THE NEW MATER DOLOROSA

Otago Witness, Issue 3100, 13 August 1913, Page 77

THE NEW MATER DOLOROSA

By Jkssie Mackav. “ In sorrow shall thou bring forth children,” ran the old Semitic prophecy, for as a prophecy and not a doom we now, in fuller light and understanding, recognise that ancient Scripture, under which sorrow has been multiplied to the mothers of men. The strange fact grows clearer every decade that, while the curse of Adam has been lightened, ameliorated, softened, as ages have passed, the curse of Eve has grown ever heavier. Physically, morally, spiritually, there are burdens laid upon modern, civilised motherhood that the strong, simple, unreasoning women of the prime never knew. Taking it all in all, sociology and pathology unite to-day in affirming the increasing tragedy of motherhood. The fashionable specialist, and the slum-worker join hands in arraigning the forces that lay upon motherhood the burden of all the world. And because we have already seen and lleetingly fixed the vision of a glorious me the r hood to be, the nightmare that broods over earth’s . darkest places horrifies ns more than in days of more unrelieved gloom gone by. Leaving the more radical and fundamental issues raised on planes intangible and ethical, let ns look for a moment on the new Mater Dolorosa, and recognise where this title is most fitly bestowed today in all Christendom. A chill falls on ns as we realise with a start that it is under our own Imperial flag we are to look for tliis woman of sorrows. The now Mater Dolorosa is the slnm-lmother of Britain, the Helot of our own proud polity, the vital product of England’s own crooked, one-sided civilisation..

It' there is one thing that English administration prides itself upon to-day it is on its new schemes for the preservation ahd well-being of child-life. There are scores of agencies at work on these lines in London and the larger centres. Clinics, schools for mothers, fresh-air funds, homes, baby hospitals—all these are being equipped and endowed at lavish cost, and yet for some strange reason the great stagnant ocean of social misery at Home is scarcely even stirred by these philanthropic currents. It is true that England did not move far on these lines till fear compelled her. She had passed a leisurely series of Factory Acts, curtailing or abolishing the hideous conditions of child labour a century ago, and then lay back on her oars till a succession of rude awakenings within the last two decades or so brought home the vital danger of the policy of drift. America and Germany had sprung into deadly commercial rivalry ; her operatives were proved comparatively slow, inefficient, unteachahle. The man behind the machine was found wanting. The Boer war made the first great vital demand on her resources since the Crimean war of the fifties. She found she could not provide the human material that once had proved the bulwark of Eurovre’s freedom. The man behind the gun was found wanting. The whole world was filled with the ring of hammers on the ironclads of the East and the West. The cry went up that England was not ready—she was ill-equipped, under-manned, out, of date. The old Sea Queen reared herself and looked ; but lo! the sturdy physique, the thews and stature that had delighted the admirals of other days came no more ; here, again, the dismal work of rejection went on, making enrolment harder every year. The man before the mast was found wanting. Lastly, the new age cried for rural reform and the fundamental stability of the peasant population. England looked with a start towards her emptying villages and her rapidly congesting town tenements. The man behind the plough was wanting, too. Then she turned desperately to seek the cult of the child. Sentiment joined with expediency to pet. praise, train, and almost coddle the children of the nations. Schools, playgrounds. doctors, nurses, shows, free dinners, treats, junketings—all these England gladly found money for. Onlv two things were denied the children of the poor. England would not give them fathers with the right to work nor mothers with the right to live. And even to this present deadly hour she professes herself unable to understand why the children site has endowed with such carefulness are nearly as peaked and Dale ami deficient as they were 20 years ago. Who can answer this riddle of the grim modern Sphinx? There is one who could riddle it arisrht if she would but speak. The Mater Dolorosa knows, she, the mother of England’s pauper millions, her gaunt proletariat who are. in ever-increasing numbers, unfit either to work at Home or emigrate elsewhere. True, the Mater Dolorosa has spoken, and spoken in vain ; sticks, stones, and words that hurt longer than either have been her portion from the men of England, high and low. But let us who are afar hear what she has to say about herself and the child she has reared—the man who is gone from mast and gun and plough. Even if we see her daily life as it is. without going into details of law and log and schedule, affecting her rears as a girl worker and helping to make her the figure of sorrow she is, we will ask no

more why England stands on the vital down grade to-day. The reason why the cult of the child has been so disappointing. so fatuous, so resniUess, as educationists and slum workers declare it on the

whole to be, in the very places which. )i"-i?. most need of amelioration, is because they began at (He wrong end. As Anna Martin puts it in the Nineteenth Century:

“Begin with the child,” was a popular cry; “begin with the mother would have been a sounder principle.”

(To be continued.)