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THE NEW FREEWOMAN
AN INDIVIDUALIST REVIEW
Published on the 1st and 15th of each month.
Ho. 1. Vol. 1. JUNE 15, 1913. SIXPENCE NET
The Lean Kind 1
Views and Comments 3
Trees of Gold. By Rebecca West 5
Social Atavism in California.
By R. W. Kauffman. 7
Mind and Movements (Woman's
New Era). By Francis Grierson. 10
The Eclipse of Woman. By F.R.A.I. 11
Concerning Free Love. By Theodore Schroeder 12
Two Testaments. By Benj. R. Tucker 15
The Golden Age. By Huntly Carter 16
Correspondence, Personal Rights. By J. H. Levy 17
Eve. By Horace Holley. 18
THE LEAN KIND.
This is the epoch of the gadding mind. The mind 'not at home' but given to something else, occupied with alien 'causes' is of the normal order, and as such must be held accountable for that contemning of the lonely occupant of the home—the Self—which is the characteristic of the common mind. With the lean kind—the antithesis of those 'Fat' with whom latterly we have become so familiarised—the most embarrassing notion is that of the possession of a self having wants. To be selfless is to have attained unto that condition of which leanness is the fitting outcome. Hence, the popularity of the 'Cause' which provides the Idol to 'which the desired self-sacrifice can be offered. The greater the sacrifice the Idol can accept the greater is it as a 'Cause,' whether it be liberty, equality, fraternity, honesty or what not. If ten thousand starving men, with their tens of thousands of dependants, starve in the Cause of Honesty, how great is Honesty! If a woman throws away her life for freedom, how great is freedom! And no mistake.
'Great is the Cause and small are men,' is the creed of the lean kind. Consider the Cause of Honesty--the righteous frenzy for the maintenance of the status quo in regard to property. True it is that all worshippers of honesty have no property, but what of that: the greater the sacrifice: good is it to be a vessel of dishonour if thereby is achieved the greater glory of the Cause.
It is true one may choose one's 'Cause,' but choice appears to fall fairly uniformly into classes, and as for the lean kind, they choose honesty. 'Poor but honest,' is the lean one's epitaph. He makes it his honour to see to it that property shall remain 'just so.' He will right and die and play policeman with zeal, that property should remain just so! There have been those, however, who have maintained that 'Property was theft.' Monsieur Proudhon said so, and Monsieur Shaw supports him. 'The only true thing which has been said about property,' says Mr.
Shaw. We—and the lean—beg leave to dissent, what though in dissenting, we differ. The lean scout the base notion, for where would the Cause, Honesty be if horribly it should prove true? It is therefore not true for the lean. And for us? If the pick and the shovel are the discovered gold, then property is theft. But if the shovel and pick be as a means to an end—the acquiring of gold—then theft is to property in the same relation. Theft is the time-honoured, success-crowned means to property. All the wholesale acquirements of property have come, do come, will come, in this way. Whether Saxon robs Celt, and Dane robs Saxon, and Norman robs all three: whether William Shortlegs robs the English to give property to his fellow-bandits, or bandits, grown bolder, rob the Church for themselves, or the Trust-maker robs whom he will, the process is one and the same. A constant state of flux (Oh, Cause of Honesty!) flux of property, from hands which yield into hands which seize! Small wonder the lean kind love not this truth, and cover their eyes with their Cause. Hands which seize are not their kind of hands; the spirit of their Cause makes the muscles relax and the grip grow feeble.
Property once seized, the seizers set about to make ilux static. They declare a truce. They send forth a proclamation: 'Henceforth the possessed—we and our children—must remain possessors: and the dispossessed remain the dispossessed—for ever: these shall not raise disturbing hands against the state of things: should they, the STATE will visit upon them the penalities due.' For notice: In the process of proclamation, the victors have taken the proclamation for the deed; they have not merely said 'this state, now established, shall remain.' they have said, without pause for breath, 'this shall be' and 'this is,' 'The State now is and we are the State.' And so it turns out. The dispossessed—the lean—make answer: 'Yea—great conquerors, as you say, so it is.' The STATE
2 THE NEW FREEWOMAN. June 15, 1913
IS. Though we perish, let the State live for ever! Thus the State takes birth; the mobile takes on immobility; the Iron Mask upon which its makers write the law for the lean to keep, descends; henceforth, the lean, the law-abiding, the honest, are the pillars of the STATE, while the possessors of it are left well-established, free to pursue chance and adventure in the flux which has never ceased to flow in the secret order above the State. Hence comes high finance—a game of sport best played like cricket, with limited numbers.
The law of honesty is the first precept written out on the Iron Mask. Honesty is a rule of convenience whose purpose is to keep back the crowd from the excellent game of the select few. But, 'Among yourselves, seize what you can,' which reminds us of Mr. Cecil Chesterton. Mr. Chesterton charged the financial sportsmen with corruption, and tried to prove his charge by Law. Extraordinary forgetfulness. The law is not for those who make it. It is for the dispossessed only. Mr. Chesterton tried to establish a charge of dishonesty in a sphere where honesty—quite rightly—is a term of reproach. The holders of 'un-earned increment' are not concerned with honesty—that Cause of the Canaille—the retail-property-holder's virtue. He might with as much relevance have charged Mr. Isaacs with doing no work! Working is a lean-man's virtue and so is honesty, but neither are the virtues of the makers of the State. The reason Mr. Chesterton is mulcted of £10,000 is, that he used a word—corruption—which is not held in favour among the herd, who cannot be expected to understand that what is crime to them is the sport of a higher order; to whom theft, for instance, is not theft. It carries no stigma as it does with the lean. The State itself has no blush when it reveals its sole right to our money to be its might: makes us pay up for fear of wishing that we had, later; no blush that it steals because it can. All of which goes to prove it is a poor job calling names and explains why we are giving our first article to the lean kind. It is to protest against the irrelevance for the Lean of the doings of the Fat. During the last few months there has appeared amongst us an artist of foremost rank, an artist who is a satirist, who has revealed the very lineaments of the soul of his 'Fat Men.' Mr. Will Dyson's cartoons, now appearing daily in the 'Herald,' are the event of recent journalism. The power and truth, the pull and thrust of arm, the clutch upon their material, the face-to-face revelation—that these things should appear now in England is almost incredible. Yet we have not so far forgotten the satiric rage of Swift to be wholly without criterion for judgment of the measure of strength with which he wields this lightning flail, and, notwithstanding their truth and stretch of arm, union of brain and soul, the quality of Swift which leaves us seared and but barely alive, is absent from Mr. Dyson's work. For all his contempt for his thick-necked breed of 'fat-men,' contempt which we believe Mr. Dyson means to be the last word with his work, this does not create the ache, the burning wound which is at the kernel of contempt, and is that which the outer rage of contempt is meant to hide. He draws 'fat men' as though he hated them, yet his artists' revelation is truer than his interpretation of it. He has seen the breed of Fat men, and having seen he cannot for the life of him hate them as Swift hated his Yahoos. They are all redeemed by a quality which Mr. Dyson sees revealed, but which he does not know. The last glance at the cartoons always carries a smile. With the arm to wield the superhuman rage of Swift, he does not do so. Did he. his subjects would be shattered. He appears himself to feel he may not let himself go. There exists something he would shrink from destroying.
Mr. Dyson's choice of subjects (unless due, and one hopes to an accidental connection with a spirited journal which itself is engaged 111 a futile 'War against Fat,') illustrates his difference in relation to Swift, as a difference in what each fears. We hate what we fear and if what is feared is not in itself hateful, the hate recoils back upon us, only in part assuaged. Dyson fears brutal, stupid strength. Swift feared, loathed, writhed at the bare suggestion of weakness, meekness, and what these imply. Swift was girding at the thing which is the woe of men and the tragedy of the Godhead which Arnold assures us would do all things well but sometimes fails in strength.' Swift touches men in the quick; he reveals the shameful sore which we all walk enshrouded to hide. His Yahoo is each of us. His lay figures which bear the virtues, his Houyhnhnms have no soul to save in a bath of fire. He has not misdirected his rage. He lives with the Immortals because of his stupendous courage which dared to turn an unwinking eye upon that which other men dare approach only by stealth and with averted gaze. He saw, knew and uttered forth, what none but a giant may look upon. Dyson on the other hand, looks and sees, but his head is turned in the wrong direction. What he sees is merit smothered over with accidental demerits. The filthy vestures that meet his gaze, and which a finer breed than these thick-necked Fat would throw off in repulsion and disgust, are the outcome, not of the quality which Dyson reveals in his 'Fat,' but of the lack of this quality in the figures which crouch behind him—the lean. The vitriolic passion of repudiation which is satire, is with him never called into being. His primary occupation is with what should be his lay figures. He has directed his withering flame against his Houyhnhnms—the Fat, instead of against his Yahoos—the Lean. At present his work, while it makes the 'Daily Herald' notable, is not out of place there, but we trow a man would have a heart of flint who insisted on Yahoos with, shall we say, Mr. George Lansbury,—insisted that is on truth. The lean are spoon-fed with lies—a diet with no fattening qualities. Even Mr. Dyson's drawings of 'the worker' are sentimental. None dare tell the 'worker' the blunt truth, that his leanness blights the landscape and that he is responsible. The tales of leanness' woes are told to the discredit of fat, but they recoil in truth to the discredit of lean. It is the last resort of the downtrodden to seek comfort in the relating thereof. There is only one thing the down-trodden with retained dignity can do, and that is to Get Up. And there is only one thing for the lean and that is, to get fat, get property: and it is the one thing they will not do. The efforts to dodge the responsibility of self-defence, self-appropriation, to assume the mastership in their own person, is the unmistakeable mark of the lean. The first conscious effort of mind in any prospective change of circumstance is to look for the chain and the collar and the next great Someone to whom they may belong, serve, work for. If not the slave-owner, then the employer; (employer—someone who keeps him busy!) if not the individual (employer, then the State; if not these then the Commune or the Trade Union or the Trade Guild: an 'employed person,' worker, for ever. Let reproaches be directed where cause lies—home—and then they may bear fruit. As Mr. Tillett might have remembered when he called upon the Deity to perform a task which he could have done for himself had he cared, what a man wants doing, he will do himself. And what is true in relation to the deity is true in relation to fat men. The fat man is just as 'likely to endow the lean scolders as is the Almighty—none at all. He is satisfied in the knowledge that they can achieve their own endowment as he and his achieved theirs, by taking from yielding hands.
June 15, 1913 THE NEW FREEWOMAN. 3
VIEWS AND COMMENTS.
'The Cause to which I have given my life.' This is a message, the last but one of Mrs. Pankhurst. The Cause is the 'Vote.' With so many shoddy phrases extant we prefer to examine what Mrs. Pankhurst has given in order to secure the privilege of the vote, rather than be put off with the phrase 'my life,' which may well be rhetorical, as was that of her daughter when she spoke of 'doing her bit, for her seven years' and then left the bit and the years to others. Six years ago Mrs. Pankhurst would have said: 'I want the vote given to me.' Now she has to say 'I have given myself to the Cause—the Vote.' The alteration in attitude displayed does indeed illustrate what (rhetoric apart) Mrs. Pankhurst has given of herself in this agitation. She has literally abandoned her judgment and her original ambition, which was to be an active participant in state politics. A member of the Labour Party she fell an honest victim to the illusion regarding political power which made Mr. Tom Mann in 1891 say, 'When next we strike, we shall strike on the ballot-box,' an illusion which increased in intensity until 1905-6 when the attention bestowed on the political side of labour organization had its effect in the return of a greatly augmented labour party to the House of Commons, and at which time Mrs. Pankhurst's union actually took birth. Its formation was the high-tempered response of a capable woman to the snubs and neglects suffered by women in an organization wholly man-led. Her ambition for herself was to be of the same order of power, if of better quality—as the Macdonalds, Hardies and Snowdens. For her daughter, having provided her with the legal training so advantageous to political guile, her ambitions were boundless. She was to be given the choice of office, Prime Minister or Lord Chancellor, and either position she would have adorned. A legitimate ambition founded on a legitimate basis—the Vote. Therefore 'I want the vote' six years ago. And now? The first wild passion of women's insistence spent; the effective mouthpieces and actionists fallen out from her ranks; herself in the process of rapidly advancing invalidism, alternating between prison and nursing home, her mouth effectually closed; her daughter settled as a quiet pamphleteering suffragist abroad; and the vote? In the dim and speculative future! What has happened? She has pinioned herself with words—words—words, and these, not her own. She ventured into the maze of the symbolists, whose vulturous progeny—the empty concepts—got her! She began to 'lead a Cause,' and imperceptibly the Cause became Leader—leading where all causes tend—to self-annihilation. Mrs. Pankhurst may die and great is the Cause. What Cause? The Cause of the empty concept—the fount of all insincerity: the Cause of the Symbol—the Nothing worked upon by the Dithyramb.
Miss Emily Davison has gladly laid down her life for woman's freedom.' This is Mrs. Pankhurst's latest message. Here, then, we have it—the cause of Freedom. Freedom is the devil which drives. We must get a nearer view of it. What have we in mind when we say Freedom? We detect three elements: two notions and an atmosphere. There is the notion of a force, and a notion of a barrier which the force breaks through. A 'breaking through' is the single complex which is the 'getting free.' A definite action, therefore, with a positive beginning and a definable end: limited in time and complete in its operation. There exists nothing in this which explains the vague unending thing called 'freedom.' To 'get free' apparently is not freedom which is something which carries on an independent existence on its own account. This separate existence is the atmosphere. Freedom therefore is made up of loose association with the two notions which coalesce into the one action of getting free, plus an atmosphere. The action is the individual affair. the thing which must be done for oneself and permits of no vicariousness: the other, i.e., the atmosphere, is the part which one can create for others. This atmosphere is an interesting study: examined, it reveals itself, half swoon, half thrill. It is the essence of sensation, the food of the voluptuary. The thrill is the memory, the aroma of far-off fair deeds: the swoon is the suspension of intellect which allows vague association to make these deeds appear in part as one's own. Deeds, mark you! definite things. Now we can ask the question: What is the relationship of the simple, normal, definable life-process of over-coming specific resistances which we call getting free to the vague symbolic indefinable thing called Freedom. The second is a blatant exploitation of the first. The first is an individual affair which must be operated in one's own person and which once done is over. The second is not an action: it is a worked up atmosphere, secured by culling special nose-gays of 'free-ings,'—the most notable deeds of the most notable persons by preference—bunching them together and inhaling their decaying sweetness with exactly the same type of pleasure as that which the drugtaker and the drunkard get out of their vices. As tippling is the vicious exploitation of the normal quenching of thirst so the following after 'Freedom' is the vicious exploitation of the normal activity of working oneself free of difficulties.
When therefore a person 'dies for the cause of women's freedom' the effect of such a death is to give a crowd of degenerate orgiasts a new sensation. The motive may be,—a motive arrived at by a tragically mistaken process of reasoning—the belief that thereby others can be freed. Such is a tragic delusion. There is only one person concerned in the freeing of individuals: and that is the person who wears and feels and resents the shackles. Shackles must be burst off: if they are cut away from outside, they will immediately reform, as those whose cause is 'our poor sisters' and 'poor brothers' will find. The prostitution and poverty problems will be solved when the prostitute refuses to be prostituted and the poor refuse to be poor. Flogging the prostitutor, or railing at the exploiter is idle, for the defect is not primarily in these.
* * *
But these voluptuous mooners apart, what of freedom? The answer is, that these voluptuaries apart, there is no 'freedom'—and the Cause of Freedom is one long course of banalities and mis-statements unlimited. 'Freedom' presumes a state and there is no state of being free; there is an activity of free-ing but the activity is limited by time to the duration of the act itself; the act completed, the free-ing is ended. To advance the concept of freedom as a reality is to attempt to give to that which has no meaning apart from expansion of a force, the laid-out, static quality of the objective world; it seeks to establish in space—in the static—that which has an existence only in time; of which the termination is the motive which engenders the beginning. There is no freedom and hence there can be no right for it. Free-states, (amazing contradiction) free-speech, free-assemblage have just as much to do with the power which works itself free, as a massed collections of wreckage—specimens picked up from a cyclone-area have to the departed cyclone—i.e., associations which call it to mind, and no more. Remote connection indeed, for let the storm sweep through once more and in the second wreckage these same specimens will have lost their identity; they will be recognisable no more. So! The patient advocates of 'free states,' 'free speech,' 'free assemblage,' what are they but deluded children in the vicinity of forces they do not comprehend? If they want to assemble and speak without let or hindrance, let them increase their own power, their strength of arm until they can speak and meet as they will. But to ask for free speech and free meeting, what is it but an acknowledgement of tutelage, inferiority. If what they ask is given them, what will their speech be but—permitted speech—something graciously allowed to inferiors and minors. Oh Freedom, subtle deceiver, what chains are forged and rivetted in thy Name! (It will be noted that one falls inevitably into rhetoric immediately the blighting word is addressed. Unreal itself, it rallies unrealities to itself
4
THE NEW FREEWOMAN. June 15, 1913
as kind to kind.) We have flogged 'freedom'—and we hope to extinction. We cannot, for the nonce, deal with other members of this confusion-fostering class of words—those of the Empty Concept—the Nothings worked on by the Dithyramb—whose use and implications have gangrened all culture. Their number is legion—Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Unity, Justice, Truth, Humanity, Law, Mumbo-Jumbo, Mesopotamia, Abracadabra, Om-Tat-Sat. Intellectual concepts all—futile products of men who pursue their own shadow. Since Plato, literary philosophers have been digging pitfalls into which a lying Culture lures them and their fellow-men. A true concept is the framework which the intellect puts round something felt: feeling experienced either directly in the Soul, or indirectly through the perceptions of sense. An intellectual concept is not, strictly speaking, a concept at all: it represents the giving of a 'local habitation and a name' to a 'Nothing.' It is a verbal trick, put through from many different and mainly sub-conscious motives, and its immediate outcome is sentimentality—an intellectual 'fake' touched up with associated emotion—an easeful, 'pleasant' mechanical process, and one almost universally practised. It is the formation of the intellectual concept which makes every successive culture a poison-diet for the peoples which create it. A virile people turns to thought, creates a culture which promptly turns upon it to encompass its destruction. There has been as yet no exception in the history of mankind. To-day we see the same process illustrated in the lives of individuals. The unreal concept is at the back of every 'Cause.' Hear of a Cause and look for the hag, and it will be found in these lying creations of the idle brain. It is the natural sequence, since the brain must guide life's action, that these will o' the wisps should lead the individual astray, and the higher the quality of the individual, the more disastrous are the consequences. 'Causes' are the diversion of the feeble—of those who have lost the power of acting strongly from their own nature. They are for the titillation of the senses of the herd, and a person who can act strongly should shun all Causeites and their works. Strong natures, who act out their beliefs in their own person, not realising that such grounds for actions as Causes proffer are in place only among those who having lost the instinct for action amuse themselves by words, occasionally are fascinated by the jargon, with consequences disastrous in the highest degree to themselves. Miss Davison, for instance, was in the presence of something innocuous to most of her companions, but very deadly in relation to herself when she lent ear to the pleadings of the great Cause 'Freedom.' Her soul strong for action, sucked in the poison which would have harmed little, one less sincere. Miss Davison we know has long held that in her 'Cause' a death was necessary. Were it not for the tragic sequel, one might smile at the naively-honest mind arguing so simply with issues so stupendous. It was inevitable, that, short of abandoning the 'Cause' some such tragedy should gather round her. A fatalism must inevitably attach to those who cannot abandon the phrases of their yesterdays: who must spend more on them because they have already spent much. She, like so many others, trying to endow a state of affairs purely spectacular with the verisimilitude of the dramatic, felt that the situation was not 'moving' yet she had not the requisite malice to inform her what was wrong. That the 'movement' was engineered, i.e., mechanical not living, that all that was desired was the kind of movement which can be effected by a cinematograph—not a surging, living uprising, taking its own wayward living course. Miss Davison never realised the difference, or realising, like a handful of other persons, was too much bound by the hopes and deeds of her yesterdays to act upon the realisation.
She did not understand that the presence of the tiny handful of people like herself in a spectacular affair was a very considerable embarrassment to the situation, which accounted for the suspicion and semi-disgrace 111 which they were constantly held; that their presence was just tolerated because occasionally the organization might need to dump them down, one here and one there to act as living beings for an occasion, and then return them to the rôle of automaton. And yet she might have. If we remember rightly, the last occasion upon which we saw her, more than a year ago, she was under warning of dismissal from her 'post with a pittance' (twenty shillings weekly if we remember aright) upon her next attempt to 'militate' on her own account, a dismissal which we believe actually had effect later. Apparently she continued to work at the dead situation, as an artist might try to touch up a few bits in someone's daub so to give the thing which has never lived the 'air' of life. If a death would be a relieving touch in the monotony of the stale spectacle, then a death there should be.
There has, indeed, been an outcry for 'a death,' for quite a time. Some male fool stated the need very clearly in an interested section of the press some time back. Mrs. Pankhurst herself appears to have felt it, and has called herself a 'dying woman' for nearly a year now. We can find the heart to be sorry for Mrs. Pankhurst, in spite of this tragedy due to the criminally silly situation she has allowed to obtain. We suggest to her, that she takes the first step, sets the example to the others, and casts her yesterdays. For her, in truth, success has been heavily streaked with failures: To gain a crowd, she gave up the best part in herself—her reality. Having gained them, the worst part of her promptly lost them. She has dignity and self-respect and she has put herself in a position which allows of neither. The argument of suffering is not respectable. There is something to be said for a 'death as a spectacle,' but there is nothing to be said for 'dying-long-drawn-out' as an argument. There is no virtue in suffering: To be relying on pity as a main argument is the tactic of the weak. Mrs. Pankhurst, hunger-striking, negates the spirit of successful defiance which the hunger-strike embodied. She has counted without the ingenuity of her opponents. By adopting the hunger-strike at all, she entered upon a tactic, the meaning of which was that she should bring herself so near to death that a prison would not hold her. The State's reply was to contrive a means of enabling her to leave prison for just so long and upon such terms as would enable her to be held in prison—a negation of her own tactic. The hunger-strike, a brave but brutal thing in itself, is one which can be continued only as it began—in the brutal spirit. When the State turns her out of prison in order to get well enough to return, the logical, solely effective retort is "I will go out of prison, not to befit myself to return, but to carry on my work and do as I will." It would be a great gamble—but only so could Mrs. Pankhurst hope to prevent her sword being turned against herself; only so could she expect to make their cat-and-mouse effort non-effective. And the situation is not worth it. Far better and stronger would it be for her to take measures to bring the preposterous situation to an end and start afresh. There should be for her an added inducement in the truly horrible position of Christabel Pankhurst who, for 40 or 50 a month, wags the militant dog by the tip of a tail attenuated by stretching a few hundred miles. We will not enlarge upon the situation: it should be sufficient merely to state it. We suggest that Mrs. Pankhurst should judge of it with a little sensitiveness, and end it. For Miss Davison, one can only say that she in deadly circumstances maintained entire her integrity of Soul:
June 15, 1913 THE NEW FREEWOMAN. 5
her sincerity, which was such because her strength was such. It could not be gainsaid by any chance circumstances in which it became entangled. Her courage one recognises, note and remember. And we are grateful that in her final effort luck was with her. Chance betrays so many occasions, for her as for all who attempt to fill in a spectacle, and her experience had had its bitternesses. Here, luck crowned her courage; she has been permitted to secure what we know she cared to have: the well-done of those whose work she chose to do. And we are profoundly glad. A daring deed, a perfect spectacle, and the cost all hers. It might have been otherwise—life and recriminations.
* * * *
With the rapid decline of faith in politics and political method, and the collapse of Mrs. Pankhurst's campaign, the fictitious interest which has been worked up for votes for women since 1906 has already largely died down. The method of 'influence' in politics has shewn its superiority. It has the crowning merit of success—naturally so since where all is guile, methods must be of guile to have effect. Accordingly, it is realised that votes will be given to women, if and when, the fortuitous collection of women holding the positions of first females in the household of members of some future administration decide that it would please them to have them. The prospect of having to win the favour of, say, Mrs. Asquith, does not seem to grace the situation with dignity: but then politics have no dignity. The mistake in the 'vote' agitation lay in thinking they had, though it now appears difficult to understand how it could have been imagined that anything of intrinsic value could be in the gift of the six hundred members of parliament whose personal wills stood between the women and the vote. Understanding, however, is the fruit of making mistakes, and it is now clear that the 'woman movement' must find its definition and activity in matters unrelated to voting 'rights.'
For fear of being guilty of supporting the power of another 'empty concept' we hasten to add that the term 'Woman Movement' is one which deserves to go the way of all such—freedom, liberty and the rest—to destruction. Accurately speaking, there is no 'Woman Movement.' 'Woman' is doing nothing—she has, indeed, no existence. A very limited number of individual women are emphasising the fact that the first thing to be taken into account with regard to them is that they are individuals and can not be lumped together into a class, a sex, or a 'movement.' They—this small number—regard themselves neither as wives, mothers, spinsters, women, nor men. They are themselves, each cut off from and differing from the rest. What each is and what each requires she proposes to find by looking into her own wants—not 'class' or 'race' wants—which explains her repudiation of 'descriptions by function.' If primarily women are to regard themselves as Woman or as the Mother, their satisfactions as individuals would be subordinated to an external authority: the requirements of the development of Woman or Mother as such—Empty concepts again. 'Woman as such'—-'mother as type' has no reality: the subordination of the individual to the Interest (another word for Cause) of motherhood, or the 'Interest of the Race' is the old trick, subjugating the real to the unreal. A woman as a mother, takes on the accidental 'mother characteristic' merely by the way, wholly for her own satisfaction. She is so because she wants, not because of any wants of the community, the State, the Race, or any other faked-up authority. The centre of the Universe lies in the desire of the individual, and the Universe for the individual has no meaning apart from their individual satisfactions, a means to an end. The few individual women before mentioned maintain that their only fitting description is that of Individual: Ends-in-themselves. They are Egoists. They are Autocrats, and government in their autocracy is vested in the Self which holds the reins in the kingdom of varying wants and desires, and which defines the resultant of these different forces as the Satisfaction of Itself. The intensive satisfaction of Self is for the individual the one goal in life.
TREES OF GOLD.
The collection of toothbrushes which I keep in my bedroom looks untidy: but it will have to stay, as it is until I write my autobiography, because the only record of my spiritual life consists of the chemist's marks on the handles. For when I find myself consumed by any passion (which is usually rage) I fling myself out of London into some little place. And always I forget to take a toothbrush and have to buy a new one: hence I have accumulated a hoard of those boney reminders of the temperament. Sometimes they do not earn their keep, for they do not tell me why I went to Eastbourne. That was a horrible place, ravaged by a wind that made one look as though one had been drawn by Walter Sickert and that drove me dishevelled into a Ballad Concert where two fat men played a Chopin concert for twenty-five minutes. They might have been Belloc and Chesterton eternally discoursing of the Jews....
And I wonder why I went to Poole. I spent a jolly afternoon there in an old long-profaned Chapel on the quay, sitting on plump, crepitant sacks that exuded the sleepy scent of grain, while against a milk-white sea clucking machinery most entertainingly dropped coal into a dissolute little tramp steamer and fetched up sleek mud from the harbour bottom. That was what I really liked: dying a little death and dropping my life behind me, and giving to pleasant little plans when I could contemplate the innocent activities of the natives as a virgin martyr new to Heaven might survey the gambols of the Cherubim. But it has suddenly come about that England is no place for a respectable virgin martyr; It blunts the fine edge of the sword of the soul to live in a peace maintained by the torture of women. If I had stayed in England any longer I should have become as satisfied as any proprietor of a slaughter-house that God's in His Heaven, all's right with the world. So I looked round for a country that was not given over to the devil, who is the eternal fomenter of law and order. The news that King Alfonso was being specially guarded drove me to Spain: happy is the country where they know at whom to throw their bombs.
To recover this certainty of which I had been robbed by our great free Parliamentary institutions, I crossed the Pyrenean frontier one Sunday in May. My body was hot with fatigue, and the discussion of Votes for Women, which I was carrying on with a Basque wine-merchant, the King of Spain's photographer, and a German commercial traveller, lacked coherence because I cannot speak more than ten words of any foreign language grammatically. This is not a defect but a penalty attached to an active mind. How could I, who have been busy all my life debating on the nature of things, possibly spare the time to master a different and unenlightening system of naming things? Nevertheless, I leaped into a river of language and emerged, dripping with irregular verbs and wagging my tail with pride, to lay at their feet a declaration that things being as they arc I want a vote. They gazed on me as
6 THE NEW FREEWOMAN.
one might gaze on a rebellious chocolate-cream. I should have left it at that: but my fundamental honesty, distressed at receiving this moist and benevolent glance on false pretences, moved me to explain that I was not a luxury but a journalist.
It was a brutal thing to do. They sat in a quiet large-eyed row and looked at me as a London crowd will look all day at a house where murder has been done, while their imaginations reconstructed the crime whereby the quivering morsel of femininity that must surely have been born in me was clubbed to death. Oddly enough, I felt guilty and unbeautifully raddled with intellectual passions: so that I appreciated the kindness of the German commercial traveller in bringing out his samples to divert the conversation. With a half-hearted hope of resuscitating my womanliness he surrounded me with miles and miles df galoon. I took the stiff ribbon in my hands, and with determination smiled delightedly at the raised chocolate and magenta flowers: and I recovered the sense of my innocence. For this German, staggering from capital to capital to seduce immortal souls into the purchase of galoon, was given up to blacker, more unsensuous sensuality than I should ever touch in staggering from Poole to Eastbourne, or even from idea to idea. I discovered where the emotion of modern Europe was spending itself one day last winter when, misdirected by Exchange, a voice asked me through the telephone to quote my lowest price for earthenwear stoves (size D.). Never before had I been asked any question with such passion. The man who spoke was, like this German, one of a more hot-eyed and disordered multitude than was ever led by drink or the basest kinds of love, who desire to spread Axminster carpets on the Muscovian steppes and gild the South Sea lands with Waterbury watches as their forefathers desired to feed the whole earth with the body of Christ. Our enemy is commerce: The frenetic distribution and exchange of ugly things made by unhappy people confuses the earth. I thanked God that I had no hand in peace and prosperity and handed back the galoon.
We passed out of the Pyrenean mists and I looked out to find that we had left that damnable smiling green which makes France fit for nothing but a bleaching-ground. Quite quickly I realised that I had come to something that was as important to me as my birth. We had passed into a broad valley that was burned: not by the sun, for in these parts it was hardly more than early Spring, but by some deep passion of the earth that might have burst through the fields and light the air to flame had it not been that kind of passion that loves to feed upon itself. The red soil crumbled, the grass was young yet consumed. A fire ran up the poplars and discoloured the leaves that were rustling in a cold wind: and beside them a river flowed thinly as though leeched of its fulness by this ravening country. The land throbbed like a bared heart, and here and there a graveyard was the symbol of the valley's desperation. There were four high walls that were not white but pallid like terrified flesh: and above them spread black cypresses, calm as nothing else in that land was calm, without doubt rising from miraculously cold, wet roots. The ravaged earth had set itself to prison death, who yet sucked to its prison all the life its passion could create. The mind could grasp that struggle, but not the war between the valley and the naked limestone mountains that marched up from the east and west as proudly as befitted the raw material, the untainted substance of the earth. The land broke into a surf of burnt green trees against these cliffs, which were so stripped and shining that its veins of snow seemed warm and human: it became a hot and narrow gorge twisting upwards against this coldness. Rage shivered the mountain into peaks and deep distortions so beautiful that it strained this consciousness to perceive them: one could not fully grasp its beauty because of the limitations of this humanity. To enter into it one would need to be a mountain. It was exactly what I had always expected life to be like. Until now I had always been a little disappointed with things.
The train slid haltingly up an incline against a roaring wind into a tunnel full of little blue-clad navvies, who shouted and waved lamps from deep trenches. And I realised that I was feeling horribly ill. I had left London with the kind of fatigue that easily becomes a frenzy, and I had not passed unscathed by the flatness of France and the blunt ugliness of its women. But this was a grimmer kind of physical misery. I was a grey and disgusting object: I felt as though I was going to die, and I knew that my corpse would be most offensive to the eye. And not only was I distressed by my body but I felt concerned about my soul. For my illness was due, not to the long journey nor even to those galoons, but to the beauty of the burning valley and the naked hills. I was shattered by excitement. I had a right to be excited. This really was an important occasion in my life: before I had always worshipped this violent and courageous beauty, which I had never found in people and rarely in art, without any certainty that it existed. All the same, that it should shatter me condemned my life. I cared for nothing really deeply except this beauty. But I could not express it. And if I could make anything which had that quality of fierce splendour I could not make people like it. They would turn their backs on ravaged and distorted Spain and go to Switzerland to be pleased by the unsurprising beauty of the sunshine on the snow. I might, of course, ascend to a region where I would be content to make beauty without praise or company. But beauty is so dangerous. One has to use flame to burn the galoons from Europe and the tame squalor from life, and in the end one may so easily turn this weapon of fire on oneself. By the heat of its desires and adorations the mind may become like hot wax: incapable of receiving the sharp impressions which are all it lives for. The fire by whose blaze the soul meant to lighten the world may burn it down to its foundations and leave it a smoking ruin, as unlovely as any factory or building designed from the first for base uses. The fervent purpose may destroy its instrument and die frustrated. It brings not only personal disaster but it is a treachery against the orderly procession of generation after generation, which we call life. The poor hurt the community in which they live: they fall into ugly ways of life, they spread disease, they leech the stores of the kind. So too the tragic hurt the community: they live impulsively, they spread excitement, they make preposterous demand on the patience and service of those of good-will. They wreck the peace for which the race must seek for the sake of the future.
But all the fine things that grow out of life, like beauty or love or pride, demand this ritual of rashness and cruelty. If one loves them we must pardon those whose dignity it is to perform the ritual; it is worth while. At Burgos I walked to the Chapel of a palace, which eight hundred years ago a Castilian King gave to the most aristocratic order of Cistircian nuns. I saw the thirty sisters celebrate mass as they might have performed a slow court dance before the throne, and bow to the altar with such reverence as the daughters of the most mighty houses of Spain might decently pay to the son of a carpenter. Each of their bodies was as proud as a walled city full of towers. To cultivate
June 15, 1913 THE NEW FREEWOMAN. 7
their pride they had fenced their bodies in the spotless decency of an ordered life among women: they had folded away their minds in the cold casket of the love of Christ. Without doubt they might have governed their country haughtily or borne children to inherit their power: but in that life they might have been chipped and broken by contacts with insubordinate persons and uncoercibie desires. They turned their backs on life and gave it an inspiring masterpiece, for that mass gave one the power to defy the earth and to defy it beautifully. If Christ had so abandoned himself to his genius for grace he might have sweetened the world. But he chose to save it, not by a gentle life-time spent sunnily among children and fishermen, but by the nine hours of His passion on the Cross: so he damned it by accustoming it to the sight of pain. Here in Spain the contemplation of his torn and bleeding body has perverted the people into a habit of indecency and the enjoyment of bull-fights. To this desire to save the world we still fall. To secure peace in our time we insist on "character," meaning an absence of characteristics, in our schools and produce an eventempered and disciplined population, that might as well have never been born. Our writers totter into sociology to tidy things up, and benevolently design new and improved workhouse dietaries instead of new stars. They will make life easy to live. But life itself is nothing: it is the trimmings that matter, the pride and honour and beauty.
That is why I face unashamed the disaster that the worship of my kind of beauty may bring on me and on my neighbours. On the Castilian heights above Burgos there were trees of gold. They thrust shining leaves into the quivering cloudless skies, and their slim trunks were of the glowing metal itself. They shivered in a wind that came down from the snow and the light throbbed through their bodies. The secret of their beauty was a lichenous growth that gnawed inwards as it glowed outwards. Yet they were better, so gilded and diseased, than the healthy tree whereof they cut the mischievous cross of Christ.
Rebecca West.
SOCIAL ATAVISM IN CALIFORNIA.
There has now for two years existed in California a state of affairs that, a half-century ago, would have been described as war. It is a battle against the guarantees of freedom of speech and assembly granted by the constitution of the United States to every person within the borders of that country. It has already caused the loss of many lives, the destruction of many thousands of dollars' worth of property and the arrests of very many thousands of men and women that were protesting against the abrogation of their legal rights.
That California is, however, thoroughly opposed to these men and women, and that the rest of the country is ready to become just as much so, will be seen from a perusal of the following cuttings taken from two American publications, one secular and the other religious, one printed on the Pacific and the other on the Atlantic coast:
"Soon—it has begun to happen already—the plain citizens of every country will form a combine. Its object will be the suppression of sedition and anarchy in the persons of professional agitators. It will be a big, powerful, effective, but very unostentatious revolt. It will work quickly, surely, silently. The first thing the Plain Citizen Combine will accomplish is the quiet removal of these gentlemen....They will just quietly disappear.... There will be a little inquiry at first, but it will die down ever so quickly."
This is an editorial expression made on November 2nd., 1911, in the Los Angeles, California, "Times," a daily newspaper owned and edited by Harrison Gray Otis. The second cutting, although many more such from many other sources could be supplied, expresses the opinion of the Rev. Father Belford in the Roman Catholic "Nativity Mirror," for April, 1912:—
"The Socialist is busy....His power is an actual menace to our city. There seems to be no law to suppress or control him. He is more dangerous than cholera or smallpox—yes, he is the mad dog of society, and should be silenced, if need be, by a bullet."
The war that such editorials has encouraged has, as I have said, resolved itself into a war upon free speech. To end agitation, you must put down the agitator, and the most effective agitator is the man that mounts a soap-box on a street-corner. After him the reactionary forces went. At the outset he happened as a rule to be a member of the Socialist Party of the United States, which has lately grown threatening to the national control of the Republican and Democratic parties. Accordingly, in every considerable town the governing faction either passed ordinances forbidding street-speaking, or else, without the formality of an ordinance, instructed the police to arrest street-orators for "obstructing the highway," and a really countless number of imprisonments followed.
Then, when the efforts for suppression concentrated on the Pacific Coast, where labour-troubles were attracting agitators, a new factor appeared. This was the organization known as the I.W.W., or Industrial Workers of the World, the United States' expression of the movement from craft-unionism and toward industrial unionism. Even their enemies admit that the I.W.W.'s members are men of pure motive and high courage; but, precisely because of these qualities, they are dangerous opponents. They cannot be bought and they cannot be intimidated. Consequently, with the appearance of the l.W.W.'s in the States of Washington, Oregon and California, the gaols became congested.
Gradually, the war centred in California. This commonwealth, once a territory governed, when governed at all, by lynch-law and the vigilantes, had long since adopted an appearance of civilization and become a sovereign State with all the legal machinery appertaining thereto. But now it reverted. Harrison Otis, owner of the Los Angeles "Times," helped to form the reactionaries—who held government and courts in their political control—into a merchants' and manufacturers' association, the avowed purpose of which was to drive union labour from the Pacific Coast, and the first attack of which was directed against the street-orator and free-speech. Actual war began and soon resulted in the blowing-up of one of "The Times" buildings by McNamara—not an I.W.W., or Anarchist, or Socialist, but a trades unionist, a member of the Democratic party and of the Roman Catholic Church.
San Diego is a place of about 20,000 inhabitants, mostly wealthy people of American birth. It is the county-seat of San Diego County, in southern California. A labour-dispute, at first of only local importance, brought the agitators to this city, and the reactionaries followed.
The leaders of the workers passed the word that no violence was to be so much as attempted. Their enemies were to be given no excuse under the law. Neither strikers nor agitators were to carry arms. The only rights to be insisted upon were the constitutional rights of free-speech and assembly. These orders, as the Governor's Special Commissioner later found, were obeyed.
8 THE NEW FREEWOMAN. June 15, 1913
The reactionaries, on their part, were equally determined. The Merchants' Association, the city's leading business-men and a majority in the local government, secured the help of the City Council, detective-force and police-force and organized a body of mercenaries known as the "Vigilance Committee." They declared that they would make San Diego "too hot to hold" the advocates of free-speech.
In the January of last year, the City Council passed an ordinance forbidding all street-speaking in the business-district. When the victims of this ordinance protested that the law was in violation of the constitution of the United States and that of California, they were told to go to the local courts and test it.
They did not go to the courts. To do so would have been to encounter delays and appeals that would be ruinous. The local judges were the social, political and business associates of the members of the Manufacturers' Association, and to apply to them for an injunction against the enforcement of the unconstitutional ordinance was sheer waste of time. Moreover, the long war had already depleted the finances of the agitators. Their one hope, therefore, lay in an open, but not physical, resistance. They could not fight in the courts, and they would not fight in the streets. But they could and would speak in disregard of the ordinance; they could and would go to gaol.
They did go to gaol. They were arrested by the score. No resistance was offered the police; but no sooner was one speaker torn from his soap-box on a corner than another soap-box was supporting another speaker on the next corner. The city gaol was filled and overflowed into the county gaol. The county gaol was filled and overflowed into the gaols of nearby counties. Yet in no case did the captives attempt violence, and in not one instance was a weapon found on the person of a speaker.
The reactionaries now resolved that this attempt to appeal to the outside public by congesting the prisons should fail, and so torture was applied to frighten the advocates of free-speech, and deportation by kidnapping was employed to rid the gaols of the surplus. "A great mass of evidence was submitted to your Commissioner," writes Colonel Weinstock, whom the Governor appointed to inquire into the affair, "including forty-three sworn affidavits to the effect that members of the I.W.W., their sympathizers and others, had. . . been arrested by the city police. . .without being charged with a violation of the law, had been taken out of the city. . .and there submitted to an inhuman, brutal beating by a body of men, part of whom were police-officers, part constables, and part private citizens."
From one of these groups of cases the sworn statement of John Wallace is here selected, not because it is the worst, for it is not the worst, but because it does not contain quite so many unprintable details as some others.
On no charge and without a warrant, Wallace was arrested and taken to gaol. At about ten o'clock of one evening, he and fourteen others similarly "detained," were dragged from the prison and put into a motor-truck in which, accompanied by a policeman, they were driven some eighteen miles to a lonely spot where fifteen or more motors were standing at rest. Also at rest, but ominously ready for action, were some seventy-five men, openly armed with whips, night-sticks, knives and revolvers.
Wallace, when his turn came, was taken from the truck and dragged to a platform on which a United States flag was tossed. He was struck over the head until he assumed a kneeling posture, and in this significant position he was compelled to kiss the flag. Meanwhile, there was begun a clubbing of the other prisoners, which continued for ten minutes, whereafter all the victims were put into motors and driven to a place near the county-line. Here, after another whipping, they were driven into a cattle-pen with three armed guards to watch them. At about 8 a.m., the prisoners, who had not been permitted to touch food or drink for above eighteen hours, were forced to "run the gauntlet" between rows of men with clubs in their hands. After that, the flag-kissing episode was repeated, and the unfortunates were told to cross the county-line and never return—fifteen men against most of whom not even a formal charge had been lodged.
Perhaps it may be pleaded that Wallace was an I.W.W., or a Socialist, or an Anarchist, whatever excuse may be found in such a plea. What he was I do not know. But Julius Tum was none of these things. I quote the Governor's Commissioner: "I desire to call the especial attention of your Excellency to the detailed story of Julius Tum, a young German tailor. Tum is not a member of the I.W.W.; is not a Socialist—He came to San Diego some time ago in search of employment at his trade. He finally succeeded in getting work. . . .This poor, inoffensive and harmless young man, if but half of the story he tells be true, for having committed no offence other than out of curiosity dropping into the I.W.W. headquarters to get for his information some of its literature, was taken in charge by the police and put under duress. He underwent the almost unbelievable experience hereinbefore related by John Wallace, only in a more extreme degree. . . .Your Commissioner, after seeing and talking with this man... giving him an exhaustive cross-examination. . . became thoroughly satisfied that he spoke the truth without any attempt at exaggeration."
Nor is there lacking more than a suspicion of downright murder: Michael Hoey, a member of the I.W.W., was arrested and lodged in gaol. He was sixty-five years old. According to his fellow-prisoners, he was brought there in evident agony, complaining that "he had been kicked in the groin by a policeman and seriously ruptured." He died—and the coroner's jury, composed of his enemies and the enemies of his cause, returned a verdict of "death from tuberculosis of the lungs and valvular disease of the heart."
Official bestiality goes, at any rate, undenied. and it must be kept in mind that this bestiality always exerted itself against persons not only not convicted of any offence, but not even charged with one. Prisoners were starved, and one, a boy, as a punishment for asking for food, was beaten by a policeman named Hathaway. Robert L. St. John, president of the San Diego Electrical Workers' Union, was arrested while at his work, locked up, abused by detectives Myers and Lopez, and finally released with the mere statement that he had been mistaken for Vincent St. John, General Secretary of the I.W.W. A. J. Van Bebber, secretary of another local union, was subjected to insults, the mention of which convention forbids, and physically assaulted. G. E. Fitzgerald, business-agent of the Carpenters' Union, dragged from his dinner, without a warrant, to jail, was there maltreated and met at police-headquarters', he says, by J. M. Porter, a non-union building-contractor, who "with vile oaths," shook his fist in Fitzgerald's face and cried: "If you ever again try to organize my men. I'll shoot you!"
These are but a few of a tide of many instances that reached its flow in the case of Dr. B. L. Reitman. Some brief mention of the Reitman outrage has already managed to find is way, unlike the other cases, into the British and American newspapers. The full details are too terrible to be printed here; but a
June 15, 1913 THE NEW FREEWOMAN. 9
less incomplete version than any that has yet appeared is that given by Reitman himself.
Reitman is a man of education and culture and a doctor of medicine. He went to San Diego as the agent of Emma Goldman, the lecturer on anarchism and one of the best authorities on the drama in the United States. Neither Reitman nor Miss Goldman was accused of any offence. There had been no lecture, and no warrant was issued against them. Yet, on the evening of their arrival, six citizens entered the room in which Reitman happened to be, and, in the Doctor's own words:
"They drew revolvers and pointed them at me. They said: 'If you utter a sound or make a move, we'll kill you.'. . .I was taken into the street, past a uniformed policeman, and thrown into an automobile. When the mob saw me, they set up a howl of delight. The auto went slowly down the main street and was joined by another containing seven business-men. This was at about 10.30 p.m.
"I wish I could describe that twenty-mile ride....I was with six men and a chauffeur, and as soon as we were out of the business-district, these men started cursing, kicking and beating me. . . .They put their fingers in my eyes and nose; pounded and bit me....They said: 'Don't break his nose; I promised the doctor in the other auto to have that pleasure! 'We could kill you, and nobody would know who did it; we've got the police on our side.' 'We're not going to arrest anybody else; we're just going to club h--l out of them.'
"When we reached the county-line, the two automobiles drove to a deserted spot, and then we all got out. The men formed a ring about me. They tore my clothes from me, and in a moment, I stood before them naked.... I was knocked down and compelled to kiss the American flag, which I had been taught to love in my boyhood days. . . . When I lay naked on the ground, my tormentors kicked and beat me until I was almost insensible. With a lighted cigar they burned the letters I.W.W. on my buttocks; they then poured a can of tar over my head and body. Une business-man, who is active in church-work, attempted to push his cane into my rectum. One banker twisted my testicles. . . . When they were tired of their fun, they returned me my underwear and vest and ordered me to run the gauntlet."
Women fare little better than men in San Diego. Emma Goldman has long been a valiant champion of free-speech. It was she who, in the Philadelphia free-speech fight, had made against her the legal decision by Judge Robert Newton Willson, which has provoked so much ridicule from other jurists in the eastern States of the Union, Judge Willson actually ruling that an alien on American soil is not entitled to the constitutional guarantees. Miss Goldman narrowly escaped lynching in San Diego, and fared little better at the hands of the western mob than she had fared at those of the eastern judge.
I have given so much space to the Reitman-Goldman episode only for the obvious reason that Dr. Reitman and Miss Goldman were more explicit than hundreds of their fellow-sufferers. Nevertheless, it must be kept in mind that what the doctor endured is only of a piece with what was inflicted on scores of other victims. It is small wonder that the Governor's Commissioner has concluded:
"The Sacred rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, guaranteed under the constitution, were trampled under foot by men who. in the name of law and order, as an alleged vigilantes committee, proved themselves to be the bitterest enemies of law and order."
And who are these terrorists? Not aliens, not the poor, the oppressed, the ignorant. They are the law-makers, the law-administrators, the associated merchants and business-men, the natives, the well-to-do, the ruling and educated class of San Diego. A list of the outragers of Dr. Reitman and others, made public by Miss Goldman, includes the names of J. M. Porter, of Porter and Forbes, real-estate dealers; Walter P. Moore, Assistant Superintendent of Streets of San Diego; Francis Bierman, journalist; Colonel J. Dodge, theatrical manager; his brother, another real-estate operator; Clark Braly, a rich ranch-owner; George Sears, a prominent citizen; Amy Johnson, apparently "a male, despite the name"; George Washington Fishburn, president of the Marine National Bank; Carl I. Ferris, owner of a chemist's shop; R. J. Walsh, of the R. J. Walsh real-estate Company; a Mr. Brodnax, who is an estate-agent and member of the firm of Brodnax and Neale; W. Litzenberg, of the Homeland Real-Estate Company; Colonel Frederic Jewell, a retired banker; and J. E. Forward, Jr., F. J. Lee, W. F. Ludington, S. C. Payson, a Dr. Chamberlain, John Burkham, George Burnham, and Percy Goodwin, all well-known men in San Diego. No person mentioned in this list has, so far as I have been informed, denied his right to be there.
The newspapers of San Diego frankly endorse the actions of this mob. On March 4th., 1912, the San Diego "Tribune" declared that "hanging is too good" for the apostles of free-speech. "They are much better dead," it said; "they are the waste material of creation and should be drained off into the sewer of oblivion, there to rot." The next day the same paper regretted that the law prevented citizens from taking the I.W/W.'s "away from the police and hanging them," because this method "would end the trouble in half-an-hour." It spoke hopefully of the citizens being permitted "to take the law into their own hands," which, it considered, would be "permanently for the good of San Diego." So much for the "Tribune." The "Union," which employed the sweet-smelling Bierman, said editorially on the 7th. April, 1912, that "self-protection" had become "the supreme law" and added that "there is every reason to believe that this plan...will be continued as long as may be deemed necessary. If," it concluded, "this be lawlessness, make the most of it."
But the editorial wisdom of San Diego has forgotten one thing. It has forgotten Section 5508 of the United States Revised Statutes, which reads:
"If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten or intimidate any citizen in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same, they shall be fined not more than $5,000 and imprisoned not more than ten years; and shall, moreover, be thereafter ineligible to any office or place of honour, profit or trust created by the constitution or laws of the United States." The rule alleged to have been broken by the partisans of free-speech in San Diego carried with its violation the penalty of a fine not exceeding $100 and thirty days in the city gaol, either or both, and it was but a local and more than questionable ordinance. The law, openly broken by the Merchants' Association and those fighting with it, carries with its violation the penalty of a fine not exceeding $5,000, together with imprisonment for not more than ten years and disbarment from public office. If "the punishment fits the crime," who are the greater criminals: the apostles of free-speech in San Diego, or its enemies?
And what, finally, has happened to these re-
10 THE NEW FREEWOMAN. June 15, 1913
spectable citizens of San Diego to whom no harm has been done by the people that they outrage? We have in the United States a proverb to the effect that "there is only one generation between shirt-sleeves and shirt-sleeves": is there but two years from California to the jungle? If the ape and the tiger once assert themselves in a civilized human being, do they remain to rule? Are we like dogs that have once tasted the blood of sheep and must therefore revert to the ancestral wolf?
I do not know. I know only the facts that I have here set down. Because I hope that the facts may be explained and resented, I have thus marshalled them.
Reginald Wright Kauffman.
WOMAN'S NEW ERA.
By Francis Grierson.
Five great movements have vivified the pages of history within the past fifty years—the emancipation of the slaves in America, the placing of the French Republic on a permanent basis, the military triumph of Japan, the founding of the Chinese Republic, and the awakening of women after a slumber of three thousand years.
The first four movements had their rise in something social, economic, and political; the awakening of woman was spiritual. Cycles of centuries elapsed between Deborah's song of triumph and the burning of Joan of Arc at the stake, and another cycle elapsed between the Orleans tragedy and the proclamation declaring Queen Victoria Empress of India.
All movements and systems, political and social, religious and material, develop and wane in cycles. Everything that we see, hear, and sense exists according to inexorable law, and the leader of any movement who believes in chance is doomed to failure. A belief in chance and luck is a negative belief; the most active thought vibrations are high-strung and positive. The true psychic vibrations are not established by denial, but by affirmation. It requires more psychic force to affirm new truths than it does to attack old lies.
But the different cycles (of time have their special character. Some are masculine, some are neutral, and some are feminine. Some are material, others are psychic. We are now entering upon a long cycle of spiritual activity in which women will lead for the first time since the commencement of the Christian era. For ages she has been compelled to grapple with phantoms and shadows of religious materialism, with a one-sided political and intellectual economy exercised by people who are often devoid of intuition and psychic perception. Women have been revolving in a vicious circle around a centre composed of social, political, and religious negations, and not until recently have they possessed sufficient illumination to help themselves. Mere votes will never be of any great service to women if the old order of materialistic control is permitted to continue. Not until women are taught how to exert a psychic influence and radiate a psychic thought-power, will the old order be permanently changed. The two greatest spiritual movements of our time—modern Theosophy and Christian Science—were evolved by women.
Madame Blavatsky, a Russian, was the founder of the Theosophical Society which has ramifications in all the countries of the world, and is still gaining adherents everywhere; and Mrs. Eddy began her work alone, without funds and without any patronage from anyone. Both these women began by a propaganda among a small circle of their friends, and I remember the time when Mrs. Eddy was quite unknown beyond a circle of ten or twenty persons in Boston. This was some forty-five years ago. I witnessed the very beginning of Madame Blavatsky's propaganda. It was in the Vermont Mountains, in the autumn of 1874, and I was present in the room when Colonel Olcott first met the author of Isis Unveiled. Before that time Madame Blavatsky was quite unknown and, indeed, she did not begin to be talked about until a year later in New York City. At the time I met her she had not yet published a book. Modern Theosophy had, in reality, its beginning at the farm-house of the Eddy Brothers, in Vermont, where Colonel Olcott went as a reporter for the Graphic, the first daily illustrated paper ever issued in New York City. The Eddy Brothers were no relations of Mrs. Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, but the name of Eddy is bound up with the two greatest modern movements started by women.
The third movement, now on its way, will touch political and social life at a point not touched by Mrs. Eddy and Madame Blavatsky.
In all these movements it does not matter in the least what people think about them in their beginning or how many enemies a movement may have. Our likes and dislikes make no difference whatever. What matters and what counts is the psychic intensity manifest by the founder of a movement. Whence comes this psychic intensity? From a consciousness of power. But what constitutes power? Power is engendered in the individual by the action of a new cycle of thought-waves. This new psychic force pays no attention to what has gone before or what is likely to come. It exists in and by itself. It is a self-created miracle. Herein lies the wonder. The God-Principle in all nature, and especially in human nature, is a miraculous principle. This force pays no more heed to opposing opinions and popular opposition than a cyclone pays to personal opinion. Opposition to new thought-forces may be likened to the ripples on a pond caused by the throwing of a stone, compared with the waves caused by a storm at sea; the first is a local incident, the second is general and all-compelling.
A movement of any kind is not prevented by opposition or by any sort of attack. Witness the systematic attack on Madame Blavatsky by Dr. Hodgson. Anyone who reads, and has ears to listen, knows which of these names is falling into the limbo of forgotten things.
It was Madame Blavatsky who instituted a personal cycle, a new current of thought-waves. No matter what thousands of other people said about anything she did, these thought-forces acted, and are still acting, on thousands of minds in different parts of the world.
The same holds good for Mrs. Eddy. At the time Mark Twain made his attack on Christian Science and its founder, it was read by millions of intelligent and critical people, but it left Mrs. Eddy and her movement exactly where they were before the onslaught. A cyclic movement is like a citadel which can be taken neither by famine nor the sword nor by any device known in warfare.
For more than forty years I have meditated on the mysteries and the causes of the cyclic action of mind. Having been in the very midst of all the greatest modern movements of the past sixty years both in Europe and America, I was early led to think about them for myself and arrive at conclusions of my own. I am not satisfied with the explanations of movements like modern Theosophy, Spiritism, Christian Science, Mormonism, or any Woman's movement of the time. With the passing of ancient Greece, the world lost the sense of reason and took to sentimental opinions, and an opinion holds the same relation to truth as sentiment holds to a sum in arithmetic. A cyclic wave of thought cannot be established by anyone s opinions.
June 15,1913 THE NEW FREEWOMAN. 11
In order to elucidate the subject of thought-cycles, I intend writing a detailed account of my meeting and my experiences with Colonel Olcott and Madame Blavatsky in 1874.
By means of pyschic illumination, "women will push open the door of the super-world," to use the words of Miss Dora Marsden. There must be an actual awakening to the spiritual side of life and thought before anything great can arise out of the present chaos of conflicting opinions and sentiments, and woman will never enjoy her own rights until she rises superior to the material forces which bind the world to conditions little above the conditions of primitive barbarism.
Christian Science and Theosophy belong to the philosophical and metaphysical domain of mental activity. The new movement ought to teach women how to exert their spiritual facilities on a practical, social, and political plane, in a way that will lift the material out of the vulgar and the common-place. They must cease to be bound down by loads which they are not able to carry, and if the new movement attaches itself to the old order of metaphysics, to the old order of social ambition, it will fail. Every cultured woman should be a psychic entity and a spiritual force. Women must erect their own altars and preside according to their own spiritual illumination.
Francis Grierson.
THE ECLIPSE OF WOMAN.
NOTES ON A PREHISTORIC REVOLUTION BY F.R.A.I.
[These articles are contributed by an anthropologist whose interest in the subject is scientific, and who is less desirous to see any radical change carried out than he is that the whole subject of the relation between the sexes shall be considered in the light of that information which only history can supply.]
I.—LADIES FIRST!
Plato, in the Banquet, puts into the mouth of Aristophanes the quaint theory that the human race was once bisexual, each individual being composed of a man and woman, with two heads, four arms and legs, and a similar complement of other organs. Even the playful fancies of such a philosopher are more sane than the sober theories of a dunce, and science has substantially endorsed this imagination by training animal life up to a stage when there was no differentiation of sex.
Man, as a distinct order, is born of woman, as much as he still is in his individual capacity. The most striking proof of this is the one laid stress upon by Darwin, namely, the fact that every man has feminine breasts, or, at least, nipples. Scientifically speaking, woman is the human type, of which man is an eccentric or abnormal development. The story of Adam and Eve is the exact reverse of the truth. And it is necessary to insist on this because the religious, political and industrial eclipse of woman is the result of a great revolution, in which Christianity is the latest episode; and woman will never obtain the religious franchise from a masculine God.
The male sex originated in the superior activity of some cells over others, at a time when the type was constituted by one cell. Man was, what he is still, the adventurer, and woman the stay-at-home. The wandering cells gradually lost the function of child-bearing, which tends to anchor the female to one spot. We need only compare the hen sitting on her eggs with the cock flying abroad in search of food, to understand the natural course of the evolution.
These general characteristics of the two sexes have persisted through many changes in their relations, in certain families of spiders the female lurks in her nest, the male invades it, impregnates her, and is promptly devoured by her. His function in life is over, and he is disposed of accordingly, while she remains to carry on the species. Thus the female may be said to be the species, to which the male is but an adjunct.
A more familiar case is that of the bees. The hive contains only one female, but she is the hive, and all the rest are her organs. The drones impregnate her, and are destroyed as soon as their usefulness to her is at an end. The workers feed her and her offspring, and are permitted to live for that purpose. The queen bee, as she is very properly named, is the type of woman, and we must keep her before our mind's eye if we would understand the history of the human queen.
A well-meaning professor has published a learned volume with the object of demonstrating that monogamy is the "natural" and most common relation between the sexes in a primitive constitution of society. Advocates who approach the question under the influence of sentiment, do not deserve much consideration from the scientist; and as there is not a syllable from one end of the Bible to the other in favour of monogamy, except in the case of bishops, and all the most intimate friends of Jehovah lived in open polygamy, it is difficult to understand the worship of monogamy as anything but an Anglo-Saxon fad, unworthy of serious discussion. In view of the fact that the sexes are almost equally balanced in point of numbers, and that no child has more than two parents, it does not require demonstration that a temporary cohabitation of two individuals, one of either sex, is the normal and necessary condition of society during the period in which the parental function is active in both.
Beyond that, everything is a question of industrial economy, of personal sentiment, or of superstition.
Thus in Africa, where the mother suckles her child for years, the father is forbidden to approach her till it is weaned, and therefore takes another wife if he can afford to do so. In Christian countries, the law compels him to resort to women diseased by their miserable conditions, with results which are sometimes terrible for his next offspring. The Puritan who exults in the spectacle of children born into the world victims of some horrible infirmity, probably owes his own insane feeling on the subject to the same congenital cause.
So far as observation and reason can carry us. the most ordinary primitive relation between the sexes was that of promiscuity, modified naturally by the parental state, and by difference of ages. The Romans found the Britons living in what seemed to the invaders a state of promiscuity; though an anthropologist cannot doubt that the Roman observer took a superficial view, and that there must have been some system of taboos such as exists among the merest savages.
It is. of course, a delusion to suppose that the British population, which ought to be called Pictish rather than Celtic, was really exterminated by Saxons or Danes. What is called the Celtic revival in Ireland and Scotland is a Pictish revival, and the feminist revival in England is connected with it. It is the resurrection of Boadicea.
In order to form a scientific judgment on the relation between the sexes we must note that Nature is seemingly wasteful of life germs. No marriage law. however unnatural, no phallic observances, can obviate the fact that even a single coition between the male and female entails the waste of myriads
12 THE NEW FREEWOMAN. June 15, 1913
of germs for one that strikes root. To a truly devout mind, this would suggest that the purposes of the Creator may possibly be better served by the British marriage law than that of Justinian—for it is to the Byzantine legislation of the sixth century that the subjection of woman is directly due.
Now the British law, which is still very generally adhered to in practice by the poorer classes, makes marriage depend on parentage, in obedience to the apparent will of the Creator. The sexual relation begins with betrothal. If it results in fruitfulness the betrothal is completed by a marriage, legal according to the Byzantine system imposed on us by foreign missionaries. If it appears that Nature has forbidden the banns, the experimental union is dissolved.
This wholesome and truly God-fearing system is the best evidence of the position of woman in primitive times. She was a mother first and a wife afterwards. The first rank was allotted to her by the Creator, and she can neither abdicate it (as a class) nor be deprived of it. The second was forced upon her by man.
The history of her degradation must therefore be traced from a stage of society in which the maternal function was the supreme one, and the merely sexual function was comparatively unimportant to our Roman-Christian laws.
To the modern mind this may seem a paradox, since we know that one function depends on the other. But this was so little known to primitive man that the political downfall of woman actually dates from the discovery of fatherhood.
Two of the most careful investigators in the field of anthropology, Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, have reported the existence of a tribe of Australian aborigines who are as ignorant on the subject as an English child. And although the present writer is disposed to receive that report with some reserve, there can be no reasonable doubt that at one time the whole human family were in such a state of ignorance.
We are, therefore, justified in stating from this position, that whether the primitive relation between the sexes was in practice monogamy or promiscuity, in either case it was not in any conjugal relation that woman took her place in primitive society. It was as the mother that she held that commanding rank that she was destined to forfeit as the wife, a rank which is still testified to by the archaic word for a mother, the word now written queen.
F.R A.I.
CONCERNING FREE LOVE.
"Freedom" and "love," taken separately, each symbolizes the most universally approved ideals of our race and time. A man from Mars might therefore be astonished to find that these ideas when combined, become the most stinging and burning epithets which can be hurled at a conventional person.
In discussion of sociology and morals, no vituperation carries with it a greater capacity for arousing emotional aversion, no epithet more successfully inhibits the logical processes of the average person, than the innocent words, "free" and "love," when used conjointly. The epithet "free lover" is especially effective to preclude the sane discussion of divorce. The savages, whose ideas and ideals still dominate the psychological imperative of our times, could think of no essential to marriage except the physical and material. In modern times these elements have been supplemented by the absurd overvaluation of ritualistic regularity and conformity to ceremonial law. The christianized barbarian, like his protagonist, the primitive savage, has not yet reached that stage of development in which intellectual, social and aesthetic considerations form an essential factor of the marital relations. Therefore, neither savage nor average Christian is able to consider these as elements of the divorce problem, and even the advocates of laws for easier and saner divorce are often silenced by the odious epithet "free lover."
Because these words convey to me no definite significance, nor anything necessarily implying social harm, I conclude that the emotional associations accompanying this epithet are a species of moral hysteria, which ought to be eliminated from serious problems.
The words "free love," if they have any meaning at all, would seem to signify the antithesis of a love by compulsion, and yet I find no one with either the stupidity or the courage to say that love may be called into existence or prolonged by statute law or other coercive measures. If then, nobody can believe in compulsory love, because in its very nature the development of love-emotion is incapable of subjection to legislative enactment or other artificial coercion, then we all believe in free love. From this view-point, it is still harder to understand why the term should have become so forceful an epithet of reproach.
To explain this irrational phenomenon, we must enquire a little into the historical and psychological origin of the phrase and its emotional associations. Historically, the epithet achieved its recent American prominence by general use in reproaching a heretical religious community of Oneida, New York State, known as the Bible Communists. These religious enthusiasts maintained a social system in which procreative acts were promiscuously indulged, not according to the natural inclination of the parties immediately concerned, but according to mandates of priests, who were recognized as holding in all matters a supreme authority in the community. Although, if it is to exist at all, love always must be free, here, not love itself, but the ultimate expression or simulation of love between the sexes was a matter of authoritarian determination. Even exclusive monogamous relations were prohibited. This coerced expression of love, of course, bore no necessary relation to the existence of any romantic love between the parties. To dignify these coerced associations with the title of "free love" or any other kind of "love" or of "freedom," was of course a most grotesque misnomer which came about because the purists who gave the phrase currency as an epithet, were usually so obsessed by sensualism that they could not distinguish between cultural love and mere carnal contact. They employed the word "free" in this connection because the Bible Communists, by reason of their exaggerated notion of the sacredness of sex, held that all sexual affairs of those who were spiritually as exalted as themselves, were above and therefore exempt from unsanctified control.
All through the history of Christian fervor we find a recurrence of spiritual enthusiasm breaking out in claims of "perfectionism," and a consequent repudiation by such heretical sects of the coerced asceticism of church and state. But every such assertion of sexual freedom implies, necessarily, a denial of Christian orthodoxy and therefore, in the minds of religious bigots, evokes all the hatred that is commonly accorded theological heretics. In order that the ethical problem involved may be relieved of those emotions, associated with mere phrases which invariably befog the reason and annul its mandates, it becomes necessary that we have a clearer understanding of the etiology and psychology of those
June 15, 1913 THE NEW FREEWOMAN. 13
exaggerated ideas about the ethical potency of love-passion, and the equally absurd exaggeration of the ethical potency of statute law in relation to sex. These are both at bottom only conflicts of religious superstitions seeking objective or ethical justification for ideals of non-rational, subjective import. The process is that of substituting sexual irregularity for theologic heresy, and declaring both equally displeasing in "the eyes of the Lord." Thus the fanatical hatred, which was at first aroused by the latter, attached itself to the former, and the epithet "free lover" thereby came to arouse all the evil feelings which were formerly attached to the epithet "anti-Christ."
To the real ethicist, even the ultimate expression of love is neither moral nor immoral, in and of itself. To the unintelligent, morality depends not upon a refined sense of justice or any consideration of social service or beneficence, but is determined by the expediency of conforming to some arbitrary conventional standard quite unrelated to any application of the scientific method to human experience. Such purism only promotes sex-perversion, eroto-mania, eroto-phobia and all the consequences of moral blindness or persersity. Often the suppressed passion becomes abnormally intense, and through association becomes concentrated upon some persons or person of the other sex, and extra-legal mutual gratification frequently results. The victims of such conditions are seldom intelligent ethicists, and their change of conduct is not the result of a reasoned view of the ethical factors involved. Were it so, the justification for the unauthorized indulgence would have been seen before and independent of the unusual strain. But those who have not a rational ethics, are nevertheless impelled to seek and make some justification for an unconventional yielding to physical predispositions.
Since no new factor has entered into the situation, except the growing intensity of sex-desire, the subjects involved can find no justification for their new and irresistable inclination, except in the love-longing and love-passion itself. Among the poets, this necessity breaks out in dreamy, mad rhapsodies of love-eulogy. Secular mystics have developed the notion that this passion, unlike any other, has an inherent ethical potency. Hence, various doctrines of varietism and promiscuity are promulgated as being per se moral and beneficent. With the religious mystic we always have something akin to the apotheosis of sex, and the unconventional life finds its justification in the super-physical or alleged transcendental, and we hear of "spiritual affinities" and "celestial marriages" as justifying incidental promiscuity or polygamy, in defiance of convention and of statute law.
Through its suppression, sexual desire grows in intensity. Normal inducements to rational restraint gradually fade into relative insignificance. For many persons thus situated, there comes a time when the imperativeness of the passion overpowers all barriers to gratification. Frequently, more or less ill-advised marriages result. With others various forms of auto-erotism are initiated and through frequent repetition, the occasional perverse indulgences become habitual at first and then obsessive as well as inhibitive to normal temptation or gratification. Such perverts often become purist leaders and proclaim the vileness of normal sexuality as a self-justification and a means of warding off suspicion. If the passion remains long suppressed it then easily becomes the "unbearable idea" of the hysterical person with or without religious coloring. Seeking to make a virtue of misfortune and craving applause equal to his suffering, the unfortunate person attributes the latter to false causes through fear of disclosing the true one, and vehemently inflicts envious denunciations upon all who enjoy that freedom which she craves but dares not take for herself.
In all such cases, from the very abnormity of the passion, comes the theory that whatever be its expression, love is nevertheless its own moral justification. On the other hand, the abnormal overvaluation of the evil of normal sensualism leads to the ascetic ideal and the anti-ethical notion that the ultimate expression of love is, per se, its own damnation.
It is quite inseparable from the extravagant sex-overvaluation, which is current in our puritan civilization, that we should mistake moral sentimentalism for ethic, and give mere expediency an ethical valuation. The wane of the ascetic ideal was an emotional rather than an intellectual reaction, and sought within itself the justification for renouncing the anti-natural. Hence, in our popular thinking, love justifies all. A loveless sexual union is distasteful to a normal person for the same reason that a perverted indulgence is distasteful. When those who lack capacity for self-analysis sought to justify their ignoring of ascetic restraint, they appealed to an effective predisposition in others, when proclaiming the ethical potency of love passion.
But to the rational person, this sort of moral sentimentalism should be just as distasteful as the kind that exaggerates the sinfulness of unlegalized or unsanctified sexualism. Both standards are equally beyond the domain of ethics, and for the same reason. Under the one standard, certain sexual relations are denounced merely because not preceded or followed by legal or religious ceremonies; under the other, even a legal and sanctified union is denounced as immoral because of the absence of mere love-passion, the value of which is purely aesthetic never ethical.
Both positions are equally devoid of ethical understanding, because both ignore alternatives and the remoter consequences of the contemplated union as controlling factors of true ethical judgment. An epileptic couple, begetting a degenerate offspring—a curse to themselves and to society—are doing an immoral act, no matter how much their union is legalized, parsonized or sanctified. The ethical outrage upon the offspring and society is not lessened a particle, though their love-passion for one another be intense even to the point of abnormality.
Under no circumstances should such ethical outrages upon others be given ethical rank equal to a loveless and lawless union between normal persons, which results in happiness to themselves and does injury to no one. Under the last hypothesis, it makes no difference whether the union is childless or not, the assumption being, that if there be a child neither it nor society is disadvantaged by that fact.
The question of the ethical potency of love-emotion is closely related to the larger problem of the place of the emotions in the more rational man. In animals, especially of the lower order, every act is automatic-unpremeditated reaction to some stimulus. With the development of self-consciousness, there comes into play the capacity for the intelligent, conscious supervision of motive and conduct. This means, that the immediate impulse to react upon stimuli is checked to a greater or less degree by the conscious consideration of the related causes and consequences, even very remote ones. Relative degrees of intelligence are measurable by the relative completeness with which all the related and remote circumstances are weighed and consciously accounted for in the resultant act. In other words, that conduct is farthest removed from the unconscious automatism of animals and, consequently, is the product of later evolution, which implies the most uniform
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and accurate subordination of every impulse to the check and justification of the cold logic processes.
At another extreme we see persons of a highly evolved environment and antecedents who, through degeneration, have reverted to something nearly akin to the state of the lowest human types. Because of some infirmity and a consequently abnormal emotionalism, it has become impossible for such persons to so check their impulses by the cold logic processes as to make their conduct conform even approximately to that of the normal individual of meagre or average intelligence. This inability to restrain their emotional impulses within the limits of practical harmlessness, ultimately leads such persuns to the confines of some asylum.
That being is farthest removed from the unconscious automatism of the prehuman state and from the irresponsible state of the insane, who most uniformly, constantly and successfully subordinates the feeling-impulse to the check and justification of the calm processes of cold logic, which co-ordinate the feeling-impulses with all the factors likely to effect the broader interests of self and society. This does not mean that the feelings are to be eliminated from any situation, but that they must be brought into proper and logical co-ordination with an ever widening circle of consciousness of the feelings and interests of other beings. The feelings may be used—indeed, must be used to aid us in the interpretation of many phenomena which present themselves. The feelings should also be permitted considerable sway in furnishing the dynamics by which we are impelled onward in a course of action, first determined by rational processes. From this point of view the essential thing is, that with the well-regulated, highly-evolved person the feelings as such should never be the primal determinant of conduct. Emotions should serve only as the interpreters of others, and as the dynamics of one's own life. Mere emotional intensity is utterly devoid of ethical value; to this general rule love is no exception.
Yet unenlightened sentimentalism continues to be the order of the day in regard to all matters of sex. There are two general classes of sentimentalists, both equally unacquainted with the methods of true ethicists. One class, usually composed of women who have broken away from orthodox thinking, contending for nothing more startling than this: "As soon as love ceases between men and women, it is shameful for them to live together." To the popular mind this comprises all that "free love" stands for, since freedom to dissolve one union implies freedom to form a new one.
The second class of unenlightened sentimentalists is lead by our moralists for revenue. These unenlightened sentimentalists vociferously denounce the first theorists quoted. Their views are condensed in the following quotation from an eminent newspaper writer: "To such persons, marriage means nothing more than the legitimization of sexual intercourse. This is no better than the philosophy of the pig-stye." It may be remarked that the first sentence quoted is the substance of the judicial conception of the American courts.
The above criticism and the theorist who is thereby rebuked, represent to average minds the only possible alternatives. On the one side is an exaggerated sentimentalism; on the other, an exaggerated emotional aversion to the unconventional, the latter giving expression to a blind assumption of great ethical value in mere legality and seeking justification in mere question-begging epithets which are always indiscriminately and effectively hurled at the heretic.
I propose that we look a little beneath the surface, and enquire whether the denunciation quoted above is not more literally and accurately applicable to the legalized, indissoluble marriage than to tree unions. To my mind, coerced monogamy is legalized rape. It may be well also to see whether the usual defence of free unions is not founded upon an ethical over-valuation of love-emotion. In disposing of the over-valuation of both the beneficence and sinfulness of a harmless normality even in matters of sex, the way is prepared for the consideration of a new view of life from the standpoint of some cultural status not yet attained.
Culture is the condition of all real freedom. By the term culture in this connection, I mean a highly developed state of social and self-consciousness in the sense in which these terms are considered, for instance, by Prof. Warner Fite in his "Individualism." Such culture cannot be imparted by a single essay, or by reading alone. It must be acquired by diversity of experience, accompanied by an intelligent interpretation of one's own life. It is quite hopeless to expect the merely culturined to understand the meaning of real culture or even to grasp the cultural aspects of sex relations under freedom. The merely culturined are utterly incapable of estimating the influence of true culture upon our conceptions of responsibility and freedom or upon conduct freed from artificial restraint and fears. In keeping with such incapacity, vulgarians of the grosser sort, and theologasters in general, assert that freedom means the return to barbarianism, and to what they are pleased to stigmatize as barn-yard morality. For the bone-headed conformist, the scatter-brained sentimentalist and the culturined coward, such question-begging epithets are very comforting. The epithetic "argument" appeals forcibly easily convincing to those whose moral development is still so near the pig-stye stage as to leave them incapable of imagining an ethical state in which automatic self-restraint renders artificial coercion unnecessary, and freedom the only means to righteousness. Conscious of their own incapacity to exercise such self-restraint, their ignorance leads them naturally to doubt that anyone else may possibly be so cultured that freedom from barbaric penalities and fears will not induce harmful excesses or sensual invasions. Such a conclusion seems partly justified also by the fact that many come to grief through sex; it is not pointed out that grief comes because they are as ignorant as are our moralists for revenue and their puritanical abetters, while the many who live in freedom under the guidance of their own intelligence remain unknown, since they neither seek the company of the vulgar nor furnish headlines for the scandal-mongers.
Thus it is the influence of culture that differentiates the freedom of the future from the savagery of the past. Barn-yard materialists have only the conception of freedom to be derived from barnyard observation and, at best, confirmed by their own introspection. Only on this account do they conceive of sex freedom as merely a blind pursuit of an hereditary impulse, Culturined "pure" people, obsessed by their own lewdness, are unable to understand or believe in the possibility of so highly developed a social consciousness, so refined a sense of justice as will automatically restrain all injurious impulses. These intellectual bankrupts can not see that though cultured persons might indulge in unparsonized sexuality, they would no more indulge in harmful sensualism than they would deliberately commit a purposeless murder. The responsibilities of the larger liberty can be understood and consciously assumed only by the highly cultured, and they are beyond the sphere and understanding of barn-yard moralists of every sort. It is because of their own limited understanding that the latter are employing censorship of sex literature, curtailment of freedom lof thought and action to prevent the higher sex-
June 15, 1913 THE NEW FREEWOMAN. 15
intelligence which would eliminate most of the evils of sex, without destroying any of its beneficences. They fear both the intelligence required and the responsibilities assumed under freedom, just as most immature minds have an instinctive dread of the unknown.
What has the future in store for us? In the field of sex as in geology, theological untruth will be replaced by the enlightenment of science. Thus much of the present harmfulness of sex-life will be eliminated, and consequently much of sexual activity will be put outside the domain of ethics. From this fact also, more freedom of action will be possible without injury to anyone.
Differentiation is an important product of evolution. As men and women become more and more differentiated from each other, there will be greater difficulty in finding a mate answering even approximately all of one's needs. With this evolutionary process there comes also a greater complexity in the character of each of us—a complexity of personality which will make it increasingly difficult to determine whether the character of a candidate for matrimony is indeed as he appears to be, superficially. Out of these evolutionary products there will come increasing doubt, stumbling and disaster. These in turn will produce the demand for more experimentation and trial marriages. This will mean an increasing, conscious, intelligent, harmless, purposeful promiscuity.
But this is not the only result of such a course. For these highly differentiated individuals of the future, a person of the opposite sex who answers all the needs of any one—social, economic, aesthetic, emotional, intellectual, and physical,—will not be readily found. Consequently, when at last two persons come together who do respond adequately to all of each other's needs, no force could drive them apart. They will be held in a natural tie through many more bonds of sympathy than at present are possible, and more lasting than all the brutal coercion of social custom and statute law. These cultural unions of highly-refined beings will be free unions of voluntary exclusiveness, beside which our present hypocritical pretentions of monogamy, the phallic ceremonials of Christians and the authorized rapes of present legalolitry will be shameful to contemplate.
Theodore Schroedor.
TWO TESTAMENTS.
The same day's budget of news offers us two documents which it may be well to place in contrast. One is the will of J. Pierpoint Morgan, which begins with this bequest:
"I commit my soul into the hands of my Saviour, in full confidence that, having redeemed it and washed it in His most precious blood, He will send it faultless before my Heavenly Father, and I entreat my children to maintain and defend at all hazard and at any cost of personal sacrifice, the blessed doctrine of complete atonement for sin through the blood of Jesus Christ, once offered, and through that alone."
The other is an expression of the last wishes of A. Monier-Simentof, one of the French "tragic bandits," written to his lawyer on the day before he was guillotined:
"La Santé, April 20.
"Dear Monsieur Dubron,
"I leave to society my ardent desire that the social institutions of a not distant future may show a maximum of comfort and independence, to the end that the individual, in his leisure, may better de-
vote himself to education and to all that constitutes the beauty of life,—to instruction and to science in general.
I leave the revolver that was seized in my room at the time of my arrest to a Paris museum, in memory of an innocent victim of an affair that sent a shudder of fear through the country; and, should this wish be carried out, I desire that upon the hilt of the revolver shall be plainly inscribed the words of the great martyr: 'Thou shalt not kill!'
"All my papers and letters are to be given to my parents: Xavier Monier, Estagel (Pyrénées-Orientales). The works of J. J. Rousseau are to be given to my sister for the education of her son.
"The works to be given to the Municipal Library of Paris are as follows: "The Origin of Species," the complete works of Rabelais, 'Science and Conscience,' 'Egoism,' 'Ancestral Influences,' 'Liberty and Determinism,' Spencer's 'What is Morality?' 'Philosophy,' 'Pedagogy.'
"I leave to my much-esteemed defender, Bruno-Dubron, in honour of the devotion and warm eloquence with which he pleaded my cause, and in token also of my eternal gratitude and my affection, the work of Guyau: 'Outline of a Morality without Obligation or Sanction.'
"To Maître Michon, who, graciously and with devotion, has also brought me words of hope and comfort while awaiting the final outcome of our situation, I address my deep thanks, and I leave to him, in memory of his kindness, the work of Bunge: 'Right is Might.'
"I add a word concerning the inspectors who, during the sad and uniform days that I have passed in their company, have spoken words of consolation to me. I leave my gratitude and friendship to these worthy defenders of society.
"I think, my dear Monsieur Dubron, that I need not urge upon you the execution of my last wishes, for I know your heart, and I am sure in advance that after my death you will fulfil my desires of to-day. I finish, then, by offering you the expression of my affection and of my kind recollections.
"Write to my parents, offer them a few words of consolation; that is all that I shall ask of your goodness.
"Your very grateful,
"A. Monier-Simentor."
One need not be an advocate of "individual resumption," of "propaganda by deed," or even of "direct action," in order to prefer the petty bandit who, having a social ideal, seeks to further it by an isolated act of violence, though knowing that thereby he bares his neck to the knife, to the giant bandit who, believing in society as it is and having no ideal but his own aggrandizement, realizes it by forging and wielding the mighty weapon of legal monopoly to despoil a whole people of their products and their liberties, and who, wolfish devourer of the flock, continues, even after his death, to bathe in the Blood of the Lamb.
Benj. R. Tucker.
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16
THE NEW FREEWOMAN. June 15, 1913
THE GOLDEN AGE.
Can anything be more seriously contemptible than present-day desire? Of recent years there has been a great deal of talk about a coming age. Proselytes from atheism have labelled it the new age, as though new ages were like virtue, something we assume but never possess. Distinguished thoughts and deeds have foregathered from all parts of the world seeking to bring themselves to a focus and to make a united departure on a new and universal scale. And what is this departure? It is said that present-day man is starting on a Columbus-voyage of discovery. He has heard of a new civilization whereby he may realise his self and thus directly promote human life. What are his clues to the whereabouts of this realm of mystery? They are simply those of a longline of similar expeditions: man's unreal experiences of the past, the manifestation of the soul in man at its worst, a petty and pitiful burden of false ideas, ideals and achievements, the ignoble legacy of centuries of false and uncontrollable desire. In preparing for this voyage man then is merely following the methods of the past. He has not even provided himself with a new vessel. Turn to former expeditions and there is the same crazy old synthetic vessel in use. The Greeks set sail in it and so did the master-builders of the Middle Ages. To-day it is slightly altered by wear and tear and over-cumbered with sea vermin, that is all. And if the vessel is ancient and decrepit, so are the members of its crew. The most that can be said for them is that they are civilised savages. Though veneered with culture and learning, they are still savages; even worse. Savages have an excuse for being savages; they have none. So dismal is their condition that recent science can find no better description for it than half self-realized. They are ignorant because they are too learned, fossilized by museumy habits, degraded by mechanical pursuits; in short, freaks whose speech and action stink of closets, libraries and other thought factories. What is the nature of the preparation which they have made for setting out on their expedition? They have equipped themselves with material-power. Such are the Godless-clowns who in hopeless ignorance desire to discover that which by the very nature of their undevelopment, they are unfitted to do. Has the lowest grade of savage a more ludicrous desire?
Neither the planning of expeditions in quest of a new civilisation nor the proposal to excavate old Utopias should be the aim of the moment. If the world without is to be a symbol of the world within us obviously the form and content of the world within must be the first consideration. All our thoughts and actions, therefore, should be concentrated upon the formation of a new desire—a desire to realise our spiritual potentialities. Without this realisation there can be no clue to the whereabouts of the new civilisation. And before we can discover this clue we must discover that to real self-realisation. Both clues lie in the unknown: both are shrouded in mystery.
The change of human desire. This change is the most urgently necessary question before us. It is a colossal problem, requiring for its solution the utmost concentration of human intelligence. Indeed, it calls for a period of rest in human affairs, during which the world might assume the appearance of a vast empty room where at first nothing old or new could he seen. Here, seated in darkness and in space, man could project and contemplate his meagre and ever-contracting soul. And, perhaps, out of the temporary darkness would suddenly flash the greatest illumination of his life.
I do not suppose this period of contemplation to be, as far as the human race is concerned, possible of attainment. For one thing, a materialistic age is not likely to breed contemplatives. On the contrary, its chief output will continue to be a class of uncreative pigmies who live suspended upside down with their eyes out of their heads, like guinea pigs, "Back to the Past" is their unceasing superstitious cry. Yesterday it was "Back to Greece," and heavy pseudo-Greek poetry insulted the age. To-day it is "Back to India," and the sacred books of the Buddhist canon engross all our resentment. To-morrow it will be "Back to Jerusalem," and the brayings of asses will distract all our attention.
The clue to the desire for a real life, then, must come through a personality of independent creative-force-a human being who can do for the human race what it is unable to do for itself, who, by power of vision and interpretation, can see and hew out the foundations of the first Golden Age on earth. But, apparently, this richly-endowed personality has not yet arrived. There are city builders but no true citizen builders, makers of shells but not fertilisers of soul-stuff. The great soul architect, however, is coming. Till he arrives, what then? There is group activity; not that such activity can breed the great formative idea; but it can, by method and enthusiasm, at least prepare for the coming of the exceptional individual, if rightly directed by seers not logicians, intelligence not intellect.
Broadly speaking, group activity could provide five search parties, scientific, metaphysical, philosophical, religious and artistic, for the present purpose. Their first object would be to provide a base to work from. By assuming the existence of a world in which there is nothing but The Soul, and that the life of The Soul is the real life, they may suppose that this world will form a base. By assuming that all men have some soul, they may suppose that man would form the ground of exploration. By assuming, further, the existence of definite laws of The Soul they may suppose that the discovery of those laws in man and of their application to his work, would be the objects of the search. By assuming still further that the limitation of The Soul in man is traceable in the spirit of his work, they may suppose that, by taking cognisance of the limitation of such work, they may trace the limitation of soul-stuff in man himself. And they may hope that one of the principle results of this search will be the discovery of a definite language of The Soul; that is, a simple, true and common language by which all the members of the search parties may communicate results to each other, and by which the units of the human race may be trained in the said laws.
The Soul has been robbed of its birthright by pedagogues, professed scientists and other stiff crocodiles. It has imbibed the vices of learning; idiot terms have undermined the foundations of its simplicity. It has been abstracted from life. Before it can be fully realized in man it must be rescued from the abstruse.
I believe that Art could begin the rescue, for I have formed the opinion that the principles of Art correspond to those of The Soul. I will go further and say that Art and The Soul are one, and that which we have been calling Art is really the Soul. If I were asked for evidence I would say, "There are innumerable thinkers who, consciously or unconsciously, have conveyed the idea that without soul there is no art, without Art The Soul cannot be expressed." We speak, too, of man's soul buried in cities. Clearly the word "Art" is used times out of number in the sense of "Soul." Precise thinkers say "Soul" because the word "Art" by itself might be, and often is. mistaken for "science" or "technique." Examine for instance, the slovenly scribblings of those objects
June 15, 1913 THE NEW FREEWOMAN. 17
of derision who cannot see Art for the "subject" picture and trade finish. But though evidence in support of my idea is forthcoming, I do not say that the idea is true. I do not know. I venture to put it forward because I believe it to be true. Furthermore, I attach this importance to it, that it contains the germ of a new and human aesthetic, in comparison of which the aesthetic of a scholar, say Benedetto Croce, is a gross insult to the intelligence.
The first step towards forming a common language of The Soul as Art, would be to establish the relations between the two by showing that whatever set of definitions is made respecting the one, belongs to the other. Thus, a definition of (1) the nature of The Soul, (2) soul-impressions,—life, power, force, intelligence, extension, infinity, knowledge,—(3) the medium for receiving and transmitting such impressions, (4) the impressions stored up in phenomena, that is, impressions of impressions, is a definition of the nature of Art, its impressions, medium and externalisation. Then would follow an attempt to discover a common language of Art as representing that of The Soul, starting with a fresh definition of Art and proceeding to trace as rapidly as possible the passage of Art through man and its reappearance in his achievements.
Let me then ask, What is Art? I would define it as an activity, which is called vibrative force. The beginning of Art is life; the end of Life is Art. Imagine Art to be the first thing coming out of space and selecting its interpretative force, which is called mind. Then imagine art-forms emerging through this connection and forming actual impressions of an impression which transcends such forms. Then the artist would naturally take his place as an interpretative medium, necessary to express those impressions which cannot by themselves be expressed. Let us be clear in this to start with, that Art is lifecentred not man-centred. Art can live without man; but man cannot live without Art. That it is eternal not ephemeral; that it is continuous, and under proper conditions flows on through man, and his work initiating us into the truth of itself and Reality; that it is a Purity which cannot be expressed by an Impurity. Then we shall clearly understand why it is that Art happens, and in the most unexpected places—in Central Africa, but never at the Royal Academy. And we shall cease to acclaim as works of Art the products of science and of impure minds, in which we can discover only the greed of learning and the credulity of the public; and avoid the garbage of Royal Academies and English dealer's exhibitions as we would all things that stink in the nostrils of every intelligent person on the earth. For is it not prophesied that no one shall have such works in favourable remembrance—save critikins whose opinions are received by intelligent persons with astonishment and disgust.
Art moves in a great circle. They that wish to trace a segment of this circle may do so at Free Painting exhibitions, such as those of the Paris Independents and the London Allied Artists' Association. From time to time I shall consider the works of exhibitions of the kind, because it is possible to gain from them a great deal that is illuminating in regard to the application of the principles of Art. For instance, this year's Independent Exhibition in Paris contained three pictures by a newcomer. Mr. Clarence E. King, which may be held up as wonderful examples of the application of the principle of purity, and to which I hope to return later. The Exhibition, as a whole, does not call for much comment. The exhibits were below the average of extremist achievement. Numerous queer mannerisms in drawing and painting were flirting with each other, and works by classical painters affected the language of cubism in a desperate effort to appear in the fashion. Indeed, the toil and intrigue to impress the spectator that cubism is the newest thing, was so marked that the exhibition appeared to announce the one thing that is happening in Paris. Painters are making Picasso academic. The Picassokins far outnumbered the rest of the multitude that composed the Independent Empire. Overmuch Picasso and little pains is almost as bad as overmuch pains and little Picasso.
Huntly Carter.
CORRESPONDENCE.
Personal Rights Association,
11 Abbeville Road, S.W.
13th. May, 1913.
Sir,
At the commencement of last year, I had the honour of sending you a correspondence on the case of Miss Jessie Brown, of Glasgow, which had passed mainly between the Scottish Office and the Glasgow Corporation on the one side and myself on the other. My Committee hoped that, long before this time, the matter would have been settled in accord with the demands of justice, by compensation to Miss Brown for the cruel wrong which has been inflicted on her. But this hope has not been realized. Indeed, Miss Brown has been subjected to further outrage by covert defamation of her character; and the responsibility for this state of things rests with His Majesty's Government.
As, with the enormous extent of business with which Members of Parliament are now supposed to be acquainted, it cannot be expected that the particulars are fresh in your memory, I am directed to tell as succinctly as possible, with due regard to clearness, the successive stages of this remarkable case. My Committee stand pledged to substantiate each and all of the allegations made.
On the evening of Saturday, 28th December, 1907, Miss Jessie Brown, of Apsley Place, South Side, Glasgow, was arrested by two plain-clothes constables, Alexander Sturgeon and Andrew Stirling, and forced to go with them to the Southern Police Court. She was there charged by them with having importuned five men for the purpose of prostitution. She denied this, but was lodged in a police cell and kept there till the following Monday morning. She was then taken before one of the magistrates of the City of Glasgow and charged with loitering about and importuning five men for the purpose of prostitution. On the sole evidence of the two above-named police constables, she was found guilty, but was discharged after an admonition. On her release, she took steps to vindicate her character, and received certificates from two eminent medical men that she was virgo intacta. These certificates were as follows:—
177 Crown Street, Glasgow,
27th. January, 190S. I hereby certify on soul and conscience that I have this day examined Miss Jessie Brown, and state decidedly that she is virgo intacta,
William X. Peden, M.B., CM. 4 Newton Place, Charing Cross, Glasgowr
10th. June, 1908. I have examined Miss Brown, 32 Apsley Place, at my house this day. There can be no doubt that she is an untouched virgin, and that she can never have lived by prostitution.
J. Nigel Stark, M.D., F.F.P.S.G. Surgeon. Royal Samaritan Hospital for Women, and late Assistant Physician, Glasgow Maternity Hospital, and President, Obstetrical and Gynecological Society.
18 THE NEW FREEWOMAN. June 15, 1913
Miss Brown showed these certificates to the Chief Constable of Glasgow, to the Magistrate who had convicted her, and to other Magistrates, with the view of getting the conviction expunged from the records of the Court, but without result. She then brought an action in the Sheriff Court, at Glasgow, against the two constables, in which action she claimed damages for wrongful arrest; but she was unsuccessful, as the constables sheltered themselves under the Public Authorities Protection Act. She subsequently brought an action before the Justiciary Appeal Court; and that Court, consisting of Lord Ardwall, Lord Mackenzie, and the Lord Justice's Clerk, unanimously quashed the conviction on the ground of oppression. Miss Brown has since made frequent endeavours to obtain redress, but has been met, as I have said, by covert attempts at defamation of her character, which really constitute a serious aggravation of the outrage already committed on her. On the 27th February, 1912, Alexander Sturgeon, one of the above-named constables, was convicted of what the presiding Sheriff described as a "singularly cold-blooded and brutal" bigamy. On the 18th July last, both of the above-named constables were, at the Court of Session, Edinburgh, condemned to pay £40 damages for the illegal arrest of one Duncan Harvey, thus completing the evidence as to the worthlessness of the testimony on which Miss Brown was convicted of a charge which every honourable woman looks upon with horror.
My Committee have done all they possibly could to urge His Majesty's Government to remedy the wrong done to Miss Brown, and have been met, not only by repeated refusals, but by an attempt to frighten Members of Parliament from endeavouring to obtain redress for the injured woman, by communicating to them, under the seal of secrecy, slanderous statements with respect to her. Especially has it been stipulated, in these underhand confabulations, that I—who have been acting for Miss Brown—should know nothing about this cabal; and I would have known nothing about it save for a mistake on the part of one of these whose mind it was sought to poison against Miss Brown.
And while this was being done sub rosâ, the Secretary for Scotland has been professing that he has no jurisdiction in the matter—that the sole jurisdiction rested with the Glasgow Magistrates who were responsible for the wrong! Ministers are very tender about their own reputation, and rightly so. The Attorney-General is reported to have said, of those who brought accusations against them, that "as gentlemen, they should have been as careful of another person's honour as of their own." This is quite true; but may I plead that it does not cease to be so when the reputation at stake is not that of rich or highly-placed men, but that of a poor woman who is endeavouring to earn a livelihood? If Ministers are suffering from calumny, does this not look like a dispensation of retributive justice?
The Secretary for Scotland has virtually said to Miss Brown:—"We do not deny that you were a virgin when convicted as a prostitute and soliciting as one. We do not deny that the sole witnesses against you have proved to be worthless. We do not deny that your trial was oppressive. But we have tried you jamuis clausis for something else, and have found you guilty. We have given you no chance of defending yourself. We have sedulously kept our proceedings hidden from your agents. And because of this, our judgment on you respecting an undeclared accusation, we refuse you a remedy for the wrong which we do not deny was done to you."
If Miss Brown had done anything for which she was responsible to the law, the Glasgow Magistrates have had ample time to prosecute her. If they have not done so, is it not monstrous that they or the Secretary for Scotland should endeavour privately to blast her character? And, in reality, this attempt is as irrelevant as it is unjust. "My Lords," said the great Lord Chatham on a memorable occasion, "the character of Mr. Wilkes has been very improperly introduced into this discussion. For my part, I consider him merely and indifferently as an English subject, possessed of certain rights which the laws have given him. In his person, though he were the worst of men, I contend for the safety and security of the best; and God forbid, my lords, that there ever should be a power in this country of measuring the civil rights of the subject by his moral character, or by any other rule than the fixed law of the land. Let us be cautious how we invade the liberties of our fellow subjects, however mean, however remote; for be assured, my lords, that in whatever part of the Empire you suffer slavery to be established, you will find it a disease which spreads by contact, and soon reaches from the extremities to the heart."
My Committee appeal to the Commons of the United Kingdom for justice to a much wronged woman. In her person are we all oppressed; and in her person shall we all be vindicated.
I have the honour to be, Sir, Very respectfully yours, J. H. Levy, Hon. Sec.
EVE.
Why have you hid yourself, O Eve,
Among these laughing girls,
And why are you divided, Womanhood,
Among these anxious women?
There is no world for me
But only silent hills and empty woods,
And restless seas and rivers.
And lights of sun and star
That bear their barren torches up and down, And only casual storms and seasons; No soul, but only thoughts and moods And self-tormenting dreams, Until we mate, O Eve,
And gather all these fragment-worlds and lives Into our large and procreant passion.
Horace Holley.
THE NEW FREEWOMAN.
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SYNDICALISM AND THE CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH.
(HOW WE SHALL BRING ABOUT THE REVOLUTION.)
By EMILE PATAUD and EMILE POUGET. Foreword by TOM MANN.
Preface by PETER KROPOTKIN. Drawings by WILL DYSON.
Translated from the French by Charlotte and Frederic Charles.
A vivid historical story of the Syndicalist transformation and an intensely interesting account of the new institutions at work. A book by advocates of Syndicalism who have a world wide reputation is indispensable to all who are interested in the great movements of to-day.
Those who wish to understand the aims and methods of Syndicalism, must not confine their reading to accounts of what Syndicalism is writen by critics and opponents, but must first and foremost, read what the best exponents of Syndicalist theories say themselves.
". . . . There is a titanic passion about the angry and triumphant crowds that sweep through the pages of this romance.
This is a book which if it have good fortune may well become one of the text books of humanity.....
It is a book which makes the pulse beat quicker.
But this book is not merely inspiring. It is convincing. It is the most complete statement of the Syndicalist theory and practice which
has vet appeared.....
There is no logical tlaw in the argument as a whole.
It is hard to see why the orthodox State-Collectivists should be bold enough to think that they have a stronger case than the Syndicalists who base their faith on the action of the rank and tile of the Trade Unionists and the Co-operators."
G.R.S.T., in "Daily Herald."
CLOTH, 3 6 net. PAPER, 2 6 net, All booksellers or post free to any address in the World from The New International Publishing Co., 37 and 38 Park End Street, Oxford.
The Fifth International Summer School
Ideal Human Life
THE work of the Summer School is outlined briefly below in a synthetic programme which, it is hoped, will bring the lectures, classes and discussions into a general plan, and concentrate the thought of the School on a definite purpose, viz.: "How can we create Ideal Human Life?"
SECTION I. PHILOSOPHY
Do we recognize a need for a philosophical basis implying knowledge of the principles in Man?
Do we know what Man is? What principles are universally recognized to be inherent in
Man?
What is the relation of thought to physical life? Does philosophical thinking help to bring the ideal into practical life? If so, how?
SECTION II. SCIENCE
How may the speculations of Science be applied to stimulate human evolution towards realization of the philosophical ideals? 11 What is the net result, in terms of principles, of all scientific speculation to date?
What is Science gradually 'discovering '? Is it possible for man to make any original research into Life itself? If so, how?
Does Science need Religion? What does Science tell us of the relation of Man to Matter? Does it imply a distinction between Man and Matter? How is matter transmuted?
Is there any connection between experimental-science and so-called occult-science? If so, where do they meet?
SECTION III. RELIGION What is the function of Religion in man's struggle with 'environment '?
Does a study of Comparative Religion help?
Has it been satisfactorily demonstrated that all religions spring from a common source? If so, can we recognise the same essential teachings in all religions? Is unity among all a possibility within reach? Is there need for 'new' religions? How would they help? Would religion increase in value if it were more philosophical and scientific?
SECT. IV. SOCIAL SERVICE A
What have former civilizations contributed to man's understanding of himself? Has man, in our present civilization, taken full advantage of the experience of the past?
To promote Unity in Religion, Philosophy, Science, and Art, and its expression in all branches of Social Service. : : : : : :
Chairman—-D. N. DUNLOP.
To be held at
The Peebles Hotel—Hydro,
Peebles. Scotland,
July 19th to August 2nd, 1913.
—Syllabus of Lectures.—WHAT IS HUMAN NATURE? (Section I )
Dr. A. S. Crapsey (New York.)
THE SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE FOR THE
TRANSMUTATION OF MATTER and its conclusions, with Demonstrations.
Mr. Karl L. Schwabe.
WHAT IS ESSENTIAL IN ART? (Section V.)
(With Lantern Slides)
Dr. Ananda Coomaraswamy.
RECITAL OF INDIAN MUSIC (Section V.)
Ratan Devi.
THE PLACE OF THE CHURCH IN THE LIFE OF TO-DAY (Section II.)
The Rev. A. B. Robb.
THE MESSAGE OF THE GITA (Sect. I.)
Dr. R. V. Khedkar, F.R.C.S. (Kolhapur, India.)
THE FREE WOMAN (Section IV.)
Miss Dora Marsden.
WHAT MEN LIVE BY (Section IV.)
Dr. A. S. Crapsey.
TAKING POLITICS SERIOUSLY (Section IV.)
Mr. William L. Hare.
EROS AND PSYCHE (a typical Greek myth, with Lantern Slides) (Section III.)
Mr. Percy Lund.
THE EXPRESSION OF ART IN LIFE (Sect. V)
Mr. W. Wroblewski.
INITIATION and ILLUMINATION (Sects. I. and III.)
Dr. K. C. Anderson (Dundee).
THE SOUL and MODERN PSYCHOLOGY Sect I)
Miss Charlotte Woods.
MISS MARGARET McMILLAN and MISS ISABELLA M. PAGAN will also lecture. Subjects to be announced later.
Hon. Sec, WINNIFRED W. LEISENRING, B.A.
Classes and discussions will be held every day during the School.
TERMS.
BOOKING FEE: For two weeks, 10s. per person. For one week, 5s. per person.
BOARD: From £1 15s. to 3s. per week.
What is the value of the study of Folk-lore, Archaeology, and other forms of antiquarian research? Does it reveal laws or principles necessary to us to-day in shaping the ideal out of the matter of our lives?
Are 'epics' more important than 'edicts' to a nation? If so, how?
B
We are not satisfied with present agricultural nor industrial conditions. Do we wish to 'revive' old-time villages or to perpetuate modern cities? What is the meaning of the enormous increase in armaments of all nations? What has armaments to do with a contented people?
Is the arrangement of details in our civilization 'wrong?' Have we the materials for a better civilization? If so, by what means can the details be re-arranged?
Do we need a coherent policy leading, according to principles, to a new and better civilization? Are 'parliaments' or 'parishes' more important to a nation? Can we formulate a new national ideal which will fire the imagination of the people? Is this desirable? C
Is it possible to form a practical synthesis from a combination of the principles involved in the patriarchal practices of the East and the individualistic ideals of the West? 11 What is the true relation of Democracy and Aristocracy? Can the people ascend to wisdom and beauty so that none are over-looked or forgotten? If so, how will it be done? What is Freedom? Will the mutual attitude and relations of men and women require to be considerably changed before true freedom is possible for humanity?
What is the direction of the change, and how will it be brought about? SECTION V. ART.
A
Are Art and Industry mutually antagonistic? Can we blame machinery for what is
'ugly' in our modern surroundings?
Do we wish to revive past arts and industries or shall we create new crafts combining the best in the past and the present? Has each Art a mutual relation to every other Art, and is it possible to make each Art a necessary part of the actual, daily, social Life?
Has Art a function in fusing agriculture, commerce, government, and educational bodies? B
Are there permanent laws in Art? If so do they correspond to the philosophical principles of Life?
How may we distinguish true and false Art?
Where can be found the true direction of Art? Is it in academic and traditional rules, in personal whims or in fundamental laws?
What is the relation of Art to Science and Religion? Is it possible for every human being to become an Artist? If so, what would humanity gain thereby?
Will the new civilization be an expression of Art in its true synthetical sense and be realised through co-operative effort?
MUSIC a special feature-Miss Marian Collier, pianist; Miss May Mukle, 'cellist; Mr. Harold Goosens violinist
Illustrated phamphlet giving further particulars will be sent on application to the Hon. Secretary, Fifth International
Summer School, Oakley House, Bloomsbury Street, London, W.C.
Printed by Trade Union Labour at The Oxonian Press, Oxford, and published for the Proprietors by the New International Publishing Co., 33 and 35 Park End Stret, Oxford