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Page 3
But when all this is thankfully recognized and acknowledged, I still
cannot help questioning whether the mass of educated women have at all
grasped the depth and complexity of the problem with which we have to
grapple if we are to fufil our trust as the guardians of the home and
family, and those hidden wells of the national life from which spring up
all that is best and highest in the national character. Nay, I sometimes
fear lest even our increased activity in practical work may not have the
effect of calling off our attention from those deep underlying causes
which must be dealt with if we are not to engage in the hopeless task of
trying to fill a cistern the tap of which has been left running. This
absorption in the effect and inattention to the cause is to a certain
degree bred in us by the very nature of the duties that devolve upon us
as women. John Stuart Mill has compared the life of a woman to an
"interrupted sentence." The mere fact that our lives are so interrupted
by incessant home calls, and that we are necessarily so concerned in the
details of life, is apt to make us wanting in grasp of underlying
principles. Perhaps it is the fact of my having been associated all the
early years of my life with eminent scientific men that has formed in me
a habit of mind always to regard effects in relation to causes, so that
merely to cure evil results without striking at the evil cause seems to
me, to use a Johnsonian simile, "like stopping up a hole or two of a
sieve with the hope of making it hold water."
It is, therefore, on these deeper aspects that more especially bear upon
the lives and training of our own sons that I want to write, placing
before you some facts which you must know if you are to be their
guardians, and venturing to make some suggestions which, as the result
of much collective wisdom and prayer, I think may prove helpful to you
in that which lies nearest your heart. Only, if some of the facts are
such as may prove both painful and disagreeable to you, do not therefore
reject them in your ignorance as false. Do not follow the advice of a
politician to a friend whom he was urging to speak on some public
question. "But how can I?" his friend replied; "I know nothing of the
subject, and should therefore have nothing to say." "Oh, you can always
get up and deny the facts," was the sardonic reply.
Let me first of all give you my credentials, all the more necessary as
my long illness has doubtless made me unknown by name to many of the
younger generation, who may therefore question my right to impart facts
or make any suggestions at all. Suffer me, therefore, to recount to you
how I have gained my knowledge and what are the sources of my
information.
In the first place, I was trained for the work by a medical man--my
friend Mr. James Hinton--first in his own branch of the London
profession, and a most original thinker. To him the degradation of
women, which most men accept with such blank indifference, was a source
of unspeakable distress. He used to wander about the Haymarket and
Piccadilly in London at night, and break his heart over the sights he
saw and the tales he heard. The words of the Prophet ground themselves
into his very soul, with regard to the miserable wanderers of our
streets: "This is a people robbed and spoiled; they are all of them
snared in holes and hid in prison-houses; they are for a prey, and none
delivereth; for a spoil, and none saith, Restore."
The very first time he came down to me at Brighton, to see if I could
give him any help, speaking of all he had seen and heard, his voice
suddenly broke, and he bowed his face upon my hands and wept like a
child. That one man could suffer as he did over the degradation of this
womanhood of ours has always been to me the most hopeful thing I know--a
divine earnest of ultimate overcoming. The only thing that seemed in a
measure to assuage his anguish was my promise to devote myself to the
one work of fighting it and endeavoring to awake the conscience of the
nation to some sense of guilt with regard to it. In order to fit me for
this work he considered that I ought to know all that he as a medical
man knew. He emphatically did not spare me, and often the knowledge that
he imparted to me was drowned in a storm of tears. We were to have
worked together, but his mind, already unhinged by suffering, ultimately
gave way, and, with all that this world could give him--health, fame,
wealth, family affection, devoted friends--he died prematurely of a
broken heart.
For ten years, therefore, after my friend's death I gave up everything
for the purpose of carrying on the work he left me, and beat wearily up
and down the three kingdoms, holding meetings, organizing practical
work, agitating for the greater legal protection of the young,
afterwards embodied in two Acts--one for removing children from dens of
infamy and one known as the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which have done
much to educate the public sentiment of the country; but always making
it my chief object to rouse educated women to face the facts about their
own womanhood, and, above all, to rouse mothers to realize the perils of
their own boys and to be determined to know enough to enable them to act
as their guardians.
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