Under Currents

Waikato Times, Volume 103, Issue 17326, 11 February 1928, Page 6

Under Currents

IN ‘THE DRIFT OF LIFE

!By “ Sce.\z7. ”

TOO lIOT FOR SCHOOL. The Auckland Education Board has refused to allow the schools to be closed on hot afternoons. Many parents feel this is a mistake. More would be roused to protest if the obildren came home to lunch and revealed their weariness. For children of five or six, even those in good health, it seems positively cruel to insist on desk work throughout the torrid days. Many parents would gladly keep the children home, but they know the youngsters are eager to keep up with their mates and they do not wish to spoil the attendance average on which the teacher’s position depends. The best way would seem to be for the school committees to express their wishes. Meantime parents cannot be expected to submit to the regime if they believe it is really injuring the child. * * * * BOBBY’S LAMENT. This one is for the farmers, and especially for those who are being pestered by the Noxious Weeds Inspector: Bobby Piper was giving great assistance in putting' out the swamp fire. His five-year-old voice gave peremptory orders: “Here put some water on this post! Look, the fire’s going to catch the trees. Gome here, Mr Milligan. Bang it! Bang it!’’ Then Bobby was silent and sad for a while. In tragic tones he said, “isn’t it awful — ail those blackberries getting burned!” ' a * * * JOSEPHINE BUTLER. There has arisen a generation that knows not Josephine. In our youth we heard of her vaguely as a champion of women. It was the generation before mine that knew her as an ardent knight leading the campaign to save girls from the white slavery of licensed vice and incidentally helping to give women a status in university life. Her centenary is being celebrated this year, and I plead this as my excuse for worshipping at her shrine. In youth (as Josephine Grey) she was a lover of the open air and of animals, a fearless rider, beautiful in person and with a fund of humour. But even as a girl in the large and happy home circle, Josephine was at times borne down under the weight of the suffering of the world and the difficulty of reconciling this with the thought of a God whose name was Love. “For hours and days and weeks," she wrote years afterwards, “I sought the answer to my soul’s trouble and the solution of its dark questionings.” Marriage in 1852 with George Butler, a university tutor and examiner, brought her the perfect companionship of a highly trained mind whose understanding sympathy never failed to sapport her. She revolted against the idea of morality held at Oxford, •where they lived —the idea (as she put it) “that a pure woman should be absnintely ignorant of a certain class of evils in the world, albeit those evils bore with murderous cruelty on other women.” Her first public work was to help, with her husband, in the movement for lectures to women which developed into the University Extension scheme and the establishment of Newnham College, (iris of to-day take the freedom of education as a matter of course. In Josephine Butler's day higher education was man's prerogative, and she and others had to fight to win it for women. WAR ON WHITE SLAVERY. Mrs Butler had tragedy in her own life, her young daughter being killed in an accident. It was in 1869, when she was nearly 40 years old, that she entered the strenuous campaign against the Acts of Parliament which, to quote a biographer, aimed “to secure physical safety for licentious men by the creation of a slave class of registered women.” This law was administered by speoial polioe, on whose word alone a woman oould be arrested and forced to prove her innocence by submission to a surgical examination. Tidings leaked out of girls being ohased through the streets and of attempts at suicide by women who preferred death to the publioity of trial. In the campaign of protest Mrs Butler and her friends needed not only a fund of moral courage hut physioal bravery, for the passions of those who traded in vice were aroused. On December 3i, 1869, there was published the “Ladies’ Appeal and Protest,” with 120 influential signatures. Its revelations came as a shock to the general public. It was not till 17 years after that the. campaign was won by the repeal of the Aot. Meanwhile Mrs Butler had carried the war into Europe. That the system of lioensed vice was a failure is now generally recognised. The faot that the rate of disease under that system in the British Army (in 1883) was 260 per 1000 (against only 27 per 1000 in 1923) is convincing, though, of course, other faotors have had their effect. Present-day opinion is strongly in favour of confidential treatment at free clinics. This has brought about a very marked diminution of social disease where it has been tried in Europe and in the large cities of England. Josephine Butler advooated this plan, and Sir George Newman recently wrote that it had “led directly to a substantial reduction in the occurrence and mortality of these diseases,” and the result had been “one of the most immediate of all recent publio ameliorative measures.” A FRIEND TO ALL.

However, Mrs Butler s inspiration was her concern for women’s personality—and men’s too. It is recorded that, when living at Liverpool, she sal on the iloor of the casual wards picking oakum with the women there. Many girls who had fallen, often by their very trustfulness, were received into her home either to be nursed back to health or sometimes to die. She was an intensely religious woman and one ol' the most eloquent tributes paid to her was that of Frederick W. 11. Myers: “She introduced me to Christianity, so Lo say. by an inner door; nol to its encumbering forms and dogma! but to its heart of lire.” , „ •'Josephine But.ier: An Appreciation is ihe title of a book by E. M. Turner, just published by the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene, Orchard House, Great Smith Street, London S.W.I. * * * * THE DOG AND THE MOON. A little dog barked at the big red moon That smiled in the evening sky. The neighbours smote him with rooks and shoon — But still he continued his ragful tuna. And he barked ’Lili his throat was dry. But, soon ’noath the hill that obstructed the west, The moon sank out of sight; And the little dog said, as he laid down p lo nest, “Well," I scared it away all right.” —L. v. La Taste in “Time.* 4