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-Project Gutenberg's Facts And Fictions Of Life, by Helen H. Gardener
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
-almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
-re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
-with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
-
-
-Title: Facts And Fictions Of Life
-
-Author: Helen H. Gardener
-
-Release Date: March 13, 2013 [EBook #42329]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FACTS AND FICTIONS OF LIFE ***
-
-
-
-
-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 Lozčre, 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 Ł. 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!
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
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