Human behaviour is key to the spread of coronavirus, so government scientists are trying to control our decisions. Does it work, and what happens when they get it wrong?
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The author’s experience.—When our girls, Fay and Fern, were six and four years of age, they became interested in learning about their coming into the world. Their mamma had told me of their puzzling questions. We agreed that I should tell them a story of life, every six months or a year, until they were nine or ten. Then their mamma should tell them the last story, the story of their life.
A few days later some young men, whom we were helping through college, and I were working among the flowers, when one of the girls made some inquiry about the relation of birds. This naturally opened the way for my first talk. I promised her and her sister a very interesting story at the rest hour at noon. As ever, they were both anxious to hear a new story. Dinner over, they followed me into the greenhouse. I gathered a number of flowers and invited them to be seated near me while I told them the story.
Praise a child for asking.—I opened the story by saying, “Mamma tells me that you have become interested in knowing where you were before you were born and how you got into this world. We have talked together about your interest in this matter and we are glad that you have asked these questions, and especially because you came first to us. For you to ask these questions so early in life indicates that you are very bright and intelligent. We are your natural teachers. We love you as no one else does or can. In the future, anything you wish to know about yourselves, come to us and we will take pleasure in telling you all that is best for you to know.”
Why the child should be told gradually.—You would like to be able to read and understand all there is in the fourth reader. There is nothing in the fourth reader that could do you a particle of harm. There are many things in the fourth reader that you could not understand. Papa and mamma might read and try to explain them to you. Still, there would be some things that we could not make plain to you, for the reason that you are not old enough for your little minds to grasp them. You understand that you must learn first what there is in the first reader. When you have learned all there is in it, then you are ready for the second reader. The mastery of the second reader prepares you for the third and the third reader prepares you for the fourth. There are some things that you understand to-day, that you could not understand six months ago. This great world is full of things that you cannot understand now; but, as you grow older and your mind grows stronger, step by step, you will learn and understand things that you cannot understand now. There are so many things in this world that may be known, that no one lives long enough to learn them all. Just so, you would like to know how God brings little children into this world. This is God’s wonderful plan. It could not do you a bit of harm to know all about it, if you could understand it. But you are not old enough now. Papa can tell you a beautiful story about how God brings all the little sprigs of grass, weeds, vegetables and trees into the world now, and in a few months I can tell you about the mussels, oysters and fish. Then, when you are a year older, I will tell you about the birds; later, I will tell you about the higher animals. When you are eight or ten, mamma will tell you the last story—God’s beautiful plan of bringing little children into the home.
Some things right one time and wrong at another.—You are both old enough to know that there are some things we do that is right for us to do under certain conditions, but would be very wrong for us to do under other conditions. Some things would be right to do during the week, but wrong if done on Sunday. Every few days you take an all-over bath. It is perfectly right for you to take these baths and for your mamma to help you. All people, who desire to live cleanly lives and enjoy good health, take frequent all-over baths. But you have noticed that when you take baths, other people are not invited to be present, not even papa is present. This is because our bodies are sacred. We wear clothing that our bodies may not be exposed to the gaze of other people.
We do not speak the name of God and Jesus in a light and frivolous way because these names are sacred.
Why we do not talk about the origin of life.—One of the most delicate, pure and sacred experiences connected with human life is God’s beautiful plan of bringing little children into the home. It is so sacred, pure and delicate that good people seldom speak of it, and never in a light and foolish way. It is for this reason that you have never heard your mamma and papa speak of it. It is right for fathers and mothers, husbands and wives to speak to each other about this matter; also, for grown people, when there is some good reason for doing so. It is not wise or best for little children to talk about how children come into the world except to their parents. We are your natural teachers and we want you always to feel free to come to us with questions about things of this nature. When you are older you will understand better why papa gives you this advice.
Many men and women, boys and girls have not been carefully trained to be good. They get angry and quarrel or fight, use bad language, break the Sabbath, and do many other wrong things. Some appear to take pleasure in doing wrong and in leading others to do wrong. This class of people do not look upon God’s plan of bringing little children into the world as being pure and sacred. They use very bad language when they try to talk about the story of life or tell it to others. When little children hear these people talk about the story of life, their little minds and hearts are filled with bad words and very wicked thoughts. In this way many little boys and girls are started wrong in life and they are sure to have a hard and painful struggle to rid themselves of impure thoughts, words and habits in after life.
It may not be very long until some schoolmate or someone older than you will say, “I know something that you don’t. You would like to know it and I will tell you, if you will not tell your papa and mamma about it.” Now, girls, whenever someone wants to tell you something and asks you not to tell your mamma and papa, you may be sure that it is wrong, that it will injure you, and most likely it is false. Mamma and papa would advise you to say to them, “We don’t want to hear anything that we cannot talk about to mamma and papa.”{
Story of the plants.—The story of life that papa will tell you to-day will be about the plants, vegetables and trees, how their young come into the world. Papa has gathered some beautiful flowers with which to illustrate the story. This will be our first lesson in Botany. Every part of a plant has special names. Many of the names are too difficult for you to remember. When you get older you will learn and remember the names. The story of life in all flowering plants begins in the flower.
The outer parts.—At sight, we notice that the many parts of a flower are arranged in whorls or circles. The outer whorl is called the (1) calix. You will notice that in some of these flowers, the calix is highly colored, in others it looks like little green leaves and in some of the flowers the calix is absent. You will observe that in some flowers the calix is composed of four or more parts. These separate parts are called (2) sepals. In other flowers the sepals have grown together so they appear to be only one sepal. In such flowers we count the sepals by the small notches on top.
The second whorl is called the (3) corolla. This whorl is usually the most highly colored part of the flower. If either of these whorls is absent in a flower, it is the calix. Sometimes both whorls are absent. The separate parts of the corolla are called (4) petals. Sometimes the petals are separate from the base of the flower. In other flowers they are more or less united.
The papa parts.—While the calix and corolla form the most attractive and beautiful parts, they are not the most important parts of a flower. The prettiest things are not always the best or most useful things. Let us now carefully examine these central organs. They are called the essential organs. Were it not for these organs in the flowers, no new grasses, plants, vegetables and trees would come into this world. Such a misfortune would rob this world of most of its beauty and much of its value. In this flower, the next whorl consists of a number of small slender organs. These are called (5) stamens. They are the father parts of the flower and possess the father nature. On top of these organs are little delicate bodies, poised lightly, and filled with a very fine dust. These little bodies are called (6) anthers. The fine grains of powder are called pollen. You can rub the pollen off with your finger. This dust varies slightly in color in different flowers.
The mamma parts.—The central organ in this flower is called the pistil. The pistil is composed of three parts. At the base of the pistil is the (7) pod, more correctly called the ovary. In the ovary little seed are formed. On top of the ovary is a slender organ called the style. On top of the style is a spongy enlargement called the (9) stigma. The stigma, style and ovary form the mother part of the flower and possess the mother nature. In some plants each flower has more than one pistil.
How the papa and mamma natures unite.—When the pollen is ripe, the anther cells burst open and the little, light, powdery pollen falls out and it is carried by gravity, the wind or by insects to the stigma. The little pores of the stigma open and admit the grains of pollen and the style carries the pollen to the ovary where it unites with the little seed. The seed are then said to be fertilized. This means that the father and mother natures have united in the seed. The seed grow and develop in the ovary. While this is being done, food for the little baby plants to live on while only a day or two old, is being stored up in the seed. In such seed is the tiny beginning of a future plant. The seed ripen in the pod. The pod bursts open and the seed fall upon the ground, or men gather them, and later plant them in the soil. The spring sunshine and rain cause the seed to sprout and as tiny stems appear above the ground, only an inch or so high, they are nothing in the world but little baby sprigs of grass, little baby weeds, little baby vegetables or little baby trees.
When God created the first grasses, plants and trees, He commanded them to be “fruitful and multiply.” In this story you have learned how all the grown-up plants and trees obey this command of God.
The two natures do not always exist in the same flower.—In the flowers we have studied, we found both the male and female organs in the same flower. Each flower possessed the two natures, male and female. But this is not true of all plants and trees. In some plants and trees flowers can be found having only stamens. These would be father-flowers. They could not produce seed or fruit. On some plants and trees may be found flowers having only pistils. These are mother-flowers. Flowers of these two kinds may be found growing on the same limb of a plant or tree, or on different limbs, or on different trees. The poplar and willow trees are examples of the last kind.
In the case of the Indian corn, the ear of corn, including the cob, the grains, shuck and silk form the mother part of the cornstalk. The tassel of the cornstalk is the father part and contains the father nature. The tassel produces a great deal of pollen. You have, on passing through a patch of corn, noticed the pollen falling everywhere and covering everything. Ears of corn sometimes have as many as 1000 grains of corn to the cob. Each grain sends out one or more little silks beyond the shuck to catch some of the pollen. Should these little silks fail to catch the grains of pollen, no grains of corn would form on the cob. The father and mother natures must unite if little seed are formed. From this we learn why it is that every little sprig of grass, weed, vegetable, and tree must have a father and mother and their natures must unite.
The three methods.—We mentioned three ways by which the pollen from the male organs is carried to the stigma of the female organ: wind, gravity and insects. In the corn, the ears are below the tassel and gravity is all that is necessary to carry the pollen to the silks. Where one tree bears bloom having only stamens and another tree of the same species bears flowers having only pistils, nature may use both the wind and insects in carrying the pollen from the male to the female tree. In some plants and trees the blooms are so constructed that gravity and the wind are of but little service. In such flowers a sweet juice is formed at the base of the flower. This attracts the bees and insects. As they press down into the flower to sip the sweet juice they rub off some of the pollen on to their wings, legs and back. The next flower they enter, some of this pollen is rubbed off on the stigma of that flower. In this way the seed are fertilized. From this we see that the real purpose of the sweet juice in the flower, is not produced for food for the insects, but for the purpose of attracting the insects so they may carry the pollen from one flower to another.
A most wise, sacred and beautiful plan.—In this little story, you have learned in a general way God’s plan of bringing all little grasses, plants, vegetables and trees into being that come from a seed. You have learned two great laws, namely; every plant that comes from a seed must have a father and mother, and, the father and mother natures must unite in the seed. These two great laws are just as true in the animals and in the human family as among the plants. When we most admire a beautiful bed of flowers or a blooming tree, when we gather a bouquet of flowers to wear, or offer to a friend, at that very moment the two natures are uniting for the purpose of increasing their kind. God is the author of the male and female organs of the plants and for this reason the union of their two natures is sacred and pure. Plants were the first living things that God made; man was the last. The plants were at the bottom of God’s work of creation; man was at the top. If the same laws we have found in the plants, that enable them to bring their little children into the world, are the same laws that enable human fathers and mothers to bring their little children into the world, and since we found this plan to be sacred and pure among all the flowers; then this same plan, when used in the human family, must be pure and sacred. If man is so much higher in the scale of life than the flower, then these laws must be even more sacred in the human family. This will show you how very degrading it is to entertain low and vulgar thoughts about the coming of little children into this world, as some people do.
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Home a unit of government.—As already observed, the home is a partnership. It is a unit of government. In an ideal unit of home government, every member is governed by and through an intelligent understanding of the customs, rules and laws, a conscientious recognition of what is right and wrong and the golden rule of love. Each have equal rights. What is wrong for one is equally wrong for each and all. What is right for one is equally right for each and all. Such a home is a unit of government where parents and children are organized under a constitution of intellect, conscience and love; for the purpose of building character, fitting themselves for larger citizenship in this life and the life that is to be the sequence to this one.
The home is the biggest institution in the world. Home building is the noblest and highest vocation in life. Its responsibilities are stupendous, its possibilities are limitless and its rewards are infinite. Home builders should be the best qualified and the most skillful of architects.
The training of a child.—Solomon said, “train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it.” The thoughts, actions and habits of childhood have much to do with a child’s future character and possibilities. When a child’s training is commenced in early childhood, was it begun soon enough? After a noted surgeon had examined a patient, turning to a friend he said, “If I could have had this patient two generations ago, I could have saved his life.” When Oliver Wendell Holmes was asked when a child’s training should begin, he replied, “At least one hundred years before he is born.” Sometimes it happens that good children are made bad and bad children are made worse by the company they keep before they are born. The little boy was not far wrong, who, when he found his mother lamenting the choice she had made of a life companion, said, “Mamma, we made a bad choice when we chose papa, didn’t we?” Some children have made an equally bad choice of their mammas and some appear to have made a doubly bad choice of both parents.
Each child must be studied.—A child is not easily understood. No two children are alike. Each child has a very complex nature. He is the product of the ages. The complex nature of his parents are blended into his being, producing a more complex being. He is not a duplicate of either. He has received from his parents a blending of their natures; in a limited way, what they inherited from his grandparents and their grandparents back to Adam. Parents and teachers should try to discover his latent forces, his slumbering passions, his genius, his inherent propensities and native goodness. They should wisely use nature’s laws and God’s gifts, in constraining, controlling and eradicating the inherited and acquainted tendencies that are pernicious; also in drawing out, giving direction to and developing the inherited and acquired good in his life.
Importance of early training.—Children in the home are to be trained. Their prenatal culture, the most important part of a child’s education, may have been respected or neglected. This cannot be altered now. The next agency to be utilized in the child’s training is environment. This can be applied from its birth. The child is more susceptible to external influences in babyhood than in childhood, in childhood than in youth, in youth than in maturity. The child becomes more fixed in disposition and character and more difficult to change as he grows older.
The training of parents.—If I were a perfect sage, philosopher or Christian, or all three combined into a perfect teacher, I would much prefer the task of training one hundred little children than the task of training ten parents (including the author) how to train their children. Most parents need to devote three hours, to a careful analysis and study of their inherited and acquired weaknesses, to one devoted to a similar study of a child.
A study of disposition.—Such peculiarities of mind and disposition as cruelty, ambition, firmness, conscientiousness and affection may be so pronounced in one’s life as to bias his judgment and unfit him for the training of children. When one of these characteristics is very dominant in a father or mother, it will most likely appear in an exaggerated form in one or more of the children. Like excites like, is a law that should be thoroughly understood by parents. Where firmness is very pronounced in both parents and child, there will be a constant clash unless one or both exercise full self-control. Such a child should be controlled largely by love. A severe or cruel parent will make a coward of a timid child and a criminal of a self-willed child. The over-conscientious parent will disgust one child and make a fanatic of another. The over-affectionate parent will appeal alone to the affections and leave the will of a child undeveloped. Appealing alone to the ambition of a very proud, ambitious child is likely to make him conceited and egotistical. For a parent to quarrel, have a fit of anger or to use violence is degrading and demonstrates his weakness and incapacity to be at the head of a family. At the same time, these mental states tend to awaken similar feelings in the child, which usually result in a clash. If the child had first displayed anger, this could have been overcome by self-control, kindness and love on the part of the parent.
The law of influence.—If you want to arouse a desirable feeling, sentiment, emotion or conviction in another, you must be controlled by that mental and moral state and allow it to emanate from you. If you are controlled, by an undesirable thought or feeling, others must have self-control enough to resist your influence, or soon they will be controlled by a similar mental state. Thus, we see that unless parents exercise judgment and self-control, they will often use methods that are unwise and harmful.
Defects in our homes and schools.—One of the saddest defects in our home training and our system of education is, that when a child reaches maturity in the home or graduates from the high school or college, he knows more about other things than he does about himself and the essentials of building a home. How to analyze, study, know and control one’s self; how to understand, train and govern children would be of far greater value in the education of young men and women than many departments of study we now emphasize.
The function of the home.—The children are in the home for the primary purpose of being developed into ideal men and women. To accomplish this end is the mission of parents. To do this effectively parents must possess high ideals. These ideals include such training and education as will lead to a strong and healthy body, a keen and well-trained intellect, a moral and religious character and an abiding faith in God.
Physical training.—The physical, mental and moral natures are intimately and vitally related. One influences each of the other two. The physical health and strength of a child hinders or helps the mental and moral life. The proper time to overcome the weakness of any physical function, or inherited physical weakness, is in childhood. This is done by proper dieting, hygienic living, bathing, exercise and sexual chastity. Improperly prepared and unwholesome food are the chief causes of death among infants and a leading cause of impaired indigestion in childhood. The kind of food used, effects the mind and character of the child. Too much candy, rich pastries and meat are not good for a child, or grown people either.
Use of medicine.—One hundred million dollars ($100,000,000) are spent annually on patent medicine and fully that much or more on mineral drugs. We are not animals. We do not know how to live. Few men would be willing to give a lawyer ten dollars to tell him how to keep out of trouble, but he will give him all he has to get him out of trouble. Few would give ten dollars to a doctor for preventive advice, but they will pay a doctor all they possess, for a cure. Oliver Wendell Holmes had a custom of saying, “If all the drugs of the world were thrown into the sea, it would be a blessing to humanity, but a curse to the fish.” Children should be kept healthy by hygienic living.
Use of condiments, coffee, tobacco, etc.—Condiments, tea, coffee and tobacco are not foods—they stimulate—they do not strengthen; they create unnatural appetites and inflame the passions. No one would drink tea or coffee were it not for the tannin and caffeine contained in them. If these drugs were removed, these drinks would be no more tempting than a cup of warm water. Most people, who use these drinks would consider it a sin to go to a drug store, buy some pure tannin or caffeine, dilute it with water, sweeten it with sugar and drink it.
The tobacco habit is an enormous evil.—It creates a demand for something stronger. It paves the way for the whisky habit. Drunkenness is largely due to a pathological physical condition. Remove the causes, coffee, tobacco and sensuality and it will do more to check drunkenness than all the legislation that can be secured in the next century.
Mental training.—The mental training of children is very largely committed to school and college teachers. Parents should take a very intense interest in the child’s education. They should study the talents and discover and strengthen the weaker faculties of the child. Most children get their minds “stuffed” with unassimilated facts. Nothing is clear to them. They do not remember what they have learned. They cannot reason logically. They have had their minds “stuffed.” Parents as well as teachers, can largely prevent this. From the earliest mental training of the child, he should be trained to take a personal interest in knowing things. He should be taught to think. Encourage a child to ask questions. If he asks questions which he should understand, have him answer them and give his reasons for the answer. In some cases ask him questions that will suggest an answer. Getting a child started right is the more important half of his education. He will look after the other half.
Moral training.—The object of all moral training of a child is self-government or self-control. Before a child is capable of self-government, he must be taught to distinguish between right and wrong. This is largely the work of the intellect. His conscience must be awakened and quickened. Conscience is a natural instinct through which God’s spirit and man’s conception, of right and wrong, prompts him to moral action, and which condemns the action he conceives to be wrong and approves the action he conceives to be right. The will must be so trained and developed that a childis able to will to do what he knows to be right and his conscience approves. He is now a perfectly free agent, a law to himself. He is governed from within and need not to be governed from without. This moral training requires years and should begin in infancy.
Let the baby alone.—Good babies are made bad by receiving too much attention. The baby should not be lifted from the cradle, fondled and coddled, kissed and talked to, simply because it gurgles or makes an innocent attempt to be noticed. This is needless attention. At first it is disagreeable to the child. Later a demand is created and the child is spoiled. If left alone babies would entertain themselves much of the time.
When a baby is learning to crawl and walk, observe the “let alone” policy as much as possible. Keep an eye on the child to see that it does not get hurt. What you do not want it to have, put out of its reach. It should be safeguarded from places of danger. If these precautions are taken, you will be saved the excuse for that endless round of “don’t get hurt,” “don’t touch that,” “don’t do that,” etc. By these endless “don’ts” children are taught disobedience. If the child falls, unless it is hurt, do not run and pick it up. Let it alone, it will get up. In this way you teach it to be independent and self-reliant. If you run and pick it up, the child gets the idea that you were to blame. Later, when it falls, it screams, cries and gets angry. Perhaps you hit the object and teach the child that the object over which it fell was at fault. This is deception and has a bad effect.
Give the child something to do.—Teach it to dress itself, to take off and put on its shoes and stockings. It should have a special place to put these, on retiring. It should have a drawer or a room where it can put its individual belongings. This teaches the child the idea of responsibility.
The first idea of wrongdoing.—When a child eats some forbidden thing, or does some forbidden act, from which it suffers, it can be led to see that it has violated the laws of nature. If possible, alleviate the pain, but the lesson which nature would teach, through pain, should be emphasized. The child should see that the pain came as a result of violating the laws of nature. A little later in life, the child can be taught that all desires, thoughts, words and acts that are helpful to self and others are right and those that injure self and others are wrong. These principles can be applied gradually to the laws of the home, of society and God.
Parents should agree.—There should be a perfect agreement between parents, with respect to the government in the home. Where parents disagree, children lose all respect for parental authority. Differences should be discussed by parents, only when the children are not present.
Punishment in the home.—Whipping, slapping and cuffing are relics of savagery. Whipping should never be resorted to except in extreme cases. It is not the natural consequence of disobedience. It never appeals to a child’s sense of justice. Punishment should always be natural and consistent with justice. Some examples will illustrate these principles, as follows: A child is called to breakfast—it does not come. Stubbornness or disobedience is the cause. What should be a natural punishment? Scolding, slapping, jerking the child up and forcing it to the table? No—there is no logical connection. The punishment should consist in the child’s doing without its breakfast. This should be explained to the child: A boy loses his toy. Should he be pitied and another bought for him? Certainly not. Should he be whipped? This would not be natural. He simply goes without his toy until he finds it: A boy steals some object. Should he be whipped? No. His attention should be called to the nature of his sin. He should be compelled, if necessary, to return the stolen object and confess his wrong. The deep sense of humiliation is the natural punishment. Let him feel the full force of it: A boy uses tobacco. Should he be whipped? Certainly not, as long as his teacher, the family doctor, the minister and the father use it. No child on earth could see any connection between the wrong and the punishment. What should be done? Nine times out of ten, under present conditions, the boy will use tobacco, in spite of all that a mother can do. So long as doctors, teachers, ministers and fathers use tobacco, legislation against the cigarette will increase our youthful criminals. If a father has a moral right to use tobacco, so has his boy. If the boy can be led to see clearly that the use of tobacco is wrong, if his conscience can be awakened and if his personal will can be brought to constantly oppose the use of it, then he can be saved. THIS IS THE ONLY REMEDY.
Study the offense.—Find the natural consequence. Become an example of obedience to every law, for your child. Show the child the results of wrong living and the benefits of right living. This will usually obviate all punishment, aside from what nature inflicts.
Corporal punishment.—If corporal punishment be unavoidable, it should not be administered when either parent or child is angry. This would only increase the cause that made the punishment necessary. In most cases it would be best to postpone the punishment until the next day. Only a very rebellious child can be helped by this method.
Scolding and threatening.—From a hotel window I heard a mother say to her twelve-year-old girl, “I will gouge your eyes out.” “I will slap your head off, you little hussy.” A child treated in this way becomes willful or spiteful, loses self-respect or respect for the parent. Scolding and threatening children are sins against their finer natures.
Three good rules.—The author’s father would not employ men on his farm without the understanding that they were not to swear, speak vulgarly about a woman, or tell a “ghost” or “bugaboo” story in the presence of his children. A servant, man or woman, about your business or home, can undo or counteract in a few hours or days, in a single statement or story, picture or book, act or habit, the life efforts of a noble father and a pure mother. One of the purest men recently said to me, “When I was only fifteen years of age I heard a servant utter one sentence that required a score of years to get its effects eradicated.” Men have told me of the pernicious effects of servants, dating back to when they were two and three years old. Frightful stories and startling statements, of impending dangers, destroy the natural freedom, independence and courage of many children for life. Once I sat by the side of a nervous mother holding a nervous four-year-old girl in her lap, as our train sped forward at the rate of fifty miles an hour, over one of those magnificent stretches on a western prairie. We had discussed heredity, child training and other interesting and vital subjects, when she referred to her nervous little girl and told me how at night she would notice her little body twitching, jerking, floundering and all at once she would awake with a scream having dreamed that she was falling from some dizzy height toward jagged rocks and certain death beneath; or that some huge angry beast, poised on tiptoes and in the act of pouncing upon her and tearing her body into shreds—a horrible nightmare. About the time she had finished describing one of those fearful experiences and was in the act of asking me for advice, we were passing an object on the outside that interested the little girl; quickly she turned and began peering through the window. She was in no danger. Her head was not projected beyond the window. The nervous mother grabbed the little girl by the body and cried, “You are falling! You are falling!” My reply to her request for advice was, “My! if you should handle me that way, I would have a half dozen nightmares here in open daylight.” I told that mother that her daughter’s nervousness was due to bad heredity and bad environment and that she was responsible for both.
Personal purity.—As soon as a child begins to enquire about its origin, it is old enough to be told the truth in the right way. Some children become interested when they are three and four, all normal children by the time they are seven. Since the inquiring mind will not rest satisfied until a plausible answer has been received, and since the ignorant and vicious youth is ever alert and anxious to give this information in a pernicious way, it behooves the thoughtful parents to safeguard their children with the truth told in the right way. No normal boy should reach the age of eight, or girl the age of ten, before they have been told the story of life.
Children often discover, or are taught, the secret vice at a very early age. Sex consciousness and pleasure may be early developed because of some unnatural conditions of the sex organs. For this reason, parents should know that these parts are normal in their children. When children are observed to frequently handle, or scratch these organs, unnatural conditions should be suspected. The child should not be slapped or scolded, rather call in the family physician. Trying to keep a child ignorant concerning this vice is impossible, therefore unwise. There is not one boy in fifty who does not know of the vice, and understands the language used to describe it. Trying to keep a child from vicious companions is good as far as it goes, but the facts are that the child is most likely to discover the vice himself, while it is hardly possible to keep a child entirely away from the vicious. The only sane method is to teach the child the laws of personal purity. If the secret vice is to be prevented, some children should receive council when they are six, others at eight, all by the time they are ten or twelve. Children have inherited lustful tendencies. Their troubles are more largely from within than from without. Hence the children that have been most carefully guarded from bad company and kept in ignorance are usually the ones who are most injured by the secret sin. A single talk to a child is not sufficient. We frequently instruct and appeal to the child to be obedient, truthful and honest; in like manner we should at reasonable periods instruct and encourage him to keep his thoughts and desires pure.
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Classifications of children’s faults—Peculiar children—Real faults as distinguished from interference with the teacher’s ease—Truancy, its nature and effects—The genesis of crime—The lie, its classes and relations to imagination—Predatory activities—Gangs—Causes of crime—The effects of stories of crime—Temibility—Juvenile crime and its treatment.
Siegert[1] groups children of problematical nature into the following sixteen classes: the sad, the extremely good or bad, star-gazers, scatter-brains, apathetic, misanthropic, doubters and investigators, reverent, critical, executive, stupid and clownish, naive, funny, anamnesic, disposed to learn, and blasé; patience, foresight, and self-control, he thinks, are chiefly needed.
A unique and interesting study was undertaken by Közle[2] by collecting and studying thirty German writers on pedagogical subjects since Pestalozzi, and cataloguing all the words they use describing the faults of children. In all, this gave 914 faults, far more in number than their virtues. These were classified as native and of external origin, acute and chronic, egoistic and altruistic, greed, perverted honor, self-will, falsity, laziness, frivolity, distraction, precocity, timidity, envy and malevolence, ingratitude, quarrelsomeness, cruelty, superstition; and the latter fifteen were settled on as resultant groups, and the authors who describe them best are quoted.
Bohannon[3] on the basis of questionnaire returns classified peculiar children as heavy, tall, short, small, strong, weak, deft, agile, clumsy, beautiful, ugly, deformed, birthmarked, keen and precocious, defective in sense, mind, and speech, nervous, clean, dainty, dirty, orderly, obedient, disobedient, disorderly, teasing, buoyant, buffoon, cruel, selfish, generous, sympathetic, inquisitive, lying, ill-tempered, silent, dignified, frank, loquacious, courageous, timid, whining, spoiled, gluttonous and only child.
Marro[4] tabulated the conduct of 3,012 boys in gymnasial and lyceal classes in Italy from eleven to eighteen years of age (see table given above). Conduct was marked as good, bad, and indifferent, according to the teacher’s estimate, and was good at eighteen in 74 per cent of the cases; at eleven in 70 per cent; at seventeen in 69 per cent; and at fourteen in only 58 per cent. In positively bad conduct, the age of fifteen led, thirteen and fourteen were but little better, while it improved at sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen. In general, conduct was good at eleven; declined at twelve and thirteen; said, to its worst at fourteen; and then improved in yearly increments that did not differ much, and at seventeen was nearly as good as at eleven, and at eighteen four points better.
[Illustration: Percentage x Age]
He computed also the following percentage table of the causes of punishments in certain Italian schools for girls and boys near pubescent ages:
Boys Girls
Quarrels and blows 53.90 17.4
Laziness, negligence 1.80 21.3
Untidiness 10.70 24.7
Improper language .41 14.6
Indecent acts and words 1.00 .24
Refusal to work .82 1.26
Various offenses against discipline 19.00 19.9
Truancy 9.60 .0
Plots to run away 1.70 .0
Running away .72 .0
Mr. Sears[5] reports in percentages statistics of the punishments received by a thousand children for the following offenses: Disorder, 17-1/3; disobedience, 16; carelessness, 13-1/3; running away, 12-2/3; quarreling, 10; tardiness, 6-2/3; rudeness, 6; fighting, 5-1/3; lying, 4; stealing, 1; miscellaneous, 7-1/3. He names a long list of punishable offenses, such as malice, swearing, obscenity, bullying, lying, cheating, untidiness, insolence, insult, conspiracy, disobedience, obstinacy, rudeness, noisiness, ridicule; injury to books, building, or other property; and analyzes at length the kinds of punishment, modes of making it fit the offense and the nature of the child, the discipline of consequences, lapse of time between the offense and its punishment, the principle of slight but sure tasks as penalties, etc.
Triplett[6] attempted a census of faults and defeats named by the teacher. Here inattention by far led all others. Defects of sense and speech, carelessness, indifference, lack of honor and of self-restraint, laziness, dreamy listlessness, nervousness, mental incapacity, lack of consideration for others, vanity, affectation, disobedience, untruthfulness, grumbling, etc., follow. Inattention to a degree that makes some children at the mercy of their environment and all its changes, and their mental life one perpetual distraction, is a fault which teachers, of course, naturally observe. Children’s views of their own faults and those of other children lay a very different emphasis. Here fighting, bullying, and teasing lead all others; then come stealing, bad manners, lying, disobedience, truancy, cruelty to animals, untidiness, selfishness, etc. Parents’ view of this subject Triplett found still different. Here wilfulness and obstinacy led all others with teasing, quarreling, dislike of application and effort, and many others following. The vast number of faults mentioned contrasts very strikingly with the seven deadly sins.
In a suggestive statistical study on the relations of the conduct of children to the weather, Dexter[7] found that excessive humidity was most productive of misdemeanors; that when the temperature was between 90 and 100 the probability of bad conduct was increased 300 per cent, when between 80 and 90 it was increased 104 per cent. Abnormal barometric pressure, whether great or small, was found to increase misconduct 50 per cent; abnormal movements of the wind increased it from 20 to 66 per cent; while the time of year and precipitation seemed to have almost no effect. While the effect of weather has been generally recognized by superintendents and teachers and directors of prisons and asylums, and even by banks, which in London do not permit clerks to do the more important bookkeeping during very foggy days, the statistical estimates of its effect in general need larger numbers for more valuable determinations. Temperature is known to have a very distinct effect upon crime, especially suicide and truancy. Workmen do less in bad weather, blood pressure is modified, etc.[8]
In his study of truancy, Kline[9] starts with the assumption that the maximum metabolism is always consciously or unconsciously sought, and that migrations are generally away from the extremes of hot and cold toward an optimum temperature. The curve of truancies and runaways increases in a marked ratio at puberty, which probably represents the age of natural majority among primitive people. Dislike of school, the passion for out-of-door life, and more universal interests in man and nature now arise, so that runaways may be interpreted as an instinctive rebellion against limitations of freedom and unnatural methods of education as well as against poor homes. Hunger is one of its most potent, although often unconscious causes. The habitual environment now begins to seem dull and there is a great increase in impatience at restraint. Sometimes there is a mania for simply going away and enjoying the liberty of nomadic life. Just as good people in foreign parts sometimes allow themselves unwonted liberties, so vagrancy increases crime. The passion to get to and play at or in the water is often strangely dominant. It seems so fine out of doors, especially in the spring, and the woods and fields make it so hard to voluntarily incarcerate oneself in the schoolroom, that pubescent boys and even girls often feel like animals in captivity. They long intensely for the utter abandon of a wilder life, and very characteristic is the frequent discarding of foot and head dress and even garments in the blind instinct to realise again the conditions of primitive man. The manifestations of this impulse, if read aright, are grave arraignments of the lack of adaptability of the child’s environment to his disposition and nature, and with home restraints once broken, the liabilities to every crime, especially theft, are enormously increased. The truant, although a cording to Kline’s measurements slightly smaller than the average child, is more energetic and is generally capable of the greatest activity and usefulness in more out-of-door vocations. Truancy is augmented, too, just in proportion as legitimate and interesting physical exercise is denied.
The vagrant, itinerant, vagabond, gadabout, hobo, and tramp, that Riis has made so interesting, is an arrested, degenerate, or perverted being who abhors work; feels that the world owes him a living; and generally has his first real nomad experience in the teens or earlier. It is a chronic illusion of youth that gives “elsewhere” a special charm. In the immediate present things are mean, dulled by wont, and perhaps even nauseating because of familiarity. There must be a change of scene to see the world; man is not sessile but locomotor; and the moment his life becomes migratory all the restraints and responsibilities of settled life vanish. It is possible to steal and pass on undiscovered and unsuspected, and to steal again. The vagabond escapes the control of public sentiment, which normally is an external conscience, and having none of his own within him thus lapses to a feral state. The constraint of city, home, and school is especially irksome, and if to this repulsion is added the attraction of a love of nature and of perpetual change, we have the diathesis of the roadsman already developed. Adolescence is the normal time of emancipation from the parental roof, when youth seeks to set up a home of its own, but the apprentice to life must wander far and long enough to find the best habitat in which to set up for himself. This is the spring season of emigration; and it should be an indispensable part of every life curriculum, just before settlement, to travel far and wide, if resources and inclination permit. But this stage should end in wisely chosen settlement where the young life can be independently developed, and that with more complacency and satisfaction because the place has been wisely chosen on the basis of a wide comparison. The chronic vagrant has simply failed to develop the reductives of this normal stage.
Crime is cryptogamous and flourishes in concealment, so that not only does falsehood facilitate it, but certain types of lies often cause and are caused by it. The beginning of wisdom in treatment is to discriminate between good and bad lies. My own study[10] of the lies of 300 normal children, by a method carefully devised in order to avoid all indelicacy to the childish consciousness, suggested the following distinct species of lies. It is often a well-marked epoch when the young child first learns that it can imagine and state things that have no objective counterpart in its life, and there is often a weird intoxication when some absurd and monstrous statement is made, while the first sensation of a deliberate break with truth causes a real excitement which is often the birth pang of the imagination. More commonly this is seen in childish play, which owes a part of its charm to self-deception. Children make believe they are animals, doctors, ogres, play school, that they are dead, mimic all they see and hear. Idealising temperaments sometimes prompt children of three or four suddenly to assert that they saw a pig with five ears, apples on a cherry tree, and other Munchausen wonders, which really means merely that they have had a new mental combination independently of experience. Sometimes their fancy is almost visualisation and develops into a kind of mythopeic faculty which spins clever yarns and suggests in a sense, quite as pregnant as Froschmer asserts of all mental activity and of the universe itself, that all their life is imagination. Its control and not its elimination in a Gradgrind age of crass facts is what should be sought in the interests of the highest truthfulness and of the evolution of thought as something above reality, which prepares the way for imaginative literature. The life of Hartley Coleridge,[11] by his brother, is one of many illustrations. He fancied cataract of what he named “jug-force” would burst out in a certain field and flow between populous banks, where an ideal government, long wars, and even a reform in spelling, would prevail, illustrated in a journal devoted to the affairs of this realm—all these developed in his imagination, where they existed with great reality for years. The vividness of this fancy resembles the pseudo-hallucinations of Kandinsky. Two sisters used to say, “Let us play we are sisters,” as if this made the relation more real. Cagliostro found adolescent boys particularly apt for training for his exhibition of phrenological impostures, illustrating his thirty-five faculties. “He lied when he confessed he had lied,” said a young Sancho Panza, who had believed the wild tales of another boy who later admitted their falsity. Sir James Mackintosh, near puberty, after reading Roman history, used to fancy himself the Emperor of Constantinople, and carried on the administration of the realm for hours at a time. His fancies never quite became convictions, but adolescence is the golden age of this kind of dreamery and reverie which supplements reality and totalizes our faculties, and often gives a special charm to dramatic activities and in morbid cases to simulation and dissimulation. It is a state from which some of the bad, but far more of the good qualities of life and mind arise. These are the noble lies of poetry, art, and idealism, but their pedagogic regime must be wise.
Again with children as with savages, truth depends largely upon personal likes and dislikes. Truth is for friends, and lies are felt to be quite right for enemies. The young often see no wrong in lies their friends wish told, but may collapse and confess when asked if they would have told their mother thus. Boys best keep up complotted lies and are surer to own up if caught than girls. It is harder to cheat in school with a teacher who is liked. Friendships are cemented by confidences and secrets, and when they wane, promises not to tell weaken in their validity. Lies to the priest, and above all to God, are the worst. All this makes special attention to friendships, leaders, and favorites important, and suggests the high value of science for general veracity.
The worst lies, perhaps, are those of selfishness. They ease children over many hard places in life, and are convenient covers for weakness and vice. These lies are, on the whole, judging from our census, most prevalent. They are also most corrupting and hard to correct. All bad habits particularly predispose to the lie of concealment; for those who do wrong are almost certain to have recourse to falsehood, and the sense of meanness thus slowly bred, which may be met by appeals to honor, for so much of which school life is responsible, is often mitigated by the fact that falsehoods are frequently resorted to in moments of danger and excitement, are easily forgotten when it is over, and rarely rankle. These, even more than the pseudomaniac cases mentioned later, grow rankly in those with criminal predispositions.
The lie heroic is often justified as a means of noble ends. Youth has an instinct which is wholesome for viewing moral situations as wholes. Callow casualists are fond of declaring that it would be a duty to state that their mother was out when she was in, if it would save her life, although they perhaps would not lie to save their own. A doctor, many suggested, might tell an overanxious patient or friend that there was hope, saving his conscience perhaps by reflecting that there was hope, although they had it while he had none. The end at first in such cases may be very noble and the fib or quibble very petty, but worse lies for meaner objects may follow. Youth often describes such situations with exhilaration as if there were a feeling of easement from the monotonous and tedious obligation of rigorous literal veracity, and here mentors are liable to become nervous and err. The youth who really gets interested in the conflict of duties may reverently be referred to the inner lie of his own conscience, the need of keeping which as a private tribunal is now apparent.
Many adolescents become craven literalists and distinctly morbid and pseudophobiac, regarding every deviation from scrupulously literal truth as alike heinous; and many systematized palliatives and casuistic word-splittings, methods of whispering or silently interpolating the words “not,” “perhaps,” or “I think,” sometimes said over hundreds of times to neutralize the guilt of intended or unintended falsehoods, appear in our records as a sad product of bad methods.
Next to the selfish lie for protection—of special psychological interest for adolescent crime—is what we may call pseudomania, seen especially in pathological girls in their teens, who are honeycombed with selfishness and affectation and have a passion for always acting a part, attracting attention, etc. The recent literature of telepathy and hypnotism furnishes many striking examples of this diathesis of impostors of both sexes. It is a strange psychological paradox that some can so deliberately prefer to call black white and find distinct inebriation in flying diametrically in the face of truth and fact. The great impostors, whose entire lives have been a fabric of lies, are cases in point. They find a distinct pleasure not only in the sense of power which their ability to make trouble gives, but in the sense of making truth a lie, and of decreeing things into and out of existence.
Sheldon’s interesting statistics show that among the institutional activities of American children,[12] predatory organizations culminate from eleven to fifteen, and are chiefly among boys. These include bands of robbers, clubs for hunting and fishing, play armies, organized fighting bands between separate districts, associations for building forts, etc. This form of association is the typical one for boys of twelve. After this age their interests are gradually transferred to less loosely organized athletic clubs. Sheldon’s statistics are as follows:
Age 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 Total No. of predatory 4 5 3 0 7 1 1 3 1 0 25 = Girls societies 4 2 17 31 18 22 (11) 7 1 0 111 = Boys
Innocent though these predatory habits may be in small boys, if they are not naturally and normally reduced at the beginning of the teens and their energy worked off into athletic societies, they become dangerous. “The robber knight, the pirate chief, and the marauder become the real models.” The stealing clubs gather edibles and even useless things, the loss of which causes mischief, into some den, cellar, or camp in the woods, where the plunder of their raids is collected. An organized gang of boy pilferers for the purpose of entering stores had a cache, where the stolen goods were brought together. Some of these bands have specialized on electric bells and connections, or golf sticks and balls. Jacob Riis says that on the East Side of New York, every corner has its gang with a program of defiance of law and order, where the young tough who is a coward alone becomes dangerous when he hunts with the pack. He is ambitious to get “pinched” or arrested and to pose as a hero. His vanity may obliterate common fear and custom as his mind becomes inflamed with flash literature and “penny dreadfuls.” Sometimes whole neighborhoods are terrorized so that no one dares to testify against the atrocities they commit. Riis even goes so far as to say that “a bare enumeration of the names of the best-known gangs would occupy the pages of this book.”[13] The names are sufficiently suggestive—hell’s kitchen gang, stable gang, dead men, floaters, rock, pay, hock gang, the soup-house gang, plug uglies, back-alley men, dead beats, cop beaters, and roasters, hell benders, chain gang, sheeny skinners, street cleaners, tough kids, sluggers, wild Indians, cave and cellar men, moonlight howlers, junk club, crook gang, being some I have heard of. Some of the members of these gangs never knew a home, were found perhaps as babies wrapped in newspapers, survivors of the seventy-two dead infants Riis says were picked up on the streets in New York in 1889, or of baby farming. They grow up street arabs, slum waifs, the driftwood of society, its flotsam and jetsam, or plankton, fighting for a warn corner in their resorts or living in crowded tenement-houses that rent for more than a house on Fifth Avenue. Arrant cowards singly, they dare and do anything together. A gang stole a team in East New York and drove down the avenue, shopping to throw in supplies, one member sitting in the back of the wagon and shooting at all who interfered. One gang specialized on stealing baby carriages, depositing their inmates on the sidewalk. Another blew up a grocery store because its owner refused a gift they demanded. Another tried to saw off the head of a Jewish pedler. One member killed another for calling him “no gent.” Six murderous assaults were made at one time by these gangs within a single week. One who is caught and does his “bit” or “stretch” is a hero, and when a leader is hanged, as has sometimes happened, he is almost envied for his notoriety. A frequent ideal is to pound a policeman with his own club. The gang federates all nationalities. Property is depreciated and may be ruined if it is frequented by these gangs or becomes their lair or “hang-out.” A citizen residing on the Hudson procured a howitzer and pointed it at a boat gang, forbidding them to land on his river frontage. They have their calls, whistles, signs, rally suddenly from no one knows where, and vanish in the alleys, basements, roofs, and corridors they know so well. Their inordinate vanity is well called the slum counterpart of self-esteem, and Riis calls the gang a club run wild. They have their own ideality and a gaudy pinchbeck honor. A young tough, when arrested, wrenched away the policeman’s club, dashed into the street, rescued a baby from a runaway, and came back and gave himself up. They batten on the yellowest literature. Those of foreign descent, who come to speak our language better than their parents, early learn to despise them. Gangs emulate each other in hardihood, and this is one cause of epidemics in crime. They passionately love boundless independence, are sometimes very susceptible to good influence if applied with great wisdom and discretion, but easily fall away. What is the true moral antitoxin for this class, or at least what is the safety-valve and how and when to pull it, we are now just beginning to learn, but it is a new specialty in the great work of salvage from the wreckage of city life. In London, where these groups are better organised and yet more numerous, war is often waged between them, weapons are used and murder is not so very infrequent. Normally this instinct passes harmlessly over into associations for physical training, which furnishes a safe outlet for these instincts, until the reductives of maturer years have perfected their work.
The causation of crime, which the cure seeks to remove, is a problem comparable with the origin of sin and evil. First, of course, comes heredity, bad antenatal conditions, bad homes, unhealthful infancy and childhood, overcrowded slums with their promiscuity and squalor, which are always near the border of lawlessness, and perhaps are the chief cause of crime. A large per cent of juvenile offenders, variously estimated, but probably one-tenth of all, are vagrants or without homes, and divorce of parents and illegitimacy seem to be nearly equal as causative agencies. If whatever is physiologically wrong is morally wrong, and whatever is physiologically right is morally right, we have an important ethical suggestion from somatic conditions. There is no doubt that conscious intelligence during a certain early stage of its development tends to deteriorate the strength and infallibility of instinctive processes, so that education is always beset with the danger of interfering with ancestral and congenital tendencies. Its prime object ought to be moralization, but it can not be denied that in conquering ignorance we do not thereby conquer poverty or vice. After the free schools in London were opened there was an increase of juvenile offenders. New kinds of crime, such as forgery, grand larceny, intricate swindling schemes, were doubled, while sneak thieves, drunkards, and pick-pockets decreased, and the proportion of educated criminals was greatly augmented.[14] To collect masses of children and ram them with the same unassimilated facts is not education in this sense, and we ought to confess that youthful crime is an expression of educational failure. Illiterate criminals are more likely to be detected, and also to be condemned, than are educated criminals. Every anthropologist knows that the deepest poverty and ignorance among primitive people are in nowise incompatible with honesty, integrity, and virtue. Indeed there is much reason to suspect that the extremes of wealth and poverty are more productive of crime than ignorance, or even intemperance. Educators have no doubt vastly overestimated the moral efficiency of the three R’s and forgotten that character in infancy is all instinct; that in childhood it is slowly made over into habits; while at adolescence more than at any other period of life, it can be cultivated through ideals. The dawn of puberty, although perhaps marked by a certain moral hebetude, is soon followed by a stormy period of great agitation, when the very worst and best impulses in the human soul struggle against each other for its possession, and when there is peculiar proneness to be either very good or very bad. As the agitation slowly subsides, it is found that there has been a renaissance of either the best or the worst elements of the soul, if not indeed of both.
Although pedagogues make vast claims for the moralizing effect of schooling, I cannot find a single criminologist who is satisfied with the modern school, while most bring the severest indictments against it for the blind and ignorant assumption that the three R’s or any merely intellectual training can moralize. By nature, children are more or less morally blind, and statistics show that between thirteen and sixteen incorrigibility is between two and three times as great as at any other age. It is almost impossible for adults to realize the irresponsibility and even moral neurasthenia incidental to this stage of development. If we reflect what a girl would do if dressed like a boy and leading his life and exposed to the same moral contagion, or what a boy would do if corseted and compelled to live like a girl, perhaps we can realize that whatever rôle heredity plays, the youth who go wrong are, in the vast majority of cases, victims of circumstances or of immaturity, and deserving of both pity and hope. It was this sentiment that impelled Zarnadelli to reconstruct the criminal law of Italy, in this respect, and it was this sympathy that made Rollet a self-constituted advocate, pleading each morning for the twenty or thirty boys and eight or ten girls arrested every day in Paris.
Those smitten with the institution craze or with any extreme correctionalist views will never solve the problem of criminal youths. First of all, they must be carefully and objectively studied, lived with, and understood as in this country Gulick, Johnson, Forbush and Yoder are doing in different ways, but each with success. Criminaloid youth is more sharply individualized than the common good child, who is less differentiated. Virtue is more uniform and monotonous than sin. There is one right but there are many wrong ways, hence they need to be individually studied by every paidological method, physical and psychic. Keepers, attendants, and even sponsors who have to do with these children should be educators with souls full of fatherhood and motherhood, and they should understand that the darkest criminal propensities are frequently offset by the very best qualities; that juvenile murderers are often very tender-hearted to parents, sisters, children, or pets;[15] they should understand that in the criminal constitution there are precisely the same ingredients, although perhaps differently compounded, accentuated, mutually controlled, etc., by the environment, as in themselves, so that to know all would, in the great majority of cases, be to pardon all; that the home sentiments need emphasis; that a little less stress of misery to overcome the effects of economic malaise and, above all, a friend, mentor, adviser are needed.
I incline to think that many children would be better and not worse for reading, provided it can be done in tender years, stories like those of Captain Kidd, Jack Sheppard, Dick Turpin, and other gory tales, and perhaps later tales like Eugene Aram, and the ophidian medicated novel, Elsie Venner, etc., on the principle of the Aristotelian catharsis to arouse betimes the higher faculties which develop later, and whose function it is to deplete the bad centers and suppress or inhibit their activity. Again, I believe that judicious and incisive scolding is a moral tonic, which is often greatly needed, and if rightly administered would be extremely effective, because it shows the instinctive reaction of the sane conscience against evil deeds and tendencies. Special pedagogic attention should be given to the sentiment of justice, which is almost the beginning of personal morals in boys; and plays should be chosen and encouraged that hold the beam even, regardless of personal wish and interest. Further yet benevolence and its underlying impulse to do more than justice to our associates; to do good in the world; to give pleasure to those about, and not pain, can be directly cultivated. Truth-telling presents a far harder problem, as we have seen. It is no pedagogical triumph to clip the wings of fancy, but effort should be directed almost solely against the cowardly lies, which cover evil; and the heroism of telling the truth and taking the consequences is another of the elements of the moral sense, so complex, so late in development, and so often permanently crippled. The money sense, by all the many means now used for its development in school, is the surest safeguard against the most common juvenile crime of theft, and much can be taught by precept, example, and moral regimen of the sacredness of property rights. The regularity of school work and its industry is a valuable moralizing agent, but entirely inadequate and insufficient by itself. Educators must face the fact that the ultimate verdict concerning the utility of the school will be determined, as Talleck well says, by its moral efficiency in saving children from personal vice and crime.
Wherever any source of pollution of school communities occurs, it must be at once and effectively detected, and some artificial elements must be introduced into the environment. In other words, there must be a system of moral orthopedics. Garofalo’s[16] new term and principle of “temibility” is perhaps of great service. He would thus designate the quantum of evil feared that is sufficient to restrain criminal impulsion. We can not measure guilt or culpability, which may be of all degrees from nothing to infinity perhaps, but we can to some extent scale the effectiveness of restraint, if criminal impulse is not absolutely irresistible. Pain then must be so organised as to follow and measure the offense by as nearly a natural method as possible, while on the other hand the rewards for good conduct must also be more or less accentuated. Thus the problem of criminology for youth can not be based on the principles now recognised for adults. They can not be protective of society only, but must have marked reformatory elements. Solitude[17] which tends to make weak, agitated, and fearful, at this very gregarious age should be enforced with very great discretion. There must be no personal and unmotivated clemency or pardon in such scheme, for, according to the old saw, “Mercy but murders, pardoning those who kill”; nor on the other hand should there be the excessive disregard of personal adjustments, and the uniformitarian, who perhaps celebrated his highest triumph in the old sentence, “Kill all offenders and suspects, for God will know his own,” should have no part nor lot here. The philosopher Hartmann has a suggestive article advocating that penal colonies made up of transported criminals should be experimented upon by statesmen in order to put various theories of self-government to a practical test. However this may be, the penologist of youth must face some such problem in the organization of the house of detention, boys’ club, farm, reformatory, etc. We must pass beyond the clumsy apparatus of a term sentence., or the devices of a jury, clumsier yet, for this purpose; we must admit the principle of regret, fear, penance, material restoration of damage, and understand the sense in which, for both society and for the individual, it makes no practical difference whether experts think there is some taint of insanity, provided only that irresponsibility is not hopelessly complete.
In few aspects of this theme do conceptions of and practises in regard to adolescence need more radical reconstruction. A mere accident of circumstance often condemns to criminal careers youths capable of the highest service to society, and for a mere brief season of temperamental outbreak or obstreperousness exposes them to all the infamy to which ignorant and cruel public opinion condemns all those who have once been detected on the wrong side of the invisible and arbitrary line of rectitude. The heart of criminal psychology is here; and not only that, but I would conclude with a most earnest personal protest against the current methods of teaching and studying ethics in our academic institutions as a speculative, historical, and abstract thing. Here in the concrete and saliently objective facts of crime it should have its beginning, and have more blood and body in it by getting again close to the hot battle line between vice and virtue, and then only, when balanced and sanified by a rich ballast of facts, can it with advantage slowly work its way over to the larger and higher philosophy of conduct, which, when developed from this basis, will be a radically different thing from the shadowy phantom, schematic speculations of many contemporary moralists, taught in our schools and colleges.
[Footnote 1: Problematische Kindesnaturen. Eine Studie für Schule und
Haus. Voigtländer, Leipzig, 1889.]
[Footnote 2: Die pädagogische Pathologie in der Erziehungskunde des 19
Jahrhunderts. Bertelsman, Gütersloh, 1893, p. 494.]
[Footnote 3: Peculiar and Exceptional Children. Pedagogical Seminary,
October, 1896, vol. 4, pp. 3-60.]
[Footnote 4: La Puberté. Schleicher Frères, Paris, 1902, p. 72.]
[Footnote 5: Home and School Punishments. Pedagogical Seminary, March, 1899, vol. 6, pp. 159-187.]
[Footnote 6: A Study of the Faults of Children. Pedagogical Seminary,
June, 1903, vol. 10, p. 200 et seq.]
[Footnote 7: The Child and the Weather, by Edwin G. Dexter.
Pedagogical Seminary, April, 1898, vol. 5, pp. 512-522.]
[Footnote 8: Psychic Effects of the Weather, by J.S. Lemon. American
Journal of Psychology, January, 1894, vol. 6, pp. 277-279.]
[Footnote 9: Truancy as Related to the Migrating Instinct, by L.W.
Kline. Pedagogical Seminary, January, 1898, vol. 5, pp. 381-420.]
[Footnote 10: Children’s Lies. American Journal of Psychology,
January, 1890, vol. 3, pp. 59-70.]
[Footnote 11: Poems. With memoir by his brother, 2 vols., London, 1851.]
[Footnote 12: American Journal of Psychology, July, 1898, vol. 9, pp. 425-448.]
[Footnote 13: How the Other Half Lives. Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1890, p. 229.]
[Footnote 14: The Curse in Education, by Rebecca Harding Davis. North
American Review, May, 1899, vol. 168, pp. 609-614.]
[Footnote 15: Holtzendorff: Psychologie des Mordes. C. Pfeiffer,
Berlin, 1875]
[Footnote 16: La Criminologie. Paris, Alcan, 1890, p. 332]
[Footnote 17: See its psychology and dangers well pointed out by M.H.
Small: Psychical Relations of Society and Solitude. Pedagogical
Seminary, April, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 13-69]
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It is my honest hope that nothing I’ve right here exhibited can be mistaken by the the Aristocracy and gentry for ethical indignation. No such feeling, in fact, is in my coronary heart. Moral judgments, as outdated Friedrich used to say, are international to my nature. Setting apart the huge herd which exhibits no definable character in any respect, it appears to me that the minority distinguished by what is often thought to be an extra of sin could be very far more admirable than the minority distinguished by an extra of advantage. My expertise of the world has taught me that the typical wine-bibber is a much better fellow than the typical prohibitionist, and that the typical rogue is healthier firm than the typical poor drudge, and that the worst white, slave dealer of my acquaintance is a decenter man than the very best vice crusader. In the identical manner I’m satisfied that the typical lady, no matter her deficiencies, is tremendously superior to the typical man. The very ease with which she defies and swindles him in a number of capital conditions of life is the clearest of proofs of her normal superiority. She didn’t receive her current excessive immunities as a present from the gods, however solely after a protracted and sometimes bitter combat, and in that combat she exhibited forensic and tactical skills of a really admirable order. There was no weak point of man that she didn’t penetrate and make the most of. There was no trick that she didn’t put to efficient use. There was no system so daring and inordinate that it daunted her.
The newest and biggest fruit of this female expertise for fight is the extension of the suffrage, now common within the Protestant international locations, and even advancing in these of the Greek and Latin rites. This fruit was garnered, not by an assault en masse, however by a mere foray. I imagine that almost all of ladies, for causes that I shall presently expose, weren’t anticipating the extension, and regard it as of small worth at the moment. They know that they will get what they need with out going to the precise polls for it; furthermore, they’re out of sympathy with many of the brummagem reforms advocated by the skilled suffragists, female and male. The mere assertion of the present suffragist platform, with its lengthy listing of quack sure-cures for all of the sorrows of the world, is sufficient to make them smile sadly. In specific, they’re sceptical of all reforms that rely on the mass motion of immense numbers of voters, massive sections of whom are wholly devoid of sense. A standard lady, certainly, no extra believes in democracy within the nation than she believes in democracy at her personal fireplace; she is aware of that there should be a category to order and a category to obey, and that the 2 can by no means coalesce. Nor is she vulnerable to the inventory sentimentalities upon which the entire democratic course of is predicated. This was proven very dramatically within the United States on the nationwide election of 1920, during which the late Woodrow Wilson was introduced all the way down to colossal and ignominious defeat—the primary normal election during which all American ladies might vote. All the sentimentality of the state of affairs was on the facet of Wilson, and but absolutely three-fourths of the newly-enfranchised ladies voters voted in opposition to him. He is, regardless of his skills for deception, a poor well-liked psychologist, and so he made a clumsy effort to fetch the women by tear-squeezing: each connoisseur will keep in mind his bathos about breaking the center of the world. Well, only a few ladies imagine in damaged hearts, and the trigger isn’t far to hunt: virtually each lady above the age of twenty-five has a damaged coronary heart. That is to say, she has been vastly upset, both by failing to nab some fairly fellow that her coronary heart was set on, or, worse, by truly nabbing him, after which discovering him to be a bounder or an imbecile, or each. Thus strolling the world with damaged hearts, ladies know that the harm isn’t critical. When he pulled out the Vox angelica cease and commenced sobbing and snuffling and blowing his nostril tragically, the discovered physician merely drove all the ladies voters into the arms of the Hon. Warren Gamaliel Harding, who was too silly to invent any points in any respect, however merely took detrimental benefit of the mistrust aroused by his opponent.
Once the ladies of Christendom grow to be comfortable in using the poll, and eliminate the preposterous harridans who obtained it for them and who now search to inform them what to do with it, they’ll proceed to a scotching of lots of the sentimentalities which at the moment corrupt politics. For one factor, I imagine that they’ll provoke measures in opposition to democracy—the worst evil of the present-day world. When they arrive to the matter, they’ll actually not ordain the extension of the suffrage to youngsters, criminals and the insane briefly, to these ever extra inflammable and knavish than the male hinds who’ve loved it for therefore lengthy; they’ll attempt to result in its restriction, little by little, to the small minority that’s clever, agnostic and self-possessed—say six ladies to at least one man. Thus, out of their larger intuition for actuality, they’ll make democracy protected for a democracy.
The curse of man, and the reason for almost all his woes, is his stupendous capability for believing the unbelievable. He is endlessly embracing delusions, and every new one is worse than all which have gone earlier than. But the place is the delusion that ladies cherish—I imply habitually, firmly, passionately? Who will draw up an inventory of propositions, held and maintained by them in sober earnest, which are clearly not true? (I allude right here, in fact, to real ladies, to not suffragettes and different such pseudo-males). As for me, I mustn’t prefer to undertake such an inventory. I do know of nothing, the truth is, that correctly belongs to it. Women, as a category, imagine in not one of the ludicrous rights, duties and pious obligations that males are endlessly gabbling about. Their superior intelligence is on no account extra eloquently demonstrated than by their ironical view of all such phantasmagoria. Their recurring angle towards males is considered one of aloof disdain, and their recurring angle towards what males imagine in, and get into sweats about, and bellow for, is considerably the identical. It takes twice as lengthy to transform a physique of ladies to some new fallacy because it takes to transform a physique of males, and even then they halt, hesitate and are filled with mordant criticisms. The ladies of Colorado had been voting for 21 years earlier than they succumbed to prohibition sufficiently to permit the person voters of the state to undertake it; their very own majority voice was in opposition to it to the top. During the interval the boys voters of a dozen non-suffrage American states had gone shrieking to the mourners’ bench. In California, enfranchised in 1911, the ladies rejected the dry revelation in 1914. National prohibition was adopted throughout the struggle with out their votes—they didn’t get the franchise all through the nation till it was within the Constitution—and it’s with out their assist at the moment. The American man, regardless of his status for lawlessness, is definitely very a lot afraid of the police, and in all of the areas the place prohibition is now truly enforced he makes excuses for his poltroonish acceptance of it by arguing that it’ll do him good in the long term, or that he must sacrifice his personal needs to the widespread weal. But it’s virtually unattainable to search out an American lady of any tradition who’s in favour of it. One and all, they’re against the turmoil and corruption that it entails, and resentful of the invasion of liberty underlying it. Being realists, they haven’t any perception in any program which proposes to remedy the pure swinishness of males by laws. Every regular lady believes, and fairly precisely, that the typical man could be very very like her husband, John, and he or she is aware of very properly that John is a weak, foolish and knavish fellow, and that any effort to transform him into an archangel in a single day is certain to come back to grief. As for her view of the typical creature of her personal intercourse, it’s marked by a cynicism so penetrating and so damaging {that a} clear assertion of it might shock past endurance.
Thus there’s not the slightest likelihood that the enfranchised ladies of Protestantdom, as soon as they grow to be comfortable in using the poll, will give any heed to the ex-suffragettes who now presume to guide and instruct them in politics. Years in the past I predicted that these suffragettes, tried out by victory, would grow to be idiots. They are actually onerous at work proving it. Half of them dedicate themselves to advocating reforms, mainly of a sexual character, so totally preposterous that even male politicians and newspaper editors snort at them; the opposite half succumb absurdly to the blandishments of the old-time male politicians, and so enroll themselves within the nice political events. A lady who joins considered one of these events merely turns into an imitation man, which is to say, a donkey. Thereafter she is nothing however an obscure cog in an historical and creaking machine, the only intelligible function of which is to keep up a horde of scoundrels in public workplace. Her vote is immediately set off by the vote of some sister who joins the opposite camorra. Parenthetically, I could add that all the girls to take to this political immolation appear to me to be frightfully plain. I do know these of England, Germany and Scandinavia solely by their portraits within the illustrated papers, however these of the United States I’ve studied at shut vary at numerous massive political gatherings, together with the 2 nationwide conventions first following the extension of the suffrage. I’m certainly no fastidious fellow—the truth is, I choose a sure melancholy decay in ladies to the loud, circus-wagon brilliance of youth—however I provide you with my phrase that there have been not 5 ladies at both nationwide conference who might have embraced me in digital camera with out first giving me chloral. Some of the chief stateswomen on present, the truth is, had been so downright hideous that I felt faint each time I had to have a look at them.
The reform-monging suffragists appear to be equally devoid of the extra caressing items. They could also be full of altruistic ardour, however they actually have dangerous complexions, and never a lot of them know costume their hair. Nine-tenths of them advocate reforms aimed on the alleged lubricity of the male-the single normal, medical certificates for bridegrooms, birth-control, and so forth. The motive right here, I imagine, is mere rage and jealousy. The lady who isn’t pursued units up the doctrine that pursuit is offensive to her intercourse, and needs to make it a felony. No genuinely engaging lady has any such want. She likes masculine admiration, nevertheless violently expressed, and is kind of capable of maintain herself. More, she is properly conscious that only a few males are daring sufficient to supply it and not using a plain invitation, and this consciousness makes her extraordinarily cynical of all ladies who complain of being harassed, beset, storied, and seduced. All the extra clever ladies that I do know, certainly, are unanimously of the opinion that no woman in her proper senses has ever been truly seduced for the reason that world started; at any time when they hear of a case, they sympathize with the person. Yet extra, the traditional lady of vigorous charms, roving about amongst males, all the time tries to attract the admiration of those that have beforehand admired elsewhere; she prefers the skilled to the novice, and estimates her talent by the attractiveness of the huntresses who’ve hitherto stalked it. The iron-faced suffragist propagandist, if she will get a person in any respect, should get one wholly with out sentimental expertise. If he has any, her crude manoeuvres make him snort and he’s repelled by her lack of pulchritude and amiability. All such suffragists (save a couple of miraculous beauties) marry ninth-rate males after they marry in any respect. They need to put up with the kind of castoffs who’re virtually able to fall in love with girl physicists, embryologists, and embalmers.
Fortunately for the human race, the campaigns of those indignant viragoes will come to naught. Men will carry on pursuing ladies till hell freezes over, and ladies will hold luring them on. If the latter enterprise had been deserted, the truth is, the entire recreation of affection would play out, for not many males take any discover of ladies spontaneously. Nine males out of ten can be fairly glad, I imagine, if there have been no ladies on the planet, as soon as they’d grown accustomed to the quiet. Practically all males are their happiest when they’re engaged upon actions—for instance, consuming, playing, looking, enterprise, journey—to which ladies usually are not ordinarily admitted. It is ladies who seduce them from such celibate doings. The hare postures and gyrates in entrance of the hound. The strategy to put an finish to the gaudy crimes that the suffragist alarmists speak about is to shave the heads of all the gorgeous ladies on the planet, and pluck out their eyebrows, and pull their enamel, and put them in khaki, and forbid them to wriggle on dance-floors, or to put on scents, or to make use of lip-sticks, or to roll their eyes. Reform, as ordinary, errors the fish for the fly.
The current public prosperity of the ex-suffragettes is mainly as a consequence of the truth that the old-time male politicians, being naturally very silly, mistake them for spokesmen for the entire physique of ladies, and so present them politeness. But quickly or late—and possibly disconcertingly quickly—the good mass of smart and agnostic ladies will flip upon them and depose them, and thereafter the girl vote can be now not on the disposal of bogus Great Thinkers and messiahs. If the suffragettes proceed to fill the newspapers with nonsense, as soon as that change has been effected, will probably be solely as a minority sect of tolerated idiots, just like the Swedenborgians, Christian Scientists, Seventh Day Adventists and different such fanatics of at the moment. This was the historical past of the extension of the suffrage in all the American states that made it earlier than the nationwide enfranchisement of ladies and will probably be repeated within the nation at massive, and in Great Britain and on the Continent. Women usually are not taken in by quackery as readily as males are; the hardness of their shell of logic makes it troublesome to penetrate to their feelings. For one lady who testifies publicly that she has been cured of most cancers by some swindling patent drugs, there are no less than twenty masculine witnesses. Even such frauds because the favorite American elixir, Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, that are ostensibly treatments for particularly female ills, anatomically unattainable within the male, are mainly swallowed, so an clever druggist tells me, by males.
My personal perception, based mostly on elaborate inquiries and lengthy meditation, is that the grant of the poll to ladies marks the hid however none the much less actual starting of an enchancment in our politics, and, in the long run, in our complete idea of presidency. As issues stand, an clever grappling with a few of the capital issues of the commonwealth is nearly unattainable. A politician usually prospers underneath democracy, not in proportion as his rules are sound and his honour incorruptible, however in proportion as she excels within the manufacture of sonorous phrases, and the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defences in opposition to them. Our politics thus degenerates right into a mere pursuit of hobgoblins; the male voter, a coward in addition to an ass, is endlessly taking fright at a brand new one and electing some mountebank to put it. For 100 years previous the folks of the United States, probably the most horrible current democratic state, have scarcely had a political marketing campaign that was not based mostly upon some preposterous concern—first of slavery after which of the manumitted slave, first of capitalism after which of communism, first of the outdated after which of the novel. It is a peculiarity of ladies that they don’t seem to be simply set off by such alarms, that they don’t fall readily into such facile tumults and phobias. What begins a male assembly to snuffling and trembling most violently is exactly the factor that may trigger a feminine assembly to smell. What we’d like, to beat back mobocracy and safeguard a civilized type of authorities, is extra of this sniffing. What we’d like—and in the long run it should come—is a sniff so highly effective that it’ll name a halt upon the navigation of the ship from the forecastle, and put a reliable employees on the bridge, and lay a course that’s describable in intelligible phrases.
The officers nominated by the male citizens in fashionable democracies earlier than the extension of the suffrage had been normally chosen, not for his or her competence however for his or her mere expertise for idiocy; they mirrored precisely the male weak point for no matter is rhetorical and mawkish and feeble and unfaithful. Consider, for instance, what occurred in a salient case. Every 4 years the male voters of the United States selected from amongst themselves one who was put ahead as the person most match, of all resident males, to be the primary citizen of the commonwealth. He was chosen after interminable dialogue; his {qualifications} had been totally canvassed; very massive powers and dignities had been put into his arms. Well, what did we generally discover after we examined this gentleman? We discovered, not a profound thinker, not a frontrunner of sound opinion, not a person of notable sense, however merely a wholesaler of notions so childish that they need to wants disgust a sentient suckling—briefly, a spouting geyser of fallacies and sentimentalities, a cataract of unsupported assumptions and hole moralizings, a tedious phrase-merchant and platitudinarian, a fellow whose noblest flights of thought had been flattered after they had been known as understandable—particularly, a Wilson, a Taft, a Roosevelt, or a Harding.
This was the male champion. I don’t enterprise upon the cruelty of evaluating his bombastic flummeries to the clear reasoning of a lady of like fame and place; all I ask of you is that you simply weigh them, for sense, for shrewdness, for clever grasp of obscure relations, for mental honesty and braveness, with the concepts of the typical midwife.
I’ve spoken with some disdain of the suffragette. What is the matter along with her, essentially, is straightforward: she is a lady who has stupidly carried her envy of sure of the superficial privileges of males to such a degree that it takes on the character of an obsession, and makes her blind to their worthless and sometimes mainly imaginary character. In specific, she centres this frenzy of hers upon one particular privilege, to wit, the alleged privilege of promiscuity in amour, the trendy droit du seigneur. Read the books of the chief girl Savonarolas, and you can find working by means of them an hysterical denunciation of what’s known as the double normal of morality; there’s, certainly, a complete literature devoted completely to it. The existence of this double normal appears to drive the poor ladies half frantic. They bellow raucously for its abrogation, and demand that the frivolous male be visited with much more idiotic penalties than these which now go to the aberrant feminine; some even advocate gravely his mutilation by surgical procedure, that he could also be pressured into rectitude by a bodily incapacity for sin.
All this, in fact, is hocus-pocus, and the considered usually are not deceived by it for an immediate. What these virtuous bel dames truly want of their hearts isn’t that the male be decreased to chemical purity, however that the franchise of dalliance be prolonged to themselves. The most basic acquaintance with Freudian psychology exposes their secret animus. Unable to ensnare males underneath the current system, or in any respect occasions, unable to ensnare males sufficiently appetizing to arouse the envy of different ladies, they leap to the idea that it might be simpler if the foundations had been much less exacting. This idea exposes their deficiency within the chief character of their intercourse: correct statement. The reality is that, even when they possessed the liberty that males are supposed to own, they might nonetheless discover it troublesome to attain their ambition, for the typical man, no matter his stupidity, is no less than eager sufficient in judgment to choose a single wink from a genuinely engaging lady to the final delirious favours of the everyday suffragette. Thus the idea of the whoopers and snorters of the trigger, in its esoteric in addition to in its public side, is unsound. They are merely ladies who, of their tastes and processes of thoughts, are two-thirds males, and the actual fact explains their failure to attain presentable husbands, and even consolatory betrayal, fairly as successfully because it explains the prepared credence they offer to political and philosophical absurdities.
The reality is that the image of male carnality that such ladies conjure up belongs virtually wholly to fable, as I’ve already noticed in coping with the sophistries of Dr. Eliza Burt Gamble, a paralogist on a considerably increased airplane. As they depict him of their fevered treatises on illegitimacy, white-slave buying and selling and ophthalmia neonatorum, the typical male grownup of the Christian and cultured international locations leads a lifetime of gaudy lubricity, rolling magnificently from one liaison to a different, and with an virtually limitless queue of ruined milliners, dancers, charwomen, parlour-maids and waitresses behind him, all dying of poison and despair. The lifetime of man, as these furiously envious ones see it, is the lifetime of a number one actor in a boulevard revue. He is a polygamous, multigamous, myriadigamous; an insatiable and unconscionable debauche, a monster of promiscuity; prodigiously untrue to his spouse, and even to his associates’ wives; fathomlessly libidinous and fantastically glad.
Needless to say, this image bears no extra relation to the information than a dissertation on main technique by a navy “expert” promoted from dramatic critic. If the chief suffragette scare mongers (I communicate with none embarrassing naming of names) had been engaging sufficient to males to get close to sufficient to sufficient males to know sufficient about them for his or her function they might paralyze the Dorcas societies with no such cajoling libels. As a matter of sober reality, the typical man of our time and race is kind of incapable of all these incandescent and intriguing divertisements. He is way extra virtuous than they make him out, far much less schooled in sin, far much less enterprising and ruthless. I don’t say, in fact, that he’s pure in coronary heart, for the possibilities are that he is not; what I do say is that, within the overwhelming majority of instances, he’s pure in act, even within the face of temptation. And why? For a number of major causes, not to enter minor ones. One is that he lacks the braveness. Another is that he lacks the cash. Another is that he’s essentially ethical, and has a conscience. It takes extra sinful initiative than he has in him to plunge into any affair save probably the most informal and sordid; it takes extra ingenuity and intrepidity than he has in him to hold it off; it takes extra money than he can conceal from his consort to finance it. A person might power his precise spouse to share the direst poverty, however even the least vampirish lady of the third half calls for to be courted in what, contemplating his station in life, is the grand method, and the bills of that grand method scare off all save a small minority of specialists in deception. So lengthy, certainly, as a spouse is aware of her husband’s revenue precisely, she has a positive technique of holding him to his oaths.
Even more practical than the fiscal barrier is the barrier of poltroonery. The one character that distinguishes man from the opposite increased vertebrate, certainly, is his extreme timorousness, his simple yielding to alarms, his incapacity for journey and not using a crowd behind him. In his regular incarnation he’s no extra able to initiating an extra-legal affair—in any respect occasions, above the mawkish harmlessness of a flirting match with a cigar woman in a cafe-than he’s of scaling the battlements of hell. He likes to consider himself doing it, simply as he likes to consider himself main a cavalry cost or climbing the Matterhorn. Often, certainly, his self-importance leads him to think about the factor carried out, and he admits by winks and blushes that he’s a nasty one. But on the backside of all that tawdry pretence there’s normally nothing extra materials than an oafish smirk at some disgusted shop-girl, or a scraping of shins underneath the desk. Let any lady who’s disquieted by stories of her husband’s derelictions determine to herself how lengthy it might have taken him to suggest to her if left to his personal enterprise, after which let her ask herself if that’s the case pusillanimous a creature may very well be imaged within the position of Don Giovanni.
Finally, there’s his conscience—the amassed sediment of ancestral faintheartedness in numerous generations, with imprecise spiritual fears and superstitions to leaven and mellow it. What! a conscience? Yes, expensive associates, a conscience. That conscience could also be imperfect, inept, unintelligent, brummagem. It could also be indistinguishable, at instances, from the mere concern that somebody could also be wanting. It could also be shot by means of with hypocrisy, stupidity, play-acting. But nonetheless, as consciences go in Christendom, it’s genuinely entitled to the identify—and it’s all the time in motion. A person, keep in mind, isn’t a being in vacuo; he’s the fruit and slave of the atmosphere that bathes him. One can not enter the House of Commons, the United States Senate, or a jail for felons with out changing into, in some measure, a rascal. One can not fall overboard with out transport water. One can not cross by means of a contemporary college with out carrying away scars. And by the identical token one can not dwell and have one’s being in a contemporary democratic state, 12 months in and 12 months out, with out falling, to some extent no less than, underneath that ethical obsession which is the hall-mark of the mob-man let out. A citizen of such a state, his nostril buried in Nietzsche, “Man and Superman,” and different such superior literature, might caress himself with the notion that he’s an immoralist, that his soul is stuffed with soothing sin, that he has reduce himself free from the revelation of God. But all of the whereas there is part of him that continues to be a sound Christian, a moralist, a proper considering and forward-looking man. And that half, in instances of stress, asserts itself. It might not fear him on unusual events. It might not cease him when he swears, or takes a nip of whiskey behind the door, or goes motoring on Sunday; it might even let him alone when he goes to a leg-show. But the second a concrete Temptress rises earlier than him, her nostril snow-white, her lips rouged, her eyelashes drooping provokingly—the second such an deserted wench has at him, and his lack of prepared funds begins to conspire together with his lack of braveness to assault and wobble him—at that exact second his conscience flares into operate, and so finishes his enterprise. First he sees problem, then he sees the hazard, then he sees improper. The result’s that he slinks off in trepidation, and one other vampire is baffled of her prey.
It is, certainly, the key scandal of Christendom, no less than within the Protestant areas, that almost all males are trustworthy to their wives. You will a journey a great distance earlier than you discover a married man who will admit that he’s, however the information are the information, and I’m certainly not one to flout them.
The origin of the delusion that the typical man is a Leopold II or Augustus the Strong, with the amorous expertise of a guinea pig, isn’t far to hunt. It lies in three elements, the which I rehearse briefly:
1. The idiotic self-importance of males, resulting in their everlasting boasting, both by open mendacity or sinister hints.
2. The notions of vice crusaders, nonconformist divines, Y. M. C. A. secretaries, and different such libidinous poltroons as to what they might do themselves if they’d the braveness.
3. The ditto of sure suffragettes as to ditto.
Here you may have the genesis of a generalization that offers the much less vital kind of ladies a substantial amount of pointless uneasiness and vastly augments the pure conceit of males. Some pornographic outdated fellow, within the discharge of his duties as director of an anti-vice society, places in a night ploughing by means of such books as “The Memoirs of Fanny Hill,” Casanova’s Confessions, the Cena Trimalchionis of Gaius Petronius, and II Samuel. From this perusal he arises with the conviction that life amid the purple lights should be one stupendous whirl of deviltry, that the clerks he sees in Broadway or Piccadilly at evening are out for revels that may have brought about protests in Sodom and Nineveh, that the typical man who chooses hell leads an existence akin to that of a Mormon bishop, that the world outdoors the Bible class is packed like a sardine-can with betrayed salesgirls, that each man who would not imagine that Jonah swallowed the whale spends his complete leisure leaping by means of the seventh hoop of the Decalogue. “If I were not saved and anointed of God,” whispers the vice director into his personal ear, “that is what I, the Rev. Dr. Jasper Barebones, would be doing. The late King David did it; he was human, and hence immoral. The late King Edward VII was not beyond suspicion: the very numeral in his name has its suggestions. Millions of others go the same route…. Ergo, Up, guards, and at ’em! Bring me the pad of blank warrants! Order out the seachlights and scaling-ladders! Swear in four hundred more policemen! Let us chase these hell-hounds out of Christendom, and make the world safe for monogamy, poor working girls, and infant damnation!”
Thus the hound of heaven, arguing fallaciously from his personal secret aspirations. Where he makes his mistake is in assuming that the unconsecrated, whereas sharing his longing to debauch and betray, are free from his different weaknesses, e.g., his timidity, his lack of resourcefulness, his conscience. As I’ve mentioned, they don’t seem to be. The overwhelming majority of those that seem within the public haunts of sin are there, to not interact in overt acts of ribaldry, however merely to tremble agreeably upon the sting of the abyss. They are the identical skittish experimentalists, exactly, who throng the halfway at a world’s honest, and go to smutty exhibits, and soak up intercourse magazines, and browse the kind of books that our vice crusading pal reads. They prefer to conjure up the charms of carnality, and to assist out their considerably sluggish imaginations by precise peeps at it, however with regards to taking a forthright header into the sulphur they normally fail to muster up the braveness. For one clerk who succumbs to the houris of the pave, there are 5 hundred who succumb to lack of means, the warnings of the intercourse hygienists, and their very own miserable consciences. For one “clubman”—i.e., bagman or suburban vestryman—who invades the ladies’s outlets, engages the love of some harmless miss, lures her into infamy after which sells her to the Italians, there are one thousand who by no means get any additional than asking the worth of cologne water and discharging a couple of furtive winks. And for one husband of the Nordic race who maintains a blonde refrain woman in oriental luxurious across the nook, there are ten thousand who’re as true to their wives, 12 months in and 12 months out, as so many convicts within the death-house, and can be no extra able to any such loathsome malpractice, even within the face of free alternative, than they might be of slicing off the ears of their younger.
I’m sorry to explode a lot romance. In specific, I’m sorry for the suffragettes who specialize within the double normal, for after they get into pantaloons eventually, and have the brand new freedom, they’ll uncover to their sorrow that they’ve been pursuing a chimera—that there’s actually no such animal because the male anarchist they’ve been denouncing and envying—that the wholesale fornication of man, no less than underneath Christian democracy, has little extra precise existence than trustworthy promoting or sound cooking. They have adopted the porno maniacs in embracing a bit of buncombe, and when the day of deliverance comes it is going to flip to ashes of their arms.
Their error, as I say, lies in overestimating the braveness and enterprise of man. They themselves, barring mere bodily valour, a top quality during which the typical man is way exceeded by the typical jackal or wolf, have extra of each. If the implications, to a person, of the slightest descent from virginity had been one-tenth as swift and barbarous as the implications to a younger woman in like case, it might take a division of infantry to dredge up a single male flouter of that lex talionis in the entire western world. As issues stand at the moment, even with the percentages so tremendously in his favour, the typical male hesitates and is thus not misplaced. Turn to the statistics of the vice crusaders should you doubt it. They present that the weekly receipts of feminine recruits upon the wharves of sin are all the time greater than the demand; that extra younger ladies enter upon the vermilion profession than could make respectable livings at it; that the stress of the temptation they maintain out is the chief consider corrupting our undergraduates. What was the primary act of the American Army when it started summoning its younger clerks and faculty boys and plough arms to conscription camps? Its first act was to mark off a so-called ethical zone round every camp, and to safe it with trenches and machine weapons, and to place a variety of volunteer termagants to patrolling it, that the assembled jeunesse is likely to be protected of their rectitude from the immoral advances of the adjoining milkmaids and poor working ladies.
I’ve given three causes for the prosperity of the notion that man is a pure polygamist, bent eternally upon recent dives into Lake of Brimstone No. 7. To these one other must be added: the thirst for martyrdom which exhibits itself in so many ladies, significantly underneath the upper types of civilization. This unhealthy urge for food, the truth is, could also be described as considered one of civilization’s ailments; it’s virtually exceptional in additional primitive societies. The savage lady, unprotected by her impolite tradition and compelled to heavy and relentless labour, has retained her bodily power and with it her honesty and self-respect. The civilized lady, steadily degenerated by a larger ease, and helped down that hill by the pretensions of civilized man, has turned her infirmity right into a advantage, and so impacts a feebleness that’s truly far past the truth. It is by this route that she will be able to most successfully disarm masculine mistrust, and get what she desires. Man is flattered by any acknowledgment, nevertheless insincere, of his superior power and capability. He likes to be leaned upon, appealed to, adopted docilely. And this tribute to his would possibly caresses him on the psychic airplane in addition to on the airplane of the clearly bodily. He not solely enjoys serving to a lady over a gutter; he additionally enjoys serving to her dry her tears. The result’s the huge pretence that characterizes the relations of the sexes underneath civilization—the double pretence of man’s crafty and autonomy and of lady’s dependence and deference. Man is all the time in search of somebody to boast to; lady is all the time in search of a shoulder to place her head on.
This female affectation, in fact, has steadily taken on the power of a hard and fast behavior, and so it’s got a sure assist, by a well-recognized technique of self-delusion, in actuality. The civilized lady inherits that behavior as she inherits her crafty. She is born half satisfied that she is actually as weak and helpless as she later pretends to be, and the prevailing folklore gives her limitless corroboration. One of the resultant phenomena is the enjoyment of martyrdom that one so usually finds in ladies, and significantly within the least alert and introspective of them. They take a heavy, unhealthy pleasure in struggling; it subtly pleases them to be onerous put upon; they prefer to image themselves as slaughtered saints. Thus they all the time discover one thing to complain of; the very situations of home life give them a superabundance of medical materials. And if, by any likelihood, such materials exhibits a falling off, they’re uneasy and sad. Let a lady have a husband whose conduct isn’t moderately open to query, and she’s going to invent legendary offences to make him bearable. And if her invention fails she can be plunged into the utmost distress and humiliation. This reality most likely explains many mysterious divorces: the husband was not too dangerous, however too good. For public opinion amongst ladies, keep in mind, doesn’t favour the girl who is stuffed with a placid contentment and has no masculine torts to report; if she says that her husband is wholly passable she is seemed upon as a numskull much more dense that he’s himself. A person, talking of his spouse to different males, all the time praises her extravagantly. Boasting about her soothes his self-importance; he likes to fire up the envy of his fellows. But when two ladies speak of their husbands it’s primarily atrocities that they describe. The most esteemed lady gossip is the one with the longest and most numerous repertoire of complaints.
This craving for martyrdom explains one of many generally famous characters of ladies: their keen aptitude for bearing bodily ache. As now we have seen, they’ve truly a very good deal much less endurance than males; large accidents shock them extra severely and kill them extra rapidly. But when acute algesia is unaccompanied by any profounder phenomena they’re undoubtedly capable of bear it with a far larger present of resignation. The motive isn’t far to hunt. In ache a person sees solely an invasion of his liberty, power and shallowness. It flooring him, masters him, and makes him ridiculous. But a lady, extra refined and devious in her processes of thoughts, senses the dramatic impact that the spectacle of her struggling makes upon the spectators, already full of compassion for her feebleness. She would thus a lot somewhat be praised for dealing with ache with a martyr’s fortitude than for devising some technique of eliminating it–the first considered a person. No lady might have invented chloroform, nor, for that matter, alcohol. Both medicine supply an escape from conditions and experiences that, even in aggravated kinds, ladies relish. The lady who drinks as males drink—that’s, to boost her threshold of sensation and ease the agony of dwelling—almost all the time exhibits a deficiency in female characters and an undue preponderance of masculine characters. Almost invariably you can find her useless and boastful, and filled with different marks of that bombastic exhibitionism which is so sterlingly male.
This female yearning for martyrdom, in fact, usually takes on a downright pathological character, and so engages the psychiatrist. Women present many different traits of the identical type. To be a lady underneath our Christian civilization, certainly, means to dwell a life that’s heavy with repression and dissimulation, and this repression and dissimulation, in the long term, can not fail to provide results which are indistinguishable from illness. You will discover a few of them described at size in any handbook on psychoanalysis. The Viennese, Adler, and the Dane, Poul Bjerre, argue, certainly, that womanliness itself, as it’s encountered underneath Christianity, is a illness. All ladies endure from a suppressed revolt in opposition to the inhibitions pressured upon them by our synthetic tradition, and this suppressed revolt, by well-known Freudian means, produces a posh of psychological signs that’s acquainted to all of us. At one finish of the size we observe the suffragette, along with her grotesque adoption of the male perception in legal guidelines, phrases and talismans, and her hysterical demand for a sexual libertarianism that she couldn’t put to make use of if she had it. And on the different finish we discover the snuffling and neurotic lady, along with her bogus martyrdom, her extravagant pruderies and her pathological delusions. As Ibsen noticed way back, it is a man’s world. Women have damaged a lot of their outdated chains, however they’re nonetheless enmeshed in a formidable community of artificial taboos and sentimentalities, and it’ll take them one other era, no less than, to get real freedom. That that is true is proven by the deep unrest that but marks the intercourse, regardless of its latest progress towards social, political and financial equality. It is nearly unattainable to discover a man who actually needs that he had been a lady, however virtually each lady, at a while or different in her life, is gnawed by a remorse that she isn’t a person.
Two of the toughest issues that ladies need to bear are (a) the silly masculine disinclination to confess their mental superiority, and even their equality, and even their possession of a standard human gear for thought, and (b) the equally silly masculine doctrine that they represent a particular and ineffable species of vertebrate, with out the pure instincts and appetites of the order—to adapt a phrase from Hackle, that they’re transcendental and virtually gaseous mammals, and marked by a whole lack of sure salient mammalian characters. The first imbecility has already involved us at size. One finds traces of it even in works professedly dedicated to disposing of it. In one such guide, for instance, I come across this: “What all the skill and constructive capacity of the physicians in the Crimean War failed to accomplish Florence Nightingale accomplished by her beautiful femininity and nobility of soul.” In different phrases, by her possession of some recondite and indescribable magic, sharply separated from the unusual psychological processes of man. The idea is unsound and preposterous. Miss Nightingale completed her helpful work, not by magic, however by onerous widespread sense. The drawback earlier than her was merely considered one of group. Many males had tackled it, and all of them had failed stupendously. What she did was to convey her female sharpness of wit, her female clear-thinking, to bear upon it. Thus attacked, it yielded rapidly, and as soon as it had been dropped at order it was simple for different individuals to hold on what she had begun. But the opinion of a person’s world nonetheless prefers to credit score her success to some mysterious angelical high quality, unstatable in lucid phrases and having no extra actuality than the divine inspiration of an archbishop. Her terribly acute and correct intelligence is thus conveniently put upon the desk, and the amour propre of man is stored inviolate. To confess frankly that she had extra sense than any male Englishman of her era can be to utter a reality too harsh to be bearable.
The second delusion generally exhibits itself within the idea, already mentioned, that ladies are devoid of any intercourse intuition—that they undergo the odious caresses of the lubricious male solely by a strong effort of the need, and with the only object of discharging their responsibility to posterity. It can be unattainable to enter this delusion with correct candour and at due size in a piece designed for studying aloud within the home circle; all I can do is to refer the scholar to the books of any competent authority on the psychology of intercourse, say Ellis, or to the confidences (if they’re obtainable) of any complaisant bachelor of his acquaintance.
The glad tidings preached by Christ had been clearly extremely beneficial to ladies. He lifted them to equality earlier than the Lord when their very possession of souls was nonetheless doubted by the vast majority of rival theologians. Moreover, He esteemed them socially and set worth upon their sagacity, and one of the crucial disdained of their intercourse, a girl previously in public life, was amongst His common advisers. Mariolatry is thus on no account the invention of the mediaeval popes, as Protestant theologians would have us imagine. On the opposite, it’s plainly discernible within the Four Gospels. What the mediaeval popes truly invented (or, to be exact, reinvented, for they merely borrowed the weather of it from St. Paul) was the doctrine of ladies’s inferiority, the exact reverse of the factor credited to them. Committed, for sound causes of self-discipline, to the celibacy of the clergy, they needed to assist it by depicting all visitors with ladies within the mild of a hazardous and ignominious enterprise. The consequence was the deliberate group and improvement of the idea of feminine triviality, lack of duty and normal looseness of thoughts. Woman turned a kind of satan, however with out the admired intelligence of the common demons. The look of ladies saints, nevertheless, provided a continuing and embarrassing criticism of this idiotic doctrine. If occasional ladies had been match to take a seat upon the appropriate hand of God—and so they had been usually proving it, and forcing the church to acknowledge it—then certainly all ladies couldn’t be as dangerous because the books made them out. There thus arose the idea of the angelic lady, the pure vestal; we see her at full size within the romances of mediaeval chivalry. What emerged in the long run was a kind of double doctrine, first that ladies had been devils and secondly that they had been angels. This preposterous dualism has merged, as now we have seen, right into a compromise dogma in fashionable instances. By that dogma it’s held, on the one hand, that ladies are unintelligent and immoral, and alternatively, that they’re free from all these weaknesses of the flesh which distinguish males. This, roughly talking, is the notion of the typical male numskull at the moment.
Christianity has thus each libelled ladies and flattered them, however with the load all the time on the facet of the libel. It is subsequently, at backside, their enemy, as the faith of Christ, now wholly extinct, was their pal. And as they steadily throw off the shackles which have certain them for a thousand years they present appreciation of the actual fact. Women, certainly, usually are not naturally spiritual, and they’re rising much less and fewer spiritual as 12 months chases 12 months. Their unusual devotion has little if any pious exaltation in it; it’s a routine apply, power on them by the masculine notion that an look of holiness is correct to their lowly station, and a masculine feeling that church-going in some way retains them so as, and out of doings that may be much less reassuring. When they exhibit any real spiritual fervour, its sexual character is normally so apparent that even the vast majority of males are cognizant of it. Women by no means go flocking ecstatically to a church during which the agent of God within the pulpit is an aged asthmatic with a watchful spouse. When one finds them pushed to frenzies by the deserves of the saints, and weeping over the sorrows of the heathen, and dashing out to haul the entire vicinage as much as grace, and spending hours on their knees in hysterical abasement earlier than the heavenly throne, it’s fairly protected to imagine, even with out an precise go to, that the ecclesiastic who has labored the miracle is a good and toothsome fellow, and a very good deal extra aphrodisiacal than discovered. All the good preachers to ladies in fashionable instances have been males of suave and ingratiating behavior, and the good majority of them, from Henry Ward Beecher up and down, have been taken, quickly or late, in transactions way more appropriate to the boudoir than to the footstool of the Almighty. Their well-known killings have all the time been made among the many silliest kind of ladies—the type, briefly, who fall so wanting the traditional acumen of their intercourse that they’re bemused by mere magnificence in males.
Such ladies are in a minority, and so the intercourse exhibits a very good deal fewer spiritual lovers per mille than the intercourse of sentiment and perception. Attending, a number of years in the past, the gladiatorial exhibits of the Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday, the celebrated American pulpit-clown, I used to be always struck by the good preponderance of males within the pen dedicated to the saved. Men of all ages and in monumental numbers got here swarming to the altar, loudly bawling for assist in opposition to their sins, however the ladies had been something however quite a few, and the few who appeared had been mainly both chlorotic adolescents or pathetic outdated Saufschwestern. For six nights working I sat straight beneath the gifted exhorter with out seeing a single feminine convert of what statisticians name the child-bearing age—that’s, the age of most intelligence and attraction. Among the male simpletons bagged by his yells throughout this time had been the president of a railroad, half a dozen wealthy bankers and retailers, and the previous governor of an American state. But not a lady of comparable place or dignity. Not a lady that any self-respecting bachelor would care to chuck underneath the chin.
This cynical view of non secular emotionalism, and with it of the entire inventory of ecclesiastical balderdash, might be accountable, no less than partially, for the reluctance of ladies to enter upon the sacerdotal profession. In these Christian sects which nonetheless bar them from the pulpit—normally on the imperfectly hid floor that they don’t seem to be equal to its alleged calls for upon the morals and the mind—one by no means hears of them protesting in opposition to the prohibition; they’re fairly content material to depart the degrading imposture to males, who’re higher fitted for it by expertise and conscience. And in these baroque sects, mainly American, which admit them they present no eagerness to placed on the stole and chasuble. When the primary clergywoman appeared within the United States, it was predicted by alarmists that males can be pushed out of the pulpit by the brand new competitors. Nothing of the type has occurred, neither is it in prospect. The complete corps of feminine divines within the nation is likely to be herded into one small room. Women, when literate in any respect, are far too clever to make efficient ecclesiastics. Their sharp sense of actuality is in limitless opposition to the entire sacerdotal masquerade, and their cynical humour stands in opposition to the snorting that’s inseparable from pulpit oratory.
Those ladies who enter upon the spiritual life are virtually invariably moved by some motive distinct from mere pious irritation. It is a commonplace, certainly, that, in Catholic international locations, ladies are pushed into convents by financial concerns or by disasters of amour far oftener than they’re drawn there by the hope of heaven. Read the lives of the feminine saints, and you will notice what number of of them tried marriage and failed at it earlier than ever they turned to faith. In Protestant lands only a few ladies undertake it as a occupation in any respect, and among the many few a secular impulse is nearly all the time seen. The woman who’s out of the blue overcome by a want to minister to the heathen in international lands is almost invariably discovered, on inspection, to be a woman harbouring a idea that it might be agreeable to marry some heroic missionary. In level of reality, she duly marries him. At house, maybe, she has discovered it unattainable to get a husband, however within the remoter marches of China, Senegal and Somaliland, with no white competitors current, it’s equally unattainable to fail.
What stays of the alleged piety of ladies is little greater than a social behavior, bolstered in most communities by a paucity of different and extra inviting divertissements. If you may have ever noticed the ladies of Spain and Italy at their devotions you needn’t be advised how a lot the worship of God could also be a mere excuse for rest and gossip. These ladies, of their each day lives, are surrounded by a formidable community of mediaeval taboos; their regular human want for ease and freedom in intercourse is opposed by masculine mistrust and superstition; they meet no strangers; they see and listen to nothing new. In the home of the Most High they escape from that vexing routine. Here they might brush shoulders with a crowd. Here, so to talk, they might crane their psychological necks and stretch their non secular legs. Here, above all, they might come into some kind of contact with males comparatively extra affable, cultured and charming than their husbands and fathers—to wit, with the rev. clergy.
Elsewhere in Christendom, although ladies usually are not fairly so relentlessly watched and penned up, they really feel a lot the identical want of selection and pleasure, and each are likewise on faucet within the temples of the Lord. No one, I’m positive, want be advised that the typical missionary society or church stitching circle isn’t primarily a non secular group. Its precise function is exactly that of the absurd golf equipment and secret orders to which the decrease and least resourceful lessons of males belong: it gives a way of refreshment, of self-expression, of non-public show, of political manipulation and boasting, and, if the pastor occurs to be attention-grabbing, of discreet and virtually lawful intrigue. In the course of a life largely dedicated to the research of pietistic phenomena, I’ve by no means met a single lady who cared an genuine rattling for the precise heathen. The attraction of their salvation is all the time virtually purely social. Women go to church for a similar motive that farmers and convicts go to church.
Finally, there’s the aesthetic lure. Religion, in most components of Christendom, holds out the one bait of magnificence that the inhabitants are ever cognizant of. It gives music, dim lights, comparatively formidable structure, eloquence, formality and thriller, the caressing meaninglessness that’s on the coronary heart of poetry. Women are way more conscious of such issues than males, who’re ordinarily fairly as devoid of aesthetic sensitiveness as so many oxen. The angle of the everyday man towards magnificence in its numerous kinds is, the truth is, an angle of suspicion and hostility. He doesn’t regard a murals as merely inert and silly; he regards it as, in some indefinable manner, positively offensive. He sees the artist as knowledgeable voluptuary and scoundrel, and would no extra belief him in his family than he would belief a colored clergyman in his hen-yard. It was males, and never ladies, who invented such sordid and literal faiths as these of the Mennonites, Dunkards, Wesleyans and Scotch Presbyterians, with their antipathy to stunning ritual, their obscene buttonholing of God, their nice expertise for decreasing the ineffable thriller of faith to a mere bawling of idiots. The regular lady, in as far as she has any faith in any respect, strikes irresistibly towards Catholicism, with its poetical obscurantism. The evangelical Protestant sects have a tough time holding her. She can no extra be an precise Methodist than a gentleman is usually a Methodist.
This inclination towards magnificence, in fact, is dismissed by the typical male blockhead as not more than a feeble sentimentality. The reality is that it’s exactly the other. It is definitely not sentimentality to be moved by the stately and mysterious ceremony of the mass, and even, say, by these timid imitations of it which one observes in sure Protestant church buildings. Such proceedings, no matter their defects from the standpoint of a pure aesthetic, are in any respect occasions vastly extra stunning than any of the personal acts of the people who participate in them. They raise themselves above the barren utilitarianism of on a regular basis life, and no much less above the maudlin sentimentalities that males search pleasure in. They supply a way of escape, handy and alluring, from that sordid routine of thought and occupation which ladies revolt in opposition to so pertinaciously.
I’ve mentioned that the faith preached by Jesus (now wholly extinct on the planet) was extremely beneficial to ladies. This was not saying, in fact, that ladies have repaid the praise by adopting it. They are, the truth is, detached Christians within the primitive sense, simply as they’re dangerous Christians within the antagonistic fashionable sense, and significantly on the facet of ethics. If they really settle for the renunciations commanded by the Sermon on the Mount, it’s only in an effort to flout their substance underneath cowl of their look. No lady is actually humble; she is merely politic. No lady, with a free selection earlier than her, chooses self-immolation; probably the most she genuinely needs in that route is a spectacular martyrdom. No lady delights in poverty. No lady yields when she will be able to prevail. No lady is actually meek.
In their sensible ethics, certainly, ladies pay little heed to the precepts of the Founder of Christianity, and the actual fact has handed into proverb. Their gentleness, just like the so-called honour of males, is seen solely in conditions which provide them no menace. The second a lady finds herself confronted by an antagonist genuinely harmful, both to her personal safety or to the well-being of these underneath her safety—say a baby or a husband—she shows a bellicosity which stops at nothing, nevertheless outrageous. In the courts of legislation one sometimes encounters a male extremist who tells the reality, the entire reality and nothing however the reality, even when it’s in opposition to his trigger, however no such lady has ever been on view for the reason that days of Justinian. It is, certainly, an axiom of the bar that ladies invariably lie upon the stand, and the entire effort of a barrister who has one for a shopper is dedicated to protecting her inside bounds, that the obtuse suspicions of the male jury is probably not unduly aroused. Women litigants virtually all the time win their instances, not, as is often assumed, as a result of the jurymen fall in love with them, however merely and solely as a result of they’re clear-headed, resourceful, implacable and with out qualms.
What is right here seen within the halls of justice, within the face of an unlimited technical gear for combating lying, is ten instances extra apparent in freer fields. Any man who’s so unlucky as to have a critical controversy with a lady, say within the departments of finance, theology or amour, should inevitably carry away from it a way of getting handed by means of a harmful and virtually ugly expertise. Women not solely chew within the clinches; they chew even in open combating; they’ve a dental attain, so to talk, of fantastic size. No assault is so determined that they won’t undertake it, as soon as they’re aroused; no system is so unfair and horrifying that it stays them. In my early days, needing to enhance my prose, I served for a 12 months or in order reporter for a newspaper in a police courtroom, and through that point I heard maybe 4 hundred instances of so-called wife-beating. The husbands, of their defence, virtually invariably pleaded justification, and a few of them advised such tales of studied atrocity on the home fireplace, each psychic and bodily, that the discovered Justice of the Peace discharged them with tears in his eyes and the very catchpolls within the courtroom needed to blow their noses. Many extra males than ladies go insane, and lots of extra married males than single males. The reality puzzles nobody who has had the identical alternative that I needed to discover out what goes on, 12 months in and 12 months out, behind the doorways of apparently glad properties. A lady, if she hates her husband (and lots of of them do), could make life so bitter and obnoxious to him that even loss of life upon the gallows appears candy by comparability. This hatred, in fact, is usually, and maybe virtually invariably, fairly justified. To be the spouse of an unusual man, certainly, is an expertise that should be very onerous to bear. The hollowness and self-importance of the guy, his petty meanness and stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour—all these items should revolt any lady above the bottom. To be the article of the oafish affections of such a creature, even when they’re trustworthy and profound, can’t be anticipated to present any real pleasure to a lady of sense and refinement. His efficiency as a gallant, as Honor de Balzac way back noticed, unescapably suggests a gorilla’s efforts to play the violin. Women survive the tragicomedy solely by dint of their nice capability for play-acting. They are capable of act so realistically that always they deceive even themselves; the typical lady’s contentment, certainly, is not more than a tribute to her histrionism. But there should be innumerable revolts in secret, even so, and one generally wonders that so few ladies, with the factor so facile and so protected, poison their husbands. Perhaps it’s not fairly as uncommon as important statistics make it out; the deathrate amongst husbands could be very a lot increased than amongst wives. More than as soon as, certainly, I’ve gone to the funeral of an acquaintance who died out of the blue, and noticed a curious glitter within the eyes of the inconsolable widow.
Even on this age of emancipation, regular ladies have few critical transactions in life save with their husbands and potential husbands; the enterprise of marriage is their dominant concern from adolescence to senility. When they step outdoors their recurring circle they present the identical alert and keen wariness that they exhibit inside it. A person who has dealings with them should hold his wits about him, and even when he’s most cautious he’s usually flabbergasted by their sudden and unconscionable forays. Whenever lady goes into commerce she rapidly will get a status as a pointy dealer. Every little city in America has its Hetty Green, every sweating blood from turnips, every the phobia of all of the male usurers of the neighbourhood. The man who tackles such an amazon of barter takes his fortune into his arms; he has little extra likelihood of success in opposition to the female approach in enterprise than he has in opposition to the female approach in marriage. In each arenas the benefit of ladies lies of their freedom from sentimentality. In enterprise they deal with themselves wholly to their very own revenue, and provides no thought no matter to the hopes, aspirations and amour propre of their antagonists. And within the duel of intercourse they fence, to not make factors, however to disable and disarm. A person, when he succeeds in throwing off a lady who has tried to marry him, all the time carries away a maudlin sympathy for her in her defeat and dismay. But nobody ever heard of a lady who pitied the poor fellow whose trustworthy ardour she had discovered it expedient to spurn. On the opposite, ladies take enjoyment of such clownish agonies, and exhibit them proudly, and boast about them to different ladies.
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Men, as each one is aware of, are disposed to query this superior intelligence of ladies; their egoism calls for the denial, and they’re seldom reflective sufficient to get rid of it by logical and evidential evaluation. Moreover, as we will see a bit afterward, there’s a sure specious look of soundness of their place; they’ve pressured upon ladies a synthetic character which nicely conceals their actual character, and girls have discovered it worthwhile to encourage the deception. But although each regular man thus cherishes the soothing unction that he’s the mental superior of all ladies, and notably of his spouse, he always provides the mislead his pretension by consulting and deferring to what he calls her instinct.
That is to say, he is aware of by expertise that her judgment in lots of issues of capital concern is extra delicate and looking out than his personal, and, being disinclined to accredit this higher sagacity to a extra competent intelligence, he takes refuge behind the doctrine that it is because of some impenetrable and intangible expertise for guessing appropriately, some half mystical tremendous sense, some imprecise (and, in essence, infra-human) intuition.
The true nature of this alleged intuition, nonetheless, is revealed by an examination of the conditions which encourage a person to name it to his support. These conditions don’t come up out of the purely technical issues which are his every day concern, however out of the rarer and extra basic, and therefore enormously harder issues which beset him solely at lengthy and irregular intervals, and so supply a check, not of his mere capability for being drilled, however of his capability for real ratiocination.
No man, I take it, save one consciously inferior and hen-pecked, would seek the advice of his spouse about hiring a clerk, or about extending credit score to some paltry buyer, or about some routine piece of tawdry swindling; however not even essentially the most egoistic man would fail to sound the sentiment of his spouse about taking a companion into his enterprise, or about standing for public workplace, or about combating unfair and ruinous competitors, or about marrying off their daughter. Such issues are of huge significance; they lie on the basis of well-being; they name for one of the best thought that the person confronted by them can muster; the perils hidden in a incorrect resolution overcome even the clamors of vainness. It is in such conditions that the superior psychological grasp of ladies is of apparent utility, and needs to be admitted. It is right here that they rise above the insignificant sentimentalities, superstitions and formulae of males, and apply to the enterprise their singular expertise for separating the looks from the substance, and so train what is known as their instinct.
Intuition? With all respect, bosh! Then it was instinct that led Darwin to work out the speculation of pure choice. Then it was instinct that fabricated the gigantically advanced rating of “Die Walkure.” Then it was instinct that satisfied Columbus of the existence of land to the west of the Azores. All this instinct of which a lot transcendental garbage is merchanted is not any extra and at least intelligence—intelligence so eager that it might probably penetrate to the hidden fact by way of essentially the most formidable wrappings of false semblance and manner, and so little corrupted by sentimental prudery that it is the same as the much more tough job of hauling that fact out into the sunshine, in all its bare hideousness. Women resolve the bigger questions of life appropriately and shortly, not as a result of they’re fortunate guessers, not as a result of they’re divinely impressed, not as a result of they practise a magic inherited from savagery, however merely and solely as a result of they’ve sense.
They see at a look what most males couldn’t see with searchlights and telescopes; they’re at grips with the necessities of an issue earlier than males have completed debating its mere externals. They are the supreme realists of the race. Apparently illogical, they’re the possessors of a uncommon and delicate super-logic. Apparently whimsical, they hold to the reality with a tenacity which carries them by way of each section of its incessant, jellylike shifting of kind. Apparently unobservant and simply deceived, they see with vivid and horrible eyes. In males, too, the identical cruel perspicacity generally exhibits itself—males acknowledged to be extra aloof and uninflammable than the overall—males of particular expertise for the logical—sardonic males, cynics. Men, too, generally have brains. But that may be a uncommon, uncommon man, I enterprise, who’s as steadily clever, as always sound in judgment, as little postpone by appearances, as the typical ladies of forty-eight.
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Tao Bakare
As the global pandemic continue to hold the world to ransom, nations all over the world continue to search for the ‘messiah vaccine’. Despite the fact that Covid-19 has successfully exposed even the supposed perfect and big countries in terms of inadequate health facilities, Cuba have come to the rescue.
However, Nigeria remains wanted in the battle for cure as the President have never for once failed to disappoint Nigerians.
Meanwhile, Ogun State, in the South-West region, which is one of the hotspot of the virus, has failed woefully in responding to the deadly situation.
Since the outbreak of the pandemic in Nigeria, Ogun State has recorded over three cases, while the state government has done almost nothing, but, mere cheap talk on radio, television and print. The governor has announced several millions of naira, while in reality, nothing is there to show for it.
Recently, Governor Dapo Abiodun announced that the state is working on an isolation centre in Ikenne Local Government. Good news, I am writing this piece from Ikenne right now, there is nothing in Ikenne. I call on Governor Dapo Abiodun to prove me wrong.
Also, with the state housing one of the major (but poorly funded) teaching hospitals in Nigeria, Olabisi Onabanjo University Teaching Hospital, Sagamu, one would think that the state will be more active in response to the pandemic. But the fact is that Olabisi Onabanjo University Teaching Hospital cannot even boast of a broken ventilator, let alone a functional one. Shame on the state government.
It is also sacrosanct to note that the welfare of health workers in Ogun State especially at Olabisi Onabanjo University Teaching Hospital is nothing to write home about. Apart from the fact that these ‘warriors’ have to work restless shifts of about 10 hours everyday, they do not even have enough items to discharge their duties properly. The sad news is, it is in OOUTH that nurses run out of face masks, gloves and sanitiders amidst a deadly virus.
Another major point of call is the remuneration of these health workers. The administration of former governor, Ibikunle Amosun, paid just four months out of the nine months arrears owed workers by the Gbenga Daniel regime still the present regime of Dapo Abiodun continue to hover around the same trend.
Of course, it is reasonable enough that amidst this pandemic, the welfare of our health workers should be held paramount by any reasonable government. But in Dapo Abiodun’s Ogun State, the shadow is the reality.
On arrival of Dapo Abiodun’s administration, thousands of promises were made to the people but a lot has remained unfulfilled.
The situation in Ogun State is no different from scenes in horror movies as both doctors and nurses are lamenting underpayment and little or no remuneration at all.
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A lot of legal issues are bound to arise as an aftermath of the outbreak of Coronavirus otherwise referred to as COVID-19. There is therefore a need to shed light on some of the issues that may arise and how to navigate them. This article will x-ray the rights of patients, the rights of health workers and the basic minimum obligations of the government.
The Code of Medical Ethics in Nigeria 2008 lists acts that constitute professional negligence. Rule 29.4 of the Code outlines some of these acts as follows:-
a) Failure to attend promptly to a patient requiring urgent attention when the practitioner was in a position to do so;
b) Manifesting incompetence in the assessment of a patient;
c) Making an incorrect diagnosis particularly when the clinical features were so glaring that no reasonable skillful practitioner could have failed to notice them;
d) Failure to advise, or proffering wrong advice to a patient on the risk involved in a particular operation or course of treatment, especially if such an operation or course of treatment is likely to result in serious side effects like deformity or loss of organ, or function;
e) Failure to obtain the informed consent of the patient before proceeding on any surgical procedure or course of treatment when such consent was necessary;
f) Making a mistake in treatment e.g. amputation of the wrong limb, carelessness that results in the termination of a pregnancy, prescribing the wrong drug, or dosage in error for a correctly diagnosed ailment, etc;
g) Failure to refer, or transfer a patient in good time, when such a referral or transfer was necessary;
h) Failure to do anything that ought reasonably to have been done under any circumstance for the good of the patient;
i) Failure to see a patient as often as his medical condition warrants or to make appropriate comments in the case notes of the practitioner’s observations and prescribed treatment during such visits. It also includes failure to communicate with the patient or with his relatives as may be necessary with regards to any developments, progress or prognosis in the patient’s condition.
Rule 11.2 of the 2008 Code of Medical Ethics in Nigeria provides that, “A physician shall preserve absolute confidentiality on all he knows about his patient even after the patient has died.”
Rule 44 of the Code of Medical Ethics has extensive provisions on Confidentiality and when disclosure of information can be made. The Rule provides in part that:
“Disclosure of information on the patient by the doctor can only be made following an informed consent of the patient in writing. It is clear that the ethic covers even such information as induced abortion, venereal disease, attempted suicide, concealed birth and drug dependence but would exclude situations in which a discretionary breach of confidentiality is necessary to protect the patient or the community from danger and this must be made clear to the patient at the time of the confidential disclosure. Where statutory notification of disease is involved, the consent of the patient is not required.”
Confidentiality: To Disclose Identity Of Covid-19 Patients Or Not To Disclose?
COVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by a newly discovered coronavirus. Most people infected with the COVID-19 will experience mild to moderate respiratory illness and recover without requiring special treatment. Older people, and those with underlying medical problems like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease, and cancer are more likely to develop serious illness.[1]
The Federal Ministry of Health confirmed the first case of COVID-19 in Nigeria on the 27th of February 2020. It is the case of an Italian citizen who works in Nigeria and returned from Milan, Italy to Lagos, Nigeria on the 25th of February 2020. In reaction to the report, the social was divided between those who want the name of the Italian disclosed and those that preferred it remains confidential. The outcry was even more when the Chief of Staff to the President tested positive according to reports from various media houses[2], but the Minister of Health decided to keep mute on the identity of the President’s aide who contacted the virus, citing confidentiality.
It will ordinarily be wrong to disclose the medical status of someone infected with COVID-19, for instancethe case of the Italian who was the index case. However in view of the proviso to Rule 44 of the Code of Medical Ethics 2008 which provides that a discretionary breach of confidentiality is necessary in order to protect the community from danger, I am of the view that the test results of popular figures who hold strategic offices like the Chief of Staff to the President or a Governor must be disclosed to guaranty public safety. This is necessary in view of the countless number of people from all works of life they come in contact with on a daily basis. It will be correct to have made their status public in the overriding interest of the public, since it will enable those who have come in contact with them isolate, just like we have seen in the cases of the British Prime Minister, the Bauchi State Govenor, Prince Charles, the First Lady of Canada and many more. We must commend those who announced their status in public themselves-it is the best thing to do in the interest of humanity
The World Health Organization (WHO) provides additional guidelines for the management of coronavirus patients specifically.[3]
Health workers should:
•follow established occupational safety and health procedures, avoid exposing others to health and safety risks and participate in employer-provided occupational safety and health training;
•use provided protocols to assess, triage and treat patients;
•treat patients with respect, compassion and dignity;
•maintain patient confidentiality;
•swiftly follow established public health reporting procedures of suspect and confirmed cases;
•provide or reinforce accurate infection prevention and control and public health information, including to concerned people who have neither symptoms nor risk;
•put on, use, take off and dispose of personal protective equipment properly;
•self-monitor for signs of illness and self-isolate or report illness to managers, if it occurs;
•advise management if they are experiencing signs of undue stress or mental health challenges that require support interventions; and
•report to their immediate supervisor any situation which they have reasonable justification to believe presents an imminent and serious danger to life or health.
Doctors and health workers in Nigeria must endeavor to digest the guidelines in the Code of Medical Ethics as well as the WHO Guidelines for management of Coronavirus victims and ensure they work strictly by their provisions. A breach of these duties have dire consequences.
Options Available To Covid-19 Patients Who Are Victims Of Medical Negligence
A Coronavirus patient who has suffered medical negligence has a number of options:
1. He could file a complaint with the regulatory body (e.g. the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria, in the cases involving a Doctor). The Doctor will in the first instance be investigated by the Medical and Dental Practitioners Investigation Panel, after which he will be tried by the Medical and Dental Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal. If found culpable, the Doctor may be warned, suspended from practicing for a period not exceeding 6 months or in very serious cases, have his name can be removed from the Register of Medical Practitioners. The Medical and Dental Practitioners’ Disciplinary Tribunal does not award monetary damages.
2. A suit can be filed against the Medical Doctor, the Hospital, Agency or Government in the High Court for Medical Negligence and monetary damages will be awarded if the Defendant(s) are found culpable.
3. If there is an element of Crime, a report could be made to the Police who would conduct Criminal Investigation and where the investigation reveals gross negligence, recklessness or wanton disregard for life of the victim, the police can prosecute or forward the case file to the office of the Attorney General of the State for possible prosecution in deserving cases.
A Need To Do More For Doctors And Other Professionals In The Health Sector
Health workers are at the front line of any outbreak response and as such are exposed to hazards that put them at risk of infection with an outbreak pathogen (in this case COVID-19). Hazards include pathogen exposure, long working hours, psychological distress, fatigue, occupational burnout, stigma, and physical and psychological violence.
During the outbreak of Ebola more than 500 health care workers died in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra-Leone alone. We also lost some of our finest doctors and health workers to the disease in Nigeria, the most prominent being Dr. Stella Adadevoh, who is credited with having curbed a wider spread of the Ebola virus in Nigeria by placing the index patient, Patrick Sawyer, in quarantine despite pressures from the Liberian government. As we speak, The coronavirus is waging a war of attrition against health care workers throughout the world, but nowhere is it winning more battles at the moment than in Italy and in Spain, where protective equipment and tests have been in severely short supply for weeks. In Spain 13.6% (6500) of those affected with the coronavirus are health workers and in Italy 10% (7400) of those affected with the virus are health workers. [4] In New York dozens of health workers have been affected with the virus, while hundreds are in quarantine.[5] According to reports filtering in as the time of concluding this article, three health workers have been infected with COVID-19 in Abuja, Nigeria.[6]
Human Rights Watch research into health system collapse in Hungary and Venezuela suggests the nations’ mismanaged, underfunded, and understaffed public healthcare system is poorly equipped to handle a COVID-19 outbreak. Patients and medical experts described a lack of basic hygiene protocol, lack of isolation rooms, and a shortage of health professionals, doctors and nurses, and medical supplies in general.
The situation is not too different in Nigeria at the moment and except something drastic is done we might be witnessing a devastating effect of the pandemic. Nigeria’s, public health capacity has been diminished by large scale public sector corruption. Medical personnel lack surgical masks and local supplies have been diverted and shipped to other markets partly due to corruption. Many states are ill-prepared to combat the impeding surge in patients. A senior health worker with a government hospital in Abuja, in an interview with Sahara Reporters, lamented the lack of quality Personal Protective Equipment for them, adding that government must invest in the protection of health workers at the frontline of the battle against the virus. He said, “The unfortunate thing is that the government is not providing us with what to work with. It is sad that our PPE are not up to the world standard and can be penetrated by viruses. Some of us (health workers) have to use our personal funds to purchase gloves as we do not trust the ones government supplied. Nigerians should please remember us in their prayers and government should provide us with what we really need to work.” [7]
There was report that in Bauchi State a Coronavirus patient rejected the isolation centre at the Bauchi Specialist Hospital and went back home while describing it as “too dirty”.[8]
It is disappointing to hear that the hazard allowance for doctors and health workers is N5,000 per month in Nigeria. The amount is very paltry compared to the risks and the attendant emotional and psychological stress suffered by the health-care workers (HWCs) particularly during monumental outbreaks like this. Unfortunately, when a patient is mismanaged, these doctors and health workers bear the burden of paying huge compensation and sometimes losing their jobs. More importantly, the brain-drain in the health sector is monumental, almost all my friends who are doctors, work abroad. Unfortunately, there are concerted efforts by the US Government to engage foreign Doctors to further fortify its health work force as COVID-19 ravages. Many young Nigerian doctors are already considering the offers because the Nigerian government has paid little attention to their welfare and the welfare of the general health workforce. To stop the exodus of our doctors, who are already in short supply, the government must act fast by improving their welfare packages in line with acceptable international standards.
The psychological needs of doctors and health workers are also often ignored. Unsafe working conditions contribute to health worker attrition in many countries due to work-related illness and injury and the resulting fear of health workers of occupational infection, including from HIV and Tuberculosis. The 2006 World Health Report – Working Together for Health reported on a severe health workforce crisis in fifty-seven countries, most of them in Africa and Asia. [9]
Protecting the occupational health of health workers is critical to having an adequate workforce of trained and healthy health personnel. Governments at the Federal and State levels are urged to do more by complying fully with the World Health Organization’s guidelines regarding the Rights of Health Workers while combating COVID-19. Some of the rights are:
· assume overall responsibility to ensure that all necessary preventive and protective measures are taken to minimize occupational safety and health risks;
· provide information, instruction and training on occupational safety and health, including; Refresher training on infection prevention and control(IPC); and Use, putting on, taking off and disposal of personal protective equipment(PPE);
· provide adequate IPC and PPE supplies (masks, gloves, goggles, gowns, hand sanitizer, soap and water, cleaning supplies) in sufficient quantity to healthcare or other staff caring for suspected or confirmed COVID-19 patients, such that workers do not incur expenses for occupational safety and health requirements;
· not be required to return to a work situation where there is continuing orserious danger to life or health, until the employer has taken any necessary remedial action;
· allow workers to exercise the right to remove themselves from a work situation that they have reasonable justification to believe presents an imminent and serious danger to their life or health. When a health worker exercises this right, they shall be protected from any undue consequences;
· honour the right to compensation, rehabilitation and curative services if infected with COVID-19 following exposure in the workplace. This would be considered occupational exposure and resulting illness would be considered an occupational disease,
· provide access to mental health and counselling resources; and
· enable co-operation between management and workers and/or their representatives. Etc.
In conclusion, professional care givers for COVID-19 patients should uphold four basic principles formulated by Beauchamp and Childress in their book ‘Principles of Biomedical Ethics’ in order to protect themselves from liability for negligence. The four basic principles are autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice.
Autonomy: People have the right to control what happens to their bodies. This principle simply means that an informed, competent adult patient can refuse or accept treatments, drugs, and surgeries according to their wishes. People have the right to control what happens to their bodies because they are free and rational. And these decisions must be respected by everyone, even if those decisions aren’t in the best interest of the patient.
Beneficence: All healthcare providers must strive to improve their patient’s health, to do the most good for the patient in every situation. But what is good for one patient may not be good for another, so each situation should be considered individually. And other values that might conflict with beneficence may need to be considered.
Non-maleficence: “First, do no harm” is the bedrock of medical ethics. In every situation, healthcare providers should avoid causing harm to their patients. You should also be aware of the doctrine of double effect, where a treatment intended for good unintentionally causes harm. This doctrine helps you make difficult decisions about whether actions with double effects can be undertaken.
Justice: The fourth principle demands that you should try to be as fair as possible when offering treatments to patients and allocating scarce medical resources. You should be able to justify your actions in every situation. For instance, it will amount to a professional misconduct for a Health-care Worker to remove a poor man from the ventilator because a Senator was rushed in.
Ahmed Adetola-Kazeem is a partner in Adetola-Kazeem Legal Practice and specializes in Medical and Health Law
Email: aadetolakazeem@gmail.com;aadetolakazeem@gaklp.com
[1] https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus#tab=tab_1(Accessed on the 28th of March 2020)
[2] https://businessday.ng/coronavirus/article/abba-kyari-tests-positive-for-coronavirus-buhari-negative/
https://www.channelstv.com/2020/03/24/buharis-chief-of-staff-abba-kyari-reportedly-tests-positive-for-coronavirus/ (Accessed on the 28th of March 2020)
[3] Coronavirus Disease (Covid-19) Outbreak: Rights, Roles and Responsibilities Of Health workers, Including Key Considerations For Occupational Safety And Health”. https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-rights-roles-respon-hw-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=bcabd401_0 (Accessed on the 26th of March 2020)
[4] https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/collapsing-virus-pummels-medics-spain-italy-69789413 (Accessed on 26th March 2020)
[5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/covid-19-hits-doctors-nurses-emts-threatening-health-system/2020/03/17/f21147e8-67aa-11ea-b313-df458622c2cc_story.html (Accessed on 28th of March 2020)
[6] http://saharareporters.com/2020/03/28/exclusive-two-nurses-one-doctor-infected-coronavirus-abuja-hospital
[7] Supra
[8] https://www.dailytrust.com.ng/coronavirus-patient-rejects-bauchi-isolation-centre-returns-home.html (Accessed on 28th March 2020)
[9] https://www.who.int/occupational_health/topics/hcworkers/en/(Accessed on 26th March 2020)
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A senior Nigerian Army officer, Maj. Gen. Olusegun Adeniyi, who headed Operation LAFIYA DOLE and spearheaded the fight against Boko Haram terrorists in the country’s North-East region, has reacted to his redeployment to the Nigerian Army Resource Centre as Senior Research Fellow by Chief of Army Staff, Lt Gen Tukur Yusuf Buratai.
The redeployment of Adeniyi and over 50 senior officers was announced in a statement on Tuesday.
SaharaReporters had earlier reported that Adeniyi was removed as commander of Operation LAFIYA DOLE for revealing in a viral video that troops fighting Boko Haram terrorists lacked weapons and credible intelligence to execute their mission.
FLASH: @HQNigerianArmy Removes General Adeniyi Who Disclosed Weakness of The Military Against Boko Haram In Leaked Video pic.twitter.com/7B2JZC5fwC
— Sahara Reporters (@SaharaReporters) March 31, 2020
In the viral video, Adeniyi was seen standing together with his men on the battle field and lamenting how the terrorists shelled their positions with heavy artillery and mortar bombs during an ambush where they recorded heavy casualty.
He disclosed that they lost several soldiers during the mission due to wrong intelligence provided by military authorities.
Reacting shortly after his redeployment on Tuesday, Adeniyi disclosed that the viral video was leaked by his orderly and his friend.
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BREAKING: Nigerian Army Removes General In Viral Video Asking For Weapons To Fight Boko Haram
In a message to some of his soldiers, he said that he had no regret over the leaked video because he served well and defended Nigeria’s territory with commitment.
He said, “I am posted and also a happy man. Nobody should send any long pitiable message to me.
“I have not failed, nor led irresponsibly. I have demanded your best which you gave.
“Video meant for ASA leaked by my orderly and his friend could not have been helped. For even that there is nothing to be bitter about.
“We all had fun fighting Boko Haram together. God bless you.”
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