The Revolt of Man

Without troubling themselves about rumours and alarms of this kind, the Professor and her pupil drove away in the forenoon of Monday. The air was clear and cool; there was a fresh breeze, a warm sun, and a sky flecked with light clouds. The leaves on the trees were at their best, the four horses were in excellent condition. What young fellow of two-and-twenty would have felt otherwise than happy at starting on a holiday away from the restraints of town, and in such weather?

‘There is only one thing wanting,’ he said, as they finally cleared the houses, and were bowling along the smooth highroad between hedges bright with the flowers of early summer.

‘What is that?’ asked the Professor.

‘Constance,’ he replied boldly; ‘she ought to be with us to complete my happiness.’

The Professor laughed.

‘A most unmanly remark,’ she said. ‘How can you reconcile it with the precepts of morality? Have you not been taught the wickedness of expressing, even of allowing yourself to feel an inclination for any young lady?’

‘It is your fault, my dear Professor. You have taught me so much, that I have left off thinking of unmanliness and immodesty and the copy-book texts.’

‘I have taught you,’ she replied gravely, ‘things enough to hang myself and send you to the Tower for life. But remember – remember – that you have been taught these things with a purpose.’

‘What purpose?’ he asked.

‘I began by making you discontented. I allowed you to discover that everything is not so certain as boys are taught to believe. I put you in the way of reading, and I opened your mind to all sorts of subjects generally concealed from young men.’

‘You certainly did, and you are a most crafty as well as a most beneficent Professor.’

‘You have gradually come to understand that your own intellect, the average intellect of Man, is really equal to the consideration of all questions, even those generally reserved and set apart for women.’

‘Is it not time, therefore, to let me know this mysterious purpose?’

Professor Ingleby gazed upon him in silence for a while.

‘The purpose is not mine. It is that of a wiser and greater being than myself, whose will I carry out and whom I obey.’

‘Wiser than you, Professor? Who is she? Do you mean the Perfect Woman herself?’

‘No,’ she replied; ‘the being whom I obey and reverence is none other than – my own husband.’

Lord Chester started.

‘Your husband?’ he cried. ‘You obey your husband? This is most wonderful.’

‘My husband. Yes, Lord Chester, you may now compose that sermon which shall show how Man is the Lord and Master of all created things, including – Woman. I told you I would help you in your sermon. Listen.’

All that day they drove through the fair garden, which we call England. Along the road they passed the rustics hay-making in the fields; the country women were talking at their doors; the country doctor was plodding along her daily round; the parson was jogging along the wayside, umbrella in hand, to call upon her old people; the country police in blue bonnets, carrying their dreaded pocket-books, were loitering in couples about cross-roads; the farmer drove her cart to market, or rode her cob about the fields; little girls and boys carried dinner to their fathers. Here and there they passed a country-seat, a village with its street of cottages, or they clattered through a small sleepy town with its row of villas and its quiet streets, where the men sat working at the windows in hopes of getting a chat or seeing something to break the monotony of the day.

The travellers saw, but noted nothing. For the Professor was teaching her pupil things calculated to startle even the Duchess, and at which Constance would have trembled – things which made his cheek to glow, his eyes to glisten, his mouth to quiver, his hands to clench; – things not to be spoken, not to be whispered, not to be thought, this Professor openly, boldly, and without shame, told the young man.

‘I might have guessed it,’ he said. ‘I had already half guessed it. And this – this is the reason why we are kept in subjection! – this is the LIE they have palmed upon us!’

‘Hush! calm yourself. The thing was not done in a day. The system was not invented by conscious hypocrites and deceivers; it grew, and with it the new religion, the new morality, the new order of things. Blame no one, Lord Chester, but blame the system.’

‘You have told me too much now,’ he said; ‘tell me more.’

She went on. Each word, each new fact, tore something from him that he would have believed part of his nature. Yet he had been prepared for this day by years of training, all designed by this crafty woman to arm him with strength to receive her disclosures.

‘What you see,’ she said, as they drove through a village, ‘seems calm and happy. It is the calmness of repression. Those men in the fields, those working men sitting at the windows – they are all alike unhappy, and they know not why. It is because the natural order has been reversed; the sex which should command and create is compelled to work in blind obedience. You will see, as we go on, that we, who have usurped the power, have created nothing, improved nothing, carried on nothing. It is for you, Lord Chester, to restore the old order.’

‘If I can – if I can find words,’ he stammered.

‘I have trusted you,’ the Professor went on, ‘from the very first. Bon sang ne peut mentir. Yet it was wise not to hurry matters. Your life, and my own life too, if that matters much, hang upon the success of my design. Nothing could have happened more opportunely than the Duchess’s proposal. Why? on the one hand, a sweet, charming, delightful girl; and on the other, a repulsive, bad-tempered old woman. While your blood is aflame with love and disgust, Lord Chester, I tell you this great secret. We have three months before us. We must use it, so that in less than two we shall be able to strike, and to strike hard. You are in my hands. We have, first, much to see and to learn.’

Their first halt was Windsor. Here, after ordering dinner, the Professor took her pupil to visit Eton. It was half-holiday, and the girls were out of school. Some were at the Debating Society’s rooms, where a political discussion was going on; some were strolling by the river under the grand old elms; some were reading novels in the shade; some were lying on the bank talking and laughing. It was a pleasant picture of happy school life.

‘Look at these buildings,’ said the Professor, taking up a position of vantage. ‘They were built by one of your ancestors, beautified by another, repaired and enlarged by another. This is the noblest of the old endowments – for boys.’

The Earl looked round him in wonder.

‘What would boys do with such a splendid place?’ he asked.

‘Have my lessons borne so little fruit that you should ask that question?’ The Professor looked disappointed. ‘My dear boy, they played in the playing-fields, they swam and rowed in the river, they studied in the school, they worshipped in the chapel. When it was resolved to divide the endowments, women naturally got the first choice, and they chose Eton. Afterwards the boys’ public schools fell gradually into decay, and bit by bit they were either closed or became appropriated by girls. There was once a famous school at a place called Rugby. That died. The Lady of the Manor, I believe, gradually absorbed the revenues. Harrow and Marlborough fell in, after a few years, for girls. You see, when once mothers realised the dangers of public school life for boys, they naturally left off sending them.’

‘Yes – I see – the danger that – ’

‘That they would become masterful, Lord Chester, like yourself; that they would use their strength to recover their old supremacy; that they would discover’ – here she sank her voice, although they were not within earshot of any one – ‘that they would discover how strength of brain goes with strength of muscle.’

She led the young man back across the river to the Windsor side. On the way they passed an open gate; over the gate was written ‘Select school for young gentlemen.’ Within was a gymnasium, where a dozen boys were exercising on parallel bars swinging with ropes, and playing with clubs.

‘As for your education,’ said the Professor, ‘we have discovered that the best chance for the world is for a boy to be taught three things. He must learn religion —i. e. submission, and the culture of Perfect Womanhood; he must learn a trade of some kind, unless he belongs to the aristocracy, so as not to be necessarily dependent; and he must be made healthy, strong, and active. History will credit us with one thing, at least; we have improved the race.’

It wanted an hour of dinner. The Professor, who was never tired, led her pupil over such portions of the old Castle as could still be visited – the great tower and one or two of the terraces.

‘This was once yours,’ she said. ‘This is the castle of your ancestors. Courage, my lord; you shall win it back.’

It was in a dream that the young man spent the rest of the evening. The Professor had ordered a simple yet dainty dinner, consisting of a Thames trout, a Châteaubriand, quails, and an omelette, with some Camembert cheese, but her young charge did scanty justice to it. After dinner, when the coffee had been brought, and the door was safely shut, the Professor continued the course of lectures on ancient history, by which she had already upset the mind of her pupil, and filled his brain with dreams of a revolution more stupendous than was ever suspected by the watchful bureau of police.

Their next day’s drive brought them to Oxford. It was vacation, and the colleges were empty. Only here and there a solitary figure of some lonely Fellow or Lecturer, lingering after the rest had gone, flitted across the lawns. The solitude of the place pleased the Professor. She could ramble with her pupil about the venerable courts and talk at her ease.

‘Here,’ she said, ‘in the old days was once the seat of learning and wisdom.’

‘What is it now?’ asked her disciple, surprised. ‘Is not Oxford still the seat of learning?’

‘You must read – alas! you would not understand them – the old books before you can answer your own question. What is their political economy, their moral philosophy, their social science – of which they make so great a boast – compared with the noble scholarship, the science, the speculation of former days? How can I make you understand? There was a time when everything was advanced – by men. Science must advance or fall back. We took from men their education, and science has been forgotten. We cannot now read the old books; we do not understand the old discoveries; we cannot use the tools which they invented, the men of old. Mathematics, chemistry, physical science, geology – all these exist no longer, or else exist in such an elementary form as our ancestors would have been ashamed to acknowledge. Astronomy, which widened the heart, is neglected; medicine has become a thing of books; mechanics are forgotten – ’

‘But why?’

‘Because women, who can receive, cannot create; because at no time has any woman enriched the world with a new idea, a new truth, a new discovery, a new invention; because we have undertaken the impossible.’

The Professor was silent. Never before had Lord Chester seen her so deeply moved.

‘Oh, Sacred Learning!’ she cried, ‘we have sinned against thee! We poor women in our conceit think that everything may be learned from books: we worship the Ideal Woman, and we are content with the rags of learning which remain from the work of Man. Yes, we are contented with these scraps. We will accept nothing that is not absolutely certain. Therefore we blasphemously and ignorantly say that the last word has been said upon everything, and that no more remains to be learned.’

‘Mankind is surrounded,’ the Professor went on as if talking to herself, ‘by a high wall of black ignorance and mystery. The wall is for ever receding or closing in upon us. The men of the past pushed it back more and more, and widened continually the boundaries of thought, so that the foremost among them were godlike for knowledge and for a love of knowledge. We women of the present are continually contracting the wall, so that soon we shall know nothing, unless – unless you come to our help.’

‘How can I help to restore knowledge,’ asked the young man, ‘being myself so ignorant?’

‘By giving back the university to the sex which can enlarge our bounds.’

Always the same thing – always coming back to the one subject.

There was a university sermon in the afternoon, being the feast of St Cecilia; they looked in, but the church was empty. In vacation time one hardly expects more than two or three resident lecturers with their husbands and boys, and a sprinkling of young men from the town. The sermon was dull – perhaps Lord Chester’s mind was out of sympathy with the subject; it treated on the old well-worn lines of Woman as the Musician.

‘I will show you at Cambridge,’ said the Professor when they came out, ‘some of the music of the past. What are the feeble strains, the oft-repeated phrases of modern music, compared with the grand old music conceived and written by men? Women have never composed great music.’

They left Oxford the next day and proceeded north.

‘I think,’ said the Professor as they were driving smoothly along the road, ‘that they did wrong in not trying to maintain the old railways. True there were many accidents, and sometimes great loss of life; yet it must have been a convenience to get from London to Liverpool in five hours. To be sure the art of making engines is dead: such arts could not survive when their new system of separate labour was introduced.’

They passed the old tracks of the railways from time to time, now long canals grass-grown, and now high embankments covered with trees and bushes. There were black holes, too, in the hill-sides through which the iron road had once run.

‘The country in the nineteenth century,’ said the Professor, ‘was populous and wealthy; but it would be at first terrible for one of us to see and to live in. From end to end there were great factories driven by steam-engines, in which men worked in gangs, and from which a perpetual black cloud of smoke rose to the sky; trains ran shrieking along the iron roads with more clouds of smoke and steam. The results of the work were grand; but the workmen were uncared for, and killed by the long hours and the foul atmosphere. I talk like a woman’ – she checked herself with a smile, – ‘and I want to talk so that you shall feel like a man – of the ancient type.

‘There is one point of difference between man’s and woman’s legislation which I would have you bear in mind. Man looks to the end, woman thinks of the means. If man wanted a great thing done, he cared little about the sufferings of those who did that thing. A great railway had to be built; those who made it perished of fever and exposure. What matter? The railway remained. A great injustice had to be removed; to remove it cost a war, with death to thousands. Man cared little for the deaths, but much for the result. Man was like Nature, which takes infinite pains to construct an insect of marvellous beauty, and then allows it to be crushed in thousands almost as soon as born. Woman, on the other hand, considers the means.’

They came, after three days’ posting, to Manchester. They found it a beautiful city, situated on a clear sparkling stream, in the midst of delightful rural scenery, and regularly built after the modern manner in straight streets at right angles to each other: the air was peculiarly bright and bracing. ‘I wanted very much,’ said the Professor, ‘to show you this place. You see how pretty and quiet a place it is; yet in the old times it had a population of half a million. It was perpetually black with smoke; there were hundreds of vast factories where the men worked from six in the morning until six at night. Their houses were huts – dirty, crowded nests of fever; their sole amusements were to smoke tobacco and to drink beer and spirits; they died at thirty worn out; they were of sickly and stunted appearance; they were habitual wife-beaters; they neglected their children; they had no education, no religion, no hopes, no wishes for anything but plentiful pipe and beer. See it now! The population reduced to twenty thousand; the factories swept away; the machinery destroyed; the men working separately each in his own house, making cotton for home consumption. Let us walk through the streets.’

These were broad, clean, and well kept. Very few persons were about. A few women lounged about the Court, or gathered together on the steps of the Town Hall, where one was giving her opinions violently on politics generally; some stood at the doorways talking to their neighbours; in the houses one could hear the steady click-click of the loom or spinning-jenny, as the man within, or the man and his sons, sat at their continuous and solitary labour.

‘This is beautiful to think of, is it not?’

‘I do not know what to say,’ he replied. ‘You ask me, after all that you have taught me, to admire a system in which men are slaves. Yet all looks well from the outside.’

‘It began,’ the Professor went on, without answering him directly, ‘with the famous law of the “Clack” Parliament – that in which there were three times as many women as men – which enacted that wives should receive the wages of their husbands on Monday morning, and that unmarried men, unless they could be represented by mothers or sisters, or other female relations of whom they were the support, should be paid in kind, and be housed separately in barracks provided for the purpose, where discipline could be maintained. It was difficult at first to carry this legislation into effect: the men rebelled; but the law was enforced at last. That was the death-blow to the male supremacy. Woman, for the first time, got possession of the purse. What was done in Manchester was followed in other places. Young man, the spot you stand on is holy, or the reverse, whichever you please, because it is the birthplace of woman’s sovereignty.

‘Presently it began to be whispered abroad that the hours were too long, the work too hard, and the association of men together in such large numbers was dangerous. Then, little by little, wives withdrew their husbands from the works, mothers their sons, and set them up with spinning-jennies and looms at home. Hand-made cotton was protected; the machine-made was neglected. Soon the machines were silent and the factories closed; in course of time they were pulled down. Then other improvements followed. The population was enormously diminished, partly by the new laws which forbade the marriage of unhealthy or deformed men, and only allowed women to choose husbands when they had themselves obtained a certificate of good health and good conduct. Formerly the men married at nineteen; by the new laws they were compelled to wait until four-and-twenty; then, further, to wait until they were asked; and lastly, if they were asked, to obtain a certificate of soundness and freedom from any complaint which might be transmitted to children. Therefore as few of the Manchester workmen were quite free from some form of disease, the population rapidly decreased.’

‘But,’ said Lord Chester, ‘is that wrong? A man ought to be healthy.’

That was, indeed, the creed in which he had been brought up.

‘I am telling you the history of the place,’ replied the Professor. ‘Marriage being thus almost impossible, the Manchester women emigrated and the workmen stayed where they were, and gradually the weakly ones died out. As for the present Manchester man, you shall see him on Sunday when he goes to church.’

They stayed in this pleasant and countrified town for some days. On Sunday they went to the cathedral, and attended the service, which was conducted by the Bishop herself and her principal clergy. As the Bishop preached, Lord Chester looked about him, and watched the men. They were mostly a tall and handsome race, though, in the middle-aged men, the labour at the spindles had bowed their shoulders and contracted their chests. Their faces, however, like those of the London congregation, were listless and apathetic; they paid little heed to the sermon, yet devoutly knelt, bowed, and stood up at the right places. They seemed neither to feel nor to take any interest in life. Some of the women looked as if they interpreted the law of marital obedience in the strictest, even its harshest manner possible.

Lord Chester looked with a certain special curiosity at a regiment of young unmarried workmen. He had often enough before watched such a regiment passing to and from church, but never with such interest. For in these boys he had now learned to recognise the masters of the future.

They were mostly quite young, and naturally presented a more animated appearance than their married elders. Those of them who came from the country, or had no parents, were kept in a barrack under strict rule and discipline, having prescribed hours for gymnastics, exercises, and recreation, as well as for labour.

They were not all boys. Among them marched those whom unkind Nature or accident had set apart as condemned to celibacy. These were the consumptive, the asthmatic, the crippled, the humpbacked, the deformed; those who had inherited diseases of lung, brain, or blood; the unfortunates who could not marry, and who were, therefore, cared for with what was officially known as kindness. These poor creatures presented the appearance of the most hopeless misery. At other times Lord Chester would have passed them by without a thought. He knew now how different would have been their lot under a government which did not call itself maternal. Neither boys nor incurables received pay, and the surplus of their work was devoted to the great Mother’s Sustentation Fund, or, as it was called for short, the Mother’s Tax. This was intended to supplement the wages earned by the husband at home in case of insufficiency. But the wives were exhorted and admonished to take care of their husbands, and keep them constantly at work.

‘They do take care of them,’ said the Professor. ‘They make them clean up house, cook meals, and look after the children, as well as carry on their trade; while they themselves wrangle over politics in the street or in some of the squabble-halls, which are always open. The men never go out except on Sundays; they have no friends; they have no recreation.’

‘But formerly they were even worse off, according to your own showing.’

‘No; because if they were slaves to their wheels, they were slaves who worked in gangs, and they sometimes rose from the ranks. These men are solitary slaves who can never rise.’

‘Is there nothing good at all?’ cried the young man. ‘Would you make a revolution, and upset everything? As for religion – ’

‘Say nothing,’ said the Professor, ‘about religion till I have shown you the old one. Yes; there was once something grander than anything you can imagine. We women, who have belittled everything, have even spoiled our religion.’

They passed a couple of young men wending their way to the gymnasium with racquets in their hands.

‘They are the sons of the doctor or lawyer, I suppose,’ said the Professor looking after them. ‘Fine young fellows! But what are we to do with them? The law says that every boy, except the son of a peeress, shall learn a trade. No doubt these boys have learned a trade, but they do not practise it. They stay at home idle, or they spend their days in athletics. Some time or other they will marry a woman in their own rank, and then the rest of their lives will be devoted to managing the house and looking after the children, while their wives go to office and earn the family income.’

‘What would you do with them?’

‘Nay, Lord Chester; what will you do for them? That is the question.’

The next day they left Manchester, and proceeded on their journey. At Liverpool they saw seven miles of splendid old docks, lining the banks of the river; but there were no ships. The trade of the old days had long since left the place: it was a small town now with a few fishing smacks. The Professor enlarged upon the history of the past.

‘But were the men happy?’

‘I do not know. That is nowhere stated. I imagine there used to be happiness of a kind for men in forming part of a busy hive. At least the other plan – our plan – does not seem to produce much solid happiness…’