The White Ribbon, "For God and Home, and Humanity" WELLINGTON, JULY 18 1943. (Reprinted from “White Ribbon,” January 1897.) JOSEPHINEE, BUTLER.

White Ribbon, Volume 49, Issue 6, 18 July 1943, Page 4

The White Ribbon, "For God and Home, and Humanity" WELLINGTON, JULY 18 1943. (Reprinted from “ White Ribbon,” January 1897.) JOSEPHINEE, BUTLER.

PERSONAL REMINISCENCES OF A GREAT CRUSADE. / came not to send peace on the earth, hut a sicord. —Jesus the Christ. Those who recall the part played and 'the hardships endured by Mr. W. T. Stead some twelve years since in the <*ause of Purity, will be in no wise surprised that he is able, in the November issue of the “Review of Reviews,” to write so sympathetically of Mrs. Butler’s recently published volume; and the value of the article is considerably enhanced by reason of the fact that Mr. Stead is also enabled to draw u;>on his own personal knowledge of the work and its pioneer. Says Mr. Stead: “It is the peculiar lory of Mrs. Butler that to her was reserved, in this century, the task of rediscovering a segment of humanity which, until she arose, had been almost as completely submerged from human ken as the continent of Atlantis. No Sargasso Sea of drifting morass and floating forest could conceal behind a more imj>enetrable barrier the surviving i»eaks of the sunken continent than the suspicion, the prejudice and the selfishness by which fallen women were fenced off from their kind. The women of the town, it was declared, were outcaNt, disinherited, excommunicated —things rather than women. The administration doomed them to life-long slavery and destroyed by law or by ordinance their claim to the most sacred and inalienable of all human right*—the right to their own persons and their own liberty.

‘‘Then Josephine Butler arose and of her own knowledge, born of much painful and terrible exploration of the Sargasso Sea of this Under-World, bore testimony that human hearts still were to be found even in this lost Atlantis of State-regulated vice and that woman diri not lose the indestructible divinity of her sex even when she had made of it merchandise in order to procure her daily bread.”

Mrs. Butler says: “It may surprise some of my readers to learn that the first great uprising against legalised vice had much less of the character of the ‘revolt of a sex’ than has often been supposed. It was as a citizen of a free country first, and as a woman secondly, that 1 felt compelled to come forward in the defence of the right. The Crusade was essentially a cry for “equal justice.” While noting that Mrs. Butler was “a rebel born and bred” . . . “descended from the rebel Huguenot on her mother’s side, and from the sturdy Northumbrians of the Border on the side of her fathc,” Mr. Stead also points out “that it was left to her to proclaim the fundamental truth—We never get to the heart of things human till we take the tender side of human nature.” Long years since Mrs. Butler ap]>ealed to those who, after years of shameful wallowing in sin, have married and settled down, while the outcast woman dies, consumed by disease and miserv. “She is lost to society, you are petted by society. Your own past life could reveal sins as great before God as hers have been.” Again she says, “Down all the ages since that hour when Christ and the outcast woman were face to face in the Temple, and every man in the surrounding crowd was |K>inting the finger of scorn at her, the world has continually l»cen pointing the finger of scorn at her, the world has been continually been pointing the finger at 'his typical figure of woe, as the scapegoat upon whom, justly or unjustly, the sins and miseries of society must be heaped. The question has always l>een: ‘What shall we do with her?’ Never till this last ‘new era’ has it dawned upon us, has it been asked, ‘What shall we do with him?’ Him, her companion in sin.” And to this last question Mrs. Butler replies, “At any rate do not let us send him to Parliament to make the laws.”

In one of her electoral manifestoes she wrote: “We have listened to cynical arguments in favour of the protection of male vice from men in that House

of Commons, whose illegitimate children and cast-off paramours we have shel tered and nursed in their disease and |K)vcrty and desertion, and the victims of whose seduction we have laboured hard to restore to hope and a new life. Sometimes, after looking down from tne laches* galiery there, or vainly arguing with some hardened sinner in the lobby, we he*, returned to our almost hopeless work among their victims, and have l>een driven in a moment of darkness to ask, ‘ls there indeed a God in Heaven’?” "Another tiling.’ says Mr. Stead, “which Mrs. Butler thought might be done vith ‘him’ was to compel him to fact ill#' r -Hmsibilities of paternity.” Driven ;.» work among the prostitutes by sore heartarche caused by the sudden death of her only daughter, her tenderness, love and care for the i>oor outcasts knew no bounds. She says, “I have hut one spare bedroom in my bouse. Into that room I have received, with my hfisband’s joyful consent, one after another of these my fallen sisters, we liave given to them in the hour of trouble, sickness, and death, the best that our house could afford. In that room I have nursed these i>oor outcasts tilled with disease, many of them have died in mv arms.”

Her stories from this Sargasso Sea are pitiful reading—girls and women driven to sell their own persons in order to buy bare necessaries for clear, dying ones.

But not only did she pity and strive to save the individual sufferers. To rouse public opinion was her point— to uncover the deeds of darkness. She says, “I used to kneel and pray ‘O God, I beseech Thee, send light ui>on these evil deeds--light, though it may he terrible to bear.” And again, “One of my great difficulties lias been to overcome the reluctance of men to see their women work in this matter, but every adult woman with a moral sense ought now to move

. . . and it does not injure purity’* This need for a holy revolt of good women was the burden of her Crusade cry of a quarter of a century since.

“But not lightly did she raise the standard of revolt.” “I worked hard at other things—good works, as i thought - with a kind of half-con scions hope that God would accept that work, and not require me to go farther and run my nurse the child and <he herself uses intoxicants the child is in even worse plight, for the milk of an alcoholic mother contains alcohol and the child receives alcohol as pact of its diet

heart against the naked sword which seemed to be held out. But the hand of the Lord was upon me.” Obedience to the call brought relief. Space forbids quotation from incidents of the Crusade. Not only did the mob and the police join hands in support of the Act, but when Canon Butler attempted to bring the matter before the Church Congress he was howled down. The mobs hunted the brave woman through the streets, and attempted to suffocate her. Hotels refused to take her in, and it was difficult to find her a refuge. But from the day when she stood in a cart in Newark market place, supported on either side by a man bearing a flaming torch, the common people heard her gladly, and in the end enabled the Crusaders to triumph over all their foes.