Ethel Snowden

“ The world of politics is not the only world, nor the best. The world that interprets the world, the world that takes you out of the world, the world of art is the best of all worlds. And when the passions of living men, tearing and wounding the innocent, sicken the soul, the exploits of the dead, read by the fireside, or rendered in song and dance and drama, offer a refuge for weary body and mind, tired with their fruitless protest against cruelty and wrong. ”

“ I stood on the balcony and looked across the river at the place of horrors where so many of Russia's noblest men and women had gone to their deaths, the poor victims of tyrant princes and their ministers. The abominable cruelties practised upon the martyrs for Russian freedom have been as familiar to one's mind as the alphabet, and for almost as long. One's youngest, purest and best emotion has been given throughout one's life to those who have endured torture, disgrace and death for truth and liberty. ”

“ There is no power to compel a woman to vote if she should have conscientious scruples about the rightness of voting. No police officer will arrest her, no summons be served upon her for not doing so. Then why should she object to the power of governing themselves being granted to those women of independent spirit who desire it? The right to say who shall govern her and how she shall be governed belongs to every grown woman of good understanding by the divine right of her humanity with its sense of responsibility to her kind. ”

“ The fact that so many women of the present still cling tenaciously to this old idea of their sex’s servitude is due in part to their belief in its Divine sanction, and partly to a condition of intellect and soul which is the most painful effect of ages of subjection. Ages of domination have produced a love of domination, a desire for servitude. Enslaved for so long in the flesh they have become also slavish in spirit, loving fondly the chains that bind them and grovelling at the feet of the being who destroys them. ”

“ I’m sure you’ll help Ireland. Tell your people that if it’s war they want, war they will get till every young man in Ireland is dead. Then they can begin with the old men and the women—they’ve begun with the women—and after that they’ll have to wait till the children grow up. But they’ll find them every bit as keen as their fathers. It’s in the blood of us. There are only two ways to peace, and God knows we want peace. You can either give Ireland her freedom, or you can sink the whole country in the sea. It’s the peace of the dead you’ll get if you won’t have that of the living. ”

“ Far back in the dim days of the past, farther back than the mind and imagination of most can properly travel, when the human race had just emerged from the slime in which its animal progenitors had wallowed, when the tiger and the ape were king, and when the new-born soul of man struggled with the spirit of the jungle for its earliest expression, the two halves of humanity were equally endowed. ”

“ Lenin, like all the Communists, conveys the impression of awful sureness of himself, of an immovable and overpowering self-confidence. It is not the smiling self-complacency, the shallow cocksureness of that very common individual amongst us who is sure that wisdom will die with him. It is the deadly certainty that he is right and everybody who differs from him is wrong, of the scholar and fanatic who would sacrifice his own head as readily as he would sacrifice yours in the believed interests of the thing he loves. ”

“ A slave is not a slave when he hates his chains and seeks to cast them aside; but he is a slave indeed when he loves his slavery and declines to be free when freedom is offered him. The argument that, because some women do not want the vote all women should be denied it, is both foolish and unfair. It is unfair to the women who want the vote; but it is much more cruel to the women who do not want the vote. The women who want the vote, which is the symbol to them of eternal things, are, by their aspirations, saved from the spiritual decay that comes to souls that sleep ”

“ The Trotsky who raised the banner of universal peace at Brest-Litovsk, the prince of pacifists, became the prince of militarists, the great war lord of a hundred and fifty millions of people stung to arms again. The marvellously revived and sternly disciplined armies of Trotsky have performed miracles of soldier-craft which have filled an astonished world with reluctant admiration, tossing aside their enemies, Judenitch, Petlura, Koltchak, Denikin, and Wrangel, like terriers in a barn full of rats. ”

“ The propaganda trains they are sending daily to the Polish front are marvels of ingenuity. Inside and outside these trains are covered with vivid pictures portraying side by side the horrors of Capitalism and the glories of Communism in simple intelligible form, the horrid capitalist murdering the poor peasant or standing triumphant over a dying woman and child, whilst Communist fields bursting with grain yield to the sickle of the happy, sun-browned, well-fed harvester. ”

“ Two millions of adult people in Great Britain either wholly or partially unemployed; wives and children beginning to hunger; industrial strife on a scale hitherto unimagined clouding the horizon; men by the million trained to kill, ready to be used by one side or the other in a class war; hate and violence the fruit of it all, and appalling suffering for all classes before one side recognizes the right of the workers to an assured and abundant life and the other side realizes that Russia’s way is not the way even for Russia. ”

“ The last remnant of this ancient division of labour is to be found in the half-querulous, wholly resentful suggestion, the favourite retort of the anti-feminist, 'woman's place is the home.' Woman as woman, woman when she is performing the particular duties of her sex is, undoubtedly, in the best and safest place possible when she is at home—always presuming that the home is a home indeed, and that she can afford to be there. But sex duties are only a part of woman's work, only a part, indeed, of some women's work. ”

“ Then, perhaps, the past may come to be forgotten and forgiven, and Russia become what she was destined from before the foundations of the world to become—a great leader in the humanitarian movements of the world.
For the Russians are amongst the world’s most tender dreamers. Humanity sorely needs their vision in this hour. At a time when the fatal folly and weakness of a few has flung mankind into the pit of materialism, it would be of incalculable value to Europe and the world to restore to it the idealism of a hundred millions of dreamers. ”

“ Russia, Germany, France, England, America—all will go the same way to ruin unless the great awakening comes soon, and men learn that the bonds which unite nations are indissoluble, or are cut by them at their own peril.
It is needful that all should become, if not pilgrims, priests and prophets of peace and good will. It is vital to do so. Communism cannot save mankind if it be imbued, as so far it has been, with the old bad spirit of hate. Capitalism is failing before our eyes. Militarism has failed. ”

“ It is as necessary to the modern thinking woman as the sunlight is to the flower that she should find her place in the scheme of things, and be able by her deeds to develop her own character and justify her existence to herself and to the world. The busy working wife, with her limited means, her large brood, her vision frequently limited by the harassing cares and worries of her life, feels little sympathy with the feminist, whose gospel she has never understood. ”

“ If one may judge by appearances, by the expression of their faces, by the brisk march and the smart response to the word of command, by their bright smiles and thundering cheers, the Red Army at least is well content to serve the present Government. And it is not by any means solely because life, except for those in the front lines of battle, is more assured than for the rest of the population. True it is that the army receives first attention. ”

“ Soft and slow of speech, but of quick intelligence and with the clearest outlook, his true friend would none the less wish him a happier fate than to be Minister of State in a country so full of tangled problems as Russia in these dreadful days. Making beautiful music to a company of congenial souls, the samovar steaming merrily and the song going gaily behind warm, close curtains, in the light of a bright fire, till the dawn on the horizon told of the coming day, is the proper life for this gentle Minister, whom to know is to like. ”

“ Has a handful of brilliant and thoughtful men, however good and sincere they may be, the moral right to enforce upon a whole community the system they believe in but the community as a whole rejects, with all the tyranny and cruelty such dictatorship must inevitably mean? Had the men of Russia the moral right to break up their own National Assembly, however inadequate and faulty, thereby bringing upon their country civil war and alien aggression, for the sake of a theory however magnificent? ”

“ It is too late in the day to argue that women cannot form a sound political judgment when, at election times, every political candidate clamours for the assistance of women in the work of persuading men to vote for him and the views he represents. It is, of course, the mass of women who come under this condenmation of Mrs Humphry Ward. It is inconceivable that the anti-suffragists include themselves when they say that 'the political ignorance of women is irreparable and imposed upon them by nature.' They are the great exceptions that prove the rule. ”

“ No living human being faced by so many and such frightful difficulties could have made it a success. Alien invasion, internal disorder, counter-revolutionary activities, scarcities of necessaries of all sorts, the blockade of Russia—all these things made it quite impossible for the Russian Revolutionary Government with the best brains and the finest intentions in the world to carry out more than a fraction of its programme in a very imperfect manner. The wonder is not that they have failed to establish Socialism, but that they have successfully accomplished so much that is good. ”

“ To be watched by dozens of pairs of envious eyes with every mouthful of the simple food one ate filled one with cold horror at the thought of what it implied, a slowly dying city of 21⁄4 millions of people. For the rest of my time in Vienna I contrived to share my meals with strangers whenever it was possible to do so without hurting their pride. And I found that pride is a plant which rarely survives where hunger and cold have starved the soil for several years.
What sad sights were there for the observant in the streets and cafés of the once gay city of Vienna! ”

“ The suffragist demands only equality in politics; though she desires to use her vote to help the poor, she has not always, nor even generally, a clear idea of how this is to be done. The feminist knows both what she wants to see accomplished, and the way in which it has to be done. Liberty for women to develop all the perfection of which they are capable, she desires supremely. Equality for men and women she aspires to, in all those matters of their common humanity where sex does not enter and impose an impassable barrier ”