to that doctrine, Amen! Great changes are taking place in Europe with
respect to employment and dress. These changes will find their way across
the ocean to our own country; but public opinion here will be more stub-
born than it is there.

Another thing which will change sentiment in this country will be the
franchise of women. Their battle is on now with such a determination that
its long resistance seems unlikely. Their political influence will reach all
industrial life in such a manner as to sweep away distinction hitherto exist-
ing in wages and in all kinds of employment for women. Competition of a
violent character is sure to arise between men and women. Men with fam-



PROBLEMS OF THE AGE 49

ilies will be at a disadvantage. They cannot work on a scale of wages that
women will accept if they need to do so in order to win places occupied
by men. Then we may expect a new thing in the world sex hatred. In-
deed, its appearance is already manifest in parts of Europe today. What
a serious world we are coming to! Maybe the curious thing after all is
that we ourselves cannot be attuned to the new life. At any rate the present
transformation of things is interesting. But the changes may come along
slow enough for us to adjust ourselves to them as time goes on. We are in
a period of reconstruction when the new is taking the place of the old. It
is all wonderful. We can hardly believe ourselves in the contemplation that
the new order is forcing upon us.

Sex Competition. A second obstacle to the demands of woman is the
opposition that her own sex will force upon her. Women must stand by their
husbands and oppose their sisters in a movement calculated to rob husbands
of their employment. Equal pay for equal work has the ring of eternal jus-
tice. But what is justice? Child life is needed, it must be encouraged if the
nation is to exist. Men and women must have some assistance if they are to
be the greatest of all benefactors to their country.. They cannot compete with
the childless. Will the state take over the expenses of child life? Children
must be reared in homes. A parental love demands that, and the theory of
some socialists that state institutions should be established for the support
of children is idle in the face of one of the strongest instincts of nature.

There is an ever widening chasm between the present and the past
generation. The older looks askance at the liberty and forwardness of the
younger. The younger is working a revolution in the propriety and fitness
of things. The women of this generation are looking at life from a new
angle. New ambitions have come to them, and they are talking "careers."
They mean to break away from the old order of things and set new stand-
ards of life. Will these standards be for the better or for the worse? We
all shake our heads at times. The old fashioned mother in the home, the
mother whose ambition was in the home, is still our ideal. We scarcely
stop to think that the home may become a thing of the past, is indeed in
an ever widening circle becoming so now. The unmarried and the child-
less have no homes as we have known them. Those of limited families
are drifting from home life. They must think as men think, and live as
men live. Will the new freedom to them mean a license to do what men
do? Will the double standard pass away, and the moral plane of woman
fall to that of man? Can the two sexes be alike in so many respects and not
be in danger of being alike in all respects? In the past responsibility for
immoral conduct has rested more heavily upon woman. She is learning to
evade what was once the insignia of her shame. Remove from her fear of
consequences, and will not the dangers for her be as great as they are
for man?

Intellectual Ascendency. The intellectual differences between the pres-
ent generation of women and the past can perhaps never be abridged. Will
the moral and physical difference in time break down? Is the intellect
in the ascendency? If so, what will be its power over the other attributes
of woman? Harriet Orne, in the Independent of September 1, 1917, writes:

"My emotions belong to the world of my mother, but my mind
lives in a new world which she has never entered, perhaps would not
enter if she could. It is the world which my experience has made
for me, an intellectual world where those ideas rule which have had
the most force in the world during my life time and have been a part
of my education. Between my mother's intellectual world and my
own a gulf is fixed, and we look across wistfully at one another and
strive tactfully to protect each other from our own opinions.

"I believe that the gap between the thinking of the women of my
mother's generation, and the thinking of the women of my own gen-
eration is a greater gap than has existed between any two other gener-
ations of women in the history that we know."



50 PROBLEMS OF THE AGE

What will the competition of women mean to men? At present they
are equipping themselves intellectually better than men. They are more
steadfast as students and have fewer evil habits that sap the physical and
mental life of man. What of the physical differences between them? The
women of this generation in the activities of the home show more per-
sistency and endurance than men. Here is a testimonial from Pierre Hamp
on the work of French women in the munition factories:

"Between the sewing machine or the typewriter key and the me-
chanic's lathe there is no very great distance; there is more fatigue in
making clothes on a sewing machine for troops than in turning a 75
mm. gun on a lathe one meter long. To pass the inside border of the
hem exactly under the needle requires about the same attention as to
follow with one's eye the working of the tool while calibrating the
weapon.

"Woman could easily pass directly from her previous tasks to this
treatment of steel in the workshops, for she had been spending herself
before in more exhausting work. No great effort is required of her
in metal turning. She has soon come to excel at it, and is as efficient
as man and often more so. In a workshop for making shell cases one
woman succeeded in a fortnight in attaining the average rate of pro-
duction at piece work rates. She asked if she would be paid for all
she made, irrespective of their number. This privilege was given,
and in six weeks she reached a scale of production twice as great as
that of men.

"It was formerly thought that woman's care could not be trusted
when very exact measurements had to be made, but the eyes of an
embroiderer are sharper than those of a man, and machines for mak-
ing light artillery presented few difficulties for her."

Women and War. What about woman as a fighter? Biologists say,
"The female of the species is deadlier than the male." Now that women
squads in Great Britain are undergoing intense military training, and many
of the women of this country are so given to military excitement, one is
compelled to ask what may not yet be done by women if the war continues
much longer. In Prussia a woman's battalion has been formed and has
seen active service. The famous New York physician, Dr. Hammond, in a
recent interview in the Times has this to say about woman and war:

"At present there is no question that woman represents the undis-
ciplined sex. That is particularly so in this country. Women have
been allowed too much ease and luxury and pleasure without any of
the sobering responsibility that goes with world making."

"Don't you, Doctor, consider the task of child bearing and rearing
as great and sobering a responsibility as any borne by the average
male?"

"I certainly do. Aside from the contribution to the State, it is the
best thing a woman can do for her own well-being, both moral and
physical. A woman is not fully a woman until she has borne a child.
But child-bearing is going out of fashion, especially here in America.
And it is with an acceptation of this condition that I speak."

"Where women have acquired economic strength, financial inde-
pendence, there is undoubtedly a disposition to break away from
the discipline of established decencies. It may be that women are
innately anarchistic, and that they must be held in leash by eco-
nomic dependence, and possess a physical strength less than that of
the dominant male; but I would like to see the experiment made of
subjecting them to the iron discipline of military life.

"Of course, there could be no segregation of regiments according
to sex. Women, if they are to be any real use to their country as
soldiers, and if they are to get any real benefit themselves from the
training, would have to play their part shoulder to shoulder with the



PROBLEMS OF THE AGE 51

men. I have no doubt this would result in colossal license for a time;
but there is no doubt that the problem would work out its own solu-
tion. I have no doubt of the enduring morality of the world. All
change means disruption and chaos for a time; and then the true
equilibrium is found. I, for one, would be perfectly willing to put the
world's morality to the test, crucial, I admit of sending mixed regi-
ments of men and women."

These are truly grave problems of life in woman's world. The steps
sometimes from the suggestive to the possible, from the possible to the
probable, and probable to the reality, are not only short but rapid. Who
does not venture a prediction?

Remedy. What will happen after the breakdown of marriage in our
social life? A period of reconstruction will follow. Marriage must of
course be reinstated. Without it there can be for us no heaven or no earth.
An awful punishment is already at hand because the world has thrown off
the responsibility to such an extent of this divine requirement.

Read Sec. 49:15,16,17, Doc. and Cov.



XXI Dependent Mothers

A Serious Problem. One of the big economic problems of the future
will be the fostering care of widows with children to care for. In our own
country thirty states have made provision by law for the support of children
whose mothers were not able to care for them. These enactments were
passed without regard to the war. When it is over, it is easy to imagine
the great burden which such unsupported children will cast upon the na-
tions of the earth. I may include in those mentioned the great numbers
who are and will be born out of wedlock. Children are a great asset to
the world, but aside from economic considerations, there will be involved
the question of humanity. When the war broke out there was a wave of
immorality that resulted in many thousands of so-called war babies. The
untold number of children dependent on the state for support may well
approximate many million. It was a great step the world took when it was
decided that children were entitled to an education by the state. The
question of the value of an education to the state is subordinate to the
question of life itself to the state. The burden will be enormous, and it is
likely through divorce and illegitimacy, to grow beyond our wildest imag-
ination. What we know of taxation will be incomparable with what we have
yet to learn. It may reach the breaking point, and result in great social
disorder. It is so serious already that thoughtful men are preparing our
minds for what is certain to be a crucial ordeal. For years there will be
no escape from the load we shall have to carry. It is of course easy to
imagine that attempts will be made to avoid it by the practice of race
suicide. But could the world deliberately destroy itself? The spirit of
self-destruction is rife in war. Is there no remedy? We are in a state of
intolerable darkness. It is earier to wonder than it is to know what the
world will do. There has always been in the past some redeeming power
against universal destruction. A world practically without religion is on
trial.

A Fatherless Home. A new world problem also arises. How can chil-
dren be reared without father? Is the father a necessary factor in the
home, independent of the material support he gives? Judge Niel of Chi-
cago, who is now in London in the interest of his propaganda for the statf
support of fatherless children, and who for years past has been the leading
advocate of this doctrine in the United States, has this to say, according
to the New York Sunday Sun of September 9, 1917:

"Where the mother is trained in mothercraft, as in some states,
and given sufficient support so that she can buy food, clothes and



52 PROBLEMS OF THE AGE

shelter, and keep her children in health, a far smaller number of
youngsters get into the juvenile courts than in the case where a
father of inferior grade is around. The presence of a father is not
necessary to the successful rearing of a child. The disadvantages of
fathers probably are the result principally of the low wage system,
but as things are, fathers usually fuss and make general nuisances
of themselves about the house.

"Careful study has shown that homes under the mothers' pen-
sion system, in which no father appears at all, are better than those
in which low wage fathers are present daily.

"This tends toward the natural condition, because most women
would rather be respectably married mothers rearing children than
unmarried operatives in a factory or employes of an office. If nor-
mal women are given the opportunity of being wives and independent
mothers, this will decrease also the prostitution problem, for, speak-
ing generally, there never is a prostitution problem in the psychology
of any woman till her mother instincts have been outraged. That
is something worthy of much thought. The world is now confronted
with the problem of raising great masses of children without the
supervision of fathers. It is entirely new, but on the success of its
solution will depend the race in Europe and perhaps in America
twenty years from now. If the state sees that mothers have an
opportunity of properly rearing their own children, the killing off
of the men which has occurred during this war will be comparatively
of slight importance, for twenty years from now the nation will be
made up of the children of today, not of the men who would have
lived in peace, but instead died in war."

State pensions for all mothers under the changed conditions will cer-
tainly give encouragement for an unnumbered mass of illegitimate children.

Will men who must bear the major portion of this load consent to it?
Will they set up a distinction between the unmarried mother and the mother
who has been through a divorcement; between the mother whose husband
has died and the mother who has deliberately sought motherhood in re-
sponse to the maternal instinct with which she is endowed?

Will the fathers of the children of these unmarried mothers be dragged
into the court and forced by law to support their children? It might be
easier and cheaper for the state to support the children than to multiply
the courts and other agencies to enforce their support. The whole thing
is a whirligig, which ever way we look at it. Before legislatures consent to
such a wholesale draft upon the public treasury, they may yield, for eco-
nomic reasons, to a growing demand for education in the art of birth con-
trol. Birth control would claim the best of arguments. Our moral intui-
tions and religious standards are breaking down from the sheer weight of
economic necessity. It's all a labyrinth. God no doubt has a way out for
his children, but they are at sea.

Illegitimate Children. Illegitimate children are multiplying, so are the
children of divorces. Is there a great difference between those who see an
easy way out and those who get in wrong? The great encouragement for
the birth of all classes will be the need of an increased population.

Judge Niel further says:

"Germany is caring for all illegitimate children and looking after
the mothers as well as during and after birth. An official statement says
that three million such children now are being cared for by the state.
Neither in the case of legitimate or in that of illegitimiate are the
mothers allowed to work for a considerable period before and after
the birth of a child.

"In Australia every mother, married or unmarried, who gives birth
to a living child gets 5, or about twenty-five dollars; whether she be
married or unmarried, rich or poor. Manitoba has just passed a
mothers' pension law.



PROBLEMS OF THE AGE 53

"To me these millions of children who must be reared without
financial aid from fathers obviously present the biggest problem that
the world has ever seen. Britain, France, Italy, Russia, Germany, Aus-
tria, and perhaps America will find themselves unable to continue by
the old methods and still survive as nations. If the widows and
orphans of this war are permitted to struggle unaided through their
lives and to be degenerated by inevitable poverty, decades of progress
will be lost thereby."

The computation of the present load upon the state is not the end of
the solution. Myriads of widows and unmarried mothers will go on having
children. The mother instinct will grow by what it feeds upon. Tfie
dimensions are beyond calculation. It means chaos. Order will have to
be evolved from it. Sane methods and correct principles will have to be
seriously worked out.

The Religious Side. Another danger arises in the midst of it all. Will
men marry? Why assume a responsibility they can let the state carry?
What will become of the whole marriage system? The undertaking will
have serious dangers for the state. The state argument breaks down. The
whole question is not political; it is not economic fundamentally. It is
religious. Is the world ready for religion? There are numerous examples
in history of religious break-downs. The sorrowful thing of it all is that
the restoration of religion is one of the last phases of regeneration. Think
of what we have yet to pass through between the fall of the old and the
birth of the new! The world must certainly travail in pain.

The World's Burden. The situation is not improved by the light-
minded manner in which the subject is treated by those who make a jest
of it all. It is not a passing world mood. It will grow into the fulness of a
world calamity. Its weight will repress every part of our physical, moral,
and intellectual natures. No class will escape it. The rich will stare at
bankruptcy and the poor will groan. Wounded men by the millions will
also become a load upon the state. The world has never seen anything
like it. There will be great masses of children who have neither father
nor mother. War brings diseases, and the severe strain of mothers now in
munition plants and in other works requiring the most strenuous life will
break down from the excessive strain put upon them. Women's nerves will
give way till hundreds of thousands of them will die. The nations will
have a heavy load to carry in the support of children who have neither
father nor mother. Then there will arise another problem, the question of
employment. Before children are ready to assume the independent status
of manhood, there will be a long period when their labors must be under
some sort of guidance and control. Who will employ them? The state?
Can private enterprise be depended upon to absorb such labor? Much of
the labor nowadays is transient, a few weeks or months here, and a few
months there. It would be dangerous to turn out so many thousands into
what really represents tramp life.

Indifference. "We should solve these things when we come to them,**
the indifferent may say. But there are many things we ought not to come to.
Britain left the matter of war till she came to it. It resulted in wholesale
slaughter of human life. Sometimes the "leaving of things'* is the worst
phase of the difficulty. It is all confusion madly confounded. Neither may
men in such an age be indifferent to impending calamities. A message has
been revealed, and great effort put forth to deliver it. It has been scantily
received.

If this miscellaneous child life is thrown helpless and uncared for upon
the world, what physical and moral dangers must come to it! If demorali-
zation comes to it, it will impregnate all child life. The state will suffer,
and society deteriorate. "Where is wisdom?" asked a noble ancient. Hu-
man wisdom is in the scales. Will it be found wanting? There was once
a handwriting on the wall. There is again, and its interpretation has already
been given.



54 PROBLEMS OF THE AGE

Revelation. "And the time cometh speedily that great things are to be
shown forth unto the children of men;

"But without faith shall not anything be shown forth except desolation
upon Babylon, the same which has made all nations drink of the wine of
the wrath of her fornication.

"And there are none that doeth good, except those who are ready to
receive the fulness of my gospel which I have sent forth unto this generation.

"Wherefore, I have called upon the weak things of the world, those who
are unlearned and despised, to thresh the nations by the power of my Spirit"
(Doc. and Cov. 35:11-13).



XXII Sexual Life

Its Importance in Life. One of the burning questions of the age, and
at the same time one of the consuming evils, is the life-long story of man's
sexual life. It protrudes in all the great historical events of the world, and
now that there are in that life such alarming dangers to the happiness and
continuity of the race, men and women have thrown off all disguise of
modesty, and speak on the subject with a frankness that would have seemed
shocking a generation back.

Sexual life is fundamental in our family and social existence. One of
the difficulties respecting it arises from the fact that we have come to view it
from an entirely false point of view. We speak of it sometimes as a "carnal
life," as a sort of necessary evil, as a fallen condition of which we ought to
be ashamed and for which we apologize, and as a sin which we lay at the
door of Adam and Eve. And why this shame, this apology? It is no doubt
because that life has been the most shamefully abused and most ignorantly
approached of all the conditions of our worldly existence.

Duty. God implanted in all life the powers of procreation, and all life
has a three-fold duty: of birth, reproduction, and death. These are the
general laws of our existence. Concerning the duty of reproduction, he
made to Adam and Eve the announcement of the law that man should not
live alone, that he should multiply and replenish the earth.

Man, then, in his mortal condition, became a creator by reason of the
sexual powers with which God had endowed him. He became in turn like
his Creator finite, it is true, yet he made a beginning to the powers of his
creation, which must grow in perfection as man grows in attainments.

Blessings. God called Abraham forth from the valley of the Mesopota-
mia. The great object of that call was to make him the progenitor of a cho-
sen people through whom the Messiah was to come. With that call there
came a promise, which Abraham held choice above all other promises: that
his children should be as numerous as the stars of the heaven or the sands
of the seashore. Love is the first fruits of man's creative powers. I hardly
need point to the Old Testament for evidence respecting the law of purity
and the purposes of God. God taught it to Moses on the Tables of the Law;
Christ preached it to his followers; he denounced his enemies because of
their adulterous lives. Their fall from purity made it impossible for them
to comprehend or follow him.

Relationship of Sexual Life and the Spirit of God. Let us come down
to conditions and experiences of our own times; men go forth into the
world as misionaries to expound divine laws, to preach repentance, and to
warn. From their words, faith is implanted in the hearts of men. Those
who are seeking divine truth are susceptible to the influences of these mis-
sionaries. The purity of their lives gives effectiveness to their testimonies.
On the other hand, digression from the law of purity robs them of their
spiritual life, and often severs the relationship in them between the human
and the divine. Men who digress from the higher mission of sexual life lose
faith, grow in profanity, until it suits their conscience best to believe that
there is no God, except the laws of nature, towards which they feel no very



PROBLEMS OF THE AGE 55

great responsibility. When the law of sexual life has been transgressed
through sin, men and women suffer the loss of divine love. The sexual life
is God-ordained, in the animal, vegetable, and human world. Its mission is
the mission of life and progress. It carries with it joy and blessings, within