AS WOMEN SEE IT.

Otago Witness, Issue 3195, 9 June 1915, Page 76

AS WOMEN SEE IT.

B> Jessie Mackay.

The twentieth century has seen some strange innovations. It has seen Kings in the trenches, earls’ daughters in prison, a Nonconformist attorney giving law to dukes and bishops, and women guiding the affairs of Parliament. But this year is, perhaps, unique inasmuch as it has heard a British jury charge an Imperial Government with murder. Stark, common, squalid murder has been charged upon a European Emperor and his advisers, and the world has set its seal to the verdict. But after? There is no doubt that the homicidal pack which sent the innocent women and children of the unarmed Lusitania to the bottom of the Atlantic are being chased now, like the mad dogs they are. There is no doubt that the pirate Cabal which beflagged Berlin and gave its children a joy-holiday for this and other massacres of innocents, is being fought like a very Antichrist to-day, when Teutemsm, stands alone against Christendom with the self-doomed tyranny of Turkey. Two robber Empires are they. No grass grows where the Turk has been, and the trail of the Kaiser eastward and westward is. black as death. But, late or soon, the judgment day will begin for Kaiserism: and in that day what price is European diplomacy going to put upon its own credit? To women, with minds unwarped by diplomatic precedent, this question recurs with curious insistency". Will the Allies stand to / that verdict, with all it implies, or will they stoop to treat with a chancellery assassins whose weapons are poison, treachery, lies, and “frightfulness”? To woman, whose hand is newly closing on the truncheon of power that was hers in the dawn of time—a simpler, truer, juster epoch the memory of which yet lingers among simple and isolated peoples,—it will appear that this is the crux of permanent settlement. Women reverence, not precedent nor the course 01 procedure, as men worship it in the curious man-mill'nery of Church and Bench and State, but the spirit and the essence of pure accord which alone t makes for justice and statesmanship.. Because a murderer is a Kaiser or a Kaiser’s Minister, a low order of statecraft would yet treat with him, as the traditional cavalier bowed to the Crown, were it hung on a gorsehush. The woman-soul of affairs, however, sees nothing but a murderer there, and refuses to palter with gilded crime. But the woman-soul in essence is not woman’s only. It disdains the limitation, stressed to cruel straitness all these years, of form and name. It is the vanguard of human thought, passing at a bound the slow premises and tentative holdings of the unillumined mass behind. The higher man speaks the woman’s tongue as his own. When a Mill, a Wendell Holmes, a “Fiona Macleod” speaks, it is with the voice that is most akin to the 'spheremusic which keeps earth, moon, and star moving in their place. There is a tale, that once a wise man of the Middle Ages was asked for the one supreme earthly w’ord. “He called for fair paper and wrote thereon the one word, ‘Measure’!” That is the secret. It is Measure the Government, the logic, the justice of the man-made world we know has lacked all these years.

Now what sort of Measure is to be meted to the murderer Hun in his hour of fate? We hear a good deal of spumy “patriotism,” whose every other word is “Inter the alien!” “Boycott trade!” “Starve out Germany for ever!” Three-quarters of this stuff is pure hysteria—the hysteria of little minds that would not deny their outer integument one glass of whisky to-day for all the King Georges and Kitcheners in Christendom. The loud-mouthed “patriot” who turns off a hundred unoffending workmen to starve because they are called Otto is precisely the man who -would turn down his own national manufactures if he could buy the article a farthing cheaper from Germany or Hades next year. There is patriotism that gives and patriotism that rants, and they seldom travel long in company. But what are we going to do about this murder charge? Are we, a,s a concert of Allies, going to condone it when all is done, and weakly make terms with the red Chancellery that ordained the sinking of the the torture and murder of priests, civilians, women, and children? If this is the price European diplomacy puts upon its own honour, it is the seal of all ineptitude, all decrepitude, all degeneration, that the wakening woman-soul has been freely charging upon domestic and international government for years past. The supreme punishment for Germany, once her armies are scattered and her munitions spent or taken, would be to refuse to treat with Kaiser, Kaiserling, or-

Kaiser’s man, to refuse peace till Germany herself throws down her bloodguilty Imperial House, her murderous bureaucracy, her Prussian Parliament, and the whole corrupt, cruel bodv of Junkerdom. . The robber Hohenzollerns and the iron cougue they fastened on Germany’s obedient neck for their own glorification are as much an anachronism as the thumb-screw and the pillory. Let the fall ■’ of their blood-stained Empire resound through the world by Europe’s decree and awakened Germany’s own retributive hand, as she sees her life-tree blighted and the flower of her youth mouldering in clay upon the devastated fields’ of Europe. Let it be proclaimed before the snn that honourable Kings and honourable Ministers refuse parley with murderers; that they will speak with Germany face to face, not with tyrants who have trailed her honour and her wellbeing in the dust for their own vainglory. Then there need be none of this hysteric fury that now delights in crying “ Starve the market!” Starve whom? Not the Kaiserlings and the Junkers, if such be spared, but the women, the children, the pale proletariat on which Junkerism and Kruppism fattened in its time. The starving of these will do little towards paying for Louvain, Rheims, murdered fishers and slaughtered innocents. The world waits to see whether its rulers dare press home that simple, terrible verdict of “ Murder ” found in a British lave court and endorsed by every civilised conscience. If not, then it is European diplomacy rather than German bloodfrenzy that will stand last before the calm, inexorable bar of the world’s women in judgment.