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until she had managed to mention, in introducing Mr. Parbetter, that he had been telling them such interesting things about his work in the Department of Justice; the other introductions were easier, for she was sure none of these people had ever been in Greenwich Village or seen Jasper Weed. She took a breath of relief. "Crudely done!" she thought to herself; "I show my excitement too much. I would never make a good conspirator!" But perhaps she was wrong; for, having seen the introductions successfully through, she settled down to an interesting evening.

It was interesting. Mrs. Raymond was afterward heard to say that she had had five thousand dollars' worth of excitement and fun that evening. For the case of Jasper Weed continued to be the topic of conversation. The gentleman from the Department of Justice, under skilful coaxing from Inez Vance, related to them the true history of Jasper Weed, as it stood in the secret files of the department. It appeared that Jasper Weed's real name was Joseph Widinsky, that he was born in Riga, that he had figured in the Russian revolutionary uprising of 1905, that he had been with Lenine in Switzerland, and had been sent to this country to stir up a labor rebellion. "Those," said Mr. Parbetter, "are the real facts of the case!"

"How exciting!" said Inez Vance. As it happened, the question of Mrs. Raymond's five thousand dollars came up for discussion again. Mr. Parbetter again assured her that it was lost. "Of course," ," said Mr. Jimson, mildly, "there are still a few hours of grace, I believe. The week is up to-night. If he surrenders himself to the authorities before midnight, your

bail is safe, Mrs. Raymond. And how do you know but that he may be intending to do just that?"

"If he did," said Mrs. Raymond, sharply, "I'd think him a fool. What is five thousand dollars beside twenty years of a boy's life? I should hate to believe that was what he thought of me! So far as I am concerned, I wish him luck in getting to Russia!"

Inez Vance laughed softly. "The question is," she said, "what does Russia want of him?"

"You are right," said Mr. Jimson; "that is the question. Why should Russia regard him as a useful person? Russia does not know him as well as we do."

"If you knew him as well as I do," said Mr. Parbetter, gravely, "you would not think it a joking matter." "Tell us more, Mr. Parbetter," urged Inez Vance.

Mr. Parbetter complied with her request, and the company was thrilled with the desperate deeds of Joseph Widinsky, alias Jasper Weed. It was late when Mr. Parbetter and the other guests took their leave. Mr. Jimson and Inez Vance remained.

When they were all gone, Jasper took out his watch.

"It's fifteen minutes to twelve," he said. "There's still time to call up the police station-"

"Don't be an idiot, Jasper!" said Mrs. Raymond, and put an arm affectionately about him. "I'm sure I don't know how you ever got mixed up in this crazy mess, but I want you to get out of it. The idea of your going to prison!"

Then, having sent the maids to bed, she took Jasper and Inez out into the kitchen, and they rummaged in the ice-box and made sandwiches for them

selves and talked about old times in Greenwich Village.

"Of course you 're going to let me put you up for the night?” she said to Jasper.

"Yes, if you don't mind my leaving before breakfast. If I'm going to Russia, my program from now on is laid out for me."

"Why did I marry you? It was wrong to do that, was n't it? But-I thought you were going off to prison. I wanted to make you happy." "I was happy," he said. "Can you forgive me, Jasper?" "For making me happy? Yes. I can forgive you anything."

"And will you believe me if I tell

Mrs. Raymond picked up the kitchen you something?" clock.

"This has an alarm. Take it with you. And if you 're going so early, you must get some sleep. Good night, Jasper, and good-by, and good luck!" She kissed him. Her glance dwelt for a moment on Inez. "Show him his room, darling, the one over the garden, while I lock up the house."

XII. Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish. "This is your room," said Inez, and went over and drew aside the curtain. "How sweet the flowers are! Their odors seem mixed with moonlight."

He breathed in their fragrance. "Everything I look at is precious to me just now," he said. "Absurd as it may seem, I love my country. I keep thinking I may not see it again-ever." "Jasper," said Inez, "what are you going to do in Russia?"

"Try to make myself useful," he said. "There's a whole new civilization to help build up. I know you think of me as useless, but I should like to be something else."

She put her arm about him.

"You poor darling!" she said. "Of course you are useless. That's what I like about you!"

"Why did you run away from me?" he asked abruptly.

"Because that 's the sort of person I am," she said softly. "Then-why did you—

"Yes. Tell me."

"If you won't ask me to-go to Russia with you and help you build up a new civilization, or something useful and absurd like that, I'll tell you that I love you now, Jasper."

"I don't think I'd take you to Russia with me if I could," he replied.

"I'm so glad!" she said. "You are being sensible, Jasper, at last."

"I must wind my alarm-clock," he said. "That will remind me in time that life is real, and that I am a citizen of the world, with duties awaiting me for which I shall eventually get hanged or shot. You are making me forget these things already."

"Forget them, then," she urged. "Forget them for a while, and be my playmate again!"

The moonlight shone into the room.

XIII. To the Reader. Oh, doubtless the alarm-clock will ring at the appointed hour, sending a man into exile, followed by derision and contempt, to live and die with irrelevant heroism in some strange place. But not yet.

"And here a while, where no wind brings

The baying of a pack athirst, May sleep the sleep of blessed things The blood too bright, the brow

accurst."

S

Wash-Tubs and Woman's Duty

Is a Mother's Business Child Culture or Housework?

BY CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN

OCIAL service is the highest ambition of the noblest minds. From the greatest name of all, of Him who gave His life for humanity, down through every martyr to scientific advancement, every seeker for truth, every explorer, discoverer, inventor, to the eager benevolence of the often unwelcome reformer and uplifter, we see human beings spending their lives in social service.

Nor is this passionate devotion confined to the wise and good; it is as common as the common soldier. With endurance, courage, boundless heroism, we find the men of all ages giving their lives, for the advantage of the tribe or nation, for social service.

Meanwhile, with public safety and progress dependent on social service, our private comfort, health, and happiness, depend on domestic service. Yet here yawns a gulf impassable.

Sweet and proper it is that a man should die for his country, and he has a monument in every town if he does it with marked success; but our parks and squares are sprinkled with no monuments to cooks and butlers, whether they die in our service or not.

Among all trades and professions the least popular seems to be this universal basis of home comfort, do

mestic service. There appears to be some profound innate objection to it, as shown in the tale of the irate housewife who met every hard-luck story of a hungry tramp with the offer of a steady job, with food, lodging, and good pay, in her kitchen. She found no takers. They said it was not "man's work."

There is some such distinction in our minds. Where slaves are owned, men serve, or, among the rich, menservants are employed; but speaking broadly of the world as a whole, domestic service is performed by women, and esteemed quite suitable for them.

Sweet and proper as it is for the man to give public service, it is generally held quite as high in saccharine propriety for the woman to give domestic service. In all our past, in all our peoples, was no man so poor but he held himself entitled to a woman to wait on him.

Two irresistible influences are at present undermining this age-old custom. One is the movement of women, who refuse any longer to practise only one trade; and the other the development of industry, which makes those formerly willing to be hired servants now unwilling. It is an uneasy period of changing status, in which we

struggle and suffer without under- other proof of our human progress: we standing. were the highest race, and our advance required this change.

Against the old theory, dating from Eve, of the place and purpose of woman as helpmate and subject of man, rises the new theory of woman, dating from far-off primeval supremacy, as his equal, if not leader. The new theory stands strongly on its grounds of biological law, but the old one still holds out, shaken, but not overthrown, on its basis of existing facts. The old Adam is naturally unwilling to give up the best and cheapest servant possible, the mother in the home.

"That is all very well," he admits, "as to your insects and primeval savages; but if women are as superior as you say, how did it happen that they came to be as they are mostly just house servants?"

The Adam's rib story is no longer devoutly accepted by thinking people. "God's last best gift to man" is now seen to have been here first, in the early stages of life. The general superiority of the female in lower species is undeniable, and even with us she remains equal and in some ways still ahead, in the beginnings of human evolution. But between those dim beginnings and the time when history is possible, something happened to reverse the hitherto unbroken leadership of the mother sex.

The deep importance of this reversal of the order of nature is but just dawning upon us. We have supposed, previously, that the subjection of the female was common throughout nature. Finding the contrary to be true, and that ours is the only species in which the female is inferior to and dependent on the male, we then assumed that this condition was an

Against this rises the growing objection of women to their age-old position; their increasing proof of equality in many instances; their claim that mankind has risen despite, not because of, the subjection of women; and indeed that a large proportion of our sins, diseases, and general unhappiness is due to precisely this condition.

It is no light matter to seek to change a relation which is almost as old as the human race, but neither was it a light matter for the human race to change one a million times older. After all, we are a mere infant, as a species, compared with other forms, and while undeniably the highest, with a marvelous record of achievement, yet we are as undeniably the sickest, the most dissatisfied, and most miserable of all creatures. We have committed many sins, we have made many mistakes; perhaps this putting mother under foot was one of them. Perhaps again it was a step required in that stage of social development, and later becoming increasingly injurious.

In any case, it is of visible importance to understand how it happened, to see what forces operated upon us that we should thus overturn the order of nature, as it were, and succeed in our audacious revolution. It is needless to explain that such a discovery depends on deduction purely. There were no records at that time, and the change was not one to alter the bones we unearth. Yet with some knowledge of the laws of physical evolution and further of social evolution, it is not difficult to reconstruct the conditions of primitive man and study the easy, gradual, perfectly natural and un

conscious steps by which this racial place, in our one race alone of all the alteration was made.

& 2

Let no one put forward the old shallow explanation that motherhood was the cause, the "weakness" and "dependence" of motherhood. Motherhood is not peculiar to our species; others possess it, and in no case does it make the female weak or dependent. On the contrary, and in defiance of our own artificial disabilities, it is clear that motherhood is the great developer and strengthener.

Motherhood is the force which operates in all the delicate and elaborate industry of bee and ant and spider; motherhood makes the leopardess or lioness a better hunter, not a worse; motherhood is the source of those altruistic impulses and powers from which have grown our social consciousness, imperfect though it still is.

forms of life on earth. It appears to have occurred in almost all the early peoples, and this in different lands, though some traces of a still earlier period of feminine equality are found. To account for it we must look for characteristics inherent in our race alone, appearing at a certain low stage in social culture, gradually and unconsciously producing this change in relationship, and certainly of some benefit at the time, else it would never have become so universal. Such characteristics are not far to seek.

The human species is distinguished by the prolongation of infancy, and that prolongation increases with social development. The prolongation of infancy involves the extension of motherhood, also cumulative.

The extension of motherhood in the human species, with its growing brain, its capable hand, involves the beginning of industry. As with other kinds

"They talk of disabilities, a long array of mothers, the care and service of the

of these,

Till one would think that motherhood was merely a disease."

But it is not; it is added power.

Nor should we give a moment's credence to the equally shallow theory about "tyrant man." To imagine To imagine that primitive man was able by the simple use of a club to reverse the relation of the sexes shows small acquaintance with biological law.

Let us face the facts in this way. Here is a period of evolution which we will call a thousand miles long, against which our racial life measures about a foot. Of that foot our known history is less than an inch. Somewhere in that eleven inches before history this tremendous change took

young develop ingenious activities for their benefit.

The beginning of industry, which with us means making things, things to wear, things to use, prepared food, shelter, ornament-this development of human power and skill in the human mother is the key to the position. It was this which put her in a relation to the male which is possible to no other species: she was useful to him.

There is no other female thing which occupies that place, unless we count the dependence of the drone upon the working co-mothers of the hive. Among all the mating pairs of creation the male desires the female only as a female, and only periodically as such. But following this industrial development of the human mother, the male

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