Counter-Currents. Agnes Repplier
Whatever England has needed for the regeneration of her sons, it was certainly not "pleasure-palaces" and cheap amusements. The "sluggish impotence" which Mr. Leigh observed four years ago, did not call, and does not call, for relaxation. The only cure will be so stern that no one cares to prophesy its coming.
And Americans! Well, thousands of people bearing that name assembled in New York on the 13th of November, 1915, under the auspices of the Woman's Peace Party, and amused themselves by denouncing the Administration, howling down all mention of national defence, and jeering every time the word patriotism (which we used to think a noble word) was spoken in their hearing. Men endeared themselves to the audience by declaring that they would not risk their all too precious lives to fight for any cause, and women intelligently asked why a foreign rule would not be just as good as a home one. They did not seem aware that Brussels was having a less enviable time than Boston or Milwaukee. Profound foolishness swayed the audience, abysmal ignorance soothed it. There was an abundant showing of childish irrationality; there was the apathy which befits old age; but of intelligence or of virility there was nothing.
This loss of nerve, this "weakening of faith in normal human resistance," means the disintegration of citizenship. It is the sudden call to manhood which shows us where manhood is not to be found. We Americans, begirt by sentiment, mindful of our ease, and spared for more than half-a-century from ennobling self-sacrifice, have been seeking smooth and facile methods of reform. The world, grown old in ill-doing, responds nimbly to our offers of amusement, but balks at the austere virtues which no cajolery can disguise. The more it is amused, the more it assumes amusement to be its due; and this assumption receives the support and encouragement of those whose experience must have taught them its perils.
Miss Jane Addams, in her careful study of the Chicago streets, speaks of the "pleasure-loving girl who demands that each evening shall bring her some measure of recreation." Miss Addams admits that such a girl is beset by nightly dangers, but does not appear to think her attitude an unnatural or an unreasonable one. A very able and intelligent woman who has worked hard for the establishment of decently conducted dance-halls in New York,—dance-halls sorely needed to supplant the vicious places of entertainment where drink and degradation walk hand in hand,—was asked at a public meeting whether the girls for whose welfare she was pleading never stayed at home. "Never," was the firm reply, "and will you pardon me for saying, Neither do you." The retort provoked laughter, because the young married woman who had put the question probably never did spend a night at home, unless she were entertaining. She represented a social summit,—a combination of health, wealth, beauty, charm and high spirits. But there were scores of girls and women in the audience who spent many nights at home. There are hundreds of girls and women in what are called fashionable circles who spend many nights at home. There are thousands of girls and women in more modest circumstances who spend many nights at home. If this were not the case, our cities would soon present a spectacle of demoralization. They would be chaotic on the surface, and rotten at the core.
It is claimed that the nervous exhaustion produced by hours of sustained and monotonous labour sends the factory girl into the streets at night. She is too unstrung for rest. That this is in a measure true, no experienced worker will deny, because every experienced worker is familiar with the sensation. Every woman who has toiled for hours, whether with a sewing machine or a typewriter, whether with a needle or a pen, whether in an office or at home, has felt the nervous fatigue which does not crave rest but distraction, which makes her want to "go." Every woman worth her salt has overcome this weakness, has mastered this desire. It is probable that many men suffer and struggle in the same fashion. Dr. Johnson certainly did. With inspired directness, he speaks of people who are "afraid to go home and think." He knew that fear. Many a night it drove him through the London streets till daybreak. He conquered it, conquered the sick nerves so at variance with his sound mind and sound principles, and his example is a beacon light to strugglers in the gloom.
Naturally, the working girl knows nothing about Dr. Johnson. Unhappily, she knows little of any beacon light or guide. But, if she be a reasonable human being, she does know that to expect every evening to "bring her some measure of recreation" is an utterly unreasonable demand, and that it can be gratified only at the risk of her physical and moral undoing. She has been taught to read in our public schools; she is provided with countless novels and storybooks by our public libraries; the lightest of light literature is at her command. Is this not enough to tide her over a night or two in the week? If her clothes never need mending or renovating, she is unlike any other woman the world has got to show. If there is never any washing, ironing, or housework for her to do, her position is at once unusual and regrettable. If she will not sometimes read, or work, or, because she is tired, go early to bed; if her craving for amusement has reached that acute stage when only the streets, or the moving pictures, or the dance-hall will satisfy it, she has so completely lost nerve that she has no moral stamina left. She may be virtuous, but she is an incapable weakling, and the working man who marries her ruins his life. Such girls swell the army of deserted wives which is the despair of all organized charities.
The sincere effort to regenerate the world by amusing it is to be respected; but it is not the final word of reform. The sincere effort to regenerate the world by a legal regulation of wages is a new version of an old story,—the shifting of personal obligation, the search for somebody's door at which to lay the burden of blame. It is also a denial of human experience, inherited and acquired, and a rejection of the only doctrine which stands for self-respect: "Temptations do not make the man, but they show him for what he is." Qualities nourished by this stern and sane doctrine die with the withering of faith.
So much well-meant, but not harmless nonsense—nonsense is never harmless—has been preached concerning women and their wages, that we are in the predicament of Sydney Smith when Macaulay flooded him with talk. We positively "stand in the slops." A professor of economics in an American college offers out of the fulness of his heart the following specific and original remedy for existing ills: "My idea is that one of the best ways to get an increased remuneration for women is to make them worth it."
"My idea!" This is what it means to have the scientific mind at work. A unique proposition (what have we been thinking about with our free schools for the past hundred years?), unclogged by detail, unhampered by ways and means. And if we do not see salvation in truisms, if we are daunted by the gulf between people who are theorizing and people who are merely living, we can take refuge with the reformers who demand "increased remuneration for women" whether they are worth it or not; who would make the need of the worker, and not the quality of the work, the determining factor in wages. We may "protect women from themselves," by prohibiting them from accepting less than their legal hire.
The only real peril of a minimum wage law is that it has a tendency to relegate the incompetent to beggary. It cannot, as some economists claim, discourage efficiency. Nothing can discourage efficiency, which scorns help and defies hindrance. But, by the same ruling, nothing can command more than it is worth in the markets of the world. We do wrong when we release the worker from any incentive to good work. We do wrong when we release her from a sense of personal responsibility. We do wrong when we give her a plausible excuse for following the line of least resistance, when we blight her courage by permitting her to think that her moral welfare lies in any hands but her own. The choice between poverty and dishonesty, the choice between poverty and prostitution is not an "open question." It is closed, if human reason and human experience can speak authoritatively upon any subject in the world.
The injury done by loose thinking and loose talking is irremediable. When the State Senate Vice Investigating Committee of Illinois permitted and encouraged an expression of what it was pleased to call the "shop-girl's philosophy," it sowed the seeds of mischief deep enough to insure a heavy crop of evil. I quote a single episode, as it was reported in the newspapers of March 8th, 1913,—a report which, if inaccurate in detail, must be correct in substance. A young man who had been in the employ of Sears, Roebuck & Co. was on the stand. She was questioned by Lieutenant-Governor O'Hara.
"'If a girl were getting $8 a week, and had to support a widowed mother, would you blame that girl if she committed a crime?'
"The witness looked up frankly, and replied, 'No, I would n't.'
"'Would you blame