The Forerunner Part 115

I don't mean glad she was dead, poor girl; but glad I didn't marry him, and did marry Jimmy.

WHAT VIRTUES ARE MADE OF

"Making a virtue of necessity" we say, somewhat scornfully; and never consider that all virtues are so made.

"The savage virtues" of endurance, patience, grat.i.tude, hospitality, are easily seen to be precisely the main necessities of savages. Their daily hardships and occasional miseries were such that an extra store of endurance was needed, and this they artificially cultivated by the system of initiation by torture.

The Spartans used the same plan, training the young soldier to bear a doubly heavy spear, that the real one might be light to his hand.

Patience was needed by the hunter, and still more by the laboring squaw; grat.i.tude sprang from the great need--and rarity--of mercy or service; and hospitality is always found in proportion to the distance, difficulty, and danger of traveling. Courage, as the preeminent virtue of manhood, rose to this prominence later in history, under conditions of constant warfare.

Where you have to meet danger, and your danger is best overcome by courage, by that necessity courage becomes a virtue. It has not been deemed a virtue in women, because it was not a necessity. They were not allowed to face outer danger; and what dangers they had were best escaped by avoidance and ingenuity. Amusingly enough, since the woman's main danger came through her "natural protector"--man; and since her skill and success in escaping from or overcoming him was naturally not valued by him, much less considered a necessity; this power of evasion and adaptation in woman has never been called a virtue. Yet it is just as serviceable to her as courage to the man, and therefore as much a virtue.

Honesty is a modern virtue. It existed, without a name and without praise, among savages; but its place among virtues comes with the period of commercial life. Without some honesty, no commerce; it is absolutely necessary to keep the world going; its absence in any degree is a social injury; therefore we extol honesty and seek to punish dishonesty, as the savage never thought of doing.

All men are not honest in this commercial period, nor were all men brave in the period of warfare: but they all agree in praising the virtue most needed at the time.

Truth, as a special virtue, is interesting to study. The feeling of trust in the word of another is of great value, under some conditions.

Under what conditions? In slavery? No. Truthfulness is evidently not advantageous to slaves, for they do not manifest, or even esteem that quality.

Those same Spartans, to whom courage and endurance stood so high, thought but little of truth and honesty, and taught their boys to steal.

In warfare trickery and robbery are part of the game.

Where do we find the "word of honour" most valued? Among gentlefolk and n.o.bles, and those who inherit their traditions and impulses. It is conditioned upon freedom and power. You must trust a man's word--when you have no other hold upon him!

Mercy, kindness, "humanity"--as we quite justifiably call it,--is a very young virtue, growing with social growth. Cruelty was once the rule; now the exception. The more inextricably our lives are interwoven in the social fabric, the more we need the mutual love which is the natural state of social beings; and this feeling becoming a necessity, it also becomes a virtue. Similarly, as our lives depend on the presence and service of other animals we need to be kind to them; and in our highest development so far, kindness to animals has been elected virtue.

But of all virtues made of necessity, none is more glaringly in evidence than the one we call "virtue" itself,--chast.i.ty. We call it "virtue"

because it is _the_ quality--and the only quality--which has been a necessity to the possessor--woman. Her life depended absolutely on man.

He valued her in one relation, and in that relation demanded this one thing;--that she serve him alone.

Because of this demand, to her an absolute necessity, we have developed the virtue of chast.i.ty, and praised it above all others--in woman! But in men it was not even considered a virtue, much less demanded and enforced.

Could anything be clearer proof that virtue was made of necessity?

What we need to study now is the chief necessity of modern life. When we have found that out we shall be able to rearrange our scale of virtues.

ANIMALS IN CITIES

A city is a group residence for human beings. There is no room in it for any animal but one--_Genus h.o.m.o._ At present we make a sort of menagerie of it.

Genus h.o.m.o is the major factor, bus he shares his common home with many other beasts, _genus equus,_ _genus canis,_ _genus felis,_ and members of others whose Latin names are not so familiar.

The horse is most numerous. He is a clean animal, a good friend and strong servant where animals belong--in the country. In the city he is an enemy. His stable is a Depot for the Wholesale Distribution of Diseases.

The services of the horse, and the tons upon tons of fertilizing material produced by him, are financially valuable; but the injury from many deaths, the yearly drain from long sickness, and all the doctors and druggists bills, amounts to a far greater loss.

There is no horse work in a city that cannot be done by machine. The carriage, wagon, truck and dray, can take his place as workers; and they _breed no flies._

We are learning, learning fast, how large a proportion of diseases spring from minute living things which get inside of us and play havoc with our organism. And very lately we are learning further, that of all the benevolent distributors of disease none are more swift and sure than certain insects; insects which are born and bred in and upon the bodies and excreta of animals.

It is true that our kitchen garbage furnishes another popular nursery for flies, but the unclean stable is the other breeding place.

Next in number to the horse come the dog and cat. These creatures are not healthy and not happy in a city. They cannot be kept there without injury to them; and the injury is more than revenged upon their keepers.

The dog furnishes his quota of deaths from hydrophobia, as well as plain "a.s.sault and battery;" he defiles our sidewalks, and the fruits and vegetables exposed upon our sidewalks; he keeps us awake by his forlorn howling; he has diseases of his own which we may receive from him; and he has fleas.

The flea, as well as the fly, is a valiant and industrious purveyor of disease. From beast to beast they hop, carrying their toxic germs with them: and the dog, displeased with his persecutors, scratches them off upon our carpets.

The same applies to cats. A cat in the country is clean and safe; a cat in the city is neither--if it has any freedom. If a young kitten, cleansed and flealess, were reared in a lofty apartment, it would be clean, doubtless; but the usual cat is free on intersecting fences; and in the contact of warfare, or of gentler feelings, the flea is free to travel and exchange.

The rat and mouse come under the same condemnation; they have fleas.

They make dirt. They tend to increase and maintain our insect pests and terrors. They penetrate to all unsavory places. They acquire disease themselves, or carry the germs of it in their blood or on their fur.

Their parasites gather them up and give them to us. The rats will leave a sinking ship, the fleas will leave a sinking rat, and among their millions some of them come to us.

When we build cities clean and tight from bas.e.m.e.nt to roof,--all concrete, brick, stone, metal, and plaster; when the holes for pipes of all sorts are scaled as they enter the home; when the kitchen is eliminated by 90 per cent. and replaced by the food laboratories; when no animal but man is allowed within city limits--and he is taught to keep clean; we can then compare, for antiseptic cleanliness with a fine hospital--and have few hospitals to compare with!

WHAT DIANTHA DID

XI.

THE POWER OF THE SCREW.

Your car is too big for one person to stir-- Your chauffeur is a little man, too; Yet he lifts that machine, does the little chauffeur, By the power of a gentle jackscrew.

Diantha worked.

For all her employees she demanded a ten-hour day, she worked fourteen; rising at six and not getting to bed till eleven, when her charges were all safely in their rooms for the night.

They were all up at five-thirty or thereabouts, breakfasting at six, and the girls off in time to reach their various places by seven. Their day was from 7 A. M. to 8.30 P. M., with half an hour out, from 11.30 to twelve, for their lunch; and three hours, between 2.20 and 5.30, for their own time, including their tea. Then they worked again from 5.30 to 8.30, on the dinner and the dishes, and then they came home to a pleasant nine o'clock supper, and had all hour to dance or rest before the 10.30 bell for bed time.

Special friends and "cousins" often came home with them, and frequently shared the supper--for a quarter--and the dance for nothing.

It was no light matter in the first place to keep twenty girls contented with such a regime, and working with the steady excellence required, and in the second place to keep twenty employers contented with them. There were failures on both sides; half a dozen families gave up the plan, and it took time to replace them; and three girls had to be asked to resign before the year was over. But most of them had been in training in the summer, and had listened for months to Diantha's earnest talks to the clubs, with good results.

"Remember we are not doing this for ourselves alone," she would say to them. "Our experiment is going to make this kind of work easier for all home workers everywhere. You may not like it at first, but neither did you like the old way. It will grow easier as we get used to it; and we _must_ keep the rules, because we made them!"

She laboriously composed a neat little circular, distributed it widely, and kept a pile in her lunch room for people to take.