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unit is indeed neither man nor woman singly, but man and woman together, more particularly that union between the two which finds expression in the home. Whatever tends to weaken this unit, to destroy collaboration between man and woman, is evil, and must be fought as a public danger.

Woman and man are not equal in anything but in the value of that difference between them which makes each indispensable to the complete development of the other. Where one is strong the other is weak, where one is blind the other sees, where one fails the other wins. We need each other; but we need each other's difference, not each other's similarity. Our common life is most rich, most powerful, when we best understand how to value each other's peculiar excellence, how to reinforce our unlike strengths by a wise division of labour. This division of labour has been defined so clearly by a physical law that it seems inconceivable we should ever have been able to stray far from the understanding of what is symbolised by the separate powers and separate duties that mark parenthood.

Every now and again in the history of human development we find men and women rejecting some ideal as worthless which is probably only worthless because they have failed to live up to it. This is like rejecting Christ because a church is stagnant or corrupt. The ideal that shines behind marriage need not be cast aside because the bond of interchange has lost too much of its strength and of its sweetness. It will remain an ideal so long as civilisation tends towards order and away from chaos. We have seen the marriage tie adhered to ignobly, nobly broken; we have known it to be the source of great wrongs, of wrecked lives, of tragic grief to the individual; yet we all acknowledge it to be an ideal that we may not renounce. It means far more than the union for life of any particular man and woman who have chosen each other, more than legitimate fatherhood and motherhood, more than the creation of a home, the formation of a national unit: it symbolises that interchange of forces, spiritual as well as physical, which alone makes it possible for human life to Le productive and complete.

When we see gross and tangible proof of failure in marriage: when the woman goes to work and the man loafs about like å brute when the slatternly wife runs the streets and the husband

comes home to a fireless hearth: when the mother sends the babes out to beg, and the father drinks the children's bread : when the strenuous lady goes to meetings and the gentleman goes on the turf: when the wife has a lover and the man his own haunts when the children are left to strangers and the parents drift from hotel to hotel: our sense of fitness is outraged. For most of us cling fondly still, if in secret, to the old ideal of the guarded home, of the bread-winner's return to the cheerful hearth, of the nursery with a mother in it, of hands clapsed in silence beside the children's bed, of loyalty, fidelity, all that lifelong interchange of service, forbearance, respect, encouragement and love which we once pictured as marriage.

What we fail properly to feel as an outrage is present violence threatened to that principle underlying marriage, which is nothing less than the bond uniting in just and true relationship the whole of manhood to the whole of womanhood. Humanity, being composed of two separate forces, male and female, neither in itself complete, creative only when united, can only hope to achieve greatness by the blending of these forces in noble collaboration. The misunderstanding of this principle, the attempted substitution, as it were, of sterile comradeship or criminal rivalry for harmonious fertile union between the male and female forces of the world, is the danger that lends gravity to the whole feminist

movement.

The use of all revolutions is manifest; they serve to break up the rigidity of hardened laws and customs, they destroy in order that something new may be upbuilt. The fault of our age is that we are destroying too fast and too thoughtlessly on all sides, that the ground at our feet is encumbered by too many shattered temples which we have neither time not skill to rebuild.

Woman's revolt has broken up many an ancient sanctuary once needed for her protection, the walls of which now seemed too narrow, the vaulted roofs too low. It is time to begin rebuilding; only we must take care how we rebuild, in what spirit we reshape our altered boundaries. There is immense difference between slavery imposed and freedom surrendered. A vast number of women in the past have believed themselves slaves; an equally vast number in the future will be led by a sense of fitness, by love, by the voice of their whole nature, to

accept freely and with pride the very limitations they are now flinging from them.

It is a very grand thing to be a woman, quite as grand a thing to be a man. We cannot hope to be great as man is great, because his greatness is of another nature; his creative forces are external, ours internal; yet who shall choose between our strengths? There have perhaps been as many women of genius as men of genius, only the world has not always heard their names; they gave all they had to the men they loved, to the children they bore. When we look back upon even a few of the women whose lives we have watched or known of, when we consider their purity, their wisdom, their devotion, their patience, their goodness, their silence, we can never feel that it means little to be a woman.

Because we have strengths, intuitions and virtues which man lacks, and which he needs in exchange for gifts which are peculiarly his, looking towards the possibility of a nobler and better humanity, we cannot see it otherwise than formed of women who shall have developed, to the utmost, those particular strengths, intuitions and virtues which must needs be blended with the best of man's forces if a noble race is to be. No country that desires supremacy can afford to encourage the production of the sexless being, neither of the woman who seeks to do man's work, nor of the man who fails in manhood. It needs men that are men, and women that are women.

Whatever woman may be worth in individual instances, she is only valuable to the community by reason of her womanhood. That is why we ought to fight the so-called feminist movement, which is actually an outrage upon womanhood. Let us make it easier for women to be women, let us take care that they are not driven to be less than men. The undesirable usurpation by woman of that part of the world's work which is properly man's must infallibly lead to neglect of that part which is her own. Women in the mass should never be pushed into public life; the fighting part of life is man's. If, instead of holding aloof from the battlefield of public affairs, woman jumps down into the thick of the fray, she is bound to forfeit all those mysterious gifts of insight which once enabled her to help her mate: it is her place to stand apart, aloft if may be, watchful, serene and grave,

prepared to warn or to encourage, ready to bind wounds: her voice should only be heard in rare moments, her hand only raised at the call of dire necessity.

The woman who thinks she can get anything worth having by shrill shrieks, or by the shaking of spasmodic fists, is in the wrong. If she wants power she can always have it, through egitimate use of the influence possessed by every woman worthy of the name. To her own intrinsic powers there is no limit, save chat of her folly, of her insufficiency, of her lack of faith in the eternal traditions of her sex.

In these traditions the women of England have more faith perhaps than the present seems to show. Therefore, even if the vote be imposed upon us against the will of the silent majority, even if we be doomed to flounder on in a state of discord, leaving our men unaided in the great social struggle now confronting all, failing England, perhaps, in an hour of danger, it seems more than certain that the future will see our return, along the circular path of progress, to the immovable starting-point of an indestructible femininity.

The study of human life and history teaches us clearly that the swing of the pendulum makes for equilibrium. No outrage upon natural laws is tolerated in creation; whatever wins a temporary advantage by any form of excess, meets with a repellent force of equal strength, which, soon or late, imposes order.

Every disintegrating action now at work must inevitably bring about a salutary reaction. This does not mean that we have any right to stand aside, idle spectators of grave issues; each one of us has a part to play, however humble; no influence is too slight to serve as an impulsion towards the ultimate restoration of balance.

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YOUNG CHINA AND YOUNG TURKEY

ON the 16th of December last I had the good fortune to be present, a spectator in the Strangers' Gallery, at a session of the Chamber of Deputies in Constantinople, when Saïd Pasha's policy on a constitutional question concerning the dissolution of the Chamber by the Sultan, was subjected to a violent attack by the Opposition. The proceedings afforded an unusually instructive object-lesson in the political and social economics of a nation in process of adapting itself to a new and complex environment. Here was the young and heady wine of European democracy visibly agitating an ancient but serviceable skin of Asia; here were the blood-brethren and beneficiaries of the Revolution already divided amongst themselves, afflicted by the eternal questions that separate the Ins from the Outs, the True Believer from the Infidel. Here was the new administrative machine settling down into the old inevitable grooves—a “ Committee of Union and Liberty," fiercely assailing a "Committee of Union and Progress." Here was the impatient new, fiercely striving to ring out the philosophic old-a silent struggle of systems, grim conflict of human and racial forces of East and West, all set forth and conducted upon lines of parliamentary procedure. The Chamber, in its severely practical architecture and equipment, was suggestive of a lecture hall or an anatomical school, and the beardless young men who occupied the tiers of seats and desks on the Left, might have lent colour to this suggestion, but that their behaviour was far removed from that of men who come to listen or to learn. Observing their fierce minatory gestures, listening to their passionate outcries of derision and protest; noting the nervous, almost hysterical, emotions evoked by their leader's fine frenzy of denunciation at the Tribune, one's thoughts reverted instinctively to the main

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