Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  “I can see now the wonderful advantage you have,” she said eagerly. “Humanity got its ‘second wind’ with the discovery of the ‘new world’ — didn’t it?”

  It always delighted me to note the speed and correctness with which she picked up idioms and bits of slang. They were a novelty to her, and a constant delight.

  “You had a big new country to spread out in, and no competitors — there were no previous inhabitants, were there?”

  “Nothing but Indians,” I said.

  “Indians?”

  “Yes, savages, like those in the forests below your mountain land, though more advanced in some ways.”

  “How did you arrange with them?” she asked.

  “I hate to tell you, Ellador. You see you have — a little — idealized my country. We did not ‘arrange’ with those savages. We killed them.”

  “All of them? How many were there?” She was quite calm. She made no movement of alarm or horror, but I could see the rich color fade from her face, and her dear gentle mouth set in harder lines of control.

  “It is a long story, and not a nice one, I’m sorry to say. We left some, hemming them in in spots called ‘reservations.’ There has been a good deal of education and missionary work; some Indians have become fully civilized — as good citizens as any; and some have intermarried with the whites. We have many people with Indian blood. But speaking generally this is one of our national shames. Helen Hunt wrote a book about it, called ‘A Century of Dishonor.’”

  Ellador was silent. That lovely far-off homesick look came into her eyes.

  “I hate to disillusion you, dear heart,” I said. “We are not perfect in America. I truly think we have many advantages over any other country, but we are not blameless.”

  “I’ll defer judgment till I get there,” she presently answered. “Let’s go back to what we were discussing — the pressure of population.”

  Rather sadly we took it up again, and saw how, as long as warfare was the relief, nations continually boiled over upon one another; gaining more land by the simple process of killing off the previous owners, and having to repeat the process indefinitely as soon as the population again pressed against its limits. Where warfare was abandoned and a settled boundary established, as when great China walled itself in from marauding tribes, then the population showed an ingrowing pressure, and reduced the standard of living to a ghastly minimum. Then came the later process of peaceful emigration, by which the coasts and islands of the Pacific became tinged with the moving thousands of the Yellow Races.

  She saw it all as a great panorama, an endless procession, never accepting a static world with the limitations of parti-colored maps, but always watching the movement of races.

  “That’s what ails Europe now, isn’t it?” she said at last. “That’s why those close-packed fertile races were always struggling up and down among one another and making room, for awhile, by killing people?”

  “That’s certainly a good part of it,” I agreed. “Every nation wants more land to accommodate its increasing population.”

  “And they want an increase of population in order to win more land — don’t they?”

  This, too, was plain.

  “And there isn’t any way out of it — on a limited earth — but fixed boundaries with suicidal crowding inside, or the ‘fortunes of war’?”

  That, too, was plain, unfortunately.

  “Then why do not the women limit the population, as we did?”

  “Oh, Ellador, Ellador — you cannot seem to realize that this world is not a woman’s world, like your little country. This is a man’s world — and they did not want to limit the population.”

  “Why not?” she urged. “Was it because they did not bear the children? Was it because they would rather fight than live in peace? What was the reason?”

  “Neither of those,” I said slowly. “The real reason is that neither men nor women have been able to see broadly enough, to think deeply enough, sufficiently to visualize these great racial questions. They just follow their instincts and obeyed their ancient religions, and these things happened without their knowing why.”

  “But the women!” protested Ellador. “Surely the women could see as simple a thing as that. It’s only a matter of square miles; how many people to a mile can live healthfully and pleasantly. Are these women willing to have their children grow up so crowded that they can’t be happy, or where they’ll have to fight for room to live? I can’t understand it.”

  Then she went determinedly to question a Japanese authority, to whom we were introduced by one of our friends, as to the status of women in Japan. She was polite; she was meek; she steeled herself beforehand to hear without surprise; and the authority, also courteous to a degree, gave her a brief outline with illustrative story and quotation, of the point of view from which women were regarded in that country. She grasped it even more thoroughly than she had in India or China.

  We left Japan for Home, via Hawaii, and for days she was silent about the subject. Then, as the wide blue sea, the brilliant days spinning by, the smooth magnificence of our progress comforted her, she touched on it once more.

  “I’m trying not to feel about these particularly awful things, and not to judge, even, till I know more. These things are so; and my knowing them does not make them any worse than they were before.”

  “You’re a brave girl — and a strong one,” I assured her. “That’s the only way to do. I’m awfully sorry you had to have such a dose at first — this war, of all things; and then women in the East! I ought to have prepared you better.”

  “You could not have, dearest — it would have been impossible. No mere words could have made me visualize the inconceivable. And no matter how I came to it, slow or fast, the horror would have been the same. It is as impossible for me to make you see how I feel it now, as it would have been for you to make me feel it beforehand.”

  The voyage did her great good. She loved the sea, and gloried in the ships, doing her best to ignore the pitiful labor conditions of those who made the glory possible. Always she made friends — travelers, missionaries, business men, and women, wherever she found them. Yet, strangely enough, she seemed more at a loss with the women than with the men; seemed not to know, quite, how to approach them. It was not for lack of love and sympathy — far from it; she was eager to make friends with them. I finally worked out an explanation like this: She made friends with the men on the human side rather than attracting them by femininity; and as human beings they exchanged ideas and got on well together. The women were not so human; had a less wide outlook, less experience, as a rule. When she did get near enough to one of them for talk at all intimate, then came the ultra-feminine point of view, the different sense of social and moral values, the peculiar limitations of their position.

  I saw this, as reflected by Ellador, as I had never seen it for myself before. What I did not understand, at first, was why she seemed to flag in interest and in patience, with the women, sooner than with the men. She never criticized them, but I could see a puzzled grieved look come over her kind face and then she would withdraw.

  There were exceptions, marked ones. A woman doctor who had worked for years in China was going home for a long needed vacation, and Ellador was with her day after day, “learning,” she told me. And there was another, once a missionary, now a research worker in biology, who commanded her sincere admiration.

  We came to the lovely Hawaiian Islands, quite rested and refreshed, and arranged to stay there awhile and enjoy the splendor of those sea-girt mountains. Here her eager social interest was again aroused and she supplied herself with the history of this little sample of “social progress” most rapidly. There were plenty to teach her, a few excellent books to read, and numbers of most self-satisfied descendants of missionaries to boast of the noble work of their fathers.

  “This is very illuminating,” she told me. “It is a — what’s that nice word Professor Whiting used? — a microcosm — isn’t it
?”

  By this time my dear investigator had as clear an idea of general human history as any one, not a specialist could wish; and had it in a very small note-book. While in England someone had given her Winwood Reade’s wonderful “Martyrdom of Man,” as good a basis for historical study as could be asked; and all the facts and theories she had been collecting since were duly related to her general views.

  “Here you have done it so quickly — inside of a century. Only 1820 — and these nice gentle golden-colored people were living here by themselves.”

  “They weren’t always gentle — don’t idealize them too much!” I interrupted. “They had wars and quarrels, and they had a very horrid taboo religion — particularly hard on women.”

  “Yes — I know that — they weren’t ‘perfect, as we are,’ as Professor Boynton used to say; but they were beautiful and healthy and happy; they were courteous and kind; and oh, how splendidly they could swim! Even the babies, they tell me.”

  “I’ve understood a child can swim earlier than it can walk — did they tell you that?”

  “Yes — why not? But look here, my dear. Then came the missionaries and — interfered. Now these natives and owners of the land are only 15 per cent. of the population, with 20 per cent. of the deaths. They are dispossessed and are being exterminated.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Well?”

  Ellador looked at me. One could watch the expressions follow one another over her face, like cloud shadows and sunlight over a landscape. She looked puzzled; she evidently saw a reason. She became stern; then a further reason was recognized, and then that heavenly mother-look came over her, the one I had grown to prize most deeply.

  But all she said was: “I love you, Van.”

  “Thank Heaven for that, my dear. I thought you were going to cast me out because of the dispossessed Hawaiians. I didn’t do it — you’re not blaming me, are you?”

  “Did not — America — do it?” she asked, quietly. “And do you care at all?”

  Then I embarked on one of those confined and contradictory explanations by which the wolf who has eaten the lamb seeks to show how unavoidable — if not how justifiable it all was.

  “Do you feel like that about England’s taking the Boers’ country?” she asked gently.

  I did not. I had always felt that a particularly inexcusable piece of “expansion.”

  “And your country is not packed very close yet — is it? Having so much — why did you need these?”

  “We wanted to Christianize them — to civilize them,” I urged rather sulkily.

  “Do you think Christ would have had the same effect on them? And does civilization help dead people?”

  She saw I was hurt, and stopped to kiss me. “Let’s drop it, dear — I was wrong to press the point. But I’ve become so used to saying everything to you, just as if you were one of my sisters — I forget that things must look differently when one’s own country is involved.”

  She said no more about the vanishing Hawaiians, but I began to look at them with a very different feeling from what I had ever had before. We had brought them syphilis and tuberculosis. The Chinese brought them leprosy. One of their lovely islands was now a name of horror from that ghastly disease, a place where noble Christians strive to minimize the evil — too late.

  The missionaries, nobly purposed, no doubt, to begin with, had amassed great fortunes in land given to them by these careless children who knew so little of land ownership; and the children and grandchildren of the missionaries lived wealthy and powerful, proud of the “great work” of their forefathers, and apparently seeing no evil in the sad results. Perhaps they thought it was no matter how soon the natives died, so that they died Christians.

  And the civilization we have brought them means an endless day of labor, long hours of grinding toil for other people’s profit, in place of the clean ease and freedom of their own old life. Hard labor, disease, death; and the lasting consciousness of all this among their dwindling ranks; exclusion, social dissemination, industrial exploitation, approaching extermination — it is no wonder their music is mournful.

  I was glad to leave the lovely place; glad to put aside a sense of national guilt, and to see Ellador freshen again as the golden days and velvet nights flowed over us as we steamed toward the sunrise — and Home.

  There were plenty of Californians on board, both wise and unwise, and I saw my wife, with a constantly increasing ease and skill, extracting information from each and all she talked with. It is not difficult to extract information about California from a Californian. Not being one myself; and having more definite knowledge about my own country than I had had about most of the others we had visited, I was able to check off this triumphant flood of “boosting” with somewhat colder facts.

  Ellador liked it. “It does my heart good,” she said, “both to know that there is such a country on earth, and that people can care for it like that.”

  She particularly revelled in Ina Coolbrith’s exquisite poem “California,” so rich with tender pride, with vivid appreciation. Some devotee had the book with her, and poured forth a new torrent of praise over a fine list she had of “Californian authors.”

  This annoyed me rather more than real estate, climate, fruit or flowers; and having been somewhat browbeaten over Hawaii, I wanted to take it out of somebody else. I am not as good as Ellador; don’t pretend to be. At moments like that I don’t even want to be. So I said to this bubbling enthusiast: “Why do you call all these people ‘Californian authors?’”

  She looked at me in genuine surprise.

  “Were they born there?” I inquired. “Are they native sons or daughters?”

  She had to admit they were not, save in a few cases. We marked those who were — it was a most insufficient list.

  “But they lived in California,” she insisted.

  “How long?” I asked. “How long a visit or residence does it take to make an author a ‘Californian’ — like Mark Twain, for instance? Is he ‘a Connecticut author’ because he lived more years than that in Connecticut, or ‘a New York author’ because he lived quite a while in New York?”

  She looked much annoyed, and I was not a bit sorry, but went on ruthlessly: “I think California is the only state in the Union that is not content with its own crop — but tries to claim everything in sight.”

  5. MY COUNTRY

  In through the Golden Gate we steamed at last, one glorious morning; calm Tamalpais basking on the northern side, and the billowing city rising tumultuously on the southern, with the brilliant beauty of “The Fair” glowing on the water’s edge.

  I had been through before, and showed her through the glass as we passed, the Seal Rocks and the Cliff House with the great Sutro Baths beside it; and then the jeweled tower, the streaming banners of that wonder-city of a year.

  It was in February. There had been rain, and now the luminous rich green of the blazing sudden spring was cloaking every sloping shore. The long bay stretched wide on either hand; the fair bay cities opposite embroidered the western shore for miles; San Francisco rose before us.

  Ellador stood by my side, holding my arm with tense excitement. “Your country, dear!” she said. “How beautiful it is! I shall love it!”

  I was loving it myself, at that moment, as I never had before.

  Behind me was that long journey of us three adventurous explorers; our longer imprisonment, and then these travels of ours, through war-torn Europe, and the slow dark reaches of the Oriental civilization.

  “It certainly looks good to me!” I told her.

  We spent many days at the great Exposition, and others, later, at the still lovelier, smaller one at San Diego, — days of great happiness to both of us, and real pride to me. Later on I lost this feeling — replacing it with a growing discomfort.

  I suppose everyone loves and honors his own country — practically everyone. And we Americans, so young a people, so buoyantly carried along on the flood of easy geographical expansion, so sud
denly increased in numbers, not by natural growth of our own stock but by crowding injections of alien blood, by vast hordes of low-grade laborers whose ignorant masses made our own ignorant masses feel superior to all the earth — we Americans are almost as boastful as the still newer Federation of Germany.

  I had thought myself a sociologist, an ethnologist, one able to judge fairly from wide knowledge. And yet, with all my knowledge, with all my lucid criticism of my country’s errors and shortcomings, I had kept an unshaken inner conviction of our superiority.

  Ellador had shaken it.

  It was not that she had found any fault with the institutions of my beloved land. Quite the contrary. She believed it faultless — or nearly so. She expected too much. Knowing her as I now did, becoming more and more familiar with the amazing lucidity and fairness of her mind, with its orderly marshalling of well-knit facts and the swinging searchlight of perception which covered every point in her field of vision, I had a strange helpless sense of coming to judgment.

  In Herland I had never fully realized the quality of mind developed by their cultural system. Some of its power and clarity was of course plain to us, but we could no more measure that mind than a child can measure its teacher’s. I had lived with it now, watched it work, seen it in relation to others, to those of learned men and women of various nations. There was no ostentation about Ellador’s intellectual processes. She made no display of learning, did not contradict and argue. Sometimes, in questions of fact, if it seemed essential to the matter under discussion, she would quote authority in opposition, but for the most part she listened, asking a few questions to satisfy herself as to the point of view of her interlocutor. I used to note with appreciative delight how these innocent. almost irrelevant questions would bring out answers each one of which was a branching guide-post as to the mind of the speaker. Sometimes just two would show him to be capable of believing flat contradictions, or merely one would indicate a limitation of knowledge or an attitude of prejudice which “placed” the man at once. These were not “smart” questions, with a flippantly triumphant and all-too-logical demand at the end, leaving the victim confused and angry. He never realized what was being done to him.