Rheta Childe Dorr

“ A thousand generations of service, unpaid, loving, intimate, must have left the strongest kind of a mental habit in its wake. Women, when they emerged from the seclusion of their homes and began to mingle in the world procession, when they were thrown on their own financial responsibility, found themselves willy nilly in the ranks of the producers, the wage earners; when the enlightenment of education was no longer denied them, when their responsibilities ceased to be entirely domestic and became somewhat social, when, in a word, women began to think, they naturally thought in human terms. ”

“ For I am just as much of a socialist as when I went to Russia in May, 1917, and just as little of an anarchist. I believe that the next economic development will be socialism, that is coöperation, common ownership of the principal means of production, and the administration of all departments of government for the collective good of all the people. I believe that the world is for the many, not the few. But Russia has demonstrated that there is no advantage to be gained by taking all power out of the hands of one class and placing it in the hands of another. ”

“ Nearly four years ago the splendid armies of Belgium and France rushed into the fray, the magnificent volunteer army of Great Britain joining them in swift [96] order. But none of those armies were quite like ours. Those men went out, without adequate training, in a passion of patriotism, in a glory of rage and pain. Their hearts were blazing, their brains on fire. They knew that they must die if their countries were to live. The American soldiers are fired by no such strong emotion. The men I saw in France, on their way to the trenches, were like men going to work. ”

“ New York is by no means unique. Every city has its dance hall problem; every small town its girl and boy problem; every country-side its tragedy of the girl who, for relief from monotony, goes to the city and never returns.
It is strange that nowhere, until lately, in city, town, or country, has it occurred to any one that the community owed anything to this insatiable thirst for joy. ”

“ I saw a working class which had been oppressed under czardom itself turn oppressor; an army that had been starved and betrayed use its freedom to starve and betray its own people. I saw elected delegates to the people’s councils turn into sneak thieves and looters. I saw law and order and decency and all regard for human life or human rights set aside, and I saw responsible statesmen in power allow all this to go on, allow their country to rush toward an abyss of ruin and shame because they were afraid to lose popularity with the mob. ”

“ The spring wind blowing over the devastated and ravished plains bore the roaring of artillery plainly to our ears. Every day since then those guns have roared nearer, and now that part of France is closed to civilians.
The next message that came out of the sector where the Americans hold the line brought mourning and tears to many women. And yet I can truthfully say that I would be happier to have my son dead in France, sleeping in a soldier’s grave beyond the sea, than to have him alive and safe, shirking his duty in a bullet-proof job at home. ”

“ In New York City alone there are three hundred saloon dance halls. Three hundred dens of evil where every night in the year gallons of liquid damnation are forced down the throats of unwilling drinkers! Where the bodies and souls of thousands of girls are annually destroyed, because the young are irresistibly drawn toward joy, and because we, all of us, good people, busy people, indifferent people, unseeing people, have permitted joy to become commercialized, have turned it into a commodity to be used for money profit by the worst elements in society. ”

“ They have laid railroads, built wharves, dredged a great river. They have done more, our men, than dig themselves in trenches over there. They have shown Europe and the world the true heart and metal of America. What they have built will remain a monument for generations to point to and admire.
In Paris there stands a noble monument to our Washington, and at no great distance there is another to the rugged giant Abraham Lincoln. ”

“ I have often walked past that great, beautiful, yellow palace on the Moika canal, the Petrograd town house of the Yussupoff family, and tried to reconstruct the ghastly drama enacted there on that December night. Snow burying the black ice of the canal, shrouding the street and silent houses, dimming the street lights, and in a basement room, a private retreat of the lord of the palace, a young man sweating from every shivering pore, and watching the sinister monk eat and drink deadly poison which affected him no more than water. ”

“ The city will be like a great, well-ordered, comfortable, sanitary household. Everything will be as clean as in a good home. Every one, as in a family, will have enough to eat, clothes to wear, and a good bed to sleep on. There will be no slums, no sweat shops, no sad women and children toiling in tenement rooms. There will be no babies dying because of an impure milk supply. There will be no "lung blocks" poisoning human beings that landlords may pile up sordid profits. No painted girls, with hunger gnawing at their empty stomachs, will walk in the shadows. ”

“ It is not only the French language that our soldiers are learning, but French history as well. The part of central France occupied by our army is a storied treasure house of history. No part of France is more French. It abounds in castles, châteaux, museums, pointed towers, dungeon cells and torture chambers, ancient churches and crumbling city walls. Even the farms, centuries old, some of them, show the remains of past defenses. ”

“ Think of a great, young, hurrying nation that can still find time to study all these frightful problems of poverty and disease, and to grapple with them. I hope you will go on doing that, and still find more and more ways of bringing beauty into the lives of the workers. How can you expect workmen who toil all day in hot, hideous factories or on remote farms, with nothing in their lives but work and worry, to have beauty in their souls? ”

“ It has seemed to most of our courts and most of our judges that the State fulfilled its whole duty to its women citizens when it guaranteed them the right freely to contract—even though they consented, or their poverty consented, to contracts which involved irreparable harm to themselves, the community, and future generations. The women of this country have done nothing more important than to educate the judiciary of the United States out of and beyond this terrible delusion. ”

“ A soldier who goes into battle half nourished, one whose heart is heavy thinking of hungry children at home, is a soldier half beaten. He who goes forward with a well-nourished body and a mind at rest is a soldier three-quarters victorious.
This is how you have helped fight the battle for the peace of the world, women of America. And let me assure you that Europe is fully awake to the fact. Nothing that President Wilson has done, or Congress, or the men at the head of our wonderful army in France, has made a deeper impression on the allies than what the housekeepers of this country have done. ”

“ There is a fortune waiting for the capitalist who will take cold, soft drinks to Russia, and he will have besides the fortune the additional satisfaction of bringing hope to the sodden victims of vodka.
An army that will obey orders; a government that will govern; leaders in business, in transportation, in agriculture and a people willing to obey those leaders; education, wholesome life. Russia needs all these, and in her coming mighty struggle to achieve them the whole world of democracy, and especially our United States, must lend willing and sympathetic help and guidance. ”

“ But when night falls, swallowing up the neighborhood of tangled streets and obscure alleyways, Jefferson Market assumes prominence. High up in the square brick tower an illuminated clock seems perpetually to be hurrying its pointing hands toward midnight. From many windows, barred for the most part, streams an intense white light. Above an iron-guarded door at the side of the building floats a great globe of light, and beneath its glare, through the iron-guarded door, there passes, every week-day night in the year, a long procession of prodigals. ”

“ Why could he not have known that the abolishment of the death penalty at that hour of supreme crisis would drench the revolution in blood?
Kerensky was in the beginning an extreme idealist, a preacher, a prophet. He changed a great deal between February and November, 1917. But events, I think, on the whole, prove him an extreme idealist, a dreamer instead of a doer. Such men and women are never really great as leaders. They can stir up an enormous enthusiasm, send the crowd to the highest pitch of inspiration, even make it do monumental things for a time. ”

“ No man can exist half crook, half honest.
“They see nothing but their propaganda.” That is a perfect description of Monsieur Albert Thomas and all the other misguided idealists who walk with blinders obscuring their eyes. They think and talk as though unaware that the world around them was in flames.
On a battle-front of seventy-five miles our allied soldiers are enduring such hardships, are performing such miracles of labor, are suffering such wounds, such horrible mutilations, that no imagination can compass the facts. ”

“ There was a terrible confession, on the part of the employers, involved in this protest against the ten-hour day, a confession of the wretched state of women's wages in the State of Illinois. If women of mature years—one of the petitioners had been an expert box maker for over thirty years—are unable, in a day of ten hours, to earn enough to keep body and soul together, is it not proved that women workers are in no position freely to contract? For who, of her own free will, would contract to work ten hours a day for less than the price of life? ”

“ If fighting and dying were the price of Russia’s freedom, they wanted to fight and fight again. If they could rally unwilling men to fight, they wanted nothing in the world except more chances to do it. Wounds were nothing, death was nothing in the scale of Russia’s honor or dishonor. Then too, and this is a strange commentary on women’s “protected” position in life, the women soldiers said that fighting was not the most difficult or the most disagreeable work they had ever done. They said it was less arduous if a little more dangerous than working in a harvest field or a factory. ”

“ Can you imagine the wild joy, the renewed hope, the quickened spirit that fills the hearts of the men who have been fighting for nearly four years? Against terrible odds, against one ally which German cunning poisoned to death, almost against hope our allies have fought. ”

“ The housekeeper clings to her archaic kitchen, firmly believing that if she gave it up, tried to replace it by any form of co-operative living, the pillars of society would crumble and the home pass out of existence. Yet so strong is her instinctive repugnance to the medieval system on which her household is conducted, that she shuns it, runs away from it whenever she can. Housekeeping as a business is a dark mystery to her. The mass of women in the United States probably hold, almost as an article of religion, the theory that woman's place is in the home. ”

“ All my life I have been an admiring student of the French revolution, and I have fervently wished that I might have lived in the Paris of that time, to witness, even as a humble spectator, the downfall of autocracy and the birth of a people’s liberty. ”

“ And there, I verily believe, is the secret of the vitality and the unconquerable strength of the French nation. At their mother’s knee the men of France learn that the first love and allegiance of their hearts and lives are due their country. They never forget that lesson.
I do not know who ever invented the fiction that French women are not maternal. It is true that they do not, as a rule, have many children, but that is easily understood when one studies the French economic and social conditions. In all families outside the wage earning class the girl children must be provided with dowries. ”

“ Standing on the corner of the Bowery and Grand Street, in New York, when the Third Avenue trains overhead are roaring their way uptown packed with homeward-bound humanity, or on the corner of State and Madison streets, in Chicago, or on the corner of Front and Lehigh streets, in Philadelphia; pausing at the hour of six at the junction of any city's great industrial arteries, you get a full realization of the change. Of the pushing, jostling, clamoring mob, which the sidewalks are much too narrow to contain, observe the preponderance of girls. ”

“ When these troubles culminate—and in a few weeks at the most, the world will stand aghast at Russia’s state—the orgy of the Bolsheviki, the riot of the dreamers will end. Human nature is the same in Russia as it is elsewhere, the same as it is in New York or in Emporia, Kansas. We all know how, when hard times pinch the country, the Republican party elects its candidates. The people follow their theorizing and dreaming leaders in good times, but when the hard times come they turn to the party of strong business men to set them on their feet again. ”

“ Much fighting, horrible suffering, enormous sacrifice lie between us and victory, but victory is sure.
We shall lose thousands, hundreds of thousands, it may be. But for every American soldier that falls eight Germans will die, be sure of that. The only army in the world that is absolutely fresh and untired is the American army. Our men will tire, but before they do all the Germans left alive will be exhausted. ”

“ Can you picture them at night, streaming with light, gay with music, filled with dancing crowds?—not crowds from homes of wealth and comfort, but crowds from streets and byways; crowds for which, at present, the underworld spreads its nets? The great mass of the people, packed in dreary tenements, slaves of machinery by day, slaves of their own starved souls by night, must go somewhere for relaxation and forgetfulness. ”

“ The greatest task ahead of Russia is federation, and she probably will in the end learn how to give autonomy to her states and establish a central government which will bind all the states together in happy union. But she has years of strife and monumental effort ahead of her before the task is done. The wisest men in Russia—even Prof. Miliukoff, who lived for years in the United States—appear to be in a complete fog on the subject of federation. Half the wise men want an empire like Great Britain or Germany, with practically all the power in one central governing body. ”

“ Thousands of young women who never in their lives before saw a man except in the presence of their mothers now work in station canteens at all hours of the day and night, cooking, serving, feeding soldiers and refugees, waiting on the sick and weary with tireless devotion.
I have spoken of the dearth of conductors on the French trains. There is one train attendant who never fails, and that is the young woman who collects funds for the Red Cross. Every time a train stops it is boarded by girls and women in white uniforms, who go through all the carriages shaking tin money receptacles. ”