An Appeal to the Women of New Zealand.

White Ribbon, Volume 7, Issue 81, 1 February 1902, Page 1

An Appeal to the Women of New Zealand.

By Ellice Hopkins. It is impossible lor me to address the New Zealand mothers, ".nd those who, though not mothers, are yet in loco parentis, without first of all expressing the deep and grateful affection which we bear to them for having come to the help of the mother country in her hour of great difficulty and peril, when, without warning, our own territories were invaded, and, utterly unprepared as we were through our hatred of war, we were forced to defend our own people. No nation but our own recognises that our Empire, unlike every other, has no territorial continuity, but is only bound together by high character and utter loyalty 10 one another, and to those great trinciples of justice, freedom, and equal rights on which our Empire is based, and, violating which, the Empire itself falls to pieces. But you have recognised it. You have given us your hero sons to fight this battle by our side. Your tears, —tears such as only mothers shed,—have mingled with ours. Your dead lie side by side with ours in the sacramental union of death, and with the blood of your slain you have cemented the whole Empire into an indissoluble reality which will defy the shocks of time, and before long will

bring to South Africa herself the bless' ings of just laws, an incorruptible government, and a freedom such as they have never known. But as Prince Schwartzenl>erg said, “ You can do everything with bayonets except sit upon them.” That brilliant

(President of the Auckland W.C.T.U.) writer, Mr Fitchett, has written of the “Deeds that Won the Empire”; but far more permanently present with us is the need of deeds that maintain the Empire. If our Empire ever goes to pieces it will not l>e from any coalition of forces frem without,—that the loyalty

of our colonial possessions has made impossible,—but will be from moral decay from within ; and if our men have won the Empire, the noble lot falls, especially to us women, of maintaining; what they have won. There is one great dry-rot of nations which has successively destroyed 1 ie brilliant civilisation of Greece, the massive power of Rome, the great Spanish empire, and, by the declining population it produces, will in two or three generations reduce France to a second or third rate power ; and that is the moral corruption which wars against the sanctity of the family, the purity of the home, the moral training of children, the sacred rights of the individual, all the great bases of our higher national, political, and personal life. It is this evil that we women in these latter days are called upon to fight, touching as it does all the great trusts of our tvomanhood. Do not deny its existence among you. Above all do not trust the statistics of the police on this point, as for some reason or other they see fit to minimise it to an extraordinary extent. One of the police stated to a friend of mine that child-prostitution was impossible in Australasia, as there was a law to protect them. He forgot to add that that law only extended upto'the age of fourteen, and is only a clause in the Industrial Schools Act ; so that children of fourteen, without the instincts of a woman

to save themselves, may disgrace your Christian civilisation by being on the streets without any interference on th'* part of the law. In England there is legal protection outside the Industrial Schools Act in all cases up to sixteen, and under certain circumstances up to eighteen ; and we hope in time to raise it to a still higher age. In countries like your own, where the population is largely fed by immigration, the degradation of women is often of a peculiarly sad type, being added to by young and inexperienced women who go out with the expectation of making their fortune, totally unfit as they are for colonial life, and finding themselves without employment and half starved, accept in despair the wages of sin from the men who always dog the steps of a starving woman to tempt her to ruin. Our Women’s Emigration Societies have to a certain degree lessened this, but what external agency can altogether stand between an inexperienced and wilful girl, and the unknown dangers that beset her ?

Lastly, what about your own boys? Do not think for one moment that your schools are free from the moral dangers presented by our English Schools, which have alone at times filled me with the darkness of despair. Those evils are common to every school w here boys are herded together without the influence of mothers and sisters. Even day schools do not, alas! wholly eradicate the danger that springs up whenever a bad boy is found, and is kept intensely secret. The evil will go on till the parents, and especially the mothers, make themselves the friends, and the moral teachers of their own boys. Here we touch at the very root of things ; for my fifteen years’ work at this question has convinced me that till we get a higher tone among men, till we diminish the demand that pro duces the supply the whole of this great evil will go on. Wherever we may choose to lay the blame, the bald fact stares us in the face that the degradation of women, with all its awful results of disease and corruption to the State, is kept up by the money of men. Stop the money of men and the whole thing, as far as the trade of vice is concerned, would be starved out in three months’ time.

May I not appeal to you women of New Zealand to come forward as freely as your husbands, sons and brothers have done in the cause of right and justice, and grapple as bravely with this insidious and terrible foe ? May I not

plead with you in the words of that splendid man, the President of the United States. “ You must feel in you a fiery wrath against evil. When you see a wrong, instead of feeling shocked and hurt and a desire to go home and a wish that right prevailed, you should go out and tight till that wrong isoveroome.” And now comes the question that has sprung so often from the lips of English mothers, and which doubtless springs from yours. “ What can we do” ? The first simple thing 1 want you to do is to get a little book called, “ The Power of Womanhood ; or, Mothers and Sons,” in which I ha e embodied the answer to that question, as given not only by myself, but by many of our English leading men and most thoughtful mothers. So great is the help that it is proving to educated mothers that though it has only been published for a short two years, it is already in its sixth edition. In order to place it within the reach of all, I have given a guarantee of so as to enable my publisher to issue a shilling edition for Australia and New Zealand—a guarantee which will only cease when five thousand copies have been sold. Will you not only read it yourselves but get other mothers to study its suggestions ? I have also tried to meet the great difficulty that lsexperienced by mothers as to how to impart pure knowledge to theirboysin a small paper called, “ The Story of Life,’ anti another pap *r for working women entitled, “ Early Training of Girls and Boys,” which is in its tenth edition, both of which I hope shortly to issue. Once recognise the power of your own womanhood, and you will realise your power slowly but surely to abolish the horrible curse of its degradation. You will lealise that if to our hero sons has been given the glory of winning the British Empire,—which I venture to call the greatest civilising, order-spread-ing, christianising world power ever known, — to us women has been given the still greater glory of those deeds which maintain the Emipire, in maintaining the sanctity of the family, the reverence for marriage laws, chivalrous respect for all womanhood, and a high standard of purity for men and women alike, which form the stability of the State. “ This wrong has ever been, this sin Will last the world out,” do men cry P “ Nature herself pleads a necessity.” Hut thou, trust thou the law within; by tha* supreme reality, Dare thou to give all history the lie.

Yea, by that uncreated light, Whereof this solid earth and sky Are hut the fitful shadows cast on high : Rise up and cry, suprem * in right, “ This wrong is dead and damned to-day, Though through all ages it had held its way.” And broken though thine arm, thy spear Naught but a bruised striw, yet smite The ancient regent lie in all men’s sight. And though men flout at thee and jeer, A gnat that buzzes up against a wall Of rock in hopes to l>eat it to its fall ; Though stronger grow the wrong each day, And though l>eneath its iron feet It pound thee small, and all thine ends defeat; Yet shall the world, confused, astray, Grow polar to thee, slowly taught, And crystal out a kosmos round thy thought.