The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons. Ellice Hopkins
found in the river, some poor suicide, who had leapt,
"Mad from life's history,
Swift to death's mystery,
Anywhere, anywhere, out of the world,"
that poor mother would get into her head it might be her dear girl that was lying there alone and unclaimed; and she would pay her fare—if she could afford it—or if not, trudge the distance on foot, creep, trembling, into the mortuary or the public-house where the body lay, blue from drowning, or with the ugly red gash across the throat, take one look, and then cry with a sigh of relief, "No, it ain't my child," and return again to her watching and waiting.
"Once, ma'am," she said, "I had a dream. I saw a beautiful place, all bright and shiny, and there were lots of angels singing so sweet, when out of the midst of the glory came my poor girl. She came straight to me, and said, 'Oh, mother, don't fret; I'm safe and I'm happy!' and with those words in my ears I awoke. That dream has been a great comfort to me, ma'am; I feel sure God sent it to me. But oh, ma'am," she exclaimed, with a new light of hope in her face, and clasping her hands in silent entreaty, "the thought came into my head whilst you were a-speakin', if you would be so kind as to ask at the end of every one of your meetin's, 'Has anyone heard or seen anything of a girl of the name of Sarah Smith?' As you go all about the country, maybe I might get to hear of her that way."
Ah me! the pathetic forlornness of the suggestion, the last hope of a broken-hearted mother, that I should go all over the three kingdoms asking my large audiences, "Have you seen or heard anything of Sarah Smith?" And I was dumb. I had not a word of comfort to give her. I had heard the words too often from the lips of outcast girls in answer to my question, "Does your mother know where you are?" "Oh, no; I couldn't bear that mother should know about me!"—not to know what the fate of that young girl had been. She had been trapped, or drugged, or enticed into that dread under-world into which so many of our working-class girls disappear and are lost. Possibly she had been sent out of the country, and was in some foreign den. One's best hope was that she was dead.
But picture to yourselves the long-drawn anguish of that mother, with nothing but a dream to comfort her amid the dread realities of life. Picture her as only one of thousands and thousands of our working-class mothers on whose poor dumb hearts the same nameless sorrow rests like a gravestone; and I think no woman—no mother, at least—but will agree with me, that this is a matter from which we, as women, cannot stand off. Even if we had not the moral and physical welfare of our own boys to consider, we are baptized into this cause by the tears of women, the dumb tears of the poor. But there is one last consideration, exquisitely painful as it is, which I cannot, I dare not, pass over, and which more than any other has aroused the thoughtful women of England and America to face the question and endeavor to grapple, however imperfectly as yet, with the problem. For some strange reason the whole weight of this evil in its last resort comes crushing down on the shoulders of a little child—infant Christs of the cross without the crown, "martyrs of the pang, without the palm." The sins of their parents are visited on them from their birth, in scrofula, blindness, consumption. "Disease and suffering," in Dickens's words, "preside over their birth, rock their wretched cradles, nail down their little coffins, and fill their unknown graves." More than one-half of the inmates of our Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children are sent there by vice. But would to God it were only innocent suffering that is inflicted on the children of our land. Alas! alas! when I first began my work, a ward in a large London penitentiary, I found, was set apart for degraded children! Or take that one brief appalling statement in the record of ten years of work—1884 to 1894—issued by a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. In the classification of the various victims it is stated that the society had dealt with 4460 pitiable child victims of debauchery! Alas for our England, and the debasement which a low moral standard for men has made possible in our midst! And, judging by the absence of proper legal protection and the extraordinarily low age of consent adopted by some of the States of the Union, I fear things are not much better in America.
One of our sweetest poets, Charles Tennyson Turner, in an exquisite sonnet on a three-year-old child being presented with a toy globe, has portrayed the consecration of a child's innocence, bathing the world itself in its baptismal dew:
"She patted all the world; old empires peep'd
Between her baby fingers; her soft hand
Was welcome at all frontiers."
And when at length they turn "her sweet unlearned eye" "on our own isle," she utters a little joyous cry:
"Oh yes, I see it! Letty's home is there!
And while she hid all England with a kiss,
Bright over Europe fell her golden hair."
By the side of that exquisite picture of the beatitude of a child's innocence place the picture of that long procession of desecrated children, with no "sweet unlearned eye," but eyes learned in the worst forms of human wickedness and cruelty; and let any woman say, if she can or dare, that this is a subject on which she is not called to have any voice and which she prefers to let alone. Surely our womanhood has not become in these last days such a withered and wilted thing that our ears have grown too nice for the cry of these hapless children! As women, we are the natural guardians of the innocence of all children. The divine motherhood that is at the heart of every woman worthy of the name "rises up in wrath" within us and cries: "We will fulfil our trust, not only to our own children, but to the helpless children of the poor." The day is at hand when every mother of boys will silently vow before God to send at least one knight of God into the world to fight an evil before which even a child's innocence is not sacred and which tramples under its swine's feet the weak and the helpless.
Indeed, when one reflects that this great moral problem touches all the great trusts of our womanhood, the sanctity of the family, the purity of the home, the sacredness of marriage, the sweet innocence of children, it seems like some evil dream that women can ever have asked, "Why cannot I leave this matter to men? Why should I interfere?"
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Dr. Carpenter does not hesitate to attribute this sharp dip in the male line of life to the indulgence of the passions in youth, and the subsequent rise to marriage and a more regular life.
[2] Pendennis, vol. i., p. 16.
CHAPTER III
FIRST PRINCIPLES
"But what can we do?" will be the next question, uttered perhaps in the forlorn accents of a latent despair.
Before answering this question in detail, I would endeavor to impress two cardinal points upon you.
The first point I want you to recognize, though it may seem to minister to the very hopelessness which most lames and cripples for effective action, is the depth and magnitude of the problem we have to grapple with. All other great social evils, with the possible exception of greed or covetousness, which in Scripture is often classed with impurity, may be looked upon as more or less diseases of the extremities. But the evil which we are now considering is no disease of the extremities, but a disease at the very heart of our life, attacking all the great bases on which it rests. It is not only the negation of the sanctity of the family and the destroyer of the purity of the home, as I have already pointed out, but it is also the derider of the sacredness of the individual, the slow but sure disintegrator of the body politic,