The New Freewoman

Published the 1st and 15th of each month. THE NEW Freewoman AN INDIVIDUALIST REVIEW. No. 4 Vol. I. FRIDAY, AUGUST 1st, 1913. Sixpence. CONTENTS. Editor : DORA MARSDEN. B.A. The Heart of the Question 6i Views and Comments 65 At Valladolid. By Rebecca West 66 The Status of Women in Early Greek Times. By Edward Carpenter 68 The Eclipse of Woman. By F. R. A. I. 69 The Etiquette of Dying. By Reginald W. Kauffman 70 Paris Notes. By Benj. R. Tucker 72 Metaphysicing the Drama. By Huntly Carter 74 Reviews 76 Correspondence 78

THE HEART OF THE QUESTION. IT is difficult for us, in a culture made powerless because it has accepted intellectual concepts as real—denying as we do that the grounds exist upon which these have been given their verbal creation—to handle seriously the arguments of the rhetoricians whose phraseology continues to make thinking farcical and irrelevant to life. If one army uses bullets which upon the opposing army burst as soap-bubbles, there will certainly be a victory but scarcely war. So we feel with the controversialists whose ammunition is words, the meanings of which cut no deeper than the thickness of their written form on paper. We have already looked for the substance of liberty, equality, justice, fraternity: the newest advent is " dignity." Mr. G. K. Chesterton, the mainstay of democracy, has defined democracy: " The natural dignity of man-as-such." The empty wind of man-as-such tempts us to recall the remarks of Mr. Samuel Pepys anent his wife's six-months-old head-dress to the effect that there is a limit beyond which such things will not very well go: literary reputations are of a like decaying order. What man-as-such apparently is meant to imply is " all men," and can be left at that, while we consider " dignity." The dictionary defines it as " Nobleness or elevation of mind based on moral rectitude." As of the words comprising this definition, the verb, the conjunction and the two prepositions are the only ones which to us have meaning, it is useless to us, and we fall back upon common understanding to learn why "dignity" stands in better repute in the real world than many other of the same highflown tribe, and we find the far from uncommon explanation—because of its relations. "Dignity" loosely understood, is an attitude of mind following upon the possession of worth. To have it, means that for the occasion one possesses enough to render one "self-sufficient." To retire from a situation with "dignity" is to withdraw oneself from the network of claims and arguments wound about a case and take one's stand upon the measure of what one has the power to effect: upon one's actual worth in short: great or small as this may be. In this sense, it is the revelation of personal significance; of what, stripped of all wrappings, all donned-on labels, the individual is able to encompass by dint of his actual holding of power. It is from this aspect that the word "worth" shows itself so much more illuminating of real value than is "dignity." Probably it is its ancestry, localised and hence familiar, that has preserved worth from the artificial uses to which its abstract relative "dignity" has been put. "Weorthan," the Anglo-Saxon, "to become," is highly significant. We can be easy in applying the label as to what things are; but our judgment of their essential nature is demanded when we are called upon to say what things will become. We at once get back our scent for reality. We are lavish in ascribing " dignity " because it costs nothing. We are more careful when we begin to reckon worth. It is time to return to the definition of democracy, "the natural dignity of man as such." We have stated that to possess "dignity" is to reveal oneself as self-sufficient, asking nothing, taking one's stand upon what one is worth. We ourselves, at some length, and irrefutably as we think have shewn democracy to be the " mechanical contrivance for the regulating of a people mutually dependent." Hence Mr. Chesterton's definition is reduced to a contradiction—a veritable reductio ad absurdum. 62 THE NEW FREEWOMAN August 1st, 1913, Substituting the popularly understood psychological significance of "dignity" for the rhetorical use, we get the definition as " democracy is the natural power to be self-sufficient of men as such." Even democracy one imagines cannot contrive to mean at one and the same time " Is " and Is not," " dependent " and " self-sufficient. " If, on the other hand, the word dignity is discarded as suspect and the equivalent phrase compounded with the word " worth " be used, the result is equally absurd: " Democracy is the natural measure of worth of man as such." Obviously the natural worth of men is nil. Men have, as the Americans would say, to make good. In worth, it is the becoming which counts, and not an asserted potentiality. A man as worthless as a mud-puddle is as worthless as a mud-puddle. He has no inherent " as-such " quality which stands to his account to be ascribed to him as worth. He is worth just what he is worth, i.e., what he owns of power no matter in what form. Common speech has it " a man is worth so and so " the meaning ordinarily being that the man owns material goods and properties. This totalising of worth however fails in comprehensiveness: the worth of a man or woman comprises more than material property: it includes ability, skill, beauty, in women-sex, everything in short which represents power to achieve one's own ends and satisfactions. It includes everything one owns, and nothing of that to which one has a titular claim only. All " as such " claims for instance are invalid: they have no potency off paper. One's claims as Woman, as Man, as Wife, claims to " Justice," " Right," to " Equality" are nothing—so much empty sound. One may claim, with sense, just what one has the power to get. The emphasis put on claiming is the revelation of the impotence and futility of the claimant. It serves merely as a diversion of attention from the thing which matters, from consideration of the " power to get." The question we are concerned with is the meaning of the disturbance regarding the position of women in society. It has already been noted in the pages of The New Freewoman the strong reaction which has set in among the " intellectuals " against not only suffragism, but against what is called " feminism," the " economic independence of women " and so forth. The " New Witness " has been reinforced by the " New Age," Mr. G. K. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc by the Editor of the " New Age," and Mrs. Humphry Ward by Mrs. Beatrice Hastings. As these writers can wield the pen with a force rare among those whom they oppose, their opposition has strength quite out of proportion to their numbers. It is as well therefore that their arguments should receive examination. One of their latest pronouncements is that of Mr. Chesterton, in an article on Women in which the definition of democracy to which we have referred, is but one jewel in a crown. Mr. Chesterton is coaxing women to abandon the " crazy cant " of " economic independence." He complains to them that " the capitalists can treat each woman as that only too common thing, the conscientious spinster," but surely the complaint is lodged in the wrong quarter. If there is anything wrong with this species of treatment, it is the capitalists' affair. Either " each woman " is a conscientious spinster— in which case the treatment is strictly correct, and would be a failure were it otherwise—or " each woman " is not, in which case the capitalists will find out their error and at their own cost. If one has a mixed collection of tabby cats and tiger cubs, and one fondles all indiscriminately after the manner successful with the tabby cats, it is the fondler who has the difference to learn. Similarly, with " each man," whom Mr. Chesterton avows, the capitalists "can treat as that very unusual thing—the economical bachelor." But surely now, God Himself could treat things, for any length of time, and with impunity, only for what they are. If treatment goes down with them, it is presumably the correct treatment. The capitalist, presumably, takes people as he finds them, and gives them the treatment they consent to put up with. He certainly is successful from his point of view, while the rhetoricians who nag the " people " to attempt to persuade the capitalist that he should treat them as he "ought," i.e., as they say they should be treated, fail. The capitalist apparently has gauged their measure correctly, but they have not gauged his. The presumption is that they arc what he takes them for, and not what they say they are. When their measure alters, he will probably be swift to make the readjustments necessary. The vital concern for the "lean kind," i.e., all of the "conscientious spinster," and "economical bachelor order " is not what the capitalist does but what they arc. " They should claim " continues Mr. Chesterton, this and that. Why claim? If they can get (i.e. take) what they want, there is no need to claim it; and if they are powerless to, then claiming is only another name for whining. The capitalists did not claim the "conscientious" and "economical" attitude. They found it ready to hand, waiting to be used. And they used it. When such attitudes no longer exist, obviously they will not be used. Obviously, therefore, at the heart of the problem there lies the question of worth, power indwelling in the individual. Power, humanly speaking, means ownership, which in turn means the power of using one's possessions in the service of one's own satisfactions. (Wisdom lies in knowing what one's satisfactions are.) Ownership is synonymous with worth. A man (a woman) is worth just what he owns. The more extensively he owns, the more augmented is his worth, his power. The scale of values applied to things owned is a matter of individual choice. Fundamentally it is a matter of religious assertion—always a personal affair. Increasing in strength however with time, unsupported by the main trend of human culture (ordinarily indeed, directly opposed by it) there has persisted a conscious knowledge that the minimum which the individual desires to own, are the powers encompassed in his own person. Individuals in all ages have struggled to win the control of themselves for themselves. To do so, it has been necessary for them to disregard the "cultured" tendency to submit to the claims advanced by gods, churches, states, ideas, causes, institutions and notions innumerable which have waited to prey upon men, like harpies each with its own " Hither to me." In the course of the struggle it has become clear that ownership of one's self is impossible in this life, unless one owns something external to oneself: owns, that is, material property. When the sphere of an individual's ownership has shrunk to the extent where it is coterminous with his own powers and person, unless he can immediately widen the boundary, he has perforce to begin the sale of himself into the service of those who possess and therefore can give him the external property necessary to existence—either wages or gifts in kind. He therefore ceases, as the common language has it, to be his own master. He has become the hired man. He effects the satisfactions of others, whether whole-time as a slave, or part-time as a wage-earner. The brain-worker alienates his brain power, the labourer and mechanic his power of limb; women sell what their power of sexual attraction will fetch, either in marriage or prostitution. The process in each case is the same—the further alienation of one's property from a hoard already too diminished to preserve its usufruct for its own service: it is the progressive inroad made upon that which constitutes the kernel of being; that which constitutes the " I." Peasant women sell their hair; foster-nurses their nourishment; recently a woman put up her entire person for sale for any purposes whatsoever; one man, we read of, sold his nose to replace the damaged feature of a person who possessed property enough to buy. The process is August 1st, 1913. THE NEW FREEWOMAN 63 automatic: " To him that hath external property is given; but he that hath naught in addition to his own person, must thereupon give himself." It now becomes easy to place women's position in society. Women on the whole own little or no property. Automatically therefore the process of bartering themselves begins. For various reasons, but particularly because of the advent of industrialism, there exists a prejudice against the sale of the strength in their arms or the activities of their brains, even should they have the desire to sell these by preference. Consequently not selling her limbs as does the hired man, she sells her sex, which she can sell because there exists a market which can afford to pay. It will be noticed that ordinarily men even among the unemployed do not sell sex. The reason is that women in any extended degree do not possess the property with which to pay therefor. Probably as the poverty question became more and more urgent and unemployment more acute, had there been a market provided by women to encourage the sale, men would have sold themselves in this respect equally with women. It is said, with what truth we cannot here vouch for, that there already exists for men not only a market for sex among men, but a rapidly increasing supply; that the practice of what is known as sodomy is increasing and that the number of male prostitutes to be seen at certain hours in London is rapidly gaining upon that of the number of women prostitutes who entertain the liveliest hostility against the male competitors in the sex-market. That this state of things should be is very natural since as we have seen, once the integral ownership of the individual by the individual is abandoned, as it must be when individuals possess no property external to their own persons, the sale of the entire soul and body is a question only of time and degree. It is the problem of hired men (including women) throughout the history of the world—a problem which is no problem, but rather a truism. We are however just now more concerned with the position of women in society, and we must look at things a little more in detail before we pass on to the attitude which various schools of " reformers " take up in regard to the question, thus arriving at a statement of The New Freewomax's attitude, which is not reforming at all, but religious and basic. Practically all women are on sale: that explains why there is no reality in the attack of the " respectable " upon the prostitute. It is not the sale that society objects to: that is so much a part of itself that it is barely conscious of the fact. " Society " therefore cannot " deal " with prostitution. It would be as impossible for it to do so as for a man to suspend his own person by his own unassisted efforts. What respectable society objects to is the prices which are offered. The respectable, i.e. those who are married, or who believe in marriage, and hope to be married, not only desire to put themselves on the market, they are endeavouring to dictate the price by effecting a corner. This explains precisely what has happened, for instance in the recent Piccadilly Flat case, where the prostitutes called to give evidence are sympathised with, whilst a hue and cry is raised for the purchasers. The venom is against these, because they are buying women cheap whereas marriage sells them dear. "Maintenance for life in such style as your means will allow, and not a farthing under," is the cry of the marriage-auctioneer. "If I cannot get a bid up to that figure I will withdraw the wares," and so he does, and the long long line of spinsters is the result, " conscientious spinsters " who earn their maintenance (hardly) in a market from which Mr. Chesterton and the Editor of the " New Age " would oust them. They offer for sale their limbs after realising that the price demanded for their sex is not forthcoming. Therefore not " sales " but " cheapness " is the rallying point of hostility. "Don't make yourselves cheap" is a very ancient cry: and excellent advice it is—when one is on sale. It is interesting to note that the reaction against the " crazy cant " of the economic independence of women should have taken this precise line. It says in effect: It is a poor business selling your limbs especially in this overcrowded market. Much better to specialise in sex, which by attention to little commercial details such as trimming up the goods, placing them at a coy and tantalising angle, and above all by not allowing the market to appear glutted, will fetch quite a tidy sum: maintenance for life in marriage, no less." This is the course which Mrs. Beatrice Hastings is advising week by week in the pages of the "New Age." Her views are those of a great number of people in whose statements however they are merely implicit. Mrs. Hastings is explicit and quotes well and strongly. She says : " I am quite sure of it. We have all become so very free lately that even sexual freedom is taken for granted. We are too too sympathetic indeed. We have too soon and too loftily set aside the necessity of securing our maintenance! A man has small need to seek the company of a brothel nowadays, let alone to marry. He need only join one of the innumerable little groups and societies, Suffrage, Anti-Suffrage, Fabian, Theosophical, Dramatic, Poetical, Christian, Ethical, Mystic, Vegetarian, or what he pleases, to become perfectly comfortable." "In my opinion, one reason why virtuous women are failing to secure in marriage even a man to whom they would be really devoted is simply their bad manners. Lack of restraint, lack of the graceful subtlety in making themselves scarce, is the characteristic of modern young women. They go everywhere with men on the slightest nod of invitation. They are never out, never engaged, never too whimsically in a temper or busily self-interested to be able to see anybody just now. They must stupidly want to be ' pals ' with men, and men, as even the ' Daily Mail ' has found necessary to warn its circulation, do not marry their ' pals.' ".. . " Women knew all these feminine things once upon a time, and we never so much as mentioned them, just did them. Women do not know them nowadays: the modern young maiden is an absolute fool. Mrs. Humphry Ward was lately jeered at in 'Votes for Women' as suggesting a return to the poke bonnet and flounces, but a woman in a poke bonnet and flounces was a charming mystery. She could not be catalogued at a glance as her modern sister may be." " I should say that the craft of wearing clothes is pretty well lost to-day: we are all too busy putting them on! It is entertaining to me to find myself agreeing with Mrs. Humphry Ward; but I saw the procession to Miss Davison's funeral; they were all amazingly garbed in the true obsequial spirit, where the ideal is to disfigure oneself out of respect for the dead." "It is no use saying that these things do not matter. They do matter. They are making men most uncharitable, and we positively cannot exist without charity. The women I know who are most determinedly trying to be independent give their secret away with every glance of their pitiful resolute face, with their airs quite as unconcealably as ever the pathetic-eyed maiden of fainting days. Economic independence is a game for youth, and for the rare natural virgin who has the asceticism and solitary preferences of her temperament." " Let mamma look after her daughter a little in the old-fashioned manner, keep her away from boys, and hockey, and all other cheapening and familiarising fields.....Let mamma be a little more respectful to papa, who will not give votes to women, and little miss will soon take her cue. Miss, properly trained, and with all her feminine wits about her, needs not to fear the rivalry of the prostitute."* *" New Age," July 7th. 64 " The married woman should be legally forbidden to work outside her home, the pin-money girl should be emigrated, and the job-seeker gently chloroformed. To be wholly serious, public opinion ought to tell these women what they are—object for charity, and ought to treat them as such. By this means the woe of one large type of women would cease at least to be public."f There we have the sex-market surely enough, with the sale of first-class goods under consideration. Their distinction from the second-class, the distinction of the wife from the prostitute is exactly this question of reserve: power to wait for the quickening of the market. It is merely a question of urgency. The boldness of the prostitute is accounted for by the fact that she wants the purchase money on the spot. The prospective wife can afford to wait, and therefore to manœuvre, which is the meaning of the flounces and poke-bonnet. It is a difference not of principle or of attitude, but merely of time. " Married or betrayed" is the exclamatory horror of a woman who imagining she was fetching the price of first-class goods, finds that she has gone for an old song. It is here that we shall feel better able to draw the line of difference which exists between men and women in relation to this matter of sex: which is that whereas with men sex is an appetite which demands food, with respectable women sex as a need seeking its own satisfaction has to be ignored. This accounts for the existence of the " womanly woman," essentially a person who lays herself out to be "sought," in whom, far from thinking of seeking on her own account, would (doubtless truthfully) declare that she has no impulses she might possibly seek to satisfy. She belongs to the category of women who one generation ago were denominated by the title of "the sex." She was without desire, but (for a consideration) she gave herself as a satisfaction. Men had the hunger: the womanly woman was the loaf. So that whereas men had a sex, women were the sex, which regarded as a "commodity," she sold in the best market. Being a property, and not a hunger which, satisfied, is got rid of, sex in the womanly woman cannot be laid aside. It is to be available when called upon, dependent not upon their own desires, but the desires of those to whom it is sold. And they themselves go with it. They are attached to the wares, like grand pianos given away with a pound of merchandise. This simile from the retail world is illuminating. It explains the existence of the demand for the prostitute. It is the difficulty of housing and caring for non-negotiable grand pianos. They are expensive to maintain in style due. One, is as many as a man can very well keep. The demand for the prostitute is the ruse to avoid the embarrassing gift, just as the marriage-contract is the institution which insists upon it. "Take my love, and you must take me, and keep me, until death doth us part," is the standpoint of the respectable woman, and the animosity of the respectable world against the clients of the prostitutes is the rage of traders against customers who have hunted out a cheaper market. One may in light of the above analysis of the state of affairs in relation to women, well be able to understand, even if not to excuse, the position which men like Mr. Chesterton and the Editor of the "New Age" adopt towards the arguments advanced by such writers as Mrs. Charlotte Gilman and Olive Schreiner to the effect that women should sell the energy of their limbs in whatever market they can command. If a man is to house, clothe and feed a wife, he will find it necessary to safeguard the returns he gets for his form of prostitution, the sale of his energy. He must, like the wife, keep up the price of his hire. If he has to pay so much for some women, he feels he should not be unduly competed with in his market, undercut by other women. His t "New Age," May 8th. attitude to the woman-worker is analogous to that of the wife to the prostitute: he feels she brings the prices down, and he complains. Unfortunately for the sympathetic reception of his protests, his complaints are not addressed to one and the same person. His position is "Now, Mary, if I am to keep you for life, you Martha must not come prowling round, trying to get my job." Martha's obvious retort is "What you can do, and what you engage to do is a matter you must settle up with Mary. I have enough to do to look after myself. If I can't sell sex, like Mary, I must sell my limbs, like you." Mrs. Gilman and Olive Schreiner state a plain case for Martha, and Mr. Chesterton and the editor of the "New Age" a touching case for John, while Mrs. Hastings and Mrs. Ward have a warning word for Mary. "Times are hard, and if you don't use your wits yours will be a parlous case." And they proceed to expound to her afresh the Gentle Art of Clinging. Truth to tell, it is a parlous condition for all three. Obviously nothing is gained by harrying the poor hired man John, who has both sold and pledged himself. The attitude of what one might call the Mr. Pethick-Lawrence school is possible only to very unimaginative or very rich men: the school which seeks legal power for women in order that they may exact legal pillage from an overdriven slave. "The legal claim upon a husband's earnings," "payment of wives," is a project which we hope men will resist to the uttermost: if necessary with the help of poker and boot, and this in the interests of women themselves. Women do not need more protection; they need less. They should be taking upon themselves the responsibility for their own protection and maintenance: which can only be achieved by the augmentation of their own individual power. The fact that they possess power upon which they can draw at need is evident by the fact that the despised spinster has been able to hold her own in that hole of iniquity which men's lack of imagination and sensitiveness have permitted to become established—the industrial field. And more than the necessitous spinster: women who, if spinsters, are so by choice, are widening the area of their shrunken competence. They have fenced round that part of themselves which concerns sex and love and said in effect, "This is not for sale; it is for personal satisfaction, and can be negotiated with only as a gift." True, they are doing what the hired men are doing, selling their energy, but if they can make one advance they can make another. They can acquire property, and we believe, will do so, once they realise that the securing of property is essential to the exercise of power. Then their labour, if and when they labour, will be at their own bidding, and will be expended in increasing the value of that which is their own. It is, we believe, this setting towards Power already existent among a few individual women which is the explanation of anything which is of value in what is known as the women's movement. It is as yet mainly unconscious—instinctive. The danger which immediately besets it, is lest it should be exploited by the rhetoricians—the leaders, whether these be the Mrs. Despards, Mrs. Lawrences, Mrs. Pankhursts or any others, who would lead them to believe that their concern lies somewhere with a Cause outside themselves; who teach them that dignity can be conferred; that freedom can be given; that Power is in the gift of the opponent. When power becomes more self-conscious, it will make it clear that while dignity and freedom are myths, power is a reality and that it comes from within. The deficiency and defects, if such there be, the failing in strength which entails these woes, are personal affairs and must be settled up personally with ourselves. The question for each woman who is wasting herself with a Cause is, "Well, what am I worth? What do I own?" The answer will give her the measure of her value—even to those to whom she has been offering herself as a gift. August 1st, 1913. THE NEW FREEWOMAN 65 VIEWS AND COMMENTS. "All's love, all's law," sang Browning. "And consequent drivel," one must affirm. The most deadening factor in this pseudo-scientific age is the obsessing of the mental powers effected by the notion of law—immanent principle—which is conceived as guiding human consciousness slowly but surely onward to its true destiny. The notion is deadly in exactly the proportion that it is diverting. Men spend themselves easily and readily in the game. The result is that life is turned into a Search (and for that which has no existence) where it might be a Creation (of that which before was not, but now is through our labour). The Divine Wisdom, Theosophia, is supposed to exist, ready-made: and our task is to find it. Supposedly it is like the complete picture which is sold with the box of pattern-bricks, only here, somehow, the picture has been abstracted and we are left with the bricks, each bearing its little hint of what the Whole should be, but the collection tumbied and confused together. Like diligent children, we struggle for the correct arrangement, and are now near, and now remote: hot and cold, as the children would say. The "Saviours of Society," the "Masters," are the Adepts at the game, who having natural aptitude like born chess-players for instance, are quick to see possible moves. It is true that the patterns indicated by the Adepts do not usually tally one with the other, but that presumably is because they are working on different parts of the pattern, and the disparities will disappear when the Whole is revealed. The working out of the Whole, is the practice of the Law, the Immanent Principle, which slowly reveals itself to the assiduous Searcher. It is all very highly diverting and no doubt has its uses, chief among which is the deferring of the painful realisation that all the Divine Wisdom to which any one of us will attain, is that which we create for ourselves. The picture-pattern is not ready-made. Its creation waits upon us, its creators. Our existence is not dependent upon the will of the gods: the existence of the gods is dependent upon our will. "Can men by much searching find out God?" No, but they can create gods, attain to them, and project more powerful. The character of the future is not enwombed in Time, it is lying in the strength (or weakness) of our Will. Hence the evil of the Gadding Minds, the minds which arc seeking saviours and alien purposes. If we have no purposes of our own, we are lost. A force is denoted by its direction: and in life, purpose is direction. The lack of purpose is lack of force therefore. " Saviours " who bequeath causes, i.e. purposes, are exploiters of the bankruptcy of power in men. They foster the delusion that men of no use to themselves may be good for others, whereas one is good for others only by being good for oneself: that is, by being a power in oneself. He who can do most good for a man is a strong man. His strength calls out resistance. He is not a man to shun but to fight and to enjoy. The dangerous man is the one who gathers men about his feet. Either he is a weakling, breathing out weakness and playing upon its presence in others, or he is a strong man hiding power, that the weak may approach unafraid. If so, very shortly, the weak will be his "Followers." No man has in himself the redemption of his fellows: the utmost he can effect for them is to help them to rally together their dissipated strength. No man can found a religion, save his own. It is then, not a religion, but the attitude of being sincere with himself: when what he does is bound back upon what he feels. Thus there are no religions, only religious men, that is, sincere men. @@@ Making one with the notion of Law underlying human activity, there exists the inference that life should exhibit some uniform Order. Law and Order are all of apiece. Hence moral codes and conventions, enacted to forward some End. But what End? The only end which it is worth while for the individual to give his attention to, is the increase of his own power, of which he himself is the only one who may be expected to know what is required for its increase. So each man becomes a "law to himself," which is a denial of law, since law essentially involves relation and relation is comparison. If the individual is unique, with a law to himself there can be no comparison—no law therefore, and common life becomes anarchic and disordered. The question therefore turns upon the advantages and disadvantages of Disorder, which in turn leads to a consideration of what is meant by Disorder. Disorder is an absence, not of Order but of the kind of order which one would like to have. When children use books and papers to make trains and tunnels, it is beautiful order to them, but likely to prove aggravating litter and disarrangement to the owner. The order of an army is admirable to a Napoleon: it is galling restraint to the privates who comprise the body of it. Mrs. Webb's idea of a collective state is in exquisite order for her, but many people would consent to her beheadal as a tyrant rather than live in it. The tale is the same of all orders from empires down to families: wherever an authority imposes a uniform order even upon two, there will be uneasiness and rebellion in proportion to the vitality of those upon whom it is laid. The explanation is of course that life is incessantly creative: that life is in no two days the same: the same measure never fits twice exactly. Hence the futility of state-making, law-making, moral-making. All that is of importance is lifeaugmenting, and that is the individual's affair. There is no corporate life. There are only individuals, geographically situated near to, or at a distance from, each other, and the geographical situation, and sentiments brought into being by neighbours or the lack of them incidental thereto, form part of the attributes of the individuals. If we subtract all the individuals, with all that belongs to each from the sum-total which we call " society " there will be nothing left. Society is a collection of individuals— that and no more. Attempts therefore to exploit an antithesis, to raise a problem of "the society versus the individual," can be met by a dissolution of the term "society." In fact, these general, concrete names tend to become as dangerous to the growth of life, as those cultural devastators, the intellectual concepts, have been. For instance, in the interests of the "Race," incredible acts of interference with the individual, are being perpetrated by—individuals. In the interests of the " Family " highly educated men ask women to do something which obviously they do not want to do, and expect them to do it— in the name of the Family. In the name of the State, individuals arc robbed, imprisoned, flogged, put to death, and sent out to be murdered in their tens of thousands. If these things were done in the names of individuals, they would be resisted to the extent of men's power: even by those who originally had been the aggressors; but because they are done in the name of a generality: that is in the name of groups of individuals lumped together, they are submitted to as a duty, on the principle that the whole is greater than the part. It is not realised that the only "Wholes" are just the individuals: that the so-called Wholes are nothing whatsoever— mere verbalities, and that in sacrificing the one to the other the Real is destroyed in the interests of the Unreal, the Living sacrificed to the Non-existent.

66 THE NEW FREEWOMAN August 1st, 1913. At Valladolid. THE girl who opened the door to me said that the doctor was in bed and led me down a long twisting corridor articulated by doors that coloured its shadows with thin bars of light and puffs of garlic. I found great satisfaction in the near sense of her, for she was like a little pigeon: her plumpness was so obviously coursing with quick blood that it seemed not at all solid but likely to flutter, as though tucked snug to her she wore feathered wings. When she paused at the last door to let me enter she stretched up her little golden neck to have a good look at me through the dusk. If I had been a man I would have turned away from all else to make love to her and capture some of her vitality. As it was I was distressed by her close, gleaming texture and the serenity with which her long waist grew like a stem from her round hips and flowered into her bosom: she reminded me that I was in an abnormal condition, that a woman need not be tortured by intense perception. I walked past her and sat down on a sofa beside the window while she turned on the electric light. I was too ill to face the brightness and drooped my head forwards on my shoulder: I remembered that I had seen a dying setter do so at the beam of a lanthorn, and I found satisfaction in the unity of living creatures betokened by sensation. I raised my head to wonder why the girl was still standing at the door and found her face changed: the space between cheekbone and jaw had become hollow and full of shadow and her eyes were oily with excitement. She had seen the patch of blood that splashed my white dress under my left breast. " Oh. ... I'm not much hurt," I muttered apologetically, smiling at her. But she flung up her little brown hands and ran from the room, slightly hostile to me as is a puppy to its distempered fellow, but most hugely enjoying the disaster. It was curious that although my point of view was utterly altered by pain and desperation I could still understand normal people. Loss of blood was making me sick, so I lay down on the sofa. The girl had run into the next room and was crying out the story of my wound in the guttural voice of the North that was an allusion to passionate rural things: so might two shepherds cry across some stream a tale of sudden death and ravished villages. She was checked, I think, for my hearing was blurred by greater sickness and a sudden access of my grief. I shivered with jealousy and hunger, and depression weakened me as if a thin greenish fluid was flushing the blood from my veins. I was terrified when I heard the man to whom she had spoken moving heavily about the room and coughing up words as though an idea was sticking in his mind as a fishbone sticks in the throat, for I felt that he would not come to me till he had passed out of some preoccupation. I put my hand to my wound. Where the blood had dried on my dress the muslin was as stiff as cardboard and this change of texture seemed to me a horrifying symbol of the transformation that this wound might by more bleeding wreak on my whole body. I wept, not so much from love of life as because I was too tired to perform this difficult alchemy of the flesh. Then I heard the voice in the next room chant a sentence very definitely, as though thereby a long argument was closed. A minute later the door opened and the man came in. I knew he stood between me and the light, for I felt his shadow on my eyelids, but I did not raise my head: partly because I was ashamed of my tears and partly because his dull step suggested that he walked under a misfortune. He breathed heavily over me like a big dog. " I shot myself ten days ago," I said in my heavy Spanish. " I was cleaning a revolver. They took the bullet out. I have been travelling ever since. They told me not to. They were right, it seems. The wound has broken." When his shadow lifted I turned my face to the wall and tried to cry silently to keep myself from being disturbed by his massive movements as he thickly called to the girl to bid her bring water and set out from a cupboard clattering things with the sweet wistful smell of a chemist's shop. Then I felt his fingers at the throat of my dress, and wondered at his hirsute hands: for though his hair grew thick as an ape's it was very fine and silky. A cold wet rag dripped down me and was plugged into my hot wound. The shock shattered me and I cried out in English: " Oh, you don't know what a tragedy it is that I have come to you! I suppose you knew I lied. I wasn't cleaning a revolver. I meant to kill myself. I had reason. It wasn't that I wanted to cut myself out of life so that people might notice the gap and be appalled by the violence of its making. Even at the last resort I'm never sufficiently interested in other people to care about making scenes. It was that death was an urgent need, a necessary escape from terrible pain. The night before I'd had an awful time. I took sixty grains of veronal. The fatal dose is fifteen. My mother and sisters were in the dining-room and I didn't want them to call the doctor and his stomach-pump till it was too late, so I went into the drawing-room. But I couldn't die in that little hutch: I went out. It was a sapphire evening and the lanes were full of lovers sleepy with happiness. Before night I should be sleepy like them. Before dawn I should be happy like them. I walked on for a long time waiting till drowsiness should stuff my eyes and I should creep into some front garden to die. The night got black. I came to a vast place that rose to the stars like a giant cruet. I sat on a flight of steps that soared to a minaret and heard hundreds of people singing ' The Village Blacksmith ' twelve times over. Instead of dying I sat till eleven o'clock listening to a Choir concert at the Alexandra Palace. And I had to trudge seven miles home, for as I'd expected to die I hadn't taken enough money for the motor bus. Why didn't I die? I wonder. When we lived in Manchester we had a big black cat. It caught a skin disease and we wanted to kill it. We couldn't. We gave it laudanum, morphia. Prussic acid turned its whiskers a little grey. But die it wouldn't. We took it to a patch of livid water in a bowl of clay on some waste ground at Cheetham and tried to drown it. Its claws flashed from the dark stew and pierced the mucous surface of the shore. Until we left Manchester a year later we saw his long polluted body creeping from ash-heap to ash-heap, tolling the bell at his neck that used so blithely to warn birds of his coming: raw with ill circumstance but alive. They say I'm like a black cat. Perhaps there is a feline type in which consciousness is a most persistent disease. Life has planted itself in all our nerves: we can't root it up. And it was an agony! Oh, that was a heartbreaking disappointment over the veronal. But there was still the revolver, as I said to myself on the way home from the Alexandra Park. But the difficulties in the way of suicide for a humane child of the twentieth century! Where was I to do it? At home? I couldn't distress my mother by suddenly presenting my corpse to her. At a hotel? It would spoil its custom and depress the chambermaids. In the street? Death has its decencies as much as love and birth. So I did a crueller thing. I went to the flat of a man who loves me so much that he will forgive me everything. He was so glad to see me, my heart bled. I had another grief then. But I was so hurt I had to clamber unto death. He left me in his study for a minute. Then there was the difficulty of how to do it. A bullet through the head, I had meant it to be. But that makes a mess and in England the coroner's jury is obliged to view the body. I shot at my heart. I failed, for no other reason that I can see than that I am like a black cat. There was a dreadful business of stitching and August 1st, 1913. THE NEW FREEWOMAN 67 probing. And those who loved me gathered round me as I lay on the brink of death and dragged me back, tearing my flesh with the sharp teeth of their love. My mother sat by my bed and cried from the collarbone, sobs that scald the throat. My sisters moved reproachfully about the room, saying to me with their deep-set eyes, 'So you meant to leave us, after we have gone so loyally with you through all these years of poverty and tragedy.' And sometimes the man who loved me, in whose house I had done this thing, came and looked at me. And from his heavy, patient sweetness I saw that I had committed the sin that had been committed against me: seduction. For though my lover had left my body chaste he had seduced my soul: he mingled himself with me till he was more myself than I am and then left me. Well, wasn't that what I was doing when I shot myself? One never escapes from the body of one's mother. Wouldn't my death be a brutal destruction of my mother's substance? My sisters and I had made an interesting life out of our uneasy circumstances. Had I the right to run away and leave them short-handed and to discolour our masterpiece by violent memories? And I was the heart of the man who loved me and if I died no mere blood would flow in him. God may do these villainies, I cannot. ... So you see my refuge is cut off from me. I can't kill myself now any more than I could set fire to an orphanage. I know as I have never known anything before that my suicide would be a damnable sin. Virtue imprisons me in life. But pain easily unlooses the leash of virtue and I spend every night in tears. I tire out my body all day so that I fall asleep as soon as I get into bed. But my grief tears a hole in the night, a horrid time at dawn when I lie and bite my wrists and sweat with pain. It is as though suffering had become a new and exhausting function of the body. Often I am ready to commit any sin for the sake of rest. But now I can't! To-day when my wound breaks I come to you instead of doing the obvious thing and going to the Cathedral to kneel in the shadow of a pillar till the blood dripped to my knees and I fell forward on the stone. You see, I've lost my courage! It bled out of me that night I realised I'd failed again. I'd tried twice before so it was a heavy disappointment: and in itself it's a terrible thing. One has to climb slowly down to death and one thinks all the time. I am too weak to go through that again. I must go on living though life sticks in my body as a knife in a heart. What shall I do? What shall I do?" I turned my face towards the electric light so that the glare might distract some of the perceptions that were abandoning themselves to the business of suffering and saw very slowly, for my eyes had become foolish at focussing after I had wept every day for seven months, that the doctor's face did not bear the superior and slightly disgusted air of one listening to a language which he does not understand. I felt the shame of nakedness. I turned away from him shivering. If my senses had not been shattered by grief I should have known long before that I was stripping myself before eyes that could see for, as he rebandaged me, his fingers moved on my flesh a little stiffly with dislike in the supple glow of professional skill. The horrible thing that had happened to me was constantly procuring me as a victim to the most unlikely humiliations. But I was now so exhausted that the event, though it kept its painful content, did not long retain its sharp edges and its separateness and went to swell the general mass of my misery, so I could look without any special anguish at the man to whom I had exposed myself. He was not English, for no Englishman could have sustained without some loss of dignity his degree of dirtiness: yet certainly the misfortune under which he moved so heavily was that he was not a Spaniard but was depressed by Northern birth. From the tallow-like substance of his flesh and the flat Mongolian moulding of the jawbone and nose I suspected him to be Russian: and when I asked him how he understood English a sentence about going from the University of Moscow to a dispensary at Leeds rambled uncordially through a vast, opaque beard. He fixed the bandage with a safety-pin and went to the table, turning on me a mountainous back marked with crumples like boulders and rough creases like becks in summer: every part of him was badly made and even his breath tumbled clumsily from his nostrils. I extended to him the tenderness one gives to a hippopotamus or a boneshaker or any other grotesque and a certain sympathy, for when I moved among the Spanish women with their long backs curved like scimitars I felt my Northern physical rigidity to be a deformity. But I perceived from the droop of his head on his chest that he was thinking of me with hostility. I was a little surprised though I had noticed that now I was as sinister among the happy as a burning house in Brook Street. People often took a dislike to me at first sight, but doctors are commonly used to finding their patients distorted by suffering. It might be that he was consumed by the anger that burns in many men when they see a woman experiencing any emotion with intensity. Then suddenly I detested him. If he had despised me I would have felt exhilarated, as I did when the crowd in the Plaza de Toros whistled contempt at the hurt bull, by contact with humanity that did not instinctively identify itself with the defeated. But he was analysing my emotion. We hate the Jews because of their habit of evaluation, because they sheath the glance of delight before a beautiful fabric and begin to estimate its origin and cost with terrible rightness: if the legend of ritual murder were true it would hardly add to the racial disgrace of successful picture-dealing. Yet I perceived, after dwelling for some weeks among beautiful brown people who yielded themselves to emotion without prudence as lovers should give themselves to love, that our Northern habit of evaluating emotion is infinitely uglier. It means that the mind stands erect when it should cast itself down before higher things; like some lean Cookers, far wandered to a foreign land from her Wesleyan chapel, who refuses to kneel to the Host on Corpus Christi day. It means that the passions which, springing from the body, should some day know the peace of death are infected with the dreadful permanence of things experienced by the mind: as though a poppy should be taken from an Andalusian cornfield and compelled to burn blood-red for ever in the sunless corridors of a museum instead of returning in dust to the earth. My sorrow should have died with me. Through this man's understanding it would percolate down the ages: his realisation of my pain would fall like a shadow on the next man he met and reverberate from voice to voice till it depressed the children of children not yet born. I wanted to get away from him: I asked him his fee and put down the pesetas on the table while he creaked to the door. Its opening discovered the girl who had shown me in crouching on her delicate little haunches with her eye to the eyehole: she uncoiled herself, vibrating with silent laughter at being discovered. In two years' time, when she had learned to enjoy the fire of the soul as much as the sunshine on the water she would be one of the most glorious animals on earth: and her ways would be the seemly, natural ways of an animal. Under such a disaster as mine she would dissolve like snow in sunlight: a few tears would shine on the dust or, if she had the quality of violence, a bright bloodstain. She had no detestable Northern tenacity. She would not live on like some old woman smitten with a horrible disease of age whose will refuses to let her body decently acknowledge its defeat. I understood why the doctor hated me and what an unnatural offence was my persistence in miserable living. Detesting each other from common vice of thinking subtly about violent things, we bowed to each other: and I went out into the happy streets where Spaniard cried to Spaniard as comfortable animals howl from cage to cage. Rebecca West.

68 THE NEW FREEWOMAN August 1st, 1913. The Status of Women in early Greek Times. IT is well known that the Dorian Greeks, and those who were influenced by them, regarded a very close and personal attachment between men as part and parcel of their civic life; and it has sometimes been said that this kind of attachment was held in such high honour just because women at that time occupied such a low place and were so lightly esteemed. I wish to show in the following lines that this is an entirely mistaken argument, and that as a matter of fact during that early period when, from prehistoric sources, the institution of military comradeship came into Greece with the Dorians it was associated with a high standard in the position of women, and not by any means with their contempt or neglect. This association is very noticeable in Homer. For the main motive of the Iliad is, as Benecke observes in his Women in Greek Poetry, undoubtedly the dramatic and passionate comradeship between Achilles and Patroclus; yet no one could say that Andromache or Penelope or Nausicaa are servile or negligible characters. There is ample evidence indeed to show that the status of women among the early Dorians was one of freedom and honour—a survival perhaps of a matriarchal period. Addington Symonds in his Key of Blue (p. 64) says :—" This masculine love did not exclude marriage, nor had it the effect of lowering the position of women in society, since it is notorious that in those Dorian States where the love of comrades became an institution, women received more public honour and enjoyed fuller liberty and power over property than elsewhere." C. O. Müller in his History and Antiquities of the Doric Race (vol. II., p. 305) says:—"The Dorians, as well at Sparta as in the South of Italy, were almost the only nation who esteemed the higher attributes of the female mind as capable of cultivation." In Sparta the women had great sway and influence. The wife was called despoina (mistress) by the husband. As girls they were "trained by physical exercise for the healthy performance of the duties of motherhood; they were taught to run and wrestle naked, like the youths, to dance and sing in public, and to associate freely with men. Marriage was permitted only in the prime of life; and a free intercourse, outside the limits of marriage, between healthy men and women was encouraged and approved by public opinion."t It may be worth while to quote entire the passage in which Plutarch (Lycurgus, c. 14) describes this state of affairs. He first of all cites Aristotle as saying (Polit.: Book II.) that " in the absence of their husbands, the wives made themselves absolute mistresses at home, and would be treated with as much respect as if they had been so many queens"; and then he goes on to say that Lycurgus "took for that sex all the care that was possible. As an instance of it, he ordered the maidens to exercise themselves with wrestling, running, throwing the bar and casting the dart, to the end that the fruit they conceived might take deeper root, and grow strong, and spread itself in strong and healthy bodies; and withal that they themselves by such robust exercises might be the more able to undergo the pains of child-bearing with ease and safety. And to the end he might take away their over-great tenderness and that acquired womanishness which vain custom hath added to the natural, he ordered that they should go naked as well as the young men, and dance too in that condition at their solemn feasts and sacrifices, singing certain songs, whilst the young men stood in a ring about them, seeing and hearing them. In these songs they now and then gave a satirical glance, to very good purpose, on those who had misbehaved themselves (in the wars), and sometimes sang encomiums upon such as had done any gallant action; and by these means enflamed the younger sort with an emulation of their glory. Those that were thus praised for their bravery, and in high credit among the virgins, went away hugely satisfied with such commendation; and those who were rallied were as sensibly touched with it as if they had been formally and severely reprimanded; and so much the more because the Kings and the whole Senate, as well as the rest of the City, went to see and hear all that passed."+ This passage is particularly interesting here for two reasons :—(1) because it shows the respect of the men for the opinion of the women—their praise or their blame; and (2) because of the extraordinarily public and open life of the latter, here represented, and the equality of their physical training with that of the men. With regard to this last we have in the Epithalamium of Theocritus (Idyll XVIII.) a charming picture of a chorus of Spartan maidens singing before the bridal chamber of Helen, and reminding her of how they used to exercise by the banks of the Eurotas:— "Thrice eighty virgins we pursued the race, Like men, anointed with the glistering oil." No wonder it has been said (by Müller) of the Spartans that they were "the most healthy of the Greeks, and that the most beautiful men as well as women were found amongst them." Nor can we be surprised to read further in Plutarch the anecdote of Gorgo, wife of King Leonidas, "who being told in discourse with some foreign ladies, You women of Lacedœmon are they only of the world who have an empire over the men, she briskly reparteed, A good reason, for we are the only women that bring forth Men." All this goes to show clearly enough that—however it may have been in other Greek States or at other times—contempt and neglect of women did not prevail in Sparta at the period which we are considering; and it suggests a further speculation, namely whether the Uranian temperament in the Dorian men—or such amount of it as existed among them—did not naturally favour rather than discourage this freedom and self-dependence and political activity of the women. In present-day life it pretty clearly is so. It is the Uranian classes of men, or those at least who are touched by the Uranian temperament, who chiefly support the modern woman's movement. They, among the men, are those who sympathize with the aspirations of women towards liberty. The downright normal man, with whom the passion for the other sex is the dominant note of life, is not so particularly anxious to see women free. He may love and care for his womankind; but it is generally with a proprietary sort of love. He does not exactly want to see them independent and self-determining of their fates. It is the man in whom sex-polarity is not too pronounced and dominant who looks for comradeship in woman, and is glad to give her an equal footing with himself in social life. And so also was it perhaps among some of these early or prehistoric peoples of whom the Dorian traditions and the Homeric poems give us a glimpse. Certainly it is curious that the gradual fall in the status of women in Greece from those early days down to the 5th, 4th, and 3rd centuries B.C., when the position of the wife became that of a domestic drudge and her ideal was "to stay at home and mind the house "+-—that this fall was simultaneous with the gradual decline of the honour in which the manly attachment was held, and the gradual deterioration of the latter from a great civic institution into a mere personal pastime and indulgence. The growth of Civilisation had from the first the effect of accentuating the sex-passion. The luxurious selfishness of men was stimulated in a way that led to the ultimate enslavement of women; and it is possible that the simultaneous decay of the Uranian love removed the one force which might have acted in August 1st, 1913. THE NEW FREEWOMAN 69 the opposite direction—namely, towards heroism, endurance, military and civic efficiency, and a generous sense of comradeship towards the other sex. Curious, I say that these two changes should have gone on simultaneously, and suggestive of the question whether there may not be a necessary connection between them. Curious too to find that in our present-day civilisations where (till quite recently) the position of women had reached its lowest ebb, the Uranian attachment has similarly been disowned and its healing influences ignored. Edward Carpenter. t Lowes Dickinson, " The Greek View of Life," p. 97. J Dacier's translation, vol. i. t See " The Greek View of Life," p 161. The Eclipse of Woman. IV.— THE EARTH GODDESS. THE ancient worship of Woman as the Creator of Man was closely associated with her activity as the cultivator of the soil. The story of religion is full of these coincidences, which powerfully influenced the primitive mind. Ample evidence exists that better crops were expected from seed sown by female hands, because of the belief that woman was the sole parent of her child. Thus the fertility of the earth itself came to be thought of as a feminine quality, and the Earth was worshipped as a Goddess under the names of Ge, Demeter, Cybele and so forth. A very slight advance in science was needed to teach mankind the value of the rain in causing the seed to germinate and grow. And this observation was combined with the parallel discovery of human fatherhood. The Rain-God or Sky-God was considered as the Divine Father, the husband of the Earth Mother. Professor Frazer in his great work, The Golden Bough, has sought to group all primitive religion round the rite of the symbolical marriage of these two Powers. A human King and Queen, impersonating Jupiter and Juno, or the Sky God and Earth Goddess under other names, were solemnly married, as a magical rite to ensure the annual renewal of vegetable life on earth, whether cultivated or wild. A ceremony of this kind appears to have formed part of the famous Mystery of Eleusis, as described by Miss Jane Harrison in her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. And I would venture to offer a tribute in passing to that work, one of the most instructive and fascinating ever written on the subject of religious origins, and one which vindicates the part played by woman in the evolution. Professor Frazer is not likely to have been actuated consciously by masculine prejudice. But he is seldom careful to trace a custom far enough back, and the result is that he has in fact slurred over the feminine origins of divinity as well as kingship. It should be clear that such a religious marriage as he describes cannot be a primitive custom, since it must have been preceded by the institution of human marriage. And there is independent evidence of an older rite of fornication, practised for the same object. Professor Frazer's silence on the subject of fornication is the more regrettable because of the importance of that rite in the early history of the Christian Church. It was one of the questions on which the Apostles were most sharply divided, as we may gather from Saint Luke's brief account of the First General Council, held in Jerusalem. "And when there had been much disputing," we read in the inspired record—and it would appear that SS. Paul and Barnabas were on the side of freedom, while Saint Peter acted as moderator between them and Saint James—the Council agreed on four prohibitions, "from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication: from which if ye keep yourselves, ye shall do well." (Acts xv, 6-29.) Now our own venerable Church has laid it down in her Twenty-First Article that General Councils "may err, and sometimes have erred." And the English Church has already repealed two of the foregoing clauses, Anglican Catholics being freely permitted to eat blood and things strangled; for instance, fowls. There can be no valid reason why she should not in the future accord her members a similar freedom in respect of the other two restraints imposed by the Judaising party in the primitive Church. It would be presumptuous on the part of a layman to advise the bishops on points of ecclesiastical discipline, but it is clearly right that any further revision of the Prayer Book should be carried out in the full light that anthropological research can afford. The evidence goes to show that the particular rite which is the subject of the fourth prohibition lingered on in Europe through the Middle Ages, under the name of the Witches' Sabbath. The proper season for it was May; indeed the name of the month is taken from the word May as the old form of Maid (Anglo-Saxon maeg), that word, like virgin, having meant originally a woman who had attained maturity. The ultimate root is the same as in magic and might. (Rev. W. W. Skeat, Etymological Dictionary.) It is stated that on some of the islands of the Hebrides the old May festival was kept up in the primitive fashion down into the eighteenth century. And Bannatyne, the secretary of John Knox, in his Journal of Transactions in Scotland, records an instance of the Witches' Sabbath being celebrated in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh, in his time. Although the Roman Church made efforts to put down these superstitious observances, their final extinction must be credited to the Puritans. Puritanism has obtained so strong a hold over the Anglo-Saxon mind that it is easy for us to misjudge the motives of our forefathers and foremothers, and to regard as mere debauchery what was in their sentiment a holy and religious custom. When Herodotus informs us that every woman of ancient Babylon was required to repair once in her life to the temple of Mylitta, and submit to the embrace of a stranger for hire, we have no right to assume that the custom was not deeply repugnant to many of its victims. And in the same way we have no right to take it for granted that all the young marriageable girls of ancient Britain looked forward with any feeling but the deepest dread to the hour on which they were compelled to go forth into the midnight wood, and take part in the orgy of May Day. Knox and his followers rendered a real service to civilisation by convincing the populace that these rites were not necessary to salvation, even if they went too far in the opposite direction. Whatever changes may be in store for us, it is to be hoped that participation in the Witches' Sabbath will never again be compulsory in this country. The question is of practical importance at the present moment because this worship of the Earth Goddess is intimately connected with the political rights of women. Saint Augustine informs us (in the City of God, xviii, 9) that the introduction of the Olympian Gods at Athens, and the consequent eclipse of the old Earth Goddesses, was accompanied by the change from matriarchal to patriarchal government. The women were deprived of votes, and children who had formerly borne the name of their mother's family, were now given their father's instead. A very similar revolution seems to have taken place among the Khonds of Orissa, where Tari the Earth 70 THE NEW FREEWOMAN August 1st, 1913. Goddess was degraded on the arrival of Boora, the Light or Sky God (in this case probably the Sun instead of the Thunder God. See Pagan Christs, by J. M. Robertson, M.P., pp. 109-110). If the general tendency in the past has been for these religious and political changes to go together, it follows that the recovery by women of their political rights is likely to be accompanied by a revival of their influence in the religious sphere. To put it in the plainest light, women will be empowered to legislate for the Church of England. As that Church was governed by a woman during the forty years that really settled and stamped its character, there should be no reason for alarm as to the probable future. But we may reasonably expect the worship of the Virgin to be revived, and the present attitude of the Church on marriage and other questions to be modified. It is clear that the decisions of the Council of Jerusalem were not accepted with perfect unanimity in the primitive Church; even the Church of Thyatira, so warmly commended for its " charity, and service, and faith, and patience, and works," being reproached with nonconformity on the points in dispute. And it is significant that these conservatives were led by a prophetess, harshly termed " that woman, Jezebel." (Rev. II, 19-20.) Whatever discussions may take place in the future on these controversial questions, the side which indulges in violent and personal language will certainly be in the wrong. F. R. A. I. The Etiquette of Dying. IN spite of our admirable position as, with one exception, the most unprogressive nations in the world, we Americans and English, otherwise sober-minded to the point of intellectual dyspepsia, refuse to take Death seriously. We insure our families against our departure, we religiously provide violet-nosegays for the carriage-horses of our insurance companies' presidents, but we are never at any pains to insure ourselves. We court death by voting for the parties pledged to protect that great infant-industry, Poverty; by eating food from which a Leeds goat would fly; at hours that would shock a Chicago hog; by overwork for small pay; by careless motor-laws and careful biplanes; and yet, when the average modern Englishman or American comes to die, he does it so stupidly that a visitor from Mars might suppose that we never had a precedent. It is the great anomaly of our character. A man will study hard for all his other rôles. He crams for his university examinations; he gets his marriage-proposal letter-perfect; if he is a banker, he cultivates an expression of honesty; if he is a lawyer, he achieves a mask of wisdom; if he is a priest, he adopts an Oxford walk and a Tractarian movement; but, be he what he may, he will not study at all for the final rôle, for the last act of that comedy which, if it be not Hugo's " passage de peu de choses à rien" is then, as Montaigne declares, " l'acte sans doute le plus difficile." "Death," admonished Savonarola, "should be met with fortitude." "With cheerfulness," corrected the expiring de 'Medici. And it is true that, of whatever race, a brave man always dies as if he were used to it, but it is also true that, in our race, we do not quit the world with that art which, for this act, should peculiarly befit human beings. " Good-bye, proud world !" cried Emerson, who always wrote prose when he attempted verse and whose prose was always poetry —" Good-bye, proud world! I'm going home ": he alone of all of us seems to have reflected that, as the moment of death assumes all men equal, so, in the eternity after death, whether we go to Heaven or to Hell, we go at least into an absolute monarchy. Wasteful as we are, in this neglected opportunity lies, then, our greatest artistic malversation. The thing could be so easy. In any other attitude of life a man may be detected, but, thanks to our mealy-mouthed reverence for the " Nil nisi " of tradition, nobody will have the heart to contradict this last pose; in any other attitudinizing, a man may survive to betray himself, but in this one Lazarus is about the only case of anti-climax on record. It seems, indeed, a sort of indecency that most of us, who lead lives of unassuaged frivolity, should commit our one serious act unpreparedly. It is of course true that Fate, who at best can merely imitate art, frequently bungles and decrees grossly philistine deaths: all railroad-employes are not wrecked, some sailors are not drowned, and only a comparatively few judges are hanged. But if we cannot control the manner in which death is inflicted, we can at least decide that in which it is to be met— a ploughboy should not have the bad taste to die like a general, though both have been known to die drunk. All argument to the contrary is dangerous, and not to cross a bridge before you come to it is a sure way of crossing it ungracefully at the last. Everywhere else men have realized this fact and erected a thoroughly organized etiquette of dying. We have but to consult our pet histories—" sets " symbolically bound in half-calf, which nobody reads —to find the proof that, once in other times and now in other places, mankind must have given considerable of its span to the rehearsal of " Last Words "; by no common chance were those words so many and so fitting. Consider Socrates, passing his last hours haranguing his disciples on the immortality of the soul, and never hesitating for a phrase. Sarsfield, slain at Landen, gasps: " Oh, that this had been for Ireland!"—are we to suppose that the hero hadn't that mot long ready for the first flying harm? Good old Mr. Abbott, in a similar simplicity, used, in my schoolboy days, to convince me that the first Napoleon died murmuring: "France—the Army— Josephine !" History being obsessed by the dramatic sense, never permits anyone to leave its stage without " a few appropriate remarks " : "They run!" cried the aide to the wounded Wolfe. "Who run?" the general demanded. "The French," answered the aide. "Ah," sighed Wolfe in the pure pleasure of slaughter successfully accomplished: " then I die happy !" At almost the same moment, in the enemy's lines, Montcalm was being told that he could survive but a few hours. "So much the better," he responded; "I shall not live to witness the surrender of Quebec." Nobody can have forgotten that red-fire, low-music and slow-curtain style of chronicle. In it men always composed their death-songs as carefully as King Lodbrog. That they were forever ready is shown in the case of the Duke Frederick. Roger Ascham, who was Queen Elizabeth's preceptor, says that Charles V., when Frederick was taken prisoner at Mulberg, decided that it would be well to make an example of this Protestant and sent his death-warrant to the captive while that gentleman was engaged at a game of chess with his cousin, the Landgrave of Lithenburg. Frederick read the document and tucked it in his belt. "I perceive," he said, " that I fall a victim to my religion and that my death is necessary to the emperor's schemes of distinguishing the Protestant August 1st, 1913. THE NEW FREEWOMAN 71 faith. But God will maintain His own cause. Come, sinner, take heed of your game." Obviously a man like that was worth keeping alive. The Emperor wisely recalled his warrant and "ever after treated the Elector of Saxony with the highest respect and esteem." This, however, is aside from the point. The point is that these men, down to the Frenchman that gave the tumbril-driver a pourboire to hurry him to the guillotine, had observed an etiquette of dying. The Earl of Derby, on the night preceding his execution, lay in his bed "like a monument in a church" and " to-morrow," he said, " I shall really be so." One must meet death half way; one must be decorous in the face of decorum, and one must preserve precedent. " Did those that came before me in this place uncover?" asked that staunch King's man, Lord Capell, and, on being assured that they did, he handed his plumed hat to the executioner and delivered his farewell oration bareheaded. Yet this is precisely the sort of thing that we here and now fail to do. There was Aaron Burr, for example. The most romantic figure in American history, his death showed a lack of imagination that so effectively gave the lie to his life as to discredit the whole accusation of his treason. We are fond of regarding him as a sort of American Duke of Monmouth; but the real Duke of Monmouth did not forget his pose at the end : "Here," he said to Jack Ketch, " are three guineas. Don't hack me as you hacked Lord Russell. I've heard you struck him three or four times. Do your work well, and my servant shall give you more gold." The whole secret of this etiquette is the secret of any other sort of etiquette. A man should die in character—if not in his own, then in that which, throughout life, he has assumed as his own: Lord Essex sent the starving Spenser twenty pieces of gold; but he refused the gift, "because," said he, "I have not time left to spend them." The Jews gave the world a great religion, but no country has ever given the world so many different varieties of a single religion as the United States. Every year brings in one crop of prophets and harvests another. Now, surely the most convincing incident in a prophet's life should be the termination of it, yet in this important particular America's native product is hopelessly inferior. Why do not the illuminati appeal to Mahomet, the Chesterfield of their profession, for guidance? He kept it up to the last. When he could no more walk, he insisted on being carried to the mosque so that he could preach at his people, and, in his final agony, he told his favourite wife, Ayesha, that God, through the visitation of the Angel Gabriel, had given him choice of life or death, and that he had deliberately chosen to die. That is the way: to maintain one's rôle. It is something for a politician, when favourable returns come in, to telegraph that sublime sentence: "God reigns and the Republican Party triumphs"; but it is still more elegant to be a Pitt and die, at the news of an Ulm or an Austerlitz, sobbing: " My country! Oh, my country !" I am far from wishing a speedy end to either of those tremendous benefactors of mankind who discovered the North Pole, or went mad and said so. Still farther am I from wishing them the manner of going that was accorded another famous explorer. Nevertheless, go when and by what means they will, neither of these winners of a national Arctic Marathon can do better than follow the example of Raleigh, who kissed the axe as " a sharp medicine, but a sound cure," and who, dreading lest his ague look like fear, besought the spectators: "If you perceive any weakness in me, I beseech you to ascribe it to my sickness rather than to myself." There are splendid examples for us all. Are you an artist? Then die like Kneller: Pope—who himself died with all the deliberation you would expect of a man that edited and published his own " Correspondence "—says that Sir Godfrey passed his last hours " lying in his bed and contemplating the plan he had made for his own monument "—and ended by asking Pope to write the epitaph! Are you a soldier? Then emulate Collingwood, who, though the inscription on his tomb commends him as "just and exemplary," died in the high hope that he might live to kill again. Nor could the modern matron make a better ending than the nonagenarian Mme. de Rothschild, who, when her doctor gave up his labours with the declaration that he could not make her young again, replied that all she wanted was to continue for a while to grow old. The story of poor Wilde's death leaves no excuse for a trivial exit by present-day wits. After months of starvation in Paris, he awoke from unconsciousness to find himself surrounded by trained nurses, specialists and consulting-physicians. "Of course I shan't recover?" he inquired. They told him: "No." "Then this is a fitting finish," he said: "I have always lived extravagantly and now I perceive that I'm dying beyond my means." The theologians, of course, fare better than most. Their trade provides them with a plenitude of examples, and yet, just as the critic would do well to imitate Peterborough, who wanted to survive for vengeance on Bishop Burnet and to "give that rascal the lie in half his history," so our divines can learn something from a statesman like Cromwell. The dying Oliver asked his minister if it were possible for a man that had been in a state of grace to fall therefrom, and the minister, like the true Calvinist he was, replied with a firm negative. "Good," said the relieved Protector, "I am then safe, for I am sure that I was once in a state of grace." Once only! But that was enough for the conqueror of Drogheda. Instances, however, come too swift. Keats, with his "Don't be frightened; be firm and thank God it has come"—Carlyle, who said: "For me you can do nothing, Doctor; the only thing you could do you must not do, and that is help to make an end of this"—Robert Louis Stevenson, who rather made a good thing of his disease because it gave him such a splendid chance of showing how he scorned it— and lastly, Scott, writing without complaint, till the pen literally dropped from his fingers, and then breathing: " Friends, don't let me expose my weakness; get me to bed!"—these are the models for their own profession. The lawyer, too, ought to take counsel of that great lawyer, John of Barneveld, who went to his death not so much troubled about its manner as its legality. And all of us, if we pride ourselves upon our intelligence, could profit by Dr. Johnson. He was troubled concerning the destination of his soul, but found solace in the certainty that his body would rest in Westminster. Shall I be damned?" he feebly inquired. The attending ministrant was doubtful, but he was kindly, too, and so sought refuge in evasion. "What do you mean by ' damned '?" he parried. "Sent to Hell and punished everlastingly!" defined the Tory lexicographer. These, then, are they from whom we may learn. Dying, like anything else that is worth doing at all, is worth doing well. One should rehearse one's manner of meeting death, and above all, one's parting speech with life. Choose that carefully, for it is one paragraph that you cannot revise, one book that can never run to a second edition. Here is a manuscript that nobody will edit for you—unless, indeed, you are an accepted hero, in which case you may safely leave to history the whole duty of invent- 72 THE NEW FREEWOMAN August 1st, 1913. ing a " Last Word " for you two centuries later. Seriously, I propose a revival of the Roman Lanistae. Their system is, so far as recorded history goes, the only one that ever taught the full art of dying. It was their business, says one authority, to instruct the gladiators in the rule of fence; but they also taught their pupils " not only the use of their arms, but likewise the most graceful postures of falling and the finest attitudes of dying in. The food. .. prescribed. .. was of such a nature as to enrich and thicken the blood, so that it might flow more leisurely through their wounds, and thus the spectators might be the longer gratified with the sight of their agonies." Here, in a word, were pedagogues that went further than our short-sighted instructors of to-day. We waste as little time as they did in teaching youth to live beautifully, but, whereas we emulate them by government schools to instruct young men in the task of killing others, the Lanistae taught the etiquette of death. Reginald Wright Kauffman.

To Foreign DespotSo -----An----- Order of Individualists, who do not want to be driven to attack Society, as the only way of gaining toleration for their own higher ideals, wish to hear of an Island on which they can try to lead the Better Life, without being pursued and annexed, and converted against their will into criminal Anarchists, by a Christian .... Government. Address : The Chancellor of the Angel Club, c/o The New Freewoman. The Humanitarian Holiday Recreative Party and Food Reform Summer School. (which gave such unqualified satisfaction and pleasure to all who attended it last year) will be repeated this year. For this purpose a Boarding School with 70 beds has been taken. The house stands in its own grounds overlooking a beautiful wooded park near sea. Lectures, musical and other entertainments, excursions by land and sea, outdoor games, etc. Inclusive terms, full board residence (4 meals a day) 1 to 2 guineas per week according to bedroom accommodation. Prospectus giving all particulars from the Hon. Secretary or Mr. and Mrs. Massingham, Food Reform Guest House, 17, Norfolk Terrace, Brighton.

Paris Notes. SCHOOL PRIZES AND PROBLEMS. (Translated from the French of Jean Jacques Brousson in "Gil Bias.") HAPPY Barbamuche (Hector, Victor, Nestor, Népomucène, Vinceslas), I have learned through the newspapers of your academic triumphs. At the distribution of prizes in your grammar-school you have been named fifteen times. Prize for conduct, for geography, for cosmography, for dancing, for football, for Greek version, for horsemanship, for violin playing, for history, for Latin verses, for Spanish, for fencing, for algebra, for line drawing,— you have had them all. Yes, fifteen times, with gymnastic stride and to the strains of a discordant and patriotic orchestra, you have mounted the steps of the platform hung in blood-red Andrinople. Fifteen times the mayor of the town has encircled your pimpled and close-cropped brow with a crown of crimped-paper daisies. Fifteen times he has kissed, without passion or disgust, your downy purple cheeks. Fifteen times you have redescended the trembling boards of glory, your arms breaking under the burden of your trophies. Every mother in the audience regretted that she had not carried you in her womb. Every father was jealous of your progenitor. On your way home, O Barbamuche, in the procession of your parents, of your sisters, of your nieces, of your serving-maids, proud caravan staggering under the heap of heavy octavos bound in red and gilt, you met the little Crabouillat. He is the dunce of the class. You eyed him with just disdain. He had obtained not the tiniest booklet, not even a leaf of laurel wherewith to season a stew. In shame, like a malefactor, his father thumped him along to hasten his flight from the gaze of a contemptuous public. Resembling the lamentable Niobe, his mother, weeping like a gutter-spout, followed at fifteen paces, hiding the immensity of her affliction behind an inadequate handkerchief. At sight of you both, Monsieur Jourdain, Monsieur Dimanche, Monsieur Josse, Madame La Ressource, standing in the doorways of their shops, lifted the veil of the future : "Ah! this Barbamuche! What ability! He will go far. Surely he will be a notary some day, or a cabinet minister, or a member of the municipal council. Just as you see him, he will have his street and his statue in our city." As for the distressing Crabouillat, they unanimously declared him unfit for anything, unsuited to any office in the republic. In advance they consigned him to privation, the night shelter, the hospital, and the paupers' grave. Well, young and interesting Barbamuche, it will be just the contrary. The dunce will become His Excellency and have his statue. And the finest street in the city will be called Crabouillat Street. For mark this, O Barbamuche, if there is an essential and fundamental truth in this lower world where all is uncertainty and illusion, it is that only the former dunces come to anything. Having learned nothing at school, they have nothing to forget. Their brains are fresh, and not encrusted with that academic deposit of which you are so vain. They have so far done nothing. Good! they are not tired. Their ardor is unimpaired. And then, is it true that they have done nothing? It is very difficult to do nothing. While you were stuffing your thumbs in your ears to rehearse your everlasting lesson, your schoolfellow T, armed with a jagged penknife, was lovingly carving his name in his desk: I predict that he will become a famous, engraver on wood. August 1st, 1913. THE NEW FREEWOMAN 73 U, who dissected maybugs behind his raised desk-cover, may end in the skin of a great entomologist. And entomologists, you know, are very much in fashion, because they prove God by the instincts of cockroaches. And who shall prevent V, who converted the finest pages of Bossuet and Boileau into superb three-masters and elegant caravels, from becoming an admiral and sending his own battleships to the bottom, quite like any other? As for the ingenious W, who poured the dregs of his glass on litmus paper to make it redden like a young virgin, the subtle W who made the ink boil in the inkstands by sprinkling it with powdered chalk, he will follow in Pasteur's footsteps, and become famous by the sacrifice of a hundred thousand innocent guinea-pigs. And why should not X, who drew caricatures of the teacher on the margins of his Virgil, be elected some day a member of the Institute ? Y, who bartered rusty pens, without points, for agate marbles, doubtless will become a Rothschild. Z, who yawned under the penalties imposed upon him and scanned on his dirty fingers verses to Noémie, his cousin, will be a poet. He will fling himself into the water with only six sous in his pocket. At least his name will float upon the lips of men. While you, O Barbamuche (Hector, Victor, Nestor, Népomucène, Vinceslas), fifteen times named, will be at most a functionray, a paper-scratcher, a budget-eater. You will wear out your shiny half-sleeves on ministerial paper. Broken to discipline and routine on the benches of your school, you will be fit for nothing but to turn a mill, like the blindfolded ass. Not with field daisies or victorious laurels should your sheepish persistence have been crowned, but with a prophetic leather ring-cushion. @@@ " A vessel has 3 masts. The mizzenmast measures 20 metres, the mainmast 25, and the foremast 19.75. Its tonnage is 4,000. It has provisions on board for 98 days. There are 127 passengers. Find the age of the captain." Such, or nearly such, is the problem that a pedant propounded to the sagacity of a graduating class. This somewhat outworn pleasantry has excited the vengeful fervor of our journalistic confrères. But there is nothing new about it. Pedants have always been banterers, delighting in setting snares. Our master, Anatole France, loves to tell how old father Hase, a soaring Hellenist, took him down at his examinations. This famous philologist questioned him in geography, as is the custom. Had he been a geographer, he would have questioned him in philology. "My child," said he, "you have been highly recommended to me. Well, let us see. Do not be troubled. Do not answer hastily. The Seine empties into the Channel, doesn't it?" "Yes, Monsieur." "Very good! Very good! The Loire empties into the Atlantic, doesn't it?" "Yes, Monsieur," said the youth, with growing confidence. "Perfect! Perfect! The Gironde also empties into the Atlantic, doesn't it?" "Yes, Monsieur"; and this time the acquiescence was accompanied by a beatific smile. "Marvellous! And the Rhone empties into Lake Michigan, doesn't it?" "Yes, Monsieur," answered the candidate, enthusiastically, fascinated by the hypocritical benevolence of his executioner. "Ah! Truly? The Rhone empties into Lake Michigan? You are an ass, my child, a downright ass, asinus. I give you a zero, a pointed zero. Off with you!" In your opinion, which of the two had the longer ears, old father Hase or the young Thibaut, who since has become Anatole France? @@@ HISTORY IN ANTICIPATION. (Translated from the French of Clément Vautil in "Le Matin.") Mademoiselle Dupont is engaged to be married. She is delightful, and Monsieur Durand, her intended, is a charming fellow, a little delicate in health, it is true, but never complaining. Moreover, marriage will do him good. Nothing like the conjugal soup-kettle to restore one's vigour. One day the young woman's father takes Monsieur Durand into a corner, and says to him : "All is broken off." "Why?" "You did not tell me that your name is on the official list of the tuberculous !" "True, but I am getting better. And, as I have friends in high office, I hope that my name will soon be taken off the list." "No matter; I cannot allow my daughter to marry a consumptive." The marriage is abandoned. Commonplace consequence of the compulsory declaration of tuberculosis! Some time later Mademoiselle Dupont is engaged again. This time Monsieur Chose is the choice of her heart. Monsieur Chose also seems to be suffering a little, but Papa Dupont attaches no importance to this; he has assured himself that his future son-in-law does not figure on the famous list drawn up by the advice of the Academy of Medicine. The marriage is celebrated joyously. Who still remembers the poor evicted consumptive? Now, a year later, the young woman is delivered! of a still-born child. Moreover, characteristic symptoms had already enlightened the family physician. Monsieur Chose is obliged to confess : "It is true, I am syphilitic. But, after all, that is my right. I figure on no list of prohibitions. And I have married with the guarantee of the government !" @@@ A French deputy who lately addressed the Chamber for four hours on a matter of law rushed into the library not long ago and said to the librarian : "You have no idea of the tricks that my memory plays me. Perhaps you can tell me—for I have forgotten—on what date the law of supply and demand was enacted." I cannot vouch for the foregoing. L'Intransigeant is responsible for it. Se non è véro, ben trovato. @@@ A Columbia University professor, while refusing to approve the tactics of the suffragettes, complimented them on the fibre shown in their willingness to commit crime and take the consequences. Someone answered that the compliment was undeserved, since the suffragettes, in resisting forcible feeding, decline to take the consequences. Doubtless the professor would have been happier in his phrase had he directed his eulogy to the willingness to risk the consequences. But his critic's position is groundless. A rebel against the State is contemptible if he complains of the consequences of his rebellion, but certainly he is entitled to avoid them if he can, and, in doing so, he shows, not lack of fibre, but possession of wit. To say that a rebel is bound in honour 74 THE NEW FREEWOMAN August 1st, 1913. to take the consequences is to declare the victim the tyrant's debtor, and is superstition pure and simple. ANARCHY'S NEW ALLIES. THE movement in favour of exacting health certificates from both parties to a marriage is gaining ground rapidly in the United States. Legislatures are enacting laws in this direction, and religious bodies are ordering their clergymen to refrain from solemnizing marriages without the physician's sanction. Whereat there is much rejoicing, it being forgotten apparently that husbands and wives may, and frequently do, contract disease after marriage, and communicate it to offspring. The logic of this movement requires periodical examination of all husbands and wives by authorized doctors, and compulsory divorce in case of the discovery of disease. The prostitute who is pestered in this way may live to see the wife similarly treated. Let us have equality before the law for all licensees of the State. But do these hygienic moralists realize that they are aiding the Anarchists, though not by Anarchistic methods, to lessen the number of marriages, increase the number of free unions and illegitimate children, and reduce the birth-rate? Now that John D. Rockefeller, Jr., is helping Brieux to put "Damaged Goods" on the stage, what will Rockefeller do if Brieux asks him to alternate "Damaged Goods" with "Maternity"? The one play discourages marriage, the other encourages abortion, and the result of either is fewer slaves for Rockefeller. And what will happen when this form of the eugenics craze shall strike France, already in a panic over the dwindling of her population? Will Piety and Patriotism, in league to contrive ways and means for the more rapid production of human targets for invisible artillery belching shrapnel, be able to resist the demand of Purity that henceforth no invalid shall be permitted to engage in target manufacture? There is trouble ahead for the three Ps, whatever road they take. The gods have made them mad, and their consequent destruction is imminent. Benj. R. Tucker. Metaphysicing the Drama. A FEW evenings ago I sat at a lonely part of the South Coast at sundown just when distant brass-railed yachts began to gleam like fire-flies. I saw from this spot the sun fling a flaming cloth across the channel formed by the coast and the far-flung island where the sea terminates in a faint blue line. Then in the luminous air I passed out to the heart of an immense encardined globe while behind me the earth sank from view as though effaced by a curtain of gold enfolding the Holiest. The magic of the sun had lifted me out of civilisation into the eternal. I am accustomed to accept the welcome of the sun and the sea. Sometimes the sun looks over an ivory cloud and the sea spreads a jewelled tail for me. At others, its golden light projects welcoming arms across twin peaks of polished jade, or lifts the tapestry wrought by the sea upon a curving horizon. Sometimes, as day deepens, it bids me peer at the world as from the heart of a great ruby. I follow it as it climbs to the South, and it swings me athwart the vital blue as in a burnished cauldron. I watch it nestle in the silken night and my spirit goes forth to where amphitheatred clouds wave spectral crests as though showering applause upon the victor of Time. Thus, at all times, I am invited to travel along the paths once trod by man through the avenues of the emotions, right to the heart of the temple of The Soul, there to realise the eternal mysteries. I travel by principles and methods of the earliest and loftiest initiation into the mysteries of The Soul. Civilisation recedes and pre-civilisation takes its place revealing the advent not only of individual initiation but of its earliest form of expression, namely, The Drama. When the caveman emerged into the sun and the rising dawn flushing him with ecstacy bade him unfold his soul in naked dance The Drama was born. Drama was then an element by which The Soul gave instantaneous expression to its deepest mysteries, and The Drama served as body and raiment for human souls that expressed this element. This was the meaning of Drama and The Drama at an early period of the world's history when mankind walked in dreams and beheld the sun and stars with wonderment. Then Drama was Art expressed in movement; and The Drama was movement—movement that sprang from feelings too intense for words. To the early man words were inadequate to express the human soul's unfolding. They are just as inadequate to-day. Our real experiences do not express themselves in devil's or angel's gabble, in maleficent or beneficent chuckle, but in great silences. Speech was invented to decorate dungeons of learning, to unmask phoneticians and those sick creatures, their critics, and to communicate trivial and transient things. Speech is the symbol of civilisation and the curse of The Drama. As civilisation grew, corrupted and destroyed spiritual man, so Speech grew and reflected corruption and death. And as Speech grew so it mutilated the original meanings of Drama and The Drama. The pure form of both underwent gross adulteration, became alloyed with word tradition and superstition. This was a bad and sad thing for man. While The Drama was scornful of words and mankind realised it as the expression of an eternal energy, its power was irresistible and sway illimitable; while men externalised Drama in action each was impelled to create his own form of dramatic expression; but as soon as speech stepped in man appears to have lost his separate individuality. He became less sensitive to dramatic influences and from being a creative author-actor became a mere spectator. He was, in fact, compelled to call in others to tell him the story of his own soul what time he sat in the background a limp and listless onlooker. Hence arose his deputies the word-mongering gang of playwrights, producers and actors, who to-day have hardly any other idea of what The Drama means or of choosing a subject for a play than by continual reference to word books and human gramaphones. In their hands Speech has destroyed the play-spirit in human beings. In suggesting that The Drama has nothing to do with words I am aware that I am suggesting that civilisation has nothing to do with The Drama. Neither has it. The theme of The Drama is The Soul's unfolding. What has civilisation to do with The Soul? It has nothing to do even with the terms applicable to it. Who can truthfully speak of its loftiness, vastness, splendour, majesty, of its eternal and unparalleled glory? Accurately, we speak instead of its blood-shed, diabolical malice, its venom, oppression, hatred and destructive force. Civilisation is, in fact, synonymous with destructive energy and has the same vocabulary adorning itself with such words as shatter, crush, ruin, pillage, plunder, massacre, ravage. In short civilisation is the glorification of the Principle of Evil. Erase it altogether and we shall at once find the true theme and principles of the Drama, those that existed when man stood on August 1st, 1913. THE NEW FREEWOMAN 75 the threshold of Life. For thousands of years no attempt has been made to cross the threshold. The human mind has been engaged instead in a preposterous attempt to produce a pseudo form of drama. We all know the history of the War of Words. We have heard that as man gradually lost his identity with the universal he grew more and more garrulous. As ages of idiot gabble succeeded each other blotting out his spiritual guide so there arose in his mind suicidal questionings concerning his whence and whither on this mortal planet. And as his doubts increased so he sought to veil the nakedness of illuminating action by pretexts, devices and poetic glitter. The first and foremost pretext for word infliction was Destiny. Some gibbering imbecile having conceived the theme of the conflict of The Soul with Fate (whatever Fate may be) set it to words according to the feeling of the age. The idea took root. The ancient Greeks seized it and rapidly developed it, prepared the verbal ingredients, the really dreadful incidents of the conflict, recorded, discussed, explained, even gloated over the malignity and cruelty of the leading character—called Fate, added poetic flavouring and served up the mixture to an audience which thoroughly enjoyed disasters seen through the lens of a family curse. I am prepared to hear someone say that the splendour of this spoken poetry is a great palliation of the brutality of degrading The Drama. But is such poetry justified in making the world more devil-ridden that it should be? Ought we to praise it for converting The Drama from a movement to a meta-physic? Ought we to praise it for ravaging mankind on a vast scale for its own aggrandisement? Perhaps if the successful usurper had retained its early form and continued to plunge human beings into disasters and dissipation on a scale colossal enough to stir the imaginative force of the poet in them some excuse might be found for it. By enabling them to participate freely in fictitious crimes and to incur fictitious hereditary liabilities it might have cured their hunger for the real thing. But unfortunately the mania of the Diction Drama for following the times did not allow it to stop at old pretexts and devices. Apparently it was convinced that it was possible to make interesting material out of any odds and ends of human experience. So we find it placing itself under ecclesiastical control and priding itself on its discovery of Heaven and of its independence of Earth. At this stage a great part of its business was taken up with an exhibition of the great intellectual resources of the Deity and the Devil. It revealed their mental contrivances for explaining their systems, the one of morals and metaphysics for the government of the world, the other of the utility of the Fig Leaf and Hell. Thus it revealed their remarkable verbal address both argumentative and persuasive and showed that the Deity in conversation with Adam and Eve and the Devil discussing the origin and working of his cooking establishment, had nothing to learn from teachers of pronunciation. Following the invasion of Paradise came a reverse. Heaven got mislaid. The Mysteries and Miracles went in search of it and never returned. The Diction Drama still clothed in religious ideal, emancipated itself from ecclesiastical control and ceased to chatter the lay version of the Church Liturgy. Being now uncertain as to the latitude of Heaven and Hell it sought a compromise in changing the good and evil spirits into the personification of abstract virtues and vices, transformed itself into a waxworks showman and from being theological and liturgical became social and intellectual. By this time the Diction Drama had fully arrived at its metaphysical mission. Its moral awakening was complete. It had discovered the earth and all that in there is and henceforth its purpose was to purify, strengthen, even to amuse mankind by showing it as a gramaphonic actor in the material world process. Its chattering shadow has never grown less simply because the idea that conflict is the "life and soul" of The Drama has strengthened; and the ancient device of introducing the interference of philosophy to settle the conflict has continued to be increasingly employed. The Diction Drama has, in fact, continued to follow the current of philosophical, intellectual and social thought. This means that it has been wandering in a vicious circle. For the philosophical, intellectual and social thought which produced the Morality Play of the 15th and 16th century largely persists to-day. There is still considerable doubt as to the whereabouts of Heaven. For everybody will not accept the implication of Comte, Darwin and Spencer that Heaven is here and now and at its gates are the flaming swords of Evolution and Heredity. The newest exponents of the Diction Drama are not likely to accept my statement that the said form of drama has been stagnating these many centuries. In their view it has evolved and attained its highest refinement. If the War of Words in the old Morality days showed that the combatative interest of human beings found gratification in the crude fight of rival vices and virtues disguised as rhetoricians, it shows in the present Bernard-Shaw-cum-John-Galsworthy Morality play that the interest finds gratification in the competitive struggle among mankind generally. The morality-mongering playwright of the 19th-20th century has found his materials in the manifestations of this struggle and has augmented its brutalities by his vigorous ignorance. I have recent examples of the said " highest refinement " all around me. Let me quote one or two. Here is a " gem " from " Milestones " by Arnold Bennett and Edward Knoblauch : "Precisely. Don't you go and imagine that all the arguments are on one side. They aren't. Five-sixths of the experts in England have no belief whatever in the future of iron ships. You know that! Iron ships indeed! And what about British oak? andc, andc." And here are some thoughts of " gold " from the " brilliant " Henry Arthur Jones' "The Divine Gift " : "What's anybody's fame? Even Shakespeare's? A century or two of growing renown; a babble of confused criticism; a buzz of ignorant worship and applause; a tramp of Americans to his birthplace; a hash of his scenes; then ten or fifteen thousand years of fading mention; a withering mention; a mere name; an echo... Wry empty, all of it! For all that our pulses will jump when we hear those roars of applause you'll get at Covent Garden next season." "That is dramatic speech" says "T.P.'s Weekly," "colloquial yet eloquent, with the imagination balanced 'twixt cold oblivion and the heavy, dreadful fascination of the public life." Who would have thought it. I have enough samples of this sort of dramatic screech to cover the walls of a very large Bedlam if as some sane persons maintain they are in need of that accommodation. Surely after such heart-rending " highest refinement " the rest is the Drama of Silence. The current degradation of The Drama following the line already indicated and the queer use of the words Drama and The Drama, afford further examples of the " highest refinement." Take these:— "Has not our modern drama been getting away from the centre of late? Is it not showing a tendency to leave the main road and run up little by-lanes?" (Mr. H. A. Jones.) It is proper under the circumstances that " our modern dramatists " should run up little by-lanes also,—and stop there. " We who work for the drama need not blush.. English drama may go begging and starve before they (the moneyed class) will lift a finger to save it." (Granville Barker.) Who wants English drama. We want DRAMA. " We are giving the most practical demonstration in our power of our belief in the 76 THE NEW FREEWOMAN August 1st, 1913. Drama as made in England." (Mr. J. E. Vedrenne in the "Morning Post.") Here's the true-born British drama for you. " Mr. Louis N. Parker's 'Joseph and His Brethren' contains no fewer than fifty-six speaking parts." ("Daily Telegraph.") Apparently Joseph and his brothers belong to the parrot tribe. " Sir J. M. Barrie complained that the critics said of his plays that they were charming, but they were not plays." ("London Mail.") And yet they reported them as plays in the papers. " The dramatist is the sole author of a play, but he is not the sole creator of it." (Mr. Arnold Bennett in the " English Review.") This is the sort of jumble of thoughts that we expect from a writer who says that play-writing is the easiest thing in the world. " The Irish are a race of talkers and in Lady Gregory's plays the people talk a wonderful, ornate, fantastical language." ("The New Statesman.") And the gift of the gab drama flourishes. " The master passion of William Archer's life has been the theatre, not the conventional, stereotyped vulgarisation of the drama which passes current under that name." (" Everyman.") The drama posing as the theatre is another instance of its depraved duplicity. " To maintain the Censorship of the Drama is what we regard as a national duty. .. far from degrading Drama by this means, Drama is actually honoured by it." ("The Old Age.") I wonder how they honour Drama? " Drama has for its subject the conflict of the soul with Fate." (" Rolls Passage Scorpion ") A definition illustrating the confused state of the writer's mind. He means The Drama, or A Drama. " There is a certain kind of literary dandy who would banish all that is healthy, all that is beautiful from the stage, and substitute in their place that kind of art which is the outcome of an over-sated civilisation. It is not from the ranks of these that the drama will be vitalised." (From Sir Herbert Tree's "Thoughts and After-thoughts.") Apparently it is one of the after (dinner) ones which may account for its giddy silliness. " The drama was very artificial in Victorian times, and did not really express or interpret life (meaning human life). Now it does." (Rev. James Adderley.) And is still more artificial. " A great play does not necessarily need the stage to prove its greatness." (Mr. John Drinkwater in "The Blue Review.") Mr. Drinkwater means that the library will do as well. " The peasant in ' The Tragedy of Nan ' achieves poetry of a high order; while he speaks he is a pantheist, he is enthralled by the world and its forces, he is all of a piece with the sun, with the flowing waters, with the wind that soughs through the trees on the eternal hills." (W. L. George and Helen George in "The Manchester Playgoer.") While the peasant speaks he is a character in present-day Diction Drama, and is enthralled by nothing except the glorious hope of having his speech reported at length in the " Daily Mail." A primitive man would not forget his manners so far as to talk at the Sun. He would respond silently to its call. " We must learn to play. We must be personal in our amusements," says "Plain Talk." Precisely. And the moment we have learnt " to play " that moment we shall cease to tolerate The Diction Drama and renew the spirit of acting. Huntly Carter. Reviews. Sati: A Vindication of the Hindu Woman. By Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. (Sociological Review. 2/6.) We are hearing a great deal just now about the ancient ideals of India. One mid-Victorian journal represents the importation of such ideals to be the new road to salvation, and the translation of the utterances of the founders of Eastern forms of religion to be the new path of literary progress. Impelled by its epoch-making discovery it does not hesitate to solicit subscriptions to enable it to purchase translations, even containing ditches, to present to its juvenile readers. For our own part we prefer the silence of India, not only as to its Religion, but on all other topics which Western peoples cannot and never will understand. Before the coming of the " Mahabharata " to England the shining wisdom of India was for India only—foreigners being without the sacred radius. After reading Dr. Coomaraswamy's address we are inclined to offer the said foreigners our sincere congratulations. Apparently the " Mahabharata " is not a book that should ever have been permitted to say its say outside India and now that Dr. Coomaraswamy has unintentionally exposed its subtle poison there is hope that even the stupidest journals will begin to take the fact to heart. We are led to say " unintentionally " because when Dr. Coomaraswamy read his paper (which has since been issued in book form) before the Sociological Society there were signs that he believed the ideals taught by this sacred book, to be true, and that he was rendering a great service to his own country and all other countries, by quoting the following extract from a conversation between Shiva and Uma. " The Great God asks Shahki to describe the duties of women " and " She who is queen of heaven, and yet so sweetly human answers " : " The duties of woman are created in the rites of wedding, when in presence of the nuptial fire she becomes the associate of her Lord, for the performance of all righteous deeds. She should be beautiful and gentle, considering her husband as her god and serving him as such in fortune and misfortune, health and sickness, obedient even if commanded to unrighteous deeds or acts that may lead to her own destruction. She should rise early, serving the gods, always keeping her house clean, tending the domestic sacred fire, eating only after the needs of gods and guests and servants have been satisfied, devoted to her father and mother and the father and mother of her husband. Devotion to her Lord is woman's honour, it is her eternal heaven." Then follows an extract from the Laws of Manu : " Though destitute of virtue or seeking pleasure elsewhere, or devoid of good qualities, a husband must he constantly worshipped as a god by a faithful wife. .. ." We have not space to examine the points of Dr. Coomaraswamy's arguments in favour of the monstrous blasphemy contained in the above Oriental notion of subjection, impersonality and sacrifice. We, however, note that the idea of men setting themselves up as Gods, and of women consenting to worship them as such, to live, think, act, die with them, and to dwell with them after death no matter how pestiferous they may be, has his full approval. Apparently Dr. Coomaraswamy believes that his vindication of Sutee does assist his indictment of Western woman's worst enemy—Industrialism; and the career of one gross tyranny can only be cut short in the midst of its uselessness by another gross tyranny. Perhaps he is not aware of the true nature of the sharks which infest Indian waters. If not we beg of him to consider the following words of H. M. Swanwick : " Oriental conception of the subjection of women leads to the hideous cruelties of child marriage, to the soul mutilation of child widows, to the callous neglect of the health of women, which, until Western medical women—all too few—came to the rescue, left them with barbarous tending in sickness and childbirth long after the men had taken advantage of Western science for their own bodies." Dr. Coomaraswamy is no doubt a worthy citizen of India and of great service to that country in propagating its stupid ideals concerning women. But to our mind the evidence against the usefulness of such ideals to Western peoples is overwhelming; and his attempt to foist fossilised slave ideals on England at a moment when its intelligent citizens are fiercely fighting to crush them out, can only lay him open to ridicule. We shall not be surprised to hear that he has reaped in pain what he is sowing in pamphleteering. H. C. @@@ Goslings. By J. D. Beresford. (W. Heinemann. 6/-. net.) The task Mr. Beresford has set himself in " Goslings " is an extremely interesting one: he has has tried to show the twentieth century world and its civilization in the grip of a great catastrophic happening, which, in his own words, involves " a return to the old segregation of nations, and brings about a new epoch beginning with separated peoples evolving on more or less racial lines." August 1st, 1913. THE NEW FREEWOMAN 77 His fantasy develops through the agency of a terror-striking plague which crawls slowly from the East through Europe, its peculiar characteristic lying in the fact that the disease spares the women but carries off the men in vast numbers, leaving a world whose female population is to the male as a hundred to one or so. It will be realised at once how full of possibilities is this situation, how dramatic, and, to a large extent, original (even though it be granted that "Goslings" is a very direct descendant of Mr. Wells' " War in the Air," and to a lesser degree of "The Food of the Gods "). The members of the Gosling family are chosen to develop the theme. We see them first, before the advent of the Plague, in their Brondesbury home: a family of four—father, mother, and two grown-up daughters. It is one out of those countless suburban families on %300 per annum (George Gosling was head of the counting-house in the firm of Barker and Prince, wholesale provision merchants), of very slight education, no interests save the narrowest personal ones, very respectable as regards all the conventions, more or less happy, and more or less indifferent to one another, though preserving an amicable relationship. To them all life is the life they, and their similarly situated neighbours lead, a life which will continue intact for all eternity. Crashing into the midst of their narrow, dull existences comes the great Plague on a sudden. The one man who knew of its relentless march westwards is Jasper Thrale, a young literary man, a scholar, athirst for experiences in life. It was this "furious curiosity concerning life" which had led him, in spite of a comfortable income, to work for his living in strange lands at strange occupations, which brought him into contact with the mysterious Plague in Thibet, and finally sends him hasting back to London to point out the coming danger to the public. No one will heed him— neither newspaper editors, nor Cabinet Ministers, nor public men—until too late. The Plague comes, decimates England, and leaves it once more a primitive country, inhabited almost solely by women, who must turn to the Mother-Earth, and to her alone, for the barest subsistence. The Gosling family, like all others, are overwhelmed. Their food supplies give out: they are forced to trek away to find new stores, and finally George Gosling abandons wife and daughters to take up his lot with an attractive young woman who needs his masculine help to carry on her farm and her existence. The Gosling women, left alone, now begin their experiences. After many adventures, they arrive in a little colony at Marlow, and there settle down to take a share in the work of maintaining existence. They must dig and plough and reap and sow, make all the necessary clothes, build houses when needed, grind corn—in a word do all the work of the community. The little settlement is aided by Jasper Thrale, who has survived and brings his expert knowledge (chiefly bearing on machines and their working) to the women's service. Of the three Gosling women, the only one who can adapt herself to the new life is Blanche, the elder of the two girls. Mrs. Gosling, wholly lacking in initiative and adaptability, soon succumbs, and dies; Millie is early and easily allured by the young Adonis of the community, a coarsely attractive butcher, who is now able (in this man-less community) to give free play to his instincts. The whole community passes through many vicissitudes; difficulties, both external and internal, beset it: the women's labour can hardly keep pace with their needs; jealousies and hatreds burst out among them; and, worst of all, all sorts of abnormalities are rife, due to this one-sexed existence. Jasper Thrale finds himself a mate in Lady Eileen Ferrar, and the two together do their utmost to preserve the community in health and sanity. Salvation dawns at the close of the book with the coming of an American liner into Southampton Water, bearing men who are ready to act as a pioneering army and restore England once more to some semblance of her life before the Plague. Even so bald an outline as this will suffice to show the interest of Mr. Beresford's theme, but it is not the idea alone which is of value. There are some remarkably vivid pieces of portraiture in the book, sketches drawn with a few strokes which imprint themselves on one's mind. Perhaps the best of these is the portrait of George Gosling, the mediocre, self-complacent tradesman-mind, of whom Thrale says to his friend Gurney he has seen " a god in old Gosling.. .. Just a touch of wonder and imagination now and again. Something he was quite unconscious of himself." Mrs. Isaacson, the once wealthy Jewess, is another admirable picture, and yet another is Mrs. Gosling. Moreover, there is a fine dramatic gift displayed, coupled with a quick and penetrating insight at times. Why, then, must we look back with regret to the earlier " Hampdenshire Wonder," why be forced to regard this book as something decidedly less than a success? Perhaps it is mainly due to two causes: in the first place, it hardly seems as if Mr. Beresford had quite made up his mind as to what he was aiming at. " Goslings " is both too " fantastic " and too serious, and consequently leaves us in a divided mind. The "fantasy" of it is too much overloaded with moralising and diatribe; indeed, the whole book is something in the nature of an essay on Woman, which goes far to spoil the story as such. But the profundities involved are none of them dealt with seriously, and the reader cannot find himself properly " at home " in either realm. An illustration will explain my point. At the close of the book we leave Thrale (something of the type of Trafford in Wells' "Marriage," let it be noted) calmly contemplating the restoration of the Factory System in England, and Lady Eileen (supposedly an embodiment of sanity and wide vision; declaring that now a new world has come into being, everything will be different and finer, women will be healthy and noble, everything will be straightened out, and so forth. This is annoying and misleading, since nothing has happened to presage any such new world, nor any fundamental change in the human outlook. The other cause of failure lies, I think, in the lack of construction: parts of the story seem " made " too obviously (in particular the episode of Thrale and Lady Eileen), and in other parts important matters suddenly drop out, into silence. For my part, I felt that I should have been more interested to follow up the career of George Gosling than that of any of his female relatives, or that of Millie in preference to Eileen's—a fault on Mr. Beresford's part, I hold. I might add another cause of comparative failure— comparative only, I wish to insist, but one is bound to expect much from the writer of " The Hampdenshire Wonder." The wide vision and spiritual understanding of that book is not to be found in "Goslings." Is it, possibly, because the author is writing with too much "anger and dismay," with a " militancy " springing from certain prejudices and limitations? He has championed " Anger and Dismay " very recently in an essay, but surely we must seek to find its source before giving praise. I cannot think that the section, for instance, dealing with women's clothes and women's taste, nor that telling of the Marlow butcher's amours, displays the finest emotion. Mr. Beresford will understand, I hope, that if one speaks of defects it is because his work has a high value, and having already achieved so finely he is bound to be judged by those same achievements. When all is said, " Goslings " remains a very interesting, often very attractive, piece of work. B. L.

78 THE NEW FREEWOMAN August 1st, 1913. Correspondence. Note to Correspondents— While quite willing to publish letters under noms de plume, we make it a condition of publication that the name and address of each correspondent should be supplied to the Editor. — Ed. NOT EVEN WILL O' THE WISPS, NOT EVEN MIRRORS TO CATCH LARKS. To the Editor of The New Freewoman. Madam, We are told that all socialists, whatever be their nationality, are bound to each other by a common creed, that, though they may differ over details, there is a common ground upon which they all meet and agree. Where they also meet is in a total absence of humour. In consequence socialism should go far in the world for it is noticeable that the sense of humour cripples action and ambition. The man who climbs mustn't look back and around him. Above all he mustn't stop to laugh or to ask himself what on earth he is doing there. A typical specimen of socialist naïveté is the following paragraph which was given as conspicuous a position in the Daily Herald for July 1st as it might have had say—in the Sketch. " A rebel taxi-man commenting on Lord Devonport's reign of hunger at the docks last year sends us the following for our Society columns: ' I set down at the Savoy Hotel to-day, and saw an ultrafashionable young lady and a fat man standing in the porch. A powerful Daimler car drove up and the fat man signalled to the linkman to fetch a stool for her ladyship to step on—it being too much effort to step directly in the car. The heels of her shoes were studded and blazed with DIAMONDS !!' " A fable might be made out of this story: " Once upon a time there was a man, and he was a credulous man, who called himself a socialist, and he went out into the world to hunt for magic stones to share among his comrades. And he came upon a proud and beautiful fairy whose feet sparkled with a thousand gems, the light from which was so bright that it struck him blind," andc., andc. In a word, it is to be hoped the diamonds the socialists are out for are not of the nature of the pebbles in the lady's heels, a wheelbarrowful of which would not buy the rebel taxi-man's tobacco for a week, probably. (I like taxi-men, who live on Savoy Hotel customers, being rebels, by the way.) And it is with green stuff like this that more social victims are made, not less; that no end of harm is done and no good whatever, that things are pulled down all over the place and nothing put up. It is the vulgar, gimcrack propaganda of the tract, repelling precisely those without whose support no cause can be considered to have been gained. And while it is the most futile it is the most dangerous form of propaganda for it stirs nought up but mud. "Tiens Ferme." @@@ PRIVATE MORALITY AND PUBLIC LIFE. To the Editor of The New Freewoman. Madam, I fear that Mr. Wm. Foss has but imperfectly apprehended the true glory of our political life, which consists of (1) escaping detection and (2) if detected, escaping newspaper publication. Mr. Foss does not seem to understand that all the pillars and sacred principles of our constitution would fall if the House of Commons included members who had been "found out." What would happen to the Secrecy of the Party Funds and all the various intrigues on which our present system of government reposes if clumsy persons like co-respondents were entrusted with political power? It is true that all these considerations apply with even greater force to the financial demi-vierges of the Marconi scandal but Cabinet Ministers must be allowed their first bite. In any case the fate of the late member for Leicester and the degradation of the Post Office official who dabbled in Marconis, sufficiently point a moral and adorn the tale. Your obedient Servant, The Husband of One Wife and Father of Three Daughters.

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Anyone, however, who is interested can be supplied with all necessary information by applying to the Secretary of the company, Oakley House, Bloomsbury Street, London, W.C. 80 THE NEW FREEWOMAN August 1st, 1913. SOME OPINIONS on THE FREEWOMAN. FRANCIS GR1ERSON.—I predict for you brilliant success in the near future. No new movement -will succeed that gives quarter to the blind forces of the material. The psychic, being superior, will over-ride the material, and that is what is occurring in certain parts of the world, notably in America. H. G. WELLS.—I rejoice beyond measure in the revival of The Freewoman. Its policy even at its worst was a wholesome weekly irritant, and its columns were more illuminating and entertaining than anything since Mr. Frank Harris's "Saturday Review." EDWARD CARPENTER.—The Freewoman did so well during its short career under your editorship, it was so broad-minded and courageous, that its oessation has been a real loss to the cause of free and rational discussion of human problems. HAVELOCK ELLIS.—I admire so much the energy and courage of The Freewoman that I am really sorry I cannot identify myself more closely with its spirit and outlook. No doubt a newspaper requires both funds and publicity. The first is usually difficult to obtain, but I scarcely think you can complain on the second head. Considering the inevitable difficulties, the limited appeal of so revolutionary a journal, and the closure of the usual method of procuring publicity, it is wonderful how widely the paper is known. REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN, Author of "Daughters of Ishmael."—The Freewoman was a torch in the night. I am glad indeed that that torch is to be rekindled, and I shall always be at your command to do whatever I can to help to guard the flame. BENJ. R. TUCKER, Thirty years Editor of New York " Liberty."—I consider your paper the most important publication in existence. EDEN PHILLPOTTS.—I am delighted to learn that The Freewoman is not dead, but merely in a fainting condition from lack of necessary nourishment. May she soon be her dashing self again. MRS. G. BERNARD SHAW.—I am really glad to hear that there is a chance of restarting The Freewoman, for though there has been much I have not agreed with, I think it is a valuable medium of self-expression for a clever set of young men and women. CHARLES LAPWORTH, Editor of the " Daily Herald."—It was while Mrs. Lapworth and I were leading the lives of tramps in Italy that we were first introduced to The Freewoman, and we fell in love with its fine upstanding, vigorous attitude towards " Life Problems." I hope it will go on. EDNA KENTON (Hon. Secretary, The New Freewoman Committee, New York).—I cannot tell you how unreservedly I admire your courage and your standpoint. Until the advent of The Freewoman I had not had the same feeling of breathless wonder at the voicing of heretofore unprinted things since reading "The Ego and Its Own." CHARLES T. HALLINAN (Associate Editor, " Chicago Evening Post ").—I am delighted that The Freewoman is again to take the field. There is work for it to do here as well as in England. I believe that a large and intelligent minority in the suffrage movement in this country is ready for the discussion of something else besides votes. It may take them some time to get used to the libertarian emphasis of The Freewoman, but they will be able at once to recover through its columns a perspective of the woman's movement which, through no fault of its own, is suffering at present from an exeess of politicians and a shortage of general ideas. FLOYD DELL on The Freewoman in "Studies in Modern Feminism."—She provokes thought. And she welcomes it. She wants everybody to think—not to think necessarily, nor the right thought always, but that which they can and must. She is a propagandist, it is true. But she does not create a silence and call it conversion. She stimulates her readers to cast out the devils that inhabit their souls—fear, prejudice. She helps them to build up their lives on a basis of will—the exercise, not the suppression, of will. She indurates them to the world. She liberates them to life. C. F. HUNT (Chicago).—Every progressive individual I know will hear from me in regard to making the future of your paper secure. LUCIAN CARY (Chicago).—The Freewoman is one of those forces which are proving all the old generalizations about women untrue. MRS. HUMPHREY WARD on The Freewoman in "The Times."—A newspaper has recently appeared amongst us which is written by women of high education who, generally 6peaking, sign their names to what they write. The paper shows in some respects conspicuous ability, and is, I believe, eagerly read.. .. The doctrine of the economic independence of women which is everywhere part and parcel of the Suffrage movement leads, in the case of this ably-written paper, to strange results.. .. Arguments against the immoral permanence of marriage, complete freedom of union under the guidance of passion between men and women, and other speculations and contentions; with regard to the relations of the sexes.. .. These matters and the handling of them shed a flood of light on certain aspects of the " Woman Movement." ... It seems to me, and to others, what they (i.e., Suffragists) have no right to do is to ignore this dark and dangerous side of the "Woman Movement." EARL PERCY on The Freewoman in the " Morning Post."—With regard to the Church League, the welcome (to The Freewoman) would appear to be equally cordial, if less official. In the issues of The Freewoman for July nth and July 18th, appear letters from the Rev. -----, a member of the League. In the first case the letter is placed close to one entitled " The Children of the State," advocating open immorality, which hardly seems a suitable situation for a clergyman's letter. In his second letter, however, he says: " It is refreshing. .. to meet somebody who has the courage to champion," andc. This refers to the Editor, whose courage in that particular issue took the form of an article entitled "The immorality of the Marriage Contract." So that on one page a clergyman writes on "The Idea of God," and "oh another the marriage state is described as immoral. Presumably "The Idea of God" is, in his opinion, quite consistent with this view of marriage. If the Church League is not in sympathy with the doctrines of The Freewoman, why does one of its members, an eminent divine of the Church of England, correspond with it? MORNING POST Editorial on The Freewoman."—'The battle, then (i.e., the women's), is against society, and naturally there is a tendency to alliance with the Socialist Party, who have also a quarrel with out established institutions. A Socialist feminist organ, the The Freewoman, preaches the new doctrine with a great deal of vigour and frankness. THE FORUM (New York, October, 1912).—The Freewoman came with the incredible heresy that the woman movement was nothing if not an effort on the part of the women to lift themselves for ever out of the " servant " class and to place themselves definitely and finally among the " masters," using their faculties, like all masters, for the upbuilding and development of their own personalities and the advancement of their own personal aims CURRENT OPINION (New York, January, 1913).—The feminist movement has evolved its superwoman; or rather, the superwoman is the ultimate expression of that new philosophy of feminism preached by the daring " humanist " review, the London Freewoman. THE AMERICAN REVIEW OF REVIEWS (FRANCES BJORKMAN, quoted in December, 1912).— The writer of The Freewoman editorials has shot into the literary and philosophical firmament as a star of the first magnitude. Although practically unknown before the advent of The Freewoman last November, she speaks always with the quietly authoritative air of the writer who has arrived. Her style has beauty as well as force and clarity. Merely as an essayist she makes us wonder why we have never heard of her before. THE CHICAGO EVENING POST (October, 1912).—Year by year The Freewoman, if unhampered, will precipitate for the English and the American woman's movements some new and lasting conceptions of the vital problems which confront us. Some of these expressions of opinion were written to the Editor under the impression that the old paper would be revived. For reasons unnecessary to enlarge upon, that plan has been abandoned in favour of the present plan of commencing an entirely new and separate publication. Printed by Robert Johnson and Co., Ltd., 28, Tulketh Street, Southport, and published by the Proprietors The New Freewoman, Ltd., at Oakley House, Bloomsbury Street, London, W.C.