ON FRIENDSHIP IN ONE’S PRIVATE CIRCLE.

White Ribbon, Volume 1, Issue 4, 1 October 1895, Page 2

ON FRIENDSHIP IN ONE’S PRIVATE CIRCLE.

Woman may easily be friends, free with and trusting each other. There is no natural obstacle against such friendship, but such mental errors as intolerance, envy, and class-prejudice may be obstacles. Women, as a whole, possess solidarity. With respect to men, there is naturally rather rivalry than sympathy between them ; but this is so often overlaid by the more recently evolved goodwill, that a free and trustful friendship results. With respect to a man and a womam, there is every natural inducement to freedom, friendship, and trust; but this natural union has been broken, and the sexes estranged in various ways, by man’s selfish desires, cunning, and domination, and a resulting timidity, suspicion, stand-off etiquette and dissociating customs and habits on the part of woman.

It is evident that, along with a sincere desire on a man’s part to be sociable with his fellow-men, and pure and thoughtful towards women, there should be found an answering goodwill, trust, and freedom in friendship with him on the part of tne men and women he knows; freedom in word and deed, an atmosphere above the petty differences of sex, creed, class, or condition. Those who can be friends in this way will find that each feeds and develops the others natures, and the more so, the more the fusion and interchange. J. R. Wilkinson, Canterbury College, N.Z.