The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons | Page 3

with which we have to grapple if we are to fufil our trust as the guardians of the home and family, and those hidden wells of the national life from which spring up all that is best and highest in the national character. Nay, I sometimes fear lest even our increased activity in practical work may not have the effect of calling off our attention from those deep underlying causes which must be dealt with if we are not to engage in the hopeless task of trying to fill a cistern the tap of which has been left running. This absorption in the effect and inattention to the cause is to a certain degree bred in us by the very nature of the duties that devolve upon us as women. John Stuart Mill has compared the life of a woman to an "interrupted sentence." The mere fact that our lives are so interrupted by incessant home calls, and that we are necessarily so concerned in the details of life, is apt to make us wanting in grasp of underlying principles. Perhaps it is the fact of my having been associated all the early years of my life with eminent scientific men that has formed in me a habit of mind always to regard effects in relation to causes, so that merely to cure evil results without striking at the evil cause seems to me, to use a Johnsonian simile, "like stopping up a hole or two of a sieve with the hope of making it hold water."
It is, therefore, on these deeper aspects that more especially bear upon the lives and training of our own sons that I want to write, placing before you some facts which you must know if you are to be their guardians, and venturing to make some suggestions which, as the result of much collective wisdom and prayer, I think may prove helpful to you in that which lies nearest your heart. Only, if some of the facts are such as may prove both painful and disagreeable to you, do not therefore reject them in your ignorance as false. Do not follow the advice of a politician to a friend whom he was urging to speak on some public question. "But how can I?" his friend replied; "I know nothing of the subject, and should therefore have nothing to say." "Oh, you can always get up and deny the facts," was the sardonic reply.
Let me first of all give you my credentials, all the more necessary as my long illness has doubtless made me unknown by name to many of the younger generation, who may therefore question my right to impart facts or make any suggestions at all. Suffer me, therefore, to recount to you how I have gained my knowledge and what are the sources of my information.
In the first place, I was trained for the work by a medical man--my friend Mr. James Hinton--first in his own branch of the London profession, and a most original thinker. To him the degradation of women, which most men accept with such blank indifference, was a source of unspeakable distress. He used to wander about the Haymarket and Piccadilly in London at night, and break his heart over the sights he saw and the tales he heard. The words of the Prophet ground themselves into his very soul, with regard to the miserable wanderers of our streets: "This is a people robbed and spoiled; they are all of them snared in holes and hid in prison-houses; they are for a prey, and none delivereth; for a spoil, and none saith, Restore."
The very first time he came down to me at Brighton, to see if I could give him any help, speaking of all he had seen and heard, his voice suddenly broke, and he bowed his face upon my hands and wept like a child. That one man could suffer as he did over the degradation of this womanhood of ours has always been to me the most hopeful thing I know--a divine earnest of ultimate overcoming. The only thing that seemed in a measure to assuage his anguish was my promise to devote myself to the one work of fighting it and endeavoring to awake the conscience of the nation to some sense of guilt with regard to it. In order to fit me for this work he considered that I ought to know all that he as a medical man knew. He emphatically did not spare me, and often the knowledge that he imparted to me was drowned in a storm of tears. We were to have worked together, but his mind, already unhinged by suffering, ultimately gave way, and, with all that this world could give him--health, fame, wealth, family affection, devoted friends--he