THE WOMAN INFLUENCE IN GERMANY.

Taranaki Daily News, 26 August 1916, Page 10

THE WOMAN INFLUENCE IN GERMANY.

LITTLE LESS THAN SLAVES. (By Mrs.. Desmond Humphreys). It is, of course, diitieult to judge of a peoile by the cursory view that travellers obtain. But I remember on my first visit to Germany how astonished I was at the casual way women were treated, and the enormous amount of physical work they performed. The peasants labored in the fields even a» the men; carried heavy burdens; performed all sorts of duties; worked as domestic servants in private families, or hotels, or lodging-houses as I had never seen servants work either in England, or France, or tlie colonies. In the higher circles of society I discovered that the "lady" held still only a position equivalent to her capacity as "Hausfrau." From a relative of mine who had married a German and lived in Gottingen I learnt that this position was the sole honor a German husband offered as equivalent for the sacrifice of himself in marriage. That he only looked upon his wife as someone who would minister to and take charge of his personal comforts; see to his food, his clothes, his rest, his physical requirements, and be satisfied herself with such casual courtesy or endearments as a Sultan may choose to bestow on a slave.

In military circles the husband was even a most absolute despot. But so used were the women to look upon him as a superior being that they rejoiced in his tyranny and gloried in their own subservience. Mothers of past generations had taught this duty to their daughters, and it had been re-taught, and carried on through successive generations, until the very thought of liberty such as English women and French women and American women enjoy, seemed absolutely immoral. Now, humiliating as the thought may be to the gloriously-uniformed, heelclicking militant, yet the fact remains that he was once a mere flabby, squalling infant. A thing of no significance <. - cept to his mother or his nurse. He was dependent on a woman for everything. Had she neglected, or starved, or illused him as in later years lie has illused her, he would not have been able to take his place in the field of self-glori-fication; he might have known only a diseased or crippled manhood.

Does he ever think of this? Is he ever grateful or loyal to women us a sex because of the debt lie owes to one woman as a martyr It seems not. The whole teaching of German philosophy and of German scientists has tended to the degradation rather than the advancement of woman. Her place is always that of the inferior, the subordinate. He is always master of the house. His word is law; his tastes alone are to be consulted. She is the satellite to his sun, but he must always be the sun. If he shines, let her be duly grateful; if he sulks behind clouds of discontent, let her patiently wait his re-effulgence. The relative of whom I spoke had become a patient down-trodden, domestic creature, tyrannised over by her husband and his relatives, unable to do anything that was right according to German views or prejudices, and bitterly regretful of lost liberty, even of the mid-Vic-torian order of feminine enfranchisement.

I HUMILITY EXPLAINED. It was v then that I began to question the reasons for this humility, and came at last to the conclusion that it was the women of Germany who had spoilt their men, spoilt them by the perpetual submission of mothers and sisters, usually continued by sweethearts and wives. Always and ever did the "adoring feminine" march side by side with the tyrannous male. "He who must be obeyed" as son, as husband, as father, soon became incapable of any other attitude than that of command. When he left his own country and went to those where women held a position of their own and challenged man's prerogatives in almost every profession, or every art, he could not understand why it was permitted. When, little by little, tho sea of advanced thought swept to his own shores and threatened to engulf a contingent of his own down-crushed womanhood, he was in absolute terror. The ideal of the "Hausfrau" could not exist if the said "Hausfrau" was to learn of her slavery. By every means must her eyes be kept closed and her intellect submerged in domesticity. Her place was in the home. She must at least superintend what she did not actually perform. Every rank had domestic obligations respecting the washing of the best china, the making of a special "Kuelien," the personal home superintendence of the "Frau Hochgebornen," or the "Frau Militarisch."

The German mind seems always to work in grooves. For so long had women been insignificant by comparison that he could not contemplate a threatened revolt. The All-Highest himself had over and over again declared the ideal Woman as "wife, mother and cook." Certainly he set no example from boyhood to maturity that would mean reverence to woman in her highest attributes as woman. His treatment of his own mother forms a black record of his conception of filial duty. What his Empress had endured at his hands the Court circles of Berlin, and, later, the chronicles of iState scandals, have testified. His cruel egotism has been exploited in a thousand ways from the hour when, at his father's death-bed, he made his mother and sisters quasi prisoners of Statue, until the crowning perfidy of his invasion of Luxemburg and his insolence towards its brave young Duchess. Now the history of mankind throughout the centuries has proved that the degradation of woman means also the degradation of man. His coarser nature needs the softening and ennobling influences which she has shown she possesses. When he seeks to coaTsen and humiliate her the race suffers. This is just what the Teuton lias done for centuries, and perhaps it explains the brutality and gavageness and egotism of his conduct to-day. Women enfeebled and subservient cannot influence man. The beer-swilling, swaggering Hun is prool of this. He has shown himself absolutely deficient in chivalry, or honor, or mercy. These are virtues essentially instilled by woman, and the fruits not only of her teaching, but her influence. That such teaching and influence have had no place in the curriculum of German education or German home life explains fully why the unleashed savages of 1914-16 have behaved as they have done. And it ' is not the driven and doped soldier that one can blame so much as their officers and trainers. It is they who were the teacher« of unnamable infamies—who saw in war but lust and loot and bloodshed. It is they who, glorying in intellectual emancipation, threw all decency aside and showed the world that fearsome brute, "the Superman." Their Frankenstein is dead, but he left this monster of his creation behind, and all with one accord have fallen down and worshipped it. From the swaggering Kaiser in his capital to the swaggering private in his "Bicr-haus" that cult has spread and contaminated, all whom it

touched. The normal man wished to become something abnormal. He was in haste to grasp what was far above his comprehension—to destroy what had gone before and replace it with an incomplete substitute. But this has meant leaping from negation to affirmation without a sure footing on the other side of the barrier.

AN APPALLING DOCTRINE. Could anything be more harmful for general acceptance than the doctrine that there should he no belief in morals; that there is no immutable rule establishing good and evil; that "nothing ia true," hut "all things are lawful"? This is the teaching which resulted in the war cry of "Dcutschland über allea." and the frenzied passions of a once splendid nation. For, looking back at those early memories of which I have spoken, at the beautiful cities, the works of art, the wonderul music, the splendid military giants, I find it hard to reconcile my first ideas of Germany with the revealed Germany of the past two years. At times I fancy this war is but a hideous nightmare, that I shall wake one day and say, "It really never happened." But, alas it is very real, and it has happened, and we owe it happening in a great measure to the false teaching of Nietzschke's perverted intellect and the absolute lack of feminine influence exerted for moral purposes; for the cultivation of human virtues, and the placing of high and holy ideals before man. To deny the existence of a thing does not prove it does not exist; but it les. sens faith in good, and lowers the standard of high thinking. The Teuton awaking suddenly to the call of his new god, came to the conclusion that European civilisation must be called to order and revised by might of arms. With a confusion of ideas he yet grasped firmly the standard of his own super-excellence. It would be doing a kindness to the •world to impress upon its benighted peoples the seal of the New Culture. But the New Culture being totally opposed to the Old, it would be necessary to overthrow and destroy, and then reconstruct on a new basis. Their prophet had said, "Why truth rather than error Why good rather than evil. Why not he wholly free, wholly immoral; a law to ourself instead of a follower of others' laws?" All these metaphysical entities which had been so long reverenced as ''God," "Truth," "Honor," *iSo]f-Bacri-fice" were merely phantoms of imagination. It was best to get rid of them and on the dead ashcg of. their graves build up the New Man with the "will to aeiiieve," the "power to conquer," the faith in himself and his invincibility, which is higher than all preconceived morals.

The New Man, of course, would have nothing to do with the Old Tast; with treaties, and bonds, and obligations; with loyalty and truth; with anything so commonplace as promises, so old-fash-ioned as honor. A race of masters must rule a race of slaves..The Teuton was to be the master of the world, therefore he would act as best suited his self-pro-mised sovereignity. Here we have a creed promulgated, and a race ripe for its acceptance. A race of men proclaimed heroes from their cradles; worshipped and spoilt by women, the tools of a tyrannical philosophy, and the disciple of a cult which proclaimed them as beyond good and evil; superlative and supreme; self-endowed by past ages of glory, the heroes of a new epoch of civilisation.

Was there not a wife, a mother, a sweetheart, a friend, to lay a gentle hand upon the bragging mouth, to bid the boaster pause and think before enacting Samson in the Temple an engulfing himself and those who followed him in universal ruin? It would seem not. And had there been, would the swaggering hero have condescended to listen to one whom he long ago placed in the scales of a lower creation? Would he not say, as he had ever said: "Woman has no place in the counsels of man. Her part is to obey, and applaud; to believe that whatever he does is right, because he does it." It is this super-blindness of Germany which has led her into quagmires of mistakes, which has proved again and again that'her estimate of men and actions is not only founded on her own conviction that that estimate must be correct because it is hers. Under certain circumstances she would act in a particular way. Well—there are the circumstances. Why don't her enemies act in that way,

AMAZED BY GERMAN LIES. The world has been puzzled and amazed by the persistance with which the German has lied through the Presa, through the mouths of others, and through his own mouth. But the world has not yet learnt to accept the creed of Super-inanity. If it had, the riddle would be solved at once. For the Teuton says to himself: "There is no difference between a lie and the truth if I am speaking. I want people to believe a certain thing has happened. It is to their advantage and their peace of mind that they should believe it. Therefore, I say it has happened." It did not, of course, occur to English minds to buy up half the journals of Tuykey and Greece, and America and India, and any neutral country that was open to bribery. Had she done so the world would have known something of our successes. As it is, it has chiefly learnt of our failures. Germany has scored all along the line because she considers her own interests are paramount to those of the rest of the world, and any method is permitted if it can make the world believe this. Ifc must be a splendid doctrine—this All-High, AllSupreme, All-Perfect doctrine of the Superman—this steadfast faith in the Lie Offensive which flies broadcast over the habitable globe and cannot be proved a lie because we others are too proud, or too indifferent, to grapple with its ingenuity. The strong and powerful are always right; they intend to be victors, therefore they proclaim themselves victorious. Why trouble about the value of words? Leave that to women, or to fools, who value scraps of paper more than a million lives'.. Imbued with such feelings, armed by such faith in his own invincibility, is it any wonder the Teutonic soul dreamt of world-conquest, and resolved to cast aside any pre-accepted theory of Right and Honor as mere obstacles in the path of Desire? All the misery and frightfulness he has caused and will continue to cause is but the fruit of a pernicious doctrine enthusiastically accepted and disastrously obeyed. But let us not forget that the soil had been prepared by generations of women, who had enjoyed a shameful slavery as wives and of selfcreated heroes; whose pots and kettles and kitchens meant more to them than true morality, or freedom of thought, or intellectual advancement. They as willing slaves brought into the world the fruit of slavery—had chosen to obey rather than to influence, and sent their young sons forth unwarned and unprotected to achieve their moral downfall in any den of infamy they might select. It is only from cause that we get effect. In the brutal degenerate savage who has endeavored to show us the real meaning

of war, we may read back to the training school of his nursery, or the weakminded, flaxen-haired doll who plighted her troth in a flutter of ecstasy at the mere thought of a uniform! Simple things; insignificant things. But from such things has sprung the demoralisation of a nation.