"I certainly have enough data now to be fair in my deduc- tion," Ellador said, on our home trip. "It has been awfully inter- esting, visiting your world. And coming back to your country now, with wider knowledge and a background of experience, I think I can be fairer to it. So if you're ready, we'll go back to where we left off that day I jumped to South America."
She turned over her book of notes on the United States and looked at me cheerfully.
"Homes," she said, "The Home, The American Home—and the homes of all the rest of the world, past and present "
I tucked the Kenwood rug closer about her feet, settled my own, and prepared to listen.
"Yes, ma'am. Here you and I, at great expense, have circled the habitable globe, been most everywhere except to Aus- tralasia and South Africa—spent a good year canvassing the U. S.—and if you're not ready to give us your diagnosis—and pre- scriptions—why, I shall lose faith in Herland!"
"Want it for the world—or just your country?" she asked serenely.
"Oh, well, give us both; you're capable of it. But not quite all at once—I couldn't take it in. America first, please."
"It's not so long," she began slowly. "Not if you generalize, safely. One could, of course, say that because the Jones chil- dren were let alone they spilled the ink, teased the dog, hurt the kitten, let the canary out, ate too much jam, soiled their clothes, pulled up the tulip bulbs, smeared the wall-paper, broke the china, tore the curtains—and so forth, and so forth, and so forth. And you could tell just how it happened in each case— that would take some time. Especially if you added a similar account of the Smith children and the Brown children and so on. But if you say: 'Neglected children are liable to be- come mischievous,' you've said it all."
"Don't be as short as that," I begged. "It would not be illuminating."
We spent many hours on the endless subject,—rich, fruitful hours, full of insight, simplification, and hope.
"I'm not so shocked as I was at first," she told me. "I've seen that Europe goes on being Europe even if each nation loses a million men—two million men. They'll grow again. * * * I see that all this horror is no new thing to the worldpoor world—poor, wretched, blind baby! But it's a sturdy baby for all that. It's Here—it has not died. * * *
"What seems to be the matter, speaking very generally, is this: People have not understood their own works—their social nature, that is. They have not understood—that's all."
"Stupid? Hopelessly stupid?" I asked.
"Not at all—not in the least—but here's the trouble: their minds were always filled up beforehand with what they used to believe. Talk about putting new wine in old bottles—it's putting old wine in new bottles that has kept the world back.
"You can see it all the way long," she pursued. "New life, con- tinually arising, new condition, but always the old, older, oldest ideas, theories, beliefs. Every nation, every race, hampered and hagridden by what it used to think, used to believe, used to know. And all the nice, fresh, eager, struggling children for- cibly filled up with the same old stuff. It is pretty terrible, Van. But it's so—funny —that I can stand it. In one way human misery is a joke—because you don't have to have it!
"Then you people came over to a New Continent and started a New Country, with a lot of New Ideas—yet you kept enough old ones to drown any country. No wonder you've splashed so much— just to keep above water."
I didn't say much. I wanted her to work it out, gradually. She was letting me see her do it. Of course, in this record I'm piecing together a great many talks, a great many ideas, and I'm afraid leaving out some. It was no light matter she had un- dertaken, even for a Herlander.
"This family and home idea is responsible for a great part of it," she said. "Not, as I find you quite generally believe, as a type and pattern of all that is good and lovely, but as a persist- ent primitive social group, interfering with the development of later groups. If you look at what you ought to have evolved by this time, it becomes fairly easy to see what is the matter.
"Take your own case—with its wonderful new start—a clean slate of a country, and a very good installation of people to be- gin with. A good religion, too, in essence, and a prompt appre- ciation of the need of being generally educated. Then your splendid political opening—the great wave of democracy pouring out into expression. Room for all, wealth for all. What should have been the result—easily? Why, Van—the proudest Yankee, Southerner, Westerner, that ever lived doesn't begin to estimate what your people might have done!
"What they have done is a good deal —but, Oh—what they might have done! You see, they didn't understand democracy. They began to play, but they didn't know the game. It was like a small child, running a big auto. Democracy calls for the con- scious intelligent co-ordinate action of all the people. Without it, it is like a partly paralyzed king.
"First you left out half the people— an awful mistake. You only gradually took in the other half. You saw dimly the need of education, but you didn't know what education was—'reading, writing, and arithmetic,' are needed, even in monarchies. You needed special education in the new social processs.
"Democracy calls for the understanding, recognition, and universal practise of social laws,—laws which are "natural," like those of physics and chemistry; but your religion—and your education, too— taught Authority—not real law. You couldn't make a good electrician on mere authority, could you? He has to understand, not merely obey. Neither can you so make the citizens of a democracy. Reverence for and submis- sion to authority are right in monarchies—wrong in democra- cies. When Demos is King he must learn to act for himself, not to do as he is told.
"And back of your Christian religion is the Hebrew; back of that—The Family. It all comes down to that absurd root error of the proprietary family."
We were easily at one in this view, but I had never related it to America's political shortcomings before.
"That old Boss Father is behind God," she went on calmly. "The personal concept of God as a father, with his special chil- dren, his benign patronage, his quick rage, long anger, and eternal vengeance ——" she shivered, "it is an ugly picture. "The things men have thought about God," she said slowly, "are a ghastly proof of the way they have previously behaved. As they have improved, their ideas of God have improved slowly.
"When Kings were established, they crystallized the whole thing, in plain sight, and you had Kings a very long time, you see—have them yet. Kings and Fathers, Bosses, Rulers, Masters, Overlords—it is all such a poor preparation for demo- cracy. Fathers and Kings and the Hebrew Deity are behind you and above you. Democracy is before you, around you; it is a thing to do. * * *
"You have to learn it by trying—there is no tradition, and no authority. It calls for brave, careful, continuous, scientific ex- periment, with record of progress, and prompt relinquishment of failures and mistakes. It is open in front, and in mo- tion—democracy is a going concern." (How a foreigner does love an idiom or a bit of slang! Even this Herland angel was not above it.)
"Now, you in young America had left off the King idea, for the most part. But you had the King's ancestor—the Father, the Absolute Boss, and you had a religion heavily weighted with that same basic concept. Moreover, as Protestants, bookwor- shippers, in default of a King, you must needs make a written ruler for yourselves, and that poor, blind, blessed baby, Demo- cracy, promptly made itself a Cast-Iron Constitution — and crawled under it."
That was something to chew on. It was so. It was undeniably so. We had done just that. We had been so anxious for "stabil- ity"—as if a young living thing could remain "stable"—the qual- ity of stones.
"You grew, in spite of it. You had to. The big wild land helped, the remoteness and necessity for individual action and continual experiment. The migration of the children helped."
"Migration of the children! What on earth do you mean, Ellador ?"
"Why, haven't you noticed? Hardly any of your children stay at home any more than they can help, any longer than they can help. And as soon as they are able they get off—as far as they can. They may love the old homestead—but they don't stay in it."
This was so, too.
"You see that steadily lightens up this old mistake about Authority. It is the change to the laboratory system of liv- ing—finding out how by doing it."
"It does hot seem to me that there is much 'authority' left in the American home," I urged. "All the immigrants complain of just that."
"Of course they do. Your immigrants, naturally, understand democracy even less than you do. You have all of you set the word 'Freedom' over the most intricately co-ordinated kind of political relation. You see the Authority method is so simple. 'It is an order!'—and you merely do it—no thought, no effort—no responsibility. God says so—the King or the captain says so—the Book says so —and back of it all, the Family, the Father-Boss. What's that nice story: 'Papa says so—and if he says so, it is so, if it ain't so!'"
"But, Ellador—really—there is almost none of that in the American family; surely you must have seen the difference ?"
"I have. In the oldest countries the most absolute Father- Boss—and family worship—the dead father being even more potent than the live ones. "Van, dear—the thing I cannot fully understand is this reverence people have for dead people. Why is it? How is it? Why is a man who wasn't much when he was alive anything more when he is dead? You do not really believe that people are dwindling and deteriorating from age to age, do you ?"
"That is precisely what we used to believe," I told her, "for the greater part of our history—for all of it really—the evolu- tion idea is still less than a centry old—in popular thought."
"But you Americans who are free, who are progressive, who are willing to change in most things—why do you still talk about what 'your fathers' said and did—as if it was so important?"
"It's because of our recent birth as a nation, I suppose," I answered, and the prodigious struggle those fathers of ours made—the Pilgrim Fathers, the Church fathers, the Revolution- ary fathers—and now our own immediate fathers in the Civil War.
"But why is it that you only reverence them politically—and perhaps, religiously ! Nobody quotes them in business meth- ods, in art, or science, or medecine, or mechanics. Why do you assume that they were so permanently wise in knowing how to govern a huge machine-run, electrically-connected, city-
dominated nation, which they were unable even to imagine ? It's so foolish, Van."
It is foolish. I admitted it. But I told her, perhaps a little testily, that I didn't see what our homes had to do with it.
Then that wise lady said sweet, kind, discriminating things about us till I felt better, and came back with smooth clarity to the subject.
"Please understand, dear, that I am not talking about mar- riage—the beauty and joy and fruitful power of this dear union are a growing wonder to me. You know that—!"
I knew that. She made me realize it, with a praising heart, every day.
No, this monogamous marriage of yours is distinctly right—when it is a real one. It is the making a business of it that I object to."
"You mean the women kept at housework?"
"That's part of it—about a third of it. I mean the whole thing: the men saddling themselves for life with the task of feeding the greedy thing, and the poor children heavily stamped with it before they can escape. That's the worst—"
She stopped at that for a little. So far she had not entered on the condition of women, or of children, in any thorough way. She had notes enough—volumes.
"What I'm trying to establish is this," she said slowly, "the connection between what seem to me errors in your social fab- ric, and the natural result of these in your political action. The family relation is the oldest—the democratic relation is the newest. The family relation demands close, interconnected love, authority and service. The democratic relation demands universal justice and good will, the capacity for the widest co- ordinate action in the common interest, together with a high individual responsibility. People have to be educated for this—it is not easy. Your homes require the heaviest drain on personal energy, on personal loyalty, and .leave a small per- centage either of feeling or action for the State."
"You don't expect everyone to be a statesman, do you?" "Why not? Everyone must be—in a democracy."
"But we should not make better citizens if we neglected our homes, should we?"
"Does it make a man a better soldier if he stays at home—to protect his family ? Oh, Van, dear, don't you see ? These poor foolish fighting men are at least united, co-ordinated, making a common effort for a common cause. They are—or think they are—protecting their homes together."
"I suppose you mean socialism again," I rather sulkily sug- gested, but she took it very sweetly.
"We isolated Herlanders never heard of Socialism," she answered. "We had no German-Jewish economist to explain to us in interminable, and, to most people, uncomprehensible pro- lixity, the reasons why it was better to work together for com- mon good. Perhaps 'the feminine mind' did not need so much explanation of so obvious a fact. We comothers, in our isola- tion, with a small visible group of blood relations (without any Father-Boss) just saw that our interests were in common. We couldn't help seeing it.
"Stop a bit, Sister," said I. "Are you insinuating that Mr. Father is at the bottom of the whole trouble? Are you going to be as mean as Adam and lay all the blame on him ?'
She laughed gleefully. "Not quite. I won't curse him. I won't suggest ages of hideous injustice to all men because of the the alleged transgression of one man. No, it is not Mr. Father I am blaming, nor his fatherhood—for that is evidently the high crown of physiological transmission." (Always these Herland women bowed their heads at what they called the holy mystery of fatherhood, and always we men were—well—not completely pleased.)
