GREATEST RESULT OF THE WAR.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 6, Issue 282, 8 June 1917, Page 1 (Supplement)

GREATEST RESULT OF THE WAR.

SHACKLES WE SHALL NEVER WEAR AGAIN.

By AUSTIN HARRISON, In the "Sunday Pictorial."

(A brilliant article by the Editor of the '"English Review," who gives his reasons for believing that the war will result in social changes of the greatest importance)

"Yes, we are all good friends here; you see. there are no women."

Such words from the lips of a French soldier aston'shed me (we were sitting on a log in the Argonue Forest), and I pressed him to explain. Did. he ascribe the good comradeship in tho Army to the absence of petticcats? Perhaps he was a woman-hater —but, no, there was a light in his eyes which disputed that. "Tell me," I said; "I don't understand."

"It is very simple, he returned. "Here, in the trenches, we arc just men, free men; now, in the civilisation at tJio back no man is free. Look here, a man marries and has two children. Ho has to keep them. Something occurs which makes him long to take up an attitude, to speak out, to change his manner of life, to play the mancan he? He consults his wife. 'What!' she exclaims, 'g've up £2OO a year for an idea, a scruple, a principle, an ideal, and who will house and clothe us if for your scruple you lose your job ? Have you no love for me, for your children?' The man kisses his .wife, and she puts a hairpin through his bold imaginings. Ag:'n, take the scc ; al effects of marriage, cf the home, of woman on our civilisation. Are we not all torn by petty jealousies, pecuniary worries, envies hatreds, fears? A woman says to her man: 'Seo how well Louisa dresses. How is it you can't give me such nice hats? And Alphonse ponders over the wrong. He ? waits his opp rtunity. H 3 does Lou'sa's husband a bad turn and get;, promotion in his place, and so hj climbs, as we all climb—at the back, propelled to struggle, iguomimously With tho commercial machine for — what? What, after all? Hats, trinkets, cars, furs, social position, titles, because at home we are jealous men and women, envious,* covetous, selfish, worldly, and there is little Christianity in us:

"Now in the trenches these things do not exist. Here woman is the true ideal; she is France. ] tell Jack, who at home hated me, to go out at night on patrol duty; he obeys implicitly—ho never questions my motive. For the first time we men are equals, free, posseted with one common idea —unity. Bravery is the platitude of our uniform. We know no fear. Our God is our soldier's duty—to obey. ONLY THE FREE ARE HAPPY.

"Every day I see men I thought at homo were cowards and mean fellows to be heroes, and I see some of our civilian heroes to be indifferent sold'ers. VallUß have changed. Wo have right values to-day. Tho servility and bondage of tho old life are bad' memories. We laugh at them. We are impersonal. We serve. We are free, and shall I tell you why? Because nothing can frighten us, neither man nor thing. Only the fearless .ire free. Only the freo are happy." It was impossible to doubt this man, and that is how this war differ* from all other wars in that it has taught 6 o!diers to thi>.k. I expect it is precisely the same in our Army; I am suic it is. In France, of course, woman lias a quite special position : she is the incarnation of sox. She is enthroned as an idea of love and motherhood before which the male take-i off his hat so to speak, socially and mentally. And this new kind of war which has taken the form of sitting in trenches by the year has led thus to a divorce between the sexes su-h as has never existed before. The social discovery of the war is this segregaton cf tho sexes and the purifying results which must derive from it. ' In France it has liberated the men from a kind of sex tvr.inny; in England it has LIBERATED THE WOMEN. A few years ago we were told women could not do what men did—to-day we know they are doing our work, and, on the whole, doing it well. Even the trade unions have had to admit this co-sex fellowship. From the point of view of sex and of sociology this discovery is extraordinarily interesting. It amounts to a mutual discovery of values, which cannot fail to exercise an enormous influence on tho next generation and the development of the body politic, alike hero and in the other belligerent countries. First, it h?S lead to a deeper common respect. Secondly, it has led to a better sense of proportion. Thirdly, it has promoted a deeper comparative understanding in the interests of country on the whole. Thus standards have lieen ra ; sed. In a .word, the sexes have acquired the consciousness of their own d'stinctivo merits, from which only good can result. Tho French have a saying, "The absent are wrong," but this war has sliown that absence has been salutary and that divorce has led rather to love than to the languishing malady of indifference. No doubt if the soldiers have been freed from worldly cares, tho women have had to bear them all the more; that, of course, is so, but the women have borne them with a fortitude as fine and tempered as that of tho toon . and that, ton, tho -iijldior-i rreogni.in.

?>\\t. w mew \wvttv, so do, women. T\\o lone; estrangement of fox, the parting of wife and husband, of lovers, of love —th'n operates hero a« out thorp. Tf it ha- given men freedom, it has given men confidence; both have acquired n sex distaste for fear—that fo-ar wh'oh snrts and corrodes our commercial civilis-!-tiOH. Fiom the war the men will return hv the ions of thousands— philosophers: they will find a womanhood which has acquired the sonso of e'tiaonsbip. The viril" bedtimes of the sold'orfi will mate with a femininity of a finer en ; li'/jit-enmojit. the issue of whic n eannofail io knit nohler patterns in nur o'vdKot'on, and to cu! deep : nto our life. : 'So von tlunk things will ohangi nf^rwaids 5 " I viid to this keen Frencn eo'd'-or "Yon d-nt 'mean to go Ivuk if, ib« old hrp"cris>os am ' illus'oiw." HV nmwn'fd mo ouickly. evidently sp e-.kin«r in (hco wonN : "Well, what wsm T in peace? A follow in a -''im. with no hones, no idoaK i„,i a dailv worker, who enmc home tired out «nd srrtimbWl nnl •tru<™lc* with the little care* of life. T.-.-dav, I