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tries, women have acquired a national importance such as they never before possessed.

Opposition to the enfranchisement of women and to their admission into all departments of economic activity has not of course disappeared altogether. Such an attitude, however, is taken by the irreconcilable.

Many persons, some of them very influential who formerly looked down upon women, have been converted to the women's cause. In the course of a recent debate in the House of Commons, so eminent a politician as Mr. H. H. Asquith confessed that his opposition to the enfranchisement of women had been removed by the splendid work that the women had done during the war. Mr. Walter Long, the Secretary of State for the Colonies made a similar confession. I quote a passage from Mr. Asquith's speech to show the influences that have brought about the conversion:

"The House of Commons will not be unprepared to hear that I myself, and I believe many others, no longer regard this question (woman suffrage) from the standpoint which we occupied before the war. During the whole of my political life I have opposed the various schemes which from time to time have been presented to Parliament for giving the Parliamentary vote, whether piecemeal or wholesale, to women; while it is only right that I should say that I have as consistently advocated and done my best to promote the opening out to women of other spheres of activity which have been in the past confined exclusively to men. "Why and in what sense, the House may ask, have I changed my views?

I am not the least ashamedindeed I am glad to have the opportunity to disclose the process which has operated in my mind.

"My opposition to woman suffrage has always been based, and based

solely, on considerations of public expediency. I think that some years ago I ventured to use the expression 'Let the women work out their own salvation.' Well, they have worked it out during this war. How could we have carried on the war without them? Short of actually bearing arms in the field, there is hardly a service which has contributed or is contributing to the maintenance of our cause in which women have not been at least as active and as efficient as men; and wherever we turn we see them doing with zeal and success, and without detriment to the prerogatives of their sex, work which three years ago would have been regarded as falling exclusively within the province of men. That is not a matter of sentiment. It appeals to our feelings as well as our judgment.

"What I confess moves me still more in this matter is the problem of reconstruction when the war is over. The questions which will then necessarily arise in regard to women's labor and women's functions and activities in the new ordering of things -for, do not doubt it, the old order will change are questions in regard to which I, for my part, feel it impossible consistently either with justice or with expediency to withhold from women the power and the right of making their voice directly heard. Let me add that since the war began we have had no recurrence of that detestable campaign which disfigured the annals of political agitation in this country, and no one can now contend that we are yielding to violence what we refused to concede to argument. I, therefore, with, I believe, many others who have hitherto thought with me in this matter, am prepared to acquiesce in the general decision of the majority of the Conference that some measure of woman suffrage should be conferred."

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War: The Leveleye Vo/295 No24,1917

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Conversions of such eminent poli- by the war have been great. Time

ticians as Mr. Asquith are important. They make it possible to entertain the hope that women will become enfranchised before long.

It is, however, to be noted that the scheme suggested by the majority of the Speaker's Committee, to which Mr. Asquith referred in the passage quoted, does not propose to enfranchise women on the same basis as men. A much higher age limit, on which agreement was not reached, is to be imposed upon women than is the case with

men.

This device is employed in order to keep down the number of women electors. As the females of the United Kingdom slightly exceed the males in number, effort is being made to insure that the women's vote shall not become predominant. It, therefore, follows that even if women are enfranchised, political differentiation on the sex basis will still remain though to a less extent than at present.

The future that awaits the women who, for the first time, have entered gainful occupations during the war, still remains a mystery. Many of them are occupying positions that their employers have promised to give back to the men who vacated them to join the army, when their service to their country is over. Many of the fighters will, of course, not return. Many more will not wish to go back to their old employment, but will prefer to find something else to do, or even to emigrate to one of the Over-Sea Dominions, to live under new conditions. In any event, with the return of peace, many women will lose the situations that they are at present occupying.

The pessimist would have us believe that the women who are crowded out will find it difficult to secure other employment. I, myself, do not share this gloomy view. The ravages caused

LIVING AGE,VOL. VIII, No. 899.

and money will be required to repairs the damage that has been done. These operations will offer work, during the period of transition, to persons who are at present prosecuting the war, and who may otherwise find it difficult to support themselves. If the army and munition workers are demobilized in such a manner that they do not disorganize the labor market, the nation will be spared much depression and misery.

I am not sanguine to the point of believing that the women will be able to retain a foothold in all the trades and professions in which they are at present employed. I am not even sure that women will want to remain in some of the positions that they are at present filling. It is clear, on the other hand, that some of the indoor callings that were formerly monopolized by men have permanently passed out of their hands.

It is not at all likely that the era of friction between men and women over gainful occupations has been for all time closed by the war. In fact, such conflict has not disappeared, even during the course of hostilities. Opposition has been offered by almost every section of organized male labor to women encroaching upon their preserves) At times it has been very

difficult for the authorities to overcome this obstruction. When the war is over, this pent-up energy is bound to assert itself.

In the meantime, women workers are increasing in number, and are acquiring influence and power. Female labor being cheaper than male labor, and not always less efficient, allowance for cheapness of cost being made, the employers are likely to stand by the women workers. Any opposition that is brought to bear against the women who have entered callings that were closed to them

previously, will not, therefore, have everything its own way.

Whatever may happen in future, the war has emancipated women from many prejudices, and given them national importance. Who could have foretold that such results would follow the greatest conflict in the world's history? On the contrary, many pessimists feared, at the outbreak of The Hindustan Review.

hostilities, that the struggle might lower the prestige of women, because they could not engage in fighting. The women, however, rose to the occasion, and established a new record of service, patriotism and efficiency. Their sacrifices are not likely to be forgotten during the era of reconstruction that will follow the era of destruction.

St. Nihal Singh.

EMERSON, CICERO AND THE STOICS.

Some months ago I chanced to take Emerson, as I usually do when I am depressed, always like Matthew Arnold finding him an abiding refuge and friend to all those who would "live in the spirit." And, curiously enough, during my reading I was again stopped short, as so often before, by a single sentence, and one, too, which had puzzled me for thirty years, but which I had always lightly skipped over, as some far-off mystical intrusion into Emerson's sky of an alien thought, to be interpreted only in a cryptic, remote, or quasi-Pickwickian sense. The sentence runs to the effect that the only true philosophy of the world is to be found "in the figment of the Stoics." Strange! I thought to myself again, that this Pağan utterance should come from Emerson, a nineteenth century thinker, born in Christian times. I knew, of course, that Emerson had turned the Trinity upside down, as it were; that he had put the Holy Spirit-or Over-Soul, as he calls it-in the place of God the Father; that, as a Unitarian, he had abolished the Divinity of Christ; and that he had relegated God Himself, as we understand Him, to a vague historical tradition merely. In other words, he had dissolved the Deity, with His active executive, controlling power, His governance and

initiative and, if you will, His miracles, interpositions, and the restinto a kind of abstract phantom; and (now that Christ the Son was eliminated) had given the World over to the passive member of the Trinity-the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, the Inspirer as to some pure and beautiful, sweetly-gentle Mother and Nurse of Mankind, who was to lead us by her mild, persuasive sway, to our Own salvation. But that Emerson should decline on some old Pagan Stoicism, and identify his Over-Soul with it as the summit at once of Religion and Philosophy-I could not understand!

It was soon after reading Emerson's Essay that I took up by a happy chance, Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, where alone the utterances of the great founders of the Stoic, Epicurean, and other schools are given in detail, the originals being long since lost. Now, in these Tusculan Disputations of Cicero, the point raised is: "What is the Supreme Good of Man, and on what foundation does it rest?" After reading carefully the arguments of the different protagonists in these dialogues, I must confess that had I not known beforehand the evolution of these different systems of Pagan Thought from one another, I should have found myself, like Cicero, so entangled in the logical meshes of their

argumentation, that I should have been obliged to give the problem up, and become, like him, an Eclectic, picking out a plum here and there perhaps for my own personal satisfaction, but, for the rest, falling back with Cicero on the doctrine that in all these "high matters," we can attain to no certainty, but only to a "greater or less probability." As for the Epicureans, I felt with Cicero that their doctrines were to be thrown out altogether, as a disgrace to human nature itself!

What, then, was the Stoic's Deity, or as Emerson would call it, his Over-Soul? It was not a God the Father, for in no Pagan philosophy whatever, Stoic or another, was there any God of Love. That alone in all religions and philosophies, came in with Christianity. Nor was it a Spiritual Being as such; nor yet a purely Intelligent One (with some kind of center somewhere, as we imagine it); but it was like the overarching sky, a kind of abstract diffused Providence, overlooking the world as a whole, while separate from it. It had special extension, too, and was made up of sublimated matter of the nature of fire or fiery ether, of which both Intelligence and Soul were, in some obscure way, qualities. As such, too, it existed in the mind of each individual man, over-arching it, and separate from it, as a Judge and Lawgiver, but, humanly speaking, without Love; overlooking all our thoughts and actions with its warning finger, but without in any sense interfering with our own free will.

Now, all this was to the Stoics as much a truism and commonplace as it was to Emerson; and we have now to ask, how it practically affected the actions of these men? It did not make half-naked anchorites of them, as the Hindoo religion did. What it did was to make Stoics of them; that

is to say, men like Brutus and Cato, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, who walked abroad freely, mingling in the politics and other activities of the world, while despising its vanities and ambitions, its joys and griefs and sorrows, with all the confusions and mental perturbations they brought in their train. For with the Stoics, all these things were purely and flatly indifferent, "neither good nor evil," as they said; their sole concern in such a world being to keep their own skirts pure and unspotted, and for the rest, to find in their rapt contemplation of their abstract, pure and Providential Soul (at once Universal, and private to each and every man), their harmony, their peace and rest. It was a splendid dream. But should the rough world press too hardly on them, what then? They could always walk out of it at will, and at any time -by suicide. For, in that way, as Seneca said, "the door is always open"; or as Æmilius Paulus (in other words) to the King of Macedon whom he was leading to Rome in chains: "If you cannot face it, you can end it here and now; do it if you will, and I will walk by."

How, then, does Cicero, who takes the part of "chorus" to the separate speakers in these Tusculan Disputations, feel in regard to this lofty, transcendental Ideal of the Stoics? He admires it from afar; but has to confess that personally he cannot do justice to it! Indeed, when he thinks of it, and its cold unapproachable heights, he flags and almost faints with the sense of his hopeless inability to reach it. But why? In the first place, unlike Brutus and Cato, he was not certain of the existence of this transcendental Over-Soul within him, and separate from him; but held it as at best only a matter of "more or less probability." Besides, in high Statesmanship, and in his whole-souled

devotion to the great Roman Republic which had given to his rare abilities, as an orator, their splendid setting, he frankly admits that in the purely human honor which it brought him, he found every satisfaction his soul could desire in this world. And the consequence was that in his Philosophy he was obliged to fall back from this lofty, icy peak of the Stoics, to one which, if lower in its elevation, was more warm and sunny and reassuring. It was that of the Platonists and Aristotelians, whose doctrine in substance amounted to this: that there were other things besides this Ideal Providence and Over-Soul of the Stoics that were worthy of a life's devotion; as, for example, personal honor and integrity, laudable worldly ambition, pure human love, disinterested friendship and generosity. Cicero was aware, of course, that these merely human compliances of his would seem to his Stoic friends as great a descent from their high Ideal as if he had lain down on his back in the "sty of Epicurus" himself! But he, with his Platonists and Aristotelians, still insisted that you cannot divorce these high human sentiments from your bleak and icy Over-Soul without deforming and devitalizing it. You cannot, for example, divorce from it a mother's love for her children, and her grief for their loss; a patriot's sorrow for the misfortunes of his country; a high-minded man from the tears he sheds for the loss of his honor. On the contrary, these purely human sentiments-foibles you may call themwill warm and enrich your devotion to your icy Ideal, as the lower-lying forests and flowers do the Alpine peaks. They will inlay your cold, over-arching sky with patines of pure gold, which will shine like stars, and "in their motions like the angels sing."

Now, I must confess that, having

read over these Tusculan Disputations, not in the heyday of youth when generous emotions, high ideals, and ambitions are rife, but in my cold, old age, I still agree with Cicero, and am obliged to line up beside him. But the Stoics themselves, hard pressed here, renewed their attacks on our comfortable, easy complacency; and in their way, and at the first blush, I must say outflanked us! For, said they, if you once permit your mind to be diverted for a moment from the pure Spirit within you, and decline on merely human love, honor, integrity, ambition, friendship, and the rest (however disinterested they may be) you will let in the sea; you will not only have blurred the purity of the Over-Soul within you, but beginning with these shifting expediencies, you will soon end by obliterating it altogether. For consider it well-or have you forgotten it?-that you cannot have love without jealousy; high ambition without envy or detraction; the elevation of one man without disparagement of another; in a word, all the old, mixed confusion of the sentiments and passions from which it is the aim of Philosophy to purge and purify you, and which can only be done by ignoring and despising them all alike, and fixing your mind alone on the Over-Soul. If not, observe the consequence that this zigzag of yours between love and hate, honor and detraction, ambition and fear (each of which necessarily involves the other somewhere in your human life) will, as it crosses and intercrosses the pure, over-arching curve of the Supreme Soul, as surely blur and obliterate it as when you obliterate a line of curve on paper by running your pencil to and fro across it. There is no natural human sentiment or passion without its opposite, as there is no natural sunlight without somewhere its shade.

What, then, were we to say to this?

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