The Forerunner Part 169

For each child, the healthy body and mind; the warm, deep love and protecting care of its own personal mother: and for all children, the best provision possible from the united love and wisdom of our social parentage. This is not to love our children less, but more. It is not to rob them of the life-long devotion of one well-meaning average woman, but to give them the immortal, continued devotion of age after age of growing love and wisdom from the best among us who will give successive lives to the service of children because they love them better even than their mothers!

HOW WE WASTE THREE-FOURTHS OF OUR MONEY

The waste of Nature is great, and seems unavoidable: it is Nature's way.

She is prodigal of time, of material, of life itself; and seems to have unlimited supplies to draw from. But the waste in our human processes is conspicuously absurd. We submit to it because we are not, in general, awake to what is going on.

Recent spasms of civic investigation have revealed to us one large source of waste in the dishonest use of public money. We are taxed more than is necessary to meet expenses in no way essential to good government. Ten per cent is a moderate allowance for this loss.

We waste more largely and less noticeably in carelessness of our natural resources, as is now beginning to be realized. Waste of timber is followed by waste of water, and that by waste of land. The earth's surface of arable soil is being washed into the ocean at a wholly unnecessary rate, the foundation of all wealth--of our very life on earth--thus slipping away from us un.o.bserved. Every barren, naked hill is a ruined garden; every yellow, muddy river is leaking gold dust from our pockets; every choked harbor is a loss in money. Another ten per cent is scant allowance for this.

The waste of sewage in almost every city so provided, as well as the loss of the same valuable fertilizing material in smaller places, is grotesquely foolish. If we saw a farmer gathering all the material from his stables and cow sheds and throwing it into the sea, we should think he was a fool. We in towns and cities are just as foolish in wholesale waste of what is worth good money to the farmer. The sale of this material by any great city, together with the sale of its garbage, would be a large and steady source of income. At present we pay out large sums for sewage systems to throw away this product, and pay further sums to persons to take away the garbage and other refuse. We then, to acc.u.mulate idiocy, pay more large sums to dredge out the harbors we have ourselves obstructed, and furthermore charge ourselves with a heavy death rate and a burden of disease from the effects of the defiled water and poisoned fish--defiled and poisoned by ourselves. Taken altogether this makes another ten per cent. of our wealth wasted. (All these sums are arbitrary, but well below what they would really amount to.)

We pay very heavily to support our public inst.i.tutions for the defective, crippled and criminal population--in terrible numbers and increasing. Practically all this is pure waste of money--to say nothing of the loss and suffering to humanity. Prisons, hospitals, insane asylums, poor houses, and the like cost the community a prodigious amount.

This is very largely unnecessary. Our criminal population is made--not born! The born criminal belongs in the hospital or asylum. Our crippled and blind are mainly made so by vicious parents--and all that contributes to vice can be avoided. It is a tremendous expense to produce and maintain such a lot of poor human stock--and it is wholly unnecessary--the most utter waste. We will call it another ten per cent.

Our all too numerous diseases with their premature deaths const.i.tute another heavy loss. The waste of human life force in the infant mortality alone is enormous. The cost of medicine, of doctors, of undertakers, of graveyard rents; the loss of services of those prematurely taken from us--all this is a groaning burden of pain and loss amounting easily to another ten per cent.

We lose by fire, unnecessarily, other huge sums--and fire loss is absolute; there is no "come back," no compensating circ.u.mstance. More human life is lost in fighting fire. In this, and in the terrible death roll from accident in mill and mine and railroad, we lose in money more than another ten per cent.

In the foolishness of throat-cutting compet.i.tion with all its multiplication of plant and service, its interruptions and interference and delay, another ten per cent is gone--and more. In the general inadequacy of our people--low grade people where we might have high grade ones, like poor stock in cows or hens, or poor kinds of corn or wheat instead of first-cla.s.s varieties, we waste again good ten per cent--and more. Also in the blind, careless a.s.sortment of occupation where people work grudgingly at what they do not like we lose largely.

The vigorous output of happy, well placed workers would be worth ten per cent. added to our present wealth.

Then comes our method of domestic industry in which we waste forty-three per cent. of the productive labor of the world--and three-fourths of our living expenses.

Put these all together--and every one of them is modestly within the mark--and three-fourths is a small allowance to cover our wastes. Isn't it time we had a Social Secretary and a Financial Expert to teach us a few things?

OUR ANDROCENTRIC CULTURE; OR, THE MAN-MADE WORLD

XIV.

A HUMAN WORLD.

In the change from the dominance of one s.e.x to the equal power of two, to what may we look forward? What effect upon civilization is to be expected from the equality of womanhood in the human race?

To put the most natural question first--what will men lose by it? Many men are genuinely concerned about this; fearing some new position of subservience and disrespect. Others laugh at the very idea of change in their position, relying as always on the heavier fist. So long as fighting was the determining process, the best fighter must needs win; but in the rearrangement of processes which marks our age, superior physical strength does not make the poorer wealthy, nor even the soldier a general.

The major processes of life to-day are quite within the powers of women; women are fulfilling their new relations more and more successfully; gathering new strength, new knowledge, new ideals. The change is upon us; what will it do to men?

No harm.

As we are a monogamous race, there will be no such drastic and cruel selection among competing males as would eliminate the vast majority as unfit. Even though some be considered unfit for fatherhood, all human life remains open to them. Perhaps the most important feature of this change comes in right here; along this old line of s.e.x-selection, replacing that power in the right hands, and using it for the good of the race.

The woman, free at last, intelligent, recognizing her real place and responsibility in life as a human being, will be not less, but more, efficient as a mother. She will understand that, in the line of physical evolution, motherhood is the highest process; and that her work, as a contribution to an improved race, must always involve this great function. She will see that right parentage is the purpose of the whole scheme of s.e.x-relationship, and act accordingly.

In our time, his human faculties being sufficiently developed, civilized man can look over and around his s.e.x limitations, and begin to see what are the true purposes and methods of human life.

He is now beginning to learn that his own governing necessity of Desire is not _the_ governing necessity of parentage, but only a contributory tendency; and that, in the interests of better parentage, motherhood is the dominant factor, and must be so considered.

In slow reluctant admission of this fact, man heretofore has recognized one cla.s.s of women as mothers; and has granted them a varying amount of consideration as such; but he has none the less insisted on maintaining another cla.s.s of women, forbidden motherhood, and merely subservient to his desires; a barren, mischievous unnatural relation, wholly aside from parental purposes, and absolutely injurious to society. This whole field of morbid action will be eliminated from human life by the normal development of women.

It is not a question of interfering with or punishing men; still less of interfering with or punishing women; but purely a matter of changed education and opportunity for every child.

Each and all shall be taught the real nature and purpose of motherhood; the real nature and purpose of manhood; what each is for, and which is the more important. A new sense of the power and pride of womanhood will waken; a womanhood no longer sunk in helpless dependence upon men; no longer limited to mere unpaid house-service; no longer blinded by the false morality which subjects even motherhood to man's dominance; but a womanhood which will recognize its pre-eminent responsibility to the human race, and live up to it. Then, with all normal and right compet.i.tion among men for the favor of women, those best fitted for fatherhood will be chosen. Those who are not chosen will live single--perforce.

Many, under the old mistaken notion of what used to be called the "social necessity" of prost.i.tution, will protest at the idea of its extinction.

"It is necessary to have it," they will say.

"Necessary _to whom?_"

Not to the women hideously sacrificed to it, surely.

Not to society, honey-combed with diseases due to this cause.

Not to the family, weakened and impoverished by it.

To whom then? To the men who want it?

But it is not good for them, it promotes all manner of disease, of vice, of crime. It is absolutely and unquestionably a "social evil."

An intelligent and powerful womanhood will put an end to this indulgence of one s.e.x at the expense of the other; and to the injury of both.

In this inevitable change will lie what some men will consider a loss.

But only those of the present generation. For the sons of the women now entering upon this new era of world life will be differently reared.

They will recognize the true relation of men to the primal process; and be amazed that for so long the greater values have been lost sight of in favor of the less.

This one change will do more to promote the physical health and beauty of the race; to improve the quality of children born, and the general vigor and purity of social life, than any one measure which could be proposed. It rests upon a recognition of motherhood as the real base and cause of the family; and dismisses to the limbo of all outworn superst.i.tion that false Hebraic and grossly androcentric doctrine that the woman is to be subject to the man, and that he shall rule over her.

He has tried this arrangement long enough--to the grievous injury of the world. A higher standard of happiness will result; equality and mutual respect between parents; pure love, undefiled by self-interests on either side; and a new respect for Childhood.

With the Child, seen at last to be the governing purpose of this relation, with all the best energies of men and women bent on raising the standard of life for all children, we shall have a new status of family life which will be clean and n.o.ble, and satisfying to all its members.

The change in all the varied lines of human work is beyond the powers of any present day prophet to forecast with precision. A new grade of womanhood we can clearly foresee; proud, strong, serene, independent; great mothers of great women and great men. These will hold high standards and draw men up to them; by no compulsion save nature's law of attraction. A clean and healthful world, enjoying the taste of life as it never has since racial babyhood, with homes of quiet and content--this we can foresee.

Art--in the extreme sense will perhaps always belong most to men. It would seem as if that ceaseless urge to expression, was, at least originally, most congenial to the male. But applied art, in every form, and art used directly for transmission of ideas, such as literature, or oratory, appeals to women as much, if not more, than to men.

We can make no safe a.s.sumption as to what, if any, distinction there will be in the free human work of men and women, until we have seen generation after generation grow up under absolutely equal conditions.

In all our games and sports and minor social customs, such changes will occur as must needs follow upon the rising dignity alloted to the woman's temperament, the woman's point of view; not in the least denying to men the fullest exercise of their special powers and preferences; but cla.s.sifying these newly, as not human--merely male. At present we have pages or columns in our papers, marked as "The Woman's Page" "Of Interest to Women," and similar delimiting t.i.tles. Similarly we might have distinctly masculine matters so marked and specified; not a.s.sumed as now to be of general human interest.

The effect of the change upon Ethics and Religion is deep and wide.

With the entrance of women upon full human life, a new principle comes into prominence; the principle of loving service. That this is the governing principle of Christianity is believed by many; but an androcentric interpretation has quite overlooked it; and made, as we have shown, the essential dogma of their faith the desire of an eternal reward and the combat with an eternal enemy.