Arthur Mee's talks to girls

ARTHUR MEE'S
=1 TALKS TO GIRLS

100

Presented to the

LIBRARY of the

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

from
the Library of

THE REVEREND DOCTOR
R. STUART JOHNSTON

ARTHUR MEE'S
TALKS TO GIRLS

UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME

ARTHUR MEE'S TALKS TO BOYS
Published by H odder & Stoughton

ARTHUR MEE'S
TALKS TO GIRLS

By the Editor of The

Children s Newspaper

Being the Revised Edition of
Arthur Mee's Letters to Girls

HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LIMITED LONDON

M jde and Printed in Great Britain
Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and

CONTENTS

The Years of Your Life .... 7

Talks

TO A KING'S DAUGHTER . n

TO THE GIRL WHO IS WONDERING . 26

TO THE GIRL WHO LOVES HER HOME 39

TO THE GIRL IN SEARCH OF PLEASURE 51

TO THE GIRL WHO THINKS AND FEELS 63

TO THE GIRL WHO WILL HAVE A VOTE 75

TO THE GIRL WHO WILL MARRY SOME

DAY 85

TO THE GIRL WHO HAS MADE HER

CHOICE 96

TO THE GIRL ON THE HIGHWAY OF

LIFE 107

TO THE GIRL IN SEARCH OF

OPPORTUNITY. . . .119

TO THE GIRL WHO BRINGS COMFORT

IN PAIN 129

TO THE GIRL WHO LOVES THE NOBLEST 141

The Days of Our Lives .... 154

5

THE YEARS OF YOUR LIFE

THEY lie behind you, the years of your
childhood, the saddest years this world
of ours has known. They lie in front of
you, the years of your womanhood, the
dawning years of the greatest hope that
this world has.

You will not remember very well, per
haps, the Great Shadow that fell upon the
land we call our Home, but you will come
to be proud of her as you read of those
days in the years to come. She is the
loveliest little land beneath the sun, and
you are her child. Out of her are you
made ; out of her beauty, her strength,
her sweet simplicity.

The truth is that no kingdom on the
Earth can match the wonder of the country
that is yours. Even Solomon in all his
glory was not arrayed like one of our
country lanes. Not Egypt, with its age-
old glory ; not India, with all its gorgeous
panoply ; not Italy, with all the wonder
wrought by Michael Angelo, can match
our countryside.

7

8 THE YEARS OF YOUR LIFE

It glistens like a diamond in the mid
summer sun. Its rubies hang on slender
stems in every field of corn. Its cloth of
gold is spread for the poor to feast upon.
Not a child but can lie down on its emerald
sheen. Red and white and green and
gold, Nature has put on her lovely robes
to hail the Peace of England.

A sad country it has been for years
while you were growing up. The blinds
were down, the roads were still, children
seemed to lose the spirit of their play.
The joy was out of life, for all that we
loved best, and all that made our lives
most worth the living, was away.

And none of us went through England.
We put away our horses, and jacked up
our cars, and forgot our holidays, and
worked beyond our strength. Summer
came and brought no joy with it ; winter
came and our hearts were bowed with a
fear that was near despair. Sorrow lived
with us by day and terror by night, and a
veil of gloom was drawn across the world.

" And is the Great War over ? " the
bluebells and the daffodils seemed to say
as year after year they came to the sound
of the guns. The daffodil nodded in the
garden, the bluebell nodded in the wood ;

THE YEARS OF YOUR LIFE 9

but never, somehow, did they seem quite
themselves in those sad years. Perhaps
they found nobody looking, and did not care.
This paradise of azure and gold, of red and
white, of purple and emerald green, had
seemed to lose its glow. The life of our
country lanes had come and gone and found
no multitude of happy people looking on.

It must have been a sad and lonely time
for Nature's messengers. They bided their
time through winter's long dark nights.
The bat hanging from the beam in the
barn, the frog huddled under his moss, the
snail in the crevice of the wall, the bulb down
in the snow, the hedgehog fast asleep in its
hole : they bided their time. When the sun
came out, the gentle breezes blew, and the
showers fell, out they came, these messengers
of spring, to greet a happy world ; . and
all these years there was no happy world.

Perhaps they felt it, too. The older we
grow and the more we know, wiser and
wiser seems that old saying that a grain
of wheat in the earth dreams dully every
day, and is dimly aware of what is going
to come. Deep in her heart Old Earth is
crammed with dreams, and every year her
dreams come true.

They come true in the spring. The

2

io THE YEARS OF YOUR LIFE

grub lies in its coat of mail, sleeping and
dreaming, but in the spring its dream
comes true, and it creeps about the earth
a shining beetle, or leaps into the sun a
gorgeous butterfly. Not once has Nature
missed her way. She set out ages since —
millions of years she has been on her
journey ; and every year her plans have
been fulfilled. She goes her way and
keeps her time. Day follows night, tides
rise and fall, and every winter changes^into
spring ; they follow the time-table laid
down in the beginning of the world.

And so at last the daffodils came out
again and found Peace here once more.
They found you growing up in Little
Treasure Island, with all the hope of spring
in you, all the joy of summer, all the peace
of autumn, all the strength and patience
of winter in your heart.

So you stand at the Gates of Dawn, with
the years of the Shadow behind you and
the Better Days to come. You stand there,
comrades in a mighty army, God's reinforce
ments for these islands that have bravely
borne the heat and burden of the day.

What will you do with your life ? What
is it you bring in your hand and heart to
your waiting Motherland ?

TO A KING'S DAUGHTER

NOT so very long ago, on that day which
I shall never forget because you were
taking your first steps in this world, it
seemed to me a wonderful thing that you
should be walking alone. You have had
many dreams since then, and you would
have thought it strange if you had wakened
from one of them and found it true ; yet
like a shadow growing real before our eyes
it is to see a child's first steps alone. Our
little corner of Heaven you were, and at
last you were on the Earth. The morning
of your life was dawning ; the gates of
the future were swinging open for you ;
and how you trembled lest your feet should
slip as you passed through !

And how you stood triumphant when you
reached the goal — the end of your first
journey since you came in clouds of glory !
How new a world this was when you could
stand upon your feet and reach, as it
seemed, from Earth to Heaven ! A new
Earth, indeed, this was when your feet

12 TO A KING'S DAUGHTER

touched it and you set out, with the light
of Heaven still shining in your eyes, upon
your journey through the world. And now
you are growing up, and the hours of
childhood seem shorter and shorter, and
there are many serious things to think
about, and — does every step in your
journey, we wonder, take you farther and
farther from Heaven ?

It must not, cannot be ; for, though the
years may come and go, and perhaps at
times you may even feel a little older, your
happy childhood will not die. You will
live through it again and again in the years
to come. You will grow into your larger
life as a flower grows in a garden, coming
into it naturally without any effort ; and
your past will be part of your present, for
you will never forget the days in which
you knew nothing but happiness, and saw
nothing but beautiful things. You, whose
consciousness of the world has awakened
in lovely scenes — you, who have lived so
close to Nature that she is like an elder
sister to you, will not let the sweetness of
these things pass from your life when
school bells ring and books call you from
play. You will be natural still, and
neither books, nor schools, nor friends,

TO A KING'S DAUGHTER 13

nor other countries, nor other pleasures,
will take away your love of the sweet
and simple things in which you found
delight on your first journeys in your
Father's Kingdom.

For you will never forget, my little
comrade, in all your travelling through this
world, that you walk in a kingdom that
was made for you, through a garden whose
paths were marked out for you, in fields and
woodlands planted that you might tread
softly on your way and come to no harm.
There are great rough places in the world,
and you will come to them ; but the woods
and the hills and the soft green meadows
are yours, and the silver streams, and the
babbling brooks, and the sunshine that
glints through the forest trees. You will
have no fear in the busy streets, but you
will love the long, long lanes that have so
many turnings, and the yew tree that
throws its shadows across the road, and
the rabbit that peeps out of the hedge,
and darts past you, and is gone.

You will take your place at home, abroad,
at school, wherever your place may be,
and will be merry in company and not
seek to shut yourself off from the world ;
but you will love the quiet place, the little

14 TO A KING'S DAUGHTER

bank where the wild thyme blows, the
lonely dell which only you and the birds
and the squirrels know. You will love
the narrow ways which lead out of the
country lanes into the secret places, where
the woodpecker is tapping at the trees,
and the pheasant is holding her court, and
the bluebell nods her head to kiss the
wind which always blows softly there.
You will love the great monuments that
fill the Natural Gallery of our countryside,
the silver birch, the shimmering glory that
seems ready to fade away ; the avenues of
stately elms keeping company by the road
side like old comrades ; the majestic oak,
proud that its ancient strength gave
England the wooden walls that kept her
free. All this you will cherish, and you
will never lose the power of seeking peace
and finding it in this kingdom that was
made for you. All through your life you
will give thanks for the joy of Nature that
has come to you in these early years.

You will not crave for lesser things than
those you have, you to whom the world
belongs. You who own the stars in the
sky will not sell the love of them for gold.
You will learn the value of things and know
the cost of money, and you will not buy

TO A KING'S DAUGHTER 15

money with things more precious than
rubies. For we do buy money ; let us all
be sure of that. How many men, how
many women, have bought riches and
fine raiment with nothing less than Life
itself ! If somebody should come to you
and offer you a million pounds for your
happy hours, your peace of mind, your
sweetness and pureness of heart, your
healthy body, your sound sleep at night,
you would laugh to scorn the thought of
a million pounds for these things ; yet
these are the things, too often, that are
paid for money.

You will know the power of money well
enough to use it, and value it, and spend
it to good purpose ; but you will have a
hundred things that money cannot buy,
and you will not imperil these for cheaper
things. You would not throw a piece of
silver after a stone, nor gold after bronze ;
and so you will not sell simplicity for
vanities, nor truthfulness for flatteries, nor
naturalness for artificialities. There is
nothing in the world that can repay you
if you lose the purity and gentleness and
sweet simplicity with which you are setting
out on the journey that ends beyond
this world.

16 TO A KING'S DAUGHTER

You will be rich, because you would hate
to be poor in a world with such wealth for
us all, but you will be rich in the rarest
things. Nothing is of any use to you,
however costly it may be, unless it serves
your life, or strengthens your mind, or
purifies your soul. I have known men
whom the world calls rich, seeming to the
world to have all that men can have, who
yearn in vain for things their money cannot
buy. And I have known men whom the
world calls poor, labouring patiently from
day to day, who would not sell their wealth
to any millionaire. They are like the
woman in the French Revolution, whose
cottage was burned to the ground, so that
she had nothing left in the world that the
soldiers mocking her would value. But
as she stood before them, listening to their
jeers and scomngs, she was conscious of a
calm that they could not disturb. They
had burned down her home, and all the
little things she loved to have about her,
but she had something left, and with a
scorn that must have stung those mothers'
sons she cried out to her enemies, Will you
leave me the stars ? There are things that
even revolutions cannot take away.

With these things you are rich ; without

TO A KING'S DAUGHTER 17

them you must always be poor. You will
not deceive yourself, nor be misled by false
appearances. The joy of life, which means
to you more than anything else, does not
depend on things we see in shop windows,
or on the clothes we wear, the carriages
we ride in, or the size of the house we live
in. It is much more true to say that our
homes grow in some way out of our lives
than to say that our lives grow out of our
homes. You will have a beautiful home
because you love beautiful things, but a
beautiful home will not help you unless the
love of beauty is within you.

We build up our own environment ; we
gather about us the influences that shape
our lives. There will come into your life
sad and squalid things, which none of us
can escape in a world of so many people,
with so many different interests ; and evil
influences will creep about us, however
careful we may be. But you will shield
yourself against them with the armour of
a king's daughter ; you will be responsive
to all that is natural and good, and as
adamant to the grosser things, the sights
that sadden your eye, the sounds that
offend your ear.

You will consider the lilies of the field,
3

i8 TO A KING'S DAUGHTER

how they grow ; and will not let your
sense grow dim to the marvel of the earth,
with its matchless splendour, its ever
lasting wonder, its ancient glory ever new.
The world will be yours ; its fields will be
your palaces, its lanes your corridors, its
woodlands your marble halls, its gorse your
golden coverings, its red heaths your price
less carpets, its hills your throne of kings.
The world will draw itself about you as a
friend, and you will have no fear, for you
will be at home as in a garden, and every
spring will bring you hope, and every
summer give you strength, and every winter
lift you up and fortify your faith. You
will learn to take Wordsworth with you
into the green fields, to love his songs of
the open air, and every new unfolding of
your life will prove his poetry true in you.
You will feel the arm of Mother Nature
closing round you :

In rock and plain,

In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
Will feel an overseeing power

To kindle or restrain.

" The Lady of Her Own " that Nature
made will live in you again ; you will grow
in sun and shower, in quiet and in storm.

TO A KING'S DAUGHTER 19

The floating clouds their state shall lend
To you ; for you the willow bend :

Nor shall you fail to see
E'en in the motions of the storm
Grace that shall mould a maiden's form

By silent sympathy.

The stars of midnight shall be dear
To you ; and you shall lend your ear

In many a secret place,
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound

Shall pass into your face.

So there shall come to you the vital
feelings of delight that Nature never yet
has failed to give her children. Be sure she
will not fail you in your Father's kingdom.
Every tree will sing to you if you will but
listen ; every brook will chatter, chatter
as it flows ; every hill will exalt you and
every valley give you rest. And from out
of the great heart of the world there will
come into yours that deep yearning which
knows no satisfying, but must seek for
ever in the treasuries of God, finding new
wonder and new power. You will drink
at the fountain of knowledge, and will scorn
the sham learning that has not been con
secrated at this shrine. Nothing unnatural
is true ; to that test you will bring all that

20 TO A KING'S DAUGHTER

men or women or books may ask you to
believe, and you will have nothing to do
with the things that do not pass the test.

Nature will be no far-off, unknown,
unthinkable thing to you ; she will be life
of your life and soul of your soul. I shall
never forget a wonderful page in a little
book by Richard Jefferies, who loved
Nature as his own mother — as she is, of
course, the mother of us all. To him the
spirit of Nature was something that cannot
die or pass us by, but must grow into us,
and become part of us, and grow into our
children after us, and into our children's
children ; so that the softness and tender
ness and gladness of the country, the sun
shine and the rain and the wind on the
heath, the heather and the wild rose and
the rugged hillside, would all, in some way,
be fashioned into a human life, and you,
at twelve, would be a century old.

" A country girl walks," said Richard
Jefferies in this glorious page, " and the
very earth smiles beneath her feet. She
walks in the glory of young life, but she
is really centuries old. A hundred and
fifty years at the least have passed away
while from all enchanted things of earth
and air this preciousness has been drawn :

TO A KING'S DAUGHTER 21

from the south wind that breathed a
century and a half ago over the green
wheat ; from the perfume of the growing
grasses waving over honey-laden clover and
laughing veronica, hiding the greenfinches,
baffling the bee ; from rose-loved hedges,
woodbine, and cornflower azure-blue, where
yellowing wheatstalks crowd up under the
shadow of green firs. All the devious
brooklet's sweetness where the iris stays
the sunlight ; all the wild woods hold of
beauty ; all the broad hill's thyme and
freedom, thrice a hundred years repeated.
A hundred years of cowslips, bluebells,
violets ; purple spring and golden autumn ;
sunshine, shower, and dewy mornings ; the
night immortal ; all the rhythm of Time
unrolling ; a chronicle unwritten and past
all power of writing. Who shall preserve
a record of the petals that fell from the
rose a century ago ? The swallows to the
house top three hundred times — think a
moment of that ! Thence she sprang, and
the world yearns towards her beauty as to
flowers that are past. The loveliness of
seventeen is centuries old."

You have lived close to Nature always,
and you will feel that this beautiful page
from a book is true in Life itself — as all

22 TO A KING'S DAUGHTER

books must be if they are worth the
printing, or if they are to endure. It is
not necessary for us to remind ourselves
that the Kingdom of Nature is the Kingdom
of God. You know that well ; your sight
is not so dim, your sense is not so dead,
that you cannot see the moving Hand of
God in all His works. You look out upon
your natural kingdom and see in it — as we
all might see if we could look at it through
your eyes — the reflection of the Kingdom
of Heaven upon the Earth. These unspeak
able glories that crowd about our lives —
the solemn majesty of the starlit night, the
dazzling wonder of the sun at noon,
the mystery of the rolling Earth down the
uncountable ages of Time, the dawn of light
and understanding in your mind, the living
dynamo in a seed which makes a red rose from
sunshine and rain and earth, the silence of
the universe in which nothing is still — you, so
near to the Kingdom of Heaven, will feel how
near such things as these are to God Him
self, who upholds you and me, and creates
and sustains all living things. So you will
feel the beating of the heart of Nature every
where. Nothing will be dead to you; you
will know that everything is part of a living
whole, in which you, too, are but a part.

TO A KING'S DAUGHTER 23

And, knowing this, you will live as if
your life were not for you alone. You will
not waste it or throw it away ; you will not
let yourself grow into the habit of frittering
away your strength, or of living from day
to day as if the end of life were to maintain
you in luxury and ease. A great friend of
mine is fond of saying that the useless have
no rights, and it is true. Those who insist
on their rights must insist also on their
duties, and you can have no rights in a
nation save those won by the love you
bear it, or by your own right hand.

I read a striking paragraph the other
day. Somebody who had been looking at
the supplements printed for Sunday reading
by the American papers was filled with
despair by the appalling stuff these papers
print, the silly, ignorant, and vulgar pictures
which seem humorous to some people, and
are thought to be the sort of things to give
to boys and girls. They are the best
possible seed to sow if we want to turn
little children into giggling apes instead of
men and women, and the writer of the
paragraph I read was moved to ask himself
how these terrible papers came to be. He
thought of the ages that had gone to the
making of the forests, of the natural forces

24 TO A KING'S DAUGHTER

that had been at work for millions of years
before printing machines were thought of,
and then he wrote that, " merely to amuse
thoughtless people for a brief Sunday
morning hour with impossible and extra
vagant pictures, printed in loud colours,
thousands of stately spruce and hemlock
trees upon the northern hills, which had
raised their graceful branches to the sun
shine and rain of many changing seasons,
have lived — in vain."

That is a terrible thing. A tree lives by
consuming the poison that would destroy
our lives, but it is not the natural end of
the tree to give back the poison to our
minds. You will hate this wicked use of
natural things, this utter destruction of the
Life entrusted to us for nobler ends ; and
you will see that the hand of Time shall
never write of your life as it writes of these
murdered trees — that it is all in vain. It
is for you to say.

Hundreds of years before the light of
Christianity had dawned on mankind a
wise man taught the world a lesson which
millions have still to learn. " You may put
poison in an earthen pitcher/' he said,
" and the pitcher be washed after it, and
none the worse ; but you can take nothing

TO A KING'S DAUGHTER 25

into the soul that does not indelibly infect
it, whether for good or evil." And hundreds
of years after Socrates said that, another
wise man, a poor lame man who was passing
through the world at the time of the
Romans, said this, that in banquets we en
tertain two guests^-body and soul.

So, in each of our lives, two travellers
keep company through the universe, and
though one may leave us, being frail, the
strength of the body shall pass into the
soul, and the soul go on alone. But yours
shall not for ever be alone, for king's
daughters, on their journey through the
universe, shall one day surely meet the
King.

TO THE GIRL WHO IS
WONDERING

You will surely be wondering, as you
stand at the gates of Life and look out
upon the world, what destiny the hidden
years can hold for you. As surely as the
leaves are falling outside my window in
obedience to the Hand that guides the
heavens, so surely your unfolding life is
dawning, will rise to noonday, and will
sink into the gentle sleep of night, to the
bidding of the universal law that none
can break.

But, because your life is part of the great
world, you will not believe that therefore it
is fixed for you so that you have no choice
of your own.' You are free to do as you
will. You are free to use your life or to
waste it. In the great scheme which even
now is building up a perfect world your
life must have its place. But you are not
a spectator looking on at the world. You
are an actor taking part in it, and the
great play of Life will fail so far as you
fail in your part.

26

TALKS TO GIRLS 27

And you are wondering, no doubt, what
part you will play — whether you will go
out into the world to do great things, with
fame, or public honour, or private wealth
as your reward, or whether you will be
content to be of the countless multitude
which moves in quiet paths, doing good
without ceasing, making life a blessing,
but winning neither wealth nor fame.
And, of course, you must resolve for your
self the question that every girl must ask
herself — whether you will seek first the
natural place of woman in the home, or
whether, in some wider sphere, you will
seek to carve out an independent place.
It is the most important thing you can
decide, and few things can be more difficult
than to advise you.

But of one thing it is easy and right to
advise you. You can do no wrong in
putting your natural gifts to any natural
use. You can do no wrong in fitting your
self for any office you can fill with profit
to yourself and usefulness to others. You
can do no wrong in choosing any path that
leads you to your destiny with dignity and
honour and distinction. But you may do
yourself great wrong, and may betray the
cause that every woman holds in trust,

28 TO THE GIRL WHO

if you cut yourself off, knowingly and
purposely, from the very noblest work
that daughters and wives and mothers are
called upon to do. You must have
nothing but an honest scorn for those
who would have you sell your solemn
birthright for a smaller thing.

You are growing up in an age when all
too many people are willing to sully the
fair fame of a woman. Of all the sad
things that happen in these days, nothing
is sadder for us all than the things that
make us forget for a moment the gentleness
and graciousness of womanhood. It is a
beautiful vision that comes to us as we
think of our mothers, and of their mothers,
and of mothers all down the ages of time ;
but how easy it is sometimes to forget the
things that make the thought of women
so comforting and so uplifting ! Have
nothing to do with the vulgar manners
you will see about you, with girls who
would be men, forgetting how much
greater than men they have it in their
power to be. When you find yourself in the
company of such a girl keep your modesty
and leave her ; she is not going your way.
The manners of men are not for girls to put
on as they put on hats and gloves.

IS WONDERING 29

The men for whose esteem a girl should
crave have no esteem to spare for girls
who ape their habits without thinking,
who break through the fine reserve that
is a girl's best safeguard, who mix with
men and come down to meet them. All
through the world, and all through life,
the something better in a woman has been
the world's great blessing, and nothing that
the world can give will be worth having if
you lose this priceless thing.

Whatever way you choose through life,
guard well the noblest thing your mother
gave you, the charm of being made in her
image. Cherish the solemn thought that,
next to the love of God, the love of a
mother is the strongest influence in the
world, and do nothing to wreck the
place a mother holds in the deathless
affection of mankind. You will feel
that any loosening of that bond is a
wrong to you and to the mother who
sheltered you, and, in little things and in
big things, you will be careful lest it shall
be said of you that the high and gracious
dignity of womanhood was not safe in
your keeping.

You will not mind the scoffing of those
who are careless in small things — the

30 TO THE GIRL WHO

smoking girl, the drinking girl, the girl who
buys complexions at a chemist's shop and
makes herself a painted doll. You will
be ready to give up even lawful pleasures
rather than run the risk of losing the
fair name which is worth more to
you than rubies. The knight's armour
in the days of chivalry was buckled on
by his lady, and the beautiful meaning
of that should still be true in these
days. It was the gracious way in which
a lady sent out her knight to fight with
double strength.

That is the great power of woman still,
so long as she keeps her hold upon her
knight. The things that are unseen are
hers, the influences that reach deep down
in the heart of life, and never wholly fail.
How often it is that the man who seems
so powerful, who seems to do as he likes
and to conquer wherever he goes, is really
swayed by a great love behind him, and
nearly always the love of a woman. The
man who faces the rough-and-tumble of a
hard world is all the better if he has at his
side a gentler soul, ready to hold him back,
or urge him on, or to take his mind off
meaner things and set his vision in the
stars. You will covet this wonderful power

IS WONDERING 31

that a woman has to impel a man to
glorious things, and not throw it away for
vulgarities or vanities. Remember that
your greatest pride is to be womanly, and
not manly, and, whatever work you
may do, scorn to let it be said that
you, with all the glory of womanhood
about you, were so blind to it that you
slipped from your throne to the lower
level of a man.

It goes without saying that your educa
tion will go on, whether by work, or study,
or by any other sort of contact with life
and mind. Have nothing to do with the
idea that girls should not be educated lest
they grow dissatisfied with their place in
life ; it is right that you should be dis
satisfied with any place in life which does
not give full scope to all your natural
yearnings and abilities. But watch care
fully lest you allow either work, or study,
or travel, or pleasure, or any of the count
less ways in which you seek to equip
yourself for life, to possess your entire
soul, so that these things, which should be
second, come first. Seek first the true
kingdom of womanhood, and all these
things shall be added unto you.

Let your dawning years be filled with

32 TO THE GIRL WHO

a great variety of interests ; let your life
glow with the love of many friends ; let
your mind engage itself in some definite
task ; but do not let these things, or any
other thing, drive out of your life the vision
you should ever have before you, for which
all else is but a preparation. Work, educa
tion, enjoyment are all but preparations,
and not hindrances, in the natural life to
which you are called. You will do nothing,
I hope, that will clash with your first
service to the world, turning you from the
great business of building up a home,
of stimulating those who bear the heat
and burden of the toiling day, and of
strengthening those qualities in men which
lift them a little nearer to the angels.
But you will not, therefore, imagine that
the world has no place for you outside
your home, or that you need have any
doubt or hesitation if an opportunity of
independence comes.

You may be rightly proud of the gifts
which enable you to win your own way in
the world, and there is no reason anywhere
why you should not place yourself by the
side of men in any sphere in which you can
hold your own. So long as your work fits
you, and does not unfit you, for your

IS WONDERING 33

natural destiny, it can be nothing but
a blessing. It can bring you nothing but
happiness to be conscious of a power
to face the world whatever happens, and
in the years when you are building up
your life you may wisely seek the dis
cipline and training of some useful service.
The useless have no rights, and we must
be useful. Even though your lot be cast
in pleasant places, so that you may not
need to earn your living, it will do you
no harm to do some useful work. The
real wages for good work are not made
at the Mint.

The girl who wins a place by her own
effort has strengthened herself in any
task she undertakes. She has struck
the hardest blow she can at the foolish
notion that a woman must be a sort of
looker-on at the world, with no real part
in its work. No more stupid nonsense has
ever been invented than that, and every
girl who maps out an independent path,
who learns some craft and practises it
well, does something to drive this sort of
thinking out of people's minds.

Far from the busy world, in one of the
hamlets lying off the Dorset downs, sleeps
a simple old man who spent his life as a
5

34 TO THE GIRL WHO

butler in some rich family. His name was
Robert Browning, and many, many years
after he was laid to rest in this quiet place
there came another Robert Browning among
his children's children, who wrote his name
on the Roll of Fame and lives for ever
with the poets. On the stone that marks
the butler's grave in the quiet of the
downs is this line by his great descendant :
All service ranks the same with God. Not
only over the graves of honest men,
but over all our lives should that be
written. Do not be ashamed to do the
work that comes to your hand ; rather
be ashamed to leave undone whatever
you might do.

You can have no more helpful intro
duction to the world, no more valuable
experience on the threshold of womanhood,
than you will find in some career that may
open out for you. Whether it be to earn
your own living, or to keep yourself
actively useful in the years between school
and the building up of your own home,
work of some kind can only help your life,
and you will never regret it. Two things
especially it will save you from — the habit
of wasting time, and that extravagant love
of pleasure which is the besetting tempta-

IS WONDERING 35

tion of womanhood. It is natural, no
doubt, that the one should lead to the
other. Thousands of lives have been saved
from ruin by a definite work in life ;
thousands have been wrecked by the want
of it.

Our time, said Sir Walter Scott, is like
our money : " When we change a sovereign
the shillings escape as things of small
account ; when we break a day by idleness
in the morning the rest of the hours lose
their importance in our eyes." Idle hours
are temptations, but idle years are worse,
and it is not surprising that the end of
nothing-in-particular-to-do for years should
be a consuming love of pleasure. But,
even apart from wasted years, the tempta
tions of social life, if we may call them so,
are peculiarly a woman's. She must be
at all the parties, must see all the plays,
must go here and there, and do this thing
and that thing that a man can easily get
out of ; and so, because she is so helpful
and so ready to help, she becomes involved
in social life and pleasures which may
easily lead to an extravagance of amuse
ment. And often in its train comes
the sad waste and vanity of it all —
the (love of vain things, the desire for

36 TO THE GIRL WHO

appearances rather than reality, the
very worship of dress, the display of
jewels, all innocent enough in some ways
if well controlled and kept within their
proper bounds, but fraught with danger
because it leads so pleasantly away from
the central things of life and the sweet
simplicity of womanhood.

We need not object to pearls, but it is
not a noble thing to wear a necklace which
would sell in a shop for a hundred thousand
pounds. We need not lose our love of
rare and precious things in order to agree
with John Ruskin about the vanities of
life ; and we know what he meant, and we
agree with him, when he said that the
money English people spend in cutting
diamonds would in ten years, if applied
to cutting rocks, leave no dangerous reef
or harbour round our coast ; and Great
Britain, as Ruskin finely said, would be a
diamond worth the cutting.

We need not object to anything beauti
ful, but the vanity of riches is not the love
of beauty ; and decorations that are worn
because they are ticketed at a high price
in a shop, and so advertise the splendid
incomes of those who wear them, are not
things to arouse our admiration. Learn

IS WONDERING 37

to love things that are truly beautiful, to
prize things that are truly valuable, and
scorn the empty show which flaunts
itself so much before the world and has
nothing either lovely, or noble, or worthy
behind it. You may wear a priceless gem
with great simplicity, and may dangle a
worthless bauble with great vulgarity.
Only the spirit in which you bear your
self, the feeling that lies behind your
conduct, matters.

You will have good taste, and modesty,
and maidenly ways ; and the paint and
powder and tinsel that hide the natural
loveliness of womanhood you will shrink
from as from poison, or any other ugly
thing. The meaningless conventions, the
silly excuses, the great pretences, leave
to other people. Be honest and open,
and scorn the petty deceits which,
deceiving nobody, prepare the ground
and scatter the seed for a harvest of
hypocrisy. Such things it must have been
that led the poet to write these lines :

Ah, wasteful woman ! — she who may
On her sweet self set her own price,
Knowing he cannot choose but pay :
How has she cheapened Paradise !

38 TALKS TO GIRLS

How given for nought her priceless gift,
How spoiled the bread and spilled the wine.
Which, spent with due respective thrift,
Had made brutes men, and men divine !

Life is not simple, and it is not easy
always to know what to do ; but it will
help you, now that you are wondering
which way you will go, if you make up
your mind to go the simple way. It will
help you to be natural, to be plain, to put
aside the vanities and unrealities. It will
help you to do the work that lies to
your hand and not to bother very
much about your rights until your duties
are well done.

Then, when you have done your duty,
your rights will come. You will have
found the noblest source of happiness in
the world. You will have won your way
with a brave independence ; you will have
held your place with honour and without
sacrifice ; and you will know of nothing
in the world that you would take in ex
change for the glory of your womanhood.

TO THE GIRL WHO LOVES
HER HOME

THE day will come when you, waiting
now at the dawn of womanhood, will
have passed through the gates and chosen
your place. You will have taken a step
which, perhaps more than anything else,
will influence your coming and going,
your thinking and doing, as long as your
life lasts.

You are to be the founder and fashioner
and shaper of the greatest institution on
the Earth — a happy home, and you will
wish, even now, to prepare the way for it,
to lay deep the foundations on which it
shall rest, to build up the walls that shall
shelter it from harm, to furnish it with
those precious things that shall make it
lovely to look upon and strengthening
to live in.

For you have learned already that
happy homes are not made with hands.
The foundations may be deeply set, the
walls may rise high and the windows may

39

40 TO THE GIRL WHO

look out upon a noble scene, the room may
be rich beyond the dreams of avarice and
beautiful beyond compare, and there may
be nothing wanting to please the stranger's
eye ; but the seat of happiness is not in
these things. If one invisible thing is
absent no visible splendour can atone for
it ; nothing that we can touch or taste or
hear or see can help us if this thing is miss
ing. Every day homes are wrecked and
lives are broken for want of this one thing.

You will guess that this invisible founda
tion of a happy home is the love of those
who live in it. Love and happiness run
together. There can be no transgression
of that law. Whatever else is false this
is true — that hearts divided against them
selves can never make a home. And so
you will resolve that your home shall be
built upon this firm foundation ; all others
are but shifting sand. You will remember
what our English homes have been to the
men who have gone out into the world to
spread our English freedom. Far away
at the ends of the Earth, in the great bush
at the other side of the world, on the wide-
stretching prairie and the lonely veldt, in
the streets of busy cities and beyond the
bounds of civilisation, men stop some-

LOVES HER HOME 41

times, and lay aside their work, and think
of home. The old fireside comes back to
them, the old armchair on the hearth, the
pictures on the wall, the light through the
window, and the sound of voices perhaps
long silent now — all these come back in a
flash to the man who is far away. You
will go to other countries in the years to
come, and will love to see the life of the
people there, the wonderful buildings, the
mountains, the monuments and pictures,
the impressive natural scenes and the
glorious works of man ; but you will never
see the glory that will drive out of your
heart the love of home, you will never
know abroad a joy so great as the thought
that you are coming home again.

Into our very tissue has come this love
of home, and it is not an accident that it
belongs especially to the race that has
carried freedom and good government
throughout the world. It is not an acci
dent that the English race, controlling the
lives of hundreds of races throughout the
world, is the most home-loving race of
mankind. It is not a chance that the men
who have gone out from English hearths
have conquered barbarism. Something
there is in the love of home which binds

42 TO THE GIRL WHO

men to the world we all inhabit, and stirs
them on to make it home for all.

And so you will feel that your home is
the shrine of sacred things, a field in which
the seed you sow may grow into a precious
harvest. It is good that we should feel
the splendour of this great tradition that
has gathered about the happy homes of
England, and you will strive to deserve
it and uphold it, and to see that your home
is pure and healthy and ennobling, re
sponding to all the good desires of those
who share it, but giving no shelter to any
thing base or mean or treacherous to our
country or mankind.

You will think of your home as your
own corner of the world, where you are
queen and parliament too, and you will
set your influence as on a rock. You will
love your friends outside your home, you
will cherish goodwill to your neighbours,
but within the walls of your own kingdom
you will give yourself unselfishly and toil
unceasingly for those who are banded
together as one, heart of your heart, mind
of your mind, life of your life, travelling
beside you through sunlight and shadow,
through good report and ill. You will let
nothing break up the union of those who

LOVES HER HOME 43

love your home, those who cement with
their own lives the protecting walls of your
own household. Here, free from the dis
turbing troubles of your daily work, you
will guard and foster the inner sources of
your strength, you will free yourself from the
anxieties that steal into life from all direc
tions in this conflicting world, and here,
at least, you will see the way clearly, will
find no enemies, will reap the harvest of
the sympathy whose seeds you have sown.
When all the rest of the world is dark
there will be peace in your own haven.

And yet you will not let your home be
cut off from the world, like those sad
places set apart in which men and women
live their selfish lives — their lives of selfish
goodness, if such a thing can be. We are
in the world and of the world, and we
must take our place and play our part.
If we could rule the world for just one week,
we have thought sometimes, how happy a
place we would make it ! Well, our homes
are our own worlds, in which we make our
laws and administer them, in which we lay
down our rules of life and declare our
relation to our neighbours and mankind.
They are the gardens in which we grow,
but they are like gardens also in this,

44 TO THE GIRL WHO

that the seed that is sown in them, the
plants that are watered in them, the fruits
that are ripened in them, go out beyond
them into the world. Your home will be
the place where you find rest, but your
rest will bring you new strength, and you
will spend it for the good of all.

You will try to make your home a
centre of life at its best, where the best
things are fostered so that they may be
increased abundantly, where your faith and
hope and sympathy, the whole earnestness
and power of your life, will be magnified.

A good home, in this world of care, may
be like a fountain in a desert place, pour
ing out gentleness and consolation, and
through it the influence of your own life
may be widened and deepened in all
directions. Without any fuss, quietly and
in natural ways, you will direct and guide
the influences that go out from your
hearth into the hurly-burly of the world.

Nothing in the world, perhaps, is more
difficult than the wise management of a
house. Most of us are too ready to forget,
in enjoying the great freedom of home,
that a home is like a machine, and must
have method and discipline if it is to have
peace. It is a wonderful thing, consider-

LOVES HER HOME 45

ing the millions of opposite interests in the
world, and all the selfishness and indiffer
ence, that the world agrees so well ; and
it is not surprising that the management
of a home, with perhaps six people of six
different types, with tastes that vary in
perhaps a hundred things, with conflicting
desires in food and pleasure and friendships,
and with varying needs and interests in
other ways, should call for the greatest
care and judgment.

It is not an easy task to control the
home life of a family, fitting all these
desires into a general plan, giving freedom
and happiness to each and contentment to
all, and it is harder still if some of us break
the rules. Something of the philosopher,
something of the statesman, something of
the business manager, and a great deal of
the student of human nature is wanted in
administering the daily life of a varied
household, and you will prepare for it all,
I hope, as if the happiness of the world
depended on you. You will not be
ashamed to acknowledge that your place
is in the kitchen as well as in the draw
ing-room. The proper management of a
kitchen is one of the greatest services a
woman can render to the world.

46 TO THE GIRL WHO

A friend of mine, a Member of Parlia
ment who knew the world better than most
people and had a rich fund of worldly
wisdom, astonished me, when we were
talking of politics and national welfare, by
declaring that at the bottom of them all
was the bad management of the kitchen,
especially the bad cooks. Let us wait
before we smile.

If we think of the lives of the great
multitude of working people, it is easy to
see how bad food, bad cooking, bad house
keeping, can spoil them utterly, and we
have yet to measure the effect of these
things in driving men out of their homes
and into publichouses. If it is true that
the publichouse, with all its horrible
associations, all its germs of disease, has
taken the place of home in the lives of
masses of men, who shall say how many
of these men turn to such places in search
of the comfort missing from their homes ?
And if we think of the lives of those happier
people who do not live in the sad rows of
little house-boxes where human beings
are packed together when their day's work
is done, it is easy to see that they are
turning from their homes to find the
comfort they need in hotels, or clubs, or

LOVES HER HOME 47

flats, or some other apology for the home
that failed.

And so we will not laugh at my friend
who really thinks that all our politics, all
our education, all our reforms, are as
nothing unless they get rid of bad cooks
and teach girls like you the management
of a house. There is more than humour
in it ; perhaps there may be tragedy, too.
The King of England who could not speak
English was not a sadder jest than the girl
who enthrones herself in a home without
having mastered its needs, without
knowing the truth about the proper
things to eat and drink and the way
to cook them, without understanding the
simple laws of health and the way to
keep them, without knowing a bad home
from a good one or an easy house from
a hard one.

You will learn very soon, in building up
your home, that simplicity of life is the
golden key to happiness. It is one of the
sad consequences of the progress of the
world that civilisation brings with it a
great increase in what we call our needs,
though really they are only our desires. I
would have you crave the things that will
make you happy, but I would have you

48 TO THE GIRL WHO

careful lest you create unnecessary wants.
It is astonishing to think of the number
of things we gather into our houses that
we do not need, and I like to remember
a wise friend who went with me to Norway,
and was annoyed because I would linger
in the shops when he wanted to be back
on the ship. To all remarks about the
shops he would say : ' Yes, it is wonderful
to see how many things we can do with
out." Well, he is bothering, but he is
right. Most of our houses are full of
unnecessary things. Count the number
of things on the table at dinner-time, and
think of the time spent in cleaning them all,
day after day, year after year. Remember
the number of queer things that used to
crowd our fireplaces before we discovered
the beauty of an open hearth.

You will make up your mind, I hope,
that, the simpler a home is, the more
enduring is the joy of it ; the more natural
our environment is, the more natural we
ourselves shall be. Let us set our faces,
in our homes and out of them, against
what is meaningless and artificial. If
some absurd old custom crowds our hearths
with pokers and fenders and tongs, and
hides our windows behind curtains that keep

LOVES HER HOME 49

out the light, and crowds our rooms with
furniture storing up the dust, and pulls
down our blinds to keep out the health-
giving sun and keep in the death-giving
microbes, let us refuse to bow down to these
household gods. It is good art and good
sense to have few things in a home instead
of many, and to have these few of the best ;
and it is good to have them natural instead
of artificial, with some idea in them that
helps us, or inspires us, or brings us
pleasure. It is good to have real things
instead of imitations ; it is good to have
a few of the best pictures rather than a
gallery of daubs ; and it is good to have
about us the books we love. (We should
be ashamed of a home without books.)
It is good, in a word, to live in a house that
seems to be a part of Nature herself, help
ing us in our natural life and deepening
within us the love of true and noble and
beautiful things.

You will spend these early years, while
your own home is still afar off, in fitting
yourself for it, not afraid of the great task
to which you set your hand. You will
know the high mission that you undertake.
You will rejoice in the high privilege of
building up a home, and will build it in the

50 TALKS TO GIRLS

spirit of Solomon who, amid all the glory
that amazed the Queen of Sheba, wrote :
As the sun when it ariseth in the high
heaven, so is the beauty of a good wife in the
ordering of her house.

TO THE GIRL IN SEARCH
OF PLEASURE

THE first duty of a girl, a wise man said
once, is to be happy, and we shall all do
our best to agree with him. Unless we can
be happy, life is hardly worth while.

That, perhaps, may seem a strange
thing to say, because you may know of
many lives that are a great blessing to the
world, though they may seem to you about
as sad as anything can be. It is perfectly
true that noble lives may be full of sacri
fice and sorrow ; perhaps it is even true
that sacrifice and sorrow make noble and
useful thousands of lives which but for
these things might be lived in vain. But
all through the years that are opening out
before you you will find one thing becom
ing clearer and clearer in your mind : you
will find that the pleasure-seekers are not
always glad, and the sorrow-bearers are
not always sad. You will find that there
is a secret of happiness which neither
money, nor social advantage, nor educa-

51

52 TO THE GIRL IN

tion can buy, and which neither poverty,
nor sickness, nor any other ills of this
world can destroy.

I have known many men and many
women who have most of the good things
that this world can give them, but who
have not been happy. I know more than
one rich man who would give all his
riches for something he has not got, and I
dare say you have seen women who wear
fine clothes and have sad faces, but who
ride wearily in motor-cars past happy
women laughing and singing at their
cottage doors. It cannot be, therefore,
that mere wealth brings happiness ; it is
probably true that there is as much content
ment among the poor as among the rich.

I knew a little girl who seemed to me,
through all the years I knew her, as cheer
ful as a girl . could be. I never saw her
looking sad, though to see her lying there,
in her cripple's chair or in the children's
hospital, filled me with pain. While her
friends would force a smile to cheer her,
she would laugh naturally, so that at
last we almost forgot that this child of
eight years old had never run across a
field or walked along a street, and had
had an operation on her poor little body

SEARCH OF PLEASURE 53

for every year she had lain on her back.
It is hard for us to believe it, but she was
one of the happiest little people I have
ever known.

And so we learn to understand that
there are ways to happiness which we
have not guessed. Happiness is much
more than a mere passing sense of pleasure,
and we should seek to build up the happi
ness of our lives on an enduring foundation.
No mere round of social pleasures, no mere
pleasing things that last for an hour and
are gone, can give us that. Pastime has
its proper place, and it is true that all work
and no play makes Jill a dull girl, but the
ordinary amusements of life are not the
true source of happiness.

One of your temptations will be to rely
upon these things when you should seek
enjoyment in other ways, and there is
perhaps no greater enemy of girlhood than
the ceaseless round of empty pleasures
that assail the girl who comes face to face
with life on her own account. It is so easy
to do this and that, to go here and there,
that you are sure to be tempted to give
yourself too much to the side of life which
is meant only as recreation.

I hope you will discover, long before you

54 TO THE GIRL IN

have yielded to this temptation, that the
best way to be happy is to plan your life
so that pleasures come into it naturally
instead of being outside it, as it were.
Nothing could be more unwise than the
sort of life some people live, divided into
two compartments. One compartment is
for work, which we should rather call
drudgery, for it brings them no joy and is
done against their will ; the other com
partment is for pleasure, which we should
rather call pastime, for it is merely a relief
from their duller life, and is simply a stupid
way of passing time which their dull minds
do not know how to use.

It is true that some of us must do the
duller kinds of work if the world is to go
on, and no doubt stitching all day long,
or making boxes, or adding up figures, or
typing letters, is not as interesting as
painting pictures, or writing books, or
managing businesses ; but most of us
have no real excuse for not being interested
in our work, and it is a sad thing to turn
it into such a drudgery that we must seek
relief from it at any cost. You will not
fall between these two extremes — the
burden of work which bores you and the
reaction of amusement which gives you no

SEARCH OF PLEASURE 55

real compensation ; you will make your
whole life so interesting that you will not
need to pay other people to amuse you in
order to escape from it. You will look a
long way ahead of you. You will have
a definite purpose in your life, and will
see, as far as you can, that its duties and
pleasures fit in one with the other, so that
they lead and follow each other naturally
instead of being like opposite things.

You will not allow any sort of pleasure
to come into your life which challenges or
contradicts your noblest feelings. The
beginning of this talk came a day or two
ago in a London bus, where two girls and
their mother were talking of amusements,
and one of them confessed that she was
" mad on " a music-hall artiste whose name
she mentioned. I cannot mention it here,
because the law will not allow us to say
what we think of certain people ; but the
performer this girl was " mad on " is a
disgrace to any town where he appears,
and it is a fearful thing that a girl can seek
her pleasure in such gross company.

For, remember, we are in the company
of those who entertain us, though they be
on the stage and we in the stalls. It will
help you always to remember that. You

56 TO THE GIRL IN

would not think of taking certain people
home ; you would shrink from telling your
mother that you had been with them at
dinner, or walking with them in the street,
or sitting with them by the fire, or talking
freely with them. We need not think
ourselves better than other people, and it
is no hollow hypocrisy, and no sort of
priggishness, that turns us from the com
pany of those whose way of life is not ours.
The natural pride of life, the dignity of
girlhood, will cause you to shrink from
evil things not less if they come in the form
of men and women than if they come as
serpents, and it will help us if we realise
that, whenever we go to see men and
women of bad character on the stage,
appealing to their audiences by the low
atmosphere with which they have become
associated, we are in the company of these
people as if we had invited them to
our homes.

We need not be squeamish, and need not
pry into the characters of other people
while our own are full of imperfections ;
but we know the people who are not worth
our company, and we should not allow
ourselves to meet them merely because
the meeting is impersonal and we have

SEARCH OF PLEASURE 57

paid for it. That is adding humiliation
to dishonour, and it is doing more : it is
encouraging, in the most emphatic way
we can — by paying for it with our money
and our time — forms of pleasure which do
infinite harm.

There is a pitiful tendency in these days
to lower the character of public enter
tainments, and it seems sometimes as if
an evil spirit had seized the beautiful
pleasures of the people and turned them to
mischievous ends. The kinema is often
brutish ; the theatre is often degrading.
You will be on the side of pure pleasures
always, but will hate the vulgarities which
pretend to be entertainments ; and you
will rather die than countenance with your
presence some of the shameful scenes that
take place openly on the stage. When
anything impure is done, or said, or sung
in your presence, or some foul suggestion
is made in public or in private, you will
be faced with a problem that you must
instantly decide : you will have to stay
and lose your dignity or go and keep it.
I hope you will go. Do not have it said of
you that you stained the fair fame of the
people's pleasures by patronising a hideous
thing. Be sure a play is sweet before you
8

58 TO THE GIRL IN

go to see it, just as you will be sure that a
man is honourable before you consent to
know him.

And especially you will take care, in
choosing your public pleasures, that they
are worthy of you in another sense ; you
will refuse to enjoy yourself at the cost of
another's pain. You will be ashamed to
think that another human being should
imperil life to please you, and will refuse
to be pleased by the sight of other people
risking death to earn a living. You will
be shocked to think that there should be
any pain or fear or sorrow caused to others
in order that you might enjoy a pleasant
hour, and you will ask yourself what a
mother's anxiety must be while her boy,
or her girl, or her breadwinner, hangs in
danger of death on an iron bar high up in
the air ; or -how little children must live
in dread of something happening to the
father who stands in danger every night
that you may watch him and be excited.
You will love life too much to think
lightly of endangering it for others, and
you will turn in pity and disgust from
excitements which involve great peril to
life and limb.

And not less, but perhaps more, you

SEARCH OF PLEASURE 59

will turn away from those entertainments
in which animals are made to do unnatural
things to please you. Turn away from
them as from a scene of horror, for in
witnessing these things you are taking part
in an act of cruelty to animals, and you
will reflect that this cruelty is practised,
if not by your order, at least with your
approval and at your expense, for it is
done to make a public entertainment, and
is one of the saddest examples in the world
of the cruelty of want of thought. It is
almost impossible to separate animal per
formances from cruelty.

I would not spoil your pleasures for you,
but I would have them free from all regret
and stain, and one more pitiful thing about
a woman's pleasures I hope you will set
yourself against. You will dress for
neatness and not for show, and will not
think your hat, or your coat, so important
that for their sake you can throw aside
your charity and gentleness and the human
love of justice.

You will not think it worth while to
starve to death a family of fellow-creatures
in order that you may wear a pretty hat.
You would blush for shame if you were
asked to wear a thing that had been stolen :

60 TO THE GIRL IN

how much more, then, you will blush if
you should find yourself wearing one day a
beautiful thing bought by torture and
cruelty and the shedding of blood ! It is
right that we should remember the terrible
words uttered not long ago by a professor
who had been investigating the circum
stances under which egret feathers are
obtained, and who declared that every
woman who wears an egret has the murderer's
brand upon her brow. It is a terrible say
ing, but it is true. It is enough to say here
that an egret's feather can be obtained
only by the most appalling acts of cruelty
that men can inflict upon birds, and that
every plume of an egret, or a gull, or a bird
of paradise, is obtained by the murder of
a mother bird at the time when she is
bringing up her little ones, because then
she hovers round the nest and is easily
caught. You would not take advantage
of a mother bird hovering round to protect
her little ones, and at that very moment
seize her, tear out her wings, fling her away
writhing in pain, and leave her helpless
babes to starve slowly to death ; you would
shudder at the thought of doing that.
Yet that is what you do when you wear an
egret's plume, though the actual deed is

SEARCH OF PLEASURE 61

done for you by a brutal man who is less
gentle than you, and cares only for the
money you pay him to do it.

You will wear neither plumes torn from
murdered birds, nor coats torn from living
seals, nor shell torn from the back of a
living tortoise. You will shrink from all
this, and find other things to please you,
just as you will find a way of keeping on
your hat without a pin that may destroy
somebody's eyes.

You will find your delight in a deep sense
of being right with the world. The best
way to find happiness in this world is not
to seek it ; it will come of itself if you will
live naturally and unselfishly. True happi
ness, unlike the fleeting pleasures of an
hour, never palls ; it will leave no regrets
behind. The surest way to it is to pursue
the path of duty steadily and loyally, no
matter what may come ; the surest way to
win happiness for ourselves is to give it
to others. To live simply, not craving
luxurious things, not jealous of things that
are beyond our reach, but determined to
achieve whatever is good and right for us,
and to use well whatever privileges we may
attain : this will bring us peace. It will
bring us the sort of feeling that no words

62 TALKS TO GIRLS

can explain, the feeling that enabled
Captain Scott and his comrades, tracking
across the snow to certain doom, to live
like men and die like heroes. Dying day
by day beyond the reach of hope, they
could talk cheerfully of the world they
would never see again, and across the last
days of their lives came a deep consolation.
They had done what they could, and they
lay down in their tents to rest.

You will wish it to be said of you that
you did what you could, and, doing that,
you will find your way to a happiness that
will overcome the sorrows of this world,
and survive as long as time endures.

You are thinking and feeling about a
thousand things in these years in which
you are laying the foundations of a world.
What a solemn thing that is to say, and yet
it is true that every one of us, in the days
of our youth, is building a world, as cer
tainly as he who builds up stone on stone
and crowns them with towers and domes.
We come into a world that is open to re
ceive us ; for a few short years we live in
the world as we find it ; but soon, perhaps
almost sooner than we know, we are
making our own world, carving our own
way, shaping our own thoughts, controlling
our own destinies.

We are like travellers sent out on a
journey, set in a path well marked and
beaten down by the feet of friends who
have gone before us. For a little way the
path is clear and narrow, and friends
protect and guide us as we go ; we follow
where they lead. But soon the way grows

63

64 TO THE GIRL WHO

wide, and our friends are scattered ; the
paths lead here and there, and cross and
cross ; the signposts are so confusing and
in such strange languages that we only
half perceive their meaning ; and we
wander on and on, through unknown ways
to unknown lands. No longer is the path
marked out for us ; we make it as we go,
and we go whither we will.

Life is like that. We reach it through a
narrow, guarded way, which leads into
infinite space. We come into it with
minds like a garden not yet planted — with
soil half prepared, perhaps, so that it may
have a tendency towards flowers instead
of weeds, or towards weeds instead of
flowers ; but with the actual seeds unsown,
so that we may make the garden almost
what we will. For a little while the flowers
come up about us and we have almost
nothing to do with them ; but soon the
seeds are offered us by a thousand hands,
bearing a thousand kinds of fruit, and we
can take them or reject them as we will.
What shall we take, and what shall we
reject ?

That is what will make our lives, build
ing them up or pulling them down. The
things we put into our pockets may be as

THINKS AND FEELS 65

nothing, though they be made of gold ;
but the things we put into our minds are
everything to us, though they fall from the
skies, or rise from the valleys, or pour out
upon us from the hills, and cost us nothing.
We are what we think. We are as old as
we feel, as rich or as poor as our imagina
tion. We are as strong as our faith or as
weak as our fears. It is these things that
make up life for us ; it is your mind that
makes your world, and your mind is what
you make it.

You have often heard people say, no
doubt, that if they could make their own
world they would be perfectly happy, and
perhaps you have thought so too. Well,
the boundaries of your kingdom are rising
up around you, and you are forming them.
Even now, while life is so pleasant and the
years bring no burden for you to carry,
you are laying for yourself the foundations
of a world in which you will live, I hope,
to a serene old age. You can hand on to
your future no more precious inheritance
than a mind well filled, well balanced, and
well controlled.

Is there not a special temptation be
setting a girl's path through the world
of thought ? Is it not all too easy for her
9

66 TO THE GIRL WHO

to mistake emotion for something deeper,
or to let emotion control thought ? You
will not be afraid, I am sure, of your
natural emotions ; there is no need ever
to be afraid of being natural, and generally
you will be much wiser in giving way to
emotion than in restraining or suppressing
it. But it is one of the great dangers of
the world that emotion easily overwhelms
all other feelings, and we should guard
with all our might against this. Nothing
can be more fatal than to let emotion
seize the reins and lead us blindly on. It
is easy to see how harmful this is, if we
think only for a minute ; but the pity is
that emotion can drown the power of
thought and reason, so that even gentle
natures become hard when they are greatly
moved. We have all heard the saying
that we must often be cruel to be kind,
and we can only follow that wise advice if
we have full control of our feelings and
keep emotion in its proper place.

A strange thing happened not long ago
in a large town in England, where both
men and women forgot their higher feelings
and let emotion run away, not only with
their reason, but with their sense of justice
and fair play. A fearful thing had been

THINKS AND FEELS 67

done ; a young man had brutally taken
an old man's life. Now, there must be
many noble causes in that town which are
languishing for want of sympathy and help ;
yet, while these causes suffer, there were
thousands of men and women who gave
their sympathy to this callous coward, less
deserving of compassion than many a dog,
so that when the time came for him to
suffer for his crime these people cheered
him in the streets. Nobody seems to have
given a cheer for his poor victim ; under the
stress of a great emotion the minds of these
people were unbalanced so that their sense
of justice was lost for a time, their sense
of pity was perverted ; and if they could
have had their way a hundred big con
siderations would have been put on one
side for the sake of one consideration less
important than any of the others. That
is the great harm of uncontrolled emotion :
it robs the reason of its sway, and deprives
us of our sense of right.

It is not easy to restrain the natural
feelings of pity when we see or hear sad
things, and it will be a sad day for the
world when sorrow and pain cease to stir
our feelings. But it would be worse for us
all if, in our pity, we shut our eyes and

68 TO THE GIRL WHO

hearts and minds to other feelings. We
must be strong enough to bear the sight of
pain for healing's sake, or where would
doctors and nurses come from ? We must
be stern enough to punish wrong-doing,
or what would become of peaceful people ?
It is right that we should regret the need of
causing pain, but it is wrong that we should
shun the painful duties that we owe to
ourselves and to others. We must learn
to look wisely upon all sides of life, and not
give way to the feelings that belong to
only one side of things.

It will help us all if we remember one of
Nature's greatest laws — that certain things
have certain consequences. Sin brings
sorrow in its train, and ignorance brings
suffering ; no kindness in the world can
remove these laws or alter them in the
least. What folly is it, then, to hinder
Nature when she would teach people these
eternal truths ! If we can imagine a girl
brought up so carefully that whatever
mistake she made brought no suffering in
its train ; that whatever wrong she did
brought no punishment ; that, however
ignorant she remained, she was forbidden
ever to realise her want of knowledge —
what would happen to such a girl the first

THINKS AND FEELS 69

hour she was left alone ? It is easy to see
how dangerous it is to interfere with the
teaching of the great lesson that if we do
wrong we must suffer. It is hard to refuse
a child something it badly wants, but I
have seen a mother give a child a thing
that may injure it for life, and there is only
weakness and cruelty and wickedness in
that. It is often true that we must cause
a little pain to save a greater pain.

And so we must give our reason full
control of our emotions. We must think
long, long thoughts, and not only for the
moment and the hour. We must not let
momentary feelings, so lightly roused,
govern the acts of our lives. We must
not let one emotion seize hold of us, and
control us, and dominate our lives until
it possesses us completely. We must not
let our love of 'dogs, for example, blind us
to the fact that sometimes, at the cost of
a little pain to one of these brave animals,
we may save the lives of thousands of other
dogs or even thousands of children. We
must not let any emotion so utterly possess
us that we are carried away by it, as would
the poor woman who declared that she
" would as soon lose her child as her dog."
That is a pitiful example of the way in

70 TO THE GIRL WHO

which emotion, allowed to run wild, dis
turbs the balance of the mind.

Without this balance, this careful adjust
ment of the scales of reason and emotion,
our lives must lose much of their happiness
for ourselves and much of their usefulness
to others. The life that is governed by
emotions lightly roused finds its way into
narrow grooves, and too often stays there.
It is sadly easy to grow so accustomed to
pitying people in misfortune, without con
sidering the cause, that in time we forget
to trouble about the cause of distress at all,
and help where help is wrong ; so that the
very pity that distress arouses brings
distress itself by encouraging a lack of
self-reliance and a lazy dependence on
others. Let us lose all things before we
lose our pity, but let us control our pity
wisely, tempering mercy with judgment.

A wise man once said that to the envious
man the world is like a cracked bell, from
which only discord and no music comes ;
and even good people, by narrowing down
their lives in little grooves, may get one
sided views of everything, and be a hind
rance rather than a help in the real work
of the world. There are good people who,
because they are so kind-hearted, join

THINKS AND FEELS 71

all manner of societies to protest against
things they only p°rtly understand, so op
posing that very progress of humanity which
in their hearts they wish to serve. We
must guard ourselves against that folly.

All through our lives we shall be forming
our opinions, fixing our attitude to this or
that great movement, resolving which side
we will take in a hundred questions. From
all sides the appeal to our sympathy will
come, and in the stress of life, in the midst
of all its clashing interests, it will not
be easy to decide. Often it will seem that
two ways are right when only one can be
taken, and often the way that seems right
will mean pain to those we love, or suffer
ing to ourselves that we could avoid by
pursuing another way. And sometimes it
will seem as if to find the truth is quite
impossible.

When these times come we shall do what
seems to us right ; we shall listen to the
still small voice within us which never yet
has led any one of us astray. We shall
remember, not merely the things that
crowd upon our minds at the moment, but
the way in which the acts of our lives are
wrought into a chain that never ends, but
links the human race from age to age. In

72 TO THE GIRL WHO

all things we must consider the far-off end,
the ultimate purpose of Life. We must
bear in mind the general interest of the
world, and act not only for the moment,
not only on the feelings of pain or pleasure
that will pass, but on the deep conviction
that the thing we do is right, however far
off the end may be, and however difficult
it may be to see.

So our minds will widen and deepen and
strengthen as we grow up, and will winnow
the wheat from the chaff. \Ve shall open
them wide to the gates of knowledge, and
shall trust to Time to reveal its use. We
shall grow up with the sure conviction that
no knowledge is ever wasted, and that the
end of it may be beyond our dreams. We
shall scorn to let our lives be ruled by great
prejudices or by petty ignorances ; we
shah1 refuse to be the slave of sentiment or
to put our reason under the sway of mere
emotion. But, in enthroning heart and
mind together, let us remember that the
human mind moves on from age to age, and
is not sure, while the human heart, if not
eternally the same, is an almost certain
guide to what is right and good.

So we shall tune the dictates of our minds
to the feelings of our hearts. We shall not

THINKS AND FEELS 73

split up our lives in little compartments,
caring only for a few things, being for this
and anti that ; we shall remember Row
land Hill's old saying that " I do not think
much of a man's religion unless his dog and
cat are better for it," and we shall let the
stream of our life flow wide and free. We
shall check our emotion with reason, and
our reason will be touched with emotion.

We shall not give way to the feelings
which so often mislead us, but shall recall
the wise words of the Roman emperor who
said : " Consider how much more you
often suffer from your anger and grief than
from those very things for which you are
angry and grieved." When emotion gives
way under the blow of a great calamity, we
will call upon our reason to consider, as
Dr. Johnson said, " how much has been
escaped." There is a wise passage in an
old Arab book. It tells how one went
forth to meet the Plague that had stricken
the land, asking if he could stay his cruel
hand. The Plague answered that he
meant to be merciful ; he would only take
five thousand from the Earth. Some time
afterwards these two met again. " So
thou art a liar as well as a murderer ! " said
the other to the Plague. " Thy five
10

74 TALKS TO GIRLS

thousand meant fifty thousand ! " " Not
so," answered the Blague. " I took but
my five thousand. Fear and Worry killed
the others."

You will have your share of the fears
and worries that come to us all, and will
bear them bravely. But you will be wise,
and not suffer your feelings to mislead you.
You will open your heart to sorrow and
your mind to knowledge, and you will live
in that world of thought and feeling where
true peace is found.

TO THE GIRL WHO WILL
HAVE A VOTE

You will have learned, long before your
vote comes, that your sway in the nation
is greater than any bit of paper in the
ballot-box. Infinitely greater than the
power to cast a vote is the real power of
a woman in this world.

Long ago, before the nations had grown
as ashamed of war as they are getting now,
John Ruskin said a striking thing which is
worth remembering when you think of
your influence in the world. If every
society lady in Europe would wear deep
black while any war goes on, he said, no
war would last a week. Think of that,
and be proud, for it means this. It means
that men may lose their tempers or their
senses and may go to war, that they may
waste their strength and brain on instru
ments of death, that statesmen and kings
may fling out masses of men and boys upon
the battlefields, and newspapers may
thunder out their shouts of victory, but

75

76 TO THE GIRL WHO

that the women of the world, the mothers
and sisters and wives and daughters, can
bring men's plans to nought by saying that
they shall not be. So powerful would be
the silent appeal of womanhood in mourn
ing that all the armies of Europe would
bow down before it.

That is John Ruskin's wonderful way of
saying a plain and simple truth, and it is
never too soon for you to learn it. It is not
the legal force of women, not the power
given them by law, that can make them
most felt in the nation ; it is their moral
force, the power given to them by God
Himself, that will make them irresistible
in any cause they make their own. We
grow up, in a self-governing country like
ours, believing in the power of the laws we
make to rule ourselves, and it 'is right that
we should believe in them, and respect
them. It is right that we should be
jealous of the honour of being a citizen of
a great nation, and of course it is true that
by our vote we make our power felt in the
surest possible way.

But it is equally true that the greatest
reforms in the world have been accom
plished without votes ; that is to say, the
reforms were won before they were voted

WILL HAVE A VOTE 77

for in Parliament ; and the vote was the
last step, not the first, in the campaign.
I would have you think of a vote as a noble
and solemn thing, but I hope you will
treasure even more than a vote the in
fluence which every man or woman may
have to help on great causes, to stir up
movements which, as certain as the rising
of the sun, will drive the votes and the
governing machine wherever they are
wanted to go. Some of the noblest men
and women in England have no votes, but
their lives are worth a thousand votes
when the hour for action comes.

It is a common mistake to measure our
power in the nation by our vote, and to
imagine, therefore, that we have no power
as long as we have no vote. The truth is
that it is the moral force behind the vote
that the statesman fears or craves. Char
acter is more than power, and power with
out character behind it can bring nothing
but evil in its train. How many of the
tragedies of history have come from that !

The opportunity will come to you in a
hundred ways to shape the opinion which
registers itself in Acts of Parliament, and
there is nothing the women of England
want that they could not have if they

78 TO THE GIRL WHO

would pursue it with the same energy, the
same extraordinary insistence, the same
single-minded devotion, that some of them
gave to the pursuit of a vote — if all women
would seek the end, that is, as earnestly
as some women sought the means.

Who knows whose votes may be subject
to your sway ? The moulding of public
opinion, the slow shaping of the moral force
which carries Governments to victory or
brings them to disaster, begins in the minds
of twos and threes, or more often in the mind
of one ; and it is the sowing of the seed, the
preparation of the soil, the watering of the
tender plant, which is all-important in the
history of reforms. It will help us always
if we realise this truth. We shall not be
so discouraged by the thought of how
little we can do if we remember that, just
as the laying of stone on stone built up the
Great Pyramid, just as the falling of flake
after flake of snow built up the iceberg that
met the Titanic, just as one man's love of
freedom spread itself until it burst the
bonds of every slave under the British
flag, so our own little efforts, never ceasing,
never flagging, gathering to themselves
new force with every rising of the sun,
must be crowned with success at last.

WILL HAVE A VOTE 79

Nothing can stop the growth of noble
influence ; no power of voting can with
stand it ; neither Governments, nor Armies,
nor Kings, nor any other forces can pre
vent the sun from rising on a triumphant
dawn for those whose faces are set towards
the Throne of God.

There is something like a key to the power
of women in the story of how the children
once saved a German town. The town
had been besieged until Death stared its
people in the face both inside and outside
the walls, and at last, when it seemed as if
nothing on the Earth could help them,
somebody remembered that the strongest
thing in the world is the love of a little
child. And so they sent the children
through the gates, pleading for the town
and the lives of its people, and when the
procession of boys and girls, passing through
the enemy's ranks, came to the conqueror,
he proved himself a conqueror indeed, for
he conquered the passion of war, and bade
his soldiers prepare a royal feast for his
little guests before he sent them back with
good tidings to the town.

The appeal of humanity touches us all,
and it is that appeal, the gentle playing on
the chords of human hearts, in which

8o TO THE GIRL WHO

women are unfailing. They bring into
play the noblest passions and stir our
deepest feelings, and the thought of the
women of a nation profoundly moved
upon some solemn thing is a call to action
to which no man born of woman can say
No. We have known of a man, sometimes,
who has done a wrong thing, and has
found that the only way to begin again
was to leave his country. It is a fine thing
that there should be no room in a country
for a thief, for a man whose honour is not
to be trusted, and this fine feeling, which
demands honesty and honour in business
and good conduct in private life, is akin
to a deep, silent feeling which insists on
uprightness and good character in men
who hold high positions in public life.
This silent force, the moral, power of a
feeling which everybody knows to be there,
is one of the secrets of a nation's strength,
and it is the supreme power and privilege
of women that they may uphold it. We
may apply to a nation the sentence of
Carlyle's which says that always there is
a black spot in our sunshine • it is the
shadow of ourselves. The special power
of women is to save a nation from the
shadow of itself, to lift it up above its
sordid selfishness on to a plane from which

WILL HAVE A VOTE 81

it sees the wide world of humanity. It
has been a woman's service to the world,
throughout the ages, to spread the spirit
of gentleness and selfishness, the spirit of
sacrifice and long-suffering ; it is her proud
opportunity and privilege to be the keeper
of a nation's conscience.

Nothing is more important to a nation
than that the high standard of its life
should be kept up, and no workers are
more worthy in any nation than those
who quietly and steadily maintain the even
tenor of its way. " Do not forget the girl
whose duty lies at home, helping mother,"
somebody wrote to me when these talks
were being written. " How uncongenial
the drudgery of her life may seem at first !
How much she needs encouragement, even
beyond those whose work lies in the great
world ! Her reward comes later, when
she can look back and see her duty faith
fully done, but she wants an encouraging
nod when she is young." It is true, and
those of us who love our homes can never
be too grateful to those who toil to make
homes happy.

What is true of the home is true also
of the State ; no State can hold together
unless it has within it a host of willing
ii

82 TO THE GIRL WHO

people who toil unceasingly ; no nation can
be great unless its people cherish its good
name and labour to maintain it. It is for
those of us who have votes to use them
well and wisely ; it is for those of us who
have no votes to seek them and be worthy
to possess them ; it is for all of us to strive
to make our power felt in the councils of
the nation. Of all the ways in which we
may do this none is more certain to be
effective, if we have no votes, than the
influence we may bring to bear upon those
who have. How this influence of women
does assert itself in the reputation of a
nation, not only among its own people but
even beyond its own borders, is clearly seen
when we begin to travel and see the fame
of our land among our neighbours ; and
some people still remember a beautiful
tribute which appeared in an English
newspaper long before the war.

" I would that all Englishwomen knew,"
said a French lady in a letter to the Times,
" how they are looked up to from abroad,
what a high opinion, what honour and
reverence, we foreigners have for their
principles, their truthfulness, the fresh
and pure innocence of their daughters, the
healthy youthfulness of their lovely chil-

WILL HAVE A VOTE 83

dren." It was nothing dramatic or sensa
tional that won this glowing fame for our
mothers ; it was only the quiet work of
bringing up healthy children and building
up happy homes. We remember the
words of the wise Roman emperor Marcus
Aurelius : " Dost thou not see the little
plants, the little birds, the ants, the bees,
working together to put in order their
several parts ? And art thou unwilling
to do the work of a human being, and dost
thou not make haste to do that which is
according to thy duty ? "

That which is according to thy duty lies
before you. If you have a vote your duty
is to use it ; if you have not a vote your
duty is to do the utmost in your power to
wield your influence without it, to compel
those who have the votes to use them to
wise and noble ends. In any case, under
all circumstances, your duty is to add to
the moral force which, in the long run, is
the chief asset that any nation has.

You will be grateful for the opportunities
that come to you ; you will thank God and
England for the advantages of living in a
free and happy land. Let us be grateful
in the right way. It is not by favour that
we enjoy our great advantages ; it is not

84 TALKS TO GIRLS

necessarily that we are more deserving
than others. Perhaps it is because we are
better able to spread them, to share them
with those less fortunate. Let us live our
thanks by sharing our happiness with
those about us ; let us do our utmost to
give to others something of the happiness
that others give to us.

Let us enlist, with a vote or without it,
in the great army whose unceasing pur
pose is, in the fine words of Carlyle, " to
make some nook of God's creation a little
fruitfuller, better, more worthy of God :
to make some human hearts a little wiser,
manfuller, happier ; more blessed, less
accursed."

It is work for a God, said Carlyle, and
it is work for God's partner — you.

TO THE GIRL WHO WILL MARRY
SOME DAY

IT is said of Augustus Caesar, who was
ruling the Roman Empire in the days when
Christianity came into the world, that as
he lay dying he turned to his weeping wife
and, in the last words he ever spoke to her,
said, Remember our happy married life.
Then, in the last words he ever spoke at
all, he asked after the health of a little boy.
This strong man of a worldwide empire,
as he passed out of the world in which he
was so great a figure, thought of a woman
and a child.

There is something in that which stirs
our hearts and gives us a true vision of the
things of this world. The things that
dazzle the eyes of men, the glittering
heights of power, were as shadows to the
man whose dominion slowly vanished from
his grasp ; but the simple love of his wife,
the thought of a little boy, the happy home-
life that had been his stay through all the

85

86 TO THE GIRL WHO

joys and sorrows of this world — these
things he remembered.

History takes no notice of it, but it was
something for a woman to have achieved ;
it was something that, through all the
storm and stress of Augustus Caesar's life,
a woman's love should have woven itself
about him, should have impressed itself
upon him, should have become so much
a part of him that at the end, in the solemn
silence of the last hour, it was not the
Roman Empire that he thought of, not
the power and glory of the throne of Caesar,
not the great days when he stood up in
the Forum Master of the World, but the
love of the woman who had helped him,
trusted him, and sustained him. It was
something, surely, that a woman should
set herself in his affections against an
empire, and that she should Weigh down
an empire in the scale.

It may not be for you to set yourself
against a throne in the heart of a man, but
she who shares another's life must share a
kingdom too. The life of a man goes a
hundred ways, and she who would share
it must follow them all.

And so, when you come to look out upon
the world and make your choice, you will

WILL MARRY SOME DAY 87

look far and think long. For ever and
ever you are choosing ; all the golden years
ahead you are pledging then. You will
not pledge them lightly ; you will not
engage your womanhood, all your precious
years, to interests that are not really
yours. You will not allow yourself to be
deceived ; you will not let the emotions
of an hour determine the course of your
whole life.

It is easy, perhaps the easiest thing you
can do in the world, to take a false step in
the path which will open out so pleasantly
before you in these early years when
womanhood is dawning and all the world
is young. All the barriers, it will seem to
you, are fallen down, all the voices, as you
listen, will seem to be beckoning you on ;
and there will be opening out for you
a vision of the future in which no black
spot dims the far horizon. It will be your
millennium, dawning for you even then,
urging you on as the rising sun above a
distant hill. And perhaps that light may
be your rising sun ; through these glad
fields, across these smiling plains, perhaps
your happiness may lie. But it may save
you from a saddened life to say to yourself
also, Perhaps it may not.

88 TO THE GIRL WHO

There is no courage shown on a battle
field greater than the courage you may
need in your choice of a companion through
this world. It is hard to do right when
every hour of your future is calling out to
you to beware of the present ; but that
time may come to all, and especially it
may come to a girl in her happiest days.
We have seen how vital it may be for us
not to let emotion rule our lives, and the
supreme test of our wisdom in this comes
in the choosing of a husband or a wife.
It would be wrong not to realise the power
emotion plays in this great choice ; but
it is your duty to yourself, and to all who
may depend on you, to look beyond the
hour that stirs your feelings, and reflect
upon the ever-changing circumstances in
which your choice will bind you.

And, looking beyond, you- may see, so
small that it is but a speck on the horizon,
a shadow of doubt and fear. Perhaps you
are not quite sure of your feelings at all ;
perhaps you are not quite sure that you
could bear the disappointment if it should
come. You will test yourself well ; you
will let your foundation be sure and deep ;
you will know the difference between firm
rock and shifting sands. The sands of the

WILL MARRY SOME DAY 89

sea are pleasant to walk upon, and there
are no hours more serenely happy, perhaps,
than when they are under our feet and the
tide is going out ; but we do not build
our houses on the sands. Nor will you
build up your life on things that come and
go, on feelings that thrill you with delight
but are not enduring. The day will come
when these delights will fail and other
things will please you.

It is not enough that there should be
between two lives, if they are to be lived
as one, a perfect union of hearts. There
must be union of mind as well. Not less
important to you than his affections are
the interests and hopes and aspirations of
the man in whose keeping you entrust
your life. A hundred times you will hear
it said of a man that he has a good heart,
and there can be no happiness anywhere
without good hearts. But, though you
may perhaps never hear it said of a man
that he has a good mind, it is vital that
you should know the mind as well as the
heart of a man. Nothing but sorrow can
come, however warm and deep the love of
two hearts may be, if the minds have nothing
in common — and how often it happens,
alas, that this is discovered too late !
12

go TO THE GIRL WHO

It will always be true, no doubt, that
love will rule the world (so that, as a man
will always love a woman, it will always
be true, therefore, that women rule the
world !). But even love is not beyond the
reach of wisdom. We need not love
flatterers or praters, or give our feelings
to all who ask ; and we need not let love
guide us against our better knowledge.
It is not true to say that we marry for
love and nothing else ; we marry for love
and many other things. It is true that
without love no marriage can be happy,
but it is at least equally true that even
with love marriage may be unhappy.
Shakespeare put only half the truth into
the mouth of Henry the Fifth when he
wooed Kate in his playful way, but his
merry words have an honest ring in them :

And while- thou livest, dear' Kate, take a
fellow of plain and uncoined constancy ;
for he, perforce, must do thee right, because
he hath not the gift to woo in other places ;
for these fellows of infinite tongue, that can
rhyme themselves into ladies' favours, they
do always reason themselves out again.

What ! A speaker is but a prater ; a
rhyme is but a ballad. A good leg will fall ;
a straight back will stoop ; a black beard

WILL MARRY SOME DAY 91

will turn white ; a curled pate will grow
bald ; a fair face will wither ; a full eye will
wax hollow ; but a good heart, Kate, is the
sun and the moon ; or, rather, the sun, and
not the moon, for it shines bright and never
changes, but keeps his course truly.

Even a king, at such a time in his life,
may be forgiven for remembering his own
special virtues ; but we may hope that
Kate, in her surrender, had a vision of a
kingly mind presiding over a kingly heart.
You will love King Arthur's lover better,
perhaps, than King Harry's ; you will
remember how Tennyson has made him
teach the knights of his Table Round

To love one maiden only, cleave to her,
And worship her by years of noble deeds
Until they won her ; for indeed I knew
Of no more subtle master under heaven
Than is the maiden passion for a maid,
Not only to keep down the base in man,
But teach high thought, and amiable words,
And courtliness, and the desire of fame,
And love of truth, and all that makes a man.

So the love of you will make a man
great-minded and good-hearted, too ; and
you will share his life wholly and not in

92 TO THE GIRL WHO

part. There will be no part of it, no part
of him, in which your union is not com
plete. And yet that does not mean, of
course, that you must know all that a man
may know, or that a man need know all
that a woman knows. There have been
true unions of heart and mind where one
was great and immortal and the other
simple. It is in the willingness to under
stand, the readiness to know, the love of
great and beautiful things, the hate of
ignorance and obstinacy and petty con
siderations, the spirit of light against
darkness, of right against wrong, of vision
against blindness, of a full life as against
a mere tedious existence — in these things
even a simple mind may keep a rare and
gracious company with the great. We
need not be afraid of having different
opinions — that may even be • desirable in
many ways ; but all who love you will
hope that the man you choose as your
comrade through life will share your vision
of the future, and march towards it with
your fine sense of honour, your wide charity,
your unflinching resolve to set your feet
firmly in the path that leads upward and
onward and never turns back.

It is not necessary that we should all

WILL MARRY SOME DAY 93

be ambitious ; we may not be romantic,
or imaginative, or intellectual, or artistic ;
but we may all love those who have these
qualities, and it will help us all our way
through life if we remind ourselves con
stantly that the things that are in our
minds are as vital a part of health and
happiness as the things that are in our
bodies. You will take great care that you
know the physical health of the man you
choose to marry — you will not be afraid,
at all costs, to assure yourself on this,
remembering how terrible the price of
carelessness may be ; you will be careful
of his moral health, so grave a thing to
you ; and you will be not less careful to
see that your minds have that sympathy
between them without which no home-life
can bring you lasting happiness.

A clever, good woman may marry a
clever, good man and the end of it may be
disaster. " I married for ambition," said
Mrs. Carlyle ; " Carlyle has succeeded
beyond all that my wildest hopes ever
imagined for him, and I am miserable."
It is sad and strange how something in
the mind of a man, meeting something in
the mind of a woman, may bring two lives
clattering to ruin, and perhaps it may come

94 TO THE GIRL WHO

unexpectedly, for want of thought that
might have saved its fearful consequence.

A thousand things you will have to re
solve for yourself in making this great
choice, and no one can resolve them for
you ; but I hope you will listen with
patience to the wisdom that comes of
experience. In the end you will choose
your own path, as each of us must through
out this world, but you will not resent the
advice and appeal that those who have
travelled farther than you may offer. It
is sometimes true that we are unable to
decide what is best for ourselves, and at
that time we must wait. We need not
surrender our choice, we need not abandon
the final responsibility which it is right
we should take upon ourselves. But at
such times the simple sense of duty may
compel us to pause and consider before we
take a step that can never be retraced.

We may think, in the end, that we know
our feelings best, and may determine our
own course ; but we shall never regret that
we listened to the counsels of those who
have no other interest than our happiness,
and we may regret in bitterness if we do
not. Especially in your case, if the
opportunity comes, you should eagerly

WILL MARRY SOME DAY 95

listen to the advice of a wise old doctor,
whose word, particularly if he knows where
your affections are set, may be like the
touch of a magician's wand in its effect
upon your life. Terrible sometimes are
the results of want of care.

If you will wait and not be impatient,
if you will choose a good heart and a good
mind, you two will live through happy
years so that the day will come when he
will say, as Lord Tennyson said, " The
peace of God came into my life the day I
married her."

TO THE GIRL WHO HAS MADE
HER CHOICE

You have made your choice, and will
be making your home. You can make
nothing nobler in all this world. The
greatness of a nation has no surer founda
tion than the happy homes of its people.
There is no truer service you can render
to your country, and therefore to the world,
than by building up a happy home ; and
the first of all the steps that lead straight
to a happy home is the wise choice of your
companion through this world, and the wise
blending of your two lives lived as one.

But you will not expect, now that you
two have settled down and taken your
places in the world, that henceforth there
will come nothing but smoothness and
perfect peace. Though you go the same
way, you will not tread the same path ;
though you build to the same end and
cherish the same purpose, you will have
your separate work to do, each in your
own way, and it may be that the natural

96

TALKS TO GIRLS 97

broadening of your lives may give you
separate interests. You will take care,
when this happens, that no interest of any
kind, however strongly it may appeal to
you, shall come between you two and
break the link that binds you. As all the
roads lead out from Rome, so all the roads
lead back to Rome again, and you will
see that all your pleasures, all your interests,
all the energies that absorb your life, lead
you back to your life's centre.

One of the first disappointments that
will come to you, perhaps, will be that you
two must so long be divided. The work
of a man must take him out into the world,
and you must be at home. If this should
disappoint you it will console you for ever
to remember the splendid words of Edmund
Burke, who said, in the midst of an anxious
public life, " Every care vanishes the
moment I enter under my own roof." It
is the very triumph of life to create an
environment in which we lose all our cares.
It is a door worth having that will not
admit the worries of the office, the count
ing-house, the workshop, the laboratory,
the consulting-room. The story is told
of Pasteur, the immortal benefactor of all
mankind, that so absorbed was he in his

13

g8 TO THE GIRL WHO

work that he was missing on his wedding
day, and his agitated friends found him
quietly working in his laboratory, with
his apron on, angry at being disturbed, and
pleading that his wedding could wait,
while his experiments could not ! Men
are not all Pasteurs, but one of the first
secrets of your happy home will be your
understanding of this story — the recog
nising, that is, of the all-importance of the
other side of a man's life. Perhaps it may
not be possible, sometimes, that he should
bring no care into your home, and then
will come your opportunity. You can
share it and halve the burden of it, or can
drive it away.

There is a great example of this in
the life of an American writer. Nathaniel
Hawthorne went to his office one day as
bright as usual, as interested as ever in
his work, with no foreboding of evil ; he
left it with the brink of ruin staring at him.
He had read the message that has struck
despair to so many men's hearts — the
message that his services would no longer
be required. He went with a heavy heart
to his humble home, for he was poor in
those days, and he dreaded the effect of
his ill news upon his little wife. Something

HAS MADE HER CHOICE 99

in his face told her as they met, and she
waited for the silence to be broken. Then
the heartbroken man said, I am removed
from office. The young wife walked away,
lit a bright fire, and brought pen, ink, and
paper. She set them down on the table
beside him, touched him on the shoulder,
and said with a smile, Now you can write
your book.

A new world had opened out before her,
and gently she led the sad man through
the gates. It was as if the sun had burst
through the midnight clouds, the lost post
seemed like a passport to freedom, and,
stirred by his wife's spirit, he wrote on
until he had finished the book which made
his name famous throughout the world.
Hundreds of stories tell the same tale ;
one of them tell us of a King of England
who said to Lord Eldon, "' I know how
much I owe to Ledy Eldon ; I know that
you would have made yourself a country
curate, and that she has made you my
Lord Chancellor." There are influences
of many kinds, and a good wife holds the
key of all.

Such is the power of a good woman over
circumstances that might well be too
much for a man to bear alone. At such

ioo TO THE GIRL WHO

times the thought of his home, the thought
that his wife may give way under the
blow, is often the hardest thing a man has
to bear ; and there is nothing to be com
pared to the encouragement that a woman's
smile, her chivalrous Never mind, brings
when a man is bowed down under some
great calamity. In the most perfect union
of two hearts there must be secrets still,
and the secret of a true man's life is often
this, that he must work hard and long and
never seem to weary — for what ? Not for
the joy that he will share, not for the happi
ness that he will see, but to build up some
hope and consolation, some comfortable
corner of the world, for those he may leave
behind tomorrow. It is one of the pathetic
things of this world that a man must toil
and toil to " keep a happy fireside warm,"
and that when he has toiled his hardest he
has no defensive barrier that will keep
back the wolf in the terrible days that
may befall.

He must work as if his life were two
lives, for he must struggle for the present
and the future ; he must make a double
effort, to guard against misfortune now
and to provide for those he loves when he
can shelter them no more. It is not a

HAS MADE HER CHOICE 101

light anxiety that attends him perhaps
every moment of his life, and it is heavier
still if by some good fortune he has raised
the lives of those about him to a high level
of happiness. For then he must not merely
maintain it now, but must be ready to
maintain it if some mischance shall fall ;
and then he must be so strong that he
may face adversity for perhaps long years,
and yet keep alive some hope of comfort
for his household if his own stricken life
should fail. Then, for all his toiling, there
may be almost nothing in the end, and
what happens at last is the dread fate
whose shadow pursued him from the altar
to the grave : he may pass out of this
world with the vision of his loved ones
driven to sacrifice and want, perhaps to
face the world in poverty and alone.

And so, it may be, a man's task is doubly
hard, and perhaps he dies before he comes
into his inheritance. You will not with
hold from him the love and stimulus for
which he looks to you. "HI had cancer,"
a man once said, " my wife would nurse me
and die for me if need be ; but I have some
thing worse than cancer and she cares
nothing." There are states of mental anxiety
as hard to bear as any physical disease, and

102 TO THE GIRL WHO

you will not shut your eyes to them because
they are borne bravely and quietly and
without complaint. As far as it lies in
your power you will see that the toiler
has his reward as he goes. You will see
that the home he maintains by his toil
yields him the peace that a man's life
needs. He should find there understand
ing and sympathy. You will not have
reached the high honour of being a home-
maker without learning the true value of
sympathy in all our lives. Not once or
twice, but a hundred times, we are lifted
up by a single spoken word, and a hundred
times we are bowed down because the word
has not been spoken. No one can measure
the power of a look or a word.

You will try, by sympathy and under
standing, to be necessary to those depend
ing on you for these things ; in the art of
managing a home you will have no room
for worries which can be set aside, you will
seek to avoid conflicting interests, you will
drive out the small doubts and fears and
questionings that so easily grow and wreck
so many lives. There will be things you
do not understand, but you will under
stand that, however closely your lives are
interwoven, they are two lives still, and

you will agree that, in what one does not
understand about the other's life, each
must be trusted without doubt or question.
Where husband and wife differ it is a safe
rule to leave the decision to the one who
better understands the situation.

Especially you will take great care to
add nothing to the troubles that may creep
into a man's life and perplex him from
morning till night. You will read his
moods and know how to respond to them.
You will free him from the petty irrita
tions that become real hindrances ; you
will draw him to lean on you and not drive
him to seek counsel and encouragement
elsewhere. You will not, even uncon
sciously, boycott his interests or be in
different to the things that are all the world
to him. You will welcome his friends as
yours, and not seek to cut him adrift from
the influences that he has chosen to sur
round him. You will realise that his mind
must widen and deepen by contact with
other minds, and that the real value of
social life is above and beyond the mere
pleasantries of the passing hour.

Therefore, you will foster and not dis
courage the formation of friendships and
the frequent meeting of friends ; you will

104 TO THE GIRL WHO

see that your home gives out to the world
of its best and takes in what of its best the
world can give. You will not let your
home be cut off from its neighbours ; you
will not shut yourself off from other people ;
you will not let the busy world, the world
of good people — the world of kind people
who keep charity alive, the world of serious
people who keep great movements strong,
the world of leisured people who brighten
life and are so entertaining — miss you and
pass you by. We must be part of the
stream of life, not lookers-on. In this
great world, where Life, like a rushing
river, is carrying us whether we will or
not, there is no room for lookers-on. We
must be part of it or die.

Outside the interests of our individual
lives is the life common to our homes, and
here we find room for the play of all those
gracious qualities that win distinction and
applause wherever they are found. No
where more than in a home can we sow the
seeds and cultivate the fruits of patience
and charity and forbearance and good
temper and unselfish devotion.

There is a good story told of a friend
of Abraham Lincoln, who called at White
House one day and told the President

HAS MADE HER CHOICE 105

of sad trouble in his home. There had
been a quarrel and angry words, and the
unhappy husband had come to seek con
solation from his famous friend. " Come,
come, what is it all about ? " asked
Lincoln ; and the poor man told the
President how the house was being painted,
and they could not agree upon the colour.
" I want it white, and she wants it red,"
said he ; and wise President Lincoln, who
knew that Time is always on the side of
peace, begged his friend not to let so small
a matter come between him and his wife,
but to " think it over till morning, and
compromise." And so the good man who
wanted his house white went home, and the
next day he came back to Lincoln, smiling.
" It's all right, Abe," said he, " we've com
promised; it's being painted red ! "

It is not much of a compromise in which
one side gets all its own way, but in small
things even such a compromise is better
than a quarrel, and no wise man or woman
will ever press a minor point so far that it
grows bigger and bigger until it swallows
up all else. In the eternal compromise of
life we must find out the ground on which
we come nearest to agreement, and meet
that way, and we must always remember

14

io6 TALKS TO GIRLS

that it is sometimes real strength to give
way and weakness to insist.

And so, by gentleness and patience, by
choosing the way of peace, seeking first the
things that are best for two, you will build
up the noblest monument yet erected on
our English earth — a happy home.

TO THE GIRL ON THE HIGHWAY
OF LIFE

THERE is no royal road to happiness ;
there is no broad highway that leads us
to it. We talk and read and write of the
secret of the happy life, but the way to
happiness has no secrets that are hidden
from any one of us. The successful life
is happy, and its source is in a hundred
springs, every one of them open for most
of us, if we will but let them flow. There
is no man in the world so wise that he can
give you a single rule and say, " Follow
this and you will be happy." The great
highway of a happy life lies through many
narrow ways, by many winding paths, and
we must pass through them all before we
reach it. Let us look at some of them.

Above all other things we must remem
ber that the world is not for us alone.
We must be willing that all other people
should share the freedom and happiness
we crave for ourselves. It is sad that
there are so many people in the world who

107

io8 TO THE GIRL ON

forget, in seeking their own pleasures, that
pleasure is the common right of all. When
the time comes that your plans conflict
with those of others, as they often will,
you will remember that. You will not
selfishly insist upon your own if your own
robs others of an equal right.

Much of the happiness of this world
comes from the graceful giving up of little
rights — though surely we have no rights
at all that inflict wrongs upon others.
Those of us who think ourselves unselfish
are often selfish without knowing ; per
haps we have not time to think, or do not
take the trouble to inquire, how our own
interests clash with other people's. And
how easily unselfishness itself may slip
into selfishness ! We see it again and
again, as in the refusal of invitations to do
this or that pr the other because it gives
a friend a little trouble. If our friends are
worth having, a little trouble for our sakes
is a great joy to them, and this fear of
bothering them, leading us often to disap
point them, is a twisted way of looking at
things which turns our desire to please our
friends into a means of displeasing them.
In the little things that matter so much
all the way through life we must learn to

THE HIGHWAY OF LIFE 109

give and take, to do for others what we
would have them do for us, but to accept
gladly from them the services they gladly
render us.

We must be adaptable as well as thought
ful ; we must be ready to fit ourselves
into a new situation that may unex
pectedly arise. A sensible interest in the
affairs of the world, a wide range of reading,
and at least some travel, will help us
greatly here. It should never be painful
to us to meet anybody in the world
under honourable circumstances ; if we
have taken ourselves seriously, and made
ourselves worthy of our citizenship, our
nationality, our fellowship in the human
family, we may face all men with a fear
less independence. If good fortune comes
to us, and opens the door of prosperity,
we shall not walk through it so proudly
that old friends do not know us in our
fine clothes. Nothing goes more certainly
before a fall than pride in place. Pride
in our manhood and our womanhood,
pride in our country if it is truly great,
pride in our home if we have made it what
it should be, pride even in our possessions
if they are noble of themselves and have
been nobly earned : honest pride in honest

no TO THE GIRL ON

things every one of us may have. But
the false pride of the Pharisee, the
pride that we are not as others are — the
pride of wealth, or rank, or power, or
privilege — will bring us down.

One of the best stories ever written is
Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield and
it is great because it deals with the great
simplicities of life. You will be in no
danger of the besetting sin of pride if you
read this story and mark it well, for it tells
how this ignoble spirit, working in a
woman's mind, misdirecting her ambitions,
perverting her outlook on the world,
poisoning her love of simple things,
wrecked a good man's household and
destroyed the happiness of his children.
It is like a canker. The foolishness which
regards a woman, made in the image of
God, as an object for fine 'clothes, an
advertisement to hang a draper's and
milliner's and jeweller's wares upon ; or as
a sort of centre for rich possessions which
are of no possible use except for flaunting
vulgar wealth before the world ; or as
having some strange right to put all things,
living and lovely, under her feet — there is
nothing but misery in store for the life that
this strange spirit animates. A thousand

THE HIGHWAY OF LIFE in

times it will fail, and when affliction comes
— in that terrible hour which must come
to us all, when the human frame quakes
and trembles in the presence of the Thing
it cannot understand — the character that is
ruined by false pride will have no strength
to bear the blow.

You will be proud of the things we may
rightly be proud of ; you will have a proper
sense of the dignity of life, but you will
scorn the false pride in things that do not
matter, the empty show, the vain pre
tence. It is not the things we possess that
mark us off as better than our fellows ;
the quality of a man or a woman is in
the things not seen. We may be rich and
mean ; we may be poor and generous ;
and no claim of wealth, or proud birth,
or rank, gives us the right to look down
upon those whom fortune has not favoured
with these luxurious things. The real
walls that divide the human race into
classes and groups are not walls of gold :
they are the walls that stand between the
industrious and the indolent, the brave
people and the cowards, the wise people
and the ignorant, the honest people and
the thieves, the good citizens who take up
their responsibilities and the bad citizens

H2 TO THE GIRL ON

who leave them to others. We shall have
no false divisions in our human family,
and no false pride based upon them,
when all men understand that there is
no wealth but life, and no wisdom but
that which helps us to make the best and
noblest life.

We must be unselfish, therefore, and we
must be adaptable. And we must have
friends. None of us can live without them.
" Those who would have friends/' an old
saying runs, " must show themselves
friendly." It is impossible to resist such
a simple truth. You will set yourself
against the unhappy habit of keeping
aloof ; you will see the folly of narrowing
down the circle of those whose lives come
in touch with yours. Most of us know
people who have almost everything but
friends, and miserable their lives must
be. Nothing can help us if we are
friendless, for the solitary life is beyond
endurance, and none of us can live to
ourselves or by ourselves. Whether we
realise it or not, our lives are interwoven
with the lives of those around us, and
it is probably true that our friends have
as much to do with our happiness as we
have ourselves.

THE HIGHWAY OF LIFE 113

So that you will be anxious to have great
friendships, to live in an intimate and
ever-widening circle, and you will watch
carefully lest tares creep in with the
wheat. It is not always easy to resist
unwise companionships ; but you will see
that, in being friendly, you do yourself
no wrong, and you will not admit into
your sphere of influence thoughts and
habits and manners which you would be
ashamed to declare your own.

And, just as you will keep out of the
atmosphere of your life those influences
which tell against the fine standard you
set yourself, so you will welcome such
friends as abound in grace, and gentleness,
and all those virtues which make up the
charm of the wives and mothers and
daughters of men. You will be grateful
for the companionship of those who may
be wiser than you in the learning of this
world ; you will have no silly shyness in
meeting those who can tell you more than
you know about books, or pictures, or
countries, or philosophies, or anything
worth knowing. The surest way to
ignorance is to be afraid of people. We
cannot know too many clever people, and
there is no better way of understanding

15

H4 TO THE GIRL ON

life than by meeting with the wise and
brave of every kind.

And I hope that, among other things,
you will be wise in your spending. To
most of us spending is important, and,
especially to a woman, unwise spending
may mean great sorrow. There are so
many temptations. How hard it is to
refuse a bargain — how attractive it is to
buy something for so much less than it is
really worth ! And yet nothing is truer
than that a bargain, as often as not, is the
dearest possible thing. Let us remember
always that to buy a thing we do not want
is waste, whatever it may cost. How
cheap an elephant would be at fifteen
shillings ! Yet how dear an elephant would
be at any price unless one kept a zoo or a
show, or happened to have nothing in the
world to do' but look at elephants ! The
Vicar of Wakefield's son could not help
buying a box of green spectacles because
they seemed cheap, yet how dear they
were when he took them home and found
that nobody wanted them ! The things
nobody wants, that have no uses for any
body, are dear at fourpence, though they
cost a thousand pounds to make.

Let us be wise and cautious in our

THE HIGHWAY OF LIFE 115

spending ; let us join the great host of
thrifty people who have done most of the
things worth doing in this world. Richard
Cobden, who built up a business by thrift
and lost it by neglect, knew well what
thrift can do. He knew the thrifty people,
and he said of them : " The building of all
the houses, the mills, the bridges, and the
ships, and the accomplishment of all
other great works which have rendered
men civilised and happy, has been done
by the savers, the thrifty ; and those who
have wasted their resources have always
been their slaves." It is true, and we will
follow the thrifty as we may. But it is
true, also, that a great deal of nonsense is
talked about thrift ; that much of the
advice we are given about it is more harm
ful than good, and tends to make people
mean, to narrow their tastes, to cripple
their interests, to rob them of many of the
things that are worth a hundred times
more than gold.

Once upon a time a man found a sove
reign, and ever after, it is said, he went
about with his eyes on the ground and
never saw the sun. It is only a story, but
it is true of somebody in every town and
village of our land. It is true of a house

n6 TO THE GIRL ON

I see every morning of my life, where a
woman loves a carpet, worth three pounds,
more than she loves the sun, which gives
her life itself. Every morning the great
sun pours down on this little house, and
every morning the blinds are drawn at
every window so that the sun may not
enter. Perhaps it is true that no carpet
can look on the sun and last for ever after,
but what shall we say of the spirit of thrift
which seeks to add a few days to the life
of a carpet by keeping the bright sun
shine out of a house and filling its rooms
with gloom ? What shall we say of the
spirit of thrift which drives out the sun
light and keeps in the germ of typhoid
fever ? If the microbes of disease could
come together and pass a vote of thanks
it would be passed unanimously to all
those thrifty people who drive back the
sunlight, which no microbe can look upon
and live. You will scorn the sort of thrift
that values a carpet, because it is bought
in a shop, more than the sun, which is free
to us all, and you will see how dearly money
may be bought with life itself. It is
strange that people who gladly spend their
money to see a play, which passes in an
evening and is forgotten the next, will
declare it extravagance to spend money on

THE HIGHWAY OF LIFE 117

a picture, or a bronze, or on a garden,
where the money buys pleasure that en
dures and is shared by many people.

I hope you will be thrifty, but I hope you
will come to understand that a sovereign
saved by thrift may be a sovereign lost.
The cost of a hat is what we pay for it, and
the cost of a sovereign is what we pay for
it. Nothing costs so much as money,
which is bought with the strength of our
bodies. Even those of us who use it well
and do not overvalue it must pay for it,
often, with our lives ; for life for most
of us is working and spending. You will
see, I hope, that you do not pay twenty-
one shillings for a sovereign ; you will not
sell the sun, the light of the heavens, for
a piece of carpet.

There is a wider logic than the logic of
thrift ; there are forms of thrift which a
thrifty use of language will call mean.
We cannot understand too clearly that
money is made to be spent, and that the
proper use of it is to spend it for the things
we need. If we rob ourselves of health to
save money we are buying money with
health ; if we save our money instead of
buying books, or travelling, we are buying
money with knowledge. We are paying

n8 TALKS TO GIRLS

the highest price in the world for something
worth nothing.

You will count life at its proper value,
and will not waste it for smaller things.
You will seek first the highest life, and all
other things shall be added unto you.

TO THE GIRL IN SEARCH OF
OPPORTUNITY

THE world will be a fine place to live in
when you grow up, when you and I have
been a few more journeys round the sun.
What are we going to do in the world ?
Are we going to muddle through somehow
until the dark gates open that lead into
another life, or are we going to make our
selves known and felt, and become a power
for good ?

It may be that as you sit reading this,
thinking perhaps of all the difficulties you
have, and thinking perhaps that there can
never be anything but a struggling life
before you, you will feel that the great prizes
of this world may well come to others
but somehow they can never come to you.

If you think like that you may make up
your mind at once that they will not come
to you, for no girl can get any farther than
she looks. Make up your mind where you
are going. Remember that it is not the
way we go that matters most, but how far

119

120 TO THE GIRL IN

we go that way ; whether, when we have
chosen our way, we quit ourselves like men
and women. Remember that all useful
work is honourable, and that the only
dishonour is when it is badly done.

We must be willing to do the work that
comes to our hands, and we must do it
well. More and more a girl is finding
opportunities of work for herself and for
others, and the qualities that are called
for in men's work are needed not less in
the lives of thousands of women who share
in the work of the busy world. You will
not be afraid to be ambitious : by that sin
angels fell from heaven, says Milton, but
by that great virtue angels have built up
heaven on Earth.

Perhaps the greatest lesson you can learn
as you grow up is the proper, use of time.
The waste of time is the saddest of all
sad things. Of all the natural gifts of
life, time is the most precious, for upon
time the use of other gifts depends. It is
said that Queen Elizabeth, when she lay
dying, offered her kingdom for a moment
of time ; but there was no wise man in the
kingdom who could give her that. Yet
you and I have millions of these moments,
and we waste, perhaps, thousands of them.

SEARCH OF OPPORTUNITY 121

There are people who are thrifty with
money who throw away golden moments
as if they had no value. Yet moments
are golden things, for time, which we all
share alike, whether we are kings or beg
gars or ordinary people, makes up our life,
and every bit of time we waste is a bit of
wasted life.

We need not fear to be idle, for what we
call an idle hour may sometimes be the best
medicine we could take. It is not the hour
that is properly " idle " that we shall ever
come to regret ; it is the hour upon hour,
making day upon day, and week upon
week, of time given up to useless or harmful
vanity that we shall sigh for when sighing
is in vain. Any one of us may look round
and see two people we know, one with all
the advantages of education, all the joy
of prosperity, all the influence of position ;
the other living a humdrum life without
distinction of any kind. All over the
world we can find people in pairs like this,
and the whole difference between them lies
in the way in which they use their time.
It would be easy to go through a list of the
world's great men and women, the men
and women who have helped mankind, and
to show that they prized time more than
16

122 TO THE GIRL IN

anything else that they possessed. Time,
we say, is money, but time is more than
money, for time can do what all the money
in the world can never do. Time can heal
all sorrows and cure all ills, and time, if
you will use it rightly, will give you an
opportunity such as you can hardly think
of now.

Nothing the world holds is so important
to you as the moment that comes and
goes. It is here, it is gone, it will come
no more. It brought to you an oppor
tunity ; you used it or threw it away.
Time flies, and it never returns. But its
hands are full of treasures, scattered
generously for all. We pick them up or
leave them and, according to our choice,
so is our life. Time will make us rich or
poor, for there is no wealth like the wealth
Time will give us for the asking, and there is
no poverty like the useless existence of those
who scorn the gifts that Time sends round
by the flying messengers we call moments.

You will remember that Time is yours
to use, and not to throw away ; there is
always something to be done that you
might do. The world is always waiting
for the influence without which it could
never have been worth living in — the

SEARCH OF OPPORTUNITY 123

influence of a good woman. Wherever
you go in these days, if you are old enough
to be thinking of your place in life, you will
find those who are asking that women may
have more power given to them in the
nation ; and wherever you go, if you are
wise enough to keep your eyes open, you
will find that women have a power that
Acts of Parliament can neither give nor
take away. And it is this wonderful
power that you are either making or not
making now by the way in which you
spend your time.

I do not want you to be serious beyond
your years, to give up play and to think
of the future as if it were some tyrannical
thing demanding every act and every
thought and every hour of your present
life. I want you, rather, to bring into
your life now all the joy that the world
holds for you, to store up in your memory
a countless number of remembrances of
happy days and beautiful things that will
make looking back pleasant in the years
to come. But the world is a leisurely
place for a girl, and all about you lie
temptations to give up your life to vanities.
Remember, when temptations come, that
life is made up of duties as well as pleasures,

124 TO THE GIRL IN

that we must fit ourselves to bear sorrow
as well as to enjoy happiness. You would
think a girl foolish who bought a year's
clothes as if the whole year were summer ;
but just as foolish is the girl who goes into
the future as if Time held for her nothing
but sweet things. It is often said that the
best way to keep peace is to be prepared
for war, and certainly the best way to keep
happiness is to be prepared for bitterness.

As we are building now, so will our
future be. I know two sisters ; they are
about the same age, and have had the
same opportunities. They were brought
up in the same atmosphere. They lived
in a lovely house, and their father was
rich. The world was very good to them.
One of the sisters loved to be rich, and to
have all she .wanted, and she lived as if
riches would never end, and so her life
came to depend on riches ; she chose the
life that is very pleasant to those who can
afford it. The other was glad to be rich
but she would not have felt it much if she
had been poor. She loved to do things,
and she prepared for her life as if money
had nothing at all to do with it. She
chose the life that may be very pleasant
even to those who are not rich.

SEARCH OF OPPORTUNITY 125

These two sisters grew up side by side,
both of them happy, until one day some
thing went wrong, something that their
father could not possibly have helped, and
he was rich no more. The two girls were
suddenly poor, and I think it nearly broke
the heart of one of them. But it mattered
nothing to the other, for her happiness was
set in a foundation more solid than gold.
She had learned the great secret that the
kingdom of heaven is within us, and she
is winning her way with high honour in
the profession she has chosen.

Now, we can live in either of these ways.
We can live so that a hundred things that
may happen will shatter our happiness and
break our hearts ; or we can live so that
our peace is in an armour that no chance
stroke can pierce ; so that our happiness
is based on things that endure, and not in
circumstance, which today is and tomor
row is not.

And this true happiness, this strength
that will sustain us whatever may come,
we can all possess. I do not think there
is any recipe for it that can be put into
words, because the deepest language is far
removed from feeling, and there are some
things that can only be felt. But we know,

126 TO THE GIRL IN

every one of us, when our lives are at their
best and when they are not. We know,
every one of us, whether we are interesting
ourselves in things that matter or in things
that merely please. We know whether we
are filling our minds with fine ideas and
lovely thoughts, and trying to understand
the world in which our lives must be spent.

More than anything, it seems to me, a
girl should have deep sympathy. There
is a sympathy beyond words, and perhaps
it is the best of all ; but no power can
exaggerate the good that a cheering word
may do. Often, when I have been sending
out my papers to the world, I have been
depressed and have thought I would give
up all their worry ; and then there has come
a greeting from some human heart — from
some unknown comrade, perhaps in Africa,
or China, or Egypt, or Java ; perhaps
from some lonely mother bringing up her
children in a place where wolves howl
round the door at night ; perhaps from
some man whose life is wearing itself out
in the foul slums of London ; perhaps
from some great school where hundreds of
characters are being made ; perhaps from
a chaplain in the Army, giving his life for
the men who garrison far-off places for

SEARCH OF OPPORTUNITY 127

England and civilisation and peace ; per
haps from a boy or a girl ; perhaps from
somebody in joy or sorrow : and no word
could express the power of uplifting that
such letters have. Long ago, but for the
unknown friends my papers have brought
me from end to end of the Earth, I must
have given them up.

Many times you have heard it said that
the hand that rocks the cradle rules the
world, and nothing truer ever has been
said. It means that, while men make
laws and machines and houses and ships,
women are to be the makers of men. You
are to build up the homes and hearts and
minds of those who build up only smaller
things. But woman is not only the ruler
and the maker of rulers ; she is the com
forter and sustainer. She bears the bur
den of the world's sorrow ; she brings the
world its great consolation. Whatever
great work a man may do in the world,
with all his votes and all his tools and all
his talk, the best a man can do is not to
be compared with the best that a woman
can do.

When President Garfield was asked what
he would be, he said, " I shall be a man
first of all ; if I do not succeed in that I

128 TALKS TO GIRLS

shall be nothing." I cannot ask you to be
men, but I can ask you to be something
better. Be women. Do well the most
wonderful and beautiful work that any
human being can ever do — the building
up of a home.

That is the task that awaits you, that is
the great contribution you can make to
the happiness of the world in which we
live, and to the future to which we are
going. There is nothing a king can do
greater than this work of yours ; there is
nothing a queen can do nobler than the
making of a happy home. You are the
queens of the Earth, and in these years
you are winning your kingdom. See that
it is a fair one, with nothing in it ill or
mean, and see that the days you are living
now are golden days, in which every dawn
of morning, and every shade of night,
shall build up the beautiful throne upon
which you were born to reign.

TO THE GIRL WHO BRINGS
COMFORT IN PAIN

IT is the great power of woman that she
brings comfort and consolation into homes
of sorrow and chambers of pain, and a
little thinking now may save you from
distress when you hear, as you will hear,
that the power of healing and conquering
human pain is mixed up with cruelty and
callousness to the sufferings of dogs and
other animals.

One of the noblest things in the world
is the conquest of pain and disease, in
human beings and animals too. The
victory is not yet won, but day by day the
final triumph is drawing nearer, and to
know how great a triumph this is, to know
what it means in the great story of man
kind, we must understand the difficulties
that men face in conquering pain and
driving back disease. To heal disease, to
destroy pain, we must know the cause of
both, and what chances have men of study
ing the causes of things that happen in
17 129

130 TO THE GIRL WHO

our bodies ? We cannot go inside our
bodies to find out ; we cannot experiment
with men and women and children.

And so it happened that for years and
years, for generations and generations,
men and women and children suffered
pain and died, died in thousands where
they might have lived. The human body
was like a book with one page just a little
open ; the wisest men made guesses,
which were sometimes right and often
wrong, and while they guessed and
wondered human lives ebbed out and
animals lay in pain which no man could
relieve. Men did not know that the blood
circulates through the body, but thought
it moved merely to and fro, and doctors
were like men groping in the dark, hoping
they might find the thing they wanted by
some happy chance, and sometimes find
ing it ; but mostly they groped in vain,
and kings died then for want of knowledge
which every schoolboy may have now.

But all the time light was slowly coming ;
the sealed book of the human body was
being opened wide and read right through
by clever men. And the light that shone
in the darkness was the light that came
from the animal friends of man — from the

BRINGS COMFORT IN PAIN 131

great brotherhood of living creatures that
share the joy of life with man, for whom
all good men feel and wish the highest
things.

What is true of human beings is true in
many great ways of animals too, and so
men studied animals to find out how to
heal their pain, and yours, and mine.

And now there arose a great fear among
the friends of animals, lest, in their experi
ments on animals, men should cause them
needless pain ; and, to their honour be it
said, lovers of animals all over the world
set themselves to watch for the sake of
these friends of man who have no voice
to plead. Again and again they found
that men did cruel things, that perhaps
men were not always careful to save pain
in a dog when they were trying to save
the lives of human beings ; and no one
can exaggerate the value in the world of
the mercy and pity for suffering creatures
that these good people have kept alive.

We should all be thankful for it. But we
must guard ourselves against the tempta
tion to let one feeling rule all others, and
at times, when two things seem right and
we must choose one, we must choose the
higher. When the time comes for an

132 TO THE GIRL WHO

Arctic explorer to decide whether he or his
faithful dogs must die, he stifles his grief
and shoots his dogs, and all the world
believes that he is right. And so, when
the time comes to decide whether the lives
of thousands of little children are more
precious than the lives of a few brave,
faithful dogs, we must decide as angels
would, and save the highest life.

Now, the pity is that this great truth is
lost sight of, and that there should be
people who are not afraid to say that
doctors and men of science, the great
fighters against disease, cut up animals
without mercy, as if they were cruel men
who found pleasure or profit in doing so.
The simple truth about that is that it is
untrue. The truth is that these men, who
give up their, lives to study animals for the
sake of saving children, are among the
most humane men in the world. The love
of animals that is in their hearts does not
drive out the love of children, and perhaps
it may even be true that they love their
children better than their dogs. They are
not, as has been meanly said, artists in
cruelty. They are the conquerors of disease,
the gallant men who spend their lives to
Save ours,

BRINGS COMFORT IN PAIN 133

I am writing this after six great days in
the Law Courts, when these men, like a
procession of conquerors, came up to
answer cruel things that had been said
against them. Here and there, from one
end of the land to the other, a few doctors
were found who believe that experiments
on animals are useless and wrong, who
thought Harvey was mistaken when he
said that these experiments helped him to
find out the circulation of the blood ; who
thought Pasteur could not understand his
own figures ; who were quite sure the great
Lord Lister — who saved millions of lives —
was wrong ; who had cures of their own
for all the ills of men if only the hospitals
would let them try them \ One by one these
little doctors came, and to each of them
the knowledge of our generation seemed
as if it had not been.

And then, down upon them, like an
ocean of knowledge swallowing up a pool
of ignorance, came masters of their craft
throughout the world : the men who know.

One was a famous doctor of the heart,
who for twenty years had thousands of
cases he could not understand, but at last,
after experiments had been made upon
animals, came to understand them all, so

134 TO THE GIRL WHO

that at last he could turn back to his
notebook and explain what was happening
in any case. " And if I have a puzzle
now," said he, "I call at the laboratory,
and an experiment will solve it." So,
thanks to the knowledge we have learned
from animals, there is greater hope for
those who have weak hearts. Thanks to
these experiments Sir Victor Horsley be
came perhaps the greatest surgeon of the
brain in all the world, and he could not do
his work, he told us, without the knowledge
gained from animals. There must have
been tears in many eyes as men told of the
great triumph over the germ which chokes
the throat of a child so that it cannot
breathe. We call it diphtheria, and many
doctors came to tell the Court of fearful
scenes in the .diphtheria wards' of hospitals
in the days when children died so rapidly
that nurses could not bear the work, and
would not stay. Then the animals helped
the children, and an experiment on the
noblest animal friend of man brought into
a dark world the very light of heaven, so
that now, if the case is treated in time,
hardly a child dies of diphtheria.

" I used to stand and see my friends die
from diphtheria, and could not help them,"

BRINGS COMFORT IN PAIN 135

said one doctor ; " but now we do not
mind it in the least. I saw the death-rate
from diphtheria go down like tliat," he
added, raising his hand and bringing it
down. Thanks to those " cruel men "
hundreds of girls are reading this book
who, but for them, might long ago have
ceased to read at all ; and, thanks to these
experiments on animals, the terrible dread
of diphtheria is passing for ever from
mankind.

For days the great procession of life-
savers came into the witness-box to scorn
the sneers of ignorance and stem the tide
of false emotion. For days a great rush
of pure, sweet air swept through our
English court of justice, in which no mean
slander, no petty prejudice, could live.

Like an avalanche of knowledge dashing
down into the shallows of ignorance the
truth about the conquerors of pain, the
story of the heroes of the war between life
and death, unfolded itself impressively day
after day. Like a chapter in a great
adventure was the story of the head of the
Lister Institute, the centre of research set
up by my friend Sir James Whitehead,
when he was Lord Mayor of London, as
England's monument to Pasteur. At this

136 TO THE GIRL WHO

great institution, day by day, men keep
the milk pure for our babies, and test the
purity of the water on which our lives
depend ; and all this noble work they do
with the help of animals that suffer no
pain. Samples of milk and water from
all parts come to this famous place, all
carefully labelled, so that if death should
be found in them the County Council may
know where the danger is and how to deal
with it. Thousands of these tests are
carried out every year, and you who read,
and I who write, and the men who made
this paper, and the men who set this type,
and the men who print it, may, for all we
know, owe our lives to the wise men of
the Lister Institute, who have learned of
animals how to save the lives of men and
women and children.

" What would happen if these experi
ments were not allowed ? ' the head of
the Lister Institute was asked, and his
answer is worth printing. Here, in other
words, it is :

Well, the United States Government wanted
to stop yellow fever in Cuba. They sent out
a commission to investigate, and after three
months the commission knew no more than
before. Then it was decided to experiment

BRINGS COMFORT IN PAIN 137

with inoculation, and, as animals do not
take yellow fever, some Army officers offered
themselves, and one brave orderly begged to
share the honour with his superiors. A
mosquito which had been kept hungry in a
tube for some days was first allowed to bite
a patient suffering from yellow fever, and
then to bite the officers and the orderly.
They caught the disease, but fortunately did
not die, as one doctor before them had
done. He gave up his life for mankind, but,
just as experiments on animals abolished
malaria, so these experiments on human
beings abolished yellow fever. Both have
been stamped out, and, thanks to these
experiments, the Panama Canal has been
made. Without experiments on animals
we should have to experiment regularly on
human beings.

So that, when we boast of our achieve
ments, let us remember that they could
not have been without the help of our
animal friends. We should all be kinder
to animals for this service they render to
us all, and every lover of animals will
rejoice to know that animals gain comfort
and health and release from pain by these
experiments.

Many causes of suffering in animals have
18

138 TO THE GIRL WHO

been discovered and conquered in this way,
and it is splendid to know that man is able
to pay back his debt to dumb creation by
saving animals from sufferings that were
once too great for them to bear and live.
In this noble fight against suffering, men
and animals march together. Both suffer
and both gain, and nothing should gladden
our hearts more than the knowledge that
we are able to give back abundantly
to the animal kingdom the release from
pain which its sacrifice confers upon the
human race.

It is a great and consoling thought when
the sad needs of a sorrowful world distress
us. There is one more thought that should
console us. Perhaps it may be that, in
some countries on the continent of Europe,
men who study animals and experiment
upon them are sometimes indifferent or
cruel. But it is something to fill the heart
of every British boy and girl with pride
that Great Britain is the only country in
the world where these experiments are
carefully guarded by law. We are kind
to dumb animals in Britain, and the truth
is that of the five hundred men who study
animal life to save human life, who save
thousands of human lives every year with

BRINGS COMFORT IN PAIN 139

the help of animals, every one is licensed
by the Government, and every one commits
a crime and can be punished if he causes
needless pain.

It is due to these conquerors of pain, it
is due to all lovers of animals and of
England, to say that. We may well be
proud, we who read so often of the splendid
lives of our dumb friends, that it lies not
within the right of any other nation to throw
a stone at England in this sacred cause.

It was John Ruskin who said that the
one thing certainly right is the government
by the wise and kind, be they few or many,
of the unwise and unkind, be they few or
many, but it was another wise man who
said that the tragedy of this world is not
the conflict between right and wrong, but
the conflict between right and right. Who,
then, are the wise ? Perhaps sometimes
we cannot tell. But they are wise who
love the highest when they see it, who
march abreast of Time with eyes and
minds wide open, who, having mercy in
their hearts, temper it sanely with reason,
remembering that that which all things
serve is an immortal soul.

We love rightly those who are kind ; let
us give them monuments in our hearts,

140 TALKS TO GIRLS

that their names may not pass away. But
most of all we love those who are wisely
kind, and to them we build no monument,
for theirs is the Future, and the Kingdom
of Heaven.

TO THE GIRL WHO LOVES
THE NOBLEST

IN the long, long years to come, when
you look back upon your journey through
this world, it will thrill you with gratitude
and pride, I hope, to remember the way
you came.

You will think then of these golden
years of girlhood, when the sun was always
shining, when nothing but happiness lay
about you and nothing but hopefulness
lay in front of you. You will think of
those who passed by, some in gladness,
some in sorrow ; and you will remember
with thankfulness how you made them all
a little happier as you passed. You will
think of the things you were able to do
and the other things you tried to do, and
you will be comforted to reflect that this
and that good thing you gave the world,
and this and that great cause you lifted
up. You will have regrets as you look
back, for the world is a difficult place for
those of us who are only human ; but in

141

142 TO THE GIRL WHO

the main you will cherish, I hope, a great
consolation that you have done your duty,
have loved the noblest, have made the
world a little better than you found it.

But among all the things that you will
be able to do in the world nothing will win
for you so high honour, so great a con
solation, so certain a place among those
who have served their generation well, as
the founding of a home. No monument
that a human being can set up on the
Earth can compare with that ; no legacy
that a millionaire can leave behind can
match the legacy a mother may bequeath
to the world. For the mothers of England
hold the future of England in their trust.
There is nothing that, together, they could
not do. It is better, says John Ruskin,
to build a beautiful human creature than a
beautiful dome or steeple ; and while men
are building domes and steeples women are
building up the lives of little children,
setting them in the midst of influences
which will make them noble and wise, or
ignoble and ignorant.

How infinitely great and far-reaching is
the work of a woman ! A mighty conceit
men have of the way in which they rule
the Earth, and they have no mean opinion

LOVES THE NOBLEST 143

of their Acts of Parliament, their systems
of philosophy, their marvellous machines
and the thousand other triumphant things
which the brains and hands of men have
spread throughout the world. But these
works of men may perish ; in any case
these laws, philosophies, and inventions,
are but the servants of mankind, subject
to the whims and fancies of one generation
and another.

But a girl, a woman, the founder of a
home — what does she do ? She builds up
the living future of the world. Not laws
does she make and mould, but the Parlia
ments that make the laws : not systems
of thought does she create, but thinkers :
not machines does she construct, but the
creators of machines. A man may build
a ship and say to it, " Go, sail across the
sea " ; but a woman builds up a captain
in whose hand the ship is a slave. A man
says to his creature, " You shall rise in the
air, or ride upon the earth, or dive into
the sea, according to laws you cannot
break " ; but a mother says to her boy

You may be Christ or Shakespeare, little

child,
A Saviour or a Sun to this lost world.

144 TO THE GIRL WHO

I stopped one Sunday morning at
Ajaccio, and turned out of the hot sun
that was pouring down on the Mediter
ranean into the shadow thrown by a street
of high plain houses ; and in a room in
one of these plain houses I lay down on
a bed where, a century and a half back in
the history of the world, a mother lay with
a little child. He was like most other
baby boys in that street of Corsica, and
nobody thought he mattered much, except
his mother ; but he mattered much to
everybody who happened to be alive with
him in Europe, for this mother's child grew
up to be Napoleon, whom some men call
the Great. And while he was frightening
Europe, while English politicians were
wondering if Napoleon would come and
put them in chains, and English mothers
were saying that if he came he would eat
their children, two little boys were playing
in a London square. They were like all
other boys around them to the passers-by,
but perhaps to their mothers they were
unlike, for they were mighty giants growing
up, and one lived to be Prime Minister
and change the face of politics in England,
while the other stirred every pulpit in
these islands to the depths. And while
one was being buried in Westminster

LOVES THE NOBLEST 145

Abbey, and the other in a little garden
off a country lane, a Polish mother was
singing Polish cradle songs to a baby girl
at Varsovie whom nobody would have
expected to be anything but a simple
peasant maid, though she grew up to be
known as Madame Curie, who has made
the power of her brain felt in every thinking
room and in every scientific book through
out the world.

In such ways do little children make all
the difference in the world ; so quietly, and
perhaps not knowing, does a mother bring
into life a power that may shake the world
like an earthquake, or may change it
silently like the leaven, which mixes with
the meal until the whole is leavened.

You will be proud and grateful to have
the solemn opportunity that a home of
your own will give you, and you will fit
yourself, in the years opening out before
you now, for the work of building up a
beautiful environment in which life may
grow and develop in its noblest form. Just
as our bodies grow from visible things — as
our hands and feet are simple trans
formations of the food we eat and drink —
so our minds grow from the scenes and
books and friends and thoughts that gather
19

146 TO THE GIRL WHO

about us, so our hearts are stirred and
filled with deep emotions by the invisible
and intangible things that make up what
we call our atmosphere. As the dome of
St. Paul's was made by Sir Christopher
Wren, so the mind of a girl is made by
the love that is set about her. You, the
mothers of the future of England, are
making your minds now what the minds of
your children will be, and the future of
England will be what the girls now growing
up irv England would, like it to be.

Can you think calmly, you girls of the
future, of that ? The future of England —
ah ! Do not let us mistake : we can make
it what we will. No more little children
dying from hunger and cold ; no more
mothers worn to death in the struggle to
keep alive ; -no more thousands of babies
whom nobody wants and nobody cares for ;
no more consumption devouring human
lives and throwing its dark shadow across
the hearth.

The future of England — what a dream
it is for angels ! What a land this will be
when mothers know their power, when
ignorance is banished and selfishness and
hate and ugly things have gone for ever ;
when in their place come knowledge, and

LOVES THE NOBLEST 147

charity, and gentleness, and love of country
above love of self ; with goodwill and
comradeship, and one desire of happiness
for all. We are hastening or hindering
that time, you and I, but you most of all,
for you are the builders of homes and of
lives, of homes in which lives are made
pure and beautiful and brave, or else less
pure, less beautiful, less brave. You will
send out from your homes the men who
will rule the world, the teachers, the writers,
the poets, the painters, the governors, the
workers, and the kings, and they will be
what you make them, they will do what
you bid them. So the mothers of England
can mould and shape the future as they will.
You will be thinking, perhaps, as you
read this, that homemaking is a long way
forward for you now, and that there is
time to think of all that by and by ; but
long before you have a home to make you
must fit yourself for it, and if your children
are to be your jewels you must enrich
yourself now with the treasure that is yours
to pass on to them. There is a great name
in English literature which would have
been greater still if it had been nobler, and
there is little doubt that Byron's mother
was largely to blame for the sort of man

148 TO THE GIRL WHO

Lord Byron was. She would throw the
poker at him and taunt him with being a
cripple, so that he wrote of himself that

Untaught in youth my heart to tame,
My springs of life were poisoned.

There are mothers like that — and there
are mothers like this, of whom I read in a
newspaper the other day :

There was a little girl in the infirmary,
who was very ill with pneumonia, and
there was just a slight chance of saving
her life. They tried to keep her alive by
inserting a silver tube at the bottom of her
throat to tap off the fluid from her lungs.

One day her mother came to see her, and

the attendant, taking her behind the screen,

said : " You. can only stay two minutes,

and whatever you do, don't touch that tube,

for her life is depending upon it."

The nurse went away, and on returning
in a few minutes found that the woman
had gone, and had taken the tube. She
sold it for drink. She had got her drink
and she had lost her child.

It is hard to read an ugly thing like that,
and I am not sure that I should have told
you this story ; but, knowing that such
fearful things can be, you will strive all

LOVES THE NOBLEST 149

the more to be loving and kind, to live a
life of sacrifice, if need be, for those you
care for and who care for you. You will
be all the more careful because disappoint
ment comes so easily, and a false step has
such tragic consequences. Unto your dying
day you may feel the consequence of a
wrong decision. Is anything more sad
than that broken dream of Wordsworth,
who loved a little child that he would
dandle on his knee, and loved him so
fervently that he wrote one of his most
beautiful poems to his little " faery
voyager " of six years old.

I think of thee with many fears

For what may be thy lot in future years

the poet wrote ; and then, fearing that
pain and sorrow might come to his little
playmate, he thought of him as a dewdrop
which the morning brings forth, " ill fitted
to sustain unkindly shocks " :

A gem that glitters while it lives

And no forewarning gives ;

But, at the touch of wrong, without a strife,

Slips in a moment out of life.

The little boy grew to be a young man

150 TO THE GIRL WHO

and Wordsworth grew old, and the old poet
lived on to see his child friend throw his
life away, so utterly that Hartley Coleridge
himself (for it was he) wrote these terrible
lines on the fly-leaf of a book :

When I received this volume small
My years were barely seventeen ;

When it was hoped, I should be all
Which once, alas, I might have been.

And now my years are thirty -five
And every mother hopes her lamb,

And every happy child alive,
May never be what now I am.

It is easy to think of cases like these,
but we need not dwell too much on the
way in which our hopes are sometimes
broken in a human world. It is right that
the thought of this should give us pause
and make us doubly jealous of our influence
over others ; but you will remember most
of all the glorious power you have of setting
young feet firmly on the path that never
leads astray. One by one we bring our
contribution to the heritage of those who
follow us — we prepare them for the world ;
together, as society, we prepare the world
for them. You will honour and cherish
the name you bear, and keep it unstained

LOVES THE NOBLEST 151

for those who bear it after you ; and you
will do your utmost to see that your home
is a centre of life at its best.

And so you will live now that this may be
your lot in future years. You will interest
yourself in the things that do not pass
away. Let your mind become a part of
the moving world, gathering into it the
new waves of knowledge that sweep along
the shores of Time. Have faith, hope, and
charity, and these three rich possessions will
be the strong foundation of your woman
hood. You will have no time for inanities,
no desire for the petty round that swallows
up so many useless lives. Love Nature
and obey her ; and think every day, what
ever sadness the day may bring forth,
of the comforting words of Lavengro :
' There's night and day, brother, both sweet
things ; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all
sweet things ; there's likewise the wind
on the heath."

There are always these things, and they
are for us all. The joy that they will
bring to us if we will learn to love and
understand them is unspeakable : a wide
sympathy with Nature will bring us not
only the joy that comes direct to our
senses from the natural scenes about us —

152 TO THE GIRL WHO

from running streams and golden heaths
and the sunshine pouring on the hills ; the
love of Nature will broaden our minds and
train our senses and equip us with a mental
and moral power which will be a constant
source of strength to us. It will help us
to understand the world and its people,
and the lives they live ; it will give us a
right appreciation of the proper place of
things ; it will give a meaning to all parts
of our general knowledge so that we shall
see it whole and not in fragments.

So we shall come to take a wide view of
the world we live in, and hold it in reverence
It was made for us. For us the Earth
was made to whirl and spin in space ; for
us winds were made to blow, birds to sing,
and seeds to grow. Owners of the Earth
and heirs of .the ages are we; and there is
nothing in the treasuries of Nature that
is not ours if we will take it with humility.
But humble and lowly we needs must be
on our journey to the Maker of this world.
Beyond it all our destiny awaits us ; the
glory that no man knows shall be ours at
last. We will go our way like children of
the King, following those who have gone
before, guiding those who come behind.
We will take our place in the great pro-

LOVES THE NOBLEST 153

cession that marches ever onwards, building
up and building better as we go, to a future
nobler and nobler yet.

And you, you founders of lives, you
builders of homes, shall carry on the living
chain that never ends and never dies, but
winds and winds and winds for ever until
it binds our lovely Earth around the
Throne of God.

20

THE DAYS OF OUR LIVES

WAS it not John Ruskin who prayed
that every dawn of morning should be to
us as the beginning of life, and every
setting sun as its close ? It is wonderful
how thrilling life is if we think of it like
that. How full of wonder is every day !

We wake in the morning out of a strange
darkness which has given us new strength,
out of a sleep in which our minds have been
into a world that no man knows ; in
which our bodies, though working all the
time, have rested even while at work. We
wake up refreshed for the dawning day.

We feel how wonderful a room is, every
inch of it flying about, yet all its countless
parts so small and so beyond our senses,
so perfectly balanced and so wondrously
made, that not a movement do we see
save in the glow of the fire, which brings
to our hands the warmth that came from
the Sun far back in days before the first
man was born.

By this fire we breakfast, and know that
154

THE DAYS OF OUR LIVES 155

all through the night, when we have slept,
a world has been awake to fill the table
for us ; ships and trains and willing hands
have brought together the things we like
to eat and drink. And lying on the chair,
bought for a penny, is a newspaper which
cost a thousand pounds to make, with the
story of yesterday in every country of the
world told for us to read.

We take the paper into the garden and
read its story there, and the garden now
is a miracle to us. How came all that
beauty there ? All the forces of the
universe have put it there for us. The
Sun is pouring down power upon the
garden, the air is holding over it precious
nitrogen, and in the soil are millions of
millions of little creatures seizing hold of
these things, busy as bees all day and night,
taking the thing we call decay and making
it into new life, making a garden of colour
for us as they make the mighty forests of
Africa, the rice fields of Asia, the waving
cornfields of North America, and the
boundless grazing grounds of Australasia.

We leave the garden and walk to the
station, and it rains, perhaps, as we go.
But a shower is interesting, for we know
that a raindrop is perhaps the very oldest

156 THE DAYS OF OUR LIVES

thing that remains on Earth today, the
thing that has been what it is longer than
a thing else we know.

And, as the train carries us along, we
think of the shining bands of steel that
stretch around the globe, with a living
burden at any moment of millions of men
and women going about their lives as we
are — carried forward by a ceaseless bom
bardment of tiny balls of steam, millions
of these balls striking thousands of iron
plates so hard and fast that the plates fly
to and fro and turn the wheels, and the
world can move about and get on with
its business. So we travel by a power
Napoleon refused to believe in, and we
time ourselves to the minute by a watch
that William the Conqueror's kingdom could
not have bought for him.

We read our letters as we go along, or
find them waiting on our desk ; a letter
dropped into a little red box across the
Earth lies today on a table in London
with letters written last night in Paris and
Dundee. Time and space are nothing to
us, for all times and places meet in our
daily lives, and all day long the machinery
of civilisation is running to help us. If
we would speak to Budapest we can do

THE DAYS OF OUR LIVES 157

so ; if we would send a message to a ship
at sea the instrument is ready to our hand.
If something urgent comes the telephone
is there ; if the matter can wait a little
the telegraph is there ; if the wires do
not go fast enough the ether is waiting to
carry our orders ; if the orders can wait
a few hours a penny will take them by
post. The world moves for us at the rate
we bid it go.

As the day flies on we do our work —
perhaps at home or at school ; perhaps
in an office or a shop ; perhaps in the
quiet of the countryside or the bustle of
the town ; perhaps among machines which
almost seem to think ; perhaps deep down
in the earth, or racing across the continent,
or travelling across the sea. Perhaps you
work with steel made by the strongest
fires men can endure ; perhaps you work
with a fountain pen made up of something
from the heart of a great forest, something
from the fierce fire of a volcano, something
from the top of a mountain, something from
the depths of a mine.

Then, when our day's work is done, we
go home at night, and perhaps we touch
a switch which sets moving in our room
the sound-waves set moving by Madame

158 THE DAYS OF OUR LIVES

Melba when she sang Auld Lang Syne long
years ago, and the song fills our room as
it filled the room in which she sang it then.
When the song is done, before we go to
bed, we look through the window at the
stars, moving majestically among millions
of worlds that roll above us, and as we
look into that vast and distant silence we
know that if we had a million worlds a
hundred million times as big as this, and
if these million worlds were rolled into one
and multiplied by a million more, they
would still be smaller, all together, than the
range of stars we call the Milky Way.

It is a thought with which to end a day,
and well we may rest in silence under the
wakeful stars, resting the human machine
which has worked perfectly all day without
our knowing .it, shutting off a tired body
from the brain which goes on working
still, waking in the morning after a sleep
which brings new strength for the round
of life that begins again.

The Sun comes into the room like a
message from the Maker of the Heavens.
Another day has dawned for us ; another
life begins. We go on our way through the
wonder and beauty and glory of the world.

Made and Printed in Great Britain.
Hazell, Watson &• Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.