A Little Journey in the World | Page 7

and the first thing I went to see was the Monument. It struck me as so odd, you know, that the Americans should begin life by celebrating their first defeat."
"That is our way," replied Margaret, quickly. "We have started on a new basis over here; we win by losing. He who loses his life shall find it. If the red slayer thinks he slays he is mistaken. You know the Southerners say that they surrendered at last simply because they got tired of beating the North."
"How odd!"
"Miss Debree simply means," I exclaimed, "that we have inherited from the English an inability to know when we are whipped."
"But we were not fighting the battle of Bunker Hill, or fighting about it, which is more serious, Miss Debree. What I wanted to ask you was whether you think the domestication of religion will affect its power in the regulation of conduct."
"Domestication? You are too deep for me, Mr. Morgan. I don't any more understand you than I comprehend the writers who write about the feminization of literature."
"Well, taking the mystery out of it, the predominant element of worship, making the churches sort of good-will charitable associations for the spread of sociability and good-feeling."
"You mean making Christianity practical?"
"Partially that. It is a part of the general problem of what women are going to make of the world, now they have got hold of it, or are getting hold of it, and are discontented with being women, or with being treated as women, and are bringing their emotions into all the avocations of life."
"They cannot make it any worse than it has been."
"I'm not sure of that. Robustness is needed in churches as much as in government. I don't know how much the cause of religion is advanced by these church clubs of Christian Endeavor if that is the name, associations of young boys and girls who go about visiting other like clubs in a sufficiently hilarious manner. I suppose it's the spirit of the age. I'm just wondering whether the world is getting to think more of having a good time than it is of salvation."
"And you think woman's influence--for you cannot mean anything else--is somehow taking the vigor out of affairs, making even the church a soft, purring affair, reducing us all to what I suppose you would call a mush of domesticity."
"Or femininity."
"Well, the world has been brutal enough; it had better try a little femininity now."
"I hope it will not be more cruel to women."
"That is not an argument; that is a stab. I fancy you are altogether skeptical about woman. Do you believe in her education?"
"Up to a certain point, or rather, I should say, after a certain point."
"That's it," spoke up my wife, shading her eyes from the fire with a fan. "I begin to have my doubts about education as a panacea. I've noticed that girls with only a smattering--and most of them in the nature of things can go, no further--are more liable to temptations."
"That is because 'education' is mistaken for the giving of information without training, as we are finding out in England," said Mr. Lyon.
"Or that it is dangerous to awaken the imagination without a heavy ballast of principle," said Mr. Morgan.
"That is a beautiful sentiment," Margaret exclaimed, throwing back her head, with a flash from her eyes. "That ought to shut out women entirely. Only I cannot see how teaching women what men know is going to give them any less principle than men have. It has seemed to me a long while that the time has come for treating women like human beings, and giving them the responsibility of their position."
"And what do you want, Margaret?" I asked.
"I don't know exactly what I do want," she answered, sinking back in her chair, sincerity coming to modify her enthusiasm. "I don't want to go to Congress, or be a sheriff, or a lawyer, or a locomotive engineer. I want the freedom of my own being, to be interested in everything in the world, to feel its life as men do. You don't know what it is to have an inferior person condescend to you simply because he is a man."
"Yet you wish to be treated as a woman?" queried Mr. Morgan.
"Of course. Do you think I want to banish romance out of the world?"
"You are right, my dear," said my wife. "The only thing that makes society any better than an industrial ant-hill is the love between women and men, blind and destructive as it often is."
"Well," said Mrs. Morgan, rising to go, "having got back to first principles--"
"You think it is best to take your husband home before he denies even them," Mr. Morgan added.
When the others had gone, Margaret sat by the fire, musing, as if no one else were in