PURE DRINKING WATER

Gisborne Times, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 3583, 7 March 1914, Page 8

PURE DRINKING WATER

CAN BE OBTAINED B USING ONE OF OUR CELPHIN FILTER'

1 Pint Bottles. 5s e 1 Gallon Filte;.- a l>ove sulJ--2 Gallon Filets before a „ „ ~e evening sesso vTallon^t <)llv . en^j oll a £ the 4 Galln last night. The .ale out by the Lady ap;,u<mgly to the audience, which oonsisted for the greater part of women, and the able discourse was frequently punctuated by applause. Miss

Roberts said: —■ In that clamor which has arisen m the modern world, where now this and then that is demanded for, and by 1 irge bodies of women, he who listens careful ly may detect as a 'keynote a demand which may be embodied in such a cry cus this : . . "Give us labor and the training which fits for labor. We demand this, not for ouoelVes alone, but for the race.” When first savage man wandered, hunted and fought, we wandered with Ikim. Each stop 91' his way was ours. Within our bodies we bore the race, on our shoulders we carried it, we nought tdie roots and plants for r:s food. Our hands dressed the game brought ry man—side by side, the savage man and the savage woman, we wandered free together, and labored free together, and we were oon:on ted. Then a change came. We ceased from our wanderings, and, camping upon one spot of earth, again the labors of life were divided between I.o*. While man went forth to bunt, ,>r to battle with the foe who would .have dispossessed us of all, we Inhered en the laud. We hoed the earth, we • -aped the grain, we shaped the dwel--1 ners, we wove the clothing, we moilel--1 earthen vessels and drew the Hues upon them which were humanity’s first attempt at domestic art, we i.fudiod the properties and uses of plants, and our old women were the firs! physicians of the race, a-s often :>„ first priests and prophets. Wo fed (ifie race-at- our breasts, we bore it on our shoulders, through us it' was '.-'-.aped, fed and clothed. Labor more toilsome and unending than that of can was ours, yet did we never cry out- that it was too heavy for us. Man fought—-that was his work. We fed and nurtured the race—'that was ours. VW knew that upon our labors, even :i,i upon man’s, depended the life and well-being of tine people whom we lure. We endured our toil as man (ere his wounds, bravely and silently —and we were content. Then again change came. Ages passed, and time ‘.was wfieri it. was no longer necessary that all men should go to the hunt or fif-i.j of war. Then our fallow man, having no longer full occupation in his <j.id fields of labor, began to take las .share in ours. He began to cultivate file field, to bui’d the house, to grind the com, and the tools of certain inpLuotries passed from our hands to his. The life of the fields was ours no .cure; wo moved within the gates where the time passes more slowly, end the world is sadder than in the T-.ve.-t air outside—but we had our own ,k still, and we were content. If V- mi longer grew tlhe food we still •!>se<i it. If we did nob grow and prepare the flax and hemp we still y.-ove the garments for our race. If - no longer built the house, the ■ Ortvvfi'ics which covered the walls v-re the work of our hands. We 1. vo-i the ale, and the simples, which v.-ere used as medicines, were dist-il-j •«;. prepared, and prescribed by us, cci. colse about ourM’eet, from birth i-:> manhood and womanhood grew up 1. •• children we had borne. We sat yfinh our spinning wheels, and lord’s ••.•dfe, peasant’s wife, or burgher’s wife a-U still had our work to do. But no-.y again a change has come. -Sometain si .that is entirely new has'entered 1 :r<>~the field of human labor, and left nothing as it was. The introduction of machinery has Cr'rtriely reversed the old order, both . regards industry and war. The importance of mere muscular strength, whether in labors of war or peace, is .gone by for ever; and the day of the •i’ [-importance of the culture and a-Tivity of mental power and nerve i..ii already come, and the new conditions have opened up before men a million spheres of labor, undreamed . f by their ancestors. Never before in hie history of the earth has the man’s fi-kl of remunerative toil been so wide, 1. • interesting, 00 complex, and in its :-.-Milts so all important to society; n--ver before has the male sex. taken •■s a whole, been so fully anil efronuc i.-ly occupied. Man cannot comp’ain tfii!.t modern changes have, as a whole, :■ >■■ til>C(i him of his fields of labor, dim*fished his share in the conduct of i:;c. or reduced him to a condition of c. -rind inactivity. in our woman’s field of labor mattors. have tended to shape themselves e iire.ly otherwise. Mlodern civilisa-•t-oi has tended to rob woman almost vholly of the. more valuable of her n-e-ient domain of productive and i. i rai labor —and. where there Inn not h—u a. determined and conscious re- »• stance on her part, nowhere have jifiw and compensatory fields of work 'Glided to open out to her. In thousa ids of lingo buildings steam-dr* . T en I-0:11s produce Ihe clothing of half world. To-day steam often sliapes o-:r bread, and a motor car sets the ! -at down at our door. Day by day 0. 'chine prepared and factory produced viands take a larger and larger ft <:•-> in tlio dietary of rich and poor. Among the wealthier < lasses men are ’ a be found laboring in our homes and H-i. ii«-ns. The dairy maid has given plv'.. to the or-'am separator. In mod-

cities our carpet* are beaten, our ,• ws . learn <l. our floors polished by u.ae!iinery and often by male labor. ’i.V* sewing machine begins to become iu fi,paled, and thousands of machines driven by central engines are supplyi g. not only b- sbandand s on, but the v* >r>iiUi herself with almost every arv ie of clothing from vest- to jacket, tear by year as modern civilisation advances there is a marked tendency i ■■■ the sphere of woman’s domestic labor bo contract, and this contraction or'nuests it soil more iu England and America tl-aii in less progressive coun'•tries, more in cities than in country places, more among the wealthier classes than the poorer civilisation. Hot oidy in her sphere of domestic loh-ors has change touched her and .shrunk her ancient field of labor. Time p is when the mother kept her children about her knees till adult years were reached. Hers was the training and influence which shaped them. Today so mighty and inexorable are the demands which modern civilisation makes for specialised instruction and t).lining for all individuals, who are to retain Their usefulness under present conditions, that from the earliest years of its life, the child is of necessity re-ri-ovf"! from the hands of the mother :i.;;d placed in those of. the specialised mbtru'd-or. This is especially so in the case of the wealthier classes, but even among the poorer classes, the infant.school, the public .school, and later th • necessity for manual training bakes the soil and often the daughter from the mother’s control. A woman of almost any class may have borne many children and yet. in early middle age.’ lie found sitting alone in an emptv house; a’l her offspring gone from*her to receive training and infraction at the hands of others. The old statement that the training and education of her offspring is the duty of the mother Ins become an absolute mis-statement, and clie woman who •should to-day. insist on entirely educating her children would, in nine eases out of ten, inflict an irreparable injury on them, because she is incompetent. Even; in the matter of childbearing the need and demand for the exercise of her-utmost capacity in this direction has greatly lessened. When under barbarous conditions, infant mortality high, when recurring famine'and pestilence dMT mated til? people, when war was constantly

■ ill ■ I l—— — ■aging and surgical skill ®o wanting that most wounds proved fatal, it was all important that woman’s childbearing powers should be taxed to their very uttermost lmiito, if the race were not to dwindle and die out. In the old days twenty men would need to he horn and reared to do the work which is performed to-day by one small crane, and not one of them would have needed any expenditure of family or tribal wealth on his training or education. Conditions to-day have greatly reduced infant and adult mortality and also added greatly to length of life, famine and pestilence are things of the past, and though war cannot yet unfortunately be placed in that category, still it is by no moans the general thing it once was. We have already reached a point where the social demand is not merely for human creatures in the bulk, for use as beasts of burden, but rather for '.such human creatures as shall be so trained and cultured as to be fitted for the performance of the more complex duties of modern life. Not. now, merely for many men, hut rather for few men, and those few, well born and well instructed, is the modern demand. Indeed so difficult and expensive has become the rearing and training of children to fit them for the complexities of modern Life that the ancient good wish for a man on his •wedding day that lie might be the father of twenty son#*and a like number of daughters would be considered by a modern bridegroom as a malediction rather than a blessing, and society believes now that parents should not bring into the world more children than they can rear, educate, and 1 train satisfactorily. Looking round then on the entire field of woman’s ancient labors we find that fully threefourths of it has shrunk away for ever, and that remaining fourth still tends to shrink. It is this great fact which lies behind that vast and restless woman’s movement which marks our day. It is this fact, whether clearly grasped, or vaguely felt, which awakes in the hearts of the ablest modern European women their passionate cry for new forms of lalxir, and new fields for the exercise of their powers. We do not ask that the wheels of time should go back, but we demand that in the new conditions which have arisen, and are still arising, alike upon the man and the woman, we also shall liave our full share of honored and socially useful human toil. We demand nothing more than this and we will take nothing less. As the old fields of labor close up behind us we demand entrance into the new.' We demand in the factory, the warehouse, the field, where ever machinery has usurped our ancient labor ground, that we also shall have our place as workers, guides, controllers, and possessors, that no man would accept as a good wish on his wedding dav.

The woman sets the standard for the race. Again anil again in the history of the past when a certain stage of material civilisation has been reached a curious tendency ha s manifested itself to rob the woman of all forms fit active, conscious, social labor, and the result has invariably been the decay tit her vitality and intelligence, followed after -a longer or shorter period by that of her male descendants and her entire race. 111 the past tliL> danger of becoming a mere parasite has never threatened more than the women belonging to a dominant class. It. i* 111 the present, day, under the peculiar conditions of our modern civilisation, that sex parasitism has become a danger, more or less remote, to the mass of civilised woman. In early days, before the introduction of slavery to any extent, the tendency was to throw an excessive amount of social labor on the woman. Under no conditions, at no time, in no place in the history of the world have the men of any period, of any nation or of any class shown the slightest inclination to allow their women to become inactive if, by so doing, the work would fall upon t hemselves. In ancient Greece its womanhood was heavily and richly endowed with duties anil occupations- From king’s wife to peasant’s daughter, all were busily employed from the various arts and industries carried on in the homes to the highest social functions as. priestesses and prophetesses. It was from such women a s these that those heroes, thinkers, and artists sprang, who laid the foundations of Grecian greatness. But the time came when these virile, laboring women in the upper classes were to be found no more. The great wealth, gathered by the dominant <-’ • through the labor of s'.v • m! subject people, had so immeu.-.Ry increased that there was no longer a call for physical labor on the part of these women. Waited on by slaves, living a luxurious and pampered life, they no longer sustained by their exertions either their own life or the life of their people, but sank into a condition of supine inaction and ignorance. In the course of time it was inevitable that the manhood should decay, and the day came when the nation of Greece fell utterly before her enemies, swept clean from Thessaly to Sparta, from Corinth to Ephesus, her temples destroyed anil her effete women captives. In Rome, in the days of her virtue and vigor, the Roman woman labored mightily, and bore on her shoulders her full half of the social burden. From the vestal virgin to the matron everywhere’ wo find the Roman woman erect, laboring, resolute, fulfilling lofty functions, and hearing the'whole weight of domestic toil. These were the Roman women who gave birth to the men who lmilt up Roman greatness. A few centuries later and Rome had reached that- dangerous spot in the order of social change which Greece had reached centuries before her. £>lave labor and enjoyment of the unlimited spoil- of ennijuered races, had done away with the demand for physical labor on the ]>aiN of the members of the upper classes. The Roman matron had ceased for ever from her toils. Decked in jewels and fine clothing, waited on and attended by slaves, faring sumptuously every day, she sank lower and lower till the inad pursuit of pleasure and sensuality filled the void left by the lack of honorable activity and service. Again it was ineiytable that this womanhood should >at last have given birth to a manhood as effete as itself, and that both should have been swept from existence.

The woman’s decay lias always been preceded by the subjugation of large bodies of other human creatures, .either as slaves, subject races, or elapses and as the resjfit- of the excessive/labors ok these Misses ,t here. hg-jdal beeiy mi *ccuArilat|f&i j Jff &unearned woait}#® tj therajandfe/orMhe dominant class /nwacey It has invariably been by existing on this wealth, the result of forced or ill-paid labor, that the women of the dominant class has in the past last her activity. There is, therefore, a profound truth in the statement that the decay of the great nations and civilisations of the past has resulted from.the enervation caused by excessive wealth and luxury. The mere use of any of the material products, of labor, which we term wealth, can never in itself produce that decay of the race, physical or mental, which precedes the downfall of great civilised nations. The debilitating effect of wealth sets in at that point exactly (and never before) at which the supply of material necessar--ies. comforts and enjoyments clog the individuality, causing it to rest satisfied in the mere passive possession of the results of the labor of others without feeling any necessity or desire for further productive activity of its own. The debilitating effect of unLabored for wealth lies, then, not in what it nfay give in the way of material benefit, but in the power it may, and often does, possess of robbing the individual of all incentive to exertion, thus destroying the intellectual, the physical, and finally the moral fibre Examination of past civilisations will show that almost invariably it has been the woman who has tended first to reach this point, and almost invariably from the woman to the man lias enervation and decay spread.

Again and again;-"the same story repeats itself among wie nations of Die past. First the accumulation of unearned wealth in the hands of the dominant class, the reduction first of the womanhood of that class to a life of useless luxury and idleness, and then the inevitable decay of the manhood and nation. Not slavery, nor the most vast accumulations of wealth could destroy a nation by enervation whose women remained, active, virile, and laborious, but the man cannot advance in physical powei and intellectual vigor if -the woman becomes inactive and' stationary, taking no share in the labor necessary to bulk! and maintain the society of which she is part. Only an able and laboring womanhood can permanently produce an able and laboring manhood, Only an effete and inactive manhood can ultimately be produced by an effete and inactive womanhood. It is the woman who sets the standard of the race, from which there can be no departure for any-distance for any length of time, in any direction. As her brain weakens, so weakens the man she bears; os lier muscle softens so softens bis, as she decays, so decay the people. If to-day woman is content to leave to man all labor in the new fields which are rapidly opening before the human race, if, as the old forms of domestic labor slip from her for ever she does not grasp the new, then, ultimately, large bodies of women m civilised societies must . sink into a state of dependent- parasitism, giving no useful and honorable labor or service to t-lie nation to which t-he\ belong. The woman’s labor movement of our day, which lias taken its rise among women, of the more cultured and wealthy classes, and which consists mainlv in a demand to have the doors leading to professional, political, and skilled labor thrown open to men and women alike, if brought to a satisfactory conclusion, will tend to the material and physical well-being of woman herself, as well as to that of her male companion* and descendants. It is the perception of this fact, that, not for herself, not even for tellow women alone, but for the benefit of humanity at large it is right, and necessary tluit woman should have her full share in all spheres of useful and honorable labor. It is -remarkable that ihe men who object to women entering into fields of labor which they ~ consider outside her sphere that it is not toil. nor t lieamount of toil, which the woman undertakes that is objected to; it- is the form and the amount- of reward, it is not the hard, laboring woman, even in his own class, worn out and prematurely aged with monotonous domestic toil that has no beginning and knows no end, it is not the haggard, work-crushed woman and mother, who irons his shirts, or destroys health and youth in the sweater> den where she sews the garments in which lie so radiantly appears that disturbs lnm. It is the thought of the woman doctor with an income of some hundreds a year, who drives round to see her patients or receives them in her consulting rooms, who lias time to road in her studv. or to receive her guests;- it is the thought of the woman who as legislator may 101 l for perhaps six hours of the dav on the padded legislative bench, relieving the tedium by an occasional turn in the billiard or refreshment room when she is not needed to vote or speak ; it is the thought of the woman a* Greek professor, with thiee or four hundred a year, who gives half-a-dozen lectures a week and has leisure to enjoy the society of her husband and children, and to devote to her own study and life of thought. It i.s not the woman, who, on hands and knees, at tenpence a day, scrubs the floors of public buildings or private dwellings that fills him with anguish for womanhood; that posture is for him truly feminine, and does not interfere with his ideal of the mother ami child hearer, or that some weary woman paces far into the night bearing with aching back and tired head his fretful teething dliild for a yearly pittance of £2O does not distress him, but, that the same woman, by work in an office should earn £l-50, be able to have a comfortable home of her own, and her evening free for study or pleasure distresses him deeply. It is not the labor or the'amount of labor so much as the amount of reward that interferes with his ideal of the eternal womanly; he is, as a rule, quite contented that the women of the race should labor for him, whether as teapickers or washer-women, or toilers for his children, provided the reward they receive is not large, nor in such fields as lie might himself at any time, dosire to enter.

The woman’s movement todav manifests itself, in many in* the farms or . the study, . in the incut to-day manifests itself, in many nays and various directions, it breaks out. now here and now there. At one point it is a passionate cry for a share in public and social duties, at another it makes itself felt as a determined endeavor after self-culture, again it shows itself in a resolute endeavor to enlarge the sphere of remunerative labor for women, and everywhere is heard the cry for even-handed justice between the relations of the sexes. All this diversity shows, not the weakness but the strength of the movement, which taken as a whole is a movement steady and persistent, in one direction, the direction of increased activity and culture, this movement is shaping itself in the bosom of our time beside thpse vast human developments of which men have said in the days of old “Surely this thing is not of man but of Hod.” For the woman whose faith can see through the distance the great things towards which the .struggles and sufferings of the women of to-day tend, who see beyond the present, that in a future which she knows she will never enter, are enlarged and strengthened womanhood, bearing forward a strengthened and expander! race it is not so hard to renounce and labor with unshaken purpose, but. for those who have not that clear view, but. struggle on, with a vague consciousness that somewhere a head lies a larger end towards which their efforts tend, for such as these it is perhaps not so easy to labor without growing weary. Nevertheless it is through the labors of these myriad toilers, each in her own small sphere, and out of endless failures and miscarriages, that at last the widened and beautified relations of woman to life will and must rise. It is olten said of those who are seeking this wider sphere for wojpiaw* that they are “new are ijut new. Wo who le,gd?dfrrhis movement Jo-dav ha.ve’Tn'us the blood of a 'womanhood that was never bought and never sold, that wore no veil, anc( had no foot hound, whose realised ideal of marriage was rnat of companionship, and an equality in duty and labor, who stood side by side with the man they loved in peace and in war. We are of a race of women that of old know no fear, and feared no death, and lived great lives and hoped great hopes, and if to-day some of us have fallen on evil and degenerate times, there moves in us yet the throb of the old blood. If to-day it be on no physical battlefield that we stand beside our men it is yet the eld spirit which stirs within us* in deeper and subtler ways. Though the battlefield be now for us all in the laboratory or the workshop, in the farms (?) or the study, in the assembly or in the mart or the political arena, with the pen and not the sword, of the head and not the arm we still, as of old, stand side by side with the men we love to dare and suffer and rejoice with them. It is a. gracious fact to which every woman who has achieved success or accomplished good work in any of the fields generally apportioned to men, will bear witness, whether that work be in the field of literature, of science, or. the organised professions, that the hands which have been most eagerly stretched out to welcome her have been those of men; that the voices which have most generously acclaimed her success have been those of male. fellowworkers in the fields into which she has entered. There is no door at which the hand of woman has knocked for admission into a new field of

toil, hut there have been found on the other side strong , and generous men eager to turn it for her, almost before she knocks. To those of us who stand with shaded eyes gazing into the future nothing seems of so gracious a promise as the outline we seem to discern of a condition of human life m which a closer union than the world has yet seen shall exist between the man'and the woman. In his apocalypse there was one who saw a new heaven, and a new earth. Wo see a new earth, and therein dwells love, the love of comrade* and co-workers. D is because so wide and gracious to us are the possibilities of the future; so impossible is a return to the past, so deadly is a passive acquiescence in the present that to-day we women are found everywhere raising our strange new erv, “Give us Labor and the training that fits us for labor.”