Henry Robert Samuel Dalton

“ And I say that it is contrary to nature and to common sense that a matron should be bound to one man against her will. Nature indicates that if either sex ought to be bound, it is ours. Polygamy is unnatural as well as unjust; polyandry, whether unjust or not, is natural. Without going further into this, it is obvious to anyone whose understanding has not been abused, that to bind women by a false code of virtue, which outrages nature and tramples on common sense, is about the most deliberate crime of which society can be guilty.’
‘Slay and spare not,’ said Lesbia, smiling. ”

“ It is not a question of ‘having’ a soul as you may ‘have’ blue eyes or a striped shirt or the headache; it is not that I have a soul, but that I am a soul. It is a body that you have, a soul that you are.’
‘But at any rate,’ objected Mrs Guineabush, ‘the soul is dependent upon the body.’
‘As the body is upon its food and clothing,’ rejoined the vicar. ‘But ‘is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment’? Are you and I who talk together nothing more than the flesh and vegetables we have eaten and the animal and vegetable tissues we have worn as clothes? ”

“ Her uncle partly comprehended her feelings, and said kindly,—
‘It’s au revoir, that’s all, Lesbie. Depend upon it, you'll meet again, and before very long, humanly speaking. There’s work for each of you to do in the great cause, and you can keep each other up to the mark by writing often.’
Lesbia felt her uncle’s sympathy, but still went ashore with a heavy heart. Yet she was not wanting in moral courage any more than in physical, and her good sense soon bade her rouse herself against brooding over troubles more or less imaginary. ”

“ Yes I am, Cardinal Power, an enthusiast in this cause, and with good reason. I see the goal to which all human religion has been striving through these long ages of agony. I see that goal within reach, within your reach; why do you not press forward to it? Have you no lofty ambition, no aspirations, no sense of corporate dignity, none of that initiative and enterprise without which the great Church of which you are a pillar could never have been founded? ”

“ Assassination of the Emperor of Russia by ladies of the Court! Full particulars! Telltale, special! Telltale!’
‘Good heavens, how horrible!’ exclaimed Lady Humnoddie, ringing the bell. ‘Get one of those papers, please;’ and the servant re-appeared with one in half a minute, and handed it to her.
‘Can it be true? the Emperor shot dead in the throng of a summer festive gathering, by two Nihilists, ladies in the Empress’ suite! The assassins not yet arrested! What dreadful days we live in!’
‘I am very grieved to hear it,’ said Lesbia. ‘Poor Czar! Pity the sorrows of a despotic monarch! ”

“ But looking only to the Nazarene personally, I believe he would repudiate what we glibly call Christianity, and would say to its respectable and fashionable and orthodox professors, ‘Ye are of your father the devil, and the works of your father ye will do.’ While to those who seek the truth in sincerity, even though they be called heathen, his other words apply, ‘Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord’—not every one who is sprinkled with a rite and ticketed with a creed, is my true disciple, but he who, with or without any theological system, leads a humanitarian life. ”

“ Now, you know all, darling.’
Lesbia looked very grave, but she felt it her duty to say nothing but what might cheer her mother.
‘Very well, mamma, dear, and what is there in all that ‘to disturb you—on my account? Is not all well that ends well? Why, your dream makes out that I was not in the tumult and horrors of the first part, while I was in the beautiful procession of the second. What better could you desire—for me at least?’
‘Yes, indeed, Lesbie, when one comes to reason about it. ”

“ Then turning to his niece, with a cheerful laugh,—
‘What nonsense, Lesbia! what an imagination you have! To me now the voice in the wind—since you mention it—does certainly seem to say, Sherry and sandwiches! Sherry and sandwiches!’
Her uncle’s persistent good-humour at last produced upon her the effect he desired; she laughed in her turn, merrily and naturally.
‘And what an imagination you have too, Uncle Spines! There’s no fear you’ll ever be haunted—you haven't self-respect enough. ”

“ I do not speak of features merely, but all that constitutes grace,—the beauty of figure and movement, the sweetness of the voice, and the infinite variety of charm which woman generally possesses in contrast with man. That being so, what can there be in man which attracts woman downward toward him? I could understand the theory that the mutual love of human beings, in the angelic state of perfection which we profess to aspire to in professing religion, should require a bodily adaptation for union, but then it might be a similar one, not a different one, one sex, not two sexes. ”

“ Presently the ground began to rise, and on passing the crest and beginning to descend, a wide grass valley opened before her, along the middle of which was visible that ominous line of pollard willows which makes many a straight-going man reconsider his position. But Lesbia had no hesitation about her now, and as she sailed away by the chorusing pack, her only thought was whether she could jump or would have to swim. As the gleam of the brook came in sight, she pulled up for a few seconds to choose her place, then, sitting well down in the saddle, let the mare rush. ”

“ It would be the last schism you will ever suffer, for the sufficient reason that it would be fatal. I can count upon a large following in England, and especially in Ireland; for thousands who are not now Catholics will be ready to adopt my Catholicism. In Italy, your own home, you are overthrown already; how long will it be before intelligent France shapes her course to the wind? What will become of the Papacy, disestablished, disendowed, exiled, torn by schism and beaten by a rival who sits in its seat and flourishes in its place? ”

“ Is it not rather that of an artificial system of superstition and meanness; the falsification of spiritual truth, and the consequent perversion of the religious instinct, ramifying, like a poison in the blood, through every department of life, even the most secular, and discolouring the thoughts and emotions of all sorts of persons, even the most worldly? No man can be so absorbed in the cares of business that the influences of his home will have no effect on his character; even if he have no settled home, the female society he consorts with elsewhere will have much the same effect. ”

“ But when I speak of the degradation of women, I mean their moral degradation by means of being placed in false relations toward men. What is society’s present standard of female virtue? We have it in the words of Shakspeare; you remember that when Desdemona is accused of playing false to Othello and is called by a scurrilous name, she protests against it, saying that she keeps herself ‘for my lord, from any other foul unlawful touch.’ Now that sort of thing is what I complain of, and what I call the degradation of woman. ”

“ Suddenly there came from the sea a straight short flash, followed by a clap—no, not a clap, a long peal of thunder, which echoed and bellowed among the hills, and did not die away as echoes do, but went tearing round and booming louder and louder, and the straight rod-like flashes of lightning—I suppose it was lightning—’ here Mrs Newman paused in her narrative with a scared look—‘came thick and fast out of that white fog, which had now spread over the land as well as the sea, so that the old lighthouse on the hilltop was hidden from sight. ”

“ Depend upon it, Rome will not have rivals, if by latitudinarianism she can avoid it.’
‘Latitudinarianism is a fine word, and may be made to mean a good deal,’ said Mr Bristley, laughing.
‘Let it mean all it can,’ said Lesbia; ‘the leap has been taken. Moreover, are we not told that no man having put his hand to the plough and looking back—’
‘Is fit for the kingdom of Mylitta,’ put in the vicar. ‘But seriously, Lesbie, it does seem at last as if the horizon were clearing all round. The great convulsion has not wrought the misery we all feared it would. ”

“ But, Fri, my girl, what makes you take the part of the stupid new style? There’s nothing to be said for it.’
‘Nothing,’ assented Mr Bristley. ‘Or, at any rate, so very little, that it was, in my opinion, a huge blunder to make the change. Let us have scientific truth in wholeness and consistency on a grand scale; that no rational man will gainsay. But do not let us spoil the beauty and homeliness of the old merely to make way for a shallow thing of shreds and patches. The poetry of the seasons has been quite destroyed by the silly innovation. ”

“ Brought up amid surroundings such as hers, a spoilt child of fortune and fashion, with no ambition higher than that of shining in the most outwardly brilliant but inwardly shallow circles, and with no philanthropy wider than that which, it must be said, continually prompted her to help the needy with whom she came in contact, the Marchioness of Humnoddie was surely more to be pitied than blamed for these effusions of a light heart. ”

“ But we cannot conceive of Design without a Designer, which means a designing soul or mind. Thus we arrive at the great first principle which is the basis of philosophy, that soul or mind is the reality of existence, inert matter or body its image and instrument merely.’
‘Then, uncle,’ said Lesbia, ‘since you make every living being a soul, not a body, you exclude and deny the rule of the laws of matter—those of chemistry and physiology, for instance.’
‘Laws of matter, my dear girl! Matter has no laws; how can it have any? We know nothing of matter ”

“ You wouldn’t have a young lady mount a bicycle in flowing robes, would you, Kit?’
‘No, I wouldn’t have a young lady mount a bicycle at all. But it seems to be your mission in life, Theo, to outrage its proprieties.’
‘On the whole, I am disposed to agree with that remark,’ returned Mr Bristley coolly.
Before his wife could reply, Lesbia presented herself at the door, in her muddy costume, with a healthy glow on her face and her eyes sparkling. ”

“ Don’t be off with the old love, say I, before you’re on with the new. So long as we do keep up the Christian era at all—and your convention, Letitia, may not find the world prepared to throw it over for some years yet—why did we go and spoil the poetical associations and upset the quietness of life by a change of style in the year 1752, just because some other countries had been fools enough to humour the fads of a superstitious old pope who wanted to make Easter fit in with some lunatic craze or other?’
‘That is not respectful to Infallibility, Mr Bristley,’ observed Friga. ”

“ Lesbia had a worse mishap; her mare stumbled in one of the deep grips of the ride, and as the girl was not prepared, she was thrown so much forward over the pommel that her face met the mare’s head as she jerked it up in recovering, thereby giving her rider a nasty blow on the mouth, as well as making her nose bleed. Thus, the one with her face half masked by dirt, the other with blood trickling over her chin, they settled into their stride across the open, and began to taste the not unmixed pleasures of fox-hunting. ”

“ Leaving them to shift for themselves would, in practice, draw them closer to us: such is human nature. “You shall,” is always answered by “We won't;” but “Do as you please,” often leads to calm reconsideration.’
‘I believe so too, Uncle Spines,’ answered Lesbia; ‘but the Irish difficulty is only one among the many bad signs of the times. Does it not strike you that the social as well as the political atmosphere is lurid and gathering? A bubble is biggest before it bursts, and the society of the day gives me the idea of an inflated bubble. ”

“ So I said I must come and ask you first.’
‘Delightful Fidge!’ exclaimed Hilda; ‘give me the refusal of her, Lesbie, if ever she’s for sale.’
‘Now, Lesbie, I haven’t had two words with you yet,’ said Lady Humnoddie, as she joined them. ‘What did you do in town this time? See anybody or anything?’
‘Yes, Lady Humnoddie, everybody and everything. That is, you know, everybody who is anybody, and everything that is anything. We saw a lot of fashionable marriages.’
‘Bless me, Lesbie! you’re turning dollymops like me! ”

“ But that does not compel me to deny any place at all to the male sex; it does not prove to me that the leaning of a mother toward her son as a son, of a wife towards her husband as a husband, are illusions belonging to the terrestrial conditions, and doomed to pass away along with those conditions. Rather it seems to me that just as the common religious instinct of the world is a guarantee for a future life, so the equally general attraction of women toward their male kith and kin is a guarantee for the permanence of the bi-sexual relation in that future life. ”

“ Her perseverance in dressing more rationally than those with whom she associated had begun to crack the wall of prevailing fashion among them, not only in the matter of costume itself, but, as a natural consequence, in the many habits with which fashion in dress is associated. Not a few women who at first made fun of her, had begun to envy her vigorous independence of character, and even to think of casting off some of their own fetters. ”

“ Then the human imstincts of life and safety took the place of emulation and self-sacrifice; they had done all that men could do; and the Admiral signalled to cease firing, and struck his flag.
In a few minutes all was quiet on the water, and the heavy canopy of smoke lifted slowly from the basin of Cork Harbour, which lay calm and blue in the mellow October sunset. ”

“ Infallibility must accommodate itself to the exigencies of a fallible world,’ said Lesbia, at which both the others chuckled. ‘Well, better late than never, Cardinal Power. If his Holiness could be induced to say as much to Signora Pisa-Vitri as you have now insinuated to me, all might yet be well. You say she is bent on destroying the Church; I don’t believe it. I believe she is bent on nothing more than compelling the Church to do its duty. She is within her right in using her power relentlessly, for she is a Catholic. ”

“ I do not deny that Christianity may be a trifle better than the other systems, for the reason that it upholds monogamy. But these old-world religions, one and all, are based upon the genuine original sin—that of deposing the female from her spiritual dignity and setting up the male in her place. Nothing but a radical change of front can cleanse Christianity or any other theological system from this congenital and inherent stain. ”

“ You, Lettie, lay all the blame on man’s arrogance; I, for my part, hold that we are at least equally to blame, because if women generally were to insist upon a reversal of the relations of the sexes in religion, men, even those most opposed to the change, would have no alternative but to submit. Any religion in the world, deprived of the countenance of its women, would fall to pieces like a house of cards. ”