Part 9 (1/2)

If, desiring to marry, they said that they wished to live out and to receive the equivalent of their board and lodging in money, they got in those pre-war days 18 a year extra. Is it to be wondered at that in that section of society it was a common saying that ”only fools get married”? But it was not a chaste section of the community. Men are very seldom chaste when they live in exclusively male communities.

Then, secondly, sweating makes for immorality because it means that girls are paid wages which are quite insufficient to support life. Some of them live at home with their parents and so get through, but those who have to support themselves become subjected to a terribly severe temptation to add to their starvation wages by the sale of themselves.

It is still in this way that a considerable percentage of the prost.i.tutes of the country is created, and the number of girls who, though not known as prost.i.tutes, have sacrificed their purity because of financial pressure must be very great.

The word sweating also covers cases where workers are subjected to overwork, and unduly long hours; and therefore under this head I mention the influence of the strain of long shop hours. The improvement has been great of late in this respect, but still there are restaurants and special shops where the strain on girls is very heavy. And the result is that after work is over they are fit for nothing but walking about the streets in search of diversion. Many indeed who live in hostels have almost no choice between walking in the streets or going to bed. There is no need to say more. First girls are rendered nervously weary and yet eager for fresh air and movement, and then they have to face all that street life may mean. The recreations offered them in cinemas and music-halls are often calculated to give them just the wrong sort of excitement. And so first they are bored by monotony and long hours, and then played upon by rather low forms of suggestive art. It is here that girls' clubs and troops of girl guides meet the real needs of girls; and they probably const.i.tute the finest influence of the right sort which modern life offers them.

_Luxury_

One of the most serious evils in the modern world is that a great many men and women have far more money than is good for them, and that of these a considerable number are not under any necessity to work.

Nothing in all the wide world is worse for a man than to have lots of money and nothing to do. It is among these men that the patrons of expensive vice are to be found. Of necessity such men are bored by ordinary life. For life without work in it is always boring. It follows that they must seek excitement, and a very short time suffices for them to get all the excitement possible out of innocent recreations.

Wherefore in pursuit of something to stir them they take to the diversions that are not innocent, and often try to exploit their own pa.s.sions to give color to life. Their expensive and luxurious ways of life const.i.tute one of the worst moral forces in the community. They keep in existence to pander to their desires large numbers of subordinates whose lives are also worthless and without any productive value. It is because of them that the life of a courtesan seems to offer golden prizes to some, and the hope of reaping such prizes deludes many. Because this is a materialistic age their money gives them powers to which they have no moral right, and no more wholesome thing could happen to the whole community than that the necessary changes should be worked out which would make such noxious drones impossible in the future. It is for these people that sweated workers drudge and sweat. And then, under our curious and indefensible laws of inheritance, it is possible for wealth thus created to be pa.s.sed on from generation to generation, creating for each in turn the worst possible conditions for true life. It is utterly unreasonable to hope that we shall ever as a nation attain to moral health until this evil has been dealt with. It seems to matter little whether such people are married or unmarried; in both conditions they make havoc of s.e.xual life, and poison society.

_Drink_

I have kept to the last the social evil which more than all the others put together tends to produce s.e.xual immorality. As I have already said, it is a comparatively rare thing for a man to ”go wrong” for the first time when he is entirely sober. It is Bacchus that conducts men into the courts of Venus. Mr. Flexner, who for scientific reasons made a comprehensive study of Prost.i.tution in Europe, reports that in every country the whole traffic is ”soaked in drink.” There are inhibitions in our humanity which make s.e.xual vice repulsive to our taste, and there are few who can get past these inhibitions until alcohol has deadened their better feelings. Man after man has told me that it was after some festive night when he had taken more wine than ever before that he first fell. Unmarried mothers have told me that what happened on the night that was fatal to them was that they were cajoled into taking champagne or whisky, and after that could not well remember what took place.

It is not too much to say that until we have grappled with the drink evil in our midst we cannot possibly hope to master this greater evil which follows on the heels of intemperance. This one consideration alone would make me an enthusiastic prohibitionist. We have tried life on the present terms and it has beaten us. We have allowed the common sale of a drug that is the proved enemy of our best life. It has damaged us physically, industrially, and financially. But its most deadly damage has been done in connection with our s.e.xual life. It not only misleads the unmarried, but in many homes it is daily destroying all possibility of married happiness. No doubt the difficulties of temperance reform are very great. But the real cause of the delay of effective reform is want of will in the community as a whole. I cannot but think that if the deadly and intimate connection between drink and s.e.xual vice were realized, the will to effective reform might appear among us.

When I consider all the forces which I have thus briefly reviewed, and remember that behind them there is the power of a central and universal human instinct, I no longer wonder that s.e.xual follies abound in our country, and that we have not yet solved the problem of purity. What I do wonder at is that there are hundreds of thousands of young men and women who, in spite of all these facts, insist on living clean and pure lives. There is something in human nature that fights very hard for the true way of life. Boys and girls with bad hereditary influences to hamper them, and brought up in very unfavorable surroundings, do yet constantly refuse to succ.u.mb. Even those who have made mistakes constantly refuse to be beaten, and hold on tenaciously to the narrow way. Though the modern world has been deluged with novels written to display s.e.xual irregularities in a romantic light, and to express contempt for Christian moral standards, and though no doubt thousands have been misled, it remains true that surprisingly large numbers refuse to be befooled in such ways. I believe the reason is that, strong as mere physical desire may be, love is a stronger thing still.

And it is the power of love that keeps many right. In many men it is love for an ideal woman that does it. They keep themselves from evil because, though they may never have met her, they believe one day they will, and they want to bring her their best selves without any spot of defilement. In many girls love works in the same redemptive way. And perhaps in both what is really working is a mystic longing after the best that life can hold, and a half-conscious understanding that that best is only for those who preserve unity between body and spirit, and keep the body in bonds until the pure command of love itself summons it to freedom.

And yet it is infamous that the struggle should be so hard for so many.

All of us who are ignorant or complacent or skeptical about the social evils of our time are sharers in the iniquity of those who fall. Many of us live in mean satisfaction, just because we ourselves have found comfort and security; that is how these evil forces are able to go on year after year leading thousands to their undoing. If the test of a real pa.s.sion for purity lies in caring about the forces that make for impurity and caring to the point of suffering for those who fall, then I fear few of us have that pa.s.sion in any really effective and holy form. And it will need pa.s.sion to compete with the forces that lie behind evil social conditions. They are entrenched behind the power of money, and I know of only one pa.s.sion that is stronger than money.

When will all who really love take up the challenge of this disordered modern world? We talk. We confer. We discuss social reform. But we do not love. And that is why Mammon is able to laugh at us, and go on dragging our boys and girls down into the mire.

CHAPTER XIII

FORGETTING THE THINGS WHICH ARE BEHIND

I have implied in this book that the very best in s.e.xual experience is only for those who keep themselves unspotted in early life, and who come to the sacrament of marriage with no previous and lower experience of s.e.x intimacy. I am even sure that the very best is spoilt a little by all previous unworthy thinking, and by all perverse practices.

I know that that will sound a hard saying to very many, for there are few who have fulfilled these conditions for knowing the best. It must seem to them that I am practically saying to them, ”You can never now enter into the holy of holies.” Yet I cannot alter what I have said, however acute may be my sympathy with those who have stumbled. I believe it is true, and no good ever came of hiding the truth. It is because it is true that I have such confident hope for mankind. Men and women do in their hearts want the very best, and when they come to know what are the only terms on which that very best can be had they will, I believe, accept those terms.

But this would be a cruel book, and a false book too, were I to imply that there is no way in which the past can be forgotten and forgiven, and no way into purity and joy even for those who have wandered. Were that so I could not write at all about this subject, for it would then be too tragic.

Perhaps the worst consequence of aberrations in thought and conduct is that they make it very very hard to be perfectly happy and unashamed when at last love calls them to enter into the inner chambers of marriage and romance. The shadows that rest at times on that part of marriage even for some very happy lovers are due to the fact that the man (or sometimes the woman) was once involved in something else before that was a little like it, and yet was haunted then by a sense of wrong-doing and so could not have a perfect experience. It is only to the pure that _all_ things are pure.

But it is _not_ true that the past need dog and spoil the future. It is not true that sin is irremediable, nor that its stains remain for ever.

The essential and central thing in Christianity is the a.s.sertion that there is a remedy for the situation that sin creates.