The economic effects unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic defy conventional labels. Here’s how we’ll move forward.
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The ‘Great Fall’ and the road to recovery
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Hard fought gains in immunization coverage at risk without critical health services, warns WHO
Shutting down immunization services in the COVID-19 pandemic risks triggering a resurgence of diseases that can be prevented with safe and effective vaccines, warns WHO in the lead-up to World Immunization Week (24-30 April).
When immunization services are disrupted, even for brief periods during emergencies, the risk of vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks, such as measles and polio, increase. Last year’s deadly measles outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the
Congo, which took more than 6000 lives in a country already facing its largest Ebola outbreak, highlights the importance of maintaining essential health services, such as immunization in times of emergency. Further disease outbreaks will also overwhelm
health systems already battling the impacts of COVID-19.
“Disease outbreaks must not remain a threat when we have safe and effective vaccines to protect us,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. “While the world strives to develop a new vaccine for COVID-19 at record speed,
we must not risk losing the fight to protect everyone, everywhere against vaccine-preventable diseases. These diseases will come roaring back if we do not vaccinate.”
WHO is working with partners all over the world to accelerate research and development of a safe and effective vaccine and ensure equitable access for the billions of people who will need it.
But even with an expedited process, development of a vaccine for COVID-19 will take time. Precautionary measures are essential now to help keep us safe from disease, including diseases for which vaccines already protect children and adults.
Too many people are still excluded from the benefits of vaccines
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the world had made immense progress in ensuring that children are vaccinated. In 2018, 86 percent of children under the age of five globally were vaccinated with three doses of diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTP3) and
one dose of the measles vaccine, up from 72 percent in 2000 and 20 percent in 1980. The number of children paralyzed by polio has been reduced by 99.9 percent worldwide.
Yet, global vaccination coverage is still far from the 95 per cent coverage needed to fully protect communities against outbreaks of this vaccine-preventable disease.
In 2018 nearly 20 million children worldwide – more than 1 in 10 – missed out on lifesaving vaccines, such as measles, diphtheria and tetanus. Roughly, 13 million of the children have never received any vaccines, putting them and their communities
at risk of disease and death. The majority of these children live in countries with already fragile health systems, further limiting their access to essential health services when they fall sick.
Measles continues to remain an ever-present threat, especially if vaccination rates drops. Current projections indicate that the number of reported measles cases for 2019 will be at least 800 000. In 2020 there are increasing concerns about another
resurgence, especially if vaccination rates fall due to delay or suspension of scheduled immunization activities as a result of COVID-19.
Outbreaks of polio, diphtheria and yellow fever are also of high concern, especially in the countries least able to respond quickly and decisively to address an emerging outbreak, as seen in previous emergencies such as the polio outbreak in Syria in
2013.
Maintaining immunization services during COVID-19
As the response to COVID-19 continues, countries must act now protect immunization services, in order to further minimize disease outbreaks and loss of life. This includes, facilitating urgent catch up programmes in places where
services have been disrupted, ensuring strong supply chains, disease surveillance and trained health workers. Caregivers should also make sure they continue to vaccinate their children in line with national policies.
New WHO guidelines on immunization and COVID-19 recommend that governments temporarily pause preventive immunization
campaigns where there is no active outbreak of a vaccine-preventable disease. But it urges countries prioritize the continuation of routine immunization of children in essential service delivery, as well as adult vaccinations such as influenza
for groups most at risk. If immunization services must be suspended, urgent catch-up vaccinations should be rescheduled as soon as possible, prioritizing those most at risk.
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Personas Positioning and the Message Box
When lead generation programs fail, they do so mainly because the messages communicated are irrelevant or ill-timed for the target audience. Our target customers are bombarded with thousands of messages every day. Unfortunately, we (as a society) have become so used to information overload it?s become the white noise of the marketplace. As a result, the knee-jerk reaction from companies is the ?ready, fire? execution of promotional offers. It?s easy for marketers to fall into the trap of believing that volume replaces…
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THE FETICH OF THE BIRTH-RATE
To the student of the progress of the human race the consideration of the state of public opinion regarding the Birth-rate of nations is of great interest. To the careful observer there is evident the gradual evolution of intelligent public opinion on this subject even in the comparatively short space of time in which the present generation has played its part on the great stage of human development.
Public opinion on this subject during the period named may be said to have passed through three general stages. These stages are, of course, more clearly defined among the peoples of the most prosperous and intelligent countries, as for instance, in Western Europe and America, and particularly in England, France, and the United States. While the peoples of certain of these countries have passed through these stages somewhat more rapidly than have others, still it is perceived that each of these peoples have in the main followed the same general course.
The first stage of this evolution of popular opinion may be said to have been begun about 1850, and to have ended about 1880. In this stage the ideal of a large and rapidly increasing birth-rate became a popular fetich before which all men and women were supposed to fall down and render worship. In this period public opinion manifested great satisfaction and joy in the evidences of a high and rapidly increasing birth-rate. It was held that this increasing birth-rate tended toward the success and glory of the particular nation, and incidentally to the race as a whole. The idea of Quantity was elevated to the throne of public favor, and the question of Quality was ignored or overlooked.
This period was one of an unusual expansion of industry, and the rising birth-rate was regarded as a token that the world was destined to be exploited and eventually governed by the people of those nations who were able to demonstrate the greatest efficiency in industrial pursuits, and who at the same time were wise enough to increase their respective populations by an increasing birth-rate. The populace were excited by the idea of the dominance and prosperity of their own countrymen, while the leaders of industry were delighted with the idea of an increasing supply of laborers which would tend to keep down the rate of wages which otherwise would have reached proportions which would have interfered with competition with other countries. At the same time, the militarists were secretly delighted by the signs of an increasing supply of military material with which to build up gigantic armies.
A writer on the state of public opinion on this subject during this period has well said: “It seemed to the more exuberant spirits that a vast British Empire, or a mighty Pan-German, might be expected to cover the whole world. France, with its low and falling birth-rate, was looked down at with a contempt as a decadent country inhabited with a degenerate population. No attempt to analyze the birth-rate, to ascertain what are really the biological, social, and economic accompaniments of a high birth-rate, made any impression on the popular mind. They were drowned in a general shout of exultation.”
But this period of uncritical optimism was followed by a natural reaction. The pendulum stopped in its course, and soon began to swing in the opposite direction. Here, about 1880, the second stage may be said to have begun. Public opinion began to manifest a subtle change, and this mental attitude was accompanied by a physical manifestation in the form of a decreasing birth-rate. The rate of births began to fall rapidly, and has continued to fall steadily since that time.
The writer above quoted from says of this second period: “In France the birth-rate fell slowly, in Italy more rapidly, and in England and Prussia still more rapidly. As, however, the fall began earliest in France, the birth-rate was lower there than in the other countries named. For the same reason it was lower in England than in Prussia, although England stands in this respect at almost exactly the same distance from Prussia today (1917) as thirty years ago, the fall having occurred at the same rate in both countries. It is quite possible that in the future it may become more rapid in Prussia than in England, for the birth-rate of Berlin is lower than the birth-rate of London, and urbanization is proceeding at a more rapid rate in Germany than in England.”
It is not difficult to arrive at the psychological reason underlying this great change in public opinion, as manifested in this second stage. In the first place, the wonderful era of world-expansion was arrested, by natural causes well understood by students of sociology. The ambitious dreams of world-empires were rudely interrupted. Moreover, public opinion was being affected by a quiet education along the lines of sociology and economics.
The working classes began to perceive, on the one hand, the tendency of overpopulation to hold down, or even decrease, the scale of wages. The evils of over-production, and of under-consumption were dimly perceived. And, on the other hand, the capitalists began to perceive that another factor was at work—one which they had failed to include in their optimistic calculations. Instead of the cheaper wage rate which they had expected by reason of the over-abundance of human material, they found that the growth of popular education in the democratic countries had caused the working classes to demand greater comforts of life, and to oppose the cheapening of human labor. And at the same time, the masses began to revolt against the idea of raising children to become “cannon fodder” for ambitious autocratic rulers. The masses began to protest against selling their labor and their lives so cheaply.
These changed viewpoints of the working classes began to result in attempts on their part to form associations to resist the tendency on the part of capitalists to force down the scale of wages to fit the increased population. Trade unions flourished and became powerful, and the same impulse carried many into the ranks of socialism, and still beyond into the fold of anarchism and syndicalism. And, here note this significant fact, with these new perceptions and these new movements among the masses, the birth-rate began to fall rapidly.
The writer above quoted from says of this period: “The pessimists were faced by horrors on both sides. On the one hand, they saw that the ever-increasing rate of human production which seemed to them the essential condition of national, social, even moral progress, had not only stopped but was steadily diminishing. On the other hand, they saw that, even so far as it was maintained, it involved, under modern conditions, nothing but social commotion and economic disturbance. There are still many pessimists of this class alive among us even today, alike in England and Germany, but a new generation is growing up, and this question is now entering another phase.”
It would seem that the race is now well started in the third period, phase, or stage of this conception of the birth-rate. Even the Great War is not likely to seriouslyinterrupt its ultimate progress, though conditions in all civilized countries will unquestionably be disturbed by the unusual conditions now prevailing and caused by the great conflict. The spirit of this third stage seems to be that the Truth is to be found between the two extremes, viz.: (1) the extreme of passive optimism of the first stage; and (2) the extreme of passive pessimism of the second stage. It realizes that there is excellent ground for hope in better things; but it equally realizes that hope alone is vain, and will accomplish nothing unless it is accompanied with and directed by a clear intellectual vision manifested in individual and social action based on that clear intellectual vision.
The writer above quoted from says of this developing period: “It is today beginning to be seen that the old notion of progress by means of reckless multiplication is vain. It can only be effected at a ruinous cost of death, disease, poverty, and misery. We see this in the past history of Western Europe, as we still see it in the history of Russia. Any progress effected along that line—if ‘progress’ it can be called—is now barred, for it is utterly opposed to those democratic conceptions which are ever gaining greater influence among us. Moreover, we are now better able to analyze demographic phenomena, and are no longer satisfied with any crude statements regarding the birth-rate. We realize that they need interpretation. They have to be considered in relation to the sex-constitution and the age-constitution of the population, and above all, they must be viewed in relation to the infant mortality rate.
“The bad aspect of the French birth-rate is not so much its lowness as that it is accompanied by a high infantile mortality. The fact that the German birth-rate is higher than the English ceases to be a matter of satisfaction when it is realized that German infantile mortality is vastly greater than English. A high birth-rate is no sign of a high civilization. But we are beginning to feel that a high infantile death-rate is a sign of a very inferior civilization. A low birth-rate with a low infant death-rate not only produces the same increase in population as a high birth-rate with a high death-rate, which always accompanies it (for there are no examples of a high birth-rate with a low death-rate), but it produces it in a way which is far more worthy of our admiration in this matter than the way of Russia and China where opposite conditions prevail.”
The evolutionary process which all students of sociology clearly perceive to have been underway in the matter of the attitude of public opinion toward the birth-rate, and which is now underway with increased impetus, is perceived to be a natural process. It is a natural process which has been underway from the beginning of the living world. For a long time it operated and manifested along unconscious and instinctive lines of activity, but now it has emerged into the light of human consciousness and manifests along the lines of conscious, voluntary, and deliberate human action.
In its present state of evolutionary progress human thought along these lines has found expression in what is generally known as “Birth Control.” The process which has been working slowly through the ages, attaining every new forward step with waste and pain, is henceforth destined to be carried out voluntarily, in the light of human reason, foresight, and self-restraint. The rise of Birth Control may be said to correspond with the rise of social and sanitary science in the first half of the nineteenth century, and to be indeed an essential part of that movement.
The new doctrine of Birth Control is now firmly established in all the most progressive and enlightened countries of Europe, notably in France and England; in Germany, where formerly the birth-rate was very high, Birth Control has developed with extraordinary rapidity during the present century. In Holland its principles and practice are freely taught by physicians and nurses to the mothers of the people, with the result that there is in Holland no longer any necessity for unwanted babies, and this small country possesses the proud privilege of the lowest death-rate in Europe.
In the free and enlightened Democratic communities on the other side of the globe, in Australia and New Zealand, the same principles and practice are generally accepted, with the same beneficent results. On the other hand, in the more backward and ignorant countries of Europe, Birth Control is still little known, and death and disease flourish. This is the case in those eight European countries which come at the bottom of the list of the Birth Control scale, and in which the birth-rate is the highest and the death-rate the heaviest—the two rates maintaining such a constant correspondence as to lead to the inevitable conclusion that they are associated as cause and effect.
But even in the more progressive countries Birth Control has not been established without a struggle, which has frequently ended in a hypocritical compromise, its principles being publicly ignored or denied and its practice privately accepted. For, at the great and vitally important point in human progress which Birth-Control represents, we see really the conflict of two moralities. The morality of the ancient world is here confronted by the morality of the new world.
The old morality, knowing nothing of science and the process of Nature as worked out in the evolution of life, contented itself with assuming as a basis the early chapters of Genesis in which the children of Noah are represented as entering an empty earth which it is their business to populate diligently. So it came about that for this morality, still innocent of eugenics, recklessness was almost a virtue. Children were held to be given by God; if they died or were afflicted by congenital disease, it was the dispensation of God, and, whatever imprudence the parents might commit, the pathetic faith still ruled that “God will provide.”
But in the new morality it is realized that in these matters Divine action can only be made manifest in human action, that is to say through the operation of our own enlightened reason and resolved will. Prudence, foresight, self-restraint—virtues which old morality looked down upon with benevolent contempt—assume a position of first importance. In the eyes of the new morality the ideal woman is no longer the meek drudge condemned to endless and often ineffectual child-bearing, but the free and instructed woman, able to look before and after, trained in a sense of responsibility alike to herself and to the race, and determined to have no children but the best.
Such were the two moralities which came into conflict during the nineteenth century. They are irreconcilable and each firmly rooted, one in ancient religion and tradition, the other in progressive science and reason. Nothing was possible in such a clash of opposing ideas but a feeble and confused compromise such as we find still prevailing in various countries of Old Europe. This is not a satisfactory solution, however inevitable, and is especially unsatisfactory by the consequent obscurantism which placed difficulties in the way of spreading a knowledge of the methods of Birth Control among the masses of the population. For the result has been that while the more enlightened and educated have exercised a control over the size of their families, the poorer and more ignorant—those who should have been offered every facility and encouragement to follow in the same path—have been left, through a conspiracy of silence, to carry on helplessly the bad customs of their forefathers. This social neglect has had the result that the superior family stocks have been tampered by the recklessness of the inferior stocks.
In America, we find the two moralities in active conflict today. Until recently America has meekly accepted at the hand of Old Europe the traditional prescription. On the surface, the ancient morality had been complacently, almost unquestionably, accepted in America, even to the extent of tacitly permitting the existence of a vast extension of abortion, under the surface of society— a criminal practice which ever flourishes where Birth Control is neglected.
But today, a new movement is perceptible in America. It would seem that, almost in a flash, America has awakened to the true significance of the issue. With that direct vision of hers, that swift practicality of action, and above all, that sense of the democratic nature of all social progress, we see her resolutely beginning to face this great problem. In her vigorous tongue she is demanding “What is all this secrecy about, anyway? Let us turn on the Light!” And the best authorities agree that America’s answer to the demand will be of the greatest importance, and of immense significance to the whole world.
In concluding this portion of our discussion, I ask my readers to consider the following quotations from writers who have touched upon the question of the stimulation of the birth-rate by the State, for the purpose of military policy. These quotations speak for themselves, and need but little comment.
The first authority, a German, whose name has escaped me for the moment, laments the falling birth-rate in his country, and urges his own nation to stimulate it by offering bounties; he says: “Woe to us if we follow the example of the wicked and degenerate people of other nations. Our nation needs men. We have to populate the earth, and to carry the blessings of our Kultur all over the world. In executing that high mission we cannot have too much human material in defending ourselves against the aggression of other nations who are jealous of us and our achievements and progress. Let us promote parentage by law; let us repress by law every influence which may encourage a falling birth-rate; otherwise there is nothing left us but speedy national disaster, complete and irremediable.”
Havelock Ellis, an Englishman, says: “In Germany for years past it has been difficult to take up a serious periodical without finding some anxiously statistical article about the falling birth-rate, and some wild recommendations for its arrest. For it is the militaristic German who of all Europeans is most worried by this fall; indeed Germans often even refuse to recognize it. Thus today we find Professor Gruber declaring that if the population of the German Empire continues to grow at the rate of the first five years of the present century, it will have reached 250,000,000 at the end of the century. By such a vast increase in population, the Professor complacently concludes, ‘Germany will be rendered invulnerable.’ But Gruber’s estimate is entirely fallacious. German births have fallen, roughly speaking, about 1 per 1,000 of the population, every year since the beginning of the century, and it would be equally reasonable to estimate that if they continue to fall at the present rate (which we cannot, of course, anticipate) births will altogether have ceased in Germany before the end of the century. The German birth-rate reached its climax forty years ago (1871-1880) with 40.7 per 1,000; in 1906 it was 34 per 1,000; in 1909 it was 31 per 1,000; in 1912 it was 28 per 1,000; in an almost measurable period of time, in all probability before the end of the century, it will have reached the same low level as that of France, when there will be but little difference between the ‘invulnerability’ of France and of Germany, a consummation which, for the world’s sake, is far more devoutly to be wished than that anticipated by Gruber.”
Writers of Teutonic sympathies have asserted that the aggressive attitude of Germany at the beginning of the Great War was to be legitimately explained and apologized for on the ground that the War was the inevitable expansive outcome of the abnormally high birth-rate of Germany in recent times. Dr. Dernburg, the German statesman, said not very long ago: “The expansion of the German nation has been so extraordinary during the past twenty-five years that the conditions existing before the war had become insupportable.” Another writer has said: “Of later years there has arisen a movement among German women for bringing abortion into honor and repute, so that it may be carried out openly and with the aid of the best physicians. This movement has been supported by lawyers and social reformers of high position.”
Thus, it would seem that a birth-rate stimulated by unusual circumstances or by deliberate State encouragement, seemingly draws upon it the operation of natural laws which tend to increase its death-rate by War, as well as by an increased number of abortions, and an increased death-rate. It would seem as natural laws operate to bring down the population to normal by war if the other factors do not operate sufficiently rapidly and efficiently.
Havelock Ellis makes the following interesting statement: “If we survey the belligerent nations in the war we may say that those who took the initiative in drawing it on, or at all events were most prepared to welcome it, were Germany, Austria, Serbia, and Russia—all nations with a high birth-rate, and in which the fall of the birth-rate has not yet had time to permeate. On the other hand, of the belligerent peoples of today, all indications point to the French as the people most intolerant, silently but deeply, of the war they are so ably and heroically waging. Yet the France of the present, with the lowest birth-rate, was a century ago the France of a birth-rate higher than that of Germany today, and at that time the most militarist and aggressive of nations, a perpetual menace to Europe.”
Finally, let us quote Havelock Ellis once more; he says: “When we realize these facts we are also enabled to realize how futile, how misplaced and how mischievous it is to raise the cry of ‘Race Suicide.’ It is futile because no outcry can affect a world-wide movement of civilization. It is misplaced because the rise and fall of the population is not a matter of birth-rate alone, but of the birth-rate combined with the death-rate, and while we cannot expect to touch the former we can influence the latter. It is mischievous because by fighting against a tendency which is not only inevitable but altogether beneficial, we blind ourselves to the advance of civilization and risk the misdirection of our energies. How far this blindness may be carried we see in the false patriotism of those who in the decline of the birth-rate, fancy they see the ruin of their own particular country, oblivious of the fact that we are concerned with a phenomenon of world-wide extension. The whole tendency of civilization is to reduce the birth-rate. We may go further, and assert with the distinguished German economist, Roscher, that the chief cause of the superiority of a highly civilized state over lower stages of civilization is precisely a greater degree of forethought and self-control in marriage and child-bearing. Instead of talking about Race Suicide, we should do well to observe at what an appalling rate, even yet, the population is increasing; and we should note that it is everywhere the poorest and most primitive countries, and in every country (as in Germany) the poorest regions, which show the highest birth-rate.”
The same authority says: “One last resort the would-be patriotic alarmist seeks when all others fail. He is good enough to admit that a general decline in the birth-rate might be beneficial. But, he points out, it affects social classes unequally. It is initiated, not by the degenerate and unfit, with whom we could well dispense, but by the very best classes in the community, the well-to-do and the educated. One is inclined to remark, at once, that a social change initiated by its best social class is scarcely likely to be pernicious. Where, it may be asked, if not among the most educated classes, is any process of amelioration to be initiated? We cannot make the world topsy-turvy to suit the convenience of topsy-turvy minds. All social movements tend to begin at the top and to permeate downwards. This has been the case with the decline of the birth-rate, but it is already well marked among the working classes, and has only failed to touch the lowest stratum of all, too weak-minded and too reckless to be amenable to ordinary social motives. The rational method of meeting this situation is not a propaganda in favor of procreation—a truly imbecile propaganda, since it is only carried out and only likely to be carried out, by the very class which we wish to sterilize—but rather by a wise policy of regulative eugenics. We have to create the motives, and it is not an impossible task, which will act even upon the weak-minded and reckless lowest social stratum.”
PRIVATE Sex Advice to Women By R. B. Armitage, M. D.
For Young Wives and those who Expect to be Married.
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Nigeria Slashes N312bn Off Capital Projects In 2020 Budget
The Nigerian Government has slashed N312bn from capital projects in the 2020 federal budget.
This was occasioned by the global fall in oil price and the outbreak of Coronavirus in Nigeria and other parts of the world.
A copy of the revised budget showed that there was a 20 per cent cut on capital projects across ministries, departments and agencies to around N312,820,542,675.
The decision to review the budget downwards was arrived at after a meeting between Minister of Finance, Zainab Ahmed, and the leadership of the National Assembly.
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Assuaging Plight Of The Poor In This Perilous Time By Okechukwu Nwanguma
Rule of Law and Accountability Advocacy Centre has been monitoring and receiving information on public compliance with the Federal Government ordered lockdown in Abuja, Lagos and Ogun states, which contain measures to contain the ravaging Covid-19 pandemic.
Our monitoring of the compliance with the lockdown and stay-at-home orders in Lagos, Abuja and few other states indicate that most people are finding it difficult to effectively comply for various reasons.
First, there are those, who still don’t believe that Covid-19 is a real life-threatening pandemic and that precautionary measures such as social distancing, personal hygiene and other outlined measures can prevent its infection and spread.
In fact some have been made to believe that the lockdown is a deception by government to achieve other ulterior motives. Those, who promote this narrative are mainly the apocalyptic Pentecostal ‘Men of God’, who push arguments linking Covid-19 to 5G mobile technology, which they argue is a part of the biblically ordained designs of the Anti-Christ.
Second, some Nigerians are simply lawless or lack discipline, just like when passengers are asked to switch off their phones prior to flight take off and you still find some people, seemingly ladies and gentlemen, fiddling with their phones.
To illustrate, a relative of mine called me yesterday to complain that he was arrested by the police somewhere in Lagos when he drove out to buy pap for his baby. I asked him whether he knew about the lockdown order and whether there was nowhere around his neighbourhood he could walk down to buy the pap. He said ‘but other vehicles are on the road’. I told him that he had broken the law as much as those other people. Everybody may not be arrested at once.
He wanted me to talk to the police officers, who arrested him and ordered him to drive to their station. I asked him what he wanted me to tell them.
Third, and most significantly, there are yet others, who are forced out of their homes by want and hunger. They can’t stand the site of their tender children crying for hunger.
As I said elsewhere, majority of the population fall within the poor and vulnerable category. Usually, many feed themselves and their dependents on their daily earnings. They live from hand to mouth.
Under the prevailing difficult and uncertain situation, many families and individuals are already suffering and starving, just one week into the lockdown, with one more week left to go, with the probability of an extension.
The Federal Government’s Social Intervention Policy, the so-called conditional cash transfer is not yet addressing mass poverty, deprivation and hunger. The billions, which government announced that it has released and made available for conditional cash transfer to the poor and vulnerable in communities are not reaching the targets. There are still cries of woe and anguish in most communities.
We have seen videos of caricature of the ‘social intervention’, of food items shared to some communities. In one video, we saw a street in Lagos of over 30 families, who said they were given two loaves of bread and few cups of rice and garri and few condiments (tomato paste sachets) to share. And we see members of the community lamenting and asking how a whole street of over 30 families could be given such quantity of food items not enough to serve one family for two days to share!
Corruption has become our national culture. A seemingly intractable challenge to our progress and development. Most of our politicians and public office holders are unscrupulously avaricious.
Given our past experiences where public funds meant for and released to assuage the sufferings of poor and vulnerable communities were either unconscionably used to ‘cut grasses’ or inexplicably got ‘swallowed by snakes’, we call for transparent and community-based approaches to the management and disbursement of social intervention funds.
Considering complaints by many local communities about not benefiting from the released billions of naira announced and meant to alleviate poverty and hardship, especially during this difficult and uncertain period, we call for a transparent and effective investigation of the management of the funds so far allocated. Efforts must be put in place to ensure that the funds are not diverted as usual.
Independent community committees must receive these funds and be charged with identifying those in their midst, who qualify to benefit.
The management of the funds should be monitored by a multi-stakeholder committee including government and community representatives as well as credible media and civil society representatives.
Government must put effective measures in place to check corrupt public officials, who want to steal or divert funds meant to relieve the sufferings of the poor and vulnerable people in this perilous times.
This is the only way to help the people comply with the law and stay at home for now!
Finally, since government has been announcing huge numbers of beneficiaries of cash transfer program running into millions and claiming to have paid billions, can the government make the system transparent by publishing the names and addresses of the beneficiaries on an electronic portal so that Nigerians can do the verification?
Okechukwu Nwanguma is the Executive Director of Rule of Law and Accountability Advocacy Centre
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MANUAL TRAINING AND SLOYD
History of the movement—Its philosophy—The value of hand training in the development of the brain and its significance in the making of man—A grammar of our many industries hard—The best we do can reach but few—Very great defects in our manual training methods which do not base on science and make nothing salable—The Leipzig system—Sloyd is hypermethodic—These crude peasant industries can never satisfy educational needs—The gospel of work, William Morris and the arts and crafts movement—Its spirit desirable—The magic effects of a brief period of intense work—The natural development of the drawing instinct in the child.
Manual training has many origins; but in its now most widely accepted form it came to us more than a generation ago from Moscow, and has its best representation here in our new and often magnificent manual-training high schools and in many courses in other public schools. This work meets the growing demand of the country for a more practical education, a demand which often greatly exceeds the accommodations. The philosophy, if such it may be called, that underlies the movement, is simple, forcible, and sound, and not unlike Pestalozzi’s “keine Kentnisse ohne Fertigkeiten,” [No knowledge without skill] in that it lessens the interval between thinking and doing; helps to give control, dexterity, and skill an industrial trend to taste; interests many not successful in ordinary school; tends to the better appreciation of good, honest work; imparts new zest for some studies; adds somewhat to the average length of the school period; gives a sense of capacity and effectiveness, and is a useful preparation for a number of vocations.
These claims are all well founded, and this work is a valuable addition to the pedagogic agencies of any country or state. As man excels the higher anthropoids perhaps almost as much in hand power as in mind, and since the manual areas of the brain are wide near the psychic zones, and the cortical centers are thus directly developed, the hand is a potent instrument in opening the intellect as well as in training sense and will. It is no reproach to these schools that, full as they are, they provide for but an insignificant fraction of the nearly sixteen millions or twenty per cent of the young people of the country between fifteen and twenty-four.
When we turn to the needs of these pupils, the errors and limitations of the method are painful to contemplate. The work is essentially manual and offers little for the legs, where most of the muscular tissues of the body lie, those which respond most to training and are now most in danger of degeneration at this age; the back and trunk also are little trained. Consideration of proportion and bilateral asymmetry are practically ignored. Almost in proportion as these schools have multiplied, the rage for uniformity, together with motives of economy and administrative efficiency on account of overcrowding, have made them rigid and inflexible, on the principle that as the line lengthens the stake must be strengthened. This is a double misfortune; for the courses were not sufficiently considered at first and the plastic stage of adaptation was too short, while the methods of industry have undergone vast changes since they were given shape.
There are now between three and four hundred occupations in the census, more than half of these involving manual work, so that never perhaps was there so great a pedagogic problem as to make these natural developments into conscious art, to extract what may be called basal types. This requires an effort not without analogy to Aristotle’s attempt to extract from the topics of the marketplace the underlying categories eternally conditioning all thought, or to construct a grammar of speech. Hardly an attempt worthy the name, not even the very inadequate one of a committee, has been made in this field to study the conditions and to meet them. Like Froebel’s gifts and occupations, deemed by their author the very roots of human occupations in infant form, the processes selected are underived and find their justification rather in their logical sequence and coherence than in being true norms of work. If these latter be attainable at all, it is not likely that they will fit so snugly in a brief curriculum, so that its simplicity is suspicious.
The wards of the keys that lock the secrets of nature and human life are more intricate and mazy. As H.T. Bailey well puts it in substance, a master in any art-craft must have a fourfold equipment: 1. Ability to grasp an idea and embody it. 2. Power to utilize all nerve, and a wide repertory of methods, devices, recipes, discoveries, machines, etc. 3. Knowledge of the history of the craft. 4. Skill in technical processes. American schools emphasize chiefly only the last.
The actual result is thus a course rich in details representing wood and iron chiefly, and mostly ignoring other materials; the part of the course treating of the former, wooden in its teachings and distinctly tending to make joiners, carpenters, and cabinet-makers; that of the latter, iron in its rigidity and an excellent school for smiths, mechanics, and machinists. These courses are not liberal because they hardly touch science, which is rapidly becoming the real basis of every industry. Almost nothing that can be called scientific knowledge is required or even much favored, save some geometrical and mechanical drawing and its implicates.These schools instinctively fear and repudiate plain and direct utility, or suspect its educational value or repute in the community because of this strong bias toward a few trades. This tendency also they even fear, less often because unfortunately trade-unions in this country sometimes jealously suspect it and might vote down supplies, than because the teachers in these schools were generally trained in older scholastic and even classic methods and matter. Industry is everywhere and always for the sake of the product, and to cut loose from this as if it were a contamination is a fatal mistake. To focus on process only, with no reference to the object made, is here an almost tragic case of the sacrifice of content to form, which in all history has been the chief stigma of degeneration in education. Man is a tool-using animal; but tools are always only a means to an end, the latter prompting even their invention.
Hence a course in tool manipulation only, with persistent refusal to consider the product lest features of trade-schools be introduced, has made most of our manual-training high schools ghastly, hollow, artificial institutions. Instead of making in the lower grades certain toys which are masterpieces of mechanical simplification, as tops and kites, and introducing such processes as glass-making and photography, and in higher grades making simple scientific apparatus more generic than machines, to open the great principles of the material universe, all is sacrificed to supernormalized method.
As in all hypermethodic schemes, the thought side is feeble. There is no control of the work of these schools by the higher technical institutions such as the college exercises over the high school, so that few of them do work that fits for advanced training or is thought best by technical faculties. In most of its current narrow forms, manual training will prove to be historically, as it is educationally, extemporized and tentative, and will soon be superseded by broader methods and be forgotten and obsolete, or cited only as a low point of departure from which future progress will loom up.
Indeed in more progressive centers, many new departures are now in the experimental stage. Goetze at Leipzig, as a result of long and original studies and trials, has developed courses in which pasteboard work and modeling are made of equal rank with wood and iron, and he has connected them even with the kindergarten below. In general the whole industrial life of our day is being slowly explored in the quest of new educational elements; and rubber, lead, glass, textiles, metallurgical operations, agriculture, every tool and many machines, etc., are sure to contribute their choicest pedagogical factors to the final result. In every detail the prime consideration should be the nature and needs of the youthful body and will at each age, their hygiene and fullest development; and next, the closest connection with science at every point should do the same for the intellect. Each operation and each tool—the saw, knife, plane, screw, hammer, chisel, draw-shave, sandpaper, lathe—will be studied with reference to its orthopedic value, bilateral asymmetry, the muscles it develops, and the attitudes and motor habits it favors; and uniformity, which in France often requires classes to saw, strike, plane up, down, right, left, all together, upon count and command, will give place to individuality.
Sloyd has certain special features and claims. The word means skilful, deft. The movement was organised in Sweden a quarter of a century ago as an effort to prevent the extinction by machinery of peasant home industry during the long winter night. Home sloyd was installed in an institution of its own for training teachers at Nääs. It works in wood only, with little machinery, and is best developed for children of from eleven to fifteen. It no longer aims to make artisans; but its manipulations are meant to be developmental, to teach both sexes not only to be useful but self-active and self-respecting, and to revere exactness as a form of truthfulness. It assumes that all and especially the motor-minded can really understand only what they make, and that one can work like a peasant and think like a philosopher. It aims to produce wholes rather than parts like the Russian system, and to be so essentially educational that, as a leading exponent says, its best effects would be conserved if the hands were cut off.
This change of its original utilitarianism from the lower to the liberal motor development of the middle and upper classes and from the land where it originated to another, has not eliminated the dominant marks of its origin in its models, the Penates of the sloyd household, the unique features of which persist like a national school of art, despite transplantation and transformation.[1]
Sloyd at its best tries to correlate several series, viz., exercises, tools, drawing, and models. Each must be progressive, so that every new step in each series involves a new and next developmental step in all the others, and all together, it is claimed, fit the order and degree of development of each power appealed to in the child. Yet there has been hardly an attempt to justify either the physiological or the psychological reason of a single step in any of these series, and the coördination of the series even with each other, to say nothing of their adaptation to the stages of the child’s development.
This, if as pat and complete as is urged, would indeed constitute on the whole a paragon of all the harmony, beauty, totality in variety, etc., which make it so magnificent in the admirer’s eyes. But the “45 tools, 72 exercises, 31 models, 15 of which are joints,” all learned by teachers in one school year of daily work and by pupils in four years, are overmethodic; and such correlation is impossible in so many series at once. Every dual order, even of work and unfoldment of powers, is hard enough, since the fall lost us Eden; and woodwork, could it be upon that of the tree of knowledge itself, incompatible with enjoying its fruit. Although a philosopher may see the whole universe in its smallest part, all his theory can not reproduce educational wholes from fragments of it.
The real merits of sloyd have caused its enthusiastic leaders to magnify its scope and claims far beyond their modest bounds; and although its field covers the great transition from childhood to youth, one searches in vain both its literature and practise for the slightest recognition of the new motives and methods that puberty suggests. Especially in its partially acclimatized forms to American conditions, it is all adult and almost scholastic; and as the most elaborate machinery may sometimes be run by a poor power-wheel, if the stream be swift and copious enough, so the mighty rent that sets toward motor education would give it some degree of success were it worse and less economic of pedagogic momentum than it is. It holds singularly aloof from other methods of efferent training and resists co-ördination with them, and its provisions for other than hand development are slight.
It will be one of the last to accept its true but modest place as contributing certain few but precious elements in the greater synthesis that impends. Indian industries, basketry, pottery, bead, leather, bows and arrows, bark, etc., which our civilization is making lost arts by forcing the white man’s industries upon red men at reservation schools and elsewhere, need only a small part of the systemization that Swedish peasant work has received to develop even greater educational values; and the same is true of the indigenous household work of the old New England farm, the real worth and possibilities of which are only now, and perhaps too late, beginning to be seen by a few educators.
This brings us to the arts and crafts movement, originating with Carlyle’s gospel of work and Ruskin’s medievalism, developed by William Morris and his disciples at the Red House, checked awhile by the ridicule of the comic opera “Patience,” and lately revived in some of its features by Cobden-Sanderson, and of late to some extent in various centers in this country. Its ideal was to restore the day of the seven ancient guilds and of Hans Sachs, the poet cobbler, when conscience and beauty inspired work, and the hand did what machines only imitate and vulgarize. In the past, which this school of motor culture harks back to, work, for which our degenerate age lacks even respect, was indeed praise. Refined men and women have remembered these early days, when their race was in its prime, as a lost paradise which they would regain by designing and even weaving tapestries and muslins; experimenting in vats with dyes to rival Tyrian purple; printing and binding by hand books that surpass the best of the Aldine, and Elzevirs; carving in old oak; hammering brass; forging locks, irons, and candlesticks; becoming artists in burned wood and leather; seeking old effects of simplicity and solidity in furniture and decoration, as well as architecture, stained glass, and to some extent in dress and manners; and all this toil and moil was ad majorem gloriam hominis [To the greater glory of man] in a new socialistic state, where the artist, and even the artisan, should take his rightful place above the man who merely knows.
The day of the mere professor, who deals in knowledge, is gone; and the day of the doer, who creates, has come. The brain and the hand, too long divorced and each weak and mean without the other; use and beauty, each alone vulgar; letters and labor, each soulless without the other, are henceforth to be one and inseparable; and this union will lift man to a higher level. The workman in his apron and paper hat, inspired by the new socialism and the old spirit of chivalry as revived by Scott, revering Wagner’s revival of the old Deutschenthum that was to conquer Christenthum, or Tennyson’s Arthurian cycle—this was its ideal; even as the Jews rekindled their loyalty to the ancient traditions of their race and made their Bible under Ezra; as we begin to revere the day of the farmer-citizen, who made our institutions, or as some of us would revive his vanishing industrial life for the red man.
Although this movement was by older men and women and had in it something of the longing regret of senescence for days that are no more, it shows us the glory which invests racial adolescence when it is recalled in maturity, the time when the soul can best appreciate the value of its creations and its possibilities, and really lives again in its glamour and finds in it its greatest inspiration. Hence it has its lessons for us here. A touch, but not too much of it, should be felt in all manual education, which is just as capable of idealism as literary education. This gives soul, interest, content, beauty, taste. If not a polyphrastic philosophy seeking to dignify the occupation of the workshop by a pretentious Volapük of reasons and abstract theories, we have here the pregnant suggestion of a psychological quarry of motives and spirit opened and ready to be worked. Thus the best forces from the past should be turned on to shape and reinforce the best tendencies of the present.
The writings of the above gospelers of work not only could and should, but will be used to inspire manual-training high schools, sloyd and even some of the less scholastic industrial courses; but each is incomplete without the other. These books and those that breathe their spirit should be the mental workshop of all who do tool, lathe, and forge work; who design and draw patterns, carve or mold; or of those who study how to shape matter for human uses, and whose aim is to obtain diplomas or certificates of fitness to teach all such things.
The muse of art and even of music will have some voice in the great synthesis which is to gather up the scattered, hence ineffective, elements of secondary motor training, in forms which shall represent all the needs of adolescents in the order and proportion that nature and growth stages indicate, drawing, with this end supreme, upon all the resources that history and reform offer to our selection. All this can never make work become play. Indeed it will and should make work harder and more unlike play and of another genus, because the former is thus given its own proper soul and leads its own distinct, but richer, and more abounding life.
I must not close this section without brief mention of two important studies that have supplied each a new and important determination concerning laws of work peculiar to adolescence.
The main telegraphic line requires a speed of over seventy letters per minute of all whom they will employ. As a sending rate this is not very difficult and is often attained after two months’ practise. This standard for a receiving rate is harder and later, and inquiry at schools where it is taught shows that about seventy-five per cent of those who begin the study fail to reach this speed and so are not employed. Bryan and Harter[2] explained the rate of improvement in both sending and receiving, with results represented for one typical subject in the curve on the following page.
From the first, sending improves most rapidly and crosses the dead-line a few months before the receiving rate, which may fall short. Curves 1 and 2 represent the same student. I have added line 3 to illustrate the three-fourths who fail. Receiving is far less pleasant than sending, and years of daily practise at ordinary rates will not bring a man to his maximum rate; he remains on the low plateau with no progress beyond a certain point. If forced by stress of work, danger of being dropped, or by will power to make a prolonged and intense effort, he breaks through his hidebound rate and permanently attains a faster pace. This is true at each step, and every advance seems to cost even more intensive effort than the former one. At length, for those who go on, the rate of receiving, which is a more complex process, exceeds that of sending; and the curves of the above figure would cross if prolonged. The expert receives so much faster than he sends that abbreviated codes are used, and he may take eighty to eighty-five words a minute on a typewriter in correct form.
[Illustration: Letters per Minute x Weeks of Practice.]
The motor curve seems to asymptotically approach a perhaps physiological limit, which the receiving curve does not suggest. This seems a special case of a general though not yet explained law. In learning a foreign language, speaking is first and easiest, and hearing takes a late but often sudden start to independence. Perhaps this holds of every ability. To Bryan this suggests as a hierarchy of habits, the plateau of little or no improvement, meaning that lower order habits are approaching their maximum but are not yet automatic enough to leave the attention free to attack higher order habits. The second ascent from drudgery to freedom, which comes through automatism, is often as sudden as the first ascent. One stroke of attention comes to do what once took many. To attain such effective speed is not dependent on reaction time. This shooting together of units distinguishes the master from the man, the genius from the hack. In many, if not all, skills where expertness is sought, there is a long discouraging level, and then for the best a sudden ascent, as if here, too, as we have reason to think in the growth of both the body as a whole and in that of its parts, nature does make leaps and attains her ends by alternate rests and rushes. Youth lives along on a low level of interest and accomplishment and then starts onward, is transformed, converted; the hard becomes easy; the old life sinks to a lower stratum; and a new and higher order, perhaps a higher brain level and functions, is evolved. The practical implication here of the necessity of hard concentrative effort as a condition of advancement is re-enforced by a quotation from Senator Stanford on the effect of early and rather intensive work at not too long periods in training colts for racing. Let-ups are especially dangerous. He says, “It is the supreme effort that develops.” This, I may add, suggests what is developed elsewhere, that truly spontaneous attention is conditioned by spontaneous muscle tension, which is a function of growth, and that muscles are thus organs of the mind; and also that even voluntary attention is motivated by the same nisus of development even in its most adult form, and that the products of science, invention, discovery, as well as the association plexus of all that was originally determined in the form of consciousness, are made by rhythmic alternation of attack, as it moves from point to point creating diversions and recurrence.
The other study, although quite independent, is part a special application and illustration of the same principle.
At the age of four or five, when they can do little more than scribble, children’s chief interest in pictures is as finished products; but in the second period, which Lange calls that of artistic illusion, the child sees in his own work not merely what it represents, but an image of fancy back of it. This, then, is the golden period for the development of power to create artistically. The child loves to draw everything with the pleasure chiefly in the act, and he cares little for the finished picture. He draws out of his own head, and not from copy before his eye. Anything and everything is attempted in bold lines in this golden age of drawing. If he followed the teacher, looked carefully and drew what he saw, he would be abashed at his production. Indians, conflagrations, games, brownies, trains, pageants, battles—everything is graphically portrayed; but only the little artist himself sees the full meaning of his lines. Criticism or drawing strictly after nature breaks this charm, since it gives place to mechanical reproduction in which the child has little interest.
Thus awakens him from his dream to a realization that he can not draw, and from ten to fifteen his power of perceiving things steadily increases and he makes almost no progress in drawing. Adolescence arouses the creative faculty and the desire and ability to draw are checked and decline after thirteen or fourteen. The curve is the plateau which Barnes has described. The child has measured his own productions upon the object they reproduced and found them wanting, is discouraged and dislikes drawing. From twelve on, Barnes found drawing more and more distasteful; and this, too, Lukens found to be the opinion of our art teachers. The pupils may draw very properly and improve in technique, but the interest is gone. This is the condition in which most men remain all their lives. Their power to appreciate steadily increases. Only a few gifted adolescents about this age begin a to develop a new zest in production, rivaling that of the period from five to ten, when their satisfaction is again chiefly in creation. These are the artists whose active powers dominate.
Lukens[3] finds in his studies of drawing, that in what he calls his fourth period of artistic development, there are those “who during adolescence experience a rebirth of creative power.” Zest in creation then often becomes a stronger incentive to work than any pleasure or profit to be derived from the finished product, so that in this the propitious conditions of the first golden age of childhood are repeated and the deepest satisfaction is again found in the work itself. At about fourteen or fifteen, which is the transition period, nascent faculties sometimes develop very rapidly. Lukens[4] draws the interesting curve shown on the following page.
[Illustration: Motor, creative or productive power. Sensory or receptive interest in the finished product.]
The reciprocity between the power to produce and that to appreciate, roughly represented in the above curve, likely is true also in the domain of music, and may be, perhaps, a general law of development. Certain it is that the adolescent power to apperceive and appreciate never so far outstrips his power to produce or reproduce as about midway in the teens. Now impressions sink deepest. The greatest artists are usually those who paint later, when the expressive powers are developed, what they have felt most deeply and known best at this age, and not those who in the late twenties, or still later, have gone to new environments and sought to depict them. All young people draw best those objects they love most, and their proficiency should be some test of the contents of their minds.
They must put their own consciousness into a picture. At the dawn of this stage of appreciation the esthetic tastes should be stimulated by exposure to, and instructed in feeling for, the subject-matter of masterpieces; and instruction in technique, detail, criticism, and learned discrimination of schools of painting should be given intermittently. Art should not now be for art’s sake, but for the sake of feeling and character, life, and conduct; it should be adjunct to morals, history, and literature; and in all, edification should be the goal; and personal interest, and not that of the teacher, should be the guide. Insistence on production should be eased, and the receptive imagination, now so hungry, should be fed and reinforced by story and all other accessories. By such a curriculum, potential creativeness, if it exists, will surely be evoked in its own good time. It will, at first, attempt no commonplace drawing-master themes, but will essay the highest that the imagination can bode forth. It may be crude and lame in execution, but it will be lofty, perhaps grand; and if it is original in consciousness, it will be in effect. Most creative painters before twenty have grappled with the greatest scenes in literature or turning points in history, representations of the loftiest truths, embodiments of the most inspiring ideals. None who deserve the name of artist copy anything now, and least of all with objective fidelity to nature; and the teacher that represses or criticizes this first point of genius, or who can not pardon the grave faults of technique inevitable at this age when ambition ought to be too great for power, is not an educator but a repressor, a pedagogic Philistine committing, like so many of his calling in other fields, the unpardonable sin against budding promise, always at this age so easily blighted.
Just as the child of six or seven should be encouraged in his strong instinct to draw the most complex scenes of his daily life, so now the inner life should find graphic utterance in all its intricacy up to the full limit of unrepressed courage. For the great majority, on the other hand, who only appreciate and will never create, the mind, if it have its rights, will be stored with the best images and sentiments of art; for at this time they are best remembered and sink deepest into heart and life. Now, although the hand may refuse, the fancy paints the world in brightest hues and fairest forms; and such an opportunity for infecting the soul with vaccine of ideality, hope, optimism, and courage in adversity, will never come again. I believe that in few departments are current educational theories and practises so hard on youth of superior gifts, just at the age when all become geniuses for a season, very brief for most, prolonged for some, and permanent for the best. We do not know how to teach to, see, hear, and feel when the sense centers are most indelibly impressible, and to give relative rest to the hand during the years when its power of accuracy is abated and when all that is good is idealized furthest, and confidence in ability to produce is at its lowest ebb.
Finally, our divorce between industrial and manual training is abnormal, and higher technical education is the chief sufferer. Professor Thurston, of Cornell, who has lately returned from a tour of inspection abroad, reported that to equal Germany we now need: “1. Twenty technical universities, having in their schools of engineering 50 instructors and 500 students each. 2. Two thousand technical high schools or manual-training schools, each having not less than 200 students and 10 instructors.” If we have elementary trade-schools, this would mean technical high schools enough to accommodate 700,000 students, served by 20,000 teachers. With the strong economic arguments in this direction we are not here concerned; but that there are tendencies to unfit youth for life by educational method and matter shown in strong relief from this standpoint, we shall point out in a later chapter.
[Footnote 1: This I have elsewhere tried to show in detail. Criticisms of High School Physics and Manual Training and Mechanic Arts in High Schools. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1902, vol. 9, pp. 193-204.]
[Footnote 2: Studies in the Physiology and Psychology of the Telegraphic Language. Psychological Review, January, 1897, vol. 4, pp. 27-53, and July, 1899, vol. 6, pp. 344-375.]
[Footnote 3: A Study of Children’s Drawings in the Early Years.
Pedagogical Seminary, October, 1896, vol. 4, pp. 79-101. See also
Drawing in the Early Years, Proceedings of the National Educational
Association, 1899, pp. 946-953. Das Kind als Künstler, von C. Götze.
Hamburg, 1898. The Genetic vs. the Logical Order in Drawing, by F.
Burk. Pedagogical Seminary, September, 1902, vol. 9, pp. 296-323.][Footnote 4: Die Entwickelungsstufen beim Zeichnen. Die Kinderfehler,
September, 1897, vol. 2, pp. 166-179.]Extract from EBook of Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene, by G. Stanley Hall
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Govt urged to help all companies, not just SMEs
PETALING JAYA: The government has been urged to look at the survival of all companies and not just Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs).
SMEs have a strict definition by SME Corp Malaysia, and many companies fall out of this scope, Knight Frank Malaysia Managing Director Sarkunan Subramaniam said today.
Knight Frank LLP is a leading independent global property consultancy.
In welcoming the third stimulus package worth RM10 billion rolled out to mitigate the severe social and economic impacts arising from the Covid-19 pandemic and the on-going movement control order (MCO), he said SMEs contribute 40% to the national economy.
“The initiatives should be extended to all businesses that are badly affected during this economic slump and additional measures should be extended to the businesses involved in the hospitality, food and beverage, tourism and aviation sectors,” he said in a statement.
“With the exception of those categorised as ‘essential services’, all other business activities have literally slowed or grind to a halt during this month-long MCO, which may be further extended should the number of infected cases continue to rise daily.”
Sarkunan said SMEs operating at premises owned by government-linked companies (GLCs) could enjoy rent exemption or discounts, although the quantum of discounts or rental exemption for these SMEs are unclear at this moment.
He applauded the government’s direction of encouraging private property owners to provide at least 30% rental discounts to SMEs during the MCO and three months after it ends by granting these landlords equivalent tax deductions.
However, he pointed out that this creates an issue for landlords having to verify if their tenants are SMEs or not. It is better for this relief be extended to all businesses since the balance 60% contribution to the national economy is other than SMEs.
“We regret that this initiative is purely for SME tenants only and urged the government to extend it to all tenants as they also facing challenges in sustaining their businesses amid this unprecedented event. All companies, small or big, are important for the country’s economy, no one should be left out,” Sarkunan added.
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Women in the New Age
42. The Transvaluation of Values
The gradual emancipation of ladies that has been happening for the final century has nonetheless a protracted technique to proceed earlier than they’re wholly delivered from their conventional burdens and so stand away from the oppressions of males. But already, it should be plain, they’ve made monumental progress—maybe greater than they made within the ten thousand years previous. The rise of the commercial system, which has borne so harshly upon the race normally, has introduced them sure unmistakable advantages. Their financial dependence, although nonetheless adequate to make marriage extremely enticing to them, is nonetheless thus far damaged down that giant lessons of ladies are actually virtually free brokers, and fairly impartial of the favour of males. Most of those girls, responding to concepts which can be nonetheless highly effective, are but intrigued, after all, by marriage, and like it to the autonomy that’s coming in, however the truth stays that they now have a free alternative within the matter, and that dire necessity now not controls them. After all, they needn’t marry if they do not need to; it’s doable to get their bread by their very own labour within the workshops of the world. Their grandmothers had been in a much more troublesome place. Failing marriage, they not solely suffered a merciless ignominy, however in lots of instances confronted the menace of precise hunger. There was merely no respectable place within the economic system of these occasions for the free girl. She both needed to enter a nunnery or settle for a disdainful patronage that was as galling as charity.
Nothing might be plainer than the impact that the rising financial safety of ladies is having upon their entire behavior of life and thoughts. The diminishing marriage fee and the much more quickly diminishing delivery charges present which manner the wind is blowing. It is frequent for male statisticians, with attribute imbecility, to ascribe the autumn within the marriage fee to a rising disinclination on the male aspect. This rising disinclination is definitely on the feminine aspect. Even although no appreciable physique of ladies has but reached the particular doctrine that marriage is much less fascinating than freedom, it should be plain that giant numbers of them now method the enterprise with far better fastidiousness than their grandmothers and even their moms exhibited. They are tougher to please, and therefore happy much less usually. The girl of a century in the past may think about nothing extra beneficial to her than marriage; even marriage with a fifth fee man was higher than no marriage in any respect. This notion is progressively feeling the opposition of a opposite notion. Women normally should desire marriage to work, however there may be an rising minority which begins to understand that work could supply the better contentment, notably if it’s mellowed by a certain quantity of philandering.
There already seems on the planet, certainly, a category of ladies, who, whereas nonetheless not genuinely averse to marriage, are but free from any idea that it’s needed, and even invariably fascinating. Among these girls are an excellent many considerably vociferous propagandists, virtually male of their violent earnestness; they vary from the man-eating suffragettes to such preachers of free motherhood as Ellen Key and such skilled shockers of the bourgeoisie because the American prophetess of birth-control, Margaret Sanger. But amongst them are many extra who wake the world with no such noisy eloquence, however content material themselves with finishing up their concepts in a quiet and respectable method. The variety of such girls is way bigger than is usually imagined, and that quantity tends to extend steadily. They are girls who, with their financial independence assured, both by inheritance or by their very own efforts, mainly within the arts and professions, do precisely as they please, and make no pother about it. Naturally sufficient, their superiority to conference and the frequent frenzy makes them extraordinarily enticing to the higher form of males, and so it isn’t unusual for certainly one of them to seek out herself voluntarily sought in marriage, with none preliminary scheming by herself—certainly an expertise that only a few odd girls ever get pleasure from, save maybe in desires or delirium.
The previous order changeth and giveth place to the brand new. Among the ladies’s golf equipment and within the girls’s faculties, I’ve little doubt, there may be nonetheless a lot debate of the previous and foolish query: Are platonic relations doable between the sexes? In different phrases, is friendship doable with out intercourse? Many a girl of the brand new order dismisses the issue with one other query: Why with out intercourse? With the decay of the traditional idea of ladies as property there should come inevitably a reconsideration of the entire intercourse query, and out of that reconsideration there should come a revision of the mediaeval penalties which now punish the slightest frivolity within the feminine. The notion that honour in girls is completely a bodily matter, {that a} single aberrance could convert a girl of the best deserves into a girl of none in any respect, that the only real invaluable factor a girl can convey to marriage is virginity—this notion is so preposterous that no clever particular person, male or feminine, truly cherishes it. It survives as one of many hole conventions of Christianity; nay, of the levantine barbarism that preceded Christianity. As girls throw off the opposite conventions which now bind them they are going to throw off this one, too, and so their advantage, grounded upon fastidiousness and self-respect as an alternative of upon mere concern and conformity, will grow to be afar extra laudable factor than it ever may be below the current system. And for its absence, in the event that they see match to get rid of it, they are going to no extra apologize than a person apologizes immediately.
43. The Lady of Joy
Even prostitution, in the long term, could grow to be a roughly respectable occupation, because it was within the nice days of the Greeks. That high quality will certainly connect to it if ever it grows fairly pointless; no matter is pointless is at all times respectable, for instance, faith, modern clothes, and a information of Latin grammar. The prostitute is disesteemed immediately, not as a result of her commerce entails something intrinsically degrading and even unpleasant, however as a result of she is presently assumed to have been pushed into it by dire necessity, towards her dignity and inclination. That this assumption is normally unsound is not any objection to it; practically all of the pondering of the world, notably within the area of morals, is predicated upon unsound assumption, e.g., that God observes the autumn of a sparrow and is shocked by the autumn of a Sunday-school superintendent. The fact is that prostitution is without doubt one of the most tasty of the occupations virtually open to the form of girls who have interaction in it, and that the prostitute generally likes her work, and wouldn’t trade locations with a shop-girl or a waitress for something on the planet. The notion on the contrary is propagated by unsuccessful prostitutes who fall into the fingers {of professional} reformers, and who assent to the imbecile theories of the latter as a way to domesticate their good will, simply as convicts in jail, questioned by tee-totalers, at all times ascribe their rascality to alcohol. No prostitute of something resembling regular intelligence is below the slightest duress; she is completely free to desert her commerce and go into a store or manufacturing facility or into home service each time the impulse strikes her; all of the prevailing gabble about white slave jails and kidnappers comes from pious rogues who make a dwelling by feeding such nonsense to the credulous. So lengthy as the common prostitute is ready to make an excellent dwelling, she is sort of content material together with her lot, and disposed to distinction it egotistically with the slavery of her virtuous sisters. If she complains of it, then you might ensure that her success is under her expectations. A ravenous lawyer at all times sees injustice, within the courts. A nasty doctor is a bitter critic of Ehrlich and Pasteur. And when a suburban clergyman is pressured out of his treatment by a vestry-room revolution he virtually invariably concludes that the sinfulness of man is incurable, and typically he even begins to doubt among the typographical errors in Holy Writ.
The excessive worth set upon virginity by males, whose esteem of it’s primarily based upon a mix of vainness and voluptuousness, causes many ladies to protect it in their very own individuals with a jealousy far past their non-public inclinations and pursuits. It is their idea that the lack of it could materially impair their probabilities of marriage. This idea isn’t supported by the information. The fact is that the girl who sacrifices her chastity, all the pieces else being equal, stands a significantly better probability of creating a creditable marriage than the girl who stays chaste. This is very true of ladies of the decrease financial lessons. At as soon as they arrive into contact, hitherto socially troublesome and typically virtually unimaginable, with males of upper lessons, and start to tackle, with the curious facility of their intercourse, the refinements and tastes and factors of view of these lessons. The mistress thus gathers allure, and what has begun as a sordid sale of amiability not uncommonly ends with formal marriage. The variety of such marriages is enormously better than seems superficially, for each events clearly make each effort to hide the information. Within the circle of my essentially restricted private acquaintance I do know of scores of males, a few of them of wealth and place, who’ve made such marriages, and who don’t appear to remorse it. It is an previous commentary, certainly, {that a} girl who has beforehand disposed of her advantage makes an excellent spouse. The frequent idea is that it’s because she is grateful to her husband for rescuing her from social outlawry; the reality is that she makes an excellent spouse as a result of she is a shrewd girl, and has specialised professionally in masculine weak spot, and is thus extra-competent on the conventional enterprise of her intercourse. Such a girl usually reveals a really magnificent sagacity. It could be very troublesome to deceive her logically, and it’s unimaginable to disarm her emotionally. Her revolt towards the pruderies and sentimentalities of the world was proof, to start with, of her mental enterprise and braveness, and her success as a insurgent is proof of her extraordinary pertinacity, resourcefulness and acumen.
Even probably the most lowly prostitute is healthier off, in all worldly methods, than the virtuous girl of her personal station in life. She has much less work to do, it’s much less monotonous and dispiriting, she meets a far better number of males, and they’re of lessons distinctly past her personal. Nor is her occupation hazardous and her final destiny tragic. A dozen or extra years in the past I noticed a considerably amusing proof of this final. At that point sure sentimental busybodies of the American metropolis during which I lived undertook an elaborate inquiry into prostitution therein, and a few of them got here to me prematurely, as a sensible journalist, for recommendation as to the way to proceed. I discovered that each one of them shared the frequent superstition that the skilled lifetime of the common prostitute is simply 5 years lengthy, and that she invariably ends within the gutter. They had been enormously amazed after they unearthed the reality. This fact was to the impact that the common prostitute of that city ended her profession, not within the morgue however on the altar of God, and that those that remained single usually continued in follow for ten, fifteen and even twenty years, after which retired on competences. It was established, certainly, that absolutely eighty per cent married, and that they virtually at all times obtained husbands who would have been far past their attain had they remained virtuous. For one who married a cabman or petty pugilist there have been a dozen who married respectable mechanics, policemen, small shopkeepers and minor officers, and a minimum of two or three who married well-to-do tradesmen {and professional} males. Among the 1000’s whose careers had been studied there was truly one who ended because the spouse of the city’s richest banker—that’s, one who bagged the perfect catch in the entire group. This girl had begun as a home servant, and deserted that harsh and dreary life to enter a brothel. Her experiences there polished and civilized her, and in her previous age she was a grande dame of nice dignity. Much of the sympathy wasted upon girls of the traditional occupation is grounded upon an error as to their very own angle towards it. An educated girl, listening to {that a} frail sister in a public stew is anticipated to be amiable to all kinds of bounders, thinks of how she would shrink from such contacts, and so concludes that the precise prostitute suffers acutely. What she overlooks is that these males, nonetheless gross and repulsive they could seem to her, are measurably superior to males of the prostitute’s personal class—say her father and brothers—and that communion with them, removed from being disgusting, is usually relatively romantic. I effectively keep in mind observing, throughout my collaboration with the vice-crusaders aforesaid, the delight of a girl of pleasure who had attracted the discover of a police lieutenant; she was intensely happy by the concept of getting a consumer of such haughty manners, such sensible costume, and what appeared to her to be so dignified a occupation. It is at all times forgotten that this weak spot isn’t confined to prostitutes, however run by the entire feminine intercourse. The girl who couldn’t think about a bootleg affair with a rich cleaning soap producer and even with a lawyer finds it fairly simple to think about herself succumbing to an envoy or a duke. There are only a few exceptions to this rule. In probably the most reserved of recent societies the ladies who characterize their highest flower are notoriously complaisant to royalty. And royal girls, to finish the circuit, not sometimes yield to actors and musicians, i.e., to males radiating a glamour not encountered even in princes.
44. The Future of Marriage
The transvaluation of values that’s now in progress will go on slowly and for a really lengthy whereas. That it’s going to ever be fairly full is, after all, unimaginable. There are inherent variations will proceed to point out themselves till the top of time. As girl progressively turns into satisfied, not solely of the potential for financial independence, but in addition of its worth, she’s going to in all probability lose her current overmastering need for marriage, and tackle herself to assembly males in free financial competitors. That is to say, she’s going to tackle herself to buying that sensible competence, that prime expertise for puerile and mainly mechanical expertness, which now units man forward of her within the labour market of the world. To do that she must sacrifice a few of her current intelligence; it’s unimaginable to think about a genuinely clever human being turning into a reliable trial lawyer, or buttonhole employee, or newspaper sub-editor, or piano tuner, or home painter. Women, to get upon all fours with males in such silly occupations, must commit non secular suicide, which might be a lot additional than they are going to ever truly go. Thus a shade of their current superiority to males will at all times stay, and with it a shade of their relative inefficiency, and so marriage will stay enticing to them, or in any respect occasions to most of them, and its overthrow might be prevented. To abolish it completely, as sure fevered reformers suggest, can be as troublesome as to abolish the precession of the equinoxes.
At the current time girls vacillate considerably absurdly between two schemes of life, the previous and the brand new. On the one hand, their financial independence continues to be stuffed with circumstances, and however they’re in revolt towards the immemorial conventions. The result’s a normal unrest, with many signs of extravagant and unintelligent revolt. One of these signs is the looks of mental striving in girls—not a striving, alas, towards the real pearls and rubies of the thoughts, however one merely towards the acquirement of the rubber stamps that males make use of of their so-called pondering. Thus we’ve girls who launch themselves into get together politics, and fill their heads with an enormous mass of ineffective information about political methods, customs, theories and personalities. Thus, too, we’ve the girl social reformer, trailing alongside ridiculously behind a tatterdemalion posse of male utopians, every with one thing to promote. And thus we’ve the girl who goes in for superior knowledge of the kind on draught in girls’s golf equipment—in short, the form of knowledge which consists completely of a physique of beliefs and propositions which can be ignorant, unimportant and unfaithful. Such banal striving is most prodigally on show within the United States, the place superficiality quantities to a nationwide illness. Its reputation is because of the comparatively better leisure of the American individuals, who work lower than another individuals on the planet, and, above all, to the comparatively better leisure of American girls. Thousands of them have been emancipated from any compulsion to productive labour with out having acquired any compensatory mental or creative curiosity or social obligation. The result’s that they swarm within the girls’s golf equipment, and waste their time, listening to dangerous poetry, worse music, and nonetheless worse lectures on Maeterlinck, Balkan politics and the unconscious. It is amongst such girls that one observes the periodic rages for Bergsonism, the Montessori methodology, the twilight sleep and different such follies, so pathetically attribute of American tradition.
One of the evil results of this tendency I’ve hitherto descanted upon, to wit, the rising disposition of American girls to treat all routine labour, notably within the residence, as infra dignitatem and therefore insupportable. Out of that notion come up many lamentable phenomena. On the one hand, we’ve the spectacle of a large number of wholesome and well-fed girls engaged in public actions that, 9 occasions out of ten, are meaningless, mischievous and a nuisance, and however we behold such a decay within the home arts that, on the first onslaught of the late conflict, the nationwide authorities needed to import a overseas professional to show the housewives of the nation the veriest components of thrift. No such instruction was wanted by the housewives of the Continent. They had been merely informed how a lot meals they may have, and their pure competence did the remainder. There is rarely any avoidable waste there, both in peace or in conflict. A French housewife has little use for a rubbish can, save as a depository for uplifting literature. She does her finest with the means at her disposal, not solely in conflict time however always.
As I’ve stated over and over on this inquiry, a girl’s disinclination to accumulate the intricate expertness that lies on the backside of fine housekeeping is due primarily to her lively intelligence; it’s troublesome for her to pay attention her thoughts upon such silly and meticulous enterprises. But whether or not troublesome or simple, it’s clearly vital for the common girl to make some effort in that course, for if she fails to take action there may be chaos. That chaos is duly seen within the United States. Here girls reveal certainly one of their subterranean qualities: their deficiency in conscientiousness. They are fairly with out that dog-like constancy to obligation which is without doubt one of the shining marks of males. They by no means summon up a excessive pleasure in doing what’s inherently unpleasant; they at all times go to the galleys below protest, and with vows of sabotage; their basic philosophy is nearly that of the syndicalists. The sentimentality of males connives at this, and is thus largely accountable for it. Before the common puella, apprenticed within the kitchen, can choose up a fourth of the culinary subtleties which can be commonplace even to the cooks on eating vehicles, she has caught a person and want concern herself about them no extra, for he has to eat, within the final evaluation, no matter she units earlier than him, and his lack of intelligence makes it simple for her to close off his tutorial criticisms by bald appeals to his feelings. By a straightforward course of he lastly attaches a optimistic worth to her indolence. It is a proof, he concludes, of her fineness of soul. In the presence of her lofty incompetence he’s abashed.
But as girls, gaining financial autonomy, meet males in progressively bitterer competitors, the rising masculine mistrust and concern of them might be mirrored even within the enchanted area of marriage, and the husband, having yielded up most of his previous rights, will start to disclose a brand new jealousy of those who stay, and notably of the fitting to a good quid professional quo for his personal docile trade. In transient, as girls shake off their historic disabilities they will even shake off a few of their historic immunities, and their doings will come to be regarded with a soberer and extra exigent scrutiny than now prevails. The extension of the suffrage, I consider, will encourage this awakening; in wresting it from the reluctant male the ladies of the western world have planted dragons’ tooth, the which can presently leap up and gnaw them. Now that girls have the political energy to acquire their simply rights, they are going to start to lose their previous energy to acquire particular privileges by sentimental appeals. Men, going through them squarely, will think about them anew, not as romantic political and social invalids, to be coddled and caressed, however as free opponents in a harsh world. When that reconsideration will get below manner there might be a normal overhauling of the relations between the sexes, and among the truthful ones, I believe, will start to marvel why they did not let effectively sufficient alone.
45. Effects of the War
The current sequence of wars, it appears seemingly, will proceed for twenty or thirty years, and maybe longer. That the primary conflict was inconclusive was proven brilliantly by the preposterous nature of the peace lastly reached—a peace so synthetic and dishonest that the signing of it was virtually equal to a brand new declaration of conflict. At least three new contests within the grand method are plainly perception—one between Germany and France to rectify the unnatural tyranny of a weak and incompetent nation over a powerful and enterprising nation, one between Japan and the United States for the mastery of the Pacific, and one between England and the United States for the management of the ocean. To these should be added numerous minor struggles, and maybe one or two of just about main character: the trouble of Russia to regain her previous unity and energy, the trouble of the Turks to place down the slave rise up (of Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, and so on.)which now menaces them, the trouble of the Latin-Americans to throw off the galling Yankee yoke, and the joint effort of Russia and Germany (maybe with England and Italy aiding) to do away with such worldwide nuisances because the insane Polish republic, the petty states of the Baltic, and maybe additionally many of the Balkan states. I cross over the chance of a brand new mutiny in India, of the rising of China towards the Japanese, and of a normal battle for a brand new alignment of boundaries in South America. All of those wars, nice and small, are possible; most of them are humanly sure. They might be fought ferociously, and with assistance from harmful engines of the utmost effectivity. They will result in an unparalleled butchery of males, and a big proportion of those males might be below forty years of age.
As a consequence there might be a scarcity of husbands in Christendom, and as a second consequence the survivors might be appreciably tougher to snare than the lads of immediately. Every man of agreeable exterior and straightforward means might be pursued, not merely by just a few dozen or rating of ladies, as now, however by entire battalions and brigades of them, and he might be pushed in sheer self-defence into very sharp bargaining. Perhaps in the long run the state must intervene within the enterprise, to forestall the potential husband going to waste within the turmoil of alternative.
Just what kind this interference is prone to take has not but appeared clearly. In France there may be already a wholesale legitimization of kids born out of wedlock and in Eastern Europe there was a clamour for the legalization of polygamy, however these gadgets don’t meet the principle downside, which is the encouragement of monogamy to the utmost. A plan that means itself is the amelioration of the place of the monogamous husband, now rendered more and more uncomfortable by the legal guidelines of most Christian states. I don’t assume that the extra clever form of girls, confronted by a deadly scarcity of males, would object severely to that amelioration. They should see plainly that the current system, whether it is carried a lot additional, will start to work powerfully towards their finest pursuits, if solely by significantly reinforcing the disinclination to marriage that already exists among the many higher form of males. The girl of true discretion, I’m satisfied, would a lot relatively marry a superior man, even on unfavourable phrases, than make John Smith her husband, serf and prisoner at one stroke.
The legislation should finally acknowledge this truth and make provision for it. The common husband, maybe, deserves little succour. The girl who pursues and marries him, although she could also be moved by egocentric goals, needs to be correctly rewarded by the state for her service to it—a service certainly to not be flippantly estimated in a navy age. And that reward could conveniently take the shape, as within the United States, of statutes giving her title to a big share of his actual property and requiring him to give up most of his revenue to her, and releasing her from all obedience to him and from all obligation to maintain his home so as. But the girl who aspires to increased sport needs to be fairly prepared, it appears to me, to resign a few of these benefits in compensation for the better honour and satisfaction of being spouse to a person of benefit, and mom to his kids. All that’s wanted is legal guidelines permitting her, if she’s going to, to resign her proper of dower, her proper to upkeep and her immunity from self-discipline, and to make another phrases that she could also be led to treat as equitable. At current girls are unable to make most of those concessions even when they might: the legal guidelines of nearly all of western nations are rigid. If, for instance, an Englishwoman ought to agree, by an ante-nuptial contract, to submit herself to the self-discipline, not of the present statutes, however of the elder frequent legislation, which allowed a husband to right his spouse corporally with a stick no thicker than his thumb, it could be competent for any sentimental neighbour to set the settlement at naught by haling her husband earlier than a Justice of the Peace for carrying it out, and it’s a secure wager that the Justice of the Peace would jail him.
This plan, nonetheless novel it might appear, is definitely already in operation. Many a married girl, as a way to maintain her husband from revolt, makes roughly disguised surrenders of sure of the rights and immunities that she has below current legal guidelines. There are, for instance, even in America, girls who practise the home arts with competence and diligence, regardless of the plain indisputable fact that no authorized penalty can be visited upon them in the event that they failed to take action. There are girls who comply with exterior trades and professions, contributing a share to the household exchequer. There are girls who obey their husbands, even towards their finest judgments. There are, most quite a few of all, girls who wink discreetly at husbandly departures, overt or in mere intent, from the oath of chemical purity taken on the altar. It is a commonplace, certainly, that many completely happy marriages admit a celebration of the third half. There can be extra of them if there have been extra girls with sufficient serenity of thoughts to see the sensible benefit of the association. The hassle with such triangulations isn’t primarily that they contain perjury or that they provide any basic offence to the spouse; if she avoids banal theatricals, in truth, they generally have the impact of augmenting the husband’s devotion to her and respect for her, if solely because the fruit of comparability. The hassle with them is that only a few males amongst us have sense sufficient to handle them intelligently. The masculine thoughts is instantly taken in by specious values; the common married man of Protestant Christendom, if he succumbs in any respect, succumbs to some meretricious and flamboyant creature, bent solely upon fleecing him. Here is the place the cruel realism of the Frenchman reveals its superiority to the sentimentality of the lads of the Teutonic races. A Frenchman would no extra consider taking a mistress with out consulting his spouse than he would consider standing for workplace with out consulting his spouse. The result’s that he’s seldom victimized. For one Frenchman ruined by girls there are a minimum of 100 Englishmen and Americans, even supposing 100 occasions as many Frenchmen have interaction in that form of recreation. The case of Zola is typical. As is well-known, his amours had been rigorously supervised by Mme. Zola from the primary days of their marriage, and in consequence his life was wholly free from scandals and his thoughts was by no means distracted from his work.
46. The Eternal Romance
But no matter the way forward for monogamous marriage, there’ll by no means be any decay of that agreeable adventurousness which now lies on the backside of all transactions between the sexes. Women could emancipate themselves, they could borrow the entire bag of masculine methods, they usually could treatment themselves of their current need for the vegetable safety of marriage, however they are going to by no means stop to be girls, and as long as they’re girls they are going to stay provocative to males. Their chief allure immediately lies exactly in the truth that they’re harmful, that they threaten masculine liberty and autonomy, that their sharp minds current a menace vastly better than that of acts of God and the general public enemy—and they are going to be harmful for ever. Men concern them, and are fascinated by them. They know the way to present their tooth charmingly; the extra enlightened of them have perfected an outstanding strategy of fascination. It was Nietzsche who known as them the recreation of the warrior—not of the poltroon, keep in mind, however of the warrior. A profound saying. They have an infinite capability for rewarding masculine trade and enterprise with small and irresistible flatteries; their acute understanding combines with their capability for evoking concepts of magnificence to make them incomparable companions when the intense enterprise of the day is finished, and the time has come to increase comfortably within the interstellar ether.
Every man, I daresay, has his personal notion of what constitutes good peace and contentment, however all of these notions, regardless of the elemental battle of the sexes, revolve round girls. As for me—and I hope I could also be pardoned, at this late stage in my inquiry, for intruding my very own persona—I reject the 2 commonest of them: ardour, a minimum of in its extra adventurous and melodramatic features, is just too thrilling and alarming for therefore indolent a person, and I’m too egoistic to have a lot need to be mothered. What, then, stays for me? Let me attempt to describe it to you.
It is the shut of a busy and vexatious day—say half previous 5 – 6 o’clock of a winter afternoon. I’ve had a cocktail or two, and am stretched out on a divan in entrance of a fireplace, smoking. At the sting of the divan, shut sufficient for me to succeed in her with my hand, sits a girl not too younger, however nonetheless handsome and well-dressed—above all, a girl with a delicate, low-pitched, agreeable voice. As I snooze she talks—of something, all the pieces, all of the issues that girls speak of: books, music, the play, males, different girls. No politics. No enterprise. No faith. No metaphysics. Nothing difficult and vexatious—however keep in mind, she is clever; what she says is clearly expressed, and sometimes picturesquely. I observe the positive sheen of her hair, the gorgeous lower of her frock, the glint of her white tooth, the arch of her eye-brow, the sleek curve of her arm. I take heed to the beautiful murmur of her voice. Gradually I go to sleep—however just for an immediate. At as soon as, observing it, she raises her voice ever so little, and I’m awake. Then to sleep once more—slowly and charmingly down that slippery hill of desires. And then awake once more, after which asleep once more, and so forth.
I ask you severely: may something be extra unutterably stunning? The sensation of falling asleep is to me probably the most beautiful on the planet. I enjoyment of it a lot that I even stay up for demise itself with a sneaking marvel and need. Well, right here is sleep poetized and made doubly candy. Here is sleep set to the best music on the planet. I match this example towards any that you just ran consider. It isn’t solely enchanting; additionally it is, in a really true sense, ennobling. In the top, when the woman grows prettily miffed and throws me out, I return to my sorrows one way or the other purged and glorified. I’m a greater man in my very own sight. I’ve grazed upon the fields of asphodel. I’ve been genuinely, utterly and unregrettably completely happy.
47. Apologia in Conclusion
At the top I crave the indulgence of the aesthetic reader for the imperfections essentially seen in all that I’ve right here set down—imperfections not solely resulting from incomplete data and fallible logic, but in addition, and maybe extra importantly, to sure basic weaknesses of the intercourse to which I’ve the honour to belong. A person is inseparable from his congenital vanities and stupidities, as a canine is inseparable from its fleas. They reveal themselves in all the pieces he says and does, however they reveal themselves most of all when he discusses the majestic thriller of girl. Just as he smirks and rolls his eyes in her precise presence, so he places on apathetic and unescapable clownishness when he essays to dissect her within the privateness of the laboratory. There is not any e book on girl by a person that’s not a stupendous compendium of posturings and imbecilities. There are however two books that present even a superficial need to be trustworthy—”The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage,” by Sir Almroth Wright, and this one. Wright made a gallant try to inform the reality, however earlier than he obtained half manner by his job his ineradicable donkeyishness as a male overcame his scientific frenzy as a psychologist, and so he swiftly washed his fingers of the enterprise, and affronted the even handed with a half baked and preposterous e book. Perhaps I’ve failed too, and much more ingloriously. If so, I’m stuffed with honest and indescribable remorse.
Extract from IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN by H. L. Mencken
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