to be reconvicted until it becomes
+practically a conviction for life to be once sent to a penal
+institution; aside from all this, there is much food for thought
+furnished by a day in a Criminal Court room. A study of the jury, and of
+the judge, is perhaps as productive of mental questions that reach far
+and mean much, as are those which I have briefly mentioned; for I am
+assured by those who are old in criminal court practice, that my day in
+court might be duplicated by a thousand days in a thousand courts and
+that in this day there were, alas, no unusual features. One suggestive
+feature was this. When the jury--an unusually intelligent looking body
+of men--was sworn for the next case, seven took the oath on the Bible
+and five refused to do so, simply affirming. This impressed me as a
+large proportion who declined to go through the ordinary form; but since
+it created no comment in the court room, I inferred that it was not
+sufficiently rare to attract attention, while only a few years ago, so
+I was told, it would have created a sensation. There appeared to be a
+growing feeling, too, against capital punishment. Quite a number of
+the talesmen were excused from serving on the jury on the ground of
+unalterable objection to this method of dealing with murderers. They
+would not hang a man, they said, no matter what his crime.
+
+"Do you see any relation between the refusal to take the old form of
+oath, and the growth of a sentiment or conscientious scruple against
+hanging as a method of punishment"? I inquired of the officer.
+
+"I do' know. Never thought of that. They're both a growin'; but I don't
+see as they've got anything to do with each other."
+
+But I thought possibly they had.
+
+
+
+
+II. IN THE POLICE COURT.
+
+The next week I concluded to visit two of the Police Courts. I reached
+court at nine o'clock, but it had been in session for half an hour or
+more then, and I was informed that "the best of it was over." I asked at
+what time it opened. The replies varied "Usually about this time." "Some
+where around nine o'clock as a rule." "Any time after seven," etc. I
+got no more definite replies than these, although I asked policemen,
+doorkeeper, court officer, and Justice. Of one Justice I asked, "What
+time do you close?"
+
+"Any time when the cases for the day are run through," he replied.
+"To-day I want to get off early and I think we can clear the calendar by
+10:30 this morning. There is very little beside excise cases to-day and
+they are simply held over with $100 bail to answer to a higher court for
+keeping their public houses open on Sunday. Monday morning hardly ever
+has much else in this court."
+
+I was seated on the "bench" beside the Judge. At this juncture a police
+officer stepped in front of the desk with his prisoner, and the Justice
+turned to him.
+
+"Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole tr--'n--g b tr'th--selp y'
+God. Kissthebook."
+
+The policeman had lifted the greasy volume, and with more regard for his
+health than for the form of oath, had carried it in the neighborhood of
+his left cheek and as quickly replaced it on the desk.
+
+"What is the charge?" inquired the Justice.
+
+"Open on Sunday," replied the officer succinctly.
+
+"See him selling anything?"
+
+"No. I asked for a drink an' he told me he was only lighting up for the
+night and wasn't sellin' nothing."
+
+"Anybody inside?"
+
+"Only him an' me."
+
+"You understand that you are entitled to counsel at every stage of this
+proceeding," said the Justice to the accused man. "What have you to say
+for yourself?"
+
+"Your Honor, I have a dye house, and a small saloon in the corner. I
+always light the gas at night in both and have it turned low. I had on
+these clothes. I was not dressed for work. I went in to light up and
+he followed me in, and arrested me and I have been in jail all night. I
+sold nothing."
+
+"Is that so, officer?" asked the Justice.
+
+"Yes, your Honor, it is so far as I know. I seen him in there lighting
+the gas, an' I went in an' asked for a drink, an' he said he wasn't
+selling an' I arrested him."
+
+"Give the record to the clerk. Discharged," said the Justice, and then
+turning to me he explained: "You see he had to arrest the man for his
+own protection. If a police officer goes into a saloon and is seen
+coming out, and doesn't make some sort of an arrest, he'll get into
+trouble; so, for his protection he had to arrest the man after he once
+went in, and I have to require that record, by the clerk, to show
+why, after he was brought before me, I discharged him. That is for my
+protection."
+
+"What is for the man's protection?" I asked. "He has been in jail all
+night. He has been dragged here as a criminal to-day, and he has a court
+record of arrest against him all because he lighted his own gas in his
+own house That seems a little hard, don't you think so?"
+
+The Judge smiled.
+
+"So it does, but he ought to have locked the door when he went in to
+light up. Perhaps he was afraid to go in a dark room and lock his door
+behind him before he struck a light, but that was his mistake and this
+is his punishment. Next!"
+
+Most of the cases were like this or not so favorable for the accused. In
+the latter instance they were held in bail to answer to a higher court.
+Two or three were accused of being what the officer called "plain
+drunks" and as many more of being "fighting drunks" or "concealed weapon
+drunks." In these cases the charge was made by the officer who had
+arrested them. There was no suggestion that "you are entitled to
+counsel," etc., and a fine of from "$10 or ten days" to "$100 or three
+months" or both was usually imposed.
+
+A pitiful sight was a woman, sick, and old, and hungry. "What is the
+charge against her, officer?" inquired the Justice.
+
+"Nothing, your Honor. She wants to be sent to the workhouse. She has no
+home, her feet are so swollen she can't work, and--"
+
+"Six months," said the Justice, and turned to me. "Now she will go
+to the workhouse, from there to the hospital, and from there to the
+dissecting table. Next."
+
+I shuddered, and the door closed on the poor wretch who, asking the city
+for a home, only, even if that home were among criminals, received a
+free pass to three of the public institutions sustained to receive such
+as she--at least so said the Justice to whom such cases were not rare
+enough to arouse the train of suggestions that came unbidden to me. He
+impressed me as a kind-hearted man, and one who tried to be a Justice in
+fact as well as in name. He told me that it was not particularly unusual
+for him to be called from his bed at midnight, go to court, light up,
+send for his clerk and hold a short session on one case of immediate
+importance--such as the commitment of a lunatic or the bailing of some
+important prisoner who declined to spend a night in jail while only a
+charge and not a conviction hung over him.
+
+"I have never committed anyone without seeing him personally," he
+explained. "Some judges do; but I never have. Only last night a man's
+brother and sister and two doctors tried to have me commit him as a
+lunatic, but I insisted on being taken to where he was. They begged me
+not to go in as he was dangerous; but I did, and one glance was all I
+needed. He was a maniac, but I would not take even such strong evidence
+as his relations and two doctors afforded without seeing him personally."
+
+"And some judges do, you say?" I inquired.
+
+"Oh yes. Next."
+
+"Next" had been waiting before the desk for some time. The officer
+went through the same form of oath. I did not see a policeman or court
+officer actually "kiss the book" during the two days which I spent in
+the Police Courts. Some witnesses did kiss it in fact and not only in
+theory. A loud resounding smack frequently prefaced the most patent
+perjury. Indeed in two cases after swearing to one set of lies and
+kissing the Bible in token of good faith, the accused changed their
+pleas from not guilty to guilty and accepted a sentence without trial.
+
+These facts did not appear to shake the confidence in the efficacy of
+such oaths and the onlookers in the court did not seem either surprised
+or shocked. Certainly the court officials were not, and yet the swearing
+went on. That it was a farce to the swearers who were quite willing to
+say they believed they would "go to hell" if they did not tell the
+truth and were equally willing to run the risk, looked to me like a very
+strong argument for a form of oath which should carry its punishment for
+perjury with it to be applied in a world more immediate and tangible.
+
+The afternoon found me in a more crowded Police Court. The Justice was
+rushing business. I stood outside the railing in front of which the
+accused were ranged. The charges were made by the police officer who
+faced the Judge. The accused stood almost directly behind the policemen
+something like four feet away. I was by the officer's side and so near
+as to touch his sleeve, and yet I can truly say that I was wholly unable
+to hear one-half of the charges made; most of them appeared to relate to
+intoxication, fighting, quarreling in the street, breaking windows and
+similar misdeeds.
+
+Some of the "cases" took less than a minute and the accused did not hear
+one word of the charge made. What he did hear in most cases and _all_ he
+could possibly hear was something like one of these:
+
+"Ten dollars or ten days." "Three months." "Ever been here before?"
+
+"No, your Honor."
+
+"Ten days."
+
+"Officer says you were quarreling in a hallway with this woman. Say for
+yourself?"
+
+"Well, your Honor, I was a little full and I got in the wrong hall and
+she tried to put me out and--"
+
+"Ten dollars."
+
+"Your Honor, I'll lose my place and I've got a wife and--" The officer
+led him away. Ten dollars meant ten days in prison to him and the
+loss of his situation. What it may have meant to his family did not
+transpire.
+
+To the next "case" which was of a similar nature, the fine meant the
+going down into a well-filled pocket, a laugh with the clerk and the
+police officer who took the proffered cigar and touched his hat to the
+object of his arrest, who, having slept off his "plain drunk," was in
+a rather merry mood. Many of the accused did not hear the charges made
+against them by the officer; in but few cases were they told that they
+had a right to counsel; almost all were fined and at least two-thirds
+of the fines meant imprisonment. A little more care was taken, a little
+more time spent if the face or clothing of the accused indicated that
+he was of the well-to-do or educated class. Indeed I left this court
+feeling that the inequality of the administration of justice as applied
+by the system of fines was carried to its farthest limit, and that it
+would be perfectly possible--easy indeed--to find a man (if he chanced
+to be poor and somewhat common looking) behind prison walls without his
+knowing even upon what charge he had been put there and without having
+made the slightest defense. If he were frightened, or ill, or unused to
+courts, and through uncertainty or slowness of speech, or not knowing
+what the various steps meant, had suddenly heard the Judge say "Ten
+dollars," and had realized that so far as he was concerned it might as
+well have been ten thousand; it was quite possible, I say, for such a
+man to find himself a convict before he knew or realized what it meant
+or with what he was charged.
+
+I wondered if all this was necessary, or if attention were called to
+it from the outside if it might not set people to thinking and if the
+thought might not result in action that would lead to better things.
+
+I wondered if a rapid picture of a boy of sixteen arrested for fighting,
+shot through this court into association with criminals for ten days,
+being found in their company afterward and sent by the criminal court
+to prison for three months for larceny, and afterward appearing and
+re-appearing as a long or short term criminal, would suggest to others
+what the idea suggested to me? I wondered, in short, if there were less
+machinery for the production and punishment of crime and more for its
+prevention, if life might not be made less of a battlefield and hospital
+for the poor or unfortunate. I wondered if the farce of oaths, the
+flippancy of trials, the passion of the prosecutor for conviction and
+all the train of evils growing out of these were necessary; and if they
+were not, I wondered if the vast non-court-attending public might not
+suggest a remedy if its attention were called to certain of the many
+suggestive features of our courts that presented themselves to me during
+my first two days as an observer of the legal machinery that grinds out
+our criminal population.
+
+
+
+
+THROWN IN WITH THE CITY'S DEAD
+
+
+I read that headline in a newspaper one morning. Then I asked myself:
+Why should the city's dead be "thrown in?"
+
+Where and how are they "thrown in?" Why are they _thrown_ in?
+
+Why, in a civilized land, should such an expression as that arouse no
+surprise--be taken as a matter of course? What is its full meaning? Are
+others as little informed upon the subject as I? Would the city's
+dead continue to be "thrown in" if the public stopped to think; if it
+understood the meaning of that single, obscure headline? Believing that
+the power of a free and fearless press is the greatest power for good
+that has yet been devised; and believing most sincerely, that wrongs
+grow greatest where silence is imposed or ignorance of the facts stands
+between the wrong doer, or the wrong deed, and enlightened public
+opinion, I decided to learn and to tell just the meaning--_all_ of the
+meaning--of those six sadly and shockingly suggestive words.
+
+Suppose you chanced to be very poor and to die in New York; or suppose,
+unknown to you, your mother, a stranger passing through the city, were
+to die suddenly. Suppose, in either case, no money were forthcoming to
+bury the body, would it be treated as well, with as humane and civilized
+consideration as if the question of money were not in the case? We are
+fond of talking about giving "tender Christian burial," and of showing
+horror and disgust for those who may wilfully observe other methods.
+We are fond of saying that death levels all distinctions. Let us see
+whether these are facts or fictions of life.
+
+The island where the "city's dead" are buried--that is, all the
+friendless and poor or unidentified, who are not cared for by some
+church or society--is a mere scrap of land, from almost any point of
+which you easily overlook it all, with its marshy border and desolate,
+unkempt surface. It contains, as the officer in charge told me, about
+seventy-nine acres at low tide. At high tide much of the border is
+submerged. Upon this scrap of land--about one mile long and less than
+half a mile wide at its _widest_ point--is concentrated so much of
+misery and human sorrow and anguish, that it is difficult to either
+grasp the idea one's self or convey it to others.
+
+There are three classes of dead sent here by the city. Those who are
+imbecile or insane--dead to thought or reason; those who are dead
+to society and hope--medium term criminals; and those whom want, and
+sorrow, and pain, and wrong can touch no more after the last indignity
+is stamped upon their dishonored clay. I will deal first with these
+happier ones who have reached the end of the journey which the other
+two classes sit waiting for. Or, perhaps some of them stand somewhat
+defiantly as they look on what they know is to be their own last home,
+and recognize the estimate placed upon them by civilized, Christian
+society.
+
+Upon this scrap of land there are already buried--or "thrown in"--over
+seventy thousand bodies. Stop and think what that means. It is a large
+city. We have but few larger in this country. Remember that this island
+is about one mile long and less than a half mile wide at the widest
+point. In places it is not much wider than Broadway.
+
+The spot on which those seventy thousand are "thrown in" is but a small
+part of this miniature island. This is laid off in plots with paths
+between. These sections are forty-five feet by fifteen, and are dug
+out seven feet deep. Again, stop and picture that. It looks like the
+beginning of a cellar for a small city house. But in that little cellar
+are buried one hundred and fifty bodies, packed three deep. Remembering
+the depth of a coffin, and remembering that a layer of earth is put on
+each, it is easy to estimate about how near the surface of the earth lie
+festering seventy thousand bodies. They are not in metallic cases, as
+may well be imagined; but I need only add that I could distinctly see
+the corpse through wide cracks in almost every rough board box, for you
+to understand that sickening odors and deadly gases are nowhere absent.
+
+But there is one thing more to add before this picture can be grasped.
+Three of these trenches are kept constantly open. This means that
+something like four hundred bodies, dead from three days to two weeks,
+lie in open pine boxes almost on the surface of the earth.
+
+You will say, "That is bad, but the island is far away and is for the
+dead only. They cannot injure each other." If that were true, a part of
+the ghastly horror would be removed, but, as I have said, the city
+sends two other classes of dead here. Two classes who are beyond hope,
+perhaps, but surely not beyond injury and a right to consideration by
+those who claim to be civilized.
+
+Standing near the "general" or Protestant trench--for while Christian
+society permits its poor and unknown to be buried in trenches three
+deep; while it forces its other poor and friendless to dig the trenches
+and "throw in" their brother unfortunates; while it condemns its
+imbeciles and lunatics to the sights, and sounds, and odors, and
+poisoned air and earth of this island, it cannot permit the Catholic and
+Protestant dead to lie in the same trenches!--standing near the general
+trench, in air too foul to describe, where five "short term men" were
+working to lower their brothers, the officer explained.
+
+"We have to keep three trenches open all the time, because the Catholics
+have to go in consecrated ground and they don't allow the 'generals' and
+Protestants in there. Then the other trench is for dissected bodies from
+hospitals and the like."
+
+"Are not many, indeed most of those, also, Catholics?" I asked.
+
+"Yes, I guess so; but they don't go in consecrated ground, because they
+aint whole." This with no sense of levity.
+
+"Are not many of the unknown likely to be Catholics, too?"
+
+"Yes, but when we find that out afterward, we dig them out if they were
+not suicides, and put them in the other trench. If they were suicides,
+of course, they have to stay with the generals. You see, we number each
+section; then we number each box, and begin at one end with number one
+and lay them right along, so a record is kept and you can dig any one
+out at any time."
+
+"Then this earth--if we may call it so--is constantly being dug into and
+opened up?" I queried.
+
+"I should think it would kill the men who work, and the insane and
+imbecile who must live here." "Well," he replied, smiling, "prisoners
+have to do what they are told to, whether it kills 'em or not, and I
+guess it don't hurt the idiots and lunatics none. They're past hurting.
+They're incurables. They never leave here."
+
+"I should think not," I replied. "And if by any chance they were not
+wholly incurable when they came, I should suppose it would not be long
+before they would be. Where does the drinking water come from?"
+
+"Drive wells, and--"
+
+"What!" I exclaimed, in spite of my determination when I went that I
+would show surprise at nothing.
+
+He looked at me in wonder.
+
+"Yes, it is easy to drive wells here. Get water easy."
+
+This time I remained silent. I did not wish to frighten away any farther
+confidences which he might feel like imparting.
+
+There is one road from end to end of the island. The houses for the male
+lunatics and imbeciles are on the highest point overlooking at all times
+the trenches and at all times within hearing of whatever goes on there.
+The odors are everywhere so that night and day, every one who is on the
+island breathes nothing else but this polluted air, except as a strong
+wind blows it, at times, from one direction over another. The women's
+quarters--much larger and better houses--are at the other end of the
+island. Not all of these overlook the trenches.
+
+Every fair day all these wretched creatures are taken out to walk.
+Where? Along this one road; back and forth, back and forth, beside the
+"dead trenches." To step aside is to walk on "graves" for about half
+the way. We sometime smile over the old joke that the Blue Laws allowed
+nothing more cheerful than a walk to the cemetery on Sunday. All days
+are Sundays to these wretches who depend on the "civilized" charity of
+our city. All laws are very, very blue; all walks lead through what can
+by only the wildest abandon of charity be called by so happy a name as
+a "cemetery," and even the air and water the city gives them is neither
+air nor water; it is pollution.
+
+A gentleman by my side watched the long procession of helpless creatures
+walk past. One man waved his hand to me and mumbled something and
+smiled--then he called back, "Wie geht's? Wie geht's?" and smiled again.
+Several of the wretched creatures laughed at him; but when I smiled and
+bowed, nearly half of the line of three hundred, turned and joined in
+his salutation. They filed past four times (the whole walk is so short),
+and they did not fail each time to recognize me and bid for recognition.
+If they know me as a stranger, I thought, they know enough to understand
+something of all this ghastliness. The line of women was a long, long
+line. I was told that in all there were fourteen hundred women, and
+nearly five hundred men on the island. The line of women broke now and
+then as some poor creature would run out on the grass and pluck a weed
+or flower, and hold it gayly up or hide it in her skirts. One waved
+her hand at us, and said in tones that indicated that she was trying to
+assume the voice and manner of a public speaker: "The Lord deserteth
+not His chosen!" I did not know whether in her poor brain, they or we
+represented the chosen who were not to be deserted. Another said gayly
+and in an assumed lisp and voice of a little girl (although she must
+have been past fifty), "There's papa, oh, papa, papa, papa! My papa!"
+This to the gentleman who stood beside me. He smiled and waved his hand
+to her. Then he said, between his teeth:
+
+"Civilized savages! To have them _here!_"
+
+"It don't hurt 'em," said the officer beside us. "They're incurables.
+They won't any of 'em remember what they saw for ten minutes. People
+don't understand crazy folks and idiots. They're the easiest cowed
+people in the world. Long as they know they're watched, they'll do
+whatever you tell them--this kind will. They're harmless."
+
+"But why have them here?" I insisted. "If they are to be poisoned, why
+not do it more quickly and--"
+
+"Poisoned!" he exclaimed, astonished. "Why, if one of the attendants
+was caught even striking one, he'd be dismissed quick. They get treated
+well. Only it is hard to keep attendants. We can't get 'em to stay here
+more than a month or so--just till they get paid. We have to go to the
+raw immigrants to get them even then. Nobody else will come."
+
+"Naturally," remarked the gentleman beside me.
+
+"Yes, it's kind of natural. This kind of folks are hard to work with,
+and the men attendants get only about seventeen to twenty dollars a
+month, and the women from ten to twelve dollars."
+
+"So the attendants of these helpless creatures are raw immigrants," I
+said; "who, perhaps, do not speak English, who are constantly changing.
+The water they get is from driven wells, the sights and exercise are
+obtained from and in and by the dead trenches. The air they breathe is
+like this, night and day, you say, and no one ever leaves alive when
+once sent here."
+
+"No one."
+
+"Who does the work--the digging, the burying, the handling of the dead,
+the carting, and the work for the insane?"
+
+"Medium term prisoners. All these are from one to six months men,"
+waving his hand over the men working below us in the horrible trench.
+
+"Do you think they leave here with an admiration for our system of
+caring for the city's dead--whether the death be social, mental, or
+physical? Do they go back with a desire to reform and become like those
+who devise and conduct this sort of thing?"
+
+He laughed.
+
+"Why, it's just a picnic for them to come up here. You can't hardly keep
+'em away with a club. Of course, the same ones don't work right _here_
+long; but when a fellow gets sent up to _any_ of these places, he comes
+over and over until he gets ambitious to go to Sing Sing and be higher
+toned."
+
+I thought of the same information given me at the Police and Criminal
+Courts a little while ago. I wondered if there might not be some flaw
+somewhere in the whole reformatory and punitive system. From the time
+a fourteen-year-old boy is taken up for breaking a window; sent to the
+reform school, where he is herded with older and worse boys, until he
+passes through the police court again,--let us say at sixteen, as a
+"ten-day drunk,"--to herd again in a windowless prison van, packed close
+with fifteen hardened criminals (as I saw a messenger boy of fifteen
+on my way to the island), and taken where for ten days he enjoys the
+society of the most abandoned; returns to town the companion of thieves;
+and goes the next time for three or six months for petit larceny, then
+for some graver crime, on and up. At last, when he has no more to learn
+or to teach, he is given a cell or room alone until the State relieves
+him of the necessity of following the course which has been mapped
+out for and steadily followed by so many. He knows when he is a three
+months' man where he is going at last. Has he not helped to dig the
+trenches for the men who looked so hard and vile to him when he broke
+that window and stood in the Police Court by their sides?
+
+Perhaps you will ask: "Why did he not take the warning, and follow a
+better course, turn the other way?"
+
+Perchance it might be asked on the other hand--since court, and morgue,
+and cemetery officials unite in the assertion that the above record is
+almost universal, and that our present methods not only do not reform,
+but actually prevent the reform of offenders--why this system is still
+followed by the State, and if the warning has not been ample and severe
+here, also.
+
+Are we to expect greater wisdom, more far-seeing judgment and a loftier
+aim in these unfortunates of society than is developed in those who
+control them?
+
+Since it is all such a dismal failure, why not plan a better way? Why
+not begin at the other end of the line to keep offenders apart? Why herd
+them--good, bad, and indifferent--together, in the stage of their career
+when there is hope for some, at least, to reform; and begin to separate
+them only when the last mile of the road is reached?
+
+Why, if the city _must_ bury its dead in trenches and under the
+conditions only half described above (because much of it is too
+sickening to present), why, if cremation or some better mode of burial
+is not possible--and certainly I think it is--why, at least, need the
+awful, the ghastly, the inhuman combination be made of burying together
+medium term criminals, imbeciles, lunatics, and thousands of corpses all
+on one mere scrap of land? If a seven-foot mass of corruption exhaling
+through the air and percolating through land and water must be devoted
+to the dead poor of a great city, why in the name of all that is
+civilized or humane, permit any living thing to be detained and poisoned
+on the same bit of earth?
+
+I saw a woman who had come to visit her mother who was one of these
+poor, insane creatures. "I can't afford to keep her at home," she said,
+"and then at times she gets 'snags' and acts so that people are afraid
+of her, so I had to let her come here. It is kind of awful, ain't it?"
+
+I thought it was "kind of awful," for more reasons than the poor woman
+could realize, for she was so used to foul air and knew so little of
+sanitary conditions that she was mercifully spared certain thoughts that
+seem to have escaped the authorities also.
+
+"It is her birthday and I brought her this," she said, showing me a
+colored cookie. "She will like it. We can visit here one day each month
+if we have friends."
+
+"How many bodies do you carry each week?" I asked of the captain of the
+city boat.
+
+"About fifty," he said. But later on both he and the official on the
+Island told me that there were six thousand buried here yearly, so
+it will be seen that his estimate per week was less than half what it
+should have been.
+
+I looked at the stack of pine boxes, the ends of which showed from
+beneath a tarpaulin on the deck.
+
+They were stacked five deep. There were seven wee ones, hardly larger
+than would be filled by a good-sized kitten.
+
+I said: "They are so _very_ small. I don't see how a baby was put
+inside."
+
+The man to whom I spoke--a deck hand who was a "ten-day-self-committed,"
+so the captain told me later--smiled a grim, sly smile and said:
+
+"I reckon you're allowin' fer trimmin's. This kind don't get piliers and
+satin linin's. It don't take much room for a baby with no trimmin's an'
+mighty little clothes."
+
+"Why are two of them dark wood and all the rest light?" I asked of the
+same man.
+
+"I reckon the folks of them two had a few cents to pay fergittin' their
+baby's box stained. It kind of looks nicer to them, and when they get a
+little more money, they'll come and get it dug up and put it in a grave
+by itself or some other place. It seems kind of awful to some folks to
+have their little baby put in amongst such a lot."
+
+He said it all quite simply, quite apologetically, as if I might think
+it rather unreasonable--this feeling that it was "kind of awful to think
+of the baby in amongst such a lot."
+
+At that time, I did not know that he was a prisoner. He showed me a
+number of things about the boxes and spoke of the open cracks and knot
+holes through which one could see what was inside. I declined to look
+after the first glance.
+
+"You don't mind it very much after you're used to it," he said. "Of
+course, _you_ would, but I mean _us_."
+
+I began to understand that he was a prisoner.
+
+"When you're a prisoner, you get used to a good deal," he said, later
+on, when they were unloading the bodies and some of the men looked white
+and sick. "They're new to it," he explained to me. "It makes them sick
+and scared; but it won't after a while."
+
+"Why are most of them here?" I asked. "Most of them look honest--and--"
+
+"Honest!" he exclaimed, with the first show he had made of rebellion or
+resentment. "Honest! Of course most of us are honest. It is liquor does
+it mostly. None of _us_ are thieves--yet!"
+
+I noticed the "us," but still evaded putting him in with the rest.
+
+"Why do they not let liquor alone, after such a hard lesson?"
+
+He laughed. He had a red, bloated, but not a bad face. He was an
+Englishman.
+
+"Some of us can't. Some don't want to, and some--some--it is about all
+some can get."
+
+Later on, I was told that this man was honest, a good worker, and that
+he was "self-committed to get the liquor out of him. He's been here
+before. When he gets out, he will be drunk before he gets three blocks
+away from the dock, and he'll be sent here again--or to the Island!"
+
+"And has this system gone on for a hundred years," I asked, "without
+finding some remedy?"
+
+"Well, since the women began to take a hand, some little has been done,"
+the officer replied. "They built a coffee and lodging house right near
+the landing, and take returning prisoners there, and give them a chance
+to work if they want to--in a broom factory they built. Some get a start
+that way and if they work and are honest, they get a letter saying so
+when they find places. It is only a drop in the bucket, but it helps a
+few."
+
+"It looks a little as though, if women were to take a hand in public,
+municipal, or governmental affairs, that reform, and not punishment,
+might be made the object of imprisonment if imprisonment became
+necessary, doesn't it?"
+
+He laughed.
+
+"Politics is no place for women. This they are doing is charity. That is
+all very well, but they got no business meddling with city government,
+and courts, and prisoners only _as_ charity."
+
+"Yet you say that, for a hundred years, those who look after the criminal
+population, thought very little of helping the men who came out, much
+less did they think of beginning at the other end and trying to keep
+them from going in. Women have been allowed to devise public charities,
+even, for only a few years past. They had no experience in building
+manufactories and conducting coffee and lodging houses; they have but
+little money of their own to put into such things and yet they have
+bethought them to start, in embryo, right here where the returning
+convict lands, what appears to have vast possibilities as you say. Now
+if this effort for the prevention of crime and want were at the other
+end of the line in municipal government, don't you think it might go
+even nearer the root of the matter and do more good?"
+
+"How would you like to be a ward politician and a heeler?" he inquired,
+wiping a smile away and looking at my gloves.
+
+"I should not like it at all."
+
+"Well, now, look at that! Of course no lady would, so--"
+
+"Do you think it possible that the world might get on fairly comfortably
+without having 'heelers' and 'ward politicians'--in the sense you
+mean--in municipal or state government? And that it might be better
+without such crime producers?" I added, as he began to laugh.
+
+"You women are always visionary. Never practical. You--"
+
+"I thought you said that the one and only really practical measure yet
+taken to reduce the criminal population as it returns from the Islands
+was invented and is conducted by women and--"
+
+"You can just make up your mind that in every family of six there'll
+be one hypocrite and one fool, either one of which is liable to be a
+criminal, too, and the State has got to take care of 'em somehow. But
+the prisons _are_ getting too full and the Almshouses and Insane Asylums
+_are_ growing very large. But there is the Two Brothers' Island. I've
+got to attend to my business now. Take the trip with me again some
+time."
+
+But it seems to me, I shall not need to go again, and that no judge
+or legislator would need to take the journey more than once, unless,
+perchance, he took it in the person of either the hypocrite or the fool
+of his family; which, let us hope, no judge and no legislator is in a
+position to do.
+
+
+
+
+AN IRRESPONSIBLE EDUCATED CLASS
+
+Education, using the word in its restricted scholastic sense, is always
+productive of restlessness and discontent, unless education, in its
+practical relations to life, furnishes an outlet and safety valve for
+the whetted and strengthened faculties. Mere mental gymnastics are
+unsatisfactory after the first flush of pleasurable excitement produced
+in the mind newly awakened to its own capabilities.
+
+There seems to be something within us which demands that our knowledge
+be in some way applied, and that the logic of thought find fruition in
+the logic of events. The moment the laborers of the country found time
+and opportunity to whet their minds, they also developed a vast and
+persistent unrest--a dissatisfaction with the order of things which gave
+to them the tools with which to carve a fuller, broader life, but had
+not yet furnished them the material upon which they might work.
+Their plane of thought was raised, their outlook was expanded, their
+possibilities multiplied; but the materials to work with remained the
+same. Their status and condition clashed with their new hopes and needs.
+This state of things produced what we call "labor troubles," with all
+their complications. Capital and labor had no contest until labor became
+(to a degree) educated.
+
+If--"in those good old days"--labor was not satisfied, it did not
+know how to make the fact very clearly understood. Capital smiled and
+patronized labor, and labor smiled and said it was quite content to work
+for so kind a master. It was safer to do that way--in those good old
+days. Then, too, so long as labor's wits had not been sharpened, so long
+as the laborer had not learned the relative values of things, perhaps he
+was content. Certainly he was far more so than he is to-day.
+
+It is well that, in his present state of angry unrest, he feels that he
+has but to organize and elect his own representatives to help enact just
+and repeal unjust laws as they bear upon his own immediate needs. But
+for this outlet to his feelings, and this hope for his own future, the
+labor troubles would be troubles indeed, and every additional book read
+by labor, every new schoolhouse built for labor, would but add flame to
+fire. But education brings with it--when taken into practical life--a
+certain sense of the responsibilities of life and of the relations of
+things.
+
+The laborer begins to argue, "Am not I partly responsible for my own
+condition? Is not my salvation in my own hands and in the hands of my
+fellows? We are units in our own government. We are in the majority
+numerically, and we are, therefore, at least partially responsible for
+not only what we do, but for that which is done to us."
+
+It is this feeling that sobers and steadies while it inspires the
+so-called working classes to-day.
+
+If, with their present enlightenment, ambitions, and needs, laboring
+men felt themselves wholly irresponsible for the present or future
+legislation, riots and lawlessness would be the inevitable result. A
+sense of responsibility alone makes educational development safe either
+in individuals or in classes.
+
+Witness the truth of this in the lives of the "gilded youths" of all
+countries whose sharpened wits are not steadied by, or applied in, any
+useful occupation. The results are disastrous to themselves and to those
+who fall under their sway or influence.
+
+Broadened ambitions, sharpened mental capacities, developed
+intellectuality, demand corresponding outlets and responsibilities.
+Lacking these, education is but an added danger. Especially is this true
+in a Republic where the theory of legal and political equality is held.
+At the present time there are but two wholly irresponsible classes in
+our republic--Indians and women.
+
+I place the Indians first because it has recently been decided in South
+Dakota that if an Indian (male) will "accept land in severalty,"
+he thereby becomes a sovereign, and is henceforth presumed to have
+sufficient interest in the welfare of his government and the stability
+of affairs in general to entitle him to be looked upon as a desirable
+citizen, capable of legislating and desiring to legislate wisely for the
+public weal.
+
+Since the government has not yet come to believe that any amount of land
+in severalty entitles women to so much confidence, and since the lack
+of responsibility develops in woman, as in man, a reckless and wanton
+spirit, we have the spectacle of this irresponsible element taking
+property laws into its own hands, and proudly destroying in public the
+belongings of other people where those belongings chanced to be in
+the form of beverages which these women disapproved of as articles of
+merchandise and use. And we have seen, farther, the grave spectacle
+of courts of law which will not or dare not enforce the law for their
+punishment.
+
+The due recognition of property rights is one of the earliest
+developments of personal, legal, and political responsibility. The negro
+notoriously disregarded these when his own human rights and individual
+responsibility were unrecognized. His desires were likely to be the
+measure of your loss.
+
+He is not the light-fingered being that he was. Mine and thine have a
+new meaning for him since--for the first time in his life--"thine" has
+any meaning to his one-time master.
+
+He is also beginning to look to his ballot for his safety and to himself
+to work out his future status, whereas one day his legs were his
+sole dependence when trickery or blandishment failed him. Woman
+still depends--where she wishes to compass an end--upon blandishment,
+deception, or a type of force which she believes will not or cannot be
+resented in the way it would unquestionably be resented if offered by
+men. A body of respectable men in a quiet community do not calmly walk
+into another man's business house, and without process of law
+destroy his property. Their sense of personal and legal and political
+responsibility is a most effective police force; and no matter how rabid
+a prohibitionist John Smith is, he does not collect a band of otherwise
+respectable men about him and proceed to destroy--with praise and prayer
+as an accompaniment--the belongings of his neighbor.
+
+No; he goes to a legal infant and a political nonexistent, and gets
+her to do it if it is to be done. He knows that to her the limit of
+responsibility is the verge of her desires on this question. He knows
+that she recognizes no right of property in a beverage she does not
+approve and a traffic she hopes to destroy. He knows that her sense
+of helplessness within the law--where she has no voice--gives her that
+reckless spirit of the political non-existent of all classes, which
+finds its revenge in lawlessness so long as it may not hope to have a
+voice in lawfulness. While woman was uneducated and wholly a dependent,
+there was little danger from her. She had too much at stake, in a purely
+physical sense. Then, too, she had not reasoned out the logical sequence
+between the pretension that a Republic of political equals before the
+law exists, while in fact one-half of that Republic has no political
+status whatever and no voice in the laws they obey. Uneducated and
+wholly dependent as woman was, this was safe enough. Educated, and to a
+degree financially independent, as she now is, she is a menace to social
+order so long as she stands without legal responsibility or political
+outlet for the expression of her opinions and desires in matters of
+government.
+
+So long as her only means of expression on the subject of the liquor
+traffic is a hatchet and prayer, she will use both, and we will have
+the shocking spectacle, witnessed a little over a year ago, of a court
+refusing to even fine those who committed as clear and wanton an outrage
+on property rights as often finds record.
+
+The steadying sense of personal and mental responsibility can develop
+only under the exercise of such responsibility. Man passed through
+the stage of regulative and prohibitive thought, and learned the true
+significance and value of Liberty only by its possession. By being
+responsible he learned the folly and danger of undue restrictive
+legislation, and the utter futility of the attempt to legislate taste,
+moral sense and lofty ideals (i. e. his personal taste and ideals) into
+his neighbors.
+
+He also learned the futility and danger of lawless raids upon those who
+were not of his way of thinking as to what they should eat or drink, or
+wherewithal they should be clothed. Woman will have to learn the same
+important lesson in the same way. She will abuse the personal rights and
+liberties of others who disagree with her (now that she is educated
+and has the power) unless she is steadied, given legal and political
+responsibility, and held to the same account for her acts as are her
+brothers. Being helpless within the law--having no means of expression
+nor of making her will and opinions felt, having no voice in municipal
+or governmental management--she has begun to find lawless outlet for
+her newly acquired talents and intellectual activity. She is playing
+the part of border "regulator" and lobbyist--two very dangerous and
+degrading rôles in any case but doubly so in the hands of an educated
+but unrepresented class.
+
+It has been argued, by men who are otherwise favorable to woman
+suffrage, that to grant the ballot to woman would be to yield up, upon
+the altar of fanaticism and narrow personal desires, much of the liberty
+for which man has fought and struggled. They argue that women do not
+stop to consider whether they have the right to interfere with what
+others do, but that they only ask whether they like the thing done.
+
+The argument goes further and asserts that women only want the ballot
+that they may restrict the liberty of other people, pass prohibitory,
+sumptuary, and religious laws; and that the ballot in the hands of
+woman means a return to a union of church and state, and the meddlesome,
+personal legislation of the type known to us as Blue Laws.
+
+It is no doubt true that there are many half-developed thinkers among
+women who demand the ballot, who desire political power for these petty
+reasons. It is also undoubtedly true that many of these would travel the
+same road trod by their fathers before them, and learn political wisdom
+slowly and only after a struggle with their own narrow ideas of liberty,
+which means their own liberty to restrict and regulate the liberty of
+other people.
+
+It may be readily admitted, I say, that woman will make some of the same
+mistakes, political, religious, and sociological, that have been made by
+men in the reach after a better way. But what has taught thoughtful men
+wisdom? What has broadened the conception of political liberty? What
+taught men the danger and folly of religious and restrictive (sumptuary)
+legislation? What but experience and responsibility?
+
+Nothing so steadies the hasty and narrow judgment as power, coupled with
+the recognition that responsibility for the use of that power is sure to
+be demanded.
+
+Many a man will advise, as secret lobbyist, what he would not do in open
+legislature. Many a man in private life asserts that "If I were judge
+or president," or what not, so and so should not be done. When the power
+and responsibility once rests upon him, his outlook is broadened, and he
+recognizes that he would endanger a far more sacred principle were he to
+adhere to his plan.
+
+This holds true with woman. With her newly acquired intellectual and
+financial power she is seeking an outlet for her capacities. She sees
+certain municipal and governmental ills. Having no direct power of
+expression, no legal, political status in a country which claims to have
+no political classes, she does what all disqualified, irresponsible,
+dissatisfied classes of men have done before her when deprived of equal
+opportunity with their fellows; she seeks by subterfuge (indirection)
+or lawlessness to compass that which she may not attempt lawfully and
+which, had she the steadying influence and discipline of responsibility
+and power, she would not do.
+
+Inexperience, coupled with irresponsibility and a lax sense of the
+rights of others, always did and always will produce tyrants.
+
+Unite this naturally produced and inevitable social and political
+condition and outlook with the developed mental capacities and
+consequent restless, undirected, and unabsorbed ambition of the women of
+to-day, and we have a dangerous lobby--working in secret by indirection
+and without open responsibility for their words, deed, or influence--to
+handle in our Republic.
+
+
+
+
+SEX IN BRAIN
+
+
+_Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in introducing the speaker said: "The
+first speaker of the evening is Helen Gardener, who is to give us an
+address on the Brain. You know the last stronghold of the enemy is
+scientific. Men have decided that we must not enter the colleges and
+study very hard; must not have the responsibility of government laid on
+our heads, because our brains weigh much less than the brains of men.
+Dr. Hammond, of New York, has published several very elaborate articles
+in the Popular Science Monthly to prove this fact. But Helen Gardener
+has spent about fourteen months in investigation, and has conferred with
+twenty able specialists upon the subject, and will give us to-night the
+result of her investigation. She will show to us that it is impossible
+to prove any of the positions that Dr. Hammond has maintained._"
+
+Read before the International Council of Women in Washington, 1888.
+
+
+Ladies and Gentlemen:--The political conditions of woman are very
+greatly influenced to-day by what is taught to her and about her
+by those two conservative moulders of public opinion--clergymen and
+physicians. Our law-makers have long since ceased to merely sneer at
+the simple claim of human rights by one-half of humanity, and for refuge
+they have flown to priest and practitioner, who do not fail them in this
+their hour of great tribulation. It is true that men, most of whom never
+enter a church, have grown somewhat ashamed to press the theological
+arguments against the equality of the sexes, and to these the medical
+argument has become an ever-present help in their time of trouble.
+
+In the early days woman was under the absolute sway of club and fist.
+Then came censer and gown, swinging hell in the perfumed depths of the
+one and hiding in the folds of the other, thumb-screw and fagot for the
+woman who dared to think. At last the theory of the primal curse upon
+her head has grown weaker. Mankind struggles to be less brutal and
+more just. Manly men are beginning to blush when they hear repeated
+the well-worn fable of the fall of man through woman's crime and
+her inferiority of position and opportunity, justified by priest
+and pleader, because of legends inherited from barbarians--mental
+deformities worthy of their parentage.
+
+When religious influence and dogma began to lose their terrors, legal
+enactments were slowly modified in woman's favor and hell went out
+of fashion. Then Conservatism, Ignorance, and Egotism, in dismay and
+terror, took counsel together and called in medical science, still in
+its infancy, to aid in staying the march of progress which is inevitable
+to civilization and so necessary to anything like a real Republic.
+Equality of opportunity began to be denied to woman, for the first
+time, upon natural and so-called scientific grounds. She was pronounced
+physically and mentally incapable, because of certain anatomical
+conditions, and she must be prevented--for her own good and that of the
+race _here_--from competition with her mental and physical superiors.
+
+It was no longer her soul, but her body, that needed saving from
+herself. Her thirst for knowledge the clergy declared had already damned
+the souls of a very large majority of mankind--in a hereafter known only
+to them. The same vicious tendency, the doctors echoed, will be the ruin
+of the physical bodies of the race in this world, as we are prepared
+to prove. The case began to look hopeless again. Opportunity must
+be denied, these doctors say, because capacity does not exist. Where
+capacity seems to exist, it is, it must be, at the expense of individual
+health and future maternal capabilities.
+
+As a person, she has no status with these consistent believers in "equal
+rights to all mankind." As a potential mother only, can she hope for
+consideration either by religious or medical theorist. This has been a
+difficult combination to meet. Few who cared to contest their verdict,
+possessed the bravery to fearlessly face the religious dictators, and
+fewer still had the anatomical and anthropological information to risk
+a fight on a field which assumed to be held by those who based all
+of their arguments upon scientific facts, collected by microscope and
+scales and reduced to unanswerable statistics.
+
+The priest, reinforced by the doctor, promised a long and bitter
+struggle, on new grounds, to those who fought for simple justice to
+the individual, aside from her sex relations; who wished for neither
+malediction nor mercy; those who claim only the right of a unit to
+enjoy the common heritage untrammeled by superstition and artificial
+difficulties. They do not ask to be helped--only not to be hindered.
+They had hailed science as their friend and ally; and behold,
+pseudo-science adopted theories, invented statistics, and published
+personal prejudices as demonstrated fact. All this has done a vast deal
+of harm to the cause of woman.
+
+Educators, theorists, and politicians readily accept the data and
+statistics of prominent physicians, and, in good faith, make them a
+basis of action, while the victims of their misinformation have been
+helpless. It is, therefore, very important to learn, if possible,
+just how far medical science and anthropology have really discovered
+demonstrable natural sex differences in the brains of men and women, and
+how far the usual theories advanced are gratuitous assumptions, founded
+upon legend and fed by mental habit and personal egotism.
+
+I began an investigation into this matter a little while ago by
+questioning the arguments and logic of the medical pseudo-scientists
+from their own basis of facts. I ended by questioning the facts
+themselves, upon the evidence furnished me by leading members of the
+profession, some of whom are known in this country and abroad as leaders
+in original investigation as brain students and anatomists. None of
+these gentlemen knew the aim or motive of my inquiries, and they gave
+me all the information to be had on this subject without bias and quite
+freely. The specialists and brain students to whom my questions were
+submitted, were of widely different religious beliefs, which beliefs,
+of course, colored their theories as well as their motives, either
+consciously or unconsciously.
+
+But the profession has reason to be proud of the ability of the most of
+these men, no less than of their sincerity and willingness to confess to
+ignorance of facts where proof was lacking. The abler the man the more
+willing was he to do this. One or two tried to explain, and, as it
+seemed to me, to force an agreement between scientific facts which they
+did possess, and their inherited belief in "revelation." Others, who did
+not themselves recognize it, performed the same mental gymnastics from
+mere force of habit, and gave a black eye to their facts in preserving
+a blind eye to their faith. But in the following results are to be found
+the opinions of eminent medical men, some of whom are Roman Catholic,
+some Protestant, and some of the negative systems of religion. So far as
+I know, not one is a believer in "Woman Suffrage," nor even in the more
+radical but less comprehensive measures for her development. Not one,
+who touched directly upon the subject, believed in sex equality in its
+entirety or had not personal prejudice and long-cherished sentiments
+opposed to it, if his reason approved. By some of them this was frankly
+stated, even while giving facts in her favor. Not more than one, so far
+as I know, is "agnostic" in religion or a believer in evolution in its
+entirety.
+
+I have mentioned these latter points, because I found in this line
+of investigation, as in all others, that a man's religious leanings
+inevitably color and modify all of his opinions, and govern his entire
+mental outlook. They even add bitterness to his "jalop" and fizz in his
+"seltzer". If he absolutely believe in the "Garden of Eden" story
+he deals with "Adam" as a creature after "God's own heart and in his
+image," and therefore capable and deserving of all opportunity
+and development for and because of himself, and to promote his own
+happiness. "Eve," of course, receives due attention as a physical,
+anatomical specimen, "with intuitions"--a mere bone or rib of
+contention, as it were, between man and man. The more orthodox the man
+the bonier the rib. The more literal and consistent his faith the less
+likely is he to deal with woman as an intellectual being, capable of
+and entitled to the same or as liberal, mental, social, and financial
+opportunities or rights as are universally conceded in this country to
+be the birthright of man, and quite beyond farther controversy in
+his case. Evidence in her favor which cannot be evaded, must be
+overwhelming, indeed, then, if an investigator starts out handicapped
+with the theory of "revelation" as a part of his mental equipment, and
+with the "sphere of woman" formulated for him by the ancient Hebrews.
+
+I went to the men whom the doctors themselves told me were the best
+authority to be found on the subject of brain anatomy and microscopy.
+One of these men, Dr. E. C. Spitzka, of New York, was referred to by
+physicians of all schools of practice as undoubtedly the best informed
+man in America, and second to none in the world, in this branch of the
+profession. They, one and all, told me that what he could not tell me
+himself on this subject, or could not tell me where to find, could not
+be of the slightest importance.
+
+I have been asked to tell you just what I started out to learn, and how
+far I succeeded. But before I do this it may not be out of place to tell
+you an anecdote of my experience in this undertaking: I went personally
+with my questions to about twenty of the leading physicians of New
+York. [I had them submitted in other ways to many more in this and other
+cities. I got written communications from the Old World as well as the
+New.] Nearly every one of these twenty, after very kindly telling me
+what he himself knew and what he believed on the subject, referred me
+to the same man as the final appeal; but not one of them was willing to
+introduce me to him. They would introduce me to anybody and everybody
+else, but they did not like to risk sending me to him. He was, they
+said, utterly impatient of ignorance, and might treat me with scant
+courtesy. He would very likely tell me flatly that he could not waste
+time on so trivial a matter--that I and everybody else ought to know all
+about "sex in brain."
+
+Now, this is a secret--I would not have it get out for a good deal. It
+took me a long while to get my courage up to go to that man without an
+introduction--a thing I did not do with any of the others. I finally,
+with fear and trembling, made up my mind to learn what he knew on this
+subject or perish in the attempt. So I took my life in my hands, put on
+my best gown--I had previously discovered that even brain anatomists are
+subject to the spell of good clothes--and went. I fully expected to be
+reduced to mere pulp before I left; but he listened quite patiently,
+asked me a few questions as to why I had come to him; told me to read
+him my questions; asked me sharply, "Who wrote those questions?" I said
+meekly, "I did." He looked at me critically, wrote something on a card,
+and dismissed me. I was uncertain whether, he had been so kind in his
+manner, because he considered me a harmless lunatic or not. Once in the
+street I read the card. I was to call again when he could give me more
+time.
+
+I went not once, but many times. I devoted some months to brain anatomy
+and anthropology. In his laboratory he had brains from those of a mouse
+to those of the largest whale on record. He showed me the peculiarities
+of brains as shown by microscope and scales. He looked up points in
+foreign journals to which I had not access. In short, he did all he
+could to aid me; and he said that no such investigation as I was trying
+to learn about had ever yet been made, although no fair record of the
+difference of sex in brain, of which we hear so much, could possibly
+be made without it. He was delightfully frank, earnest, and thoroughly
+honest. He knew--and, what is better, he was willing to tell--where
+knowledge stopped and guessing began; a point sadly confused, I found,
+by even prominent members of the profession. "I do not know," was a hard
+sentence to get from a doctor so long as he was under the impression
+that others of his profession would know. "I do not know; nobody knows,"
+came freely enough from the man who was sure of the boundaries of
+investigation, who recognized the vast difference between theories
+and proof. From him, and through him, I collected material that is of
+intense interest and importance to woman in this stage of the movement
+for her elevation.
+
+It is only right that I say here that I am of opinion that he does not
+himself believe in the equality of the sexes, but he is too thoroughly
+scientific to allow his hereditary bias to color his statements of facts
+on this or any subject. In the hands of a man who has arrived at that
+point of mental poise and dignity, our case is safe, no matter what his
+sentiments may be. Such men do not go to their emotions for premises
+when it comes to a statement of scientific facts. There are writers on
+this subject who do.
+
+As you all know, any statement calmly and persistently made is
+reasonably sure to be accepted as true, even by its victims. Frequency
+of iteration passes as proof. Even thoughtful men, after spending years
+of time in trying to explain why a thing is true, often end with the
+discovery that it is not true, after all. We are all familiar with the
+story of the wrangle of the philosophers as to why a vessel containing
+water weighed no more with a fish weighing a pound in it than it did
+after the fish was removed. After long and acrimonious debate over the
+principle of philosophy involved, some one bethought him to weigh it,
+and, of course, discovered that no unfamiliar principle was involved,
+since it was a simple misstatement as to facts.
+
+The assumptions of "divine rights" by kings and priests stood as
+unquestioned facts for centuries by those who were the victims of both.
+The "divine right" of men rests still on the same bare-faced fraud, and
+is simply the last of this interesting trinity to die, and it naturally
+dies hard, as its fellows did. If a charlatan loudly asserts that he can
+do a certain thing, no matter how unlikely that thing is, if he insists
+that he has done it often, he will find many believers who will spend
+much time in an attempt to explain how he does it, while only the few
+will think to question first if he does it.
+
+Upon this basis of calm assumption on the one side, and credulous
+acceptance on the other, has grown up a very general belief that there
+are great and well-defined natural anatomical differences between the
+brains of the sexes of the human race; that these differences are well
+known to the medical practitioner or anatomist, and that they plainly
+indicate inferiority of capacity in the female brain, which is
+structural, while, strangely enough, no one argues that this is the case
+in the lower animals. It therefore occurred to me to question--admitting
+that the microscope and scales really do show the differences to exist
+in adults--whether it would not be fair to assume, at least, that they
+are not natural and necessary sex differences, but that they are due to
+difference of opportunity and environment, and, under like conditions,
+would be produced between members of the same sex; that since this
+superiority of brain in the male sex is said to appear in the human
+race only, where alone, in all nature, superior opportunities and
+environments are held as a sex right and condition by the males, that
+the so-called "superiority of structure" is simply better development of
+the equally capable but restricted brain of the other sex.
+
+I proposed to test this by an appeal to the brains of infants. And my
+assumption although not new, appeared to be borne out by the accepted,
+though unproven theory, that the brains of the men and women are nearer
+alike the lower we go into the human scale. This assumption is clearly
+based upon the idea that where the mental opportunities of the men and
+women are nearer equal the physical results are also similar. Indeed,
+Topinard plainly states this fact in his Anthropology. He says: "The
+reason that the brain of woman is lighter than that of man is that she
+has less cerebral activity to exercise in her sphere of duty. In former
+times it was relatively larger in the department of Lozère, because then
+the woman and man mutually shared the burdens of the daily labor. The
+truth is that the weight of the brain increases with the use we make
+of it." Since women are not given diversified and stimulating mental
+employment, they can not be expected to show the results of such
+training on the brain itself.
+
+"Of the physiology of the brain comparatively little is known," says Dr.
+McDonald, author of "Criminology."
+
+I was started on my work in this matter by several articles written by
+the boldest of the medical men in this country, who is the leader of
+the medical party which claims to be opposed to the educational and
+political advancement of women because of the inevitable injury to
+her physical constitution. The writings of such a man, aided by the
+circulation and prestige of the leading journals of the country,
+which publish them as authoritative, must inevitably influence school
+directors, voters, and legislators, and go far to crystalize the belief
+that facts are well known to the medical profession, with which it would
+be dangerous to trifle, when the truth is that the positive knowledge on
+the subject is not sufficient at this moment to form even an intelligent
+guess upon. In spite of this fact the well-known physician of whom I
+speak, Dr. Wm. A. Hammond, reiterates in these articles all of the old,
+and adds one or two new arguments to prove that woman should not be
+allowed to develop what brain she has, because she possesses very little
+and even that little is of inferior quality.
+
+Professor Romanes, who is said by many to stand second only to Herbert
+Spencer in his branch of science, has also recently published a very
+extensive paper on mental differences of the sexes and the proper
+education of woman, which is, unfortunately, but most likely honestly,
+based upon this same assumption, under the belief that it was a
+demonstrated fact. His paper has been very widely copied in spite of its
+extreme length, and the fact that the same journals "absolutely can
+not find space" for even a moderately long one on the other side. The
+editors say, "The public is not interested in it"--that is, in its
+correction. I mention these two men not because they are peculiar
+in, but because they are honored representatives of, the so-called
+scientific school of objectors to human equality, and claim to base the
+right of male supremacy upon important scientific facts.
+
+Of course all this is an old assumption and as such has been dealt with
+before. But Dr. Hammond now boldly asserts that these differences are
+easily discoverable by microscope and scale, and that they are natural,
+necessary sex differences. He claims: (1.) That woman's brain is
+inferior to man's in size and quality, and, therefore, in possibility.
+(2.) That these marks of inferiority are natural and potential, and not
+produced by environment. (3.) That they are easily recognizable in the
+brain mass itself. (4.) That in consequence of these natural organic
+and fundamental differences the female brain is incapable of, first,
+accuracy; second, sustained or abstract thought; third, unbiased
+judgment (judicial fairness); fourth, the accomplishment of any really
+first-class or original work in the fields of science, art, politics,
+invention, or even literature. He points out the great danger to woman
+herself, and to the race, as her children, if she is allowed to attempt
+those things for which the structure of her brain shows her to be
+incapacitated.
+
+From this outlook it is easy to see that the nonprofessional voter, the
+school director, and the legislator might really feel it to be his duty
+to protect woman against her own ambition. It is in this way that the
+assertions of such men can, and do, cause the greatest injury to women.
+There are a number of other indictments; but for the present let us
+examine these. First, in the matter of size, the doctor concedes that
+the relative size and weight of the brain in the sexes is about the
+same, slightly in woman's favor, which he says does not count; although,
+when he finds this same difference between men, as between higher and
+lower races, he argues that it does count for a great deal. But in the
+dilemma to which this seemed to reduce him in proving his case, he says:
+"Numerous observations show beyond doubt that the intellectual power
+does not depend upon the weight of the brain relative to that of the
+body so much as it depends upon absolute brain weight." Now, if this
+were the case, an elephant would out-think any of us, and the whale,
+whose intellectual achievements have never been looked upon as
+absolutely incendiary (if we except Jonah's friend), would rank the
+greatest man on record, and have brain enough left to furnish material
+for a fair-sized female seminary.
+
+The average human male brain is said to weigh from 1,300 to 1,400
+grammes, and even a very young whale furnishes 2,312 grammes of
+"intellect-producing substance," as the doctor felicitously terms it,
+while the brain of a large whale weighed in 1883 tipped the beam at
+6,700 grammes. Truly, then, if absolute brain weight and not relative
+weight is the test, here was a "mute inglorious Milton," indeed. Almost
+any elephant is several Cuviers in disguise, or perhaps an entire
+medical faculty.
+
+The doctor says: "The female brain, however, is not only smaller than
+that of man, but it is different in structure, and this fact involves
+much more as regards the character of the mental faculties than does the
+element of size." Again he says: "Thus accurate measurements show that
+the anterior portion of the brain, comprising the frontal lobes, in
+which the highest intellectual faculties re side, is much more developed
+in man than in woman, and this not only as regards its size, but its
+convolutions also. Now, the part of the brain which is especially
+concerned in the evolution of mind is the gray matter, and this is
+increased or diminished in accordance with the number and complexity
+of the convolutions. The frontal lobes contain a greater amount of gray
+cortical matter than any other part of the brain, and they are, as we
+have seen, larger in man than in woman."
+
+Accepting these sweeping statements for the moment--although many of
+them are questioned by the highest authority--would it not be fair to
+test the case as to whether this difference in adults is fundamental and
+pre-natal, or whether it is the result of outside artificial influences,
+by an appeal to the brain of infants. If the brains of one hundred
+infants (each child weighing ten pounds) were examined, would the brains
+of the fifty males be distinguishable from those of the fifty females?
+In other words, when the weight of the body, the age, and other
+conditions are the same as to health, parentage, etc., and before the
+artificial means of development, educational stimulus and opportunity
+are applied to the one and withheld from the other, could the sex be
+determined by the difference in brain, weight, shape, size, quality, or
+convolutions? That would be the test, although it would not allow for
+the ages of hereditary dwarfage of the one, and healthy exercise of the
+brains of the other sex; but, as an opening, I was willing to stand on
+that test. It was in pursuance of this idea that I caused the following
+questions to be submitted to a large number of the leading brain
+students of America, went myself somewhat into the study of
+anthropology, and collected from several countries certain bits of
+information as to just how much basis there is for all this cry about
+the difference in men's and women's brains.
+
+Being a matter of heads, I wanted to know how much was "cry" and how
+much was "wool."
+
+These are the questions submitted to the doctors, brain anatomists and
+microscopists at the outset of my task: (1.) Is it known to the medical
+profession whether in infants (of the same age, size, health, and
+inheritance at birth) the quantity, quality, and specific gravity of
+the gray matter differs in the sexes? Does the relative amount of gray
+matter differ? (2.) Do the convolutions? Form? Actual amount of gray
+matter, differ? (3.) Given the brain, only, of a number of infants
+of the same age, weight, etc., could the sex be determined by the
+difference in shape, quantity, quality, and convolutions? (4.) If so,
+are the differences more or less marked in infants than in adults? Is
+the frontal region of the brain larger and more developed in male than
+in female infants? Is the difference as marked as in adults? (5.) Does
+use, training, etc., develop gray matter, change texture, size, shape,
+etc., of the brain mass, or are these determined and fixed at birth? The
+same as to convolutions? (6.) Does use have to do with the location of
+the fissure of Rolando, or is that fixed at birth? In an uneducated man
+would there be as much of the brain in front of this fissure as in a
+man of trained and developed mind? (7.) Does use or development of the
+mental powers change the specific gravity of the brain mass? Would it be
+the same in a great scholar as in a common laborer of the same general
+size and health? (8.) Is there unanimity of opinion on these questions?
+Are the facts known or only conjectured? (9.) If ten boys of the same
+weight, health, and general inheritance were taken in infancy and five
+of them subjected for fifty years to the conditions of a street or farm
+laborer, while the other five received all the advantages of the life of
+a scholar, would the ten brains present the same relative likenesses at
+death as at birth? Would opportunity and mental exercise make a change
+in the brains of the five students that would be discoverable by
+microscope and scales?
+
+In reply to the last question, the universal opinion was that it would
+be fair to assume that such difference would be perceptible. But one
+of the replies was that these points must necessarily remain only
+conjectural, since we can not do as the Scotch villager who shows to
+a wondering public the remains of a famous criminal, with this bit of
+history: "This is the skull and brain of a man who was hanged, at the
+age of forty, for murdering his entire family. This is the skull and
+brain of the same man at the age of seven. You can readily trace in the
+boy the man that was to be." Since it might be looked upon with disfavor
+if we were to attempt to brain people from time to time in an effort
+to discover the effects of culture upon the fissure of Rolando, we
+must base all such arguments upon reason and analogy. Is it not a fair
+presumption, since reason and analogy lead to this universally accepted
+theory as between man and man, that the same causes would produce the
+same results when applied between man and woman? Strangely enough, this
+is not held to be the case by these acute reasoners against sex equality
+in brain.
+
+But to illustrate once more the necessity of questioning facts first and
+the reasons for them afterward, I am assured by the most profound and
+capable students of these branches of science, that if such differences
+exist in the brains of infants as are indicated by my questions, it is
+not known to those who make a specialty of brain study; but, upon
+the contrary, the differences between individuals of the same sex--in
+adults, at least--are known to be much more marked than any that are
+known to exist between the sexes. Take the brains of the two poets,
+Byron and Dante. Byron's weighed 1,807 grms., while Dante's weighed only
+1,320 grms., a difference of 487 grms.; or take two statesmen, Cromwell
+and Gambetta. Cromwell's brain weighed 2,210 grms., which, by the way,
+is the greatest healthy brain on record--although Cuvier's is usually
+quoted as the largest, a part of the weight of his was due to disease,
+and if a diseased or abnormal brain is to be taken as the standard,
+then the greatest on record is that of a negro, criminal idiot--while
+Gambetta's was only 1,241 grms., a difference of 969 grms. Surely it
+would not be held because of this, that Gambetta and Dante should have
+been denied the educational and other advantages which were the natural
+right of Byron and Cromwell. Yet it is upon this very ground, by this
+very system of reasoning, that it is proposed to deny women equal
+advantages and opportunities, although the difference in brain weight
+between man and woman is claimed to be only 100 grms., and even this
+does not allow for difference in body weight, and is based upon a system
+of averages, which is neither complete nor accurate. There is, then, not
+only no proof that the sex of infants could be distinguished by their
+brains, but all of the evidence which does exist on this subject is
+wholly against the assumption.
+
+Up to this point in my investigation I learned only what I had fully
+expected to learn. At the next step, and in connection with it, I
+met with information which seems to me to offer an opportunity for
+reflection upon the matter of mental--not to say verbal--accuracy in the
+sex which does not wear "bangs." In the papers referred to, Dr. Hammond
+asserted, and no male voice or pen has seen fit to publicly correct him,
+that "it is only necessary to compare an average male with an average
+female brain to perceive at once how numerous and striking are the
+differences existing between them." He then submits a formidable list of
+striking differences which include these: "The male brain is larger, its
+vertical and transverse diameters are greater proportionately, the
+shape is quite different, the convolutions are more intricate, the sulci
+deeper, the secondary fissures more numerous, and the gray matter of the
+corresponding parts of the brain decidedly thicker."
+
+But as if all these were not enough to enable the merest novice to
+distinguish the one from the other, even if he were near-sighted, he
+offers these reinforcements: "It is quite certain, as the observations
+of the writer show, that the specific gravity of both the white and gray
+matter of the brain is greater in man than in woman." This would seem
+to leave woman without a reef to hang to; for if by any chance her brain
+did not fall short in gray matter, the specific gravity of the rest of
+it would enable the doctor to ticket her as accurately as though she
+were to appear with ear-rings and train in a ballroom. Of this point
+this is what the leading brain anatomist in America wrote me: "The only
+article recognized by the profession as important and of recent date
+which takes this theory as a working basis is by Morselli, and he is
+compelled to make the sinister admission, while asserting that the
+specific gravity is less in the female, that with old age and with
+insanity the specific gravity increases." If this is the case, I
+don't know that women need sigh over their short-coming in the item of
+specific gravity. There appear to be two very simple methods open to
+them by which they may emulate their brothers in the matter of specific
+gravity if they so desire. One of these is certain, if they live long
+enough, and the other--well, there is no protective tariff on insanity.
+But to finally clinch his argument, Dr. Hammond continues: "The question
+is, therefore, not so much that of quantity" (which appears to collide
+with his statement that it was the "absolute brain weight" which was
+the sublime test, and drops my whale into the water again), "as it is of
+quality. The brain of woman is different from that of man in structure."
+
+Again I applied my test. Does all this difference of structure and
+quality appear in the infant or only in the adult brains? Since it is
+held that these very differences are the ones produced by education and
+properly diversified mental stimulus--as between man and man--is it not
+fair to assume that like causes produce like results as between man
+and woman? Since woman has never had the advantages of these
+brain-developing processes, is it not fair to assume, if all these
+differences do exist, that it is less a matter of natural and
+characteristic inferiority than of environment and opportunity, unless
+it exists in the same ratio in infants? That would be the test as to
+whether these are natural, necessary, pre-natal sex characteristics, or
+whether they are developed by external circumstances and environment.
+The physical sex characteristics, which are natural, are as readily
+distinguished at birth as at maturity.
+
+But after a woman's waist and brain are put into tight laces and shaped
+to fit the fashion, it is rather a poor time to judge of her natural
+figure, either physical or mental. There was but one reply to my
+questions. It was this:
+
+"No such test has ever been made with the brains of infants, and the
+wildest imagination could only stand appalled at the effort. It would
+be impossible to distinguish the male from the female child by these
+'radical, natural, easily-discovered sex differences' in brain." I held,
+then, that the inference was perfectly legitimate that the great and
+numerous differences in the brains of adults, in so far as that was not,
+also, a mere flight of fancy, was not natural, pre-natal, and necessary,
+but that it was certainly fair to assume it to be produceable, by
+outside measures or environment, and that it could be no more natural
+nor desirable, for the digestive organs and the brain of one sex to be
+decreased and deformed by pressure, than it is for those of the other.
+
+But I confess I was wholly unprepared for the final result of my last
+question and argument. I discovered that these differences are not only
+not known to exist in infants, but that in spite of all the talk, the
+pathetic warnings, and the absolute statements to the contrary, that in
+a like number of adult brains such differences are not only not to be
+"perceived at once," but that if Dr. Hammond or anybody else will agree
+to allow me to furnish him with twenty well-preserved adult brains to
+be marked in cipher, so that he will not have his information before he
+makes his test, he will find that his "numerous, striking, and easily
+perceived" differences will not appear with any relation to sex, so far
+as is known at the present time. I made this offer to him through the
+_Popular Science Monthly_ some six months ago. Up to date the twenty
+brains I offered him to try on have not been called for.
+
+Upon the contrary there will be found greater difference between
+individuals of the same sex than any known to exist between the sexes
+in any and all of these test characteristics; that, in the main, since
+women weigh less than men, it would be pretty safe to guess that most of
+the lighter brains belonged to the women, but that this test would prove
+wrong in many cases, and that the others would fail utterly.
+
+I asked them why they did not correct the general impression which men
+of their profession had given out in this matter. They said they did not
+see the use of it; what difference did it make, anyhow? And then it was
+a good enough working theory. I said, "But suppose it worked the other
+way, do you think that you would say that it made no difference, and
+that a working theory that worked all one way was a safe or an honest
+one to put forth as an established fact?"
+
+"Well, we are willing to tell you the truth about it," they said; "the
+fact is, it is all theory as yet; there has not been a sufficient number
+of tests made to warrant the least dogmatism in the matter; what more
+can you ask of us than that?"
+
+What indeed?
+
+I made another discovery; it was this: The brain of no remarkable woman
+has ever been examined! Woman is ticketed to fit the hospital subjects
+and tramps, the unfortunates whose brains fall into the hands of the
+profession, as it were, by mere accident; while man is represented by
+the brains of the Cromwells, Cuviers, Byrons and Spurzheims. By this
+method the average of men's brains is carried to its highest level in
+the matter of weight and texture; while that of women is kept at its
+lowest, and even then there is only claimed 100 grammes difference! It
+is with such statistics as these, it is with such dissimilar material,
+that they and we are judged.
+
+Finally, I discovered that there is absolutely no definite information
+on the subject now in the hands of the medical profession which can
+justify the least show of dogmatism in the matter; or that, if it were
+on the other side, would not be explained entirely away in five minutes,
+and there would not be the least question as to the desirability of the
+explanation, either. They told me not only that they did not know,
+but that no one could possibly know upon the statistics and with the
+instruments in the hands of the profession to-day.
+
+This being the case, perhaps it will be just as well for women
+themselves to take a hand in the future investigations and statements,
+and I sincerely hope that the brains of some of our able women may
+be preserved and examined by honest brain students, so that we may
+hereafter have our Cuviers and Web sters and Cromwells. And I think I
+know where some of them can be found without a search-warrant--when Miss
+Anthony, Mrs. Stanton, and some others I have the honor to know, are
+done with theirs. Until that is done, no honest or fair comparison is
+possible. At present there is too great a desire on the part of these
+large-brained gentlemen, like Dr. Hammond, to look upon themselves and
+their brains as "infant industries," entitled to and in need of a
+very high protective tariff, to prevent anything like a fair and equal
+competition with the feminine product.
+
+But the fact is that we have heard so much on the one side about woman's
+physical and mental short-comings, and on the other side, from our
+prohibition friends and others, so much of the moral delinquencies of
+men, that it seems to me that we are in danger of believing both. And
+I, for one, am beginning to feel a good deal like Mark Twain's Irishman,
+whenever I hear either one discussed. He had been having a controversy
+with another man, and, as a final "clincher" to his side of the
+argument, said, with emphasis: "Now, I don't want to hear anything more
+from you on that subject but silence--and mighty little of that."
+
+Allow me to read the closing paragraph of a letter to me from Dr. E. C.
+Spitzka, the celebrated New York brain specialist, to whom I am greatly
+indebted for much valuable information:
+
+"You may hold me responsible for the following declaration: That any
+statement to the effect that an observer can tell by looking at a brain,
+or examining it microscopically, whether it belonged to a female or a
+male subject, is not founded on carefully-observed facts. The balance
+and the compasses show slight differences; the weight of the male brain
+being greater, and the angle formed by the sulcus of Rolando, forming
+a larger expansion of the frontal lobes; but both these points of
+differences have been determined by the method of averages. They do not
+necessarily apply to the individual brain and hence can not be utilized
+to determine the sex of a single brain, except by those who are willing
+to take the chances of guessing. The assertion that the microscope
+reveals definite characteristic points of difference between the male
+and female brain is utterly incorrect. No such difference has ever been
+demonstrated, nor do I think it will be by more elaborate methods than
+those we now possess. Numerous female brains exceed numerous male brains
+in absolute weight, in complexity of convolutions, and in what brain
+anatomists would call the nobler proportions. So that he who takes
+these as his criteria of the male brain may be grievously mistaken
+in attempting to assert the sex of a brain dogmatically. If I had one
+hundred female brains and one hundred male brains together, I should
+select the one hundred containing the largest and best developed brains
+as probably containing fewer female brains than the remaining one
+hundred. More than this no cautious, experienced brain anatomist would
+venture to declare."
+
+
+
+
+WOMAN AS AN ANNEX
+
+
+Ladies and Gentlemen:--If it were not often tragic and always
+humiliating, it would be exceedingly amusing to observe the results of a
+method of thought and a civilization which has proceeded always upon the
+idea that man is the race and that woman is merely an annex to him and
+because of his desires, needs and dictum.
+
+Strangely enough, the bigotry or sex bias and pride does not carry this
+theory below the human animal. Among scientists and evolutionists, and,
+indeed, even among the various religious explanations of the source and
+cause of things, the male and female of all species of animals, birds
+and insects come into life and tread its paths together and as equals.
+The male tiger does not assume to teach his mate what her "sphere" is,
+and the female hippopotamus is supposed to have sufficient brain
+power of her own to enable her to live her own life and plan her own
+occupations, decide upon her own needs and generally regulate her own
+existence, without being compelled to call upon the gentleman of
+her family in particular, and all of the gentlemen of her species in
+general, to decide for her when she is doing the proper thing. The laws
+of their species are not made and executed by one sex for the other,
+and the same food, sun, covering, educational and general conduct and
+opportunities of life which open to the one sex are equally open
+and free for the other. No protective tariff is put upon masculine
+prerogative to enable him to control all the necessaries of life for
+both sexes, to assure to him all the best opportunities, occupations,
+education and results of achievement which is the common need of their
+kind. In short, the female is in no way his subordinate.
+
+In captivity it is the female which has been, as a rule, most prized,
+best cared for and preserved. In the barnyard, field and stable alike,
+it is deemed wise to sell or kill most of the males. They are looked
+upon as good food, so to speak, but not as useful citizens. What they
+add to the world is not thought so much of--their capacities for
+the future are less valued than are those of the other sex. Even the
+man-made, religious legends bring all of these animals into life in
+pairs. Neither has precedence of the other. Neither is subject to the
+other.
+
+But when it comes to the human animal--the final blossom of creative
+thought, as religionists word it, or of universal energy, as scientists
+put it--the male, for the first time, becomes the whole idea.
+
+A helpmate for him is an after-thought, and according to man's teaching
+up to the present time, an after-thought only half matured and very
+badly executed. In spite of all the practice on other pairs--one of each
+sex--it remained for the Almighty, or nature, to make the mistake (for
+the first time) of creating the human race with one of its halves a mere
+"annex" to the other. A subject. A subordinate. Without brains to do its
+own thinking, without judgment to be its own guide. This blunder is not
+made with any other pair. In the case of all other animals each sex has
+its own brain power with which it directs its own affairs, makes its own
+laws of conduct, and so preserves its own individuality, its personal
+liberty, its freedom of action and of development.
+
+I am not ignorant of, nor do I forget, the scientific fact that in
+nature among ants, birds and beasts there are tribes and communities
+where some are slaves or are subject to others; but what I do assert
+is this, that this is not a sex distinction or degradation. It is not
+infrequently the males who are the subjects in these communities where
+liberty is not equal and where, therefore, the very basic principal of
+equality is impossible or unknown. And did it ever occur to you that
+a community or a people which recognizes in its fundamental laws and
+customs--in its very forms of expression--that it is right to preserve
+inequality of opportunity, of education, of emolument and of conduct has
+yet to learn the meaning of the words "liberty" and "justice?"
+
+Nowhere in all nature is the mere fact of sex--and that the
+race-producing sex--made a reason for fixed inequality of liberty,
+of subjugation, of subordination and of determined inferiority of
+opportunity in education, in acquirement, in position--in a word, in
+freedom. Nowhere until we reach man!
+
+Here, where for the first time in nature there enter artificial social
+conditions and needs, these artificial demands coupled with the great
+fact of maternity (everywhere else in nature absolutely under its
+own control), maternity under sex subjection, linked with financial
+dependence upon the one not so burdened, has fixed this subordinate
+status upon that part of the race which is the producer of the race.
+This fact alone is enough to account for the slow, the distorted, the
+diseased and the criminal progress of humanity.
+
+Subordinates cannot give lofty character. Servile temperaments cannot
+blossom into liberty-loving, liberty-giving descendants. Many of the
+lower animals destroy their young if they are born in captivity. They
+demand that maternity shall be free. Free from man's conditions or
+captivity, as it always has been free from the tyranny of sex control in
+their own species. *
+
+
+     * While reading the proof for this book this corroborative
+     and interesting illustration appeared in the New York World
+     of date June 24:
+
+     The tragedy which has been expected to occur any time at the
+     Zoo was enacted yesterday, when Alice, the lioness who gave
+     birth to three whelps on Wednesday morning, ate one and
+     killed another. The third was only rescued by strategy.
+     Animals never kill their young in their wild state, except
+     the male lion, from whom the female hides the young. In
+     captivity it's a common thing.
+
+     Keeper Downey first discovered the deed, and when the
+     Director arrived Alice was just finishing one of her
+     offspring. Another lay dead in the corner and the third had
+     crawled away and was crying pitifully. Director Smith had
+     the door raised which leads into another cage and Alice was
+     coaxed inside. Then the door was let down and Keepers Downy
+     and Snyder caught the only survivor and secured the body of
+     the other. It was a dangerous proceeding, as Alice was
+     terribly angry and beat her great body against the thick
+     iron bars.
+
+     The dead cub was sent to the Museum of Natural History, and
+     after a good deal of skirmishing around by Keepers Downey
+     and Shannon a Newfoundland dog belonging to an employee of
+     Clausen's Brewery, on East Fifty-fifth street, who
+     yesterday morning gave birth to eight pups, was found, and
+     last evening the survivor of the triplets was taken to the
+     brewery.
+
+     The Director will pay the owner of the dog $3 per week for
+     the baby's board and lodging, and, to the credit of the
+     generous-hearted mother dog, she has taken the little
+     lioness to her breast without so much as a questioning look.
+     She licked it and snuggled it as she did her own and
+     caressed it into nursing. After it is a few weeks old and is
+     strong it can be taken away from the dog and, with little
+     trouble, can be brought up on a bottle.
+
+
+It is the fashion in this country now-a-days to say that women are
+treated as equals. Some of the most progressive and best of men truly
+believe what they say in this regard. One of our leading daily papers,
+which insists that this is true, and even goes so far as to say that
+American gentlemen believe in and act upon the theory that their mothers
+and daughters are of a superior quality--and are always of the very
+first consideration to and by men--recently had an editorial headlined
+"Universal Suffrage the Birthright of the Free Born." I read it through,
+and if you will believe me, the writer had so large a bump of sex
+arrogance that he never once thought of one-half of humanity in
+the entire course of an elaborate and eloquent two-column article!
+"Universal" suffrage did not touch but one sex. There was but one sex
+"free born." There was but one which was born with "rights." The words
+"persons," "citizens," "residents of the state" and all similar terms
+were used quite freely, but not once did it dawn upon the mind of the
+writer that every one of those words, every argument for freedom, every
+plea for liberty and justice, equality and right, applied to the human
+race and not merely to one-half of that race.
+
+Sex bias, sex arrogance, sex pride, sex assumption is so ingrained that
+it simply does not occur to the male logicians, scientists, philosophers
+and politicians that there is a humanity. They see, think of and argue
+for and about only a sex of man--with an annex to him--woman. They call
+this the race; but they do not mean the race--they mean men. They write
+and talk of "human beings;" of their needs, their education, their
+capacity and development; but they are not thinking of humanity at all.
+They are thinking of, planning for and executing plans which subordinate
+the race--the human entity--to a subdivision, the mark and sign of which
+is the lowest and most universal possession of male nature--the mere
+procreative instinct and possibility. And this has grown to be the habit
+of thought until in science, in philosophy, in religion, in law, in
+politics--one and all--we must translate all language into other terms
+than those used. For the word "universal" we must read "male;" for
+the "people," the "nation," we must read "men." The "will of the
+majority--majority rule"--really means the larger number of masculine
+citizens. And so with all our common language, it is in a false
+tense. It is mere democratic verbal gymnastics, clothing the same old
+monarchial, aristocratic mental beliefs, with man now the "divine right"
+ruler and with woman his subject and perquisite. Its gender is misstated
+and its import multiplied by two. It does not mean what it says, and it
+does not say what it means.
+
+Our thoughts are adjusted to false verbal forms, and so the thoughts do
+not ring true. They are merely hereditary forms of speech. All masculine
+thought and expression up to the present time has been in the language
+of sex, and not in the language of race; and so it has come about that
+the music of humanity has been set in one key and played on one chord.
+
+It has been well said that an Englishman cannot speak French correctly
+until he has learned to think in French. It is far more true that no one
+can speak or write the language of human liberty and equality until he
+has learned to think in that language, and to feel without stopping to
+argue with himself, that right is not masculine only and that justice
+knows no sex. Were the claim to superior opportunity, status and
+position based upon capacity, character or wealth, upon perfection
+of form or grace of bearing, one could understand, if not accept, the
+reasonableness of the position, for it would then rest upon some sort of
+recognized superiority, but while it is based upon sex--a mere accident
+of form carrying with it a brute instinct, which is not even glorified
+by the capacity to produce, and seldom throughout nature, to suffer for
+and protect the blossom of that instinct--surely no lower, less vital or
+more degraded a basis could possibly be chosen.
+
+Not long ago a heated argument arose here in Chicago over the teaching
+of German in the public schools. This argument was used by one of the
+leading contestants in one of the leading journals:
+
+The whole amount of education that 95 per cent, of our public school
+pupils receive is lamentably small. It is far less than we could wish it
+to be.
+
+Most of these children, who are to be the citizens, and by their ballots
+the rulers of this nation, can often remain but a few years in the
+schoolroom. For the average American citizen who is not a professional
+man, or who is not destined for diplomatic service abroad, English can
+afford all the mental and intellectual pabulum needed.
+
+Now here is an amusing and also a humiliating illustration of the way
+these matters are handled, and it is for that reason, only, that I have
+used a local question here. "Ninety-five per cent, of our public school
+pupils," etc., "by their ballots are to be rulers of the nation,"
+etc., "future citizens," forsooth! Now it simply did not occur to the
+gentleman who wrote this, and to the hundreds who so write and speak
+daily, that the most of those 95 per cent have no ballots, do not
+"rule," are not "future citizens," but that they belong to the
+proscribed sex, have committed the crime of being girls, even before
+they entered the public schools, and so have permanently outlawed
+themselves for citizenship in this glorious republic of "equals." But
+his entire argument (made upon so large a per cent) really rests upon a
+much smaller number. But the girls made good ballast for the argument.
+They answered to fill in the "awful example," but they are not allowed
+the justice of real citizenship, nor to be the future "rulers" for and
+because of whom the whole argument is made, for whose educational rights
+and needs, alone, because of their future ballots, he cares so tenderly.
+It will not do to attempt to avoid this issue by the hackneyed plea.
+"The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world." Every one knows that
+this is not true in the sense in which it is used. It is true, alas! in
+a sense never dreamed of by politician and publican.
+
+It is true that the degraded status of maternity has ruled and does rule
+the world, in that it has been, and is, the most potent power to keep
+the race from lofty achievement. Subject mothers never did, and subject
+mothers never will, produce a race of free, well poised, liberty-loving,
+justice-practicing children. Maternity is an awful power. It blindly
+strikes back at injustice with a force that is a fearful menace to
+mankind. And the race which is born of mothers who are harassed,
+bullied, subordinated and made the victims of blind passion or power,
+or of mothers who are simply too petty and self-debased to feel their
+subject status, cannot fail to continue to give the horrible spectacles
+we have always had of war, of crime, of vice, of trickery, of
+double-dealing, of pretense, of lying, of arrogance, of subserviency, of
+incompetence, of brutality, and, alas! of insanity, idiocy and disease
+added to a fearful and unnecessary mortality.
+
+To a student of anthropology and heredity it requires no great brain
+power to trace these results to causes. We need only remember that
+the mental, as well as the physical conditions, capacities and
+potentialities are inherited, to understand how the dead level of
+hopeless mediocrity must be preserved as the rule of the race so long as
+the potentialities of that race must be filtered always through and
+take its impetus from a mere annex to man's power, ambition, desires and
+opinions.
+
+Let me respond right here to those who will--who always do--insist that
+woman is not so held to-day at least in England and America. That her
+present status is a dignified, an equal or even a superior one. I
+will illustrate: In a recent speech by the Hon. William E. Gladstone he
+pleaded most eloquently and earnestly for the right of Irishmen to rule
+and govern themselves. Among many other things he said: "The principal
+weapons of the opposition are bold assertion, persistent exaggeration,
+constant misconstruction and copious, arbitrary and baseless prophecies.
+True there are conflicting financial arrangements to be dealt with, but
+among the difficulties nothing exists which ought to abash or terrify
+men desirous to accomplish a great object. For the first time in ninety
+years the bill will secure the supremacy of parliament as founded upon
+right as well as backed by power."
+
+Had these remarks been made with an eye single to the "woman question,"
+they could not have been more exactly descriptive of the facts in
+the case; but with Irishmen only on his mind he continued thus: "The
+persistent distrust of the Irish people, despite all they can do, comes
+simply to this, that they are to be pressed below the level of civilized
+mankind. When the boon of self government is given to the British
+colonies is Ireland alone to be excepted from its blessings? To deny
+Ireland home rule is to say that she lacks the ordinary faculties of
+humanity."
+
+He said "Irish people," but he meant Irish men only. But see to what
+his argument leads. He says it is "pressing them below the level of
+civilized mankind" to deny them the right to stand erect, to use their
+own brains and wills in their own government; and a great party in his
+own country and a great party in this country echo with mad enthusiasm
+his opinions--for men! They call it "mankind." They mean one-half of
+mankind only, for not even Mr. Gladstone is able to rise high enough
+above his sex bias to see that the denial of all self-government, all
+representation in the making of the laws she is to obey "presses woman
+below the level of civilized mankind." Words cease to have a par
+value even with the stickler for verbal accuracy the instant their
+own arguments are applied to the other sex. Eloquently men can and do
+portray the wrongs, the outrages, the abuses which always have arisen,
+which always must arise from class legislation--from that condition
+which makes it impossible for one class or condition of citizens of a
+country to make their needs, desires, preferences and opinions felt
+in the organic law of their country on an equal and level footing with
+their fellows. Men have needed no great ability to enable them to prove
+that tyranny unspeakable always did and always will follow unlimited
+power over others so long as their arguments applied between man and
+man, but the instant the identical arguments are used to apply between
+man and woman that instant their whole attitude changes.
+
+That instant words lose all par value. That instant all men, including
+those who have but just waxed eloquent over the injustice and the real
+danger of permitting inequality before the law, become aristocrats.
+Claiming to be the logical sex, man throws logic to the winds. Claiming
+to have fought and bled to enthrone "liberty," he forgets its very name!
+Asserting that in his own hand alone can the scales of justice be held
+level, he makes of justice, of liberty and of equality a mockery and a
+pretense! He has so far read all of those words in the masculine gender
+only. He has not yet learned to think them in a universal language. He
+stultifies his every utterance and makes of his mind a jailer, and of
+his laws slave drivers, for all who cannot by physical force wrench from
+him the right to their own liberty and to their human status of equality
+of opportunity.
+
+Men have everywhere grown to believe that they have been born and that
+they rule women by divine right. Woman is a mere annex to and for his
+glory. She exists for him to rule, to think for, to adore, to tolerate
+or to abuse as he sees fit, or as is his type or nature. Her appeal must
+not be to an equal standard of justice which she has helped to
+frame, administer and live by; but it must be to his generosity, his
+tenderness, his toleration or his chivalry--in short, to his absolute
+power over her. "No people can be free without an equal legal footing
+for all of its citizens!" exclaims the statesman, and drums beat and
+trumpets blare and men march and countermarch in enthusiastic response
+to the sentiment. "We must have a government of the people, by the
+people, for the people" is cheered to the echo whenever heard, and
+nobody realizes that what is meant always is a government of men, by
+men, for men, with woman as an annex.
+
+Only three weeks ago all of our papers had leaders, editorials and
+cablegrams to announce that "universal suffrage has been granted in
+Belgium." They all grew enthusiastic over it. One of our leading New
+York editors said (and I use his editorial simply because it is a very
+good example of what almost all of our important journals said):
+
+"The triumph of the Belgian democracy is an event of the first
+significance. The masses had long appealed in vain for a removal of the
+property qualification which restricted the right of suffrage to
+140,000 persons out of a population of over 6,-000,000 but the chambers,
+dominated by the wealthy classes, resolutely refused to comply with the
+demand until a dangerous revolution was inaugurated.
+
+"Even how the change in the constitution granting universal suffrage is
+coupled with the right of plural voting by the property-owners, but it
+is quite certain that this obnoxious feature will be soon abandoned by
+the chambers and universal suffrage will prevail, as in the adjoining
+nations of France and Germany.
+
+"When these newly enfranchised electors choose the next legislature
+important changes may be expected in the laws applicable to the
+employment of labor, which have hitherto been framed solely in the
+interest of the mine-owners and the manufacturers. Fortunately for
+the king, he seems to be in sympathy with this effort of the masses to
+acquire a fair representation in the government. In the recent riots the
+hostility of the people was directed against the assembly rather than
+against the crown. It is very evident that the democratic spirit is
+gaining ground throughout Europe. Its influence is manifest in the home
+rule movement in England, in the hostility to the army bill in Germany,
+and in the rapid changes of the ministers of France. It steadily
+advances in every direction and never loses ground once acquired. It
+progresses peacefully if it can, but forcibly if it must. Its triumph in
+Belgium is one of the signs of the times in the old world."
+
+"The people" are all male in Belgium, in France, Germany and America,
+or else all of these statements are mere figures of speech, are wholly
+untrue, for the women of Belgium, of France, of Germany--and, alas! of
+democratic America, were not even thought of when the words "people,"
+"citizens," "masses," "laborers," etc., were used. They are counted in
+the estimates of the population as all of these. They are used to fill
+vacancies, to swell estimates, to round out statistics, but in the
+result of these arguments and statistics, in the victories won for
+liberty to the individual, woman has no part. She is the one outlaw in
+human progress. In a recent magazine this passage occurs:
+
+"Austria.--On April 2 Dr. Victor Adler, a socialist leader, spoke to
+about 4,000 workingmen in favor of universal suffrage. He said that
+two-thirds of the adult men had not the suffrage. Only half-civilized
+countries, like Russia and Spain, now placed their citizens in such
+inequality before the law. The workingmen of Austria had never before
+this winter suffered such hardships, and now in Vienna 26,000 workmen
+were without shelter."
+
+Yet there is no report that Dr. Adler nor the editor of the magazine,
+who waxed eloquent over it, saw any special "hardship" or "inequality"
+in a degraded status for all women. "Universal suffrage," indeed! And
+has Austria no women citizens? Were the working women who have not
+the ballot, better sheltered than the men? Or do they need no shelter?
+Another editor says: "Don't talk about a free ballot while the bread of
+the masses is in the giving of the classes."
+
+Yet, had a venturesome girl type-setter made it read, "Don't talk about
+a free ballot, a democracy or freedom while the bread of women is in the
+giving of men," the editor would have said: "She is insane, and besides
+that, she is talking unwomanly nonsense."
+
+It is the same in science, in literature, in religion. All estimates are
+made on and for the "human race," "the people of a country," etc. The
+"will of the people" is spoken of; we are told all about the brain size
+and capacity and convolutions, etc., of the different "peoples"; we hear
+learned discourses about it all, and when you sift them, woman--one-half
+of the race talked about--is used always simply and only as ballast,
+as filling to make a point in man's favor. She does not figure in the
+benefits. He is the race--she his annex.
+
+Not long ago an amusing illustration of this came to my knowledge. As
+you may perhaps know, there is more money invested in life insurance
+than in any other great financial enterprise in the world.
+
+This is the way insurance experts look at the woman question. The
+estimates of longevity, desirability of risk, etc., are based upon male
+standards. This is not in itself unnatural or unreasonable, since men
+have been the chief insurers, but few companies, indeed, being willing
+to insure women at all. But not long ago a lady applied for a policy
+on her life in a first-class company. She had three little children for
+whom she wished to provide in case of her death. She believed that she
+could properly support them so long as she lived. To her surprise she
+was told that the rate at which she must pay was $5 on each $1,000 more
+than her brother had to pay at the same age. She asked the actuary--a
+very profound man--why this was so. He told her that women had been
+found to be not so good risks as men, since they were subject to more
+dangers of death than were men, and that to make the companies safe it
+had been found necessary to charge women a higher rate.
+
+She had heard much and eloquently all her life long of the dangers of
+men's lives; of the shielded, sheltered state of feminine humanity, and
+she had never dreamed that it was--from a mortuary point of view--"extra
+hazardous" to be a woman. She assumed, however, that it must be so and
+paid her extra hazardous premium, just as if she belonged to the army or
+was a blaster or miner or "contemplated going up in a balloon." A short
+time afterward her mother, an elderly lady, had some money to invest.
+She did not wish to care for it herself, as she had never had the least
+business experience. She applied to the same actuary to know how much
+of an annual income or annuity she could buy for the sum she had. He
+figured on it for a while and told her. It was a good deal less than a
+man could get for the same amount. She had the temerity to ask why.
+
+"Well," said the actuary, gazing benignly over his glasses at her in a
+congratulatory fashion, "you see women live longer than men do--"
+
+"But you told my daughter that they did not live so long, and so she
+pays at a higher rate on insurance to make you safe lest she should die
+too young. Now you charge me more for an annuity on the theory that a
+woman lives longer than a man."
+
+"Well," said he, readjusting his glasses and going carefully over the
+mortuary table again, "that does seem to be the fact. If a woman assures
+her life she beats the company by dying sooner than a man and if she
+takes an annuity she beats us by living longer than he would. Don't know
+how it happens, but we charge extra to cover the facts as we find 'em."
+
+Such is masculine logic upon feminine perversity even in death.
+
+Yet men say that they understand us and our needs so much better than we
+do ourselves that they abandon all of their reasoning, logic, enthusiasm
+and beliefs on the great fundamental principles of justice, equality,
+liberty and law the moment their own arguments are applied to women
+instead of to "labor," the "Irish question" or to any other phase of
+class legislation as applied between man and man. The fact is simply
+and only this, that the arrogance of sex power and perversion is now so
+thoroughly ingrained that man really believes himself to be--by divine
+right--the human race and that woman is his perquisite. He has no
+universal language. He thinks in the language of sex. But more than
+this, and worse than this, he insists upon no one else being allowed to
+think in the language of humanity, and to translate that thought into
+action.
+
+
+
+
+THE MORAL RESPONSIBILITY OF WOMAN IN HEREDITY
+
+
+Read before the World's Congress of Representative Women, Chicago, 1893
+
+Ladies and Gentlemen:--Poets, statesmen, novelists, and artists have for
+ages untold striven to eclipse each other in the eulogies of motherhood.
+On the stage nothing is so sure of rapturous applause as is some
+touching bit of sacrifice which has reached its climax in a mother's
+love wherein she has yielded all to shield, to protect, or to better the
+condition of husband or child. From the crude topical songs which advise
+the son to "Stick to your mother when her hair turns gray," through
+the various phases of maternal love and devotion or sacrifice in the
+"Camille" type of thought, on up to the loftiest touches in art and
+literature, there is alike the effort to celebrate the power, the
+potentiality and the beauty of motherhood and to stimulate the
+sentiments of gratitude and love and of admiration for and emulation of
+the ideal depicted. But through it all, in the building and nurturing
+of the ideal, there runs--ever and always--the thread of thought that
+self-sacrifice, self-abnegation, self-effacement, are the grandest
+attributes of maternity. That in order to be a perfect, an ideal wife
+and mother, the woman must be sunk, the individual immolated, the ego
+subjugated. To a degree and in a sense, that is, of course, true.
+For the willingness to go down to the gates of death; to face its
+possibility for long, weary months; to know that suffering, and to fear
+that death, stands as a sure and inevitable host at the end of a long
+journey--to know this and to be willing to face it for the sake of
+others is a heroism, a bravery, a self-abnegation so infinitely above
+and beyond the small heroism of camp or battlefield that comparison is
+almost sacrilege.
+
+The condemned man, upon whom the death watch has been set, who cannot
+hope for executive clemency, who is helpless in the hands of absolute
+power, still knows that, although death may be sure, physical suffering
+is unlikely or at the worst will be but brief; but he alone stands in
+the position to know--even to a degree--the nervous strain, the mental
+anguish, the unthinking but uncontrollable panics of flesh and blood and
+nerve which woman faces at the behests of love and maternity and,
+alas, that it can be true, at the behests of sex power and financial
+dependence!
+
+But when we study anthropology and heredity we come to realize the
+indisputable facts that her love, her physical heroism and her bravery,
+linked with her political and financial subject status, has cast a
+physical blight, a moral shadow and a mental threat upon the world, we
+cease to clap quite so vigorously at the theater and our tears or smiles
+are mingled with mental reservations and a sigh for a loftier ideal of
+the meaning and purpose of maternity than the merely physical one that
+man has depicted as material sacrifice to the child and self-abnegation
+and subjection to him. We begin to wonder if much of the vice, the
+crime, the wrong, the insanity, the disease, the incompetence and
+the woe of the world is not the direct lineal descendant of this very
+self-debasement of the individual character of woman in maternity!
+
+We wonder if an unwilling, a forced or supinely yielding (and not
+self-controlled), a subject motherhood, in short, is not responsible to
+the race for the weak, the deformed, the depraved, the double dealing,
+pretense-soaked natures which curse the world with failure, with
+disease, with war, with insanity and with crime. We wonder if the awful
+power with which nature clothes maternity in heredity does not strike
+blindly back at the race for man's artificial and cruel requirements at
+the hands of the producer of the race. We wonder if mothers do not owe a
+higher duty to their offspring than that of mere nurse. We wonder if she
+has the moral right to give her children the inheritance that accident
+and subserviency stamps upon body and mind. We wonder how she dares face
+her child and know that she did not fit herself by self-development
+and by direct, sincere, firm and thorough qualifications for maternity
+before she dared to assume its responsibilities. We wonder that man has
+been so slow in learning to read the message that nature has telegraphed
+to him in letters of fire and photographed with a terrible persistency
+upon the distorted, diseased bodies and minds of his children and upon
+the moral imbeciles she has set before him as an answer to his message
+of sex domination.*
+
+
+     *  "Alienists bold, in general, that a large proportion of
+     mental diseases is the result of degeneracy; that is, they
+     are the offspring of drunken, insane, syphilitic and
+     consumptive parents, and suffer from the action of
+     heredity."--Dr. MacDonald; author of Criminology.
+
+     "Who has sinned, this man or his parents that he was blind?"
+
+     Bible.
+
+
+Self-abnegation, subserviency to man--whether he be father, lover, or
+husband--is the most dangerous that can be taught to, or forced upon
+her, whose character shall mould the next generation! She has no right
+to transmit a nature and a character that is subservient, subject,
+inefficient, undeveloped--in short, a slavish character, which is either
+blindly obedient or blindly rebellious and is therefore set, as is a
+time-lock, to prey or to be preyed upon by society in the future!
+
+If woman is not brave enough personally to demand, and to obtain,
+absolute personal liberty of action, equality of status and entire
+control of her great and race-endowing function of maternity, she has
+no right to dare to stamp upon a child, and to curse a race with
+the descendants of a servile, a dwarfed, a time-and-master-serving
+character.
+
+We have been taught that it is an awful thing to commit murder--to take
+a human life. There are students of anthropology and heredity who think
+that it is a far more awful thing to thrust, unasked, upon a human being
+a life that is handicapped before he gets it. It is a far more solemn
+responsibility to give than to take a human life! In the one case you
+invade personal liberty and put a stop to an existence more or less
+valuable and happy, but at least all pain is over for that invaded
+individuality. In the other case--in giving life--you invade the liberty
+of infinite oblivion and thrust into an inhospitable world another human
+entity to struggle, to sink, to swim, to suffer or to enjoy. Whether the
+one or the other no mortal knows, but surely knows it must contend not
+only with its environment but with its heredity--with itself.
+
+Not long ago a great man, who is successful beyond most human units,
+who is wealthy, socially to be envied, who enjoys almost ideal family
+relations, who is in all regards a man of broad intellect, of large
+heart, who is beloved, successful and powerful--not long ago this man
+said to me, when talking of life and its chances, its joys and its
+burdens and wrongs:
+
+"Well, the more I think of it all, the more I know, the more I delve
+into philosophy and science, the more I understand life as it is and as
+it must be for long years to come, if not forever, the more I wonder at
+the sturdy bravery of those who are less fortunate than I. Does it pay
+me to live? Would I choose to be born again? Were I to-day unborn, could
+I be asked for my vote, knowing all I do of life, would I vote to come
+into this world? Taking life at its best estate are we not assuming a
+tremendous risk to thrust it unasked upon those who are at least safe
+from its pitfalls? I ask myself these questions very often," he said,
+and then hesitatingly, "I sometimes think it pays after all. Of course,
+since I am here I am bound to make the best of it, but for all that I am
+not sure how I would vote on my birth if I had the chance to try it--not
+quite sure."
+
+"If you are so impressed with life for yourself--you, a fortunate,
+healthy, wealthy, happily married, successful man," said I, "don't you
+think it is a pretty serious thing to assume the right to cast that vote
+for another human pawn, who could hardly conceivably stand your chances
+in the world?"
+
+"Serious," he exclaimed. "Serious! With the world's conditions what they
+are to-day, with the physical, moral and mental chances to run, with
+woman, the character-forming producer of the race a half-educated
+subordinate to masculine domination, it is little short of madness; it
+is not far from a crime. It is a crime unless the mother is a physically
+healthy, a mentally developed and comprehending, morally clear, strong,
+vigorous entity who knows her personal responsibility in maternity and,
+knowing, dares maintain it."
+
+It has been the fashion to hold that the mothers of the race should not
+be the thinkers of the race. Indeed, in commenting upon this Congress of
+Representative Women, the most widely read newspaper on this continent
+last week said editorially:
+
+"There is to be a great series of women's congresses held at Chicago
+during the Fair. The purpose is to illustrate and celebrate the progress
+of women. Accordingly there will be sessions to discuss the achievements
+of women in art, authorship, business, science, histrionic endeavor,
+law, medicine and a variety of other activities.
+
+"But so far as the published programmes enable us to judge not one thing
+is to be done to show the progress of women as women. There will be
+no showing made of any increased capacity on their part to make homes
+happier, to make their husbands stronger for their work in the world,
+to encourage high endeavors, to maintain the best standards of honor
+and duty, to stimulate, encourage, uplift--which--from the beginning
+of civilization--has been the supreme feminine function. Nothing, it
+appears, is to be done at the congresses to show that a higher education
+and a larger intellectual advancement has enabled women to bear
+healthier children or to bring them up in a manner more surely tending
+to make this a better world to live in, the noblest of all work that can
+be done by women.
+
+"We need no congress to show us that women are more thoroughly educated
+than they once were, or that they can successfully do things once
+forbidden to them. But have wider culture and wider opportunities made
+them better wives and mothers? A congress which should show that
+would make all men advocates of still larger endeavors for woman's
+advancement. A congress, on the other hand, which assumes that the only
+thing to be celebrated is an increased capacity to win fame or money
+will teach a disastrously false and dangerous lesson to our growing
+girls."
+
+This fatal blunder as to woman's development as woman--quite aside from
+her home relations, which the editor confuses with it--has retarded
+the real civilization and caused to be transmitted--unnecessarily
+transmitted--the characteristics which have gone far to make insanity,
+disease and deformity of mind and body, the heritage of well-nigh every
+family in the land.
+
+A great medical expert said to me not long ago, "There is not more
+than one family in ten who can show a clean bill of health, mental and
+physical--aye, and moral--from hereditary taints that are serious in
+threat and almost certain of development in one form or another.
+
+"Now, if a man with a contagious disease enters a community he is
+quarantined for the benefit of his fellows, who might never take it if
+he were not restrained and isolated. But if a man with a hereditary
+or transmittible disorder, which is certain, enters a community, he is
+allowed to marry and transmit it to the helpless unborn--to establish a
+line of posterity--who are far more directly his victims than would be
+those who were exposed to a cholera contagion by a lack of quarantine.
+Fathers, physicians, society, and all educational and economic
+conditions have conspired to keep mothers ignorant of all the facts of
+life of which mothers should know everything; and so it has come about
+that the race is the victim of the narrow and dangerous doctrine of sex
+domination and sex restriction, and of selfish reckless indulgence. If
+not one family in ten can show a clean bill of heredity, is it not more
+than time that the mothers learn why, learn where, and in what they
+are responsible, and that they cease 'to close the doors of mercy on
+mankind?'"
+
+Maternity, its duties, needs and responsibilities has been exploited in
+all ages and climes; in all phases and spheres, from one point of
+view only--the point of view of the male owner. If you think that this
+statement is extreme I beg of you to read "The Evolution of Marriage"
+by Letourneau. Read it all. Read it with care. It is the production of
+a man of profound learning and research, a man who sees the light of
+the future dawning, although even he sometimes lapses from a universal,
+language of humanity into hereditary forms of speech, hedged in by sex
+bias.
+
+But in all the past arguments maternity with its duties to itself;
+maternity with its duties to the race, has never been more than merely
+touched upon, and even then it has been chiefly from the side of the
+present, and not with the tremendous search-light of heredity and of
+future generations turned upon it. It has been ever and always in its
+relations to the desires, opinions and prejudices of the present man
+power which controls it.
+
+Some time ago a famous doctor in New York took up the cudgel against
+higher education for women, and under the heading of "Education
+and Maternity; Woman's Proper Sphere; the Dangers Which Threaten
+Intellectual and Society Women;" wrote in favor of ignorant wives and a
+larger number of children. A great journal published his article without
+protest, thus giving added prestige to the opinions expressed. This,
+too, in spite of the fact that at that very time the same journal was
+appealing for alms, for free nurses, for volunteer doctors and for a
+fresh-air fund to enable the ignorant mothers of the crime-infested,
+disease-pol-luted, over populated tenements of the city to get even a
+breath of fresh air by the sea, which is only two miles from its doors!
+In spite of the fact, too, that Lombroso, Ricardo, Mendel, Spitzka,
+MacDonald and other famous anthropologists and experts have pointed out
+so plainly in their criminal, insane, imbecile and mortuary statistics
+the all-pervading evil of rapid, ill advised, irresponsible parentage.
+
+Professor Edward S. Morse, in a recent paper called "Natural Selection
+in Crime," which he courteously sent to me, said: "To one at all
+familiar with the external aspects of insanity in its various forms it
+seems incredible that its physical nature was not sooner realized. Had
+the laws of heredity been earlier understood it would have been seen
+that mental derangements, like physical diseases and tendencies, were
+transmitted."
+
+Of late years there has sprung into existence a school of criminal
+anthropology, with societies, journals, and a rapidly increasing
+literature. A most admirable summary of the work thus far accomplished
+has recently been given by Dr. Robert Fletcher in his address as
+retiring president of the Anthropological Society of Washington. In his
+opening paragraphs Dr. Fletcher thus graphically portrays the scourge of
+the criminal and his rapid increase:
+
+"In the cities, towns and villages of the civilized world every year
+thousands of unoffending men and women are slaughtered; millions of
+money, the product of honest toil and careful saving, are carried away
+by the conqueror, and incendiary fires light his pathway of destruction.
+Who is this devastator, this modern "scourge of God," whose deeds are
+not recorded in history? The criminal! Statistics unusually trustworthy
+show that if the carnage yearly produced by him could be brought
+together at one time and place it would excel the horrors of many a
+well-contested field of battle. In nine great countries of the world,
+including our own favored land, in one year, 10,380 cases of homicide
+were recorded, and in the six years extending from 1884 to 1889, in the
+United States alone, 14, 770 murders came under cognizance of the law.
+
+"And what has society done to protect itself against this aggressor?
+True, there are criminal codes, courts of law, and that surprising
+survival of the unfittest, trial by jury. Vast edifices have been built
+as prisons and reformatories, and philanthropic persons have formed
+societies for the instruction of the criminal and to care for him when
+his prison gates are opened. But, in spite of it all, the criminal
+becomes more numerous. He breeds criminals; the taint is in the blood,
+and there is no royal touch can expel it."
+
+Commenting on this Professor Morse says: "Certain results of the modern
+school of anthropology, as presented by Dr. Fletcher, may be briefly
+summed up by stating broadly that in studying the criminal classes from
+the standpoint of anatomy, physiology, external appearance, even to
+the minuter shades of difference in the form of the skull and facial
+proportions, the criminal is a marked man. His abnormities are
+characteristic, and are to be diagnosticated in only one way. That these
+propositions are being rapidly established there can be no doubt. As an
+emphatic evidence of their truth, the criminal is able to transmit his
+criminal propensities even beyond the number of generations allotted to
+inheritance by Scripture."
+
+And where do all these lunatics and criminals come from? From educated
+mothers? from mothers who are in even a small and limited sense allowed
+to own themselves, to think for themselves, control their own lives? Not
+at all. They are the mothers whose lives belong to their men, as this
+learned doctor, who objects to the higher education of women, argues
+that all wives should.
+
+Maternity is an awful power, and I repeat that it strikes back at the
+race, with a blind, fierce, far-reaching force, in revenge for its
+subject status. Dr. Arthur MacDonald, in his "Criminology," says: "The
+intellectual physiognomy shows an inferiority in criminals, and when in
+an exceptional way there is a superiority, it is rather in the nature of
+cunning and shrewdness.... Poverty, misery and organic debility are not
+infrequently the cause of crime."
+
+Who is likely to transmit "organic debility?" The mother of many
+children or of few? Who is likely to stamp a child with low intellectual
+physiognomy? The mother who is educated or she who is the willing or
+unwilling subordinate in life's benefits?
+
+Again he says: "Every asymmetry is not necessarily a defect of cerebral
+development, for, as suggested above, under the influence of education
+defects of function can be corrected, covered up or eradicated." Can
+this be true of criminals and not of normal women?
+
+Again he says: "When we consider the early surroundings, unhygienic
+conditions, alcoholic parents, etc., of the criminal, where he may begin
+vice as soon as consciousness awakes, malformation, due to neglect and
+rough treatment, are not surprising. Yet the criminal malformations may
+be frequently due to osteological conditions. But here still hereditary
+influence and surrounding conditions in early life exert their power."
+Benedikt says: "To suppose that an atypically constructed brain can
+function normally is out of the question."
+
+So long as motherhood is kept ignorant, dependent and subject in status
+just that long will heredity avenge the outrage upon her womanhood, upon
+her personality, upon her individual right to a dignified, personal,
+equal human status, by striking telling blows on the race.
+
+But let me return to the arguments of the author of "Higher Education
+and Woman's Sphere," since he represents all the reactionary thought
+on this topic and because he ignores utterly, as do all of his fellows,
+woman's duty to herself and her awful power for good or evil upon the
+race, according as she makes herself a dignified, developed, educated
+and independent individuality first and a function of maternity second.
+It seems to me that in discussing no other question in life is there so
+little logical reasoning and so much arbitrary dogmatism as in the ones
+which are usually embraced under "woman's sphere." In the first place,
+it is assumed that because women are mothers they are nothing else; that
+because this is her sphere she can have, should have, no other.
+
+Men are fathers. That is their sphere, therefore they should not be
+mentally developed, legally and politically emancipated, socially
+civilized or economically independent. This would appear to most men,
+doubtless, as a somewhat absurd proposition. It appears so to me, but
+it is not one whit less absurd when applied to women. Yet this is
+constantly done. Because women are mothers is the very reason why
+they should be developed mentally and physically and socially to their
+highest possible capacity. The old theory that a teacher was good enough
+for a primary class if she knew the "A B C's" and little else has long
+since been exploded. A high degree of intellectual capacity and a broad
+mental grasp are more important in those who have the training and
+molding of small children than if the children were older. The younger
+the mind the less capable it is to guide itself intelligently and
+therefore the more important is it that the guide be both wise and well
+informed. In a college, if the professor is only a little wiser than his
+class it does not make so much difference. In a post-graduate course it
+makes even less, for here all are supposed to be somewhat mature. Each
+has within himself an intelligent guide, a reasoner, a questioner and
+one to answer questions.
+
+With little children the one who has them in charge most closely must be
+all this and more. She must understand the proportions and relations
+of things and wherein they touch--the bearing and trend of mental and
+physical phenomena. She must furnish self-poise to the nervous child
+and stimulus to the phlegmatic one. She must be able to read signs
+and interpret indications in the mental and moral, as well as in the
+physical being of those within her care. All this she must be able to do
+readily and with apparent unconsciousness if she is best fitted to deal
+with and develop small children. More than this, she must be not only
+able to detect wants but have the wisdom to guide, to stimulate, to
+restrain, to develop the plastic creature in her keeping. If she had the
+wisdom of the fabled gods and the self-poise of the Milo she would not be
+too well equipped for bearing and educating the race in her keeping.
+
+But more than this the ideal mother should know and be. She must have
+love too loyal and sense of obligation too profound to recklessly bring
+into the world children she cannot properly endow or care for. It does
+not appear to occur to the physicians and politicians who discuss this
+question that it may be due to other causes than incapacity that the
+educated women are the mothers of fewer children than are the "ideal
+wives and mothers" of whom they speak in their arguments against her
+higher education--the squaws of the Kaffirs and Black-feet Indian women,
+who "devote but a few hours to the completion of this act of nature," as
+our doctor felicitously expresses it. It is no doubt true that habits
+of civilization do tend to make the dangers of motherhood greater. So do
+they tend to render men less sturdy--less perfect animals. A Kaffir
+or an Indian buck would not find it necessary to stay at home from his
+office, for example, because of a broken arm, or a gun shot wound in the
+leg. He would tramp sturdily through the forest, and sleep in the jungle
+with an arrow imbedded in his flesh. He would sit stolidly down on a log
+and cut it out of himself with a scalping-knife. Yet nobody would think
+it a desirable thing for a member of the Union League club to stop on
+his way up Fifth avenue and attend to his own surgery on the sidewalk.
+They would expect him to faint, and to be "carried tenderly into the
+nearest drug store" and a doctor would be sent for. He would be put
+under the influence of an anaesthetic drug during the operation,
+and carefully nursed for weeks afterward by his devoted wife, and
+intelligent physician. Then if he pulled through it would be heralded
+far and wide as because of his "magnificent physique, his pluck and the
+excellent treatment he received." Well now, is he a less "manly man"
+than is the Kaffir or the Indian buck? Is he a less desirable husband
+and father? Is he "deteriorating in his sphere?" The fact is, the more
+sensitive men have become to pain, whether it be mental or physical, the
+more manly have they grown, the more nearly fitted to be the fathers of
+a race of men and women who are not mere brutes. The race does not need
+the brute type any longer. It has already too many mere human animals
+to deal with--in its asylums, almshouses, prisons and impoverished
+districts.
+
+This world is in no danger of suffering from a lack of children, the cry
+has always been "over population" and even in our new country the wail
+has begun. Not more children, but a better kind of children is what is
+needed. Who will be likely to furnish these? The ideal "squaw wife" or
+the educated woman, who knows that her obligation to her child begins
+before it is born, and does not end even with her death, for she must
+leave it the heritage of a good name, an earnest life, a noble example,
+even after she is gone.
+
+If by "being unfitted for the sphere of wife and mother" it is meant
+that this sphere is truly that of a mere animal--a healthy animal--if
+in order to be an ideal wife to civilized man, woman should remain a
+savage; if to be a mother to an intellectually advancing race she need
+not even comprehend the advance, then truly are these arguments against
+her higher education and intellectual development logical.
+
+But even then they are not fair. Why? Simply because she has not been
+consulted as to her choice in the matter. The argument is still based
+on the tremendous assumption that man's happiness, man's desires, man's
+wishes, man's rights, are the sum total of all desire, all right,
+all freedom, all happiness and all justice. It omits two tremendous
+equations--that of the woman herself and that of her offspring, who will
+have a right to demand of her how she dared equip him so badly for the
+life into which she has taken the liberty to bring him. To demand of her
+how she dared equip herself so ill for her self-imposed task of creator
+of a human soul!
+
+Up to the present time woman's moral responsibility in heredity has been
+below the point of zero, for the reason that she has had no voice in her
+own control nor in that of her children. With the present knowledge
+of heredity she who permits herself to become a mother without having
+demanded and obtained (1) her own freedom from sex dominion and (2)
+fair and free conditions of development for herself and her child, will
+commit a crime against herself, against her child and against the race.
+
+But the learned doctor deplores the fact that educated women are
+bringing fewer children into the world, and argues that, this being the
+case, it shows that education is not within woman's sphere. Now, if
+a man does not choose to become the father of ten or twelve children
+nobody on earth feels called upon to criticise him as not properly
+filling his sphere--as out of his proper sphere--in case he prefers
+to spend more of his time on mental development and progress than upon
+irresponsible physical indulgence and paternity. If he makes up his mind
+that he cannot or does not wish to become responsible for the mental and
+physical endowment and well-being of more than one or two children, or
+of none, nobody says that his "college training unfitted him for the
+holy position of husband and father, which is his sphere." Perhaps the
+college training may have a good deal to do with it in the sense that
+with his developed mind and wider information, his sense of right and
+of personal obligation to the unborn has tended in that direction. We do
+not often notice a vast degree of self discipline of this nature in
+the uneducated, whether it be man or woman, but is this a reason for
+deprecating intellectual training for our boys? Why then for the girls?
+It appears to me that it is one of the greatest possible arguments in
+favor of higher education for women, unless, indeed, it is desirable
+to be mere Kaffirs, both male and female, which has its strong points.
+Kaffirs are healthier, hardier, more irresponsibly, happily brutal. They
+have few nervous moments, I fancy, over the future good of wife or child
+or friend. Their sense of obligation does not keep them awake nights.
+They are neither afraid nor ashamed to create helpless human beings
+simply to furnish targets for another tribe. They have not even a
+glimmer of the thought--still embryonic, indeed, in civilized man--that
+the woman whose life is risked, and the child upon whom life is thrust
+unasked, are of the least consideration in the matter. These have no
+rights which the Kaffir lord is bound to respect. I fancy if he were
+asked a question on the subject he would look at you in stupid, silent
+wonder, if he did not ask: "What have they got to do with it? I am the
+race. What she and my children are for is to look after me, to make me
+comfortable, to be my inferiors, for my glory." Most likely he would be
+so stupidly unequal to even the shadow of a thought not purely egotistic
+that he could not even formulate such preposterous questions and
+self-evident statements as these. But his civilized brother does it for
+him--so why complain?*
+
+
+     * The report of the marriage of another educated and refined
+     white woman to a full-blooded Sioux Indian shows the species
+     of lunacy that attacks those who make a hobby of Indian
+     education. The woman who has cast in her lot with an Indian,
+     whose savagery is only veneered with civilized manners, will
+     repent of her act, as all her sisters in misery have done
+     before her. As a husband the American Indian is not a model,
+     for even long training among white people fails to uproot
+     his native idea that a woman is simply provided to bear him
+     children and to do hard work which is beneath his dignity.--
+     N. Y. Press. June, 1893.
+
+
+Now, suppose a woman would prefer to enjoy her mental capabilities
+to the full and develop these rather than to be the mother of a large
+brood; suppose she thinks she should be a developed woman first before
+daring to become a mother, whose right is it to object? If men prefer
+Kaffir wives there is a large assortment on hand. Squaws, both white and
+red, are to be had for the asking.
+
+Whose right is it to decide that all women shall be squaws in mental
+development, in social position, in legal status and in political and
+economic relations, if all women do not choose to be such? Has a woman
+not the right to be a human being and count one in the economy of life
+before she is a mother---quite aside from her maternal capabilities? If
+not, when and where did she forfeit that right? When and where did _man_
+get his? Every man has and maintains the right to be a man first--a
+unit, a responsible human being; after that--aside from it--he may,
+if he choose, become also a husband and a father. Is it not more than
+possible that the whole human race has been dwarfed and retarded and
+hampered in its upward struggle because of this unaccountable effort
+to climb one side at a time, because brute force and phenomenal egotism
+have always refused to place humanity on terms of equal opportunity and
+leave nature alone?
+
+We are constantly informed that those who insist on equal opportunities,
+on equal status before the law for women are making an effort to subvert
+nature; that nature has done this and that and the other thing with and
+for women. Well if she has, then she will take care of the results in
+an open field. She does not need special, restrictive laws placed on
+the sex that she has already put under the ban of inferiority. If the
+superior sex cannot still more than hold its own without putting a high
+protective tariff on itself then how can it claim to be the superior
+sex? Nature has managed very well with the lower animals, giving them
+equal surroundings and opportunities. That nature is not allowed to
+manage for women is the very point we object to. Men have made all sorts
+of laws for and about women that are not made for and about men. Why
+not make laws and make them apply to the human being, leaving the sex
+of that human being out of the question? It is the special, restrictive,
+unnatural sex provisions in the laws and in the conditions of life
+that are objected to. No woman objects to nature's decree that she is
+a potential mother any more than men object to her decree that they are
+potential fathers.
+
+It is the fact that men insist that women are this and nothing
+more--which nature did not say--to which women object. Nowhere else
+in nature does the male claim all of the other avenues of life as
+his special sex privilege, except alone the one which he cannot
+perform--that of maternity. The sexes stand on an exact equality as to
+opportunity until we come to man. The brain of each is developed to
+the extent of its capacity. The freedom and opportunity for food and
+pleasure are enjoyed by the sexes alike. When the desire for maternity
+is strong upon her is the only time that the female brute animal ever
+becomes a mother. She decides when she is a mere mother, and when she
+is an animal with all the rights and privileges of her genus. With
+the human race alone is one-half governed upon the theory, and its
+opportunities fitted to the idea, that the female is never a unit, never
+a human being, never a person, but that she is simply, solely and only a
+potential mother, whose one "sphere" even then is to be controlled
+and regulated as to time, place and conditions--not by nature, not by
+herself, as with the lower animals, but by the other half of the race,
+which holds itself as first human, individual, and with rights, duties,
+privileges and ambitions pertaining to him as such. His sex relation,
+his potential paternity, is truly his "sphere" also, but that it is his
+whole sphere he has never dreamed. There are women who look at life the
+same way, for the other half of humanity, and decline to read nature's
+teachings--are unable to read them--in any other way.
+
+But aside from all this the doctor first claims that it is the
+intellectual development which cripples maternal capabilities and then
+he proceeds to give the reasons for the poor health of girls, which
+turn out to be bad ventilation in their schools, unwholesome sanitary
+conditions, injudicious or insufficient nourishment or physical and
+mental habits, and a lack of intelligent mothers and teachers, who dress
+and train the girls unhealthfully and in vitiated surroundings. How
+would boys fare under like conditions? Would the doctor say that it was
+the intellectual training which wrecked the health of the boys or would
+he say that it was the absurd conditions under which they got their
+training? Would he advise less mental work or less vile air; fewer
+studies or better light; more healthful clothing and food and exercise,
+or that the boys go homeland devote themselves to the sphere nature
+marked out for them--paternity?
+
+Again the doctor appears to confuse society women with college women. As
+a rule they are totally distinct classes. The mere society woman who--so
+the doctor says--"wrecks her health in rounds of pleasure and bears
+sickly children or none," is, in nine cases out of ten, the exact
+opposite of the intellectual woman--the college-bred girl--who has
+learned before she leaves college the value of health and the obligation
+to herself and others to be well. It is true that certain of the
+fashionable schools which fit girls for society and for nothing else on
+earth call their girls educated; but, since no one else does, it were
+futile to confuse the two classes. The mere society girl, as a rule, is,
+so far as real mental development and higher education and capacity to
+think logically, are concerned, as truly a squaw as if she wore blanket
+and feathers. Indeed, this is what she does wear mentally. She should be
+a perfect wife for the men who wish wives to be physical and not mental
+companions; she would be second only to the Kaffir women in that she
+wears a trifle more clothing.
+
+But even in her case, would it not be wise to infer that she has not
+necessarily physically incapacitated herself for maternity by her
+frivolous life, so much as that she does not care for children, and
+would find them troublesome to a brain, which holds nothing more serious
+and valuable than jewels and reception dates? And, if she did reproduce
+her kind, would this world be benefited? Why this constant cry for more
+children in a world crushed by the weight of sorrow, suffering and wrong
+to those already here? Until children can be born into better conditions
+let us be thankful that there is one class of women too narrowly selfish
+and another class too full of the sense of obligation to add very
+rapidly to this bee hive of misery and discontent and wrong.
+
+The world needs healthier, wiser, truer children, not more of them, and
+until mothers are both educated and rank before the law as human beings,
+they will never be able to give that kind to the world. Just so long as
+men must get their brains from the proscribed sex, just that long
+will their minds remain an "infant industry" and be in need of a high
+protective tariff in the shape of restrictive laws on women to shield
+men from equal competition in a fair field as and with human units. The
+laws of heredity are as inflexible as death. Invariable, they are
+not; but so surely as there is a family likeness in faces, there are
+hereditary reasons for crime, for insanity, for disease, for mental and
+for moral imbecility, and women owe it to themselves, and to the world
+which they populate, not to allow themselves to be made either the
+unwilling, or the supine, transmitters or creators of a mentally,
+morally or physically dwarfed or distorted progeny.
+
+
+     While reading the proof for this book, this interesting
+     article comes to me from Germany and shows how thoroughly
+     the false basis of thought is being undermined, in other
+     countries than our own. H. H. G.
+
+
+"There has been so much discussion concerning the physical and mental
+differences between men and women, and the representatives of social
+science have expressed so many contradictory opinions regarding this
+question, that I feel it my duty, as a physiologist, to give my opinion
+on this important matter. Several fathers of the Church have entirely
+denied that woman has a soul. The canonists write: 'Woman is not formed
+after the image of God; and many philosophers in the same manner have
+considered women of small consequence. In a discourse 'concerning the
+education and culture of women,' Prof Sergi has followed the lead of
+this pessimistic school. The differences between the sexes, to which
+Prof. Sergi lias called attention, are doubtless significant for
+anthropology and physiology but, in my opinion, do not depend on the
+original condition of woman, but are caused by the barriers which have
+been raised by society regarding her destiny. In order to obtain an
+unprejudiced judgment, we must free woman from the yoke which man has
+placed upon her. We must observe her in the natural position, where she
+represents a particular language in the zoological scale. The ladies
+must now pardon me if I compare them with the lower animals, for in this
+way I can the better exalt them.
+
+"As objects of comparison we will observe the most intelligent and
+faithful animals. With regard to dogs and horses we notice little
+difference between either the strength or the temperament of males and
+females. The hunter fears the lioness more than the lion, and the
+same is true of tigers and panthers. Prof. Sergi, in the above-named
+discourse, has expressed the following condemnatory opinion: "Neither in
+her physical nor mental capacities has woman reached man's normal scale
+of development, but on an average has remained so far behind that this
+sex seems to have come to a standstill in the general development of the
+race." This statement has surprised me in the highest degree. It
+appears to me that the marks of the human race, and the real physical
+characteristics which distinguish us from the animals, are feminine
+peculiarities. The principle has been adduced that the structure of the
+brain shows the abyss between man and animals. This is incorrect. There
+is no immeasurable difference between our brain and that of the gorilla,
+and the effects of the central cavities are shown only in the advancing
+development of the expressions of physical activity, not in their
+formation and character. A greater morphological difference between man
+and the animals is shown in the form of the pelvis. No physician,
+even twenty steps away, could mistake the pelvis of man for that of an
+anthropoid ape. The pelvis of woman is a new type which has appeared on
+the earth. Until now we have sought in vain for that animal which shall
+complete the chain between us and animals. It is striking: the narrow,
+high pelvis of the man is more ape-like than that of the woman. If the
+assertion is correct that the upright gait (on two feet) is the mark of
+distinction, and the noblest one for man, then woman certainly possesses
+the advantage of a pelvis particularly suitable for upright walking.
+Darwin has also demonstrated that female animals often revert to
+the masculine type, while the reverse seldom happens. More favorable
+conditions are necessary for the production of a female animal than
+a male, because the female embryo exhibits a greater fulness of life.
+Statistics have shown that under unfavorable conditions more men than
+women are born; also, male animals die more easily than female.
+
+"Several judges of the woman question who consider that the brain of
+woman cannot compare with that of man, add that women should not enter
+into emulation with men in the mental domain lest they should lose the
+charm of their femininity, and because they should give themselves up
+completely to their vocation as wife and mother. This division of the
+work is certainly very useful for man and has greatly assisted him to
+his position of power, and has Pushed woman into the background. But it
+is incorrect that woman loses her womanliness by cultivating her mind."
+
+[From the Deutsche Revue.]
+
+
+
+
+HEREDITY IN ITS RELATIONS TO A DOUBLE STANDARD OF MORALS
+
+
+Read before the World's Congress of Representative Women, Chicago, 1893
+
+
+Ladies and Gentlemen:--As a student of Anthropology and Heredity one
+is sometimes compelled to make statements which seem to the thoughtless
+listener either too radical or too horrible to be true. If I were to
+assert, for example, that good men, men who have the welfare of the
+community at heart, men who are kind fathers and indulgent husbands, men
+who believe in themselves as pure, upright and good citizens, if I were
+to say that even such men are thorough believers in and supporters of
+the theory that it is right and wise to sacrifice the liberty, purity,
+health and life of young girls and women and, through the terrible
+power of heredity, to curse the race, rather than permit men and boys to
+suffer in their own persons the results of their own misdeeds, mistakes
+or crimes, I would be accused of being "morbid" and a "man hater." But
+let us see if the above statement is not quite within the facts.
+
+I shall take as an illustration the words and arguments of a man who
+stands second, only, to our Chief Police officer in the largest city in
+the United States, and since he was permitted to present his arguments
+in the most widely read journals of the country it seems fitting that
+these opinions be dealt with as of unusual importance. All the more is
+this the case since they were intended to influence legislation in the
+interest of State-regulated vice.
+
+Among other things he said:
+
+"Of course there are disorderly houses, but they are more hidden, and
+less of that vice is flaunted, than in any other city in the world. Such
+places have existed since the world began and men of observation know
+that this fact is a safe-guard around their homes and daughters. Men of
+candid judgment, religious men, know, too, that they had ten thousand
+times rather have their live, robust boys err in this indulgence, than
+think of them in the places of those unfortunates on the island, whose
+hands are muffled or tied behind them. This is a desperately practical
+question with more than a theoretical and sentimental side. It ought to
+be talked about and better understood among fathers.
+
+"Thank God that vice is so hidden that Dr. Park-hurst has to get
+detectives to find disorderly houses, and that thousands of wives and
+daughters do not know even of their existence. Such horrible disclosures
+as were made before innocent women and girls in Dr. Parkhurst's audience
+do vastly more harm in arousing their curiosity and polluting their
+minds than a host of sin that is compelled to hide its head. When I was
+Captain of the Twenty-ninth Precinct, I went with Dr. Talmage on
+his errand for sensational information for his sermons. I know, from
+observation and from reports which I was careful to gather, that never
+in their history were the places he described as thronged by patrons,
+largely from Brooklyn, or so much money spent there for debauchery as
+after those sermons."
+
+Now I assume that this Police Inspector is a good citizen, father,
+husband and man. I assume that he is sincere and earnest in his desire
+and efforts to suppress crime and promote--so far as he is able--the
+welfare of the community. I assume, in short, that he is, in intent and
+in fact, a loyal citizen and a conscientious officer. I have no reason
+to believe that he is not doing what he conceives is best and right, and
+yet even he is quoted as advocating the sacrifice of purity to impurity,
+the creating of moral and social lepers in one sex in order that moral
+and social lepers or the ignorantly vicious of the other sex may escape
+the results of their own mistakes or vice. It impresses me anew that
+such teaching, from such authority, is not only the most unfortunate
+that can be put before a boy but that it goes farther perhaps than
+anything else can to confirm in men that conditions of sex mania which
+the Inspector says is more desirable should be cultivated by means of
+regularly recognized state institutions for the utter sacrifice and
+death of young girls than that it should end in the wreck of the sex
+maniac himself and in his own destruction.
+
+But were our statesmen students of heredity, they would not need to
+be told that there is, there can be, no "safeguards around wives and
+daughters" so long as their husbands, fathers and sons are polluting the
+streams of life before they transmit that life itself to those who are
+to be "our daughters and wives."
+
+But not going so deeply into the subject, for the moment, as to deal
+with its hereditary bearings; upon what principle his argument can
+be valid, I fail to see. Why is it better that some girl shall be
+sacrificed, body, mind and soul; why is it better that she shall be his
+victim than that he shall be his own? And then again, the problem is
+not solved when she is sacrificed. He has simply changed the form of his
+disease, and in the change, while it is possible that he has delayed for
+himself the day of destruction, he has, in the process, corrupted
+not only his victim but the social conscience, as well. Were this all
+perhaps it would be still thought wise to follow the advice of the
+Inspector--and alas, of some physicians--and continue to sacrifice under
+the bestial wheel of sex power those who are from first to last prey to
+the conditions of social and legal environment in which they are allowed
+no voice.
+
+But this is not all. The seeming "cure" is no cure at all. It is simply
+a postponement of the awful day for the sex maniac himself and, worse
+than this--more terrible than this--it is the cause of the continuance
+of the mania not only in himself but in his children. He marries some
+honest girl by and by and thus associates, with the burnt-out dregs of
+his life, one who would loathe him did she know his true character
+and his concealed but burning flame of insanely inherited, insanely
+indulged, bestially developed disease. But he is now--under the
+shadow of social respectability and church sanction--to perpetuate his
+unfortunate mania in those who are helpless--the unborn. Heredity is
+not a slip-shod thing. It does not follow One parent and one alone. The
+children of a father who "sowed his wild oats" by the method prescribed
+by the Inspector (and alas, by social custom) are as truly his victims
+as is the pariah of humanity who is to be quarantined in some given
+locality, made a social leper and a physical wreck that he, personally,
+may be neither the one nor the other. But nature is a terrible
+antagonist. She bides her time and when she strikes she does not forget
+to strike a harder, wider-reaching, more terrible blow than can be
+compassed by a single individuality or a single generation. This is
+the lesson that, so far, we have absolutely refused to learn. I do not
+hesitate to take issue with the Inspector, therefore, and say that it
+is far better for society, far better for the fathers of unfortunate
+victims of sex mania, far better for the victim himself that he be "on
+the Island with hands muffled or tied behind him," where death to one
+will end the misery to all, than that by applying the remedy which
+the Inspector recommends, the result should be, as it is, a
+future generation of sex maniacs, scrofulous, epileptic or simply
+constitutionally undermined weaklings.
+
+The boys who are encouraged to "sow their wild oats" and taught that it
+is safe to do so under State regulation should hear the reports of some
+of the students of hereditary traits, conditions and developments. There
+is to-day in an asylum not so far from the Inspector's own door but that
+its records are easy of access, one victim of this pernicious theory
+whose history runs thus: He was a gentleman of good social, financial
+and mental surroundings. He was a "young man about town." He possessed,
+(perhaps it was an hereditary trait) more consciousness of the fact that
+he was a male animal than that he was an intelligent, self-respecting
+human being who had no moral right to degrade another human being for
+his gratification, while he assumed to still retain a higher and safer
+plane than his companions in vice. He was, in brief, no better and no
+worse than many young fellows who--alas, that they are so taught by men
+who believe themselves good and honorable--"turn out to be good family
+men."
+
+After his system was thoroughly inoculated, physically, mentally, and
+morally or ethically, with the tone, the condition, the _trend_ of the
+life which the inspector, and many other good men, insist is unfit for
+the ears of women, but necessary to the welfare of men and "best" for
+them; after his life and flesh had this trend and absorption he married
+a lovely wife from a good family. All went well. Society smiled (this is
+history, not fiction), and said that rapid men when they did marry, made
+the best husbands after all. It said such men knew better how to fully
+appreciate purity at home.
+
+Society did not state that there could be no purity in a stream where
+half of the tributaries are polluted. But society was satisfied to talk
+of "pure homes" so long as there was one pure partner to the compact,
+which resulted in the home. It does not talk of an honest firm if but
+one of its members is (privately and in his own person,) honest while
+he accedes to the dishonest practices of his associates. But society
+was satisfied. A child was born, society was charmed. Four more children
+came. Society said that this late profligate was doing his duty as a
+good citizen of the State. He is now about forty-seven years old. He is
+a "paretic" in an asylum, and, if that were all, then the inspector's
+theory might still stand, because he would say that at least the awful
+calamity had been staved off all these years while he had built a "pure"
+home and left to his country others to take his place. The facts
+are these: His oldest son is an epileptic, the second is a physical
+caricature of a man, the third is a moral idiot. He has no moral sense
+at all, while he is mentally bright. He delights in victimizing dogs,
+cats, or even smaller children. All things, in fact, which are in his
+power are his legitimate prey. Then there is a girl. In the phraseology
+of the doctor she "shows only the general, constitutional signs of her
+inheritance."
+
+The youngest son is now less than seven years old; he is such a
+hopeless sex maniac even now that the parents of other children do not
+dare allow them to be alone with him for one moment.
+
+In telling me of this case the asylum physician, himself a profound
+student of heredity, said of the child:
+
+"He would shame an old Parisian debauchee. The Spartans were not so far
+wrong after all. They killed all such children as these before they had
+the chance to grow up and still further pollute the stream of life."
+And so our good citizen followed only the usual course prescribed by the
+inspector--and by society--and the result is (leaving out the horrible,
+necessary sacrifice of a woman--some woman or some number of women)--the
+result of the plan is this; a house of vice, (in a secluded quarter "for
+greater safety"); a few years of license which he believed to be his
+legitimate perquisite in the world and "no harm done;" the association
+of the later years of his wasted energies, and his pretense and
+vice-soaked life and flesh with the life of a pure girl, and then
+the legacy to society of five more sex maniacs, (who, being born in a
+wedlock, which, by its present terms, laws, and theories, still further
+develops sex mania in men and thereby implants the disease in each
+generation to be fought with or yielded to again); a doddering,
+drivelling wreck of a man in an asylum at the prime of his manhood; a
+worse than widowed wife with a knowledge in her soul which is an undying
+serpent as she looks in despair upon the five lives she has given, in
+her pathetic ignorance and trust. And his is not an unusual record.
+Of course its details are seldom known outside of the family and
+physicians. It is legitimate fruit of a tree which society in its
+avarice and ignorance and vice carefully fosters. It is the tree, the
+fruit of which fills our jails, mad-houses, asylums, poorhouses and
+prisons year after year, and yet we tend it carefully and keep its root
+strong and vigorous by exactly the methods recommended by the police
+inspector and by all believers in State regulated and State licensed
+vice, that is: It must be systematically continued for the good of
+"robust boys who might else be on the island with muffled hands. It must
+be kept in certain quarters and secret for greater safety to men, and
+that our wives and daughters may not hear of it."
+
+Not hear of it until when? Not until the years come when the honest
+physician must tell her, if not the cause, at least the horrible facts,
+when it is too late for her to prevent the awful crime of giving life
+to the children of such a husband. We hold it a terrible crime to take
+life. Is it not far more terrible in such a case to give life? In the
+one instance the results to the victims are simply the sudden ending of
+a more or less desirable existence in a more or less comfortable
+world. In the other case it is assuming to thrust unasked upon helpless
+children a living death, an inheritance of pollution which must, and
+does, develop itself in one or another form as the years go by. Which is
+the greater, more awful responsibility, to give or to take life? The law
+says the latter.
+
+Is it certain that heredity--nature's surest and least heeded
+voice--does not in many cases say the former? When society is wiser it
+will be a bit more like the Spartans. It will say: Far better that they
+be "on the island" than that they lay their fatal curse upon the world
+to expand and blight to the third and fourth generation, and, I believe,
+it was to be the "sin of the _fathers_" which was thus to follow the
+children, was it not? What was that sin? Are not its roots to be found
+in the very soil advocated as good by believers in State regulation and
+in a double standard of morals, and in the ignorance which they say
+is desirable for "our wives and daughters." Ignorance that such things
+exist as the secret, legalized, regulated slaughter (social, moral, and
+actually physical) of hundreds and thousands of one sex at the demands
+and for the gratification of the other?
+
+Are there not sex maniacs in more directions than one?
+
+Is not this very double standard theory in itself a sex mania?
+
+Are not the men who advocate and the legislators who make laws which
+recognize these double moral standards, and who ignore the plainest
+fingerboards set up by nature in hereditary conditions--are not these,
+in a sense, one and all sex maniacs?
+
+When they talk of "keeping our wives and daughters" pure and ignorant
+they do not seem to realize that the taint of blood which flows in the
+veins of that very daughter, which she herself does not understand, and
+which an ignorant mother does not dream of, and therefore cannot stand
+guard over, flows as an ever present threat that she shall be one of
+those very outcasts whom her own father is laboring to quarantine in
+darkness and oblivion!
+
+Nature has no favorites.
+
+Heredity does not spare _your_ daughter, and yet men who plant the seeds
+of sex perversion in their own families have the infinite impudence to
+cast from their doors the blossom of their own tillage!
+
+They go into heroics about being "disgraced." "You are no longer child
+of mine!" that rings in a thousand pages of literature, in one hundred
+cases out of one hundred and one should be met by the reply: This act
+of mine proves as no other could that _I am_, indeed, _your_ daughter!
+Blood of your blood and flesh of your flesh! Nature has told your secret
+through me. Let us cry quits. You put the cursed taint in my blood when
+I could not protect myself. _I_ am the one to complain, not you. Do not
+cry out for quarter like a very coward. Face your record made in flesh
+and blood. This polluted life of mine is Nature's reply to _your_ life
+of license and uncleanness! _I_ am Nature's reply to your uncontrolled
+passions--_inside of marriage and out_; I, the moral or mental idiot;
+I, the disease polluted wreck; I, the epileptic; I, the lunatic; I,
+the drunkard; I, the wrecker of the lives of others--I am your lineal
+descendant! You sacrificed others recklessly, by act and by law, to your
+desires and your arbitrary sex power; you cultivated a taint in your
+blood.
+
+It is true that you took the precaution to transmit it through purity
+and ignorance to me. That very purity and ignorance of my mother served
+to save your peace of mind and enable you to take advantage of her for
+infinite opportunity for mischief. It, alas, could not save me, for I am
+your child also. Her ignorance was your partner in a crime against
+me, her helpless infant! Do not complain. Dislike my face as you will;
+presented to you in whatsoever form or phase of distortion it may be,
+I am your direct, lineal descendant! Build better! Or go down with the
+structure you planned for other men's daughters and in which you locked
+me before I was born!
+
+If, because of their sex, men demand privileges, rights, emoluments,
+honors, opportunities and freedom, which they claim as good for and
+necessary to them and their welfare, while they insist that all these
+are not to be allowed to women--would be her damnation--are not these,
+also, sex maniacs? Has not humanity been long enough cursed by so
+degrading and degraded, so ignorant and so fatally wrong a mental,
+moral, social and legal outlook? I am attacking no individual. I am
+using an individual utterance on this subject simply to the better
+present the side of the case which is sustained by all of our present
+laws, conditions and male sentiment. I am wishing to present the
+reverse side of this awful picture. From man's point of view it is often
+presented--and in many ways. But once or twice have I ever seen the
+other side in print where it was looked at from a rational or scientific
+point of view.
+
+A short time ago a book was written which touched, to a moderate degree,
+woman's side as well as the general human side of this problem. It was
+put in the form of a novel that it might appeal to a larger reading
+public than would an essay or magazine article. It had a tremendous
+sale, and the only--or the chief--adverse criticism made upon it was,
+that it pictured a type of father which either did not exist or was too
+rare to be even taken as an illustration in fiction. Now, it is this
+very type of father of which the Inspector speaks thus: "Men of candid
+judgment, religious men, know too, that they had rather have their live,
+robust boys err in this indulgence than think of them in the places of
+those unfortunates on the island, etc., etc."
+
+That is exactly the point made by the book referred to, and which was
+criticised by one man as "morbid in its imaginings about fathers." Is
+this Inspector "morbid?"
+
+He said: "This is a desperately practical question with more than a
+theoretical or sentimental side. It ought to be talked about and better
+understood among fathers."
+
+And I agree with him perfectly so far.
+
+It is indeed, a desperately practical question for both men and
+women and Anthropology and Heredity teach, in all peoples and in each
+succeeding generation, that the question has not been solved by the
+adoption of the double standard of morals!
+
+It is so desperately practical that the land is literally covered with
+the deplorable results, in hospitals, in prisons, in imbecile asylums
+and in mad houses; but when he goes on to "thank God that this vice is
+hidden, and that thousands of wives and daughters do not know of even
+its existence," it impresses me that the Inspector is, in deploring the
+ignorance of fathers and commending it in mothers, attempting to still
+farther hedge boys about with a condition which inevitably makes of them
+sex maniacs in more directions than one. Is not his mother as deeply
+interested in her boy's welfare as is his father? Is it not to her eyes
+and wisdom his younger days are most left and to whose watchfulness,
+intelligence and information he must be trusted not to develop or
+acquire fatal habits? or if he has them in his blood as a heritage from
+his father, or from his father's father, by whom vice was looked upon as
+"safe" if only kept from the ears and eyes of wife and daughter; is
+it not imperative that the trained eye and mind of a woman who is not
+ignorant of nor blind to the very earliest indications that Nature has
+sent a message that there is a blood taint, so that, in so far as it
+is possible she may labor to modify and control his awful inheritance
+before it has him in a fatal grip?
+
+Instead of this being the case it is advocated as desirable that she
+be even "ignorant of the existence of such vice!" It is due more to the
+fact that she has been ignorant than to any other one thing that, later
+on, the boy's developed hereditary curse, or his acquired bad habits,
+have so fixed themselves upon his young mind and body that the Inspector
+and the boy's father find themselves in a position to choose between
+a straight jacket for the boy himself, or first a wrecked and outraged
+womanhood and later on descendants that are marked with a brand that is
+worse than Cain's.
+
+The Inspector says that such disclosures as Dr. Talmage's sermon before
+innocent women and girls do vastly more harm than a host of sin that is
+compelled to hide its head.
+
+Now what is the implication? Did he mean to imply that those places
+have, since the sermon, been thronged with the "wives and daughters of
+Brooklyn?" If not, how did he know that it "polluted _their_ minds?" Has
+he not jumped at that conclusion and cast a slur upon the wrong sex? the
+sex that did _not_ "squander its money in patronizing these resorts?"
+Was not that a rather desperate effort to sustain an argument by a
+_non-sequitur?_
+
+Are women's minds polluted by a knowledge of vice which they avoid
+intelligently rather than simply escape from ignorantly? Are ignorance
+and innocence the same thing? Did the Inspector believe that a knowledge
+of the degradation into which their sons are led and pushed by just
+such theories as these backed by a blind hereditary impulse which has
+no intelligent care from a wise parentage, did he believe that such
+knowledge would drive or lure "wives and daughters" into polluting vice?
+And is it not strange to hear of a condition of things which can be
+spoken of as good and desirable for boys and men which is in the same
+breath depicted as pollution even to the ears of women? Can good women
+live with these same men and not be polluted? How about the children?
+
+Man has for ages past, claimed to be the logical animal. Beasts have no
+logic at all, and in this regard woman has been gallantly classed, if
+not exactly with the beasts, certainly not with man. We may say she has
+been counted by him as a sort of missing link. She had logic--if she
+agreed with all he said. Otherwise she was an emotional, irrational,
+unclassified creature.
+
+Now, when it comes to dealing with his fellows, man has--in the main--a
+fair amount of reason and logic; but the moment he is called upon to
+think of woman as simply a human being like himself, to deal with and
+for her as such, to give her a chance to do the same with, and by,
+and for herself, that moment man becomes an emotional, irrational sex
+maniac. He is absolutely unable to look upon woman as first of all, a
+free individuality, a human being on exactly the same plane as himself.
+She is instantly "wife," "daughter," or victim to his mind always. Never
+for one instant does he contemplate her as an entity entitled to life
+and liberty, for, and because of herself. Always it is her relation to
+him that he sees and deals with--and alas for his theories of justice,
+gallantry or right--always it is as his subordinate, for his use, abuse,
+or pleasure, that he thinks of and plans for her.
+
+Why confine gilded houses to one quarter? To keep their vicious inmates
+away from "our wives and daughters, and the streets which they are on,"
+says the Inspector. But that is making sex irregularity a reason for
+restricting liberty of residence and resort--even of promenade and
+pleasure. That is to say, it restricts the liberty of one party to the
+vice--to the irregularity of sex relations. And unfortunately it is the
+wrong party who is restricted to compass the object claimed! The one
+whose vice can and actually does injure--the wife and daughter--(the
+pure woman who is his victim in marriage, and the daughter who is his
+victim in heredity) the one who can do infinite wrong, is left to roam
+at large!
+
+It is the wrong partner in vice from whom State regulation seeks to
+"protect" "our wives and daughters." It is the one who can do the
+intelligent wife or daughter no harm whatever!
+
+Man, we are told, is the logical animal. Why not apply a bit of logic
+right here? Why not set a watch on and restrict the one who does the
+real and permanent harm to the race?
+
+Men claim that it is necessary to their health, happiness and comfort
+to sacrifice utterly the characters, health, lives, and even liberty of
+locomotion of thousands of women every year. This is simply infamous and
+Nature teaches its infamy and unnaturalness.
+
+From the protozoan to the highest beast or bird there is no distinction
+of right, or opportunity or privilege as to the occupation, life,
+liberty or the pursuit of happiness anywhere in nature between the
+sexes until we reach the one species of animal where one sex has been
+subordinated to the other by artificial industrial conditions--by
+financial dependence.
+
+Now, it so happens that as civilization goes on, Nature is taking a most
+terrible revenge upon the human race for this sex perversion. Asylums
+multiply, weaklings abound, criminals and lunatics blossom out from
+heretofore honored ancestry. Nature is a terrible antagonist. Having
+the power, man may pollute the fountain of life if he will, but Nature
+revenges herself on him still.
+
+He may cover his vice with the shimmer of gold, but the curse of the
+serpent is there as of old. He may bind up the eyes of justice and
+right; but he learns at the last 'tis a desperate fight. A cover for
+vice in the father may be as fatal as ignorant maternity. Combined they
+sow broadcast on the air the horrors of life and breed its despair.
+It is to the "ignorance of our wives and daughters" on these points,
+combined with the silence of law-protected vice for men and "regulated"
+infamy for women that is due the possibility of passing in some states a
+bill to reduce to ten years the "age of consent" at which a girl is held
+legally responsible for her own ruin. If there was one good woman in the
+legislature no such bill would have a ghost of a chance to pass, or be
+kept from the public knowledge and rushed through a "secret session."
+Yet fathers of daughters pass such bills!
+
+Is it true, after all, that men are not so good protectors of women as
+is woman of her sister? Ten years of age! Why, a girl is a baby then!
+Think of your own little girl at ten! Do not dare to stop thinking
+and talking and writing on the subject until such infamous laws are an
+impossibility!
+
+Do not allow any one to make you believe that it is not "modest" or
+becoming for a woman to know about--and fight to the bitter death--any
+and all such laws! You have no right _not_ to know it! You have no right
+to dare to bring into this world a child who shall be subject to such
+a law! It seems beyond belief but it is true. And then men talk of
+"protecting" women! Men who hold that a girl is not old enough to give
+lawful consent to lawful marriage or to the sale of property until she
+is 18 years old, say she is, at the age of ten, to be held old enough to
+give consent to her own eternal disgrace, ruin, degradation!
+
+That such atrocious acts are possible is largely due to the fact that
+"our wives and daughters" do not know these things. The ignorance of
+one sex in all the vital affairs of life coupled with its financial
+dependence upon the other sex has gone far to make of all men sex
+maniacs and of so many children the victims of a polluted ancestry and
+the future progenitors of an enfeebled race.
+
+A famous physician who is an expert in these matters says in one of his
+articles, read before his brother practitioners: "There are few families
+in this country not tainted with one or another form of sex pollution.
+If it is not physical in its demonstrations it is mental. Often it is
+both, and to the trained eye, and thought, of a student of anthropology
+and heredity, the present outlook is pitiful, indeed."
+
+And again he says--and remember that it is not said by a woman about
+man. It is the serious warning of a famous expert to his fellows who
+were to meet and guard, in their profession, against the hereditary
+results of just the sort of legislative provision which has gone far to
+make of man the sex maniac he is. He said: "The wild beast is slumbering
+in us all. It is not necessary, always, to invoke insanity to account
+for its awakening." And if you will take the trouble to understand those
+few sentences by a great specialist you will have found the whole of my
+essay a mere illustration.
+
+
+
+
+DIVORCE AND THE PROPOSED NATIONAL LAWS
+
+
+In discussing any question which involves the welfare and happiness of
+people who live to-day, or are to live hereafter, I think we may take
+it for granted that we must consider it in the light of conditions
+now existing or those likely to exist in the future. We must clearly
+understand to what domain the question fairly belongs; whether it is a
+question of vital importance between human beings in their relations
+to each other, and whether it is a matter in which the law is the final
+appeal. We may fairly assume that the questions of marriage and divorce
+have to do with this world only. Indeed, that point is yielded by the
+marriage service adopted by the various Christian churches when it says,
+"until death us do part," and by the reply said to have been given by
+Christ himself, to the somewhat puzzling query put to him as to whose
+wife the seven times married woman would be in heaven.
+
+According to the record, he evaded (somewhat skilfully it must be
+admitted) the real question; but his reply at least warrants us in
+saying that he held the view that the marriage relation had nothing
+whatever to do with another life, but belonged to the province of this
+world only, and the necessities and duties of human beings toward each
+other here.
+
+This point is conceded, too, by every church when it permits the widowed
+to re-marry, and gives them clerical sanction.
+
+Therefore the religious and the civil basis of discussion are logically
+on the same premises, and in America, at least, where there is no
+contest as to the established fact that all divorces must be legal and
+not ecclesiastical, it is clear that the law does not recognize religion
+at all in the matter. While a religious marriage service may hold in
+law, a religious divorce would be illegal, in fact, fraudulent. It is
+conceded on all sides then, as we have seen, that marriage is a matter
+pertaining strictly to this world. It affects the happiness or misery of
+men and women in their relations with each other, and not at all in any
+assumed relation with another life, or a supposititious duty to a Deity.
+
+This would logically take marriage, as it has already taken divorce,
+out of the hands of the clergy, since religion and its duties are based
+primarily and necessarily upon the relations of human beings to another
+life and to a supernatural or Supreme Being. The terms of marriage and
+divorce--so far as the public is concerned--are questions of morals and
+economics.
+
+That is to say, if there were but one man and one woman in the world
+it would be for them to say whether they would be married at all,
+or--having been married--whether they would stay married, if they
+discovered that the relation was productive of misery to one or both.
+They could divorce themselves at will without injury and without fear.
+But since humanity is associated in groups constituting what is called
+society or the state, and since under present conditions men are the
+chief producers and owners of wealth and the means of livelihood, the
+support of women and children is a matter which affects the welfare of
+all so associated, in case the parents separate. The question of divorce
+is, therefore, partly in the field of economics and has to do with
+the general welfare. This being the case, law and not religion rightly
+regulates its terms. People marry because they believe that it will
+promote their happiness to do so. I am talking now of ordinary
+people under ordinary circumstances, and not of those victims of
+institutions--such as kings and princesses--who are married for state
+reasons. Nor am I writing of those still greater victims who are taught
+that it is their "duty" to marry in order to produce as many of their
+kind as possible in a world already sadly overpopulated by the very
+class thus influenced and controlled by greed and power. That is to
+say, they are so taught by those who are benefited by the unintelligent
+increase of an ignorant population.
+
+Since marriage is the most important, solemn, aed sacred contract into
+which two people can enter, and since it affects--or may affect--others
+than themselves, the State requires that it be public, that the form of
+contract be legal and that its terms be respected by both parties, to
+the end that others may not be deceived or left helpless.
+
+But if the parties to this contract learn to their sorrow that the
+association is productive of misery, if they grow to loathe each other,
+if instead of happiness, it results in sorrow or ill health, then surely
+the State is not interested in forcing those two people to continue in
+a condition which is opposed to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
+happiness. It is however, concerned in the terms of the separation since
+these do or may affect others than the two principals, and since one or
+both of these, having entered into a contract (in which the State was
+a witness) and now being desirous of terminating said contract, may be
+defrauded in a manner which vitally affects society. It can hardly be
+claimed that society is benefited by forcing two people to live in the
+same house and become the parents of children, when these two people
+have for each other only loathing or contempt. If it cannot benefit
+society, then who is benefited by the forced continuance of the marriage
+relation? The children? Can any rational person believe that it is
+well to rear children in an atmosphere of hatred, of contention, of
+rebellion?
+
+Do not our penal institutions answer this question? Are the inmates of
+these from homes where harmony reigned? Statistics show plainly that
+they are not; and they also show that an enormous per cent, of them
+come from the families of those who are not allowed by their church the
+relief of divorce from bonds grown galling. Children conceived by hatred
+and fear, overpowered by the lowest grade of passion known to the world
+(which cannot be called brutal, because the brutes are not guilty of
+it), bred in an atmosphere of contention, deception, and dread, are fit
+material for, and statistics prove that they are the class from which
+are recruited the inmates of, the reformatory and penal institutions.
+
+Is it fair to a child that it be so reared? Is it not right--is it not
+the duty of the State to secure, so far as it may, quite the opposite
+conditions of life for its helpless future citizens? Are the highest and
+best types of character bred in discord? Is the State interested in
+the high character of its future citizens? All these questions and many
+others are involved.
+
+But setting aside these most important features I would like to ask
+who is benefited by keeping together those whom hate has separated? The
+wife? Not at all. She is simply degraded below the frail creatures of
+the street whom men deride. She becomes the helpless instrument of her
+own degradation. The woman of the street may own herself, she may
+change her life, she may refuse to continue in the course which has lost
+her her self-respect. The unwilling wife is helpless. She has lost all.
+She has no refuge. She is a more degraded slave than ever felt the lash,
+for her slavery is one which sears her soul and will, if she becomes a
+mother, sear the bodies and souls of children borne by her unwillingly.
+
+It can hardly be urged that it could add to the dignity or honor of
+womanhood for a tie to be indissoluble which in itself, under such
+conditions, is a degradation and an insult. Take for example a drunken,
+a dissolute or a brutal husband. Can it be said to strike at anything
+dear or noble for womankind that some wife is absolutely freed from such
+companionship? That she be no longer forced to bear his society or even
+his name? Surely no good end can be served by the outward continuance of
+a tie already broken in fact. No one can be made better, no one happier.
+If it is urged that a God is to be considered, surely such a state of
+things could hardly excite his pleasure or admiration. If marriages are
+made in heaven those that prove a misfit--so to speak--can scarcely
+be claimed by believers in an all-wise ruler to emanate from there.
+Religious people will, I fancy, be the last to assert that wrong had its
+source in such a locality; while people who look upon this question as
+wholly outside of sacramental lines will be slow to see beauty or good
+in a relation which is a servitude and a degradation on the one side and
+a brutal domination on the other.
+
+How does the question stand then? The wife is degraded, the children
+are brutalized--are born with evil tendencies--a God can hardly be
+overjoyed; society is endangered and robbed, is deprived from its
+very cradle of its inalienable right to happiness. Who is left to be
+considered? The husband?
+
+Would any man worthy the name wish to be the husband of an unwilling
+wife? If he has a spark of honor or manhood in him could such a
+relationship, held by force, give him happiness? Would it not be
+unendurable to him?
+
+If he is so far below the brutes in his relationship with his mate that
+he can hold his position only by force is he a fit father of children?
+Is the State interested in reproducing his kind?
+
+It is true that there are several reasons why divorce is far more
+important to women than to men--notwithstanding which fact the question
+is usually discussed in the Press and Legislature by men only, the
+other interested party not being supposed to have enough at stake to
+be consulted or heard in the matter at all. But it is also true that an
+uncongenial marriage deprives a man of all of the best that is in him;
+it reduces his home to a mere den of discomfort and wretchedness; it
+forces him to be either a hypocrite at or an absentee from his own
+hearthstone and deprives him of the blessedness and sympathy--the holy
+tenderness and beauty--that should be the star in the crown of every man
+entitled to the name of husband and father.
+
+But he still owns his own body. He cannot be made an unwilling father
+of timid, diseased, or brutalized children; he is not a financial
+dependent. For these and other reasons an unhappy marriage can never
+mean to a man what it must always mean to a woman.
+
+There is an argument frequently put forward that divorce is wrong
+and unfair to the children of those so separated in case the divorced
+parties remarry and other children are added to the family. One great
+Prelate asked in his article on this subject: "Can we look with anything
+short of horror upon such a condition of things? Here is a family, we
+will say, composed of the children of three divorced fathers--all by one
+mother."
+
+This is an extreme and not a pleasing case, we may admit; but suppose
+the divorce were by death would the distinguished Prelate be so shocked?
+Is it especially uncommon, indeed, for the most devout men and women to
+marry three times? Are "half" brothers and sisters and "step" children a
+subject of moral shock to the most rigid religionists? Jesus appeared to
+approve of a woman marrying seven times. How about a mixed family there?
+Does the distinguished Prelate take issue with his Lord? No, the whole
+question hinges on the continuance of the life of the parties separated
+or divorced. If one of them dies the mixed family relation is not
+counted either a sin or a shame. If they live and the divorce is granted
+by law instead of by nature it is pronounced both.
+
+In whose interest is this distinction maintained? We have seen that it
+is not for the honor of the wife that a loathsome marriage relation
+be indissoluble, that it can lend neither dignity nor happiness to the
+husband, that it is one of the fruitful causes of diseased and criminal
+childhood and that it is, therefore, necessarily, a menace to society.
+
+Legally, morally, economically, then, it is a mistake, and it is
+productive of great misery. Who then is benefited? Why is the attempt
+so strongly made to revise the laws and check the growing liberality in
+divorce legislation?
+
+Who are the movers in that direction and upon what do they base their
+arguments? What is the final appeal of these combatants? I shall answer
+the two last questions first. The orthodox clergy and their followers,
+basing their arguments on the Bible as the final appeal, demand that
+this reform go backward. Why?
+
+Because their creeds and tenets have always claimed that marriage is a
+sacrament and not a legal contract, that it is or should be under the
+control of the clergy, and that the Bible and St. Paul say so and so
+about it. The Catholic Church has, by keeping control of the marriage of
+its believers, made sure of the children--their education--and therefore
+insured to itself their future adherence. It has perpetuated itself and
+its power by this means. It is, therefore, not difficult to see why that
+church so warmly opposes any movement which can only result in disaster
+to its growth and power. Her communicants are taught that it is their
+duty to increase and multiply, and this in spite of the fact that
+poverty and crime, want and ignorance stare in the face a large per
+cent, of the very class which it is thus sought to swell. The Catholics
+are the most prolific and furnish _by far_ the largest per cent, of both
+paupers and criminals of any other class of the community. With
+them marriage is a sacrament; divorce is not allowed, or if allowed,
+remarriage is prohibited. Children are born with astounding frequency
+of subject mothers to brutal fathers. They are bred in a constant
+atmosphere of contention, bickering, and in short, warfare. The result
+is inevitable. Contest--war--brings out all the worst elements and
+passions in human nature. This fact is well understood where war
+is conducted between large bodies of men; but in such case there is
+supposed to be a motive--some patriotic principle involved to stir and
+call out, also, some of the better nature; but in the petty warfare of
+the wretched household there is nothing to redeem life from the basest.
+
+But suppose all this is true, say the advocates of the forced
+continuance of the marriage relation; the Bible--our creeds--teach us
+to refuse the relief of divorce, and we are bound at any cost to sustain
+the indissolubility of the marriage bond. True, for those who accept
+these creeds or the Bible as a finality; but to those who do not, the
+State owes a duty. Church and State are separated in America, it is
+claimed. A magistrate can marry a man and woman, just as he can draw up
+another contract. When the State went that far it told the people that
+it did not hold marriage as a sacrament. It then and there took the
+ground that it was a legal contract, and had no necessary connection
+with religious belief or observance. It logically follows, then, that if
+the State deals with marriage as a thing not touched by religious belief
+or Biblical injunction, that the question of divorce--the terms of the
+contract--are also quite outside of the province of the clergy. This
+being the case, it appears as futile and as foolish to discuss this
+question--making of it a religious one--from the basis of the creeds or
+the Bible, as it would be to discuss the rate of interest on money or
+the wages per day for labor, from the same outlook.
+
+Believers in the finality of Biblical teaching are at liberty to hold
+their marriages as indissoluble, but have no right to insist upon
+forcing their religious dogmas upon others, nor to attempt to
+crystalize them into law for those who believe otherwise. No doubt
+the Bible gave the best light of the Jews, in the day in which it was
+written, on these and other subjects. We are quite willing to suppose
+that the various creeds and usages of the churches did the same, for the
+people whom they represented, but the creeds and the Bible have nothing
+whatever to do with the social and economic problems of our day, nor
+with the legal questions of our time.
+
+The more they are dragged into places where they do not belong, the more
+it is discovered that "revision" is necessary. The old creeds and the
+Bible are fast undergoing revision and are recut to fit the people and
+the present. It is quite impossible to revise and recut the people and
+the present to fit the old creeds and the literature of the Jews.
+
+Let us have done with such trifling with the serious problems of the
+day. It is not at all a question of whether St. Paul said or thought
+this or that about divorce. It is not at all important what some dead
+and gone Potentate said; the question before us is: What is best for
+society as it is now? Indeed it appears to me futile to discuss this
+subject at all if it is to be done from a theological basis. Every
+fairly intelligent person knows what the church teaches in the matter.
+One paragraph and a half dozen Biblical references with a notable name
+appended is all the space necessary to consume. We all know that in
+substance the Catholic church's answer to the question "Is Divorce
+wrong?" is emphatically, "Yes."
+
+We are also aware that that church revises its opinions more slowly than
+does any other.
+
+It is equally well known to the intelligent reader that the variations
+from the emphatic Yes of the Catholic church, run the scale in the
+Protestant denominations from a moderately firm yes to a distinctly
+audible no. Given the denomination and a slight knowledge of its
+history--whether it claims to be infallible and divine, as the Catholic
+and Episcopal, or only partly so as the Methodist, Presbyterian, and
+Congregational, or whether as the Unitarian and Universalist they claim
+to be human only--and you are prepared to state what the adherents
+of those churches will hold as to the marriage and divorce questions
+without resort to long papers or circumlocution. Now, for the various
+sects to teach or believe what they please on this and other subjects
+is their undoubted right so long as they do not attempt to control other
+people in matters which are outside of the province of the church, and
+so long as their own adherents are satisfied to abide by the decisions
+of the communion to which they belong.
+
+The question is, then, what is best for society as it is and as it is
+likely to be? What is best for society as it is now? Who is benefited or
+who harmed by the continuance of a loathesome relationship? Is the State
+and are the people interested in refusing to allow two people to correct
+a mistake once made? Is it for the good of anyone to make mistakes
+perpetual?
+
+I repeat that it is a question in economics and morals. It has nothing
+whatever to do with religion.
+
+Let us keep our minds clear of rubbish, and above all let us request
+that our legislators do not tamper with a question of such vital
+importance to women, in any manner (as is just now proposed) to
+crystalize the divorce laws into national form and application,
+until women be heard in the matter, freely and fully, without fear or
+intimidation. If it were proposed to make a national law for railroads
+without giving a hearing to but one side of the question; if it
+were suggested that Congress pass an educational bill of universal
+application without permitting any but its friends to be heard; if a
+general measure to control interest on money were up, and none of the
+money-lenders were given a hearing--only borrowers--there would be a
+great stir made about the injustice and inequity of such legislation.
+But it is deliberately proposed to pass a national marriage and divorce
+law, to regulate the one condition of life which is absolutely vital
+to women under present conditions, and to make this law a part of the
+national Constitution, without taking the trouble to hear one word from
+her on the subject. Let us agitate this question thoroughly. Let us
+discuss it on the basis where it belongs; where our laws have already
+put it--the economic, and moral, and social basis. Let us clear the
+track of both sentimentality and superstition. Let us hear from both
+sides--from both parties interested. We do not drag religion into the
+interstate commerce debate. When a bill comes up for street-paving,
+nobody inquires what kind of stone St. Paul was interested in having put
+down. When the Chinese bill is before us, it is not necessary to know
+what St. Sebastian thought of the laundry business. Their views may have
+been sound; but they do not apply. I repeat, therefore, let us keep to
+the subject, keep the subject on the basis where it belongs, have our
+conclusions at least blood relatives of our premises, and let us hear
+from both sides of the fireplace. And finally, let us discuss this
+matter thoroughly but let us keep clear of passing a national law until
+both parties to the contract be heard, not only in the press, but in the
+legislative deliberations.
+
+A recent writer of one of the ablest and clearest papers yet
+contributed on this subject, in arguing in favor of an amendment to
+the Constitution, which shall make divorce laws uniform, says: "Let it
+clearly be shown that Congress can best legislate in the interests of
+the _whole people_ (the italics are mine) upon the subject, and the
+people, and their representatives, the legislative assemblies, can be
+trusted to authorize it." It does not occur to even this able writer
+that half of the "whole people" will have no representation in either
+the legislative assemblies nor in Congress, and that on this subject
+above all others, this unrepresented half has far more at stake than has
+the other, and that when an amendment to the national Constitution is
+accomplished, it is a very much more difficult thing to correct any
+blunder it may contain, than it would be if the blunder were not made a
+part of that instrument.
+
+All men appear to agree that marriage is preeminently woman's "sphere."
+Certainly under existing conditions, and under conditions as they are
+likely to be for some time to come, it is the one field open to her--it
+is her "lot." At present she has nothing to say as to the laws which
+control--as to the terms of this single contract of her life--the one
+disposition she is free to make of herself and still retain her social
+status and secure support. It would seem only humane to place no farther
+thorns in her path. Until she has a voice--is represented--the "whole
+people" cannot amend the Constitution in respect to marriage and
+divorce--in respect to the "one sphere" which all men concede is woman's
+one peculiar right.
+
+No laws on these subjects--above all others--should be crystalized into
+national form and appended to the Constitution until it is done by the
+help and with the consent of the half of the people whom it will most
+seriously affect.
+
+
+
+
+LAWSUIT OR LEGACY
+
+
+     Many of the worst features in Life assurance contracts or
+     policies, mentioned in this essay, have been amended or
+     corrected since its publication, but there remain enough
+     other conditions of doubtful fairness to the policy holder
+     to, I think, justify including this essay in this book.
+
+     Among these conditions, is the clause, in all Tontine
+     policies,--and nearly all policies now issued are Tontine in
+     one form or another,--which puts all accumulations on
+     policies derived from "dividends," premiums, etc., on lapsed
+     policies etc., into the hands of directors or officers of
+     the companies, to do with as they choose, the policy holder
+     being made, by the terms of his contract or policy, to agree
+     to accept whatever proportion of surplus there may be
+     "apportioned by the Society" or Company, to his policy, when
+     it shall have matured. That is, the policy holder is not
+     represented as against the Company, in the determining of
+     what, if any surplus, his policy is or should be entitled
+     to. "At the end of the Tontine Period, if the person proposed
+     for assurance be then living, and the policy in force, the
+     policy shall participate in the accumulated surplus, derived
+     from policies on the Free Tontine plan, both existing and
+     discontinued, as may then be apportioned by the Society."
+     (Italics mine.) This leaves the policy holder absolutely at
+     the mercy of the Company, or its actuary who is, or may be,
+     the instrument of the officers of the Company. And it will
+     not do to reply that "the policy holders are the Company"
+     for it is well known, at least among insurance experts, that
+     this is one of the fictions of the business in its practical
+     management.
+
+     In illustration of certain other abuses in the management of
+     this beneficent and important business, I have also
+     included, brief, humorous sketch, which touches some of
+     these, a propoi of the fictions versus the facts.
+
+
+Within the past twenty years the business of life-insurance has grown
+with such wonderful rapidity, and changed so radically in its methods
+and contracts, that it is to-day as unlike its old self as the
+railway-car is unlike the stage-coach.
+
+The old life-insurance contract undertook to define burglary, riot, and
+rebellion, and the companies held themselves free from obligations which
+they had deliberately assumed, if the other party to the contract did
+not conform to the rules of conduct laid down under their definition
+and requirements. Nowhere else in the history of large business
+organizations has the debtor regulated his obligation by the morals of
+his creditor and liquidated his debt by acknowledging its existence, and
+then simply charging moral obliquity on the part of said creditor as the
+reason for not paying it.
+
+If A owes B fifty dollars, and B is known to be a thief or a
+murderer, it does not liquidate A's debt to simply show that fact. But
+life-insurance companies have held, and some of them still claim, the
+right to so indemnify creditors, and, strange to say, they have been
+able to conduct business on that basis. They have even gone further, and
+said that a debt to B's heirs is forfeited in like manner--thus making
+the destruction of a man's reputation after his death of pecuniary
+advantage to the company. They have been enabled to do this because many
+men do not read the insurance contract which they sign, and hence have
+no idea of its complicated and, in many cases, unfair nature. If men
+insisted upon understanding the contract before they sign it, as they do
+in other business, the more unfair features would necessarily disappear
+from all insurance contracts.
+
+If I deposit a thousand dollars in a bank, it is my money--I can
+withdraw it when I please, subject, of course, to business rules, which
+have nothing to do with my standing as a citizen. The bank has nothing
+to say in regard to my loyalty or my honesty in other affairs. My money
+can not revert to the bank on outside ethical or moral grounds. But
+in life-insurance--a business in which more money is invested than in
+banking--the opposite rule has been, and to some extent still is, in
+operation.
+
+There are a few companies, it is true, which have rarely taken advantage
+of their reserved right to mulct a family of money actually received,
+upon the plea of outside ethical delinquencies of the dead--which had
+nothing to do with his length of life--and there are companies, at the
+present time, which have voluntarily eliminated the greater part of
+these oppressive regulations and reserved rights from their forms of
+contract. But in many of the companies they still remain in full force,
+and in almost all there are improvements of a most important nature
+needed even yet.
+
+In other words, while one or two companies have made their contracts,
+in large part, what contracts purport to be, a guarantee of good
+faith--that, if so much money is paid to them during a stated interval,
+they will return to the party insured, or to his heirs, a stated sum
+at a given time--there are still many which have not so improved their
+contracts, and are doing business in the old way, depending for success
+on the ignorance of their applicants in regard to the unfair conditions
+of the contracts which they sign. A few have left out most of the
+thousand and one ifs and ands and provideds of the old regime, and
+have at last undertaken to conduct this important and rapidly-growing
+business on strictly business principles, and the results have
+abundantly attested the wisdom of the new departure and indicate the
+advisability of still more liberal measures. A man may now, if he is
+careful and wise with his choice of a company, insure his life, or,
+if insured, he may have the temerity to die, without a fairly-grounded
+expectation of leaving his family a lawsuit for a legacy. He may also be
+reasonably sure that he is not placing his own reputation (after he is
+unable to defend it) at the mercy of a powerful corporation intent upon
+saving its funds from the inroads of a just debt. And I question if
+it is too much to say that, given enough money, a strong motive, and a
+powerful corporation, on the one hand, and only a sorrowing family upon
+the other, and no man ever lived or died whose reputation could not
+be blackened beyond repair, after he was himself unable to explain or
+refute seeming irregularities of conduct or dishonesty of motive. No
+man's character is invulnerable, and no man's reputation can afford the
+strain or test of such a contest. Millions of dollars have been withheld
+from rightful heirs by threats of an exposure--the more vague the more
+frightful--of the unsuspected crimes or misdeeds of the beloved dead.
+
+Thousands of cases never known to the public have been "compromised,"
+and hundreds of heartaches and unjust suspicions and fears about the
+dead, which can never be corrected, are aroused in sorrowing but loving
+breasts by this method of doing "business." It is, of course, of the
+utmost importance that every precaution be taken by life insurance
+companies to protect against fraud and trickery, the funds held by them
+in trust for others. But with the agent, the examining physician, the
+medical directors, and the inspectors all employed by, and answerable
+to, the company represented, if fraud is committed in getting into the
+company, one or all of these paid officers must, almost of necessity,
+be party to that fraud. With all these safeguards in the hands of the
+company, if a man is accepted as a "good risk," if he pays his premiums,
+surely his family has the right to expect a legacy and not a lawsuit,
+nor a "compromise" which must cast reproach on the dead.
+
+If it were not for the enormous value and benefits of this method of
+making provision for his family, surely no man in his senses would ever
+have risked--would not risk to-day--signing a contract which gives the
+other interested party not only an absolute fixed sum of his money, year
+by year, but also reserves to it the right to investigate and construe
+his actions and motives after he is unable to contest its verdict.
+
+And not only this, but upon the finding of some slight, wholly
+immaterial flaw in his statements (which it failed to find when he was
+in the hands of its agents and officers), in some companies he not only
+forfeits the right of his heirs to their purchased inheritance, but the
+company retains his money which he has paid in besides! This is surely a
+dangerous contract for any man to sign. It is placing a temptation and
+a power in the hands of a corporation that it has never yet been in the
+nature of corporations not to abuse.
+
+"If any statement in this application is in any respect untrue, it voids
+the policy, and all payments which shall have been made revert to the
+company," gives a wide field and doubtful motive of action when it is
+remembered that many of the questions are of such a nature that not
+one man in a thousand could be absolutely sure that he knew the correct
+reply.
+
+"At what age did your grandparents die?" All four of them. How many men
+are sure that they can answer that question correctly? "Of what did each
+one die?" You do not know. You have a general idea. You express it.
+You pay your premiums ten years. You die (one doctor says of
+consumption--another says of blood-poison); the company finds some old
+person who says your grandmother on your father's side died of the
+same thing, and there is a rumor that along-forgotten (or never known)
+country cousin also had it.
+
+The company sends a representative to the widow.. He assures her (and by
+the very terms of the contract, signed by the dead husband, he is
+right and she is helpless) that they can refuse to pay a cent; that her
+husband got his policy by fraud--although no indication of his physical
+disorder appeared to any of the numerous officers employed by the
+company for its own protection, when he made his application, and by
+general reports he was (and believed himself to be) a sound man.
+
+He assures her that they want to be generous rather than just, and if
+she will sign a release, or "compromise," she will be given a small
+part of the sum named in the policy. He makes her feel the necessity of
+keeping this bargain a secret, lest other policy holders object to the
+company paying anything on the life of one who "attempted a fraud"
+upon them! He impresses upon her that in case of contest she could
+get absolutely nothing; that she is poor, and the company is rich and
+strong; and if he fails to arouse her gratitude for his generosity
+in offering to pay her anything whatever, he usually succeeds in
+intimidating her in her poverty and distress. A sparrow in the hand is
+worth more than an eagle on Mount Washington to a widow with a hungry
+family, especially if the eagle has successfully maimed his pursuer in
+the beginning of the flight.
+
+The company knows this. The widow knows it. The conclusion is therefore
+certain before the premises are stated, and the "compromise" is made or
+the claim quietly dropped. It is easy to say that a man died of some bad
+habit unknown to his family, and his family would rather forego their
+claim than drag into light, or into disgrace, the memory of the loved
+dead. All this is well understood by those on the "inside," and by
+thousands of sad hearts that dare not speak. Is there no remedy for all
+this? Is there no way that a useful and powerful business can be rid of
+features which make it both dangerous and ghoulish?
+
+The recent steps taken by the best companies are undoubtedly in the
+right direction, as those still using the old forms of contract will
+sooner or later learn. But there is room yet for improvement even in the
+best forms written to-day. The fairest insurance contract written still
+has room for improvement.
+
+Is there no way to protect these great corporations against the frauds
+of individuals, and at the same time protect the individual against the
+frauds of the corporations?
+
+Must life-insurance contracts be absolutely one-sided, and that be the
+side of the strong against the weak; the guarded against the unguarded;
+the living against the dead? It seems to me that this is wholly
+unnecessary. A life-insurance company which has the agents, the doctors,
+the medical directors, and inspectors all on its side can well afford to
+offer a fair field--a plain, fair contract--to its patrons and then pay
+its debts like any other debtor when its obligation falls due. If it can
+not find out within a year (with all the machinery in its own hands),
+and while the man is alive, that he is a bad risk, it is too late to
+make the discovery after he is dead. If the indications are sufficiently
+in his favor for them to accept his money from year to year while he
+lives, they are sufficiently favorable to him for his family to receive
+the company's money when he has died.
+
+Life-insurance is too valuable and too necessary a means of provision
+for the family for it to be overlaid with abuses that make many men
+hesitate to avail themselves of its benefits; and which put a power for
+evil into strong hands, and make temptation to do wrong inevitable and
+constant.
+
+It is said by some, whose attention has been called to this important
+subject, that the form of contract does not so much matter, since almost
+any court or jury will decide a suit against the company, and in favor
+of the family, in any event. This is taking it for granted that the
+heirs are in position, and are willing, to bring suit, and risk the
+reputation of the dead as well as the financial drain. But, as a matter
+of fact, this is not true--nor is it desirable that it should be. The
+rights of these corporations should be as jealously guarded by our
+courts as the rights of the individual; and perverted justice is a
+dangerous tool to handle. The man who signs an oppressive contract
+depending upon a court to nullify it after he is dead, is clinging to
+a rope of sand. The letter of the bond is what the court is bound to
+enforce, and every man should be sure that he signs only such as shall
+deal fairly with his heirs on that basis.
+
+The following extract is from the decision of the Court of Appeals in
+the famous Dwight case, which is so recently decided as to most forcibly
+illustrate this point:
+
+"If an insurance policy in plain and unambiguous language makes the
+observance of an apparently immaterial requirement the condition of a
+valid contract, neither courts nor juries have the right to disregard
+it or to construct, by implication or otherwise, a new contract in the
+place of that deliberately made by the parties... Such contracts are
+open in construction,... but are subject to it only when, upon the
+face of the instrument, it appears that its meaning is doubtful or its
+language ambiguous or uncertain.
+
+"An elementary writer says; 'Indeed, the very idea and purpose of
+construction imply a previous uncertainty as to the meaning of a
+contract, for when this is clear and unambiguous there is no room for
+construction and nothing for construction to do.'"
+
+For this reason the Court of Appeals cited as the ground, and the only
+ground, for its decision against the widow, the following clause from
+the policy of the contesting company:
+
+"This policy is issued, and the same is accepted by the said assured,
+upon the following express conditions and agreements: That the
+same shall cease and be null and void and of no effect... if the
+representations made in the application for this policy, upon the faith
+of which this contract is made, shall be found in any respect untrue."
+
+Colonel Dwight was in the habit of making large business ventures.
+Several times, when he had done so, he had taken heavy amounts of
+life-insurance, so that in case of the failure of his undertakings,
+and his own death before he could regain his financial feet, his family
+would not suffer. On previous occasions he had dropped the greater
+part of his insurance as soon as his business ventures had terminated
+successfully. This is not an uncommon thing for rich or speculative men
+to do.
+
+In 1878 Colonel Dwight died, with an insurance on his life of about
+$265,000, some of which he had carried for years; but a large part of it
+had been recently taken for the reasons above stated, and as he had done
+before under similar circumstances. Fifty thousand of this sum was in
+old and new policies against one company.
+
+This company paid at once, thus giving the widow means to fight for her
+claims against the other companies. In a short time one of the other
+companies, against which she had a small claim of $5,000, also paid. The
+other nineteen companies contested. The widow employed Senator Conkling,
+and the fight has been the hardest, the bitterest, and the most ghoulish
+insurance contest ever had in this country; and finally the companies
+have won in the Court of Appeals on a purely technical point, after
+having dug Colonel Dwight's body up several times, in the effort to
+prove that he was poisoned, that he hung himself, and that he was not
+dead at all! They failed utterly to prove any material cause of contest;
+but they finally won on the ground that, in answering a question in the
+application for insurance, Colonel Dwight did not state that he had ever
+engaged in the liquor business, whereas it had been known that he had
+owned a hotel where liquor was sold.
+
+Now, when it is remembered that at one time these companies tried to
+prove that Colonel Dwight had committed suicide, but that they never had
+any grounds upon which to claim that he had died of intemperance, the
+purely technical grounds for the decision of the Court of Appeals is
+apparent. Ninety-nine policies out of a hundred could be contested on
+such ground as that; and so long as insurance contracts retain these
+unreasonable and oppressive features, no man can be sure that he is not
+leaving a lawsuit and bitter sorrow to his family, and, worst of all, a
+blasted reputation for himself, when he applies for insurance under such
+a form.
+
+An officer of one of the companies was heard to boast of the fact, but a
+few days ago, that his company had spent nearly ten times the amount
+of the claim against it in this Dwight contest! This is economy indeed!
+Whose money was this spent? The policy-holder's. For what? To defeat one
+of the policy-holders in a contest for a claim no doubt as honest as any
+one of the others will present in his turn.
+
+But suppose that this was not an honest claim; suppose that Colonel
+Dwight was not a "good risk," is it not a rather suggestive indication
+of the value of the medical examinations by the expert medical examiners
+and directors of twenty-one life-insurance companies? A risk good enough
+to "pass" some forty-five doctors employed by, and for the protection
+of, the companies is, on the face of it, a good enough risk to pay. If
+this is not so, then the companies, and not the public, should be made
+to bear the responsibility of the incompetency of their own officers.
+
+But for the reputation of these medical men, it is a fortunate fact that
+the contest did not prove Colonel Dwight to be an unsafe risk. After his
+body was dug up several times, and a number of autopsies held, and most
+of him analyzed, they succeeded in proving that he owned a hotel where
+liquor was sold!
+
+But under these forms of contract, the companies undoubtedly had a legal
+right to refuse payment upon even so absurdly technical a misstatement
+of "occupation." It was claimed by his family that his hotel was a side
+issue; that he did not think of himself as in that business, and that
+his failure to say, because of it, that he was "in any way connected
+with the manufacture or sale of spirituous liquors," was a natural one
+under the circumstances. How many men give, in answering the question as
+to occupation in their applications for insurance, all of the numerous
+"plants" in which they have an interest of a financial nature, more or
+less important? One man says he is a bookkeeper, but he may possibly,
+also, own stock in a mine. His claim could be contested on that ground.
+Suppose that he really thought nothing of his mining-stock when he made
+his application and signed his contract? Suppose that in a short time
+he was called to see the mine, went into it, and died of the results of
+that trip? His policy would not, if it contained the usual conditions,
+be worth, in a legal fight, the paper it was written on.
+
+That companies often waive their reserved right to contest on such
+grounds, is used as an argument to prove the innocent nature of these
+forfeiture clauses and other oppressive conditions. But so long as they
+hold the legal power to do so, the temptation to contest will be too
+great for flesh and blood, not to say for corporations, to bear without
+yielding sometimes. The "Get thee behind me, Satan," of a fair, plain
+contract will be the best safeguard for the heirs in the matter of
+money, and for the companies in the matter of morals; while the "economy
+for the sake of surviving policy-holders" might be directed, as there
+is surely room for believing that it needs to be, into other and more
+legitimate channels. Economizing on debts to dead policy-holders is not
+a very good recommendation to living ones, for the companies which thus
+lock the wrong stable-door.
+
+The new move toward furnishing fair contracts is in the right direction,
+and it now rests with insurers--the public--to see that it does not stop
+short of fulfilling the promise of still better things in the future.
+
+
+
+
+POINTS HUMOROUS AND OTHERWISE ABOUT LIFE INSURANCE.
+
+
+Printed in Twentieth Century.
+
+
+I made up my mind to get my life insured. As i had heard some one say it
+was not wise to put all of one's eggs into the same basket, I decided
+to apply for a small policy in two of the leading companies at the same
+time. I was never seriously ill in my life, so when I was informed that
+I had been "held off" by the examining physician of one company
+who found theoretical traces of diseased kidneys, I was a good deal
+astonished. Professional etiquette prevented the examining physician
+of the other company from passing me until this matter was settled,
+although he confessed that he could find no such traces himself. In his
+opinion my weak spot was my lungs. "But doctor," said I, "I've got lungs
+like a bellows. I was stroke oar at college."
+
+"It doesn't make any difference to our doctor whether you were stroke
+oar or a stroke of lightning if he discovers that any of your ancestors
+died of consumption," remarked the agent, who had lost his temper. "You
+ought to have had better sense than to tell Dr. Pulmonary that your
+great aunt coughed before she died. He'd find evidence of lung trouble
+in a copper-bottomed boiler if it wheezed letting off steam. Who
+examined you over at the other place? Old Albumen? I'll bet ten dollars
+he'd find traces of his pet disorder in a ham if he examined one."
+
+I was getting a little piqued. I concluded to put my application in to
+several other companies and take the first policy issued. In pursuance
+of this idea I was examined by Dr. Palpitation of the M. of N. Y.
+company, and he discovered that I was liable to drop off at any time
+from heart failure. He said that he did not wish to alarm me, but I
+needed medical care and a very wise and sustained course of treatment.
+
+At this stage of the proceedings I went to the only physician I had ever
+employed for any slight ills during my past career and had him put
+me through a thorough and exhaustive physical examination without
+disclosing anything of my motive for so doing. He pronounced me fit for
+the coming boat race, which was to be an unusually trying one.
+
+"Any trace of albumen, doctor?" I asked.
+
+"None--not a trace."
+
+"Nothing wrong with my heart or lungs?"
+
+"Look here, boy. If you never die until they give out, you're going
+under from old age. I tell you, you are as sound a man as ever lived.
+There is absolutely nothing to hang a suspicion of any disorder on. For
+my sake I wish there was," he added, laughing and slapping his pocket.
+
+The next day I had a call from the doctor who had examined me for the
+E. of Y. He said that he'd like to have a second pass at my eyes. He
+thought there was a look in one of them that indicated softening of the
+brain. I laughed.
+
+He remarked that people in the first stages of that trouble usually took
+it just that way. It was a symptom.
+
+"You confounded old fool!" said I, losing my temper. "Are you in
+earnest? I supposed you were joking from the first but if you're talking
+as good sense as you've got just leave this office. I--"
+
+He left.
+
+He reported to his company that I was in a more advanced stage of the
+disorder than he had at first feared. I had arrived at the unnecessarily
+irritable condition. Of course my case was settled with that company.
+Professional etiquette again stepped in, and the doctor for the M. B.
+of C. took another whack at my liver. He said that the organ was badly
+enlarged and he'd hold me off for one year to see if it would return to
+its normal proportions. According to his diagnosis fully nine-tenths of
+the population of New York were carrying around livers that were enough
+to tire out an ox. He could tell a big livered man as far as he could
+see him, and he pointed out five who passed while he was talking.
+
+He said that enlargment of the liver was getting to be a very real
+danger to the population of all of the chief cities, and if the cause
+was not soon discovered by the medical profession and a reducing
+process, so to speak, clapped on to the metropolitan liver, life
+insurance companies would have to keep a mighty sharp eye on all
+applicants, or the death rates would wreck the most prosperous of them
+in pretty short order.
+
+I was led to infer from the way he poked and prodded around me and
+measured and sounded that my liver was rather badly sagged at one side
+and that the other lobe was swelled up like a bladder. It seems as if a
+person would notice a thing like that himself, but the doctor said
+that as like as not I'd never have discovered it at all if he had
+not--fortunately for me--been called in to examine me.
+
+He said that he never prescribed for men, he is required to examine for
+insurance, but he told me to take a certain remedy for the next three
+months and then report to him. Meantime his company would "hold me off."
+
+"We won't reject you outright," he explained "because this thing may be
+only temporary--may not be organic--and it wouldn't be a fair thing
+to your heirs to decline you outright, because that would most likely
+prevent you from ever getting life insurance anywhere in the future."
+
+That was a new idea to me and gave me a good deal of a scare.
+
+It occurred to me that the future of a man's family--where it depended
+on the insurance money of its head--was subject to considerable
+uncertainty from the various fads of the doctors.
+
+Here I was in danger of being rejected--pronounced an unsound risk--by
+four separate and distinct companies for four separate and distinct
+ailments of which my own doctor could find not the least trace and I
+could feel not the faintest twinge.
+
+If any one of them decided positively against me the future of my family
+was nil--so far as insurance went, for the examining physician of
+no other company would be bold enough or sufficiently lacking in
+"professional courtesy" to pronounce in my favor, whether he could find
+anything wrong with me himself or not. I began to realize that what I
+had so far looked upon as rather a good joke might be serious after all.
+
+It occurred to me, too, that it would be a good deal more far reaching
+than I had supposed.
+
+If Old Pulmonary--as the agent called him--stuck to his theory of my
+lungs, not only I, but my children, would be unable to get insurance. It
+would establish a family history--a "heredity"--hard to get rid of. My
+little joke in speaking of the fact that my aunt had been said to cough
+before she died, together with Dr. Pulmonary's ability to scent lung
+trouble in the breathing apparatus of a porous plaster, might lead to a
+serious complication not only for me but for my children. I concluded to
+make a clean breast of it. I did not quite dare tell Dr. Pulmonary that
+I had been deliberately guying the profession--and in fact that was not
+my first intention--but I asked if he did not think it a little odd that
+no two of them had held me off for the same reason and that each one had
+found indications of the particular disorder for which he had a special
+leaning. He pricked up his ears at once and asked all about the others.
+I told him that one had found albumen, another enlarged liver, and the
+third was afraid of heart failure or softening of the brain, and one
+was still waiting, because he could find no trouble--on account of
+professional etiquette--before reporting at all.
+
+"Meantime my own doctor--the one who has known me from
+childhood--pronounces me fit for a scull race," said I a little drily.
+
+"Does your physician know of these examinations?*' he inquired.
+
+"No, he doesn't," I responded rather hotly this time, "or no doubt he'd
+have discovered that I had inflammatory rheumatism and gangrene. He is a
+good deal of a professional ethic man, himself."
+
+The doctor turned and walked into his private room, promising to
+overhaul the papers again and talk with his subordinate.
+
+I hunted up the agent who had first called upon me and complained that
+this sort of nonsense had gone about as far as I wanted it to go. "That
+old donkey at the head of your medical department upholds the idiotic
+report of the young gosling that first examined me here, notwithstanding
+the fact that he says himself that he can't find the first trace of the
+trouble. Now, if insurance companies employ impecunious young physicians
+with little experience, because they can get them cheap, and then insist
+upon it that professional etiquette forbids any other examiner from
+correcting their blunders, it seems to me--"
+
+The agent had been looking about carefully to be sure that no one
+overheard.
+
+At this point he said:
+
+"Sh! Don't talk so loud. You see young Cardiac, who had you first,
+passed a man a short while ago who died in about six months and it was
+discovered that he had only a part of one lung and had been that way for
+years. The referee--Old Pulmonary is our referee, you know--gave him a
+pretty bad scare, and he's afraid to pass anybody at all since. 'Fraid
+he'll lose his place. All the agents are mad about it. Manage to hold
+their men over for examination until he leaves the office and then take
+'em to another one of the examiners. He'll refuse every body now for a
+while--or hold him off. Fully one-half the men he examined last month
+were rejected outright or held over. I didn't know it when I took you to
+him or I'd have taken you to some one else to be examined."
+
+"That would be all very well," said I, "if it wasn't for the absurdity
+of what the doctors are pleased to call professional etiquette, which
+prevents any other examiner for any other company from finding a man so
+held or rejected, sound. In the first place nearly all the big companies
+refuse to allow any but an 'old school' or 'regular' allopathic
+physician to examine a man. Then if that examiner has a fad, or makes
+a mistake, they are all banded together to sustain him in it and not to
+correct it, even if they can't find the first symptom of a disease about
+him. I tell you it is not only outrageous to the man and his family, but
+the result will be that men who know it will refuse to place themselves
+in any such danger. They won't want a family record of hereditary
+diseases made and put on file to stare them and their descendants in the
+face just for the sake of professional etiquette toward some young M.
+D., who just as like as not got his place from the fact that he married
+a daughter of a director of the company and had to be supported some way
+and hadn't the skill to do it in an open field in his profession. Men
+are not going to stand it. It will injure them, and it is bound to react
+on the company too. I'd never have applied at all if I'd known of it in
+time. What business has a company to ask whether an applicant has or has
+not been rejected by another company? If their own examiner can't find
+anything wrong with him, isn't that enough? This thing of the doctors
+of all the companies combining to keep a record against a man is
+outrageous. Why can't a company depend on the capacity of its own
+medical staff? If it wants any other information of a medical nature,
+why isn't the applicant's own family physician quite enough? I consider
+the thing a good deal of an outrage, and the company that omits from its
+papers the sort of questions that result in this absurd and oppressive
+professional etiquette folderol, is going to be the company of the
+future. Intelligent men know too well the chaotic state of medical
+science to be willing to risk it. Why, good Lord, man, that softening of
+the brain--paresis--idiot over at the £. of Y. can, and no doubt will,
+give me a record that may cling to me and my family in a way that
+might, in many a business or other contingency, cause the very greatest
+hardship." I looked up and saw that the medical referee who had really
+indicated that he meant to reconsider my case was standing where he had
+heard me.
+
+His face was a study* He was angry clear through. He would have (in
+a medical journal or debate) taken issue with, and proved the utter
+incapacity of nine-tenths of the profession, but to have a layman
+criticise their action when it might mean even life or death to him and
+his was more than the doctor's adherence to professional etiquette could
+bear.
+
+     * My friend, the agent, saw his face.
+
+"I'll bet you four dollars, John, that you not only won't get a policy
+here now but that no other company will pass you," said he under his
+breath. "The old man is on the war path."
+
+That was eight months ago and I'm "held off" in eleven companies now. I
+was never sick in my life. I'm as sound in person and in heredity as
+any man who ever lived, but I am at the mercy of that absurdest of all
+covers for personal incapacity--professional etiquette--combined with
+the unreasonable fact that insurance companies require an applicant
+to tell their examiners just what piece of idiotic prejudice has been
+launched at him by the doctor of every other company, so that they can
+all hold together and fit his case to the reports, and not the reports
+to the facts in his case as they find them.
+
+Meantime, Jack Howard, who died last week, poor fellow, was accepted by
+five of them because the first examiner who got hold of him, not being
+a kidney fiend but having his whole mind on lung trouble--and Jack
+had splendid lungs--didn't discover that he was in the last stages of
+Bright's disease. His family made $27,000 out of professional etiquette,
+and mine--when I die--will most likely lose that much, together with
+a reputation for a sound heredity which may affect the insurers to the
+third and fourth generation of them that love truth and tell that their
+father was rejected by all the leading life insurance companies for
+pulmonary trouble, heart disease, kidney affection, paresis, and
+enlargement of the liver. Meantime the first good company that shows
+enough sense and sufficient confidence in its own medical men to omit
+that sort of questions from its form of examination is going to get
+me--and a good many others like me.
+
+
+
+
+COMMON SENSE IN SURGERY
+
+There are certain forms of expression which once heard fit themselves
+into the mind so firmly, and re-appear in one connection or another so
+frequently, that one scarcely recognizes the fact even when one changes
+a word or two in order to make the original idea fit the case in point.
+So when I stood watching the ingenious method by which the trainers
+of the English fox-hounds induced each dog to perform his own surgical
+operations after a hunt, I remarked, with no recognition of the
+plagiarism from Dr. Holmes, "Every dog his own doctor."
+
+"No," replied the trainer, with a fine sense of distinction which I had
+not before observed--"no; I am the doctor; the dogs are the surgeons. I
+prescribe; they perform the operation. They do that part far better than
+I could; but they wouldn't do it in time to save the pain and trouble of
+a much more serious operation that they could not perform, if I did
+not set them at it in time, and keep them at work until all danger of
+inflammation is past."
+
+It was after a hunt. The dogs--splendid blooded fellows, a great pack
+of over sixty of them--had gotten many thorns and briers in their feet.
+They came back limping, foot-sore, and with troubled eyes that looked up
+piteously for relief from their pain. They were very hungry too, after
+the long chase; but "No doctor will allow a patient to eat just before a
+surgical operation," remarked the trainer, dryly. "Now watch."
+
+He threw open a door leading into an outer room of the splendid Hunt
+Club Kennel, and gave the word of command.
+
+There was a rush, and the entire pack burst through the wide entrance.
+Then every dog lay suddenly down, and began with great vigor to lick his
+feet.
+
+Why? Simply because in rushing through that door they had waded through
+a wide, shallow trough or sink of pretty warm soup. This basin was sunk
+in the stone floor, and reached entirely across the door, and was too
+wide to jump over, even had it been visible from the outside, which it
+was not.
+
+The dogs had plunged into it before they knew it was there, and were
+instantly out of its rather uncomfortable heat.
+
+Each dog worked at his feet with vigor. He was hungry. The soup was
+good; but dogs object to soup on their feet. This process was continued
+and repeated until it was thought that all thorns and briers and pebbles
+had been licked and picked from the crippled feet. Then the dogs were
+fed and put to bed--or allowed to lie down and sleep--in their fresh
+straw-filled bunks.
+
+"A doctor and a surgeon may be the same person," remarked the
+philosophical trainer, oracularly, "but they seldom are. If you
+whine--as the dogs do when their feet hurt after a hunt--or if you
+limp or complain, a doctor guesses what is the matter with you. Then he
+guesses what will cure you. If both guesses are right, you are in luck,
+and he is a skilful diagnostician. In nine cases out of ten he is giving
+you something harmless, while he is taking a second and a third look at
+you (at your expense, of course) to guess over after himself."
+
+His medical pessimism and his surgical optimism amused and entertained
+me, and I encouraged him to go on.
+
+"Now with a surgeon it is different. Surgery is an exact science. Before
+I took this position I was a surgeon's assistant in a hospital. In
+some places we are called trained nurses. In our place we were called
+surgeons' assistants. That's why I make such a distinction between
+doctors and surgeons. I've seen the two work side by side so long. I've
+seen some of the funniest mistakes made, and I've seen mistakes that
+were not funny. I've seen post-mortem examinations that would have made
+a surgeon ashamed that he had ever been born, looked upon by the doctor
+who treated the case as not at all strange; didn't stagger him a bit
+in his own opinion of himself and his scientific knowledge next time.
+I remember one case. It was a Japanese boy. He was as solid as a
+little ox, but he told Dr. G------ that he'd been taking a homoeopathic
+prescription for a cold. That was enough for Dr. G------. A red rag in
+the van of a bovine animal is nothing to the word 'homoeopathy' to Dr.
+G------. Hydropathy gives him fits, and eclecticism almost, lays him
+out. Not long ago he sat on a jury which sent to prison a man who had
+failed in a case of 'mind cure.' That gave deep delight to his 'regular'
+soul. Well, Dr. G------ questioned the little Jap, who could not speak
+good English, and had the national inclination to agree with whatever
+you say. Ever been in Japan? No? Well, they are a droll lot. Always
+strive to agree with all you say or suggest.
+
+"'Did you ever spit blood?' asked Dr. G------, by-and-by, after he
+could find nothing else wrong except the little cold for which the
+homoeopathic physician was treating the boy.
+
+"'Once,' replied that youthful victim.
+
+"'Aha! we are getting at the root of this matter now,' said Dr. G------.
+'Now tell me truly. Be careful! Did you spit much blood?'
+
+"'Yes, sir; a good deal.'
+
+"The doctor sniffed. He always knew that a homoeopathic humbug could not
+diagnose a case, and would be likely to get just about as near the facts
+as a light cold would come to tuberculosis.
+
+"'How long did this last?' he inquired of the smiling boy.
+
+"'I think--it seems to me--
+
+"'A half-hour?' queried the doctor; 'twenty minutes?'
+
+"'I think so. Yes, sir. About half an hour--twenty minutes,' responded
+the obliging youth.
+
+"I heard that talk. Common-sense told me the boy's lungs were all right;
+but it was none of my business, and so I watched him treated, off and
+on, for lung trouble for over a month before I got a chance to ask him
+any questions. Then I asked, incidentally:
+
+"'What made you spit that blood that time, Gihi?' "'I didn't know I
+ought to swallow him,' he replied, wide-eyed and anxious. 'Dentist pull
+tooth He say to me, "Spit blood here." I do like he tell me. Your doctor
+say ver' bad for lungs, spit blood. Next time I swallow him.'
+
+"I helped another practitioner, in good and regular standing, to examine
+a man's heart. He found a pretty bad wheeze in the left side. I had to
+nurse that man. He had been on a bat, and all on earth that ailed him
+was that spree, but he got treated for heart trouble. It scared the man
+almost to death.
+
+"I'd learned how a heart should sound, so one day I tried his. He was in
+bed then, and it sounded all right, so when the doctor came in, I took
+him aside, and told him that I didn't want to interfere, but that man
+was scared about to death over his heart, and it seemed to me it was all
+right--sounded like other hearts--and his pulse was all right too. The
+doctor was mad as a March h*are, though he had told me to make two or
+three tests, and keep the record for him against the time of his next
+visit. Well, to make a long matter short, the final discovery was--the
+man don't know it yet, and he is going around in dread of dropping off
+any minute with heart failure--that at the first examination the man had
+removed only his coat and vest, and his new suspender on his starched
+shirt had made the squeak. That is a cold fact, and that man paid over
+eighty dollars for the treatment he had for his heart, or rather, for
+his suspender."
+
+I was so interested in the drollery of this ex-nurse, and in his
+scorn for one branch of a profession, while he entertained almost a
+superstitious awe and admiration for surgery _per se_, that I decided
+upon my return to New York to visit a great surgeon, and ask him
+to allow me to see an operation that would fairly represent the
+advance-guard so to speak, the upward reach of the profession as it is
+to day.
+
+We all know the physician who follows his profession strictly and solely
+as a means of support. Most of us also happily know something of one or
+more medical men who are a credit to humanity, in that they subordinate
+their ability to extort money from suffering to their desire to relieve
+pain, even though such relief conduces not to their own financial
+opulence. Very few of us who are not close students of the medical
+profession realize, I think, some of the magnificent developments not
+only of surgery, but of the character of the surgeon. We are led to
+think of them as rather hard and brutal men. The side of their work and
+nature that means tenderness and devotion to the relief of those who,
+but for the skilled and brave surgeon, must die or suffer for life, is
+seldom laid before us. The quiet, sweet, and simple devotion of such men
+does not reach the public ear.
+
+The operation of which I learned, and which is the first of its kind on
+record, was so strange, so great, and so far-reaching in its suggestion
+and promise that it seemed to me it could not fail to interest and
+inspire the general reader, who never sees a medical or surgical
+journal, and who would not read it if he did.
+
+Can you think of an operation that would create a mind? Can you conceive
+of the meaning to humanity of a discovery that would transform a
+congenital imbecile into a rational being? Such an operation was the one
+I was privileged to see.
+
+The patient was a child about one year old, of good parentage and of
+healthy bodily growth, aside from the fact that its skull was that of a
+new-born child, and it had hardened and solidified into that shape and
+size. The "soft spot" was not there, and the sutures or seams of the
+skull had grown fast and solid, so that the brain within was cramped and
+compressed by its unyielding bony covering.
+
+The body could grow--did grow--but the poor little compressed brain, the
+director of the intelligent and voluntary actions of the body, was kept
+at its first estate. Even worse than this, its struggle with its bony
+cage made a pressure which caused distortion and aimless or unmeaning
+movement--the arm and leg turned in, in that helpless, pathetic way
+that tells of imbecility. In short, the baby was a physically healthy
+imbecile--the most pathetic object on this sad earth. Upon examination,
+the surgeon, a gentle, sweet-natured man, whose enthusiasm for his
+profession--for the relief of suffering--makes him the object of
+devotion of many to whom he has given life and health, and the inspirer
+and final appeal for many a brother practitioner, discovered what he
+believed to be the trouble. Led by that most uncommon of all things,
+common sense, he believed that this little victim of nature's mistake
+might be changed from a condition far worse than death to one of comfort
+for itself, and to those who now looked upon it only in anguish of soul.
+
+After explaining to the parents and the surgeons who had come to witness
+the wonderful experiment (for, after all, at this stage it was but an
+experiment based upon common-sense) that it might fail; after a modest
+and simple statement of his reason for undertaking so dangerous an
+operation, with no precedent before him; after explaining that the
+parents fully understood that not to try it meant hopeless idiocy, and
+that the trial might mean death--he began the work. I shall try to tell
+what it was in language that is not scientific, and may seem to those
+accustomed to surgical terms inadequate and unlearned; but to those who
+are not technical medical students I believe the less technical language
+will be far clearer.
+
+The child's skull was laid bare in front. Two tracks were cut from a
+little above the base (or top) of the nose up and over to the back
+of the head. One of these tracks was cut on each side, the surgeon
+explained, because it would give equal expansion to the two sides of the
+brain, and because it would cause death to cut through the middle of the
+top of the head, where lies "the superior longitudinal sinus." He left,
+therefore, the solid track of bone through the middle, and cut two
+grooves or tracks through the bone, one on either side, where nature
+(when she does not make a mistake) leaves soft or yielding edges, by
+means of which the normal skull expands to fit the needs of the brain
+within.
+
+The trench made displaced, or cut away, one-quarter of an inch of solid
+bone all the way from near the base of the nose to the back part of the
+head. In the middle of the top of the head on each side a cross-wise cut
+was made, and one inch of bone divided. Another cut was made on either
+side, slanting toward the ears. This was one inch and a half long. The
+surgeon then tenderly inserted his forefinger, pressed the internal mass
+loose from the bones where it adhered, and pushed the bones wider apart.
+This process widened the trenches to one inch.
+
+The wound was now dressed with the wonderfully effective new aseptics,
+and the flesh and skin closed over. The operation had taken an hour and
+a half. There was little bleeding. The baby was, of course, unconscious
+during the entire time. Oh, the blessings of anaesthetics! And now comes
+the wonderful result of this bold and radical but tender and humane
+operation.
+
+The baby rallied well. In three days it showed improved intelligence.
+In eight days this improvement was marked. From a creature that sat
+listless, deformed, and unmindful of all about it, it began to "take
+notice," like other children. From an "it," it had been transformed into
+a "he." It had been given personality. It ate and slept fairly well.
+
+On the tenth day the wound was exposed and dressed. It had healed, or
+"united by first intention," as the doctors say; and again one can but
+exclaim, "Oh, those wonderful aseptic dressings!" It had united without
+suppuration. It was a clean wound, cleanly healing.
+
+One month after the operation the feet and hands had straightened out,
+and lost their jerky, aimless movements. The child is now a child. It
+acts and thinks like other children, laughs and cooes and makes glad the
+hearts of those who love it.
+
+Not like other children of its age, perhaps, for it has several months
+yet to "catch up," but the last report, in one of the leading medical
+journals, said:
+
+"One month after the operation the change in its condition was
+surprising and gratifying. The deformities in the extremities had
+entirely disappeared, and there was evidently a remarkable increase in
+intelligence. It noticed those about it, took hold of objects offered
+it, laughed, and behaved much as children of ordinary development at six
+or eight months. The pupils were no longer widely dilated, but appeared
+normal. It eats and sleeps well, and is in general greatly improved as a
+result of the operation."
+
+If in one month the little imprisoned brain was able to "catch up" six
+or eight months, we may surely believe that the remaining four or five
+months which it lost, because nature sealed the little thinking-machine
+firmly in too small a casket, will be wiped away also, and the little
+victim of nature's mistake be given full and normal opportunity through
+the skill and genius of man.*
+
+
+     *It has now been several years since the operation, and the
+     child is like other children.--H. H. G.
+
+     Is not that common-sense in surgery?
+
+
+Could anything be more wonderful? Could any operation open to the future
+of the race wider possibilities and offer more brilliant hope? I may
+quote here farther from the same medical journal the report of Dr.
+Wyeth, himself:
+
+"The operation differs from any yet done. Lanne-longue, Keen, and others
+cut a trench about a quarter of an inch in width, and on one side, at
+a single operation. It seemed to me if the brain was penned in by
+premature ossification of the cranial bones, these should be torn loose
+and permanently lifted, thus allowing a thorough expansion. Should
+only temporary benefit be secured, the operation should be repeated.
+Experience alone can demonstrate whether the expansion of the brain will
+be able to spread the cranial bones to such an extent that it may reach
+even an ordinary development. The condition of these patients is
+so hopeless and deplorable that, in my opinion, very great risk is
+justifiable in any surgical interference which offers even a hope of
+amelioration."
+
+Thus the race is quietly achieving mastery over the blind forces of
+nature, and the steady hand of science, coupled with tenderness and
+sincerity, is pushing back some of the worst horrors of life, and
+throwing a flood of light and hope into the future! It makes one's
+step lighter and one's face happier only to think of these marvellous
+achievements and victories. A new impulse of hope and happiness
+dawns upon life. I owed this new inspiration to my pessimistic
+acquaintance--he of the Hunt Club Kennel--and the introduction he gave
+me to the rudiments of applied surgery. It was indeed a long sweep from
+the one operation to the other.
+
+My first and second glimpses of the operating-room were surely the two
+extremes, and yet when I suggested this to Dr. Wyeth, the great and
+gentle surgeon who performed this operation, he smilingly replied that,
+after all; either or both--indeed, all of it--was simply common-sense in
+surgery.
+
+
+
+
+HEREDITY: IS ACQUIRED CHARACTER OR CONDITION TRANSMITTIBLE?
+
+It has been well said by Herbert Spencer, and more recently by Professor
+Osborn, the able biologist of Columbia College, that the question
+involved in the discussion of heredity is not a temporary issue and that
+its solution will affect all future thought. Whether or not acquired
+character is transmitted to children is the most important question that
+confronts the human race; for it is upon the character of the race that
+depends and will depend the condition of the race.
+
+No school of scientists questions the fact of heredity; but there is
+a warm and greatly misunderstood contest over the exact method used
+by nature in the transmission. Now so far as the general public is
+concerned, so far as the sociological features of the case go, so far
+as personal conduct is involved, it does not matter a straw's weight
+whether the theory of heredity held by Lamarck and Darwin, or the one
+advanced recently by Weismann, be correct.
+
+It matters not whether your drunkenness, for example, is transmitted to
+your child directly as plain drunkenness, or whether it descends to him
+as a merely weakened and undermined "germ plasm" which "will tend
+to inebriety, insanity, imbecility" or what not. It matters not a
+farthing's worth, from the point of view of the laity, whether the
+transmission is direct, via "pangenesis," or whether it is indirect,
+via a weakened and vitiated "germ plasm" as per Weismann, or whether the
+exact method and process may not still lie in the unsolved problems of
+the laboratory. Whichever or whatever the exact process may be (which
+interests the scientist only), the facts and results are before us and
+concern each of us more vitally than does the question of what we shall
+eat or what we shall drink or wherewithal we shall be clothed. It is all
+the more unfortunate, therefore, that even an untested scientific theory
+cannot be advanced without the ignorant, the half-educated and the
+vicious taking it in some distorted form as a basis of action. Indeed it
+would seem to be wise, if one is about to make a scientific suggestion
+of importance, to take the precaution to say in advance that you
+don't mean it--for the benefit of that large class of intellectual
+batrachians who hop to the conclusion that you said something totally
+different from your intent.
+
+Because a surgeon might say to you that he knows a boy who carries a
+bullet about in his brain and that the youth appears to be no worse
+for it in either body or mind, it would not be safe to imply that he
+proposes to teach you that it would be a particularly judicious thing
+for you to attempt to convert your skull into a cartridge box.
+
+Because Weismann asserts and attempts to prove that nature's method
+of hereditary transmission precludes (for example) the possibility
+of producing a race of short-tailed cats from Tom and Tabby from whose
+caudal appendages a few inches have been artificially subtracted, some
+of his followers exclaim in glee: "It does not make the least difference
+in the world what we do or refrain from doing in one lifetime. Our
+children do not receive the results; we cannot transmit to them our
+vices or our virtues. We cannot taint their blood by our ill conduct nor
+purify it by our clean living. The 'germ plasm' from which they came
+is and has been immortal; we are simply its transmitters--not its
+creators. Our children were created and their characters and natures
+determined centuries before we were bom. We are in no sense responsible
+for what they may be; germ plasm is eternal; we are exempt from
+responsibility to posterity. Long live Weismann!"
+
+Now this is about the sort of thing that is springing up on every side
+as a result of the new discussion as to how we are to account for the
+facts of heredity. One sometimes hears, also, from these half-informed
+jubilators that "Weismann does not believe in heredity; that old theory
+is quite exploded." The fact is that Weismann is particularly strong
+in his belief in heredity--so strong as to give almost no weight to any
+possible process of intervention in its original workings. He simply
+holds that the transmission of "acquired character" is not proven,
+and he doubts the fact of these "acquired" transmissions. In his
+illustrations he deals chiefly (when in the higher animals) with
+mutilations, and in the human race shows that the most proficient
+linguist does not produce children who can read without being taught!
+
+Of course there are many and varied points in his theory of heredity
+with which only the biologist is capable of dealing. But as I intimated
+at first, the Lamarck-Darwin-Weismann controversy, so far as the
+sociological aspect of the question is involved, does not touch us.
+It belongs to the laboratory--to the how and not to the fact of
+transmission. But since the opposite impression has taken root in even
+some thoughtful minds, it is well to meet it in a direct and easily
+grasped form. There is a simple and direct method; I undertook it. I
+went to a number of well-known biologists and physicians and asked these
+questions;--
+
+1. Are there any diseases known to you, which you are absolutely certain
+are contracted by individuals whose ancestors did not have them, which
+diseases you can trace as to time and place of contraction, and
+which are of a nature to produce physical and mental changes that are
+recognizable in the child as due to the parent's condition?
+
+2. Have you ever had such cases under your own care?
+
+3. Have you a record of cases where the children of your patients
+received the effects of the disease of the parent in a manner that would
+show that "acquired character or condition" is transmittible?
+
+4. Is this true in a kind of disorder which would produce in the child a
+change of structure or condition so profound as to change its character
+and run it in a channel distinctly the result of the "acquirement" of
+the parent?
+
+I thought it best to go to specialists in brain and nerve disorders and
+to those who had had large hospital or asylum experiences. One of these,
+Dr. Henry Smith Williams, ex-medical superintendent of Randall's Island,
+where the city of New York sends its imbecile and epileptic children,
+and where many hundreds of these came under his care, replied that
+there could be no doubt of the fact that such "acquired" characters or
+conditions are transmitted. One case which he gave me, however, from his
+private practice will illustrate the point most clearly. B., a healthy
+man with no hereditary taint of the kind, acquired syphilis at a given
+time and in a known way. Before this time he was the father of one
+daughter. Several years later another daughter was born to him. The
+first girl is and has always been absolutely free from any and all
+taint. The other one has all the inherited marks of her father's
+"acquired character" and condition, which even went the length in her
+of producing the recognized change in the form of the teeth due to
+this disease. Now for all practical purposes it does not matter in
+the faintest degree whether that transmission was in accordance with
+pangenesis or by means of a vitiated environment of the "germ plasm."
+The fact is the appalling thing for the reader to face. And I give this
+case only because it was one of a vast number of similar ones which came
+to me in reply to my questions addressed to different practitioners and
+specialists.
+
+Among other places, I went to the head of a maternity hospital. This is
+what I got there: "If Weismann or any of his followers doubts for one
+second the distinct, absolute, unmistakable transmission of acquired
+disease of a kind to modify 'character' both mental and physical--if
+they doubt its results on humanity--they have never given even a slight
+study to the hospital side of life.
+
+"I can give you hundreds of cases where there is no escape from the proof
+that the children are born with the taint of an 'acquired character'
+from which they cannot free themselves. Sometimes it is shown in one
+form, sometimes in another, but it is as unmistakable as the color
+of the eyes or the number of the toes. To deny it is to deny all
+experience. I am not a biologist and I do not undertake to explain
+how it is done, but I will undertake to prove that it is done to the
+satisfaction of the most sceptical. Come in this ward. There is a child
+whose parents were robust, healthy, strong country folk until"--and then
+followed the history of the parents who had "acquired" the "character"
+which they transmitted--which had made the mental, moral and physical
+cripple in the ward before me. "Now here is what they transmitted. Do
+you fancy that if that half idiot should ever have children they will be
+'whole'? No argument but vision is needed here. That child's condition
+is the result of acquired character. Its children and its children's
+children will carry the acquirement--for we are not wise enough yet to
+eliminate even such as that from among active propagators of the race!
+If it were possible (which, thank Heaven, is not likely) that the other
+parent of this half imbecile's children would be of a sane and lofty
+type there might be a modification upward again in the progeny, but even
+then we would not soon lose the direct, undeniable, patent 'acquirement'
+which you see here."
+
+It was the same story from each and every practitioner. The hospital and
+asylum experts, the specialists in diseases of mind or body which were
+due to direct acquirement (such as drunkenness, syphilis and acquired
+epilepsy), were particularly strong in their contempt for even the
+theory that acquired character and condition are not transmittible. One
+laughingly said: "I'll grant that if I cut off a man's leg or a few of
+his fingers, his children will not be likely to be deformed because of
+that operation. This is not a permeating constitutional condition, it is
+a mere local mutilation. But if I were to take out a part of his brain
+so as to produce ["acquired"] epilepsy upon him I believe his children
+will be affected, and if he is a bad syphilitic [acquired] I know his
+children will be. Mind you, I don't say exactly what they will have,
+and they may not all have the same thing, but I do say that their
+'germ plasm' or whatever they come from, will carry the results of the
+acquired condition and character." *
+
+     *"Brown-Sequard observed that injury to the central or
+     peripheral nervous system (spinal cord, oblongata, peduncle,
+     corpora quadrigem-ina, sciatic nerve) of guinea pigs
+     produced epilepsy, and this condition even became
+     hereditary. Westphal made guinea pigs epileptic by repeated
+     blows on the skull, and this condition also became
+     hereditary."--** Manual of Human Physiology," by L. Landou,
+     translated with additions by W. Sterling. 1885.
+
+     Dr. L. Putzell, in his "Treatise on the Common Forms of
+     Functional Nervous Diseases," 1880, after describing the
+     methods by which Brown-Sequard produced epilepsy
+     traumatically in guinea pigs, says: "Brown Sequard also
+     made the curious observation that the young of guinea pigs
+     who had been made epileptic in this manner, may develop the
+     disease spontaneously. These experiments have been verified
+     by Schiff, Westphal and numerous other observers."
+
+So I beg of you to remember that while the fact and law of heredity is
+as certain as death itself, its course of action, its variability of
+operation, is as the March winds. To say that the constitutions of your
+children will be de* termined in great part by the condition of your
+body and mind is but to utter a truism; but to say exactly how--in what
+given channel this effect will flow--is not, in the present state of
+biological knowledge, possible.
+
+For the sake of illustration it is usually the part of wisdom to give
+the most probable trend of a given disorder; but to assert dogmatically
+that the son of a lunatic will be insane or that the daughter of a woman
+of the street will live as her mother did, is quite as unsafe as to
+say that a fall from a fourth-story window on to an iron door would be
+certain death. You must not forget that you may, if you want to take the
+chances, drop an infant out of a fourth-story window on to an iron door
+with no bad results to the infant (door not heard from), for I have
+known that to happen; you may sleep with a bad case of small-pox and not
+take it--as I once did; you may shoot a ball into a boy's head, taking
+in with it several pieces of bone, you may extract the bone and leave
+the ball there and the boy appear to be as good as new afterward; you
+may live all your life long with a roue and your children not be inmates
+of hospital, lunatic asylum or prison. All these things have been done,
+but it is not the part of wisdom to infer that for this reason either
+one of them would be a safe or desirable course of action; for in
+this world it behooves us to deal--when we are attempting to study
+nature--with the law of probability. The accidents, the exceptions, will
+take care of themselves.
+
+Notwithstanding this fact it will not be exactly fair to me for you to
+report that I say that every single one of Jane Smith's children will
+have fits and fall in the fire before they are twenty-one because she or
+their father is an epileptic. Perhaps one or two of those children may
+die in infancy, instead, or go insane--or to Congress; one may have
+hydrocephalus, and another be a moral idiot and astonish the natives
+because "His parents were such upright people." One may simply have a
+generally weak constitution--and another may win the American cup for
+wrestling; but the chances are that confirmed epilepsy (or what not) of
+the parent is going to "tell" in one form or another in the children.
+What I say of epilepsy is equally true of syphilis. This latter is
+so true that it can be readily told by the teeth of the children of a
+seriously infected case. That will strike the average "unprofessional"
+reader as impossible, yet it is well known to biologists, medical men
+and many dentists, so that a great many wholly innocent people who sit
+in a dentist's chair reveal more private family history than could be
+drawn from them with stronger instruments than mere forceps.
+
+I have been asked to write this paper because at the present time there
+is a tendency to discredit some of the well-known and easily proven
+facts of heredity, as a result of certain statements supposed to have
+been made by the recent school of biologists headed by Weismann. But in
+the hands of the laity much that Weismann did say is misunderstood
+and misstated and much that he never said is inferred. To professional
+biologists the loose inferences from Weismann's suggestions and
+speculations are absurd, and to experienced medical men and experts
+in the lines of practice indicated above, the arguments are beneath
+discussion. It is in this particular line of practice that proof is easy
+and abundant, where the "acquired" nature of the modified "character" is
+readily traced and the transmission (or heredity) susceptible of proof
+beyond controversy.
+
+It is for this reason that the illustrations are all taken from
+this field of investigation. If they were taken from consumption,
+tuberculosis or any of the various ordinary "transmittible" disorders,
+the cheerful opponent would assert (and no one could disprove if he held
+to the "germ plasm" theory back far enough) that the "tendency" had
+been inherent in the plasm since the days of "Adam"--that it was not
+an "acquired" character or condition which was transmitted. But with
+artificially produced epilepsy (either by accident or purposely as in
+the cases of Brown-Sequard's guinea pigs) or in the other so frequent
+and so frightful disorder mentioned above, it is a simple matter to
+trace the "acquirement" as well as the transmission. But when a new
+light arises in the literary or scientific world there are always many
+persons ready to spring forth with the declaration that they agree with
+the new point of view without first taking the precaution to ascertain
+what the recent theory really is. "Oh, I agree with him, the old theory
+is quite dead," greets the ear, and the placid pupils of the rising
+light so warp and distort the real opinion of the master as to make of
+him an absurdity. This has been markedly true of Weismann and his theory
+of heredity.
+
+In ordinary cases of scientific discussion the misconceptions of the
+laity would soon adjust themselves and little or no harm would be done
+meantime; but in such a problem as the present far more is involved than
+appears upon the surface. The ethical and moral results--not to mention
+the physical--of a reckless mistranslation or misconception of a
+scientific theory of this nature cannot be readily estimated, nor can
+it be confined to one generation. It is pathetic to realize that many
+fairly well-educated and well-meaning people, who would protect with
+their lives the children they give to the world and shield them against
+all possible physical, moral or mental distortion, mutilation or
+deformity, will stamp upon those children far worse mutilations and
+distortions (and even physical disorders) through and because of a
+half-understood version of u the new theory of heredity. Therefore
+I repeat that so far as the public is concerned, so far as the
+sociological features of the problem of heredity are involved, so far as
+the new theory relates to conduct and to physical and mental condition
+and their transmission, this controversy belongs to the laboratory--to
+the how and not to the fact of hereditary transmission, as I trust the
+above illustrations (which might be multiplied a thousand times) will
+serve to show.
+
+
+
+
+ENVIRONMENT: CAN HEREDITY BE MODIFIED
+
+
+But heredity is not the whole story, any more than the foundation is the
+whole house.
+
+Several times when I have spoken or written upon the basic principle of
+heredity, I have been met by questions like this: "Then you must think
+it is hopeless. With these awful facts and illustrations of the power
+and persistence of heredity before us, we must recognize that we are
+doomed before we are born, must we not? If there is, as you say, no
+escape from our heredity and its power and influence, what is the use
+of trying? Why not let go and just drift on the tide of inherited
+conditions? If these conditions are unfortunate for us, why not just
+accept the tragedy; if favorable, drift in the sunlight that our
+ancestors turned upon us, and let the world wag as it will?--we are not
+responsible." I confess that each time this sort of reasoning comes to
+me it finds me in a state of surprise that it is possible for thoughtful
+people--and naturally those are the ones interested in reading or
+talking upon the subject--I confess it surprises me anew each time to
+find that it is possible for such people to reason so inadequately and
+to see with but one eye.
+
+It is undoubtedly true that, do what we will, labor as we may, heredity
+has established beyond the possibility of doubt that an apple cannot
+be cultivated into a peach. Once an apple always an apple. That is the
+power of heredity. That is the foundation of the house. But there is
+another story. Plant your apple tree in hard and rugged soil; give it
+too little light and too much rain; let some one hack its bark with a
+knife from time to time; when the boys climb the tree let them
+strain and break it; let Bridget throw all sorts of liquids about its
+roots,--in short, let it take "pot luck" on a barren farm with Ignorance
+for an owner and Shiftlessness for his wife, and the best apple tree
+in the world will not remain so for many years. The apples will not
+degenerate into potatoes, however; heredity will attend to this. But
+they will become hard and knotty and sour and feeble and few as to
+apples; environment will see to that.
+
+Now suppose you had sold that farm to Intelligence and given him for a
+wife Observation or Thrift. Suppose that they had dug and fertilized and
+nourished and pruned that tree (I do not mean after it had been ruined,
+but from the start). It is quite true that you need never expect it to
+bear Malaga grapes. Heredity will still hold its own, and the kind of
+fruit was determined at birth (if I maybe permitted the form of
+speech), but very much of the quality of the fruit will depend upon the
+conditions under which it grew--the environment. So while it is true
+that our heredity is as certain as the eternal hills, and, as a famous
+biologist recently said in my hearing, dates back of the foundation of
+the Sierra Nevada mountain range, so that each of us carries within us
+mementos of an age when language was not and, as he humorously said,
+"Man has in his anatomy a collection of antiques--we are full of
+reminiscences"; still it is equally true that the power of environment,
+the conditions under which we develop or restrict our inherited
+tendencies, will determine in large part whether heredity shall be our
+slave-driver or our companion in the race for life, liberty and the
+pursuit of happiness.
+
+Let me illustrate in another way. Suppose that you are born from a
+family which has for its heritage a history of many and early deaths
+from consumption. Suppose that you have discovered that the tendency is
+strong within yourself. Is it for that reason absolutely necessary that
+you buy a coffin-plate to-morrow and proceed to die with lung trouble?
+By no means. Knowing your inherited weakness you guard with jealous care
+the health you have, and it may be that your intelligent consideration
+may secure to you, in spite of your undoubted inheritance, the
+threescore years and ten; while your robust neighbor, with lungs like a
+bellows and the inheritance from a race of athletes, may succumb to the
+March winds which he braved and you did not. Maybe "quick consumption"
+will carry him off while you remain to mourn his loss, and quite
+possibly leave with your posterity a growing tendency toward strong
+lungs.
+
+I know a man in New York City who had what is called a "family history"
+of consumption, who was rejected on that account by every life insurance
+company in this country thirty years ago. Well, that frightened him
+within an inch of his life; but with that inch he set to work to build
+his house "facing the other way," as he expressed it to me when I met
+him ten years ago, when he was, as he still is, a hale, hearty old
+gentleman. He is not and never could have been exactly robust; but he
+is as well, as happy and as content as the average man who has not
+inherited his unfortunate potentiality. It is true that nothing but
+intelligent and wise care all these years, nothing but his temperate and
+judicious life, could have compassed this end. I use the word temperate
+in its general sense. So far as I know he has not denied himself any of
+the best of life, which he has been amply able to secure; but he has at
+all times kept his house "facing the other way." His hereditary threat,
+while it has not driven him with a lash, has, it is true, lived in the
+back yard--which it does and will and must with us all, no matter what
+our environment or wisdom may be; but we need not foolishly throw open
+the windows, swing back the doors and invite it to take possession,
+while our own individuality moves down into the coal cellar.
+
+I have taken as illustrations in both of these papers inherited disease
+and its developments, but this is done only for convenience and because
+it will explain more fully, clearly and easily to most people what is
+meant. That our heredity is equally strong and certain in its mental and
+moral potentialities and tendencies is also true.* It is likewise true
+that the environment--the conditions under which we develop, curb or
+direct our natural tendencies--has a great and modifying rôle to play.
+
+
+     * "Alienists hold, in general, that a large proportion of
+     mental diseases are the result of degeneracy; that is, they
+     are the offspring of drunken, insane, syphilitic and
+     consumptive parents, and suffer from the action of
+     heredity."--Dr. Arthur McDonald, author of "Criminology."
+
+     It is sometimes asked, if children were changed in the
+     cradle, and those of fortunate parentage carried to the
+     slums to be nurtured and taught and those from the slums.
+
+     "To one at all familiar with the external aspect of insanity
+     in its various forms, it seems incredible that its physical
+     nature was not sooner realized. Had the laws of heredity
+     been earlier understood, it would have been seen that mental
+     derangements, like physical diseases and tendencies, were
+     transmitted."--Prof. Edward S. Morse.
+
+
+If placed in the cradles of luxury, would not all trace of mental, moral
+and physical heredity of a fortunate type disappear from the darlings of
+Murray Hill in their adopted environment of squalor and vice; and would
+not the haggard and half-starved, ill-nurtured waifs of Mulberry Bend
+blossom as the rose in strength and virtue in their new environment
+of luxury and of wholesome and healthful surroundings? Just here a
+digression seems necessary; for while I have no doubt that the change
+(even on the terms usually implied) would work wonders in both sets
+of infants, still it is to be remembered that for such a test to tell
+anything of real value to science, the exchange would need to be made
+upon another basis from that which is generally used as an argument,
+because it is incorrectly assumed that the children of luxury (as a
+rule) are born with clean and lofty heredity. This is, alas, so far from
+the case that it is almost a truism that "the highest and the lowest"
+(meaning the richest and the poorest) are "nearest together in action
+and farthest apart in appearance, only." They both frequently give to
+their children tainted mental, moral and physical natures with which
+to contend. The self-indulgence of the young men of the "upper classes"
+leaves a burned-out, undermined and tainted physical heredity almost a
+certainty for their children, while the ethical tone of such men--their
+moral fibre--is higher only in appearance and the ability to do secretly
+that which puts the tough of Mulberry Bend in the penitentiary because
+he has not the gold to gild his vices and to dazzle the eyes of society.
+The exchanged children, therefore, would not be so totally different
+in inherited qualities, after all. They would have alike a tainted
+ancestry. Their physical natures are the hotbeds of vices or diseases
+that are to be developed or curbed according as environment shall
+determine. But the foundation in both cases--the ground--both mental,
+moral and physical, is sowed down and harrowed in with the tainted
+heredity. The mother in both instances, as a rule, is but an aimless
+puppet who dances to the tune played by her male owner--a mere weak
+transmitter or adjunct of and for and to his scale of life. Therefore to
+point to the fact that to change these classes of infants in the
+cradle is to exchange (by means of their environment only) their mature
+development, also, from that of a Wall Street magnate to a Sing Sing
+convict, tells nothing whatever against the power and force of heredity.
+It tells only what is always claimed for fortunate or unfortunate
+environment--that "It gilds the straitened forehead of the fool," or
+that
+
+     "Through tattered clothes small vices do appear;
+     Robes and furr'd gowns hide all; plate sin with gold,
+     And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;
+     Arm it with rags, a pigmy's straw doth pierce it."
+
+Let us start fair. Let us understand that no environment can create what
+is not within the individuality--that heredity has fixed this; but that
+environment does and must act as the one tremendous and vital power to
+develop or to control the inheritance which parents stamp upon their
+children. Notwithstanding, you are personally responsible for the trend,
+the added power and development you give to much that you inherit. You
+are personally responsible to the coming generation for the fight it
+will have to make and for the strength you transmit to it to make that
+fight. Many a father and mother transmitted to their "fallen" daughter
+the weakness and the tendency to commit the acts which they and their
+fellows whine about afterward as "tarnishing the family honor." If they
+had tied her hand and foot and cast her into the midst of the waves
+of the sea expecting her to save herself they would be no more truly
+responsible for her death, be it moral or physical.
+
+And let me emphasize here that I do not attribute all of the moral and
+physical disasters of the race to the fathers of the race. By no means.
+I believe with all my heart that the mothers have to answer for their
+full share of the vice, sorrow and suffering of humanity. Woman has not,
+perhaps, been such an active agent, and much of the wrong she has done
+to her children has been compassed, through what have been regarded
+as her very virtues--her sweetest qualities--submission, compliance,
+self-abnegation! In so far as the mothers of the race have been weakly
+subservient, in that far have they a terrible score against them in the
+transmission of the qualities which has made the race too weak to do the
+best that it knew--too cowardly to be honest even with its own soul.
+
+I do not believe that the sexes, in a normal state, would differ
+materially in moral tone. Why? Simply because throughout all nature
+there is no line of demarcation between the sexes on moral grounds.
+The male and the female differ in qualities, but neither is "better,"
+"purer" nor "wiser" than the other--dividing them on the basis of
+sex alone. I do not believe that women are (under natural and equal
+conditions) better or purer than men, as is so often claimed. I do not
+believe that men are (under natural and equal conditions) wiser and
+abler than women. These are all artificially built up conditions, and
+they have fixed upon the race a very large share of its sorrow, its
+crime, its insanity, its disease and its despair. They have weakened
+woman and brutalized man. Children have been bom from two parents, one
+of whom is weakly self-effacing and trivial, narrow in outlook and petty
+in interests--a dependant, and therefore servile; while the other parent
+is unclean, unjust, self-assertive and willing to demand more than he
+is willing to give. These conditions have morally perverted the race so
+that it will continue long to need those evidences against, instead
+of for, civilization--almshouses, insane asylums, reformatories and
+prisons.
+
+It is usual to point with vast pride to the immense sums of money
+we spend year by year to support such charitable and eleemosynary
+institutions, instead of realizing, in humiliation and shame, that what
+we need to do, and what we can do, in great part, is to lock the stable
+door before the horse is stolen; that what we need to do, and what we
+can do, in large measure, is to regulate conditions and heredity so that
+we may congratulate ourselves in pointing to the small sums of money
+needed year by year to care for the unfortunate victims of inherited
+weakness or vice. We don't want our country covered with magnificently
+equipped hospitals, asylums, poor-houses and prisons. What we want is
+intelligent and wise parentage which shall depopulate eleemosynary,
+charitable and penal institutions. We don't want to continue to boast of
+a tremendous and increasing population of sick or weak minds encased in
+sick or weak bodies--half-matured, ill-born, mental, moral and physical
+weaklings who drag out a few wretched years in some retreat and then
+miserably perish.
+
+We want men and women on this continent who shall be well and
+intelligent and free and wise enough to see that not numbers but quality
+in population will solve the questions that perplex the souls of men. We
+want parents who are wise and self-controlled enough to refuse to curse
+the world and their own helpless children with vitiated lives, and
+who, if they cannot give whole, clean, fine children to the world, will
+refuse to give it any. Nothing but a low, perverted and weak moral and
+ethical sense makes possible the need of an argument on this subject.
+It is self-evident the moment one stops to ask himself a few simple and
+primitive questions: "Am I willing to buy my own comfort and pleasure
+at the expense of those who are helpless? Am I willing to be a moral and
+physical pauper preying upon the rights of my children? Am I willing to
+be a thief and misappropriate their physical, mental and moral heritage?
+Am I willing to be a murderer and taint with slow poison their lives
+before they get them? Am I willing to do this by giving to them a weak
+and dependant and silly mother and a father who is less than the best he
+can be--who arrogates to himself the prerogative of dictator who has no
+account to render?"
+
+All these questions apply to the health of the nation and to what it
+shall be in the future. When we speak of the health of a nation, we are
+so given to thinking of the physical condition, only, of its citizens
+that the more comprehensive thought of their mental, moral, ethical and
+business health is likely to escape our minds. Indeed, I fancy that few
+persons realize that even in the matter of business ethics and general
+moral outlook (including the nation's political policy, of course)
+heredity cuts a very wide swath. But it is true that national business
+morals are as distinctive from generation to generation as are the
+physical characteristics, well-being or mental qualities of the
+different peoples. Some one will say, "True, but all this is due to
+difference of environment,"--forgetting that the special features of our
+environment itself (outside of climate and soil) are due primarily to
+the hereditary habits and bias of a people. Natural selection, _per se_,
+ceased to have full force the moment man reached the stage when he was
+able to control artificial means of protection or power.. The "fittest"
+ceased to be so upon the basis of inborn quality. Artificial means--from
+the use of a sharp stone to overcome a stronger (or "fitter")
+antagonist, on up to the skilful application of money where it will do
+the most good--took the place of primary "natural selection," and
+the "fittest" to survive in the mental, moral, physical, financial or
+political arena became he who could command the artificial means of
+guiding and controlling the natural forces of primary "selection."
+The "tough" lives in the "slums" primarily because his parents did. He
+inherited his social and ethical outlook as well as his physical form,
+and the mould in which his thoughts have run was fashioned by nature and
+secondarily fixed by an environment or surrounding which also came to
+him as a part of his inheritance.
+
+Heredity and environment act and react upon each other with the
+regularity and inevitability of succession of night and day. Neither
+tells the whole story; together they make up the sum of life; and yet it
+is true that the first half--the part or foundation upon which all
+else is based and upon which all else must depend--has been taken into
+account so little in the conduct and scheme of human affairs that total
+ignorance of its very principle has been looked upon as a charming
+attribute of the young mothers upon whose weak or undeveloped shoulders
+rest the responsibility, the welfare, the shame or the glory, the very
+sanity and capacity, of the generations that are to come!
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Facts And Fictions Of Life, by Helen H. Gardener
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 42329 ***