COURAGE OF WOMEN

Greymouth Evening Star, 11 August 1923, Page 7

COURAGE OF WOMEN

A NEW DUE GIVEN. ! The courage shown by women in _ general during the war is a subject that lias been traversed many times, and lias proved an inspiration to many people of both sexes, but a newer and equally line story is told by Cyril Stern in the “Sunday Pictorial.’’ In war lime few modern men or women could be accused of want of courage the exceptions proved the rule. Since then statistics prove that other mar- j vellous courage lias been exhibited by 6 women. There has been, as everyone knows, a most distressing aftermath £ of war in the form of lack of employment, with its attendant starvation, £ misery, depression, and suffering of all kinds, within Great Britain, as well as in the other countries immediately affected by the war. Yet the figures recently issued by the Ministry of Health show that the birth rate has been maintained, showing a courage . and discipline on the part of the women. When the moral courage of a people breaks, one of the signs of t the breakage is the increase in the j number of suicides, especially among , women. “It is interesting,” says the writer, “to note what happened in 1921, when millions were unemployed, and the greatest trade depression ever , experienced was at the blackest period. ' The official figures of suicides in England and Wales averaged among men 152 annually per million from 1911 to 1914 ;it was 153 in 1921; while among women the average in that year was 50 per million, one figure to the good

from the average in 1914. Such a record is good; it is splendid.” Stern then compared the figures of so-called “violent deaths” by misadventures of various kinds, some of wliic are under kinds, a, number of whicli are under suspicion of being more or less purposeful. Again the average for women is far lower than that of the men. He remarks that there is still another reliable sign tliat the morale of woman has not only kept good, but has improved under trying circumstances of life, and that is the lessening of the death rate of infants “for lack of care.” In other words, there is not in alt the official figures so much as a single symptom of weakening or of despair. “On the contrary, everywhere the splendid virtues of our race have asserted themselves, and turned disaster into victory. Never in her history has the country produced a cleaner bill of moral health than during the years of her bitterest trial. It is also the lie direct to every pessimist who has dared to suggest tliat our people could not bear the strain of lean years. Our people, it would seem, can bear any strain that Providence puts upon them. Their moral courage, like their physical, is unshakable. There is no virtue which in these days commands such wholehearted admiration as “playing the game.” The writer continues in the fine optimistic strain to show that men are not afraid to be real Christians now —not perhaps the church-going kind, but people wlio know and act up to the fine Christian standard. “The present outcry against our prison system, against capital punishment, against the abuses of the treatment of the insane, against reformatories and similar institutions, is the voice of a hew age less sure of its righteousness than the last, far more eager to practise the virtues of love. . . We are learning how much can be accomplished by understanding and sympathy. This scientific faith, as it has been called, j is a very remarkable feature of modern ’ life. It may be the foundation of a wonderful edifice.”