Her memory deserves a better fate than interment in Mr. Jones's huge mausoleum.

The third of Samuel Butler's distinguishing characteristics was that he was incapable of falling in love with any one but himself.

He labored prodigiously to become a painter, and during his life he succeeded in having five pictures hung in the Royal Academy exposition. However, he never got out of Class C as a painter, and when he was forty-one he forsook the brush for the pen. Meanwhile he had (according to his father) killed his mother by the publication of "Erewhon," launched "The Fair Haven," got thoroughly enmeshed in the teachings of Darwin and the contentions of Mivart, Lamarck, and others, plunged into Hellenic literature to give it specificity of origin and display, and was otherwise very busy pushing over statues of heroes which he mistook for tin soldiers. Early in life he began keeping notes. His principle was that if you wanted to record a thought you had to shoot it on the wing. When he thought of or said anything especially illuminating or amusing, or heard any one else say anything of the sort, down it went. He was his own Boswell with all of that immortal's colloquiality and ingenuousness. He did not hesitate to make frank comments on the people he met, and photographic descriptions of such individuals, of his family and friends, and their letters went to make up the novel (if novel a narrative of fact can be called) through which he was made known to the general public, and by which he will probably be longest remembered, namely, "The Way of All Flesh." It was begun when he was thirty-one and finished fifteen years later. Because it is autobiographical, and biographical of his family and friends, he found the necessity of frequently rewriting it, as time, event, and God changed them.

This is not the place to discuss the merits and demerits of that book. It had an artificial popularity—Mr. G. Bernard Shaw being the artificer. There was one thing about it concerning which every one agreed: to pillory your parents in public is the equivalent of beating them up in private.

The fourth of Samuel Butler's characteristics was insensitiveness to what is generally called refinement or finer feeling. Though an artist he had little æsthetic awareness. If he knew the canons of good taste he did not subscribe to them. What he called his little jokes, which Mr. Jones relates with great gustfulness, is the ample proof of this accusation. "What is more subversive of a sultan's dignity than pinching his leg? Pinching his sultana's leg." "We shall not get infanticide, permission of suicide, cheap and easy divorce, and other social arrangements till Jesus Christ's ghost has been laid." Cheap and vulgar prostitution of intellectual possession a gentleman would call it.

Mr. Jones and Alfred, clerk, valet, and general attendant, "a live young thing about the place, and a cheerful addition to 15 Clifford's Inn," became very intimate with Butler. Mr. Jones had been a barrister, but had abandoned the law and was under a modest retainer of two hundred a year from Butler to give him Boswellian service. They found Butler companionable, and there are such indications as letters from casual acquaintances, particularly in Italy, to show that he was agreeable and sympathetic to some persons.

Aside from these there is very little in these two massive volumes to testify to the kindness, gentleness, simpleness, and humility of Samuel Butler. Apparently he disliked every one with whom he had to do or with whom he came in contact, save Mr. Pauli, Mr. Faesch, Lord Beaconsfield, and Richard Garnett. Still he was pleased with Mr. Garnett's discomfiture on hearing his lecture on "The Humor of Homer." Searching Mr. Jones's plethoric volumes carefully, it is difficult to find kind or appreciative words for contemporary or forebear.

"How many years was it before I learned to dislike Thackeray or Tennyson as much as I do now?" "Middlemarch is a long-winded piece of studied brag." "What a wretch Carlyle must be to run Goethe as he has done!" "We talked about Charlotte Brontë; Butler did not like her." "I do not like Mr. W. J. Stillman at all." "I do not remember that Edwin Lear told us anything particularly amusing." "All I remember about John Morley is that I disliked and distrusted him." "I dislike Rossetti's face and his manner and his work, and I hate his poetry and his friends." "No, I do not like Lamb; you see Canon Anger writes about him, and Canon Anger goes to tea with my sisters." "Blake was no good because he learned Italian at over sixty in order to read Dante, and we know Dante was no good because he was so fond of Virgil, and Virgil was no good because Tennyson ran him, and as for Tennyson, well, Tennyson goes without saying." "I said I was glad Stanley was dead." "I never read a line of Marcus Aurelius that left me wiser than I was before." Speaking of Maeterlinck, who was then coming to his estate, "Now a true genius cannot so soon be recognized. If a man of thirty-five can get such admiration he is probably a very good man, but he is not one of those who will redeem Israel." Though Butler was fascinated by G. Bellini, he surely had heard of Raphael.

Darwin, Wallace, Ray Lankester, most of the scientists of his time who did not fully agree with him; novelists, philosophers, artists, poets—all excited his disapproval. When he was fifty-three he made a note to remind himself to call Tennyson the Darwin of poetry and Darwin the Tennyson of science. Thus would he empty the vials of his wrath and contempt.

He acided his system, as the Italians say, with hatred and envy of his fellow man who had achieved fame or who was upon the road to it. It is difficult to rid one's mind of the thought that the motive that prompted him to literary work was that he might show how contemptibly inadequate the masters were or had been, all of them save Handel and G. Bellini.

Samuel Butler took himself with great solemnity. He believed what he wanted to believe and he believed he knew about many things far better than experts and empiricists. When they did not agree with him he took great umbrage and wrote disagreeable letters to them or made disparaging references to them in his notes. "He never could form an opinion on a subject until he had established his volatile thoughts and caged them in a note. This enabled him to make up his mind." Thus he made up his mind, aided by Miss Savage, that "The Odyssey" was written by a female, or, to use his felicitous expression, "any woman save Mrs. Barrett Browning."

Samuel Butler's most deforming characteristic was lack of reverence. He was endowed with an orderly mind. It was his passion and pastime to train and develop it. He never let anything stand in the way of accomplishing that purpose. His greatest literary gift was his capacity for presenting evidence. His chief weakness was his incapacity to gather evidence. He assumed certain things and then proceeded to prove to the reader that they were facts. This is a procedure that has never had favor in the courts or in the laboratories. Neither has it been accepted as a legitimate procedure in what might be called constructive literature, critical or creative. The only place where it has ever been received with favor is the pulpit, and Samuel Butler was the true son of the cloth which he did so much to deride and from which he believed he had divested himself.

We should never have known what a pathetic figure he was if Mr. Jones had not seen fit in his affection and his obsession to reveal him to us. We can forgive Mr. Jones for this, however, because of his belief that Samuel Butler is immortal. Would that we could also forgive him for publishing a portrait of Mr. Butler standing before the hearth in the sitting-room of his home—in his shirt-sleeves! We could not have been more shocked had we found that he wore garters around his arms to regulate the length of his shirt-sleeves. England indeed is changed. This life of Butler gives the lie to Britishers' reputation for stolidity and formality.

CHAPTER X
SAINTS AND SINNERS

Many a pia mater has been stretched to aching in the past few years by thoughts of death and its harvest of human flower in first, fresh bloom. Mystics have tried to give death a symbolic significance; they would have us believe that it has or will have a repercussion in some occult way beneficent to the world and those who are allowed to tarry here. "What is this grave which the world was coming in its heart and in its daily practices to treat as final? May it not be that the answer of the whole world, which is busy with the question, will bring into being a new adaptation of living to dying—a new Death?" is the way one of them expresses herself. Were we concerned herein with death, either new or old, we might deny her premise any foundation, and reason therefore that any conclusion she might incline to draw must be false and misleading. The world has in its heart to-day a yearning for promise and proof of immortality such as its composite heart has never had. That Christianity as practised fails to satisfy that yearning, does not justify the allegation that the thinkers of the world have become materialists.

Historians and critics who view the question from a biologic angle profess to see in war a contribution to our evolutionary progress: it kills many of the most virile, but it kills also the weaklings, actual and potential. The virile who remain push the weaklings to the wall, particularly in the procreative contest. It puts a premium on prowess and valor, and makes the race franker and braver, more resolute and more efficient; it uproots decadency; it sacrifices the grain to get rid of the tare; it plucks the flower that the thistle may be eradicated. The philosopher accepts it as a part of God's programme: some he allows to succumb to bullets, others to germs. The latter is the wise man, for he accepts things as they are, and at the same time tries to shape their course in a way that will give him and those he loves, which is all mankind, the greatest safety.

We get accustomed to and become tolerant of everything save pain. Even in such upheaval as the World War it was beyond belief how little the mechanism of daily life was disjointed. Fifteen millions of men and more were engaged in a life-and-death struggle, and yet the ordinary events of daily life were very little disturbed. People seemed to have time for work, for play, for relaxation, for contemplation. I was always reminded of this by reading the papers and observing people in theatres, concert-halls, stadia, churches, restaurants, and public places generally. I realize full well that one cannot sit still and nurse either his griefs or his hopes; that man is so constituted that he must display activity in some form. But I never fully realized that man is chronically happy. And yet it must be so, for how otherwise could he come out from prisons rotund and well-nourished, or from dark filthy tenements with a smile on his face? How else could we be so pleasure-seeking and pleasure-displaying as we were in those agonal days of the war?

The war put many things out of joint, but it did not divorce man from felicity save in individual instances or for short periods of time. The thing that the war dislocated most was further tolerance of the paradoxes of the Christian religion, the irreconcilability between preached and practised Christianity. Every one admits that the fundamental principles of Christianity are perfect and beautiful—that is, they are as perfect and as beautiful as the finite mind can grasp. But nothing can be more imperfect and uglier than the way in which the professional pietist practises it. There isn't a tenet, as formulated by its Founder, or such perfect disciples as St. Francis of Assisi, to which the professing or professional Christian conforms even approximately; and because his fellow man, prostituting it in some similar way to conform with his personal bias, does not agree with him, he proceeds to point the finger of scorn at him and to hail him as infidel and unbeliever.

I have no intention of prophesying whether the church will weather the storm in which it is now floundering or not. I think very likely it will. One reason for so thinking is that it has weathered all previous storms; one of them five hundred years ago was of severity that will never be forgotten. Since then education and enlightenment have lifted man from the supine obedience and resignation of the domestic animal, and he has demanded, and in a measure obtained, his worldly rights. This encourages me to believe that he may soon demand his spiritual rights: liberation from the tyranny imposed upon his mind by the Junkers of the church, freedom to look upon God as the fountainhead of wisdom, mercy, and love who mediates succor to the poor, the mourning, and the meek more willingly than to the rich, the joyous, and the arrogant; liberty to live according to the mandates of Christ and to die in confidence that his pledges will be redeemed. Another reason is that man must have a religion. Individual man can live without it, but collective man cannot, and there is not the slightest sign of the second coming of Christ. Religion was never so openly repudiated as during the Great War, and it never wielded as little influence on the determinations of man's conduct as it does to-day. Those who convince themselves otherwise make themselves immune to the teachings of experience.

The paucity of men who have the capacity for constructive statesmanship is pitiable, but how trifling is such a capacity compared with that required to formulate the tenets of a livable new religion! The practices of the church to-day are not those of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when it was steeped in every conceivable kind of depravity, licentiousness, simony, wealth, power, arrogance, avarice, and flattery; when it betrayed its mission to protect the weak; when it fornicated with the princes of the world; when it crucified Jesus in the name of egoism. But in what way has it espoused the sacred cause of the lowly, the best-beloved of Him who died that eternal happiness might be vouchsafed us? If Christ's vicar could remain silent without being called to account as was the case a few years ago when we were offering our fathers on the sacrificial altar for the liberation from slavery of God's ebony image, it is not likely that he will be called on to explain a similar silence during the Great War. I do not profess to say, not even to know, the attitude of the hierarchy which governed the Roman Catholic church toward the war. If it was Germanophile or Austrophile, it was more wicked than the harlot of Babylon. I should say the same had it been Anglophile or Francophile. The man who can believe that the temporal head of the church is the infallible spiritual guide of her adherents cannot believe that it should take sides against any of her own people. "The house divided against itself must fall." What I should like from the church is a definition of her attitude toward war. She teaches her children what their conduct should be about indulging their genesic extent, about the property and person of their fellow men, about intemperance of language and of appetite. Why not about war? What troubles me with the church is not so much the determination to keep her children in ignorance, nor that she has her back to the door which opens upon a vista of the world's progress and advance, hoping that she may keep it closed in the face of the divine forces of evolutionary progress which are seeking to push it open. That might be tolerated, but not her arrogation of self-sufficiency, her assumption of self-satisfaction, her boasted immutability, her sanctimonious semblance of resignation, her mumblings of archaic sayings in a language that neither its votaries nor one-half its priests understand, her profession to protect the weak and aid the poor while at the same time she bends the knee to the rich and traffics with emperors.

Though I lived nearly two years in the city where the church's mediæval gorgeousness is more striking than in any other city of the world, and where its chief stronghold is, it was rarely that its practices or its preachings disturbed my spiritual equanimity, my belief in God, or my fathomless faith. Nearly every day my duties took me through the Piazza of St. Peter and along the Vatican Gardens, and my thought was more often of his mediæval predecessors than of the voluntary "prisoner" who, while occupying the sumptuous palace, eats out his heart because he is not allowed to be a temporal sovereign—in other words, to be the antithesis of Him whose vicar he claims to be.

One morning, after I read the communiqués and had that glow of satisfaction in the accomplishments of my fellow men, that feeling of pride which every ally had during the last weeks of the war, I turned the paper and saw the arresting headline, "Translation of the Bones of St. Petronius," and I read:

In my fancy I saw a lot of able-bodied men thus engaged while those whose spiritual destinies they had elected to shape were being slaughtered on battlefields, struggling with wounds and disease in hospitals, contending with cold, thirst, hunger, and indescribable discomfort. What was the purpose of it, what benefit did it mediate, what enlightenment flowed from it? If Petronius was a good man, if he loved his fellow men, and if he did all that was within his power to do to make them better men, more capacious for a full life here and more worthy of eternal life, why should they not allow him to enjoy his reward in the bosom of the Lord? How can they enhance his happiness, what does mankind gain by taking the semblance of that which once formed a framework for his spirit and transferring it from one vessel to another while mumbling or chanting over it? What deep symbolism attaches itself to this attempt to stay nature in gathering the ashes of Petronius to their ultimate destiny? Would not these men give a better account of their stewardship to their Master were they to devote their time and their strength and their minds to the betterment of the physical and spiritual lot of those poor, desolate, forsaken unfortunates with whom I spent the afternoon—a trainload of men who had been imprisoned in an enemy country and who were returning to Italy to die of the dreadful disease that had been thrust upon them by those insatiate monsters of cruelty, the Austrians?

I have rarely spent two hours more steeped in misery than I did that afternoon at Forte Tiburtino, where I went to visit the enormous hospital constructed around that old fort. It was intended to be used for temporary concentration of the sick and wounded soldiers sent from the front, until their disorders and diseases could be interpreted sufficiently to indicate where they should be sent for most speedy restoration to health. The protracted inactivity on the battlefronts of Italy had allowed the hospital to remain for many months unutilized. When Austria decided to send back to Italy a number of the men captured in the Caporetto disaster, upon whom she had thrust tuberculosis through starvation and every conceivable deprivation, it was decided to use this hospital for their shelter until they should die or be sufficiently nurtured to be sent to parts of the country whose climate is favorable to recovery from that disease. Two or three times a week a trainload of two hundred or more of these pitiful creatures arrived, many of them in a dying state. As a rule, they had been en route for a week, and, though the Swiss Red Cross and the Italian Red Cross both attempted to make some provision that would contribute to their comfort, very little evidence of their efforts was to be seen.

Forte Tiburtino is three miles beyond Rome on the road to Tivoli. The train is switched at the Portonaccio station to the rails of the tramway and goes directly to the gates of the hospital. It was the first day of autumn, the wind was blowing a gale, whereby the unfortunates arrived in a cloud of dust which must have added to their suffering. But that was as nothing, I fancy, compared with the pain and ignominy put upon them by the antics of one of my countrywomen clad in the uniform of an American relief organization, an affable Amazon who, approaching her physiological Rubicon, had begun to display somatically and emotionally the results of disturbance and inadequacy of those wondrous internal secretions that give elasticity to the skin, lustre to the hair, sparkle to the eye, and appearance of health to the tout ensemble. She but heightened her painful plainness by a stereotyped smile which, while displaying a row of long teeth, set at an obtuse angle, accentuated the aquilinity of her nose and the prognathousness of her jaw. Everywhere I looked she was there. Every place I went I heard her: "Bentornato," "Benvenuto," "Aspetti un memento, farò la sua fotografia." The ways of the Lord are obscure. Otherwise one could explain why he did not let these poor devils die without having thrust upon them this presence, voice, and affected cheer. I saw them, weak and prostrated as they were, shrink from her as one might shrink from a famished alligator.

They opened the side doors of the cars and put steps against them; the white-clad orderlies came down first, and then began the procession of the weak, the emaciated, the forlorn, the desolate. Some were able to descend unaided, others had to be helped, one on either side, and still others dropped inert and corpse-like, across the strong back of an orderly who carried them the few feet to a stretcher. Now and then one would step out with an air of attempted jauntiness and a feeble smile, but for the most part it was a procession of those who had lost hope, who had abandoned faith in every one and everything, and who read over the portal, "Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate." It is some such procession that Dante must have encountered frequently in his passage through the infernal regions. "Nulla speranza gli comforta mai nonchè di posa, ma di minor pena." Not only did their faces reveal absolute despair but their bodies were reduced to such a state of emaciation that they were scarcely recognizable as human beings. Major Pohlmanti afterward told me that the majority of them had lost upward of forty per cent in weight, some of them, indeed, as much as sixty per cent. Many of them were so scantily clad that their chests and legs and arms were bare. Some were without socks, and their bony feet, thrust into cloth shoes with wooden soles, gave the finishing touch to what seemed to be animated skeletons covered with dirty brown paper which had been soaked in putrid oil. After those who were able to get on their feet had passed out came those who were practically in the throes of death, and those whose minds had been dethroned by suffering and privation. One was able to keep the sob in his throat until they appeared, and then the effort to suppress it was impotent. Indeed,

and they are reconciled that he shall take their hands and lead them into his dark land, as Alan Seeger said in those precious lines which will ornament his memory for many a day.

The procession slowly wound its way within the gates, and I supposed that they would be conducted and helped lovingly and tenderly to the pavilions ready to receive them; that they would be undressed and given hot, stimulating nourishment by nurses and orderlies recruited, perhaps, from those who had come before and whom nature had been kind enough partially to restore. But immediately they were confronted with a species of Italian bureaucracy which hindered their progress toward this haven of rest and of solace toward which they had been looking forward for many days, perhaps months. They were segregated in a large, barnlike structure a few yards within the gate, permitted to sit on rude, unbacked, uncomfortable benches, and compelled to await their turn until their names and their histories and an enumeration of their possessions could be recorded. I felt that God would have been kind if he had stamped across their brows the letter V to stand for virtue and valor, as he stamped the letter A upon the breast of Arthur Dimmesdale to testify to the people of New England the frailty of that Puritan parson, which was revealed to his parishioners when they gathered together to listen to the confession of his sins and to decide his punishment. There they sat, inanimate, inert, resigned, awaiting what the Italian Government might have in store for them with the same indifference as they awaited that which nature had in store for them.

Never again shall I believe that the victim of tuberculosis is optimistic and hopeful. It may be that their obvious and striking forlornness was the expression of starvation and not of disease. Only about thirty per cent of them, I am told, showed signs of active tuberculosis after the ravages of inadequate and unsuitable food have been overcome. I saw and talked with many of their predecessors, and especially those who had been there a number of weeks, sufficiently long for them to have gained in weight and in strength, but even they were still branded with that expression which hopelessness comes nearest to describing.

It occurred to me that perhaps these were the men who sat down on the sides of the road and in the fields before that great disaster in the Friuli and were resigned to being taken captive, and that the resignation which they then displayed had been stamped on them gradually day after day since then, until now it had become indelible. Life had had no joy or poetry for them. Neither the present nor the future had been tinctured with pleasure nor flavored with hope, and since that day they had been silently awaiting that which now seemed imminent—translation.

I could not but contrast the event of the morning with that of the evening. Probably every one of these boys and men had been brought up in the faith which the Holy Father claims is the only true one. They had been taught that God is Justice. They had been imbued since earliest infancy with the belief that, next to loyalty to God, their most sacred duty was to their country. In their own way they had done their best for both, and this was their reward. Their expressions of despair, their manifestations of hopelessness, their silent portrayal of their abandonment needed no explanation. The saint in the Vatican was having his reward on earth, and the sinners in Forte Tiburtino looked for theirs only in heaven.

CHAPTER XI
WOMAN'S CAUSE IS MAN'S: THEY RISE OR SINK TOGETHER ...

Woman's position in the world, socially, politically, and economically was profoundly altered by the Great War. Every contact with the affairs of the world, save uxorially, was changed and I believe that one of the aftermaths of the war will be further to change that relationship, to extend her liberty, to enhance her privileges until every semblance of the cage that has confined her since time immemorial is destroyed.

Eye-witnesses of the political and social emancipation of women do not realize how extensively concerned with it the historian of the future will be. Even less do they realize how directly certain social and economic changes of the beginning of the twentieth century will be traced to the entrance of women into the political arena. The individual who would attempt to forecast the eventual effects of national prohibition upon a people would have no respect whatsoever for his reputation as a prophet. I assume there is little doubt that women initiated and in large measure accomplished that legislation. Small wonder they did. They had to bear the brunt and the pernicious effects of alcohol consumption. Man drank it, but women paid; paid in privation, in suffering, in disease, in ignominy—they and their children. There are many habits, conventions, laws that deal with women differently than they do with men. We may confidently anticipate that woman in full possession of political privileges will soon turn her attention to legislation whose purpose will be to change this, to effect a like relationship of all human beings but especially of men and women.

The most ardent and pious Christian must admit that the practice of its principles is inimical to woman's welfare or woman's full development, using the terms welfare and development in the conventional sense of to-day. There are undoubtedly many intelligent, honest, serious women who subscribe to St. Paul's teachings of woman's duties and privileges and who take no umbrage at his pronouncements. These were in a word that she should be man's aid, his servant, and his ornament; that she should minister unto his corporeal needs, and that she should be the instrument through which God permitted man to reproduce his image and perpetuate mankind. The Christian religion came gradually to be considered figurative in its practicability, an ethical system strict conformation to which would cause the individual to be looked upon as a victim of mental aberration, but ideally quite perfect. With this conception the restrictions put upon woman's activity gradually began to disappear, and those that remained, such as, for instance, being obliged to cover her head in church, were not only willingly accepted but were considered a prerogative in so far as they facilitated personal adornment and thus contributed to the realization of a fundamental, inherent ambition—to be attractive.

Opponents of feminism have busied themselves with extraordinary industry and tireless assiduity to point out the differences between man and woman, always to the disadvantage of the latter. Their mental endowment is inferior to man; their physical strength is less; their moral caliber more attenuated; their emotional nature shallower. Why should any one take the trouble to deny any of these? He who maintains that every specimen of the human species endowed with average reasoning power should live in the enjoyment of freedom and liberty should not allow himself the trouble of denying them. He should admit it with the same readiness that he admits that there are anatomical and physical differences between the sexes. But the opponents of "rights of women," to use the phrase that has now come to have a sinister meaning, are not satisfied with such admission. They want to have us admit that, in so far as these qualities are at variance with those of man, so in proportion is woman inferior. This no well-balanced, thoughtful, unprejudiced man who has had much to do with men and women for a sufficient period to entitle him to pass judgment upon the matter can possibly admit. One may say dogmatically that woman has not the potential or actual capacity of man in the field of politics and statecraft, in the field of art and literature, in the field of science and investigation, in the field of peace and strife. He may say it, but he can furnish very little substantiation of his statement. Neither will he be able to say it convincingly very much longer. It is not and will not be fair or just that any one should make ex cathedra statements upon such subjects until women have had the same freedom in fields of activity that men have had for countless centuries. No weight or credence need be given to statements that women are possessed of intellectual and moral qualities that militate against their fitness to occupy or adorn the important positions of life's constructive activities. Possessions or infirmities which many of their ill-wishers maintain unfit them for such places may disappear when they have had opportunity to indulge their freedom. These alleged infirmities may be merely reactionary to the restrictions of their environments since time immemorial, since it is notorious that the place often develops the man. No bird can tell how far it can fly until it tries its wings.

The American people are less astonished than any other nation to find that women have invaded every field of human activity save that of active warfare. They have long since thrown down the barriers that kept women from entering such fields of activity, and welcomed their entrance into them. They were encouraged to believe that they would give an earnest of their activities and they have accomplished it without loss of their sex attractiveness. The matter, however, is quite different in the countries of Europe. There only the women of the lower classes have earned their bread in the sweat of their brow, and particularly in the fields, in the mills, and in the shops. But to-day all that is changed. They drive tram-cars, load and unload ships, they till the soil and work the mines, they make and deliver munitions; they have replaced the porter and the ticket-taker at the stations; they are the letter-carriers, cab-drivers, guardians of the peace; they direct and administer great mercantile houses; and they are forcing their way into every profession. They have not yet been in any of these activities a sufficient length of time to enable any one to say whether or not they can successfully compete with man. The prophets of old were stoned, and he would be a daring one who would venture the statement that man will successfully dislodge woman from all the positions she so satisfactorily filled during the war. In some countries she will have gained, before the end of the great social and economic adjustment which we are now attempting, the political privileges which more than anything else will put her on an equality with man, namely, the franchise. From such vantage-point she will most successfully hold what she has gained. It is too much to expect that woman will emancipate herself and come into the arena of man's activities with her handicaps and lack of training and not make mistakes prejudicial to her welfare. To expect it would be as illegitimate as to expect that a strong man who had never trained for a prize fight could enter the ring and successfully contend against a man equally strong or stronger who had been training for the contest for a long time.

No one was so fatuous as to believe in 1914 that the Central Powers, after having devoted a quarter of a century to the most assiduous training and preparation for the war that they thrust upon the civilized world, would not jeopardize the liberty of the world. The Allied nations had been content apparently to risk their fate without such preparation merely because they had right on their side. They made many mistakes and some of them were so flagrant and enormous as nearly to have cost them their existence. Women likewise have right on their side in the struggle which they have waged against the mandates of Christianity and the usurpation of man. But right alone is not sufficient in such a contest. They must combine might with it and might these days spells organization. Without it nothing worth while can be accomplished. I venture to prophesy that the striking legislation of our country of the next generation will be accomplished largely by the influence of organized women. This war has given them opportunity to display their might and examples of what organization can accomplish. Unless I misconstrue all signs, they will never again be deprived of the privileges which they have at the present day. On the contrary, such privileges will become larger and more comprehensive until they are upon an absolute equality in every walk of life with man.

In the world of politics, society, economics, education, and religion the question of rights of woman may not be given the constructive attention to which it is entitled. In our country it is possible that women are sufficiently organized to present their claims and insist upon their being heard, and not only demand their rights, which are liberty and equality, but they will get them. In England I am not so confident of the result. In France and Italy I am still less confident; in fact, their cause in these countries as things are at present seems to me almost a hopeless struggle. The only thing that consoles me is history. When one recalls that all that which we now speak of as democracy flowed from one master mind in Cromwell's little army; that the Laocoön hold which the church had upon the people in the Middle Ages was broken by Luther and a few similar masters whose spirits successfully carried the idea of liberty; that all that which is now spoken of as industrial ascendancy flowed from the activities of one or two supermen in the mill districts of northern England only three or four generations ago; then one is lifted above his depression. Liberty and tolerance have taken on a new significance. This is not due entirely to the war. The war minted the meanings, but the gold was ready for the stamp. Liberty has come to mean that woman and man are not only equal before God but that they are equal before man. And, now that this admission has been wrung from unwilling man and imposed upon governments one after the other, what kind of a life do we wish? What are our visions? What are our sane and legitimate aspirations? Are we willing to yield supinely to the tyranny of state or of money? Are we content further to tolerate the infirmities and impotency of present-day education? Shall we continue to close our eyes to the hypocrisies of the church? Shall we be willing to submit to the restrictions that are put upon us by law and covenant concerning marriage and its entailments? Shall we bow down to autocratic governments whose rulers claim, and apparently have their claims allowed, to have divine guidance? Shall we be content with the concentration of property or of private capitalistic enterprise? Shall we be callous enough to see countless thousands of God's own, the poor, deprived of the advantages of food and clothing, education and the gifts of hygiene—in brief, of everything that makes life worth living? I firmly believe that the rank and file of educated, thinking, serious-minded persons who are not immediately concerned with the possession or administration of any of these, will not tolerate them, and in so expressing my belief I do not feel that I label myself socialist. I feel that I enroll myself in the legion marching forward under the banner of liberty and the belief that enlightenment is followed by progress as unerringly as night is followed by day.

These things may be brought about by revolution, just as democracy was brought about in France after the teachings of Voltaire, Rousseau, and the French encyclopædists had blazed the way and the aftermath of the American Revolution had reached that country; but I am firmly convinced that one of the things that the World War will accomplish is that this social reformation and reconstruction will be brought about without violence and without revolution. Once a satisfactory integration of a large number of individual lives is brought about, then integration of the community and of the state is bound to follow. No one is so fatuous or so blind as to hope that integration of individual life can come to him whose creative impulses in any field are hampered or stultified, but when these creative impulses, whatever they be, are encouraged, nurtured, developed, facilitated, then the genus homo will reach its full estate and we may confidently look forward to community and state integration upon which lasting reform can be carried out socially and politically. There is not the slightest advantage to be gained by what is called political and economic reform unless at the same time there is a reformation of the creative forces of life—education, sex relations, and religion.

Any scheme of life that concerns itself only with life is bound to be a failure. Man is so constituted that he must have a philosophy from which he can form a creed that facilitates his craving for immortality. It is this belief in immortality, as fundamental a demand as life itself, which is the final conditioning impulse of all that is best in man and which gives him an inexhaustible strength and a lasting peace.

How any intelligent person can believe that the teachings of Christ as practised to-day, and I emphasize the word "practised," furnish such a philosophy or a system of ethics, transcends my understanding. The chief branch of the Christian religion stands for dogma to-day just as firmly as it did before the Renaissance, and it pretends the humility of Christ while maintaining the imperiousness of Cæsar. There is scarcely a minister of the Protestant church who is not selling his birthright for a mess of pottage by not daring to get up in his pulpit and tell his flock that they must live up to the basic principles of Christ's teachings. These ministers are just as cognizant as I am that their branch of the Christian church has lost its hold upon the people except in so far as its alleged teachings are reconcilable with their pleasurable conduct in private and in public affairs. I do not mean to say that there are not many wholly sincere and devout believers in these churches who feel the inspiration of the teachings of Christ. But because they are paid workers in the vineyard of the Lord they dare not jeopardize their existence and take no heed for the morrow, and they dare not insist that those to whom they minister should conform their conduct to Christ's commandments, because it would hazard their very existence and provoke the starvation of their children.

Do the meek inherit the earth? Have they inherited it? Does any one rejoice and be exceeding glad when men revile him and persecute him and say all manner of evil against him falsely? Is there any clergyman to-day who is teaching and insisting that if any one shall break any one of these least commandments and shall teach men to do so he shall be called the least in the Kingdom of Heaven? Suppose we grant that the Sermon on the Mount is not to be taken literally, but symbolically, of what are these mandates symbolical? "If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee. If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee." Why does one not give the same heed to these commands as he does to "Thou shalt not kill; thou shall not commit adultery"? The reason is that he who kills or commits adultery is liable to be punished by the law, and he is deterred by the fear of such punishment or of the social ostracism to which he would be subject. Christ referred to the fact that "It hath been said that whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement, but I say unto you that whosoever shall put away his wife, save for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery." But the present-day mandates of Christianity are in no way in keeping with this.

As a matter of fact, every one must admit that the only conformation which Christians make to the commands and counsel of the Sermon on the Mount is a repetition of the verses following on "After this manner therefore pray ye," and those commands which are at variance to-day with statutory and conventional laws.

I am not railing against Christianity. I am of those who firmly believe that if we were to conform our lives to the tenets of the ethical and moral teaching of Christ we should not have the need of social reconstruction which we have to-day. I am contending against the hypocrisy of those who proclaim themselves Christians from the housetops and who persecute others who do not conform to those trivial doctrinal modifications which one sect maintains are the only true interpretations of Christ's teachings. I am clamoring against the flimsy hypocrisy under which half the people of the civilized world live in regard to marriage, and who pretend to shudder and feel ill when you profess that you cannot look upon marriage as a sacrament. I am railing against those who believe that there should be one code of so-called morality for men and an entirely different one for women. If the code that is practically universally accepted to-day is proper for men, it is likewise proper for women, and I want to live to see the day when women will have as much freedom in their conduct in every walk of life as men have. The idea that woman's life centres in motherhood and that all her instincts and desires are directed, consciously or unconsciously, to that end is buncombe. It would be just as legitimate to contend that all man's instincts and desires centre in fatherhood and that his frenzied passion to accumulate fortune, or his uncontrollable ambition to obtain fame, or his insatiate appetite for power, or his insuppressible feeling to externalize his thoughts in music, in art, in poetry, in invention, were all secondary characteristics. The reproductive faculty of woman is incidental to her existence. If any one desires to claim it was the purpose of God in creating her, I shall not deny it, but as a student of human nature, and as a physician whose life has been spent with women—most of them, fortunately for me, honest and intelligent—I maintain that civilized, cultivated, thinking women do not find that motherhood satisfies their demands, their yearnings, their aspirations—in brief, their personal development. The creative will has other yearnings; not so imperative always in their demands for satisfaction, but nevertheless insistent on being satisfied if the possessor is to be spiritually content.

There are other reasons for the decline in the birthrate of the educated and civilized people of every country than the fact that motherhood does not completely satisfy the physical and mental demands of women—financial reasons, social reasons, and reasons that partake of both of them, yet not entirely of them, such as the occupation of women and the celibacy which comes of enforcement or from choice. These must be taken into consideration in our social renaissance when we shall erect our ideals of justice and liberty. The time will never come again when woman shall be man's willing or unwilling slave. The time has gone by when society shall require that the wife be faithful while the husband is faithless. Never again will the saintly, self-sacrificing woman who never questions her husband's authority but who yields supinely to his will be our ideal.

Woman may not be so strong as man. She may not be so truthful. She may be more impressionable to sinister influences. She may be less capable of erecting ideals and conforming her conduct to them. She may be less steadfast in the pursuit of any plan of life, or less capable of adhering to the ideal canons of conduct. She may or may not have any or all of the sins of omission or commission of which she is accused by man, but she is a human being made in God's image, of whom He may be more proud than He is of man. She has been rocked in the cradle of liberty and of freedom for the past five years, and to such purpose that at the present moment she is not only able to walk but to stride. In the future it will require the best effort of man to outdistance her, even though he has the benefit of ages of experience and the advantage of a start of forty thousand years.

We shall soon see whether Socrates was right when he said: "Woman once made equal to man becometh his superior."

CHAPTER XII
POSTBELLUM VAGARIES

It seems incredible that we who have chanted "Peace on earth, good-will to men" for upward of two thousand years, professing the Christian religion and enjoying its benefits, should have in the year 1914 proceeded to discredit our professions and our protestations.

It is interesting to have lived in those times, for it brought into one's thoughts and imagination sentient recognition of qualities or characteristics of individuals and of peoples which, until the advent of the war, one didn't know existed. Students of events curious to know and to understand the factors and forces that had shaped the world, geographically, politically, socially, religiously, were obliged until 1914 to rely upon the written records of the past. After that they had but to observe daily events or read of them in the public press to become apprised of what is meant by world progress. It has been a universal belief that greater reform, politically and socially, flowed from the French Revolution than from any premeditated, organized violence that the world has ever seen. In the years preceding that momentous event the peoples of Europe, and more especially those of France, were living in a state of intellectual and physical oppression which is almost impossible for the individual of average intelligence and education to appreciate. Although republican forms of government had frequently existed and had been conducted in many instances with much success, there was no indication that any of them had left the smallest trace of democracy in Europe, and the idea of social equality on a physical, intellectual, moral basis did not exist. I fancy there is scarcely an observer of the events which transpired during the Great War, or a person who gives any concrete thought to the matter, who will not admit—indeed, who will not maintain—that the results which have issued and which shall issue from that conflict and particularly those that have to do with men's relationship to each other in every walk of life, whether it be governmental or individual, conductual or spiritual, will be so radically changed that the issues of the French Revolution will seem trivial compared with them.

It was vouchsafed me to be in a position during the last year of the war to see at short range and sometimes from a vantage-point the workings of the minds of a people who have had liberty, unity, and nationality on their tongues and in their hearts for half a century and more. The Italians were in the lime-light from the day Germany threw a brand laden with explosives and poison gases into the different Christian countries of Europe. Her conduct as a whole since that time has been one of dignity, honesty, responsibility, and the exponent of the highest ideals of nationality. Whether or not she succeeded at any time in gaining the complete and absolute confidence of her allies, it would be difficult to say. To get the confidence of an individual or a country you must trust them, and the more implicitly you trust the greater will be the confidence and the finer the quality. Every one knows that Italy's alliance with Austria was an unnatural one and the majority of her people have always believed that the issue of it would be disastrous. Even the most shallow student of history knows that Austria stood menacingly over Italy during the entire period of the unholy alliance, but never more insultingly so than in 1912, when she veritably defended Turkey, while Italy was at war with that country. When Italy decided to throw her lot in with the Allies, there is no doubt whatsoever that it was with the hearty approbation of the vast majority of her people. The treaty which her minister of foreign affairs, Sonnino, made with the Allies, and which is known as the Treaty of London, and which sets forth what Italy was to have when victory was hers, although not known to the people, was satisfactory to the government, and one who reads it now can readily understand why it was so. The question was—would it be satisfactory to other governments? Was it an instrument consistent with the new liberty? Was it not at variance with what was going to be considered a fundamental right of the people, the principle of self-determination?

Italy's conduct during the first two years of the war drew forth the approbation, the praise, and the admiration of the whole world. The quality of approbation was undoubtedly merited. Whether the quantity was merited is another question. Then came their colossal disaster of Caporetto, the explanations of which have been many—some partially satisfactory, others not at all. One of the undeniable results of it was that upward of a half-million of her vigorous fighting men were marched into Austrian detention-camps and prisons. The results of this defalcation upon Italy and upon her internal resistance everybody knows. It was a greater shock to Italy and far more sinister in its effect than it was upon the Allies. Following it, she gave an example of capacity to put her house in order, and to present a solid front, the like of which has rarely been given by any country of the world. She cleaned her house to good purpose. How thoroughly she cleaned it no one can possibly know who was not permitted to enter it. The account which she gave of her courage and her strength when the enemy attempted to cross the Piave, in June of 1918, and which she gave in maintaining her lines in the mountains against an enemy infinitely superior in numbers, was the earnest of her honesty and determination.

There were, however, some things that awaited, and still await, satisfactory explanation. When the war began Italy had a population of about thirty-six millions, Austria-Hungary about fifty-four millions. Italy had an army of upward of four millions of men. It was currently estimated that Austria-Hungary had an army of between six and seven millions. It is believed by the Italians that the greater part of the dual monarchy's army was on the Italian front, and Italy convinced herself that she was standing out practically alone against an army of greatly superior numerical strength and larger military reserves. She admitted that a few Allied divisions were with her, but she maintained that she was giving far more to the western front than she received from all the Allies. There is no doubt that there were a hundred thousand Italians in France, both in the lines and behind them, and there is likewise no doubt that there was no such number of Allied soldiers in Italy. She had called to the colors boys born in 1899 and 1900. Indeed, youths of the 1899 class were sent to the front after the military reverses of October, 1917. Italy looked upon this in the light of a sacrifice which she was obliged to make in order to resist the forces of the empire which was at her throat. She believed that the Italian front was of signal importance to the alliance as a whole, and she made no secret of the fact that she was counting on the immediate assistance of American divisions. Her government frequently said that very nearly a tenth of her entire population was in the United States, and that America had always been her most trustworthy friend, and that two hundred thousand American soldiers would not only be a great moral force, but would impart fresh vigor to the national resistance.

No one denied the truth of these statements, but cogitating on them one is led to certain reflections, and they are: With an army of four millions of men, why is it they were able to put only a million and a half on the front? I understand that men were needed for munition factories, for the essential industries that provide for war consumption, and for the maintenance of the civil population; that fields must be tilled, mines must be worked, water power must be guarded, and railways must be manned. These things have to be done in every country, but soldiers do not do them. Other countries have militarized workmen, but they do not count them when they are enumerating the man strength of their army. In reality Italy had called to the colors all her healthy men between eighteen and forty-five in order that she might more easily manage them, govern them, discipline them.

The outsider who sees Italy through the veil of her statesmen's oratory and polemics knows her only pleasantly masked. One is led to think sometimes that they are more concerned with the appearance than the substance. It often looks as if they were banking too much upon her great and glorious past, and not looking to the furthering of conditions that make for the happiness and efficiency of their people. The conditions produced by the war have reminded the politicians in control that the people love their government in proportion to the benefits they derive from it, and I fancy it has at times felt that the people were not giving it that strong support which is rooted in love and consideration. "Four-fifths of the Italians have always lived on the war footing," said Prime Minister Orlando in one of his speeches to Parliament. He meant to convey that the Italians, being accustomed to hardships and sacrifices, could stand war better than others. He claimed to see in this a source of strength. Yet he must have known that the soldiers lying down by the roadside in the days of Caporetto, awaiting with Mohammedan indifference the coming of the Austrians, were replying to the officers who were urging them to retreat to some place of reorganization: "We have always lived on polenta, and we shall always have it, and it will always taste the same even if the Austrians win." Though not responsible for the sins of the past, it seems incredible that the authorities were not aware of this wide-spread feeling among the people.

It is in the hour of great trial that our conscience shows us, as in a mirror, all our past shortcomings, and it admonishes us that we reap what we have sown. Reviewing the past, the Italian Government must have known that it could not have the unswerving loyalty of a people who for fifty years had been fed on promises, big words, and magniloquent speeches covering illiterateness, oppressive taxation, obstacles to activity, and necessity of emigration. It is not with words alone that one gives happiness to a nation and receives love and support. Emigration and Bolshevism are the two symptoms of the disease that threatens the nation. Nearly a million Italians emigrated in 1913, and socialism has a firmer footing in Italy than in any other country. Surely these facts have far-reaching significance. The conclusion is that there can be little doubt that men had to be called to the colors so as to manage them better with martial discipline. Possibly it was a wise measure and a necessary prologue to the rigid censorship and to Sacchi's decree, which was a kind of lettre de cachet.

I have often asked myself, What is the Italian's most dominant characteristic? What is his most conspicuous idiosyncrasy? One day I answer it in one way, another in another. But on mature reflection I think it is that he believes what he wants to believe and that he does not trust any one implicitly. He trusts his own fellow citizen least of all. He says he trusts him, but when he puts him in a position of trust he puts somebody in to watch him and to report on him. The Italian has not that confidence in his fellow human beings that a normal man has in his honest wife, that a normal mother has in her dutiful child, that a normal lover has in his trusted innamorata. I am so prejudiced in the Italian's favor that I must defend even his infirmities. For centuries Italy was divided and weak, and countless times she has been the tool of the ambitious, the insatiate, and the predatory. She has been used over and over by more powerful nations as tongs to get their chestnuts out of the fire. For every favor she has received she has had to pay dearly, and she has learned by sad experience that promises are usually made of fragile material. Leaving out the treatment she received from France and England in the nineteenth century, more particularly during the years when she was big with nationality and unity, and during the period when she gave birth to these beloved terms, the treatment she received from these nations in 1911 and 1912, while she was waging the Libyan War, still rankles in her bosom. Despite Salisbury's promises and his parable of the stag, they recall England's disparagement of her initiative and of her conduct of her righteous War. They recall the sinister frenzy that France displayed when they took the S. S. Carthage into one of their ports because they believed she was carrying aeroplanes to the Turks, and the S. S. Manouba because she had Turkish passengers camouflaged as doctors and nurses. She recalls also that when the Hague Tribunal practically decided in her favor, neither France nor England displayed the slightest graciousness.

Despite these stabs of yesterday, Italy must purge herself of distrust, which is the ferment and leaven of weakness. She must make good her alleged trust of France, her professed confidence in England, her hail of the United States as her deliverer. It is difficult for me to believe that often she has not had one language on her lips and another in her heart. The time has come when she must make the words of her heart and her tongue one. The moment has arrived when she must put her cards upon the table and say: "That is my hand and I play the cards face upward." If she can be made to realize it, Italy is big with the prospect of a glorious future and her delivery will not be long delayed.

Nothing impressed me so much in Italy during the momentous last months of the war as her ideas of nationality, the ideas that found dissemination, if not birth, in the prophetic soul of Mazzini and which began to germinate nearly a century ago. "Great ideas make peoples great, and ideas are not great for the peoples unless they go beyond their boundaries. A people to be great must fulfil a great and holy mission in the world. Internal organization represents the sum of means and forces accumulated for the performance of a preordained mission without. National life is the instrument; international life the goal. The prosperity, the glory, the future of a nation are in proportion to its approximation to the assigned goal." These words were written by Mazzini several years after his ideas had made Italy great, and during the war they were on the tongue and in the pen of every constructive statesman who was satisfied to live only under liberty's banner.

For fifty years or more, but particularly since that fateful day, the 20th of September, 1870, when Italian union became a reality, she had professed the profoundest sympathy for the oppressed nations of her hereditary and actual enemy, Austria-Hungary. Since the beginning of the World War the proud spirits of these oppressed nations, now commonly spoken of as the Czecho-Slovaks, had been active in devising plans that would liberate them and their peoples from the jaws of the monster. The whole civilized world who love liberty were in sympathy with them. No one denies that they accomplished results that were almost miraculous. Those who had real knowledge of what was going on in the world knew that in a measure we owed to them the secrets of Germany's diabolic machinations in our own country when we were on terms of amity with the Central Powers. It was not denied that Italy's success on the Piave in June, 1918, was in some measure at least due to the information that the Czecho-Slovaks were able to give the Italians.

In April, 1918, there was a congress of Czecho-Slovaks in Rome, which was warmly received by the Italian people and by some representatives of the Italian Government. This congress formulated the principles upon which it was waging war against Austria-Hungary. It set forth in language that even a child could understand its ideas of nationality. It put before the democratic nations of the world the ideas that they represented and proposed to represent. Their claims received the approbation of the prime minister of Italy, but for some inexplicable reason the stamp of approval of Italy's minister of foreign affairs, the only one who was in a position to represent the government authoritatively, was withheld from them. It was necessary, apparently, to bring the country to the brink of dissolution of its government by a public agitation of the question initiated by the Corriere della Sera before Sonnino's official approval of their aims could be secured. Despite the fact that France, England, the United States, Japan had in turn accorded to the Czecho-Slovaks the right of nationality, and despite the fact that it was well known that that organization called into being by Italy's noble, loyal sons known as the Fascio was warmly and industriously championing the cause of these oppressed people, yet the governmental hand had to be forced before she would put it on the table and play her cards face upward. When the Corriere della Sera was able to throw off the manacles of the censorship and bring the subject of discussion into the public arena, the influential journals that represent the standpatters in the government, such as the Giornale d'Italia, the Epoca, and even the Messaggero, denied that there was any dissension or shadow of dissension between the prime minister and the minister of foreign affairs, and they continued to deny it in the most determined and deliberate way up until the very last moment. Sonnino's champions maintained that the position he took was necessary that Austria-Hungary's intrigues be rooted up and killed. The fear was expressed that the new policy favorable to the Jugoslavs might circumvent the stipulations of the Treaty of London, which were favorable to Italy, and sacrifice them to the exaggerated claims of the Jugoslav ideas of nationality.

The Corriere della Sera pointed out the futility of too great adherence to the Treaty of London and asked: "Can we expect Wilson to feel bound by the I. O. U. given to us in London if he did not sign it?" It insisted that the maintenance of the London treaty in full force was incompatible with a policy favorable to Czecho-Slav aspirations. This embittered those holding the opposite view. The Tempo rejoined: "An attempt is made to make Italians believe that there is a conflict between Rome and Washington due to our 'imperialistic ambitions,' which are looked upon with distrust by Washington. It is for this reason, they tell us, that the United States is loath to give us the help of their forces on our front. The nation rebels against this and will not allow anybody to put a noose around her neck and blackmail her by any such dilemma: either we must have a change of policy, with consequent revision of the London stipulations, or abandonment on the part of the Allies. We are not defending Sonnino, but what is much nearer our heart—the interests of Italy. We defend the Pact of London as the only guarantee of our interests. You can't tell us that an effort is not being made to diminish those stipulations: It is not true...." (Here the censor intervened.) "We entertain no prejudice against the Czecho-Slavs provided they do not insist stubbornly on crossing our path, and prove that they can do what is necessary in their own interests instead of expecting sacrifices from us. Let them meet us halfway by implicitly recognizing the integrity of the rights guaranteed to us by the Treaty of London, which are the reasons for our having entered into this war."

In the same paper, August 20, 1918, appeared this editorial statement: