नारी विमर्श

[Dark Saint Alaick]

कनाडा की प्रख्यात लेखिका नेल्ली एल. मैकक्लांग ने महिलाओं से सम्बंधित मुद्दों पर 1915 में एक बेहतरीन किताब लिखी थी - 'इन टाइम्स लाइक दीज़' ! बारह अध्यायों में सिमटी इस किताब के ये सारे अध्याय मैं यहां क्रमशः प्रस्तुत करूंगा ! अंत में यदि पाठक चाहेंगे, तो संग्रह करने वालों के लिए इस किताब की पीडीएफ प्रारूप में ई-बुक भी पेश कर दूंगा-

01. The war that never ends
02. The war that ends in exhaustion sometimes mistaken for peace
03. What do women think of war? (not that it matters)
04. Should women think?
05. The new chivalry
06. Hardy perennials!
07. Gentle lady
08. Women and the church
09. The sore thought
10. The land of the fair deal
11. As a man thinketh
12. The war against gloom

[Dark Saint Alaick]

THE WAR THAT NEVER ENDS



If, at last the sword is sheathed,
And men, exhausted, call it peace,
Old Nature wears no olive wreath,
The weapons change--war does not cease.

The little struggling blades of grass
That lift their heads and will not die,
The vines that climb where sunbeams pass,
And fight their way toward the sky!

And every soul that God has made,
Who from despair their lives defend
And struggling upward through the shade,
Break every bond that will not bend,
These are the soldiers, unafraid
In the great war that has no end.


We will begin peaceably by contemplating the world of nature, trees and
plants and flowers, common green things against which there is no
law--for surely there is no corruption in carrots, no tricks in
turnips, no mixed motive in marigolds.

To look abroad upon a peaceful field drowsing in the sunshine, lazily
touched by a wandering breeze, no one would suspect that any struggle
was going on in the tiny hearts of the flowers and grasses. The lilies
of the field have long ago been said to toil not, neither spin, and the
inference has been that they in common with all other flowers and
plants lead a "lady's life," untroubled by any thought of ambition or
activity. The whole world of nature seems to present a perfect picture
of obedience and peaceful meditation.

But for all their quiet innocent ways, every plant has one ambition and
will attain it by any means. Plants have one ambition, and therein
they have the advantage of us, who sometimes have too many, and
sometimes none at all! Their ambition is to grow--to spread--to
travel--to get away from home. Home is their enemy, for if a plant
falls at its mother's knee it is doomed to death, or a miserable
stunted life.

Every seed has its own little plan of escape. Some of them are pitiful
enough and stamped with failure, like the tiny screw of the Lucerne,
which might be of some use if the seed were started on its flight from
a considerable elevation, but as it is, it has hardly turned over
before it hits the ground. But the next seed tries the same
plan--always hoping for a happier result. With better success, the
maple seed uses its little spreading wings to conquer space, and if the
wind does its part the plan succeeds, and that the wind generally can
be depended upon to blow is shown by the wide dissemination of maple
trees.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

More subtle still are the little tricks that seeds have of getting
animals and people to give them a lift on their way. Many a bird has
picked a bright red berry from a bush, with a feeling of gratitude, no
doubt, that his temporal needs are thus graciously supplied. He
swallows the sweet husk, and incidentally the seed, paying no attention
to the latter, and flies on his way. The seed remains unchanged and
undigested, and is thus carried far from home, and gets its chance.
So, too, many seeds are provided with burrs and spikes, which stick in
sheep's wool, dog's hair, or the clothing of people, and so travel
abroad, to the far country--the land of growth, the land of promise.

There is something pathetically human in the struggle plants make to
reach the light; tiny rootlets have been known to pierce rocks in their
stern determination to reach the light that their soul craves. They
refuse to be resigned to darkness and despair! Who has not marveled at
the intelligence shown by the canary vine, the wild cucumber plant, or
the morning glory, in the way their tendrils reach out and find the
rusty nail or sliver on the fence--anything on which they can rise into
the higher air; even as you and I reach out the trembling tendrils of
our souls for something solid to rest upon?

There is no resignation in Nature, no quiet folding of the hands, no
hypocritical saying, "Thy will be done!" and giving in without a
struggle. Countless millions of seeds and plants are doomed each year
to death and failure, but all honor to them--they put up a fight to the
very end! Resignation is a cheap and indolent human virtue, which has
served as an excuse for much spiritual slothfulness. It is still
highly revered and commended. It is so much easier sometimes to sit
down and be resigned than to rise up and be indignant.

Years ago people broke every law of sanitation and when plagues came
they were resigned and piously looked heavenward, and blamed God for
the whole thing. "Thy will be done," they said, and now we know it was
not God's will at all. It is never God's will that any should perish!
People were resigned when they should have been cleaning up! "Thy will
be done!" should ever be the prayer of our hearts, but it does not let
us out of any responsibility. It is not a weak acceptance of
misfortune, or sickness, or injustice or wrong, for these things are
not God's will.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

"Thy will be done" is a call to fight--to fight for better conditions,
for moral and physical health, for sweeter manners, cleaner laws, for a
fair chance for everyone, even women!

The man or woman who tries to serve their generation need not cry out
as did the hymn writer of the last century against the danger of being
carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease, for we know that flowery
beds of ease have never been a mode of locomotion to the skies.
Flowery beds of ease lead in an entirely opposite direction, which has
had the effect of discouraging celestial emigration, for humanity is
very partial to the easy way of traveling. People like not only to
travel the easy way, but to think along the beaten path, which is so
safe and comfortable, where the thoughts have been worked over so often
that the very words are ready made, and come easily. There is a good
deal of the cat in the human family. We like comfort and ease--a warm
cushion by a cosy fire, and then sweet sleep--and don't disturb me!
Disturbers are never popular--nobody ever really loved an alarm clock
in action--no matter how grateful they may have been afterwards for its
kind services!

It was the people who did not like to be disturbed who crucified
Christ--the worst fault they had to find with Him was that He annoyed
them--He rebuked the carnal mind--He aroused the cat-spirit, and so
they crucified Him--and went back to sleep. Even yet new ideas blow
across some souls like a cold draught, and they naturally get up and
shut the door! They have even been known to slam it!

The sin of the world has ever been indifference and slothfulness, more
than real active wickedness. Life, the real abundant life of one who
has a vision of what a human soul may aspire to be, becomes a great
struggle against conditions. Life is warfare--not one set of human
beings warring upon other human beings--that is murder, no matter by
what euphonious name it may be called; but war waged against ignorance,
selfishness, darkness, prejudice and cruelty, beginning always with the
roots of evil which we find in our own hearts. What a glorious thing
it would be if nations would organize and train for this warfare, whose
end is life, and peace, and joy everlasting, as they now train and
organize for the wholesale murder and burning and pillaging whose mark
of victory is the blackened trail of smoking piles of ruins, dead and
maimed human beings, interrupted trade and paralyzed industries!

[Dark Saint Alaick]

Once a man paid for his passage across the ocean in one of the great
Atlantic liners. He brought his provisions with him to save expenses,
but as the days went on he grew tired of cheese, and his biscuits began
to taste mousy, and the savory odors of the kitchen and dining-room
were more than he could resist. There was only one day more, but he
grew so ravenously hungry, he felt he must have one good meal, if it
took his last cent. He made his way to the dining-room, and asked the
man at the desk the price of a meal. In answer to his inquiry the man
asked to see his ticket. "It will not cost you anything," he said.
"Your ticket includes meals."

That's the way it is in life--we have been traveling below our
privileges. There is enough for everyone, if we could get at it.
There is food and raiment, a chance to live, and love and labor--for
everyone; these things are included in our ticket, only some of us have
not known it, and some others have reached out and taken more than
their share, and try to excuse their "hoggishness" by declaring that
God did not intend all to travel on the same terms, but you and I know
God better than that.

To bring this about--the even chance for everyone--is the plain and
simple meaning of life. This is the War that never ends. It has been
waged all down the centuries by brave men and women whose hearts God
has touched. It is a quiet war with no blare of trumpets to keep the
soldiers on the job, no flourish of flags or clinking of swords to
stimulate flagging courage. It may not be as romantic a warfare, from
the standpoint of our medieval ideas of romance, as the old way of
sharpening up a battle axe, and spreading our enemy to the evening
breeze, but the reward of victory is not seeing our brother man dead at
our feet; but rather seeing him alive and well, working by our side.

To this end let us declare war on all meanness, snobbishness, petty or
great jealousies, all forms of injustice, all forms of special
privilege, all selfishness and all greed. Let us drop bombs on our
prejudices! Let us send submarines to blow up all our poor little
petty vanities, subterfuges and conceits, with which we have endeavored
to veil the face of Truth. Let us make a frontal attack on ignorance,
laziness, doubt, despondence, despair, and unbelief!

The banner over us is "Love," and our watchword "A Fair Deal."

[Dark Saint Alaick]

THE WAR THAT ENDS IN EXHAUSTION
SOMETIMES MISTAKEN FOR PEACE




When a skirl of pipes came down the street,
And the blare of bands, and the march of feet,
I could not keep from marching, too;
For the pipes cried "Come!" and the bands said "Do,"
And when I heard the pealing fife,
I cared no more for human life!


Away back in the cave-dwelling days, there was a simple and definite
distribution of labor. Men fought and women worked. Men fought
because they liked it; and women worked because it had to be done. Of
course the fighting had to be done too, there was always a warring
tribe out looking for trouble, while their womenfolk stayed at home and
worked. They were never threatened with a long peace. Somebody was
always willing to go "It." The young bloods could always be sure of
good fighting somewhere, and no questions asked. The masculine
attitude toward life was: "I feel good today; I'll go out and kill
something." Tribes fought for their existence, and so the work of the
warrior was held to be the most glorious of all; indeed, it was the
only work that counted. The woman's part consisted of tilling the
soil, gathering the food, tanning the skins and fashioning garments,
brewing the herbs, raising the children, dressing the warrior's wounds,
looking after the herds, and any other light and airy trifle which
might come to her notice. But all this was in the background. Plain
useful work has always been considered dull and drab.

Everything depended on the warrior. When "the boys" came home there
was much festivity, music, and feasting, and tales of the chase and
fight. The women provided the feast and washed the dishes. The
soldier has always been the hero of our civilization, and yet almost
any man makes a good soldier. Nearly every man makes a good soldier,
but not every man, or nearly every man makes a good citizen: the tests
of war are not so searching as the tests of peace, but still the
soldier is the hero.

Very early in the lives of our children we begin to inculcate the love
of battle and sieges and invasions, for we put the miniature weapons of
warfare into their little hands. We buy them boxes of tin soldiers at
Christmas, and help them to build forts and blow them up. We have
military training in our schools; and little fellows are taught to
shoot at targets, seeing in each an imaginary foe, who must be
destroyed because he is "not on our side." There is a song which runs
like this:

If a lad a maid would marry
He must learn a gun to carry.

thereby putting love and love-making on a military basis--but it goes!
Military music is in our ears, and even in our churches. "Onward
Christian soldiers, marching as to war" is a Sunday-school favorite.
We pray to the God of Battles, never by any chance to the God of
Workshops!

Once a year, of course, we hold a Peace Sunday and on that day we pray
mightily that God will give us peace in our time and that war shall be
no more, and the spear shall be beaten into the pruning hook. But the
next day we show God that he need not take us too literally, for we go
on with the military training, and the building of the battleships, and
our orators say that in time of peace we must prepare for war.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

War is the antithesis of all our teaching. It breaks all the
commandments; it makes rich men poor, and strong men weak. It makes
well men sick, and by it living men are changed to dead men. Why,
then, does war continue? Why do men go so easily to war--for we may as
well admit that they do go easily? There is one explanation. They
like it!

When the first contingent of soldiers went to the war from Manitoba,
there stood on the station platform a woman crying bitterly. (She was
not the only one.) She had in her arms an infant, and three small
children stood beside her wondering.

"'E would go!" she sobbed in reply to the sympathy expressed by the
people who stood near her, "'E loves a fight--'e went through the South
African War, and 'e's never been 'appy since--when 'e 'ears war is on
he says I'll go--'e loves it--'e does!"

'"E loves it!"

That explains many things.

"Father sent me out," said a little Irish girl, "to see if there's a
fight going on any place, because if there is, please, father would
like to be in it!" Unfortunately "father's" predilection to fight is
not wholly confined to the Irish!

But although men like to fight, war is not inevitable. War is not of
God's making. War is a crime committed by men and, therefore, when
enough people say it shall not be, it cannot be. This will not happen
until women are allowed to say what they think of war. Up to the
present time women have had nothing to say about war, except pay the
price of war--this privilege has been theirs always.

History, romance, legend and tradition having been written by men, have
shown the masculine aspect of war and have surrounded it with a false
glory and have sought to throw the veil of glamour over its hideous
face. Our histories have followed the wars. Invasions, conquests,
battles, sieges make up the subject-matter of our histories.

Some glorious soul, looking out upon his neighbors, saw some country
that he thought he could use and so he levied a heavy tax on the
people, and with the money fitted out a splendid army. Men were called
from their honest work to go out and fight other honest men who had
never done them any harm; harvest fields were trampled by their horses'
feet, villages burned, women and children fled in terror, and perished
of starvation, streets ran blood and the Glorious Soul came home
victorious with captives chained to his chariot wheel. When he drove
through the streets of his own home town, all the people cheered, that
is, all who had not been killed, of course.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

What the people thought of all this, the historians do not say. The
people were not asked or expected to think. Thinking was the most
unpopular thing they could do. There were dark damp dungeons where
hungry rats prowled ceaselessly; there were headsmen's axes and other
things prepared for people who were disposed to think and specially
designed to allay restlessness among the people.

The "people" were dealt with in one short paragraph at the end of the
chapter: "The People were very poor" (you wouldn't think they would
need to say that, and certainly there was no need to rub it in), and
they "ate black bread," and they were "very ignorant and
superstitious." Superstitious? Well, I should say they would
be--small wonder if they did see black cats and have rabbits cross
their paths, and hear death warnings, for there was always going to be
a death in the family, and they were always about to lose money! The
People were a great abstraction, infinite in number, inarticulate in
suffering--the people who fought and paid for their own killing. The
man who could get the people to do this on the largest scale was the
greatest hero of all and the historian told us much about him, his
dogs, his horses, the magnificence of his attire.

Some day, please God, there will be new histories written, and they
will tell the story of the years from the standpoint of the people, and
the hero will not be any red-handed assassin who goes through peaceful
country places leaving behind him dead men looking sightlessly up to
the sky. The hero will be the man or woman who knows and loves and
serves. In the new histories we will be shown the tragedy, the
heartbreaking tragedy of war, which like some dreadful curse has
followed the human family, beaten down their plans, their hopes, wasted
their savings, destroyed their homes, and in every way turned back the
clock of progress.

We have all wondered what would happen if the people some day decided
that they would no longer be the tools of the man higher up, what would
happen if the men who make the quarrel had to fight it out. How
glorious it would have been if this war could have been settled by
somebody taking the Kaiser out behind the barn! There would seem to be
some show of justice in a hand-to-hand encounter, where the best man
wins, but modern warfare has not even the faintest glimmering of fair
play. The exploding shell blows to pieces the strong, the brave, the
daring, just as readily as it does the cowardly, weak, or base.

War proves nothing. To kill a man does not prove that he was in the
wrong. Bloodletting cannot change men's spirits, neither can the evil
of men's thoughts be driven out by blows. If I go to my neighbor's
house, and break her furniture, and smash her pictures, and bind her
children captive, it does not prove that I am fitter to live than
she--yet according to the ethics of nations it does. I have conquered
her and she must pay me for my trouble; and her house and all that is
left in it belongs to my heirs and successors forever. That is war!

[Dark Saint Alaick]

War twists our whole moral fabric. The object of all our teaching has
been to inculcate respect for the individual, respect for human life,
honor and purity. War sweeps that all aside. The human conscience in
these long years of peace, and its resultant opportunities for
education, has grown tender to the cry of agony--the pallid face of a
hungry child finds a quick response to its mute appeal; but when we
know that hundreds are rendered homeless every day, and countless
thousands are killed and wounded, men and boys mowed down like a field
of grain, and with as little compunction, we grow a little bit numb to
human misery. What does it matter if there is a family north of the
track living on soda biscuits and turnips? War hardens us to human
grief and misery.

War takes the fit and leaves the unfit. The epileptic, the
consumptive, the inebriate, are left behind. They are not good enough
to go out to fight. So they stay at home, and perpetuate the race!
Statistics prove that the war is costing fifty millions a day, which is
a prodigious sum, but we would be getting off easy if that were all it
costs. The bitterest cost of war is not paid by us at all. It will be
paid by the unborn generations, in a lowered vitality, the loss of a
strong fatherhood, which they have never known. Napoleon lowered the
stature of the French by two inches, it is said. That is one way to
set your mark on your generation.

But the greatest evil wrought by war is not the wanton destruction of
life and property, sinful though it is; it is not even the lowered
vitality of succeeding generations, though that is attended by
appalling injury to the moral nature--the real iniquity of war is that
it sets aside the arbitrament of right and justice, and looks to brute
force for its verdict!

In the first days of panic, pessimism broke out among us, and we cried
in our despair that our civilization had failed, that Christianity had
broken down, and that God had forgotten the world. It seemed like it
at first. But now a wiser and better vision has come to us, and we
know that Christianity has not failed, for it is not fair to impute
failure to something which has never been tried. Civilization has
failed. Art, music, and culture have failed, and we know now that
underneath the thin veneer of civilization, unregenerate man is still a
savage; and we see now, what some have never seen before, that unless a
civilization is built upon love, and mutual trust, it must always end
in disaster, such as this. Up to August fourth, we often said that war
was impossible between Christian nations. We still say so, but we know
more now than we did then. We know now that there are no Christian
nations.

Oh, yes. I know the story. It was a beautiful story and a beautiful
picture. The black prince of Abyssinia asked the young Queen of
England what was the secret of England's glory and she pointed to the
"open Bible."

[Dark Saint Alaick]

The dear Queen of sainted memory was wrong. She judged her nation by
the standard of her own pure heart. England did not draw her policy
from the open Bible when in 1840 she forced the opium traffic on the
Chinese. England does not draw her policy from the open Bible when she
takes revenues from the liquor traffic, which works such irreparable
ruin to countless thousands of her people. England does not draw her
policy from the open Bible when she denies her women the rights of
citizens, when women are refused degrees after passing examinations,
when lower pay is given women for the same work than if it were done by
men. Would this be tolerated if it were really so that we were a
Christian nation? God abominates a false balance, and delights in a
just weight.

No, the principles of Christ have not yet been applied to nations. We
have only Christian people. You will see that in a second, if you look
at the disparity that there is between our conceptions of individual
duty and national duty. Take the case of the heathen--the people whom
we in our large-handed, superior way call the heathen. Individually we
believe it is our duty to send missionaries to them to convert them
into Christians. Nationally we send armies upon them (if necessary)
and convert them into customers! Individually we say: "We will send
you our religion." Nationally: "We will send you goods, and we'll make
you take them--we need the money!" Think of the bitter irony of a boat
leaving a Christian port loaded with missionaries upstairs and rum
below, both bound for the same place and for the same people--both for
the heathen "with our comp'ts."

Individually we know it is wrong to rob anyone. Yet the state robs
freely, openly, and unashamed, by unjust taxation, by the legalized
liquor traffic, by imposing unjust laws upon at least one half of the
people. We wonder at the disparity between our individual ideals and
the national ideal, but when you remember that the national ideals have
been formed by one half of the world--and not the more spiritual
half--it is not so surprising. Our national policy is the result of
male statecraft.

There is a curative power in human life just as there is in nature.
When the pot boils--it boils over. Evils cure themselves eventually.
But it is a long hard way. Yet it is the way humanity has always had
to learn. Christ realized that when he looked down at Jerusalem, and
wept over it: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often I would have gathered
you, as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, but you would
not." That was the trouble then, and it has been the trouble ever
since. Humanity has to travel a hard road to wisdom, and it has to
travel it with bleeding feet.

But it is getting its lessons now--and paying double first-class rates
for its tuition!