Facts and Fictions of Life

I saw a woman who had come to visit her mother who was one of these poor, insane creatures. "I can't afford to keep her at home," she said, "and then at times she gets 'snags' and acts so that people are afraid of her, so I had to let her come here. It is kind of awful, ain't it?"

I thought it was "kind of awful," for more reasons than the poor woman could realize, for she was so used to foul air and knew so little of sanitary conditions that she was mercifully spared certain thoughts that seem to have escaped the authorities also.

"It is her birthday and I brought her this," she said, showing me a colored cookie. "She will like it. We can visit here one day each month if we have friends."

"How many bodies do you carry each week?" I asked of the captain of the city boat.

"About fifty," he said. But later on both he and the official on the Island told me that there were six thousand buried here yearly, so it will be seen that his estimate per week was less than half what it should have been.

I looked at the stack of pine boxes, the ends of which showed from beneath a tarpaulin on the deck.

They were stacked five deep. There were seven wee ones, hardly larger than would be filled by a good-sized kitten.

I said: "They are so very small. I don't see how a baby was put inside."

The man to whom I spoke – a deck hand who was a "ten-day-self-committed," so the captain told me later – smiled a grim, sly smile and said:

"I reckon you're allowin' fer trimmin's. This kind don't get piliers and satin linin's. It don't take much room for a baby with no trimmin's an' mighty little clothes."

"Why are two of them dark wood and all the rest light?" I asked of the same man.

"I reckon the folks of them two had a few cents to pay fergittin' their baby's box stained. It kind of looks nicer to them, and when they get a little more money, they'll come and get it dug up and put it in a grave by itself or some other place. It seems kind of awful to some folks to have their little baby put in amongst such a lot."

He said it all quite simply, quite apologetically, as if I might think it rather unreasonable – this feeling that it was "kind of awful to think of the baby in amongst such a lot."

At that time, I did not know that he was a prisoner. He showed me a number of things about the boxes and spoke of the open cracks and knot holes through which one could see what was inside. I declined to look after the first glance.

"You don't mind it very much after you're used to it," he said. "Of course, you would, but I mean us."

I began to understand that he was a prisoner.

"When you're a prisoner, you get used to a good deal," he said, later on, when they were unloading the bodies and some of the men looked white and sick. "They're new to it," he explained to me. "It makes them sick and scared; but it won't after a while."

"Why are most of them here?" I asked. "Most of them look honest – and – "

"Honest!" he exclaimed, with the first show he had made of rebellion or resentment. "Honest! Of course most of us are honest. It is liquor does it mostly. None of us are thieves – yet!"

I noticed the "us," but still evaded putting him in with the rest.

"Why do they not let liquor alone, after such a hard lesson?"

He laughed. He had a red, bloated, but not a bad face. He was an Englishman.

"Some of us can't. Some don't want to, and some – some – it is about all some can get."

Later on, I was told that this man was honest, a good worker, and that he was "self-committed to get the liquor out of him. He's been here before. When he gets out, he will be drunk before he gets three blocks away from the dock, and he'll be sent here again – or to the Island!"

"And has this system gone on for a hundred years," I asked, "without finding some remedy?"

"Well, since the women began to take a hand, some little has been done," the officer replied. "They built a coffee and lodging house right near the landing, and take returning prisoners there, and give them a chance to work if they want to – in a broom factory they built. Some get a start that way and if they work and are honest, they get a letter saying so when they find places. It is only a drop in the bucket, but it helps a few."

"It looks a little as though, if women were to take a hand in public, municipal, or governmental affairs, that reform, and not punishment, might be made the object of imprisonment if imprisonment became necessary, doesn't it?"

He laughed.

"Politics is no place for women. This they are doing is charity. That is all very well, but they got no business meddling with city government, and courts, and prisoners only as charity."

"Yet you say that, for a hundred years, those who look after the criminal population, thought very little of helping the men who came out, much less did they think of beginning at the other end and trying to keep them from going in. Women have been allowed to devise public charities, even, for only a few years past. They had no experience in building manufactories and conducting coffee and lodging houses; they have but little money of their own to put into such things and yet they have bethought them to start, in embryo, right here where the returning convict lands, what appears to have vast possibilities as you say. Now if this effort for the prevention of crime and want were at the other end of the line in municipal government, don't you think it might go even nearer the root of the matter and do more good?"

"How would you like to be a ward politician and a heeler?" he inquired, wiping a smile away and looking at my gloves.

"I should not like it at all."

"Well, now, look at that! Of course no lady would, so – "

"Do you think it possible that the world might get on fairly comfortably without having 'heelers' and 'ward politicians' – in the sense you mean – in municipal or state government? And that it might be better without such crime producers?" I added, as he began to laugh.

"You women are always visionary. Never practical. You – "

"I thought you said that the one and only really practical measure yet taken to reduce the criminal population as it returns from the Islands was invented and is conducted by women and – "

"You can just make up your mind that in every family of six there'll be one hypocrite and one fool, either one of which is liable to be a criminal, too, and the State has got to take care of 'em somehow. But the prisons are getting too full and the Almshouses and Insane Asylums are growing very large. But there is the Two Brothers' Island. I've got to attend to my business now. Take the trip with me again some time."

But it seems to me, I shall not need to go again, and that no judge or legislator would need to take the journey more than once, unless, perchance, he took it in the person of either the hypocrite or the fool of his family; which, let us hope, no judge and no legislator is in a position to do.

AN IRRESPONSIBLE EDUCATED CLASS

Education, using the word in its restricted scholastic sense, is always productive of restlessness and discontent, unless education, in its practical relations to life, furnishes an outlet and safety valve for the whetted and strengthened faculties. Mere mental gymnastics are unsatisfactory after the first flush of pleasurable excitement produced in the mind newly awakened to its own capabilities.

There seems to be something within us which demands that our knowledge be in some way applied, and that the logic of thought find fruition in the logic of events. The moment the laborers of the country found time and opportunity to whet their minds, they also developed a vast and persistent unrest – a dissatisfaction with the order of things which gave to them the tools with which to carve a fuller, broader life, but had not yet furnished them the material upon which they might work. Their plane of thought was raised, their outlook was expanded, their possibilities multiplied; but the materials to work with remained the same. Their status and condition clashed with their new hopes and needs. This state of things produced what we call "labor troubles," with all their complications. Capital and labor had no contest until labor became (to a degree) educated.

If – "in those good old days" – labor was not satisfied, it did not know how to make the fact very clearly understood. Capital smiled and patronized labor, and labor smiled and said it was quite content to work for so kind a master. It was safer to do that way – in those good old days. Then, too, so long as labor's wits had not been sharpened, so long as the laborer had not learned the relative values of things, perhaps he was content. Certainly he was far more so than he is to-day.

It is well that, in his present state of angry unrest, he feels that he has but to organize and elect his own representatives to help enact just and repeal unjust laws as they bear upon his own immediate needs. But for this outlet to his feelings, and this hope for his own future, the labor troubles would be troubles indeed, and every additional book read by labor, every new schoolhouse built for labor, would but add flame to fire. But education brings with it – when taken into practical life – a certain sense of the responsibilities of life and of the relations of things.

The laborer begins to argue, "Am not I partly responsible for my own condition? Is not my salvation in my own hands and in the hands of my fellows? We are units in our own government. We are in the majority numerically, and we are, therefore, at least partially responsible for not only what we do, but for that which is done to us."

It is this feeling that sobers and steadies while it inspires the so-called working classes to-day.

If, with their present enlightenment, ambitions, and needs, laboring men felt themselves wholly irresponsible for the present or future legislation, riots and lawlessness would be the inevitable result. A sense of responsibility alone makes educational development safe either in individuals or in classes.

Witness the truth of this in the lives of the "gilded youths" of all countries whose sharpened wits are not steadied by, or applied in, any useful occupation. The results are disastrous to themselves and to those who fall under their sway or influence.

Broadened ambitions, sharpened mental capacities, developed intellectuality, demand corresponding outlets and responsibilities. Lacking these, education is but an added danger. Especially is this true in a Republic where the theory of legal and political equality is held. At the present time there are but two wholly irresponsible classes in our republic – Indians and women.

I place the Indians first because it has recently been decided in South Dakota that if an Indian (male) will "accept land in severalty," he thereby becomes a sovereign, and is henceforth presumed to have sufficient interest in the welfare of his government and the stability of affairs in general to entitle him to be looked upon as a desirable citizen, capable of legislating and desiring to legislate wisely for the public weal.

Since the government has not yet come to believe that any amount of land in severalty entitles women to so much confidence, and since the lack of responsibility develops in woman, as in man, a reckless and wanton spirit, we have the spectacle of this irresponsible element taking property laws into its own hands, and proudly destroying in public the belongings of other people where those belongings chanced to be in the form of beverages which these women disapproved of as articles of merchandise and use. And we have seen, farther, the grave spectacle of courts of law which will not or dare not enforce the law for their punishment.

The due recognition of property rights is one of the earliest developments of personal, legal, and political responsibility. The negro notoriously disregarded these when his own human rights and individual responsibility were unrecognized. His desires were likely to be the measure of your loss.

He is not the light-fingered being that he was. Mine and thine have a new meaning for him since – for the first time in his life – "thine" has any meaning to his one-time master.

He is also beginning to look to his ballot for his safety and to himself to work out his future status, whereas one day his legs were his sole dependence when trickery or blandishment failed him. Woman still depends – where she wishes to compass an end – upon blandishment, deception, or a type of force which she believes will not or cannot be resented in the way it would unquestionably be resented if offered by men. A body of respectable men in a quiet community do not calmly walk into another man's business house, and without process of law destroy his property. Their sense of personal and legal and political responsibility is a most effective police force; and no matter how rabid a prohibitionist John Smith is, he does not collect a band of otherwise respectable men about him and proceed to destroy – with praise and prayer as an accompaniment – the belongings of his neighbor.

No; he goes to a legal infant and a political nonexistent, and gets her to do it if it is to be done. He knows that to her the limit of responsibility is the verge of her desires on this question. He knows that she recognizes no right of property in a beverage she does not approve and a traffic she hopes to destroy. He knows that her sense of helplessness within the law – where she has no voice – gives her that reckless spirit of the political non-existent of all classes, which finds its revenge in lawlessness so long as it may not hope to have a voice in lawfulness. While woman was uneducated and wholly a dependent, there was little danger from her. She had too much at stake, in a purely physical sense. Then, too, she had not reasoned out the logical sequence between the pretension that a Republic of political equals before the law exists, while in fact one-half of that Republic has no political status whatever and no voice in the laws they obey. Uneducated and wholly dependent as woman was, this was safe enough. Educated, and to a degree financially independent, as she now is, she is a menace to social order so long as she stands without legal responsibility or political outlet for the expression of her opinions and desires in matters of government.

So long as her only means of expression on the subject of the liquor traffic is a hatchet and prayer, she will use both, and we will have the shocking spectacle, witnessed a little over a year ago, of a court refusing to even fine those who committed as clear and wanton an outrage on property rights as often finds record.

The steadying sense of personal and mental responsibility can develop only under the exercise of such responsibility. Man passed through the stage of regulative and prohibitive thought, and learned the true significance and value of Liberty only by its possession. By being responsible he learned the folly and danger of undue restrictive legislation, and the utter futility of the attempt to legislate taste, moral sense and lofty ideals (i. e. his personal taste and ideals) into his neighbors.

He also learned the futility and danger of lawless raids upon those who were not of his way of thinking as to what they should eat or drink, or wherewithal they should be clothed. Woman will have to learn the same important lesson in the same way. She will abuse the personal rights and liberties of others who disagree with her (now that she is educated and has the power) unless she is steadied, given legal and political responsibility, and held to the same account for her acts as are her brothers. Being helpless within the law – having no means of expression nor of making her will and opinions felt, having no voice in municipal or governmental management – she has begun to find lawless outlet for her newly acquired talents and intellectual activity. She is playing the part of border "regulator" and lobbyist – two very dangerous and degrading rôles in any case but doubly so in the hands of an educated but unrepresented class.

It has been argued, by men who are otherwise favorable to woman suffrage, that to grant the ballot to woman would be to yield up, upon the altar of fanaticism and narrow personal desires, much of the liberty for which man has fought and struggled. They argue that women do not stop to consider whether they have the right to interfere with what others do, but that they only ask whether they like the thing done.

The argument goes further and asserts that women only want the ballot that they may restrict the liberty of other people, pass prohibitory, sumptuary, and religious laws; and that the ballot in the hands of woman means a return to a union of church and state, and the meddlesome, personal legislation of the type known to us as Blue Laws.

It is no doubt true that there are many half-developed thinkers among women who demand the ballot, who desire political power for these petty reasons. It is also undoubtedly true that many of these would travel the same road trod by their fathers before them, and learn political wisdom slowly and only after a struggle with their own narrow ideas of liberty, which means their own liberty to restrict and regulate the liberty of other people.

It may be readily admitted, I say, that woman will make some of the same mistakes, political, religious, and sociological, that have been made by men in the reach after a better way. But what has taught thoughtful men wisdom? What has broadened the conception of political liberty? What taught men the danger and folly of religious and restrictive (sumptuary) legislation? What but experience and responsibility?

Nothing so steadies the hasty and narrow judgment as power, coupled with the recognition that responsibility for the use of that power is sure to be demanded.

Many a man will advise, as secret lobbyist, what he would not do in open legislature. Many a man in private life asserts that "If I were judge or president," or what not, so and so should not be done. When the power and responsibility once rests upon him, his outlook is broadened, and he recognizes that he would endanger a far more sacred principle were he to adhere to his plan.

This holds true with woman. With her newly acquired intellectual and financial power she is seeking an outlet for her capacities. She sees certain municipal and governmental ills. Having no direct power of expression, no legal, political status in a country which claims to have no political classes, she does what all disqualified, irresponsible, dissatisfied classes of men have done before her when deprived of equal opportunity with their fellows; she seeks by subterfuge (indirection) or lawlessness to compass that which she may not attempt lawfully and which, had she the steadying influence and discipline of responsibility and power, she would not do.

Inexperience, coupled with irresponsibility and a lax sense of the rights of others, always did and always will produce tyrants.

Unite this naturally produced and inevitable social and political condition and outlook with the developed mental capacities and consequent restless, undirected, and unabsorbed ambition of the women of to-day, and we have a dangerous lobby – working in secret by indirection and without open responsibility for their words, deed, or influence – to handle in our Republic.

SEX IN BRAIN

Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in introducing the speaker said: "The first speaker of the evening is Helen Gardener, who is to give us an address on the Brain. You know the last stronghold of the enemy is scientific. Men have decided that we must not enter the colleges and study very hard; must not have the responsibility of government laid on our heads, because our brains weigh much less than the brains of men. Dr. Hammond, of New York, has published several very elaborate articles in the Popular Science Monthly to prove this fact. But Helen Gardener has spent about fourteen months in investigation, and has conferred with twenty able specialists upon the subject, and will give us to-night the result of her investigation. She will show to us that it is impossible to prove any of the positions that Dr. Hammond has maintained."

Read before the International Council of Women in Washington, 1888.

Ladies and Gentlemen: – The political conditions of woman are very greatly influenced to-day by what is taught to her and about her by those two conservative moulders of public opinion – clergymen and physicians. Our law-makers have long since ceased to merely sneer at the simple claim of human rights by one-half of humanity, and for refuge they have flown to priest and practitioner, who do not fail them in this their hour of great tribulation. It is true that men, most of whom never enter a church, have grown somewhat ashamed to press the theological arguments against the equality of the sexes, and to these the medical argument has become an ever-present help in their time of trouble.

In the early days woman was under the absolute sway of club and fist. Then came censer and gown, swinging hell in the perfumed depths of the one and hiding in the folds of the other, thumb-screw and fagot for the woman who dared to think. At last the theory of the primal curse upon her head has grown weaker. Mankind struggles to be less brutal and more just. Manly men are beginning to blush when they hear repeated the well-worn fable of the fall of man through woman's crime and her inferiority of position and opportunity, justified by priest and pleader, because of legends inherited from barbarians – mental deformities worthy of their parentage.

When religious influence and dogma began to lose their terrors, legal enactments were slowly modified in woman's favor and hell went out of fashion. Then Conservatism, Ignorance, and Egotism, in dismay and terror, took counsel together and called in medical science, still in its infancy, to aid in staying the march of progress which is inevitable to civilization and so necessary to anything like a real Republic. Equality of opportunity began to be denied to woman, for the first time, upon natural and so-called scientific grounds. She was pronounced physically and mentally incapable, because of certain anatomical conditions, and she must be prevented – for her own good and that of the race here– from competition with her mental and physical superiors.

It was no longer her soul, but her body, that needed saving from herself. Her thirst for knowledge the clergy declared had already damned the souls of a very large majority of mankind – in a hereafter known only to them. The same vicious tendency, the doctors echoed, will be the ruin of the physical bodies of the race in this world, as we are prepared to prove. The case began to look hopeless again. Opportunity must be denied, these doctors say, because capacity does not exist. Where capacity seems to exist, it is, it must be, at the expense of individual health and future maternal capabilities.

As a person, she has no status with these consistent believers in "equal rights to all mankind." As a potential mother only, can she hope for consideration either by religious or medical theorist. This has been a difficult combination to meet. Few who cared to contest their verdict, possessed the bravery to fearlessly face the religious dictators, and fewer still had the anatomical and anthropological information to risk a fight on a field which assumed to be held by those who based all of their arguments upon scientific facts, collected by microscope and scales and reduced to unanswerable statistics.

The priest, reinforced by the doctor, promised a long and bitter struggle, on new grounds, to those who fought for simple justice to the individual, aside from her sex relations; who wished for neither malediction nor mercy; those who claim only the right of a unit to enjoy the common heritage untrammeled by superstition and artificial difficulties. They do not ask to be helped – only not to be hindered. They had hailed science as their friend and ally; and behold, pseudo-science adopted theories, invented statistics, and published personal prejudices as demonstrated fact. All this has done a vast deal of harm to the cause of woman.

Educators, theorists, and politicians readily accept the data and statistics of prominent physicians, and, in good faith, make them a basis of action, while the victims of their misinformation have been helpless. It is, therefore, very important to learn, if possible, just how far medical science and anthropology have really discovered demonstrable natural sex differences in the brains of men and women, and how far the usual theories advanced are gratuitous assumptions, founded upon legend and fed by mental habit and personal egotism.