XIII. ALL THIS…

XIII. ALL THIS

They laid before her conquering feet The spoils of many lands; Their crowns shone red upon her head Their scepters in her hands.

She heard two murmuring at night, Where rose-sweet shadows rest; And coveted the blossom red He laid upon her breast.

When Madam Weatherstone shook the plentiful dust of Orchardina from her expensive shoes, and returned to adorn the more classic groves of Philadelphia, Mrs. Thaddler assumed to hold undisputed sway as a social leader.

The Social Leader she meant to be; and marshalled her forces to that end. She Patronized here, and Donated there; revised her visiting list with rigid exclusiveness; secured an Eminent Professor and a Noted Writer as visitors, and gave entertainments of almost Roman magnificence.

Her husband grew more and more restive under the rising tide of social exactions in dress and deportment; and spent more and more time behind his fast horses, or on the stock-ranch where he raised them. As a neighbor and fellow ranchman, he scraped acquaintance with Ross Warden, and was able to render him many small services in the process of settling.

Mrs. Warden remembered his visit to Jopalez, and it took her some time to rearrange him in her mind as a person of wealth and standing. Having so rearranged him, on sufficient evidence, she and her daughters became most friendly, and had hopes of establishing valuable acquaintance in the town. "It's not for myself I care," she would explain to Ross, every day in the week and more on Sundays, "but for the girls. In that dreadful Jopalez there was absolutely no opportunity for them; but here, with horses, there is no reason we should not have friends. You must consider your sisters, Ross! Do be more cordial to Mr. Thaddler."

But Ross could not at present be cordial to anybody. His unexpected good fortune, the freedom from hated cares, and chance to work out his mighty theories on the faithful guinea-pig, ought to have filled his soul with joy; but Diantha's cruel obstinacy had embittered his cup of joy. He could not break with her; she had not refused him, and it was difficult in cold blood to refuse her.

He had stayed away for two whole weeks, in which time the guinea-pigs nibbled at ease and Diantha's work would have suffered except for her mother's extra efforts. Then he went to see her again, miserable but stubborn, finding her also miserable and also stubborn. They argued till there was grave danger of an absolute break between them; then dropped the subject by mutual agreement, and spent evenings of unsatisfying effort to talk about other things.

Diantha and her mother called on Mrs. Warden, of course, admiring the glorious view, the sweet high air, and the embowered loveliness of the two ranch houses. Ross drew Diantha aside and showed her "theirs"--a lovely little wide-porched concrete cottage, with a red-tiled roof, and heavy masses of Gold of Ophir and Banksia roses.

He held her hand and drew her close to him.

He kissed her when they were safe inside, and murmured: "Come, darling--won't you come and be my wife?"

"I will, Ross--whenever you say--but--!" She would not agree to give up her work, and he flung away from her in reckless despair. Mrs. Warden and the girls returned the call as a matter of duty, but came no more; the mother saying that she could not take her daughters to a Servant Girls' Club.

And though the Servant Girls' Club was soon removed to its new quarters and Union House became a quiet, well-conducted hotel, still the two families saw but little of each other.

Mrs. Warden naturally took her son's side, and considered Diantha an unnatural monster of hard-heartedness.

The matter sifted through to the ears of Mrs. Thaddler, who rejoiced in it, and called upon Mrs. Warden in her largest automobile. As a mother with four marriageable daughters, Mrs. Warden was delighted to accept and improve the acquaintance, but her aristocratic Southern soul was inwardly rebellious at the ancestorlessness and uncultured moneyed pride of her new friend.

"If only Madam Weatherstone had stayed!" she would complain to her daughters. "She had Family as well as Wealth."

"There's young Mrs. Weatherstone, mother--" suggested Dora.

"A nobody!" her mother replied. "She has the Weatherstone money, of course, but no Position; and what little she has she is losing by her low tastes. She goes about freely with Diantha Bell--her own housekeeper!"

"She's not her housekeeper now, mother--"

"Well, it's all the same! She was! And a mere general servant before that! And now to think that when Ross is willing to overlook it all and marry her, she won't give it up!"

They were all agreed on this point, unless perhaps that the youngest had her inward reservations. Dora had always liked Diantha better than had the others.

Young Mrs. Weatherstone stayed in her big empty house for a while, and as Mrs. Warden said, went about frequently with Diantha Bell. She liked Mrs. Bell, too--took her for long stimulating rides in her comfortable car, and insisted that first one and then the other of them should have a bit of vacation at her seashore home before the winter's work grew too heavy.

With Mrs. Bell she talked much of how Diantha had helped the town.

"She has no idea of the psychic effects, Mrs. Bell," said she. "She sees the business, and she has a great view of all it is going to do for women to come; but I don't think she realizes how much she is doing right now for women here--and men, too. There were my friends the Pornes; they were 'drifting apart,' as the novels have it--and no wonder. Isabel was absolutely no good as a housekeeper; he naturally didn't like it--and the baby made it all the worse; she pined for her work, you see, and couldn't get any time for it. Now they are as happy as can be--and it's just Diantha Bell's doings. The housework is off Isabel's shoulders.

"Then there are the Wagrams, and the Sheldons, and the Brinks--and ever so many more--who have told me themselves that they are far happier than they ever were before--and can live more cheaply. She ought to be the happiest girl alive!"

Mrs. Bell would agree to this, and quite swelled with happiness and pride; but Mrs. Weatherstone, watching narrowly, was not satisfied.

When she had Diantha with her she opened fire direct. "You ought to be the happiest, proudest, most triumphant woman in the world!" she said. "You're making oodles of money, your whole thing's going well, and look at your mother--she's made over!"

Diantha smiled and said she was happy; but her eyes would stray off to the very rim of the ocean; her mouth set in patient lines that were not in the least triumphant.

"Tell me about it, my friend," said her hostess. "Is it that he won't let you keep on with the business?"

Diantha nodded.

"And you won't give it up to marry him?"

"No," said Diantha. "No. Why should I? I'd marry him--to-morrow!" She held one hand with the other, tight, but they both shook a little. "I'd be glad to. But I will not give up my work!"

"You look thin," said Mrs. Weatherstone.

"Yes--"

"Do you sleep well?"

"No--not very."

"And I can see that you don't eat as you ought to. Hm! Are you going to break down?"

"No," said Diantha, "I am not going to break down. I am doing what is right, and I shall go on. It's a little hard at first--having him so near. But I am young and strong and have a great deal to do--I shall do it."

And then Mrs. Weatherstone would tell her all she knew of the intense satisfaction of the people she served, and pleasant stories about the girls. She bought her books to read and such gleanings as she found in foreign magazines on the subject of organized house-service.

Not only so, but she supplied the Orchardina library with a special bibliography on the subject, and induced the new Woman's Club to take up a course of reading in it, so that there gradually filtered into the Orchardina mind a faint perception that this was not the freak of an eccentric individual, but part of an inevitable business development, going on in various ways in many nations.

As the winter drew on, Mrs. Weatherstone whisked away again, but kept a warm current of interest in Diantha's life by many letters.

Mr. Bell came down from Jopalez with outer reluctance but inner satisfaction. He had rented his place, and Susie had three babies now. Henderson, Jr., had no place for him, and to do housework for himself was no part of Mr. Bell's plan.

In Diantha's hotel he had a comfortable room next his wife's, and a capacious chair in the firelit hall in wet weather, or on the shaded piazza in dry. The excellent library was a resource to him; he found some congenial souls to talk with; and under the new stimulus succeeded at last in patenting a small device that really worked. With this, and his rent, he felt inclined to establish a "home of his own," and the soul of Mrs. Bell sank within her. Without allowing it to come to an issue between them, she kept the question open for endless discussion; and Mr. Bell lived on in great contentment under the impression that he was about to move at almost any time. To his friends and cronies he dilated with pride on his daughter's wonderful achievements.

"She's as good as a boy!" he would declare. "Women nowadays seem to do anything they want to!" And he rigidly paid his board bill with a flourish.

Meanwhile the impressive gatherings at Mrs. Thaddler's, and the humbler tea and card parties of Diantha's friends, had a new topic as a shuttlecock.

A New York company had bought one of the largest and finest blocks in town--the old Para place--and was developing it in a manner hitherto unseen. The big, shabby, neglected estate began to turn into such a fairyland as only southern lands can know. The old live-oaks were untouched; the towering eucalyptus trees remained in ragged majesty; but an army of workmen was busy under guidance of a master of beauty.

One large and lovely building rose, promptly dubbed a hotel by the unwilling neighbors; others, smaller, showed here and there among the trees; and then a rose-gray wall of concrete ran around the whole, high, tantalizing, with green boughs and sweet odors coming over it. Those who went in reported many buildings, and much activity. But, when the wall was done, and each gate said "No admittance except on business," then the work of genii was imagined, and there was none to contradict.

It was a School of Theosophy; it was a Christian Science College; it was a Free-Love Colony; it was a Secret Society; it was a thousand wonders.

"Lot of little houses and one big one," the employees said when questioned.

"Hotel and cottages," the employers said when questioned.

They made no secret of it, they were too busy; but the town was unsatisfied. Why a wall? What did any honest person want of a wall? Yet the wall cast a pleasant shadow; there were seats here and there between buttresses, and, as the swift California season advanced, roses and oleanders nodded over the top, and gave hints of beauty and richness more subtly stimulating than all the open glory of the low-hedged gardens near.

Diantha's soul was stirred with secret envy. Some big concern was about to carry out her dream, or part of it--perhaps to be a huge and overflowing rival. Her own work grew meantime, and flourished as well as she could wish.

The food-delivery service was running to its full capacity; the girls got on very well under Mrs. Jessup, and were delighted to have a house of their own with the parlors and piazzas all to themselves, and a garden to sit in as well. If this depleted their ranks by marriage, it did not matter now, for there was a waiting list in training all the time.

Union House kept on evenly and profitably, and Diantha was beginning to feel safe and successful; but the years looked long before her.

She was always cheered by Mrs. Weatherstone's letters; and Mrs. Porne came to see her, and to compare notes over their friend's success. For Mrs. Weatherstone had been presented at Court--at more than one court, in fact; and Mrs. Weatherstone had been proposed to by a Duke--and had refused him! Orchardina well-nigh swooned when this was known.

She had been studying, investigating, had become known in scientific as well as social circles, and on her way back the strenuous upper layer of New York Society had also made much of her. Rumors grew of her exquisite costumes, of her unusual jewels, of her unique entertainments, of her popularity everywhere she went.

Other proposals, of a magnificent nature, were reported, with more magnificent refusals; and Orchardina began to be very proud of young Mrs. Weatherstone and to wish she would come back.

She did at last, bringing an Italian Prince with her, and a Hoch Geborene German Count also, who alleged they were travelling to study the country, but who were reputed to have had a duel already on the beautiful widow's account.

All this was long-drawn gossip but bore some faint resemblance to the facts. Viva Weatherstone at thirty was a very different woman front the pale, sad-eyed girl of four years earlier. And when the great house on the avenue was arrayed in new magnificence, and all Orchardina--that dared--had paid its respects to her, she opened the season, as it were, with a brilliant dinner, followed by a reception and ball.

All Orchardina came--so far as it had been invited. There was the Prince, sure enough--a pleasant, blue-eyed young man. And there was the Count, bearing visible evidence of duels a-plenty in earlier days. And there was Diantha Bell--receiving, with Mrs. Porne and Mrs. Weatherstone. All Orchardina stared. Diantha had been at the dinner--that was clear. And now she stood there in her soft, dark evening dress, the knot of golden acacias nestling against the black lace at her bosom, looking as fair and sweet as if she had never had a care in her life.

Her mother thought her the most beautiful thing she had ever seen; and her father, though somewhat critical, secretly thought so, too.

Mrs. Weatherstone cast many a loving look at the tall girl beside her in the intervals of "Delighted to see you's," and saw that her double burden had had no worse effect than to soften the lines of the mouth and give a hint of pathos to the clear depths of her eyes.

The foreign visitors were much interested in the young Amazon of Industry, as the Prince insisted on calling her; and even the German Count for a moment forgot his ancestors in her pleasant practical talk.

Mrs. Weatherstone had taken pains to call upon the Wardens--claiming a connection, if not a relationship, and to invite them all. And as the crowd grew bigger and bigger, Diantha saw Mrs. Warden at last approaching with her four daughters--and no one else. She greeted them politely and warmly; but Mrs. Weatherstone did more.

Holding them all in a little group beside her, she introduced her noble visitors to them; imparted the further information that their brother was fiance to Miss Bell. "I don't see him," she said, looking about. "He will come later, of course. Ah, Miss Madeline! How proud you all must feel of your sister-in-law to be!"

Madeline blushed and tried to say she was.

"Such a remarkable young lady!" said the Count to Adeline. "You will admire, envy, and imitate! Is it not so?"

"Your ladies of America have all things in your hands," said the Prince to Miss Cora. "To think that she has done so much, and is yet so young--and so beautiful!"

"I know you're all as proud as you can be," Mrs. Weatherstone continued to Dora. "You see, Diantha has been heard of abroad."

They all passed on presently, as others came; but Mrs. Warden's head was reeling. She wished she could by any means get at Ross, and make him come, which he had refused to do.

"I can't, mother," he had said. "You go--all of you. Take the girls. I'll call for you at twelve--but I won't go in."

Mr. and Mrs. Thaddler were there--but not happy. She was not, at least, and showed it; he was not until an idea struck him. He dodged softly out, and was soon flying off, at dangerous speed over the moon-white country roads.

He found Ross, dressed and ready, sulking blackly on his shadowy porch.

"Come and take a spin while you wait," said Mr. Thaddler.

"Thanks, I have to go in town later."

"I'll take you in town."

"Thank you, but I have to take the horses in and bring out my mother and the girls."

"I'll bring you all out in the car. Come on--it's a great night."

So Ross rather reluctantly came.

He sat back on the luxurious cushions, his arms folded sternly, his brows knit, and the stout gentleman at his side watched him shrewdly.

"How does the ranch go?" he asked.

"Very well, thank you, Mr. Thaddler."

"Them Chinks pay up promptly?"

"As prompt as the month comes round. Their rent is a very valuable part of the estate."

"Yes," Mr. Thaddler pursued. "They have a good steady market for their stuff. And the chicken man, too. Do you know who buys 'em?"

Ross did not. Did not greatly care, he intimated.

"I should think you'd be interested--you ought to--it's Diantha Bell."

Ross started, but said nothing.

"You see, I've taken a great interest in her proposition ever since she sprung it on us," Mr. Thaddler confided. "She's got the goods all right. But there was plenty against her here--you know what women are! And I made up my mind the supplies should be good and steady, anyhow. She had no trouble with her grocery orders; that was easy. Meat I couldn't handle--except indirectly--a little pressure, maybe, here and there." And he chuckled softly. "But this ranch I bought on purpose."

Ross turned as if he had been stung.

"You!" he said.

"Yes, me. Why not? It's a good property. I got it all fixed right, and then I bought your little upstate shop--lock, stock and barrel--and gave you this for it. A fair exchange is no robbery. Though it would be nice to have it all in the family, eh?"

Ross was silent for a few turbulent moments, revolving this far from pleasing information.

"What'd I do it for?" continued the unasked benefactor. "What do you think I did it for? So that brave, sweet little girl down here could have her heart's desire. She's established her business--she's proved her point--she's won the town--most of it; and there's nothing on earth to make her unhappy now but your pigheadedness! Young man, I tell you you're a plumb fool!"

One cannot throw one's host out of his own swift-flying car; nor is it wise to jump out one's self.

"Nothing on earth between you but your cussed pride!" Mr. Thaddler remorselessly went on. "This ranch is honestly yours--by a square deal. Your Jopalez business was worth the money--you ran it honestly and extended the trade. You'd have made a heap by it if you could have unbent a little. Gosh! I limbered up that store some in twelve months!" And the stout man smiled reminiscently.

Ross was still silent.

"And now you've got what you wanted--thanks to her, mind you, thanks to her!--and you ain't willing to let her have what she wants!"

The young man moistened his lips to speak.

"You ain't dependent on her in any sense--I don't mean that. You earned the place all right, and I don't doubt you'll make good, both in a business way and a scientific way, young man. But why in Hades you can't let her be happy, too, is more'n I can figure! Guess you get your notions from two generations back--and some!"

Ross began, stumblingly. "I did not know I was indebted to you, Mr. Thaddler."

"You're not, young man, you're not! I ran that shop of yours a year--built up the business and sold it for more than I paid for this. So you've no room for heroics--none at all. What I want you to realize is that you're breaking the heart of the finest woman I ever saw. You can't bend that girl--she'll never give up. A woman like that has got more things to do than just marry! But she's pining for you all the same.

"Here she is to-night, receiving with Mrs. Weatherstone--with those Bannerets, Dukes and Earls around her--standing up there like a Princess herself--and her eyes on the door all the time--and tears in 'em, I could swear--because you don't come!"

*

They drew up with a fine curve before the carriage gate.

"I'll take 'em all home--they won't be ready for some time yet," said Mr. Thaddler. "And if you two would like this car I'll send for the other one."

Ross shook hands with him. "You are very kind, Mr. Thaddler," he said. "I am obliged to you. But I think we will walk."

Tall and impressive, looking more distinguished in a six-year-old evening suit than even the Hoch Geborene in his uniform, he came at last, and Diantha saw him the moment he entered; saw, too, a new light in his eyes.

He went straight to her. And Mrs. Weatherstone did not lay it up against him that he had but the briefest of words for his hostess.

"Will you come?" he said. "May I take you home--now?"

She went with him, without a word, and they walked slowly home, by far outlying paths, and long waits on rose-bowered seats they knew.

The moon filled all the world with tender light and the orange blossoms flooded the still air with sweetness.

"Dear," said he, "I have been a proud fool--I am yet--but I have come to see a little clearer. I do not approve of your work--I cannot approve of it--but will you forgive me for that and marry me? I cannot live any longer without you?"

"Of course I will," said Diantha.

(To be continued)

THE GOOD MAN

A certain Good Man possessed many Virtues of character by right of inheritance, so that my Critical Friend remarked, "It is easy for him to be good."

Now the Good Man was by no means satisfied with his inherited virtues, and with Ceaseless Diligence and Long Effort he strove to acquire more, and in due season acquired them, abundantly, so that even my Critical Friend allowed these virtues were of some credit to him.

Nevertheless, being critical, he criticized the Good Man, to my grief and amazement.

"How can you criticize this Great White Soul?" I cried. "He has never committed a crime."

"Neither have you or I," interrupted my Critical Friend.

"He has never sinned," I continued, "he has not a single vice, he has not even a fault! And as to his Virtues!"

"What are his Virtues?" asked my Critical Friend.

Then I considered the Virtues of that Great Man and was lost in admiration and amazement. "He is unimpeachably Honest, Trustworthy and True," said I. "He is Humble and Modest even in his Superiority, and has Hope of Improvement; he is Brave in meeting adversity and Patient in bearing it. He is Chaste and Temperate, he is Generous and Unselfish and Self-sacrificing, he is Persevering and Diligent, Faithful and Enduring. He is good."

"Yes?" said my Critical Friend. "What good is he?"

"What good?" said I.

"Yes, what good? What does he do?"

"What do you mean?" I asked. "His business?"

"Of course. What's his business? What does he do in the world?"

"He's a business man," said I, "and a very good business man, if that is what you mean."

My Critical friend grinned unfeelingly. "What use is he?" he asked. "Whom does he serve? Of what use to humanity is his work? In what may the human race be benefited by his business? What will the world lose when he is gone?"

"They will lose a Good Man," said I, a little angrily.

And my Critical Friend subsided, merely grunting once more, in that tiresome way of his, "What good?"

OUR ANDROCENTRIC CULTURE; OR, THE MAN-MADE WORLD

XIII.

INDUSTRY AND ECONOMICS.

The forest of Truth, on the subject of industry and economics, is difficult to see on account of the trees.

We have so many Facts on this subject; so many Opinions; so many Traditions and Habits; and the pressure of Immediate Conclusions is so intense upon us all; that it is not easy to form a clear space in one's mind and consider the field fairly.

Possibly the present treatment of the subject will appeal most to the minds of those who know least about it; such as the Average Woman. To her, Industry is a daylong and lifelong duty, as well as a natural impulse; and economics means going without things. To such untrained but also unprejudiced minds it should be easy to show the main facts on these lines.

Let us dispose of Economics first, as having a solemn scientific appearance.

Physical Economics treats of the internal affairs of the body; the whole machinery and how it works; all organs, members, functions; each last and littlest capillary and leucocyte, are parts of that "economy."

Nature's "economy" is not in the least "economical." The waste of life, the waste of material, the waste of time and effort, are prodigious, yet she achieves her end as we see.

Domestic Economics covers the whole care and government of the household; the maintenance of peace, health, order, and morality; the care and nourishment of children as far as done at home; the entire management of the home, as well as the spending and saving of money; are included in it. Saving is the least and poorest part of it; especially as in mere abstinence from needed things; most especially when this abstinence is mainly "Mother's." How best to spend; time, strength, love, care, labor, knowledge, and money--this should be the main study in Domestic Economics.

Social, or, as they are used to call it, Political Economics, covers a larger, but not essentially different field. A family consists of people, and the Mother is their natural manager. Society consists of people--the same people--only more of them. All the people, who are members of Society, are also members of families--except some incubated orphans maybe. Social Economics covers the whole care and management of the people, the maintenance of peace and health and order and morality; the care of children, as far as done out of the home; as well as the spending and saving of the public money--all these are included in it.

This great business of Social Economics is at present little understood and most poorly managed, for this reason; we approach it from an individual point of view; seeking not so much to do our share in the common service, as to get our personal profit from the common wealth. Where the whole family labors together to harvest fruit and store it for the winter, we have legitimate Domestic Economics: but where one member takes and hides a lot for himself, to the exclusion of the others, we have no Domestic Economics at all--merely individual selfishness.

In Social Economics we have a large, but simple problem. Here is the earth, our farm. Here are the people, who own the earth. How can the most advantage to the most people be obtained from the earth with the least labor? That is the problem of Social Economics.

Looking at the world as if you held it in your hands to study and discuss, what do we find at present?

We find people living too thickly for health and comfort in some places, and too thinly for others; we find most people working too hard and too long at honest labor; some people working with damaging intensity at dishonest labor; and a few wretched paupers among the rich and poor, degenerate idlers who do not work at all, the scum and the dregs of Society.

All this is bad economics. We do not get the comfort out of life we easily could; and work far too hard for what we do get. Moreover, there is no peace, no settled security. No man is sure of his living, no matter how hard he works, a thousand things may occur to deprive him of his job, or his income. In our time there is great excitement along this line of study; and more than one proposition is advanced whereby we may improve, most notably instanced in the world-covering advance of Socialism.

In our present study the principal fact to be exhibited is the influence of a male culture upon Social Economics and Industry.

Industry, as a department of Social Economics, is little understood. Heretofore we have viewed this field from several wholly erroneous positions. From the Hebrew (and wholly androcentric) religious teaching, we have regarded labor as a curse.

Nothing could be more absurdly false. Labor is not merely a means of supporting human life--it is human life. Imagine a race of beings living without labor! They must be the rudest savages.

Human work consists in specialized industry and the exchange of its products; and without it is no civilization. As industry develops, civilization develops; peace expands; wealth increases; science and art help on the splendid total. Productive industry, and its concomitant of distributive industry cover the major field of human life.

If our industry was normal, what should we see?

A world full of healthy, happy people; each busily engaged in what he or she most enjoys doing. Normal Specialization, like all our voluntary processes, is accompanied by keen pleasure; and any check or interruption to it gives pain and injury. Whosoever works at what he loves is well and happy. Whoso works at what he does not love is ill and miserable. It is very bad economics to force unwilling industry. That is the weakness of slave labor; and of wage labor also where there is not full industrial education and freedom of choice.

Under normal conditions we should see well developed, well trained specialists happily engaged in the work they most enjoyed; for reasonable hours (any work, or play either, becomes injurious if done too long); and as a consequence the whole output of the world would be vastly improved, not only in quantity but in quality.

Plain are the melancholy facts of what we do see. Following that pitiful conception of labor as a curse, comes the very old and androcentric habit of despising it as belonging to women, and then to slaves.

As a matter of fact industry is in its origin feminine; that is, maternal. It is the overflowing fountain of mother-love and mother-power which first prompts the human race to labor; and for long ages men performed no productive industry at all; being merely hunters and fighters.

It is this lack of natural instinct for labor in the male of our species, together with the ideas and opinions based on that lack, and voiced by him in his many writings, religious and other, which have given to the world its false estimate of this great function, human work. That which is our very life, our greatest joy, our road to all advancement, we have scorned and oppressed; so that "working people," the "working classes," "having to work," etc., are to this day spoken of with contempt. Perhaps drones speak so among themselves of the "working bees!"

Normally, widening out from the mother's careful and generous service in the family, to careful, generous service in the world, we should find labor freely given, with love and pride.

Abnormally, crushed under the burden of androcentric scorn and prejudice, we have labor grudgingly produced under pressure of necessity; labor of slaves under fear of the whip, or of wage-slaves, one step higher, under fear of want. Long ages wherein hunting and fighting were the only manly occupations, have left their heavy impress. The predacious instinct and the combative instinct weigh down and disfigure our economic development. What Veblen calls "the instinct of workmanship" grows on, slowly and irresistably; but the malign features of our industrial life are distinctively androcentric: the desire to get, of the hunter; interfering with the desire to give, of the mother; the desire to overcome an antagonist--originally masculine, interfering with the desire to serve and benefit--originally feminine.

Let the reader keep in mind that as human beings, men are able to over-live their masculine natures and do noble service to the world; also that as human beings they are today far more highly developed than women, and doing far more for the world. The point here brought out is that as males their unchecked supremacy has resulted in the abnormal predominance of masculine impulses in our human processes; and that this predominance has been largely injurious.

As it happens, the distinctly feminine or maternal impulses are far more nearly in line with human progress than are those of the male; which makes her exclusion from human functions the more mischievous.

Our current teachings in the infant science of Political Economy are naively masculine. They assume as unquestionable that "the economic man" will never do anything unless he has to; will only do it to escape pain or attain pleasure; and will, inevitably, take all he can get, and do all he can to outwit, overcome, and if necessary destroy his antagonist.

Always the antagonist; to the male mind an antagonist is essential to progress, to all achievement. He has planted that root-thought in all the human world; from that old hideous idea of Satan, "The Adversary," down to the competitor in business, or the boy at the head of the class, to be superseded by another.

Therefore, even in science, "the struggle for existence" is the dominant law--to the male mind, with the "survival of the fittest" and "the elimination of the unfit."

Therefore in industry and economics we find always and everywhere the antagonist; the necessity for somebody or something to be overcome--else why make an effort? If you have not the incentive of reward, or the incentive of combat, why work? "Competition is the life of trade."

Thus the Economic Man.

But how about the Economic Woman?

To the androcentric mind she does not exist. Women are females, and that's all; their working abilities are limited to personal service.

That it would be possible to develop industry to far greater heights, and to find in social economics a simple and beneficial process for the promotion of human life and prosperity, under any other impulse than these two, Desire and Combat, is hard indeed to recognize--for the "male mind."

So absolutely interwoven are our existing concepts of maleness and humanness, so sure are we that men are people and women only females, that the claim of equal weight and dignity in human affairs of the feminine instincts and methods is scouted as absurd. We find existing industry almost wholly in male hands; find it done as men do it; assume that that is the way it must be done.

When women suggest that it could be done differently, their proposal is waved aside--they are "only women"--their ideas are "womanish."

Agreed. So are men "only men," their ideas are "mannish"; and of the two the women are more vitally human than the men.

The female is the race-type--the man the variant.

The female, as a race-type, having the female processes besides; best performs the race processes. The male, however, has with great difficulty developed them, always heavily handicapped by his maleness; being in origin essentially a creature of sex, and so dominated almost exclusively by sex impulses.

The human instinct of mutual service is checked by the masculine instinct of combat; the human tendency to specialize in labor, to rejoicingly pour force in lines of specialized expression, is checked by the predacious instinct, which will exert itself for reward; and disfigured by the masculine instinct of self-expression, which is an entirely different thing from the great human outpouring of world force.

Great men, the world's teachers and leaders, are great in humanness; mere maleness does not make for greatness unless it be in warfare--a disadvantageous glory! Great women also must be great in humanness; but their female instincts are not so subversive of human progress as are the instincts of the male. To be a teacher and leader, to love and serve, to guard and guide and help, are well in line with motherhood.

"Are they not also in line with fatherhood?" will be asked; and, "Are not the father's paternal instincts masculine?"

No, they are not; they differ in no way from the maternal, in so far as they are beneficial. Parental functions of the higher sort, of the human sort, are identical. The father can give his children many advantages which the mother can not; but that is due to his superiority as a human being. He possesses far more knowledge and power in the world, the human world; he himself is more developed in human powers and processes; and is therefore able to do much for his children which the mother can not; but this is in no way due to his masculinity. It is in this development of human powers in man, through fatherhood, that we may read the explanation of our short period of androcentric culture.

So thorough and complete a reversal of previous relation, such continuance of what appears in every way an unnatural position, must have had some justification in racial advantages, or it could not have endured. This is its justification; the establishment of humanness in the male; he being led into it, along natural lines, by the exercise of previously existing desires.

In a male culture the attracting forces must inevitably have been, we have seen, Desire and Combat. These masculine forces, acting upon human processes, while necessary to the uplifting of the man, have been anything but uplifting to civilization. A sex which thinks, feels and acts in terms of combat is difficult to harmonize in the smooth bonds of human relationship; that they have succeeded so well is a beautiful testimony to the superior power of race tendency over sex tendency. Uniting and organizing, crudely and temporarily, for the common hunt; and then, with progressive elaboration, for the common fight; they are now using the same tactics--and the same desires, unfortunately--in common work.

Union, organization, complex interservice, are the essential processes of a growing society; in them, in the ever-increasing discharge of power along widening lines of action, is the joy and health of social life. But so far men combine in order to better combat; the mutual service held incidental to the common end of conquest and plunder.

In spite of this the overmastering power of humanness is now developing among modern men immense organizations of a wholly beneficial character, with no purpose but mutual advantage. This is true human growth, and as such will inevitably take the place of the sex-prejudiced earlier processes.

The human character of the Christian religion is now being more and more insisted on; the practical love and service of each and all; in place of the old insistence on Desire--for a Crown and Harp in Heaven, and Combat--with that everlasting adversary.

In economics this great change is rapidly going on before our eyes. It is a change in idea, in basic concept, in our theory of what the whole thing is about. We are beginning to see the world, not as "a fair field and no favor"--not a place for one man to get ahead of others, for a price; but as an establishment belonging to us, the proceeds of which are to be applied, as a matter of course, to human advantage.

In the old idea, the wholly masculine idea, based on the processes of sex-combat, the advantage of the world lay in having "the best man win." Some, in the first steps of enthusiasm for Eugenics, think so still; imagining that the primal process of promoting evolution through the paternity of the conquering male is the best process.

To have one superior lion kill six or sixty inferior lions, and leave a progeny of more superior lions behind him, is all right--for lions; the superiority in fighting being all the superiority they need.

But the man able to outwit his follows, to destroy them in physical, or ruin in financial, combat, is not therefore a superior human creature. Even physical superiority, as a fighter, does not prove the kind of vigor best calculated to resist disease, or to adapt itself to changing conditions.

That our masculine culture in its effect on Economics and Industry is injurious, is clearly shown by the whole open page of history. From the simple beneficent activities of a matriarchal period we follow the same lamentable steps; nation after nation. Women are enslaved and captives are enslaved; a military despotism is developed; labor is despised and discouraged. Then when the irresistible social forces do bring us onward, in science, art, commerce, and all that we call civilization, we find the same check acting always upon that progress; and the really vital social processes of production and distribution heavily injured by the financial combat and carnage which rages ever over and among them.

The real development of the people, the forming of finer physiques, finer minds, a higher level of efficiency, a broader range of enjoyment and accomplishment--is hindered and not helped by this artificially maintained "struggle for existence," this constant endeavor to eliminate what, from a masculine standard, is "unfit."

That we have progressed thus far, that we are now moving forward so rapidly, is in spite of and not because of our androcentric culture.

A FREQUENT QUESTION

If women become economically independent, their husbands will stop working--and depend on them.

Oh, no, they won't.

How do you know they won't?

Because that kind of man will not succeed in getting that kind of woman to depend on when women are wiser.

What's to prevent the man from becoming a burden on her afterward?

The marriage contract.

You propose a new kind of marriage contract, do you?

Why not? Marriages may be made in Heaven, but the contract is drawn up by mere men. These--and some women to help them--may easily make a better one. Why not?

BOYS WILL BE BOYS

"Boys will be boys," and boys have had their day; Boy-mischief and boy-carelessness and noise Extenuated all, allowed, excused and smoothed away, Each duty missed, each damaging wild act, By this meek statement of unquestioned fact-- Boys will be boys!

"Now, women will be women." Mark the change; Calm motherhood in place of boisterous youth; No warfare now; to manage and arrange, To nurture with wise care, is woman's way, In peace and fruitful industry her sway. In love and truth.

MANY WINDOWS

Many minds are many windows, Varied are their views; Each of us, if lonely, knows Only what one window shows-- Can no further choose.

Many minds are many windows, One the light divine, We may freely move and range, Wide our windows may exchange,-- Come and look through mine!

COMMENT AND REVIEW

Lavina L. Dock is a trained nurse of long and wide experience in more than one country. She is the author of "A Text Book of Materia Medica for Nurses," now in its fourth edition, revised and enlarged, and, in collaboration with M. D. Nutting, R.N., of "The History of Nursing," in two volumes.

Miss Dock's present book, "Hygiene and Morality," is of far wider appeal than either of the former works. The title is a good one, for it links two aspects of one subject, and presents the new case without ignoring the old one.

The work deals in the main, in plain, simple moderate language, with the pathological aspects of what is called "the social evil"; laying stress not so much upon the moral danger, long known, as on the physical danger, to which we are but just awakening.

The first part gives clear descriptions of the venereal diseases, now known to be caused by specific germs; and to be both infectious and contagious in the highest degree; giving statistics as to their prevalence.

The general estimate, in syphilis, she quotes as from five to eighteen per cent of the population, varying in the different countries. Taking the most modest estimate for ours, and allowing our population at 80,000,000--this would give us an army of 4,000,000 syphilitics at large among us--unknown to the public.

Say they had leprosy, or cholera, or smallpox, and imagine our horror; yet these diseases are not comparable in their terrible consequences; not only to the victims, but to their children and grandchildren.

In gonorrhoea, a cause of sterility, blindness of babies, and all manner of surgical operations and "diseases peculiar to women," so common among innocent wives, Miss Dock shows us that European records give about seventy-five per cent of men as infected. In America things are better, a conservative estimate giving the proportion of our men having either syphilis or gonorrhoea as about sixty per cent.

As each of these diseases affects both wife and child, it is specially necessary that women should be informed about them.

The second part treats of Prostitution; the efforts made at its control and regulation, and the new widespread movement for its abolition; and gives melancholy figures to show not only the immense extent of this evil, but the fact that the large majority of its victims are unwilling ones.

Abnormal women who might wish to follow this trade are so few that in order to supply the market, innocent young girls, numbering in America about fifty thousand a year, must be forced into this profession, into shame, disease and painful death; hence the "White-Slave traffic."

The third part discusses Prevention; with wise and hopeful words; telling how chance infection may be avoided, how patients with these diseases should be isolated; and how all children should be educated in full knowledge of this danger and its best avoidance.

Miss Dock is also very clear and strong in showing that women can best reduce this evil through the use of the ballot; and gives conclusive evidence of what is already accomplished in those states and countries having equal suffrage.

It is a clean, forcible interesting book, most moderate in tone; and giving a long list of scientific authorities.

*

Now for an amusing book!

This is "Marriage as a Trade," by Cicely Hamilton, a clever and forcible English writer, co-author of that delicious little play "How The Vote Was Won."

A keen and accurate weapon is Miss Hamilton's pen; and in this work she uses it with delicious dexterity to prick bubbles, to slice off masks, cut veils and bandages, and dissect ancient idols.

Her special matter in discussion is exactly given in the title, and she does not stray from her theme; but brings out, sharply and inescapably, the universal fact, that marriage, to a woman, is not only a happiness (or a grief!), not only a duty, or at least a natural function, but a trade--she earns her living by it!

Miss Hamilton points out very forcibly that not all women are fitted by nature for following the same trade, that not all of them like it; that it produces low grade work and discontented lives; and that many women would infinitely prefer working at some other business.

The value of this book is is the sharp light thrown on this large subject from the woman's view--or at least from a woman's view; and one that will be shared by many others.

Its amusing quality is for those who like trenchant wit and penetrating satire.

*

Mary Jonston is a writer of good novels, strong, thrilling, excellent in workmanship, as all who have read her "To Have and To Hold" will agree; and it was that quality of literary skill which made me seize upon this, in the Woman's Journal of October 8th, before I noticed the name of the author:

THE WISE HOUSEKEEPER:

Will be against A HOW BUILT ON SAND. Will be for THE CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE.

Will be against GROUNDS WITHOUT SHADE AND WATER. Will be for CONSERVATISM.

Will be against QUARRELS WITH NEIGHBORS. Will be for INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION.

Will be against EXTRAVAGANT HOUSEKEEPING. Will be for ECONOMY IN ADMINISTRATION.

Will be against PENNY WISDOM AND POUND FOOLISHNESS. Will be for LIBERAL APPROPRIATIONS FOR COMMON WELFARE.

Will be against DISHONEST SERVANTS. Will be for INTELLIGENCE AND HONOR IN OFFICE.

Will be against DIRT. Will be for CLEAN POLITICS.

Will be against MOTHS, RUST AND MILDEW Will be for AN END TO GRAFT.

Will be against UNTRIMMED LAMPS. Will be for THE INITIATIVE AND REFERENDUM.

Will be against UNPAID BILLS. Will be for JUSTICE.

Will be against DARK CORNERS. Will be for COMMON OWNERSHIP IN COMMON NEEDS.

Will be against DARKENED WINDOWS. Will be for COMPULSORY EDUCATION.

Will be against CANDLES BURNED AT BOTH ENDS. Will be for ABOLITION OF CHILD LABOR.

Will be against CARELESS BREAKAGE. Will be for ACTS LOOKING TO PREVENTION OF MINE, RAILWAY AND FACTORY ACCIDENTS.

Will be against HOUSEHOLD DRUDGES. Will be for AN EIGHT-HOUR DAY.

Will be against BAD DRAINS. Will be for A FEDERAL DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH.

Will be against STAINS THAT WILL NOT COME OUT. Will be for JUVENILE COURTS.

Will be against POISONS LEFT WHERE THE CHILDREN CAN GET THEM. Will be for WAR AGAINST THE SOCIAL EVIL. WAR AGAINST ALCOHOL.

Will be against MISTAKEN PARTNERSHIPS. Will be for WISER MARRIAGE LAWS.

Will be against SPOILED CHILDREN. Will be for A FEDERAL DEPARTMENT OF EUGENICS.

Will be against A MISTRESS OF THE HOUSE WITHOUT AUTHORITY. Will be for THE FRANCHISE FOR WOMEN.

*

"To-day's Problems" is a good ten cents' worth--or five, if you live in Chicago.

It is a pocket-size pamphlet, full of short bits from some hundred and fifty leading writers, workers, and speakers, along lines of Social Progress.

Ministers, college professors, economists, sociologists, editors, authors, organizers, poets, orators; a millionaire, a member of parliament, a prince,--it's a great booklet. And not a thing in it that fills one page, even.

To-day's Problems. Trade Union Book Concern. Chicago, Ill.

*

We mean to carry lists of books useful to our readers. We wish to prove that it will pay publishers to advertise with us. If you order any book reviewed here, please send your order to The FORERUNNER.

"Pure Sociology," by Lester F. Ward, Macmillan, Pub., $4.00.

"Hygiene and Morality," by Lavina L. Dock, R. N., G. P. Putnam's Sons, Pub., $1.25.

"Marriage as a Trade," by Cicely Hamilton, Moffat, Yard & Co., Pub., $1.25.

PERSONAL PROBLEMS

Question.--A radical woman and conservative man are married, have been married for years. The woman now wants to do a share of work for votes for women. The man takes it as a personal reflection. He thinks outsiders will conclude that a woman suffragist must have a family grievance at home. How much suffrage work do you advise her to do?

Answer.--I advise her to do all the suffrage work she thinks right; and any other work she thinks right. What her husband thinks somebody else will think, is a pretty poor obstacle.

If a woman so lives as to hold the love and respect of her husband, she can differ from him quite widely--for conscience sake--and not break their bond.

If he does not love and respect her--why should she mind what he thinks?

*

Here are some earnest questions from an artist:

1. "How shall I be most efficient?

2. "Which of my work is best--what I think best, or what other people think best?

3. "If my best work is done by accident, what's the use of trying?"

Answer.--1. Live to your fullest development in all lines--and keep your health. Do not so concentrate on art as to neglect life--and your art will be greater.

2. Do the work you think best, with all your might, accepting others' judgement only when it convinces yours.

3. Trying, always--that is, doing your best work, life long--is what allows those happy accidents. Keep on trying.

*

In this department in August, "E. M. K." asked:

"Would you please outline a plan of organization among married women who wish to continue practicing their profession, through which they may arouse other women; and also reach the authorities who have control over their work?"

I then recommended political organization as the best possible; but have been called upon since to mention The Married Women Teachers' Association, of New York, as an instance of what may be done. The Secretary is Mrs. Anna G. Walsh, 22 Harvard Avenue, Jamaica, N. Y.

FROM LETTERS OF SUBSCRIBERS

"Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Since the first of January, 1904, I've been writing you this letter! 'The Women's Journal,' of Boston, presented you to me--and I've been acknowledging the introduction ever since!! '-----' I bought--and read--and re-read your 'Women and Economics' and 'The Home, It's Work and Influence.' I then as now, knew--that I had known these things always--you had only beat me to its expression."

*

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*

"The Forerunner has such a cheery, hopeful, even confident tone that it is fine to read it. I feel, dear Mrs. Gilman, that as much as I liked your earlier work, I find even more in this latest. It touches the quick more--in me."

*

"Enclosed please find post office order for $1.00, to cover a year's subscription to The Forerunner, and I sincerely trust that that magazine will have the influence that it deserves. The November number alone is worth the price."

*

"Its going to be well worth a dollar, this Forerunner of yours, if the forerunner I have received of The Forerunner is to be taken as typical, I am immensely interested in your philosophy of life. Your tale of Diantha I turned over to my eldest daughter and its effect is pronounced. She is looking for the next number."

*

"We enjoy the magazine very much, particularly the series of articles titled 'Our Androcentric Culture.' It explains very satisfactorily the present andriness of conditions. May you live a thousand years--and longer; to continue good work of enlightenment."

*

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*

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*

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*

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*

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*

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*

"We three are familiar with your 'Women and Economics' and regularly announce to each other by post card;--See such a magazine--an article by 'our C. P. G.' So imagine our satisfaction to learn that 'our Mrs. Gilman' has now a magazine where 'her policies' are so ably presented! '-----' I shall never lose an opportunity to advertise The Forerunner by word of mouth."

*

"If possible include all numbers of your paper in the following yearly subscriptions. We are anxious to have the file from the first.

"The paper is great. May it be able to outlive the necessity for its mission."

(Encloses three subscriptions).

*

"In our family circle we have read aloud The Forerunner for November and December with much interest and enjoyment. We were particularly pleased with your article on Christmas and the Santa Claus myth."

*

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*

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*

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*

"I devoured The Forerunner from 'Volume 1' to 'The pain from a raw wound,' and am not yet satisfied. Please take my check for 'more.'"

*

"How much liberty do you wish us to take in the matter of quotations from The Forerunner '-----' Both January copies have just come to hand. Your stories are more interesting than any I've read for a long time. I hope you will continue these 'Housekeeping Problems.'

*

"I find The Forerunner on our club table far too exciting to pick up and skim. Therefore I enclose a year's subscription."

*

"I am very much interested in your opinions and convictions as set forth in the books I have seen and am hoping to find a guide and friend in the above publication, which has recently come to my notice."

*

"The address was incorrect and so am sending the correct one at the top of this page, as I do not want to chance losing any of the numbers, I enjoy it so thoroughly."

*

"Your January number was fine. Mrs. D---- thinks it is worth the price for the year."

*

"The January Forerunner is especially rich. 'Here is the earth,' is worth the subscription price, to put it mildly."

*

"Mother's copy of The Forerunner has just come, and I want to subscribe right off, before I read it! I know it will be the very cleverest and most stimulating thing in print. I want to lend it to the other girls at college."

*

"I must take a few moments to say how much I enjoy The Forerunner."

*

"To speak commercially, I never saw so much value given for the price, in my life! And then the stuff itself! Well;

"'Her Housekeeper,' gave me such joy that I read it four times, to be sure I had extracted all the juice. A real love story! I suppose perhaps the only one that was ever written! I, at least, do not recall, in all the tons of fiction I have swum through a story of real LOVE before. * * * Apropos of this not seeing--not grasping the idea--comes 'The Barrel.' Oh fine! More power to your right arm."

*

"My sister and I have greatly enjoyed your publication, its articles, its poetry, its question box, its advertisements. Better send the two subscriptions from January number--we have the magazine at home, but I want my patients to regale themselves with it when they are waiting for me at the office."

*

"The magazine is fine! A real Forerunner. I was in Connecticut when it came, but rushed head first into it on the evening of my return. I hope it will grow and grow and GROW! until you have to call a halt on subscribers. I enclose a dollar to have a copy sent regularly to Miss ----- -----. It will do them good."

*

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*

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*

"I enclose a dollar for a year's subscription to Charlotte's monthly, The Forerunner. Having read one issue, I am sure a year's subscription will be a good investment."

* "Will it be presumptuous in me to take enough of your time to tell you how much The Forerunner means to an ordinary woman out West? It is defining and putting into shape so many of my vague feelings and muddy ideas. * * * Your books and magazine have been among the few great inspirations of my life that have made all life look big and splendid and worth while."

*

"A word or two of appreciation from Iowa! Your magazine The Forerunner is splendid and no mere words can tell you how I have enjoyed it. The whole thing, from cover to cover, is excellent and vigorous."

*

"The first number came. And I devoured it from cover to cover and back again before I let anyone else see it. Now they are all reading it and chuckling over 'How doth the Hat,' and discussing the serious parts with great gusto. It makes me glad when I think that more numbers are coming regularly now and I can look forward to the next one and waylay the postman when the time comes. Certainly this number has made me (for one), sit up and think a bit. I wish the next one were due to-morrow."

*

"I want to thank you for the January number of The Forerunner--both Mrs. R----- and myself have enjoyed it immensely, as we have enjoyed everything you have written. We want more of it, so here goes my subscription."

*

"Accept my hearty congratulations upon The Forerunner. The first number is delightful, and exceedingly clever. 'What Diantha did,' and 'Androcentric Culture,' are deep and clear and stimulating, and 'How doth the hat' should make all who read it sit up and take notice. It seems to me that every thinking woman who sees this copy will become a subscriber. I enclose a check for my subscription and that of my mother, Mrs. ----- -----."

*

"You astonishing woman! To write, edit and publish a magazine all by your lonesome! It seems to me a tremendous undertaking, which by its very courage should appeal to everyone. I do not know that I agree with you in the theory on which The Forerunner stands--I don't know enough about it to agree or disagree--but it's certainly interesting. I like the stories, and the short, clever things by the way. May the magazine be the success it deserves to be! I enclose $1.00 for the year, and I shall look for it with interest."

*

"Kindly send to Mrs. F----, your magazine beginning with Vol. 1 No. 1 for the year. (One dollar enclosed.) I saw the little magazine at Mr. -----'s, and was much interested in it."

*

"My mother wants you to know of her enthusiasm over the second issue of The Forerunner, which she thinks an advance even over the first number. Her points were these: 1. Such a pleasure to read a homogeneous magazine instead of having to skip from lion hunting to Christian Science and from that to flying machines. 2. Admires the way you take the individual problems of individual women, and by means of the individual problems lead these women into the larger view of life and into an understanding of the androcentric culture. 3. Article on Socialism most concise, clearest and most convincing she has ever read. In this I heartily agree." * * * "4. The trite phrase about 'not one dull word from cover to cover' applies literally and without the slightest exaggeration to this number of The Forerunner."

*

"I enclosed a dollar; please send your magazine for a year to the following address, beginning if possible with the first number, Vol. 1, No. 1. If that cannot be, then start with January. It is to go to my daughter, her husband, and brand new grand-baby; and I am sure it will do them all good."

*

"I am enclosing $1.00 for the paper--I have mislaid the circular, and if I have not the amount right, I will be very happy to send the difference. If it is practicable, I'd rather you'd send the first number of The Forerunner, instead of beginning with the current number--I'll gladly pay more for the back numbers, if I can get them."

*

"As your lectures and books always appealed to my best judgment, I am anxious to have it a monthly visitor, beginning with the first number."

*

"It has the spirit of making people think and wish to see things go on."

*

"To say that we greatly appreciate it is to only hint our mood. It is by far the strongest and best expressed word on these problems of society in which are inextricably mingled the position of woman. We read it with the greatest satisfaction and feel sure that your message is coming most timely." * * *

*

"Here is my subscription to The Forerunner--one of the most cheerful purchases I ever made, and certainly a bargain! Success attend your efforts, for they mean much to mankind."

*

"Let me compliment you on your excellent articles on Androcentric Culture. They contain knowledge combined with so much beauty of expression that they feed and charm the mind alike."

*

"I hope that The Forerunner will meet all the success it deserves and that it will go to the many men and women who are in sore need of it."

*

"Can't be without it any longer. Send Forerunner, and you may begin as far back as you like."

A FRIENDLY RESPONSE

The editor wishes to acknowledge with cordial thanks the warm response to the appeal to subscribers to "renew, and get another."

They are doing it, quite rapidly, and only three or four--so far--have discontinued. One of these did it twice! Evidently The Forerunner was non persona grata there.

We begin to feel that we have more friends--and warmer ones--than at first appeared.

OUR BOUND VOLUME AS A CHRISTMAS PRESENT

The first year comprises fourteen issues--November, 1909, to December, 1910, inclusive.

In it is the Housekeeping novel--"What Diantha Did"--which will interest many, both men and women. It offers a very practical solution to the Servant Question.

In it is also the Book About Men--"The Man-Made World, or Our Androcentric Culture."

There have been books and books about women--mostly, unpleasant. This is the first one about men, as such; men as distinguished from Human Beings--as women have always been distinguished from Human Beings.

You won't wholly like the book--just consider whether it is true!

The novel separately, or the book separately, would also make good presents, but the date of their publication is not settled, while in the bound volume of the magazine you get them both for only 25c. more than one would cost.

This set, making a volume of some 420 pages, with its twelve short stories, its articles, fables, verse, and other matter, will make a very good gift--for some people. Ready early in December. $1.25.

TO THOSE SPECIALLY INTERESTED IN THiS MAGAZINE, OR SPECIALLY INTERESTED IN FIFTY DOLLARS

This is not a "Popular Magazine." It does not try to be. It is a magazine which meets the needs of a comparatively few, but they like it immensely--as is shown by the extracts from their letters we are now publishing.

We want to reach, if possible, all the people who would like The Forerunner if they knew about it.

For the rest of this year we are making a special offer to anyone who will get us new subscribers; the regular commission of 25 per cent., and a rising premium which goes up to a total of 50 per cent. for a hundred new paid year's subscriptions.

$50.00 for one hundred new subscribers!

For a girl in college who wants to help herself;

For a woman in a liberal church, or with a wide acquaintance among progressive thinkers;

For a Suffragist in touch with similar believers;

For any man or woman who can reach organizations of liberal-minded people;

For anybody who thinks they would like to earn $50.00 that way--it is a good offer.

Write for full terms, samples, etc.

IF YOU RENEW

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Volume 1. No. 14 DECEMBER, 1910 Copyright for 1910 C. P. Gilman

You can't give what you haven't got. The best gifts are love and wisdom, courage and power. Lay in some!

IN AS MUCH

The Christian arose upon Christmas Day And solemnly cleared his score: He called on the sick, to the needy gave alms, And entered the prison door.

He lent to his friends, gave away his old coat Was never by sinners enticed, And handed the man who complained of a throat A cup of cold water--iced.

He bestowed on a newsboy a new pair of shoes, And quoted in pious glee: "In as much as ye've done it to one of these least Ye have done it unto me."

*

That night he dreamed upon judgment Day: Men's hearts were all in their throats; To his pained surprise he was hustled away And herded among the goats!

"Oh Lord," he cried, "there is some mistake, I have always remembered Thee!" But the world's neglected children rose And gazed reproachfully.

And a voice replied, "Thy punishment take; Thy duty thou didst not see! In as much as ye have NOT done it to ONE Ye have NOT done it unto me."

A WORD IN SEASON

"Children pick up words like pigeons peas, And utter them again as God shall please."

When Grandma came to the breakfast table with her sour little smile and her peremptory "Good morning," every one said "good morning" as politely and pleasantly as they could, but they didn't say very much else. They attempted bravely.

"A fine morning, Mother," Papa observed, but she only answered "Too cold."

"Did you sleep well, Mother?" ventured Mama; and the reply to that was, "No, I never do!"

Then Uncle John tried--he always tried once.

"Have you heard of our new machine, Mrs. Grey? We've got one now that'll catch anything in a room--don't have to talk right into it."

Mrs. Grey looked at him coldly.

"I do not take the least interest in your talking machines, Henry, as I have told you before."

She had, many times before, but Uncle Henry never could learn the astonishing fact. He was more interested in his machines than he was in his business, by far; and spent all his spare time in tinkering with them.

"I think they are wonderful," said little Josie.

"You're my only friend, Kid! I believe you understand 'em almost as well is I do," her Uncle answered gaily; and finished his breakfast as quickly as possible.

So did everybody. It was not appetizing to have Grandma say "How you do dawdle over your meals, Louise!"

Little Josephine slipped down from her chair, with a whispered "Scuse me Mama!" and whisked into her play room.

"How you do spoil that child!" said Grandma, and Mama closed her lips tight and looked at her husband.

"Now Mother, don't you fret about Josie," said he. "She's a good little girl and quiet as a mouse."

"Anything I can do for you downtown, Mother?"

"No thank you Joseph. I'll go to my room and be out of Louise's way."

"You're not in my way at all, Mother--won't you sit down stairs?"

Young Mrs. Grey made a brave effort to speak cordially, but old Mrs. Grey only looked injured, and said "No thank you, Louise," as she went upstairs.

Dr. Grey looked at his wife. She met his eyes steadily, cheerfully.

"I think Mother's looking better, don't you dear?" she said.

"There's nothing at all the matter with my mother--except--" he shut his mouth hard. "There are things I cannot say, Louise," he continued, "but others I can. Namely; that for sweetness and patience and gentleness you--you beat the Dutch! And I do appreciate it. One can't turn one's Mother out of the house, but I do resent her having another doctor!"

"I'd love your Mother, Joseph, if--if she was a thousand times worse!" his wife answered; and he kissed her with grateful love.

Sarah came in to clear the table presently, and Ellen stood in the pantry door to chat with her.

"Never in my life did I see any woman wid the patience of her!" said Ellen, wiping her mouth on her apron.

"She has need of it," said Sarah. "Any Mother-in-law is a trial I've heard, but this wan is the worst. Why she must needs live with 'em I don't see--she has daughters of her own."

"Tis the daughter's husbands won't put up wid her," answered Ellen, "they havin' the say of course. This man's her son--and he has to keep her if she will stay."

"And she as rich as a Jew!" Sarah went on. "And never spendin' a cent! And the Doctor workin' night and day!"--

Then Mama came in and this bit of conversation naturally came to an end.

A busy, quiet, sweet little woman was Mama; and small Josie flew into her arms and cuddled there most happily.

"Mama Dearest," she said, "How long is it to Christmas? Can I get my mat done for Grandma? And do you think she'll like it?"

"Well, well dear--that's three questions! It's two weeks yet to Christmas; and I think you can if you work steadily; and I hope she'll like it."

"And Mama--can I have my party?"

"I'm afraid not, dearest. You see Grandma is old, and she hates a noise and confusion--and parties are expensive. I'm sorry, childie. Can't you think of something else you want, that Mother can give you?"

"No," said the child, "I've wanted a party for three years, Mama! Grandma just spoils everything!"

"No, no, dear--you must always love Grandma because she is dear Papa's mother; and because she is lonely and needs our love.

"We'll have a party some day, Dearest--don't feel badly. And we always have a good time together, don't we?"

They did; but just now the child's heart was set on more social pleasures, and she went sadly back to her playroom to work on that mat for Grandma.

It was a busy day. Mama's married sister came to see her, and the child was sent out of the room. Two neighbors called, and waited, chatting, some time before Mama came down.

Grandma's doctor--who was not Papa--called; and her lawyer too; and they had to wait some time for the old lady to dress as she thought fitting.

But Grandma's doctor and lawyer were very old friends, and seemed to enjoy themselves.

The minister came also, not Grandma's minister, who was old and thin and severe and wore a long white beard; but Mama's minister, who was so vigorous and cheerful, and would lift Josephine way up over his head--as if she was ten years old. But Mama sent her out of the room this time, which was a pity.

To be sure Josephine had a little secret trail from her playroom door--behind several pieces of furniture--right up to the back of the sofa where people usually sat, but she was not often interested in their conversation. She was a quiet child, busy with her own plans and ideas; playing softly by herself, with much imaginary conversation. She set up her largest doll, a majestic personage known as "The Lady Isobel," and talked to her.

"Why is my Grandma so horrid? And why do I have to love her? How can you love people--if you don't, Lady Isobel?

"Other girls' Grandmas are nice. Nelly Elder's got a lovely Grandma! She lets Nelly have parties and everything. Maybe if Grandma likes my mat she'll--be pleasanter.

"Maybe she'll go somewhere else to live--sometime. Don't you think so, Lady Isobel?"

The Lady Isobel's reply, however, was not recorded.

Grandma pursued her pious way as usual, till an early bedtime relieved the family of her presence. Then Uncle Harry stopped puttering with his machines and came out to be sociable with his sister. If Papa was at home they would have a game of solo--if not, they played cribbage, or quiet.

Uncle Harry was the life of the household--when Grandma wasn't around.

"Well, Lulu," he said cheerfully, "What's the prospect? Can Joe make it?"

"No," said Mama. "It's out of the question. He could arrange about his practice easily enough but it's the money for the trip. He'll have to send his paper to be read."

"It's a shame!" said the young man, "He ought to be there. He'd do those other doctors good. Why in the name of reason don't the old lady give him the money--she could, easy enough."

"Joe never'll ask her for a cent," answered Mrs. Grey, "and it would never occur to her to give him one! Yet I think she loves him best of all her children."

"Huh! Love!" said Uncle Harry.

*

Grandma didn't sleep well at night. She complained of this circumstantially and at length.

"Hour after hour I hear the clock strike," she said. "Hour after hour!"

Little Josephine had heard the clock strike hour after hour one terrible night when she had an earache. She was really sorry for Grandma.

"And nothing to take up my mind," said Grandma, as if her mind was a burden to her.

But the night after this she had something to take up her mind. As a matter of fact it woke her up, as she had napped between the clock's strikings. At first she thought the servants were in her room--and realized with a start that they were speaking of her.

"Why she must live with 'em I don't see--she has daughters of her own--"

With the interest of an eavesdropper she lay still, listening, and heard no good of herself.

"How long is it to Christmas?" she presently heard her grandchild ask, and beg her mother for the "party"--still denied her.

"Grandma spoils everything!" said the clear childish voice, and the mother's gentle one urged love and patience.

It was some time before the suddenly awakened old lady, in the dark, realized the source of these voices--and then she could not locate it.

"It's some joke of that young man's" she said grimly--but the joke went on.

It was Mrs. Grey's sister now, condoling with her about this mother-in-law.

"Why do you have to put up with it Louise? Won't any of her daughters have her?"

"I'm afraid they don't want her," said Louise's gentle voice. "But Joe is her son, and of course he feels that his home is his mother's. I think he is quite right. She is old, and alone--she doesn't mean to be disagreeable."

"Well, she achieves it without effort, then! A more disagreeable old lady I never saw, Louise, and I'd like nothing better than to tell her so!"

The old lady was angry, but impressed. There is a fascination in learning how others see us, even if the lesson is unpleasant. She heard the two neighbors who talked together before Mama came down, and their talk was of her--and of how they pitied young Mrs. Grey.

"If I was in her shoes," said the older of the two, "I'd pick up and travel! She's only sixty-five--and sound as a nut."

"Has she money enough?" asked the other.

"My, yes! Money to burn! She has her annuity that her father left her, and a big insurance--and house rents. She must have all of three thousand a year."

"And doesn't she pay board here?"

"Pay board! Not she. She wouldn't pay anything so long as she has a relative to live on. She's saved all her life. But nobody'll get any good of it till she's dead."

This talk stopped when their hostess entered, changing to more general themes; but the interest revived when men's voices took up the tale.

"Yes--wants her will made again. Always making and unmaking and remaking. Harmless amusement, I suppose."

"She wastes good money on both of us--and I tell her so. But one can't be expected to absolutely refuse a patient."

"Or a client!"

"No. I suppose not."

"She's not really ill then?"

"Bless you, Ruthven, I don't know a sounder old woman anywhere. All she needs is a change--and to think of something besides herself! I tell her that, too--and she says I'm so eccentric."

"Why in all decency don't her son do her doctoring?"

"I suppose he's too frank--and not quite able to speak his mind. He's a fine fellow. That paper of his will be a great feature of our convention. Shame he can't go."

"Why can't he? Can't afford it?"

"That's just it. You see the old lady don't put up--not a cent--and he has all he can do to keep the boys in college." And their conversation stopped, and Grandma heard her own voice--inviting the doctor up to her room--and making another appointment for the lawyer.

Then it was the young minister, a cheerful, brawny youth, whom she had once described as a "Godless upstart!"

He appeared to be comforting young Mrs. Grey, and commending her. "You are doing wonders," he said, as their voices came into hearing, "and not letting your right hand know it, either."

"You make far too much of it, Mr. Eagerson," the soft voice answered, "I am so happy in my children--my home--my husband. This is the only trouble--I do not complain."

"I know you don't complain, Mrs. Grey, but I want you to know that you're appreciated! 'It is better to dwell in a corner of the housetop, than with a woman in a wide house'--especially if she's your mother-in-law."

"I won't allow you to speak so--if you are my minister!" said young Mrs. Grey with spirit; and the talk changed to church matters, where the little lady offered to help with time and service, and regretted that she had no money to give.

There was a silence, save for small confused noises of a day time household; distant sounds of doors and dishes; and then in a sad, confidential voice--"Why is Grandma so horrid? And why do I have to love her? How can you love people you don't, Lady Isobel?"

Grandma was really fond of quiet little Josephine, even if she did sometimes snub her as a matter of principle. She lay and listened to these strictly private remarks, and meditated upon them after they had ceased. It was a large dose, an omnibus dose, and took some time to assimilate; but the old lady had really a mind of her own, though much of it was uninhabited, and this generous burst of light set it to working.

She said nothing to anyone, but seemed to use her eyes and ears with more attention than previously, and allowed her grand-daughter's small efforts toward affection with new receptiveness. She had one talk with her daughter-in-law which left that little woman wet-eyed and smiling with pleasure, though she could not tell about it--that was requisite.

But the family in general heard nothing of any change of heart till breakfast time on Christmas morning. They sat enjoying that pleasant meal, in the usual respite before the old lady appeared, when Sarah came in with a bunch of notes and laid one at each plate, with an air of great importance.

"She said I was to leave 'em till you was all here--and here they are!" said Sarah, smiling mysteriously, "and that I was to say nothing--and I haven't!" And the red-cheeked girl folded her arms and waited--as interested as anybody.

Uncle Harry opened his first. "I bet it's a tract!" said he. But he blushed to the roots of his thick brown hair as he took out, not a tract, but a check.

"A Christmas present to my son-in-law-by-marriage; to be spent on the improvement of talking machines--if that is necessary!"

"Why bless her heart!" said he, "I call that pretty handsome, and I'll tell her so!"

Papa opened his.

"For your Convention trip, dear son," said this one, "and for a new dress suit--and a new suit case, and a new overcoat--a nice one. With Mother's love."

It was a large check, this one. Papa sat quite silent and looked at his wife. She went around the table and hugged him--she had to.

"You've got one, too, Louise," said he--and she opened it.

"For my dear daughter Louise; this--to be spent on other people; and this" (this was much bigger) "to be inexorably spent on herself--every cent of it! On her own special needs and pleasures--if she can think of any!"

Louise was simply crying--and little Josephine ran to comfort her.

"Hold on Kiddie--you haven't opened yours," said Uncle Harry; and they all eagerly waited while the child carefully opened her envelope with a clean knife, and read out solemnly and slowly, "For my darling Grand-child Josephine, to be spent by herself, for herself, with Mama's advice and assistance; and in particular to provide for her party!"

She turned over the stiff little piece of paper--hardly understanding.

"It's a check, dear," said Papa. "It's the same as money. Parties cost money, and Grandma has made you a Christmas present of your party."

The little girl's eyes grew big with joy.

"Can I?--Is there really--a party?"

"There is really a party--for my little daughter, this afternoon at four!"

"O where is Grandma!" cried the child--"I want to hug her!"

They all rose up hurriedly, but Sarah came forward from her scant pretense of retirement, with another note for Dr. Grey.

"I was to give you this last of all," she said, with an air of one fulfilling grave diplomatic responsibility.

"My dear ones," ran the note, "I have gathered from my family and friends, and from professional and spiritual advisers the idea that change is often beneficial. With this in mind I have given myself a Christmas present of a Cook's Tour around the world--and am gone. A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!"

She was gone.

Sarah admitted complicity.

"Sure she would have no one know a thing--not a word!" said Sarah. "And she gave us something handsome to help her! And she's got that young widder Johnson for a companion--and they went off last night on the sleeper for New York!"

The gratitude of the family had to be spent in loving letters, and in great plans of what they would do to make Grandma happy when she came back.

No one felt more grateful than little loving Josephine, whose dearest wishes were all fulfilled. When she remembered it she went very quietly, when all were busy somewhere else, climbed up on the step ladder, and took down the forgotten phonograph from the top of the wardrobe.

"Dear Grandma!" she said. "I do hope she liked it!"

CHRISTMAS LOVE

When the Writer or the Preacher or one who chances to be both considers a Christmas sermon, a Christmas story, what is the idea that comes uppermost?

Love, of course. Not sex-love: that's for every day. Not Mother-love: that's always and always. Not any of the minor brands of admiring devotion, gratitude, sympathy, friendship, attraction of any sort. No. When we say "Love" at Christmas time we mean Love, the Spirit of Life.

About once a year we give thought to it. About once a year we seek to express it; and, pitiful and limited though that expression be, its forms are right.

These main forms of Christmas expressions are two-fold: the Spirit of Joy, of Celebration, of High Festival--the highest of all; and the Spirit of Giving. These are found wherever Christmas is kept, and make it, as it should be, the glory of the year. In joy and in giving we are most absolutely in line with the mainspring of the Universe: unmeasured happiness--happiness that cannot be quenched--cannot be kept to ourselves. What must run over and pour forth on other people: that is real Love, Christmas Love--and that, of course, finds physical expression in gay festivities and showering gifts.

Light, color, music--all that is sweet and gay and comforting; games, dances and performances that show the happy heart; and always the overflow--giving, giving, giving. That is the Spirit of Life.

It is the children's festival because children are more in line with the Life Spirit than weazened old folk: the child has the passionate thirst for joy which marks his high parentage.

Whatever else is true about the Central Power of the Universe, this is true: it is power. And it pours forth in Radiant Energy. All "inanimate nature," so called, expresses this Power, each form after its kind; and all animate nature, crowned with consciousness, not only expresses it, but feels it,--which is called "Living."

We human beings are the highest, finest, subtlest instrument on this planet to receive and to transmit these waves of pouring Power. When we feel it most we call it Happiness. In two ways it reaches our consciousness, as it comes in and as it goes out, via the sensory and motor nerves. The joy of receiving power is great: "stimulus" we call it. It comes to us along the avenues of sense and thrills us with increased well being. But this kind of pleasure is sadly limited by those sense nerves of ours. We are but a little tea-cup: we cannot hold much. The Music of the Spheres might pour round us; the light of a thousand suns, the sweetness of piled banks of flowers, and all honey and sugar and rich food: every sense can be fed to its little limit only--and there the Happiness stops.

We can only feel so much--coming in. But there seems to be no limit to the joy we feel when Power goes out through us. It seems so self-evident, so needless, to say "It is more blessed to give than to receive." Why of course it is: any child even knows that.

True, a child, having a fresh, unsated sensorium, can receive with more vivid pleasure than an adult--for a while. But it is easily over-tired, easily over-fed with sensation, easily bored and weary with receiving.

Not with giving! Every child delights to let out the Power which is in him--in her; delights to make and delights to give. Therefore, to children is this their festival: the busy weeks of happiness in making gifts, the swelling, glowing pride of giving them!

It's all right as far as it goes, but why, when such a thing is such transcendent splendid blessedness, why only once a year? Why should this beautiful experience in which we not only remember the birth of the man who taught the world most of love but even try to practise what He preached--why should it be limited to a mere memorial of His birthday, plastered over the remnants of ancient festivals of the return of the Sun God--the Goodness of the Earth Mother?

If Christmas is good, why not more of it? Then we smile, wryly, and say, "Why, of course, we couldn't. The rest of life isn't like that--and we have to live, you see."

Ah, that is where we are wrong--utterly wrong. The rest of life is like that. That is life--Loving and Giving.

"Tut! Tut!" says the Practical Man. "That's emotional nonsense. That's womanish." Two-thirds right, my practical friend. It is not nonsense, but it is "emotional" and it is "womanish."

Emotion is consciousness under pressure. When we feel Power, we call it emotion. Emotions vary: some are helpful and some hateful, according to the nature of the instrument; but not to be emotional at all is not to be alive. Those who spend their lives lit by a blaze of emotion, warmed by a deep, slow-burning fire of emotion, pouring forth that emotion in great works--we call Geniuses. Genius is simply more Power.

As to being womanish: that word is no longer a term of reproach or belittlement. To be womanish is to be human, and we may now turn round and pitifully dismiss much old world folly and passion as merely "mannish." To be womanish--and practical--let us repeat, Life is Loving and Giving. When we realize this, intelligently and completely, we shall have a "continuous performance" of Christmases and a higher level of happiness the year round, varied by greater heights. At present the natural flood of Life Force, pouring through us in unbounded creative energy, resulting in the myriad forms of human achievement and manufacture, is sadly thwarted in its output by lingering remains of our old period.

For a long time we lived by getting: to hunt, to catch, to kill, to eat was all we knew: no loving or giving there save as the mother fulfilled the law. But since our Humaness began, since all our thousand powers and talents grew for mutual service, since we learned to do things for each other--to make things for each other, to give things to each other--then grew in us that rising tide of Power which lives out in expression.

In spite of our old world perverseness, that Power pours on. Though we scorn the gifts of those who make the comforts of life for us, though we despise their service and so cruelly use them as to greatly thwart their love--still we are fed and housed and clothed and carried by the love and service of our kind, the daily, hourly gifts of those who work.

"They are not gifts," cries the Practical Man. "They are paid for--every bit of 'em." Yes, Brother. And how paid for? Paid how much? What scant reward, what meagre living, what miserable houses, what stinted food, what limited education, and what poisoned pleasures do we pay to those who make every necessity, comfort, convenience and luxury for us!

Pay indeed! If a man "saves your life" once, and you give him twenty cents an hour for his exertions in your behalf--have you paid him? By the life-long labor of the human race--all those dead workers who built up the structure of our present world, all those living workers who keep the wheels revolving now--by these labors we live, all of us, all the time.

Pay? Pay for daily--hourly--maintenance, protection, food, shelter, safety, comfort? Pay for being kept alive?

Life is giving--Loving and Giving. You can't pay for it. You don't pay for it. But this you do: you hinder it, by your paying. This pitiful trickle of measurement, this ticking and pricing and holding back the world's flood of outpouring energy by our wretched turnstiles--this is what keeps us poor!

We need to let loose the Power that is in us. We need to Love more and Give more--a plain truth, Jesus taught some centuries ago, largely in vain. We have but to let out the love that is in us: there is no limit to its flood.

To so love every child that is born on earth as to provide that child with all that it needs for richest growth, for full appreciation of the splendor of human life--of conscious citizenship! Children so reared will have a thousandfold more to give, and a thousandfold greater joy in giving. Then life will roll out through our glad hearts and willing hands as the sun's light pours abroad--only that we are conscious, we feel this light, this heat, this radiant energy. We call it--love.

WHAT DIANTHA DID

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XIV. AND HEAVEN BESIDE

They were married while the flowers were knee-deep over the sunny slopes and mesas, and the canyons gulfs of color and fragrance, and went for their first moon together to a far high mountain valley hidden among wooded peaks, with a clear lake for its central jewel.

A month of heaven; while wave on wave of perfect rest and world-forgetting oblivion rolled over both their hearts.

They swam together in the dawn-flushed lake, seeing the morning mists float up from the silver surface, breaking the still reflection of thick trees and rosy clouds, rejoicing in the level shafts of forest filtered sunlight. They played and ran like children, rejoiced over their picnic meals; lay flat among the crowding flowers and slept under the tender starlight.

"I don't see," said her lover, "but that my strenuous Amazon is just as much a woman as--as any woman!"

"Who ever said I wasn't?" quoth Diantha demurely.

A month of perfect happiness. It was so short it seemed but a moment; so long in its rich perfection that they both agreed if life brought no further joy this was Enough.

Then they came down from the mountains and began living.

*

Day service is not so easily arranged on a ranch some miles from town. They tried it for a while, the new runabout car bringing out a girl in the morning early, and taking Diantha in to her office.

But motor cars are not infallible; and if it met with any accident there was delay at both ends, and more or less friction.

Then Diantha engaged a first-class Oriental gentleman, well recommended by the "vegetable Chinaman," on their own place. This was extremely satisfactory; he did the work well, and was in all ways reliable; but there arose in the town a current of malicious criticism and protest--that she "did not live up to her principles."

To this she paid no attention; her work was now too well planted, too increasingly prosperous to be weakened by small sneers.

Her mother, growing plumper now, thriving continuously in her new lines of work, kept the hotel under her immediate management, and did bookkeeping for the whole concern. New Union Home ran itself, and articles were written about it in magazines; so that here and there in other cities similar clubs were started, with varying success. The restaurant was increasingly popular; Diantha's cooks were highly skilled and handsomely paid, and from the cheap lunch to the expensive banquet they gave satisfaction.

But the "c. f. d." was the darling of her heart, and it prospered exceedingly. "There is no advertisement like a pleased customer," and her pleased customers grew in numbers and in enthusiasm. Family after family learned to prize the cleanliness and quiet, the odorlessness and flylessness of a home without a kitchen, and their questioning guests were converted by the excellent of the meals.

Critical women learned at last that a competent cook can really produce better food than an incompetent one; albeit without the sanctity of the home.

"Sanctity of your bootstraps!" protested one irascible gentleman. "Such talk is all nonsense! I don't want sacred meals--I want good ones--and I'm getting them, at last!"

"We don't brag about 'home brewing' any more," said another, "or 'home tailoring,' or 'home shoemaking.' Why all this talk about 'home cooking'?"

What pleased the men most was not only the good food, but its clock-work regularity; and not only the reduced bills but the increased health and happiness of their wives. Domestic bliss increased in Orchardina, and the doctors were more rigidly confined to the patronage of tourists.

Ross Warden did his best. Under the merciless friendliness of Mr. Thaddler he had been brought to see that Diantha had a right to do this if she would, and that he had no right to prevent her; but he did not like it any the better.

When she rolled away in her little car in the bright, sweet mornings, a light went out of the day for him. He wanted her there, in the home--his home--his wife--even when he was not in it himself. And in this particular case it was harder than for most men, because he was in the house a good deal, in his study, with no better company than a polite Chinaman some distance off.

It was by no means easy for Diantha, either. To leave him tugged at her heart-strings, as it did at his; and if he had to struggle with inherited feelings and acquired traditions, still more was she beset with an unexpected uprising of sentiments and desires she had never dreamed of feeling.

With marriage, love, happiness came an overwhelming instinct of service--personal service. She wanted to wait on him, loved to do it; regarded Wang Fu with positive jealousy when he brought in the coffee and Ross praised it. She had a sense of treason, of neglected duty, as she left the flower-crowned cottage, day by day.

But she left it, she plunged into her work, she schooled herself religiously.

"Shame on you!" she berated herself. "Now--now that you've got everything on earth--to weaken! You could stand unhappiness; can't you stand happiness?" And she strove with herself; and kept on with her work.

After all, the happiness was presently diluted by the pressure of this blank wall between them. She came home, eager, loving, delighted to be with him again. He received her with no complaint or criticism, but always an unspoken, perhaps imagined, sense of protest. She was full of loving enthusiasm about his work, and he would dilate upon his harassed guinea-pigs and their development with high satisfaction.

But he never could bring himself to ask about her labors with any genuine approval; she was keenly sensitive to his dislike for the subject, and so it was ignored between them, or treated by him in a vein of humor with which he strove to cover his real feeling.

When, before many months were over, the crowning triumph of her effort revealed itself, her joy and pride held this bitter drop--he did not sympathize--did not approve. Still, it was a great glory.

The New York Company announced the completion of their work and the Hotel del las Casas was opened to public inspection. "House of the Houses! That's a fine name!" said some disparagingly; but, at any rate, it seemed appropriate. The big estate was one rich garden, more picturesque, more dreamily beautiful, than the American commercial mind was usually able to compass, even when possessed of millions. The hotel of itself was a pleasure palace--wholly unostentatious, full of gaiety and charm, offering lovely chambers for guests and residents, and every opportunity for healthful amusement. There was the rare luxury of a big swimming-pool; there were billiard rooms, card rooms, reading rooms, lounging rooms and dancing rooms of satisfying extent.

Outside there were tennis-courts, badminton, roque, even croquet; and the wide roof was a garden of Babylon, a Court of the Stars, with views of purple mountains, fair, wide valley and far-flashing rim of sea. Around it, each in its own hedged garden, nestled "Las Casas"--the Houses--twenty in number, with winding shaded paths, groups of rare trees, a wilderness of flowers, between and about them. In one corner was a playground for children--a wall around this, that they might shout in freedom; and the nursery thereby gave every provision for the happiness and safety of the little ones.

The people poured along the winding walls, entered the pretty cottages, were much impressed by a little flock of well-floored tents in another corner, but came back with Ohs! and Ahs! of delight to the large building in the Avenue.

Diantha went all over the place, inch by inch, her eyes widening with admiration; Mr. and Mrs. Porne and Mrs. Weatherstone with her. She enjoyed the serene, well-planned beauty of the whole; approved heartily of the cottages, each one a little different, each charming in its quiet privacy, admired the plentiful arrangements for pleasure and gay association; but her professional soul blazed with enthusiasm over the great kitchens, clean as a hospital, glittering in glass and copper and cool tiling, with the swift, sure electric stove.

The fuel all went into a small, solidly built power house, and came out in light and heat and force for the whole square.

Diantha sighed in absolute appreciation.

"Fine, isn't it?" said Mr. Porne.

"How do you like the architecture?" asked Mrs. Porne.

"What do you think of my investment?" said Mrs. Weatherstone. Diantha stopped in her tracks and looked from one to the other of them.

"Fact. I control the stock--I'm president of the Hotel del las Casas Company. Our friends here have stock in it, too, and more that you don't know. We think it's going to be a paying concern. But if you can make it go, my dear, as I think you will, you can buy us all out and own the whole outfit!"

It took some time to explain all this, but the facts were visible enough.

"Nothing remarkable at all," said Mrs. Weatherstone. "Here's Astor with three big hotels on his hands--why shouldn't I have one to play with? And I've got to employ somebody to manage it!"

*

Within a year of her marriage Diantha was at the head of this pleasing Centre of Housekeeping. She kept the hotel itself so that it was a joy to all its patrons; she kept the little houses homes of pure delight for those who were so fortunate as to hold them; and she kept up her "c. f. d." business till it grew so large she had to have quite a fleet of delivery wagons.

Orchardina basked and prospered; its citizens found their homes happier and less expensive than ever before, and its citizenesses began to wake up and to do things worth while.

*

Two years, and there was a small Ross Warden born.

She loved it, nursed it, and ran her business at long range for some six months. But then she brought nurse and child to the hotel with her, placed them in the cool, airy nursery in the garden, and varied her busy day with still hours by herself--the baby in her arms.

Back they came together before supper, and found unbroken joy and peace in the quiet of home; but always in the background was the current of Ross' unspoken disapproval.

Three years, four years.

There were three babies now; Diantha was a splendid woman of thirty, handsome and strong, pre-eminently successful--and yet, there were times when she found it in her heart to envy the most ordinary people who loved and quarreled and made up in the little outlying ranch houses along the road; they had nothing between them, at least.

Meantime in the friendly opportunities of Orchardina society, added to by the unexampled possibilities of Las Casas (and they did not scorn this hotel nor Diantha's position in it), the three older Miss Wardens had married. Two of them preferred "the good old way," but one tried the "d. s." and the "c. f. d." and liked them well.

Dora amazed and displeased her family, as soon as she was of age, by frankly going over to Diantha's side and learning bookkeeping. She became an excellent accountant and bade fair to become an expert manager soon.

Ross had prospered in his work. It may be that the element of dissatisfaction in his married life spurred him on, while the unusual opportunities of his ranch allowed free effort. He had always held that the "non-transmissability of acquired traits" was not established by any number of curtailed mice or crop-eared rats. "A mutilation is not an acquired trait," he protested. "An acquired trait is one gained by exercise; it modifies the whole organism. It must have an effect on the race. We expect the sons of a line of soldiers to inherit their fathers' courage--perhaps his habit of obedience--but not his wooden leg."

To establish his views he selected from a fine family of guinea-pigs two pair; set the one, Pair A, in conditions of ordinary guinea-pig bliss, and subjected the other, Pair B, to a course of discipline. They were trained to run. They, and their descendants after them, pair following on pair; first with slow-turning wheels as in squirrel cages, the wheel inexorably going, machine-driven, and the luckless little gluttons having to move on, for gradually increasing periods of time, at gradually increasing speeds. Pair A and their progeny were sheltered and fed, but the rod was spared; Pair B were as the guests at "Muldoon's"--they had to exercise. With scientific patience and ingenuity, he devised mechanical surroundings which made them jump increasing spaces, which made them run always a little faster and a little farther; and he kept a record as carefully as if these little sheds were racing stables for a king.

Several centuries of guinea-pig time went by; generation after generation of healthy guinea-pigs passed under his modifying hands; and after some five years he had in one small yard a fine group of the descendants of his gall-fed pair, and in another the offspring of the trained ones; nimble, swift, as different from the first as the razor-backed pig of the forest from the fatted porkers in the sty. He set them to race--the young untrained specimens of these distant cousins--and the hare ran away from the tortoise completely.

Great zoologists and biologists came to see him, studied, fingered, poked, and examined the records; argued and disbelieved--and saw them run.

"It is natural selection," they said. "It profited them to run."

"Not at all," said he. "They were fed and cared for alike, with no gain from running."

"It was artificial selection," they said. "You picked out the speediest for your training."

"Not at all," said he. "I took always any healthy pair from the trained parents and from the untrained ones--quite late in life, you understand, as guinea-pigs go."

Anyhow, there were the pigs; and he took little specialized piglets scarce weaned, and pitted them against piglets of the untrained lot--and they outran them in a race for "Mama." Wherefore Mr. Ross Warden found himself famous of a sudden; and all over the scientific world the Wiesmanian controversy raged anew. He was invited to deliver a lecture before some most learned societies abroad, and in several important centers at home, and went, rejoicing.

Diantha was glad for him from the bottom of her heart, and proud of him through and through. She thoroughly appreciated his sturdy opposition to such a weight of authority; his long patience, his careful, steady work. She was left in full swing with her big business, busy and successful, honored and liked by all the town--practically--and quite independent of the small fraction which still disapproved. Some people always will. She was happy, too, in her babies--very happy.

The Hotel del las Casas was a triumph.

Diantha owned it now, and Mrs. Weatherstone built others, in other places, at a large profit.

Mrs. Warden went to live with Cora in the town. Cora had more time to entertain her--as she was the one who profited by her sister-in-law's general services.

Diantha sat in friendly talk with Mrs. Weatherstone one quiet day, and admitted that she had no cause for complaint.

"And yet--?" said her friend.

Young Mrs. Warden smiled. "There's no keeping anything from you, is there? Yes--you're right. I'm not quite satisfied. I suppose I ought not to care--but you see, I love him so! I want him to approve of me!--not just put up with it, and bear it! I want him to feel with me--to care. It is awful to know that all this big life of mine is just a mistake to him--that he condemns it in his heart."

"But you knew this from the beginning, my dear, didn't you?"

"Yes--I knew it--but it is different now. You know when you are married--"

Mrs. Weatherstone looked far away through the wide window. "I do know," she said.

Diantha reached a strong hand to clasp her friend's. "I wish I could give it to you," she said. "You have done so much for me! So much! You have poured out your money like water!"

"My money! Well I like that!" said Mrs. Weatherstone. "I have taken my money out of five and seven per cent investments, and put it into ten per cent ones, that's all. Shall I never make you realize that I am a richer woman because of you, Diantha Bell Warden! So don't try to be grateful--I won't have it! Your work has paid remember--paid me as well as you; and lots of other folks beside. You know there are eighteen good imitations of Union House running now, in different cities, and three 'Las Casas!' all succeeding--and the papers are talking about the dangers of a Cooked Food Trust!"

They were friends old and tried, and happy in mutual affection. Diantha had many now, though none quite so dear. Her parents were contented--her brother and sister doing well--her children throve and grew and found Mama a joy they never had enough of.

Yet still in her heart of hearts she was not wholly happy.

*

Then one night came by the last mail, a thick letter from Ross--thicker than usual. She opened it in her room alone, their room--to which they had come so joyously five years ago.

He told her of his journeying, his lectures, his controversies and triumphs; rather briefly--and then:

"My darling, I have learned something at last, on my travels, which will interest you, I fancy, more than the potential speed of all the guinea-pigs in the world, and its transmissability.

"From what I hear about you in foreign lands; from what I read about you wherever I go; and, even more, from what I see, as a visitor, in many families; I have at last begun to grasp the nature and importance of your work.

"As a man of science I must accept any truth when it is once clearly seen; and, though I've been a long time about it, I do see at last what brave, strong, valuable work you have been doing for the world. Doing it scientifically, too. Your figures are quoted, your records studied, your example followed. You have established certain truths in the business of living which are of importance to the race. As a student I recognize and appreciate your work. As man to man I'm proud of you--tremendously proud of you. As your husband! Ah! my love! I am coming back to you--coming soon, coming with my Whole Heart, Yours! Just wait, My Darling, till I get back to you!

"Your Lover and Husband."

Diantha held the letter close, with hands that shook a little. She kissed it--kissed it hard, over and over--not improving its appearance as a piece of polite correspondence.

Then she gave way to an overmastering burst of feeling, and knelt down by the wide bed, burying her face there, the letter still held fast. It was a funny prayer, if any human ear had heard it.

"Thank you!" was all she said, with long, deep sobbing sighs between. "Thank you!--O--thank you!"

The End

OUR OVERWORKED INSTINCTS

Instinct is a good thing in its place. We, in common with other animals, have instincts, especially in our racial youth; but as reason waxes, instinct wanes. At present, thanks to the development of the brain and even the beginnings of education, we have few instincts left. What we have, we work pretty hard.

Among both men and women, the most primal instincts are still deified. The instinct of self-preservation, which in every species is promptly subordinated to race preservation, we solemnly hail as "Nature's First Law!" It may be first, as creeping comes before walking, but is no more honorable for that!

Then there is the sex instinct, a good second to this first, an ancient, useful and generally pleasant incentive to action; but we, in our simplicity, have set up this contributive impulse as the Lord of Life. "The Life Force," we call it; when it is only one form of expression for the Life Force, and a limited one.

Self-preservation does very well to keep the cards on the table, and race preservation goes on giving us a new deal, but neither of them alone, nor both of them together, is The Game.

What we are really here for is Growth, Improvement, Progress--and we have a deep and UNIVERSAL instinct towards that, too; but little is said about it! It is our primitive animal instincts we are so proud of: our social instincts we scarcely recognize.

Men have the instinct of combat, a very useful thing in its place. But in their exclusive preoccupation of being men, they have assumed this masculine proclivity to be something of universal importance and solemnly assure us that "Life is a Struggle."

Life is a Growth, a Progress, a Journey, if you will. It may be interrupted by having.to stop and struggle, but the struggling is at its best only incidental. Nature, seeking always the line of least resistance, avoids opposition when possible: the masculine instinct of combat courts it, and he idealizes his own instincts.

So also the woman. She has her one, great original maternal instinct; and both man and woman worship it. They assume something intrinsically holy in the feelings of a mother, and something superlatively efficacious in her ministrations. Motherhood is a beautiful and useful institution, but it is not enough to take right care of children.

Every furry animal has a mother: every naked savage has a mother: every ignorant peasant has a mother; and every mother has a compelling instinct which causes her to love and protect her young. But furry animal, naked savage, ignorant peasant they remain for all of their mothers.

Evolution needs more than mothers! It is not enough to live, not enough to reproduce one's kind: we have to change, progress, improve--and instinct is no help here. Instinct is nothing but inherited habit. It always dates a long way behind us. It is never any guide in new conditions or a incentive to betterment. Instinct holds us in chains to the past; or it would if it could.

In human life--especially in modern human life--conditions change so rapidly that we have scant time to form individual habits, much less develop instincts. What we have left are very old ones, prehuman or savage in origin and mostly applying to physical relations. Suppose we recognize these early assistants, regard them with respect as once useful, and lay them where they belong--on the shelf.

Instinct is no guide to proper food to-day: we have to use our brains and learn what is right to eat. It is no guide to proper clothing--as witness the unhealthy, uncomfortable, unbeautiful garments we wear. It is no guide to success in any kind of human industry, business, science or art. These things have to be learned: they do not come "by instinct." It is no suitable guardian of our behavior, either in public or private: all good manners and established government are achieved at considerable expense to "our natural instinct." And assuredly our instincts are not reliable as leaders in education, religion or morality.

Why then, seeing the inadequacy of instinct in all these lines, are we so sure of its infallible guidance in the care of babies? A modern human mother has far less instinct to guide her than her arboreal ancestors: the real advantage her babies profit by are obtained through the development of the father--in reason, in knowledge, in skill, in the prosperity and progress of the world he makes.

He prepares for his children a Home, a School, a Church, a Government, a Nation: he provides them all manufactured articles--each last and least dish, utensil, piece of furniture, tool, weapon, safeguard, convenience, ship, bridge, plaything, jewel. He makes the world.

Into this world of reason, knowledge, skill, training and experience comes the baby, richer in each generation by a new and improved father. He is born and cherished, however, by the same kind of mother, bringing to her tremendous task no new tool worthy of the time, but merely the same old dwindling, overworked "maternal instinct."

The children of today need mothers of today, and they must begin to supplement their primitive impulse by the very fullest, highest, richest powers of the human intellect and the human heart--the real human heart, which cannot be satisfied until every child on earth is more than mothered.

LOVE'S HIGHEST

Love came on earth, woke, laughed and began his dominion. Strong? Just the Force of Creation. Glad? Merely Joy of Existence. Love cast about for Expression--for work, which is Love in Expression, And the fluctuant tissues of life began burgeoning, blooming and fruiting. Up through dim ages laughed Love, flowing through life like a fountain, Pouring new forms and yet newer, filling each form with new passion, Playing with lives like a juggler, life after life, never dropping; Till a new form was developed: Humanity came: it was daylight.

Love laughed aloud, rose in splendor, offered up hymns of thanksgiving. "Now I have room for expression! Here is a vehicle worthy! Life that is lovelier far than all these poor blossoms and creatures; Life that can grow on forever, unlimited, changeful, immortal. Here I can riot and run through a thousand warm hearts in a moment, I can flash into glories of art! I can flow into marvels of music! I can stand in Cathedrals and Towers, and sit splendid, serene, in fair cities! These exquisite, limitless beings shall radiate love from their faces, Shall uphold it with emulous arms, and scatter it wide with their fingers, Shall build me, through ages and ages, new forms and new fields of expression! I have worked through the mosses and grasses till the world was all sweetened with roses, Warm-clothed with the soft-spreading forests, and fed with ripe wheat and red apples; I have worked with fur-children and feathered, till they knew the delights of my kingdom; I have shown, thousand-fold, throughout Nature, my Masterpiece--Glory--the Mother! Now love shall pour like the sunlight, shall cover the earth like the ocean, Love encompassing all, as the air does, not only in fragrance and color, Not only in Nature and Mothers, but now, in this Crown of Creation-- Latest fruit of the Tree Everlasting, this myriad-featured fulfillment-- With unlimited force I shall fill them, in unnumbered new voices be uttered, By millions and millions and millions they shall pour out their love in their labor, And the millions shall love one another.

THE PERMANENT CHILD

I sat watching my baby, my little son, who was asleep--a year old child, fair and strong; and it did not seem a day since he was a tiny red creature, helpless and faintly groping.

As I looked and loved, I thought how it would not seem another day till he was a sturdy boy--a tall youth--a man grown; and I should lose my baby forever!

Then I thought of all the other mothers whose babies were flying from them by day and night--growing up, pushing away; of how we loved our babies and could not keep them even if we would. And I seemed to see the million babies of mankind all over the earth--black and white and yellow and brown, well-loved little ones of a million mothers--breaking into life like bubbles, blossoming, sprouting, coming into being everywhere, every hour, every minute, every second--this budding glory of babyhood--all over the earth: human life springing up in babies, like the Spring grass. And they fled as fast as they came. The days flew by--the weeks, the months, the years--and the babies changes and grew like a transformation scene; taking new shape, new size, new power; disappearing as I watched them, and becoming boys and girls, men and women.

But while I watched this millionfold swift flutter of unceasing change, suddenly something happened to it. The million and million all seemed to coalesce and become one--one little child; and the swift flutter of change grew vague and faint around it, so that although there was a soft uncertainty around the child and a half-visible smoke of growing forms arising from it, yet that small, dimpled shape remained, a little uncertain in outline as in a composite photograph, but steady and changeless as to the eyes--the clear, deep, searching eyes of a child.

My whole heart yearned to him: something rose and swelled within me, deeper, wider, stronger than anything I had ever felt before. I loved him as I had never loved my own, as I had never known I could love--and suddenly I felt that I too had changed, and that I was now not only a mother but THE MOTHER; and I saw what it was I loved: it was THE CHILD. And I longed to feed and guard and shelter and serve that Child as might a million mothers made into one, with all the sweet helplessness, all the glorious promise of a million children made one for her to love.

Then as I watched those deep child eyes: as my heart swelled and ached with that great love: I saw--I felt--I knew--what had been borne, and still was borne, by this; The Child in human history. I saw the savage mother and the savage father caring for the children the best they knew, with all the torture and distortion, all the cruel initiations, all the black, blind superstitions of those old times, to the crowning horror of infant sacrifice when the child went through the fire to Moloch--for his parents' sins!--the living, loving, helpless child, sacrificed by his parents. I saw the bent skull of the Flathead Indian child, the crippled feet of the Chinese girl child, the age-long, hideous life and death of the child-wife and the child-widow of Hindoostan. I saw The Child in Sparta, and The Child in Rome, The Child in the Dark Ages, The Child scourged, imprisoned, starved, its mind filled with all manner of black falsehoods, its body misunderstood, and maltreated; and my heart ached, and I cried out, "Were there no Mothers for those children?"

And then I saw behind The Child, The Mother visible--the vague, composite, mighty form of a million mothers made as one--but her heart was my heart to feel and know.

I said to her--aching for her yet full of awful blame--"Could you not have saved The Child from this?"

And she wrung her hands. "I loved my child," she said.

"Loved? Loved?" I cried. "Could Love allow all this? Could Love not guard and feed, could Love not teach and save?"

"Alas, no!" she said. "I gave Love: it was all I had. I had neither Knowledge nor Freedom, nor Wisdom, nor Power: and I could not guard nor feed nor teach nor save. But I could love and I could serve--and I could suffer."

And the eyes of The Child, steady, clear, deep as all Time, were on me; and I felt his pain.

Then the moving screen of The Past was swept away and The Present spread and widened before me 'till I saw the whole wide range of Earth in all its starlit glory and sunlit joy--and everywhere The Child. Also everywhere The Mother--still loving, still serving, still suffering, still without Knowledge or Wisdom or Freedom or Power, still unable to guard or feed or teach or save.

Disease seized upon The Child, disease planted in his bones and blood by his Father while the Mother, blind and helpless, became partner in this Unnatural Crime. Disease preyed upon The Child, disease from ignorance and disease from poverty and disease from pride; and the Doctors strove with the diseases--and they strove also with the Mothers, but in vain.

Poverty preyed upon The Child: he suffered for lack of life's necessities, for decency and comfort, for peace and beauty and cleanliness. And the Fathers strove with Poverty. But the Mothers remained alone--and loved and served and suffered.

Labor preyed upon The Child. Forced Labor, Premature Labor, hard, grinding, destructive Labor such as wastes the tissues of strong men; and The Child went down before it like grass before the scythe, for Childhood is meant for Growth and not for Waste and Toil. The Mind of The Child was dulled, the Body of The Child was stunted and crippled and broken: accidents fell upon him, with the Special Diseases of Labor and Premature Death.

And I cried out to The Mother--that mighty figure I saw dimly there behind The Child--to save The Child. But there replied only the faint, piping voices of a million mothers, isolated and alone, each sorrowing one heart-full for one child--and sorrowing in vain.

"My child is dead!" said one, and wept.

"Mine is a cripple!" said another, and wept.

"Mine is an idiot!" said another, and wept.

"Mine is stunted by the mill work!" said another, and wept.

"Mine is ignorant and grows vicious because of our poverty and the vileness wherein we must live!" said another, and wept.

And I cried to them again, "But you are millions upon millions--and you are Mothers! And you can have today--if you will but take it--Wisdom and Freedom and Knowledge and Power, and you can feed and teach and guard and save. And if you do not, the blood of The Child is on your hands! And The Child is The World--the Whole World--a Baby World--and yours!"

But the great picture faded and fled away. The Child disappeared and left first the flickering flight of a million babies like the leaves of a forest, and then but one, my child, asleep before me. That vague and mighty figure of The Mother disappeared, leaving first the sad-eyed faces of a million mothers--loving, serving and suffering--and then nothing but myself and my child.

But in my heart remained an emptiness that nothing could fill. I caught my baby to my heart--but he was not enough! I had seen and I had loved the Child--the Baby World.

"Oh Child of Mine!" I cried, "I will love you and serve you and I will feed and guard and teach and save--but that is not enough! You are but one, oh Child of Mine, and there are millions and millions! There were--there are--and there will be! It is a stream--a torrent. It is everlasting. Babyhood upon earth continuously, always Babyhood, Human Babyhood--and not yet Motherhood to meet its needs!"

No savage Mother is enough. No slavish Mother is enough. No narrow, selfish Mother is enough. No pitiful offered sacrifice of one Mother's life is enough.

The Child does not need sacrifice. It needs Wisdom and Freedom and Knowledge and Power. It needs Social Motherhood--the conscious, united Mother Love and Mother Care of the Whole World.

THE NEW MOTHERHOOD

I have been reading Ellen Key's "Century of the Child," reviewed in this number, and am moved to add, in connection with that review, a "brief" for the New Motherhood.

Agreeing with almost all of that noble book and with the spirit of the whole of it, I disagree with its persistence in the demand for primitive motherhood--for the entire devotion of each and every mother to her own children--and disagree on the ground that this method is not the best for child service.

Among animals, where one is as good as another, "the mother"--each one of them--can teach her young all that they need to know. Her love, care and instruction are all-sufficient. In early stages of human life, but slightly differentiated, each mother was still able to give to her children all the advantages then known, and to teach them the few arts and crafts necessary of attainment. Still later, when apprenticeship taught trades, the individual mother was still able to give all the stimulus and instruction needed for early race culture--and did so, cheerfully.

But we have now reached a stage of social development when this grade of nurture is no longer sufficient, and no longer found satisfying either by mother or child. On the one hand, women are differentiating as human beings: they are no longer all one thing--females, mothers, and NOTHING ELSE. They are still females, and will remain so; still mothers, and will remain so: but they are also Persons of widely varying sorts, with interests and capacities which fit them for social service in many lines.

On the other hand, our dawning knowledge of child culture leads us to require a standard of ability in this work based on talent, love, natural inclination, long training and wide experience. It is no longer possible for the average woman, differentiated or undifferentiated, to fulfill the work of right training for babies and little children, unassisted. Moreover, the New Motherhood is belying to-day the dogma of the high cultural value of "the home" as a place of education for young children--an old world assumption which Miss Key accepts without question and intensifies.

The standards of the New Motherhood are these:

First: The fullest development of the woman, in all her powers, that she may be the better qualified for her duties of transmission by inheritance.

Second: The fullest education of the woman in all plain truths concerning her great office, and in her absolute duty of right selection--measuring the man who would marry her by his fitness for fatherhood; and holding him to the highest standards in his duty thereto.

Third: Intelligent recognition that child culture is the greatest of arts, that it requires high specialization and life service, and the glad entrance upon this service of those women naturally fitted for it.

Such standards as these recognize the individual woman's place as a human being, her economic independence, her special social service; and hold her a far more valuable mother for such development, able to give her children a richer gift by inheritance than the mothers of the past--all too much in femininity and too little in humanity.

A mother who is something more--who is also a social servant--is a nobler being for a child to love and follow than a mother who is nothing more--except a home servant. She is wiser, stronger, happier, jollier, a better comrade, a more satisfying and contented wife; the whole atmosphere around the child at home is improved by a fully human mother.

On the second demand, that of a full conscious knowledge of the primal conditions of her business, the New Motherhood can cleanse the world of most of its diseases, and incidentally of many of its sins. A girl old enough to marry, is old enough to understand thoroughly what lies before her and why.

Especially why. The real cause and purpose of the marriage relation, parentage, she has but the vaguest ideas about--an ignorance not only absurd but really criminal in the light of its consequences. Women should recognize not only the personal joy of motherhood, which they share with so many female creatures, but the social duty of motherhood and its unmeasured powers. By right motherhood they can build the world: by wrong motherhood they keep the world as it is--weak, diseased, wicked.

The average quality of the human stock today is no personal credit to the Old Motherhood, and will be held a social disgrace by the New. But beyond a right motherhood and a right fatherhood comes the whole field of social parentage, one phase of which we call education. The effect of the environment on the child from birth is what demands the attention of the New Motherhood here: How can we provide right conditions for our children from babyhood? That is the education problem. And here arises the insistent question: "Is a small, isolated building, consecrated as a restaurant and dormitory for one family, the best cultural environment for the babyhood of the race?"

To this question the New Motherhood, slowly and timidly, is beginning to answer, "No." It is becoming more and more visible, in this deeper, higher demand for race improvement, that we might provide better educational conditions for the young of the human species. For the all-engrossing importance of the first years of childhood, it is time that we prepared a place. This is as real a need as the need of a college or school. We need A PLACE FOR BABIES--and our homes arranged in relation to such places.

A specially prepared environment, a special service of those best fitted for the task, the accumulated knowledge which we can never have until such places and such service are given--these are demanded by the New Motherhood.

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 unobserved. 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 accumulate 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 institutions 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 constitute 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 circumstance. 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 competition 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-class varieties, we waste again good ten per cent--and more. Also in the blind, careless assortment 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 sex 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 sex-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 sex-relationship, and act accordingly.

In our time, his human faculties being sufficiently developed, civilized man can look over and around his sex 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 class 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 class 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 competition 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 prostitution, 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 sex 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 superstition 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 noble, 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 assumption 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 classifying 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 titles. Similarly we might have distinctly masculine matters so marked and specified; not assumed 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.

The feminine attitude in life is wholly different. As a female she has merely to be herself and passively attract; neither to compete nor to pursue; as a mother her whole process is one of growth; first the development of the live child within her, and the wonderful nourishment from her own body; and then all the later cultivation to make the child grow; all the watching, teaching, guarding, feeding. In none of this is there either desire, combat, or self-expression. The feminine attitude, as expressed in religion, makes of it a patient practical fulfillment of law; a process of large sure improvements; a limitless comforting love and care.

This full assurance of love and of power; this endless cheerful service; the broad provision for all people; rather than the competitive selection of a few "victors;" is the natural presentation of religious truth from the woman's viewpoint. Her governing principle being growth and not combat; her main tendency being to give and not to get; she more easily and naturally lives and teaches these religious principles. It is for this reason that the broader gentler teaching of the Unitarian and Universalist sects have appealed so especially to women, and that so many women preach in their churches.

This principle of growth, as applied and used in general human life will work to far other ends than those now so painfully visible.

In education, for instance, with neither reward nor punishment as spur or bait; with no competition to rouse effort and animosity, but rather with the feeling of a gardener towards his plants; the teacher will teach and the children learn, in mutual ease and happiness. The law of passive attraction applies here, leading to such ingenuity in presentation as shall arouse the child's interest; and, in the true spirit of promoting growth, each child will have his best and fullest training, without regard to who is "ahead" of him, or her, or who "behind."

We do not sadly measure the cabbage-stalk by the corn-stalk, and praise the corn for getting ahead of the cabbage--nor incite the cabbage to emulate the corn. We nourish both, to its best growth--and are the richer.

That every child on earth shall have right conditions to make the best growth possible to it; that every citizen, from birth to death, shall have a chance to learn all he or she can assimilate, to develop every power that is in them--for the common good--this will be the aim of education, under human management.

In the world of "society" we may look for very radical changes.

With all women full human beings, trained and useful in some form of work; the class of busy idlers, who run about forever "entertaining" and being "entertained" will disappear as utterly as will the prostitute. No woman with real work to do could have the time for such petty amusements; or enjoy them if she did have time. No woman with real work to do, work she loved and was well fitted for, work honored and well-paid, would take up the Unnatural Trade. Genuine relaxation and recreation, all manner of healthful sports and pastimes, beloved of both sexes to-day, will remain, of course; but the set structure of "social functions"--so laughably misnamed--will disappear with the "society women" who make it possible. Once active members of real Society; no woman could go back to "society," any more than a roughrider could return to a hobbyhorse.

New development in dress, wise, comfortable, beautiful, may be confidently expected, as woman becomes more human. No fully human creature could hold up its head under the absurdities our women wear to-day--and have worn for dreary centuries.

So on through all the aspects of life we may look for changes, rapid and far-reaching; but natural and all for good. The improvement is not due to any inherent moral superiority of women; nor to any moral inferiority of men; men at present, as more human, are ahead of women in all distinctly human ways; yet their maleness, as we have shown repeatedly, warps and disfigures their humanness. The woman, being by nature the race-type; and her feminine functions being far more akin to human functions than are those essential to the male; will bring into human life a more normal influence.

Under this more normal influence our present perversities of functions will, of course, tend to disappear. The directly serviceable tendency of women, as shown in every step of their public work, will have small patience with hoary traditions of absurdity. We need but look at long recorded facts to see what women do--or try to do, when they have opportunity. Even in their crippled, smothered past, they have made valiant efforts--not always wise--in charity and philanthropy.

In our own time this is shown through all the length and breadth of our country, by the Woman's Clubs. Little groups of women, drawing together in human relation, at first, perhaps, with no better purpose than to "improve their minds," have grown and spread; combined and federated; and in their great reports, representing hundreds of thousands of women--we find a splendid record of human work. They strive always to improve something, to take care of something, to help and serve and benefit. In "village improvement," in traveling libraries, in lecture courses and exhibitions, in promoting good legislation; in many a line of noble effort our Women's Clubs show what women want to do.

Men do not have to do these things through their clubs, which are mainly for pleasure; they can accomplish what they wish to through regular channels. But the character and direction of the influence of women in human affairs is conclusively established by the things they already do and try to do. In those countries, and in our own states, where they are already full citizens, the legislation introduced and promoted by them is of the same beneficent character. The normal woman is a strong creature, loving and serviceable. The kind of woman men are afraid to entrust with political power, selfish, idle, over-sexed, or ignorant and narrow-minded, is not normal, but is the creature of conditions men have made. We need have no fear of her, for she will disappear with the conditions which created her.

In older days, without knowledge of the natural sciences, we accepted life as static. If, being born in China, we grew up with foot-bound women, we assumed that women were such, and must so remain. Born in India, we accepted the child-wife, the pitiful child-widow, the ecstatic suttee, as natural expressions of womanhood. In each age, each country, we have assumed life to be necessarily what it was--a moveless fact.

All this is giving way fast in our new knowledge of the laws of life. We find that Growth is the eternal law, and that even rocks are slowly changing. Human life is seen to be as dynamic as any other form; and the most certain thing about it is that it will change. In the light of this knowledge we need no longer accept the load of what we call "sin;" the grouped misery of poverty, disease and crime; the cumbrous, inefficatious, wasteful processes of life today, as needful or permanent.

We have but to learn the real elements in humanity; its true powers and natural characteristics; to see wherein we are hampered by the wrong ideas and inherited habits of earlier generations, and break loose from them--then we can safely and swiftly introduce a far nobler grade of living.

Of all crippling hindrances in false ideas, we have none more universally mischievous than this root error about men and women. Given the old androcentric theory, and we have an androcentric culture--the kind we so far know; this short stretch we call "history;" with its proud and pitiful record. We have done wonders of upward growth--for growth is the main law, and may not be wholly resisted. But we have hindered, perverted, temporarily checked that growth, age after age; and again and again has a given nation, far advanced and promising, sunk to ruin, and left another to take up its task of social evolution; repeat its errors--and its failure.

One major cause of the decay of nations is "the social evil"--a thing wholly due to the androcentric culture. Another steady endless check is warfare--due to the same cause. Largest of all is poverty; that spreading disease which grows with our social growth and shows most horribly when and where we are most proud, keeping step, as it were, with private wealth. This too, in large measure, is due to the false ideas on industry and economics, based, like the others mentioned, on a wholly masculine view of life.

By changing our underlying theory in this matter we change all the resultant assumptions; and it is this alteration in our basic theory of life which is being urged.

The scope and purpose of human life is entirely above and beyond the field of sex relationship. Women are human beings, as much as men, by nature; and as women, are even more sympathetic with human processes. To develop human life in its true powers we need full equal citizenship for women.

The great woman's movement and labor movement of to-day are parts of the same pressure, the same world-progress. An economic democracy must rest on a free womanhood; and a free womanhood inevitably leads to an economic democracy.

THE NUN IN THE KITCHEN

When you gaze upon a row of large, beautiful houses; those "residences" to which the citizen "points with pride;" those "homes" which form our ideal of life's fulfillment; bear this in mind:

For every one of those proud, spacious mansions must exist somewhere one or more huts or hovels or crowded city tenements.

Why? To furnish from the daughters of the poor the servants necessary to maintain such a domicile. So long as each woman performed with her own hands the labors of the home; there were physical limits to the size and splendor of that building.

The Palace has its slaves, the Castle its serfs, and the capacious mansions of today owe their splendor--yes, their very existence--to the nun in the kitchen.

"Why nun?" you will ask. Because in entering our service she is required to be poor, chaste and submissive; she gives up home and family; hers is a consecrated life--consecrated to the physical comfort of our families.

We expect our servants to be women as a matter of course: are not women made to serve? As a matter of fact, they are. That is, they are made to serve children, but we make them serve men. And since a married woman must serve her own husband exclusively, we must have unmarried women to serve other women's husbands! Hence the demand for maid service; hence the constant--though futile--effort to prevent our maids from marrying; and hence--this we have hitherto utterly overlooked--the continuous inadequacy of that service.

Thus an endless procession of incompetent young people--necessarily incompetent--is forever passing in and out of our back doors; and our domestic life--its health and happiness--is built upon these shifting sands!

When slaves were owned we had a secure foundation, such as it was; but the present servant is not held by a chain or collar, and as she flits through the kitchen--either slowly or swiftly--the mistress of the mansion is drawn upon, in varying degree, to be a stop-gap.

The family and the home are far too important to our happiness to be left at the mercy of such a fleeting crowd of errant damosels. Affection and obedience they may give--or may not--but competence does not come to ignorant youth. We need, to keep the world well fed and really clean, skilled, specialized, experienced, well-paid workers; and it is none of our business whether they are married or single.

LETTERS FROM SUBSCRIBERS

Being wholly unable to respond individually to the kind and helpful letters, I wish here to personally thank each friend for his or her really important contributions to the establishment of this magazine.

It is the rich response which gives assurance that the work is worth doing, and that it reaches those for whom it is written.

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN.

COMMENT AND REVIEW

THE CENTURY OF THE CHILD

This is the well chosen title for one of the most important books of this Twentieth Century, written by Ellen Key, that great Swedish woman who so intensely loves "the child," a book which has set all Europe thinking, has revolutionized the attitude of mind of thousands of young women, and filled thousands of old ones with vain remorse.

In Germany a very considerable movement among girls of the upper classes, involving a new attitude towards marriage and maternity, has resulted from this one work.

I take a special, personal interest in it because my "Woman and Economics" was held to represent the opposite pole of thought regarding women from that of this book.

What is Miss Key's position?

She holds that "the child" is the most important of personages, that life should all be bent to its service, that the woman's one, all-inclusive purpose is the right bearing and rearing of children. She shows how painfully inadequate is our present provision for child culture, how unprepared is the average mother, how unsuitable the atmosphere of the average home and also of the average school; and makes searching comment on our methods of teaching--especially in teaching religion.

Her chapter on "The Education of the Child" is so important that it has been taken out and made a book by itself.

There is present throughout the book a deep sincerity, a boundless love and sympathy, and evidence of the widest and most searching observation. It throws a relentless light on our cheap and trivial way of facing the gravest issues of life, and should stir every woman's heart to new enthusiasm for the power and glory of motherhood.

The most controversial chapters--to most of us--are the first, in which marriage is discussed, and the one on religion; but to my mind the most important question here, as in all deep study of child culture, is this: Is the mother the best person to supply the entire care for and culture of the child?

Miss Key holds that she is. For that reason she deprecates any education, any profession, any interest or purpose in a woman's life which at all interferes with this primal claim of motherhood. She allows to women the right, as individuals, to forego motherhood and develop their egos as they will; but of women as a class she demands the most entire consecration to this function. Her requirements are soul-absorbing and exclusive of all others. It is not alone in the hours spent with the child that the mother should be at work upon him, but in every waking hour--in her work and rest times--the child should be always on her heart, and she should ceaselessly revolve in her mind the problems of her work as a mother.

The book is a determined protest against the present tendency to specialization among women: it is thrown up like a rampart against the rising tide of independence and free human life demanded by the girls of today--and its strength lies in the deep truth of its attitude towards the child.

It is true that the child is the most important personage. In him--in her--must appear the inherited growth of the world. Unless our children are born better, born stronger, born cleaner and more beautiful than we, the race does not progress. And unless the first years are rightly treated, we lose in wrong education much of the fruit of right breeding.

It is true that we need among women a new, strong, clear "class conscious" motherhood which shall recognize that this deep duty is superior to that of the wife; that it is woman's worst crime to consent to bear children of vicious, diseased fathers; that it is woman's first duty, not merely to reproduce, but to improve the human race.

So far I am in hearty agreement with Ellen Key, and congratulate the world of to-day upon her book. She herself is a "human mother," a "social mother," loving children because they are children not because they are her own. Such love, such high intelligence and insight, such quenchless enthusiasm, are in themselves the proof that wise and beneficial child-service may be given by extra-maternal hearts, heads and hands. Wherein I disagree with this world-helper will be found in a few remarks on "The New Motherhood," elsewhere in these pages.

*

I was asked by a justly indignant subscriber to review Molly Elliot Sewell's amazing performance in the September "Atlantic" called "The Ladies' Battle," and replied at the time that I had not seen the article. Since then I have, and am glad to say a few words on a matter the only importance of which is that The Atlantic Monthly should have committed itself to such a presentation.

There is but one reasonable way to oppose Woman Suffrage today: that is to bring definite proof that it has worked for evil in the states and countries where it has been long in practice. This means not merely to show that evil still exists in these communities, or even that some women take part in it: it must be shown that new or greater evils exist, and that these are proven due to use of the ballot by women. We have yet to wait for such legitimate opposition.

This effort of Miss Sewall's, like all the others, consists almost wholly of prophesies of horror as to the supositious effects of an untried process, and where she does bring definite charges of corrupt behavior in a woman suffrage state, the corruption charged is one common to man suffrage everywhere, and is in no way attributable to the presence of voting women. Her anti-suffrage opinions, quoted from these states, can be overwhelmingly outnumbered by pro-suffrage ones from equally good sources.

She repeatedly alludes to woman suffrage as "a stupendous governmental change," "the overturning of the social order which woman suffrage would work," and other similar alarmist phrases; yet, as a matter of fact, women have voted more than a generation, and are now voting, in various of our states and in foreign countries all over the world without the slightest "governmental change" or "overturning of social order" other than a gradual improvement through legitimate legislation.

The notable essence of this paper lies in two statements, advanced with the utmost solemnity as "basic principles" and "basic reasons," whereas they might both be dismissed by sweeping legal exclusion as "incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial."

First, no electorate has ever existed, or ever can exist, which cannot execute its own laws.

Second, no voter has ever claimed, or ever can claim, maintenance from another voter.

To dismiss the second with an airy wave of the hand, us its merely inquire if it is a fact that in our four woman suffrage states married women have no legal claim to support from their husbands? As a matter of fact, they have. Therefore it is apparent that even now in this country, as in many others, one voter has claimed, does claim, and succeeds in getting, maintenance from another voter. Exit the second "basic reason."

The first one looks quite formidable. It calls up in one's mind a peculiar alignment of the sexes in which all the women voters are segregated and opposed to all the men voters and that this all-woman vote is on some matter which concerns all men, and that all men utterly object to doing what all women want them to do, and that all women could not make all men do what they wanted them to do--against their wills. Perhaps they couldn't. Perhaps they could. There are more ways of coercing them than by brute force. But in any case what has this preposterous vagary to do with woman suffrage?

Have the women voters of any state or country ever united as a body against the men voters? Is there any reason to suppose that they ever will? There are some measures, as in dealing with the social evil, wherein women might conceivably vote "solid" against a considerable number of men; but even then there would remain a large proportion of wise and good men on the side of virtue and health--and this proportion is increasing daily. Decisions made by all women on questions of this sort could be efficiently enforced by them.

The absurdity of this first "basic proposition" is in its innocent assumption of flatly opposing interests between men and women, whereas most of their interests are identical. In following out her grisly fears of valiant man forcibly preventing womankind from voting, our authoress again forgets existing facts and again surrenders herself to gloomy prediction.

"A dozen ruffians at a single polling place could prevent a hundred women from depositing a single ballot," she says.

Yes. But do they?

A dozen ruffians could do alarming damage to a hundred women almost anywhere if the women had no guns. Has Mrs. Seawell ever had the pleasure of observing the absence of "ruffians" at the polling places in Woman Suffrage states? She seems to imagine that women, in acquiring the ballot, instantly thereby lose, not only all their male relatives, but the protection of the law, and become a species of "enemy," with men, terrified and enraged, banded together against them--which is a childish absurdity.

The errors of fact in this article are gross and unpardonable. If Mrs. Seawell had ever examined "The Woman's Bible" she would have noticed that it was not "Miss Anthony's," but was undertaken by Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton with collaboration of some others, and that it was not an attempt to make the Bible a "suffrage document" but to show how it discriminated against women.

She alleges that the divorce rate is "practically higher" in the four suffrage states than in any others in the Union whereas Wyoming is the one state where divorce has decreased rather than increased. She speaks of Colorado as having had "more than thirty years of suffrage" whereas it was only introduced in 1893.

Any person capable of real interest in this question of practical politics and world improvement are urged to concentrate their study, not on the most fiercely sentimental presentation of what woman suffrage will do or will not do, but on the numerous and easily accessible facts as to what it really does, information concerning which can be readily obtained at the National Woman Suffrage Headquarters, 505 Fifth avenue, New York city.

*

In the preliminary announcement of this magazine, twelve short articles were promised by name.

As the months came round, other matters arose for attention, other articles were urgent, and this arbitrary set was much in the way.

One, The Nun in the Kitchen, was seized upon by another magazine. They wanted the title particularly, so it was given them--and the price thereof goeth to feed the Forerunner. But, being a much larger magazine, they benevolently allowed the same name and a similar article to appear in these modest pages.

The others, "Our Overworked Instincts" and "How We Waste Three-Fourths of Our Money" being promised, are now printed, altogether and with most gratifying brevity, their length never having been specified. The New Year is not going to be hampered with any such too previous announcements.

*

We mean to carry lists of books useful to our readers. We wish to prove that it will pay publishers to advertise with us. If you order any book reviewed here, please send your order to THE FORERUNNER.

"Pure Sociology," by Lester F. Ward, Macmillan, Pub., $4.00.

"Hygiene and Morality," by Lavina L. Dock, R.N., G. P. Putnam's Sons, Pub., $1.25.

"Marriage as a Trade," by Cicely Hamilton, Moffat, Yard & Co., Pub., $1.25.

"To-day's Problems." Trade Union Book Concern. Chicago, Ill.

"The Century of the Child," by Ellen Key; G. P. Putnam's Sons., Pub., $1.50.

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