MUSINGS and MEDITATIONS

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 13, 30 March 1907, Page 21

MUSINGS and MEDITATIONS

By

Dog Toby

BRAVE WOMEN. IN the account of the wreck of the “Suevic” it is stated that the women marched on deek like a regiment of soldiers, without a murmur or a sound of alarm. The surgeon of a large Atlantic liner has left it on record that women were, on the whole, cooler than men in ease of disaster at sea. He says that once when it was momentarily expected the vessel would sink he asked the one woman on board to wait a few moments in the cabin with her children. When he -went below to fetch them he found the mother sitting on the sofa with the three children round her, telling them stories in a low voice to keep them still. All were carefully dressed, and she had filled a pillow-case with ship’s bread, and securely tied it at the top. “ She was the very coolest person,” he said, “with whom I have ever made a voyage.” In the wreck of the “ Oregon ” the women were said to be the coolest persons on board, and in our own tales of shipwreck has not the courage of the women stood out as equal to, if not superior, to that of the men? Seldom has there been a chapter in British history more full of heroic endurance than the Indian Mutiny. As I write there lie by my side letters written by a woman, who with her husband and baby daughter was murdered at Cawnpore. She writes without a trace of fear, though she says they are quite unprotected, and before her letters reach England the suspense will have been ended one way or the other. She had been urged to leave her husband, and seek safety in one of the forts, but «he felt her duty was to be at her husband’s side. And in the midst of a recital of the dangers that threatened on every side she breaks off to say that the baby had just cut its last tooth. The letters show no more trace of fear than if they had been written in a London drawing room. Women are tim’d but brave; they will shriek at the sight of a mouse, but fearlessly face pain and death, and that, too, when they arc perforce compelled to be passive, and are denied the stimulus of action. The hardest thing of all, said a great soldier, is to remain cool under fire, waiting the word to advance. And women are chiefly called upon to show this courage. Men can act and fight, their fear is lost in the excitement of combat; women are perforce compelled to remain passive, powerless to do anything to avert the threatened catastrophe. A well-known doctor says that after a long experience of women, both as patients and nurses, he is convinced that they possess greater endurance than men, and more nerve at a pinch. Sir Charles Russell,

the eminent advocate, said that if a woman wanted to stick to a statement in the witness box, she would stand a cross-examination that would unnerve the cleverest of men. He had some experience of this in his cross-examination of Lady Dunlo, when, after cleverly leading up to the wished, for denouement, he was completely foiled by lier answer to his last question. A clerical friend of some experience in such matters assures me that in • marriage ceremony the man is always far more nervous than the woman. The brWogroorn is restless and fidgety, and

keeps glancing round to make sure his best man is there to support him; but a woman is almost always cool and collected, and has a contented purr like a cat that has got a mouse in its mouth. In our baekblocks the monotony and hardship of life fall chiefly on the women; they, by their cheerful endurance of privation and discomfort, have done as much as men to open up and colonise our laud. It is doubtful if any of our remote settlements would have been inhabited and broken in, if it had not been for the fact that so many women were found ready to brave everything in order to help and cheer their husbands in their efforts to make a home in the wilderness. Lowell tells us of the hourly mercy of a woman's soul. He connects this mercy with the gentler side of nature, the power to soothe rather than the power to stimulate and to endure. We are all apt to look o;t man as being the exclusive possessor <A courage. Because of the great part played in the world’s history by warriors, we are apt to lose sight of deeds of everyday heroism; we are wont ti mistake daring for bravery. There is undeniably a courage of sex. To maj is given the active life; the peril of exploration, the peril of war, the peril of doing. To woman is given the higher courage; the power of endurance, the power of passive calm in the face of danger, the power of love that endureth all things, hopeth all things, and that alone makes possible the chivalry, the generous spirit, the thirst for noble deeds that every man at arras must wish to have.