Earl Barnes

“ The whole business of a modern democracy is to educate itself through doing, and we are all at school. If the bills are heavy, they are our bills; and we are steadily learning how to make them less. In the past no one learned. "The Bourbons learned nothing, and forgot nothing;" and the common people were too discouraged to think. It is on these lines that our modern democracies must be judged, not as efficient and economical political machines, but as educational institutions. Judged by this standard, we believe ourselves to be the triumph of the ages. ”

“ In any community can be found strong men, honest, though misplaced or unfortunate, begging bread, wasting their lives for want of money to live decently. And beside these one sees other men of weak physique and feeble minds, who have lived as parasites on society all their lives, but who are handsomely dressed, well fed, and possessed of power to do as they will, simply because they have access to wealth. It is no wonder that if one would seek freedom to-day in America he must look for her image on a gold coin. ”

“ Before, they lived it as children; now, they live the cycle as grown men and women.
No matter how completely a woman has given up music, she will some day find herself singing when she holds her baby in her arms. As she recites Mother Goose and the fairy and folk-lore tales, she moves through the path of man's upward progress, led by a child, but with the life and understanding of adult years. As she walks with her child in the garden and in the fields, she is driven to a new interpretation of the world of nature. ”

“ What line of education should women pursue? What lines of work could they best undertake? How could they combine an independent professional or industrial career with the life of a home and the responsibilities of a mother? How far must older social restraints be modified in the interest of intellectual and industrial freedom? It was a time for constructive statesmanship, rather than for revolution; and each woman knew she was under criticism, and that her success or failure was vastly more than her own personal concern. In her all free women were being judged. ”

“ Surely the woman who spends her days looking after the details of furnishing a house and keeping it clean, of providing and serving meals, of looking after clothing and caring for children, has a world of self-expression compared with which factory and shop work is infinitely petty and mean. In the social life of friends, neighborhood, school and church she is at least as well placed as the factory worker. If the woman has the preparation required for teaching or independent business, she will find ways to use her powers that will relieve the routine of housework. ”

“ No intelligence which a woman may possess needs remain unused in the handling of a family. Women spend most of the household money to-day, at least in lower and middle-class homes. To use wisely the family pay-envelope requires knowledge and judgment of a high order. Problems in economics, sanitation, food-values and æsthetics confront the housewife at every turn of the day's work. "Even a slave need not work as a slave;" and a woman living with the man she loves is the freest woman on earth, so far as mind and spirit are concerned. ”

“ Property has become the medium through which the most binding of human relations are organized. Accumulated wealth has become a great reservoir of power to which some individuals gain access through rights of birth, others through carefully guarded privileges, and still others through cunning devices or through force; but the masses of the people must gain their fragments of this wealth through arduous lifelong labor. Even the earth, the original source of all wealth, is parceled out, and all of it is now owned by individuals or groups who control it in their own interests. ”

“ After that, for twenty-five years, she is a human being primarily devoted to romanticism, finding her largest fulfilment only in wifehood and motherhood, direct or vicarious; in the last twenty-five years, she should be a wise woman, of ripe experience, carrying over her gathered training and powers to the service of the group. All this time she is, like the man, an incomplete creature, realizing her greatest power and her greatest service only when working in loving association with the man of her choice. ”

“ The Revolutionary period was a time of intense political education for every one. War and sacrifice glorified the new ideas; and even the children and women could not escape their influence. Why then did not the American Revolution pass on to full freedom and opportunity for women? For the same reason that it did not forever abolish slavery in America. The vested interests involved were so many, and the changes so momentous and difficult, that only the most imperative needs could receive attention. ”

“ Thus we have a modern industrial democracy being educated almost entirely by celibate women.
But why should a woman be forced to leave teaching because she marries? Would not married women do much to strengthen and broaden the calling? Are not married women better fitted than celibates to deal with boys and girls in the period of adolescence? There is doubtless a feeling that a married woman should make way for some girl who needs the position to help herself along; but schools should not be used for the needs of teachers, no matter how deserving the individual may be. ”

“ One cannot but be grateful that life is so organized that no woman can be entirely shut off, unless she wills it, from the fructifying life that knits together the generations of the old and the young.
Ideals are very powerful in determining conduct, and the ideals of extreme individualism, now so constantly presented by certain leaders among emancipated women, must bear bitter fruit for an army of women in the future. While the women are young, ambition and the charm of freedom bear them gaily along. ”

“ In the last place, if the citizen knows what he wants, how to devise the governmental machinery to get it, and how to select the right men to see that it is done, he must register his desire by a vote; and then watch his servant carefully to see if he justifies the trust imposed in him. If he does not, then the citizen must criticise, threaten, and, if necessary, finally dismiss the unfaithful employee. Only one who can fulfil all these functions can be considered a desirable citizen from the point of view of a modern democracy. "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." ”

“ The richest woman in America said with approval recently that her son was too busy to fall in love.
As industry drives the mass of workers and specialists away from life's deepest realizations, so the desire to become comfortable, physically and mentally, through avoiding the deeper experiences of life, robs many of those who have a large measure of economic freedom. In all periods of great wealth this disease of ease has afflicted mankind. Life more abundantly comes only at the price of vigorous living; and love travels always in company with anxiety. ”

“ So when women passed from slavery to serfdom we lost something of male dominance and of female submission. We shall lose something in the present transition; but one must be content to lose Louis XIV and Versailles if one thereby finds modern France; one must be satisfied to lose an institution which gave us the tragically pathetic death of Alexander Hamilton, if it increases human justice and saves fathers to their families. ”

“ So the would-be citizen must know about the wealth in which he wants to share. What do the national, State and municipal governments own? How should the vast domains of land, the onetime inexhaustible forests, the mines of coal and metal, the waterways and water-powers, the special privileges and franchises belonging to the people be used? Should they be thrown away, gambled away, given away as favors, rented, sold, or handled directly by the people? On what terms or under what guarantees should they be turned over to individuals or companies, if this is to be done? ”

“ In the past, the partnership of marriage has been incomplete on the property side; why not complete it? Why not reorganize our laws and our public opinion so that two people who establish a family, putting into it all they have, should pay out of the income the necessary family expenses and divide all else equally between the parties? Property acquired before marriage, and all inherited property, might well be held in individual right since it should never be a prize for prostitution, not even when it is euphemistically termed "a good home." ”

“ In some vague degree, American women recognized the truth which Dr. Gore recently brought before a mass of working men in England. "All this passion for justice will accomplish nothing," he declared, "unless you get knowledge. You may become strong and clamorous, you may win a victory, you may affect a revolution, but you will be trodden down again under the feet of knowledge if you leave knowledge in the hands of privilege, because knowledge will always win over ignorance." ”

“ All women confront romantic love, marriage and children; and any woman who misses them misses the crowning joy and glory of her life. Vicarious realization may save the soul, but it can never fill the place of reality. ”

“ New knowledge has given us partial control over vast forces of nature; and has so increased our mobility as almost to free us from limitations of space. We have had wonderful visions of the possibilities that lie in intelligent human coöperation, and have begun to realize them in a hundred new forms. In the midst of these compelling changes, women could no more remain undisturbed, within the confines of kitchen and nursery, than men could remain on their little New England farms or cobbling shoes and making tin pans in the petty workshops of a century ago. ”

“ Of course, in such a sweeping statement as this, one must include under sex hunger all the forces that drive men and women to seek each other's society, rather than that of their own sex. In this sense, it can be truly said that it gives a motive for our care of offspring, and for all our other most self-forgetful devotions, our finest altruisms, our most polished expressions in language, manners and dress. It justifies labor, ambition, and at times even self-effacement. ”

“ V The Economic Independence of Women
Nowhere does a human being escape compulsion. Even were he alone in the world he would be forced to obey the physical laws governing gravity, heat, cold, hunger and disease. No matter what his desires might be, he would find himself limited and constrained by fixed laws, the inexorable penalties of which he could escape only by obedience. If the man were not alone, then each one of his companions would limit his freedom, and he would limit each one in the group, if they were to live together in peace and efficiency ”

“ Society must come to feel that it is at least as shameful for a broken old noble to live with a young girl under the forms of marriage as for two young lovers to live together outside them.
As to what the personal, social and industrial relation of man and wife should be, we have widely different views and practices. The older view, still embodied in the practice of most nations, and best seen in Germany and England, is that the woman's duty is to complement the husband. He does what he wishes, so far as he can, and the wife rounds out the whole. ”

“ Yet no one can seriously approach this problem in his own person without feeling that the relations of husband and wife contain elements that not only make it impossible to resolve the woman's service into money values, but that would make it useless to do so even if it could be done. The most distinctive quality of love is its desire to give. Love that seeks to get is not love. If when a woman gives herself she tries to secure individual property it will be only that she may give it to the man she loves. Marriage is a partnership of soul and body, and this includes property. ”

“ In the midst of this confusion, most of those who have sought to secure a truer relation of women to the life around them have worked on the lines of minimizing sex differences. It has been felt that the educational, industrial, social and political limitations under which women rested were due to the desire of men to exploit them. Men, being free, had developed for themselves an ideal world of thought and work; and if women wished to be free and happy, they needed only to break down the barriers separating them from this man's world. ”

“ In the first place, then, we must work to produce an entire change in our present mental attitude toward organized industries. Our present worship of industrial products, no matter how obtained, must give way to a recognition of the fact that the chief asset of a nation is its people; that a woman is more important than the clothes she makes in factories or sells in stores; and that to needlessly destroy or scrapheap a working woman is worse than to needlessly destroy or scrapheap the finest and most costly machine ever devised by man. ”

“ Meantime the old arguments against woman suffrage are too outworn to need serious attention. In the past decades our civilization has become so complex, with so many groups carrying on differentiated functions, that even if we had not the millions of educated, property-owning, wage-earning, voting women that now fill our public life, the old arguments would still be obsolete. The issues of life are no longer primarily military, and but a fraction of men voters is capable of meeting modern requirements as policemen and soldiers; in time of crisis, all men would be called into the reserves ”

“ Wealth is unjustly divided; great corporations seize public utilities and exploit them for private gain; enormous sums are squandered on unnecessary and dangerous battle-ships and soldiers; in building a single State Capitol, $3,500,000 was recently stolen, not only wasting public wealth, but corrupting public morals; in some parts of our land little children still drive the wheels of industry; and it is everywhere cheaper to scrap-heap men and women than machines; most of our cities are ugly and badly ruled; drunkenness, gambling and prostitution are common ”

“ To the man, family life, of the kind we are considering, brings a vital connection with the past and the future. Reputation, possessions, friends, all become deeply significant when a man becomes a link in the generations of men. In establishing his material home, and modifying it to the changing conditions of the family; in building up a social setting for the group; in projecting his work and his service into the future, he is held to highest standards by the fact that he is working with the partner of his choice, and for interests that are in harmony with the constitution of the universe. ”