The Man‐Made World
A religion which had attractions for the real human type is not therefore to be utterly despised by the male.
In modern history we may watch with increasing ease the slow, sure
progress of our growing humanness beneath the weakening shell of
an all‐male dominance. And in this field of what begins in the nurse as “discipline,” and ends on the scaffold as “punishment,” we can clearly see that blessed change.
What is the natural, the human attribute? What does this “Love,”
and “Do good,” and “Serve” mean? In the blundering old church, still androcentric, there was a great to‐do to carry out this doctrine, in elaborate symbolism. A set of beggars and cripples, gathered for the occasion, was exhibited, and kings and cardinals went solemnly
through the motions of serving them. As the English schoolboy phrased it, “Thomas Becket washed the feet of leopards.”
Service and love and doing good must always remain side issues in a male world. Service and love and doing good are the spirit of motherhood, and the essense of human life.
Human life is service, and is not combat. There you have the nature of the change now upon us.
What has the male mind made of Christianity?
Desire—to save one‘s own soul. Combat—with the Devil. Self‐
expression—the whole gorgeous outpouring of pageant and display,
from the jewels of the high priest‘s breastplate to the choir of mutilated men to praise a male Deity no woman may so serve.
What kind of mind can imagine a kind of god who would like a eunuch better than a woman?
For woman they made at last a place—the usual place—of
renunciation, sacrifice and service, the Sisters of Mercy and their kind; and in that loving service the woman soul has been content, not yearning for cardinal‘s cape or bishop‘s mitre.
All this is changing—changing fast. Everywhere the churches are broadening out into more service, and the service broadening out beyond a little group of widows and fatherless, of sick and in prison, 86
The Man‐Made World
to embrace its true field—all human life. In this new attitude, how shall we face the problems of crime?
Thus: “It is painfully apparent that a certain percentage of our people do not function properly. They perform antisocial acts. Why?
What is the matter with them?”
Then the heart and mind of society is applied to the question, and certain results are soon reached; others slowly worked toward.
First result. Some persons are so morally diseased that they must have hospital treatment. The world‘s last prison will be simply a hospital for moral incurables. They must by no means reproduce their kind,—that can be attended to at once. Some are morally diseased, but may be cured, and the best powers of society will be used to cure them. Some are only morally diseased because of the conditions in which they are born and reared, and here society can save millions at once.
An intelligent society will no more neglect its children than an intelligent mother will neglect her children; and will see as clearly that ill‐fed, ill‐dressed, ill‐taught and vilely associated little ones must grow up gravely injured.
As a matter of fact we make our crop of criminals, just as we make
our idiots, blind, crippled, and generally defective. Everyone is a baby first, and a baby is not a criminal, unless we make it so. It never would be,—in right conditions. Sometimes a pervert is born, as sometimes a two‐headed calf is born, but they are not common.
The older, simpler forms of crime we may prevent with case and despatch, but how of the new ones?—big, terrible, far‐reaching, wide‐spread crimes, for which we have as yet no names; and before
which our old system of anti‐personal punishment falls helpless?
What of the crimes of poisoning a community with bad food; of defiling the water; of blackening the air; of stealing whole forests?
What of the crimes of working little children; of building and renting tenements that produce crime and physical disease as well? What of
the crime of living on the wages of fallen women—of hiring men to
ruin innocent young girls; of holding them enslaved and selling them for profit? (These things are only “misdemeanors” in a man-made world!)