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New Zealand Women and the War
The Fight For The Home

By S. H. J.

There is a song of England that haunts
her hours of rest:
The calm of it and balm of it
Are breathed from every hedgerow
that blushes to the West:
From the cottage doors that nightly
Cast their welcome out so brightly
On the lanes where laughing children
are lifted and caressed
By the tenderest hands of England,
hard and blistered hands of England:
And from the restful sighing
Of the sleepers that are lying
With the arms of God around them on
the night's contented breast.
“A Song of England,” Alfred Noyes.

The women of New Zealand are called on once again to carry the grim burden of war. As their mothers did before them they must strive to ensure that the glory of the Empire is not yet to live only as the memory of a stirring song sang in the misty past.

Their striving must be based on a realisation of what the glory of the Empire really is. In sober truth the real glory of the Empire lies in the millions of happy homes that crowd the cities and countrysides that stretch from London, Edinburgh and Dublin to where “Colombo, Galle and Montreal, Port Darwin, Timaru lie only just across the road.” In these myriad homes men and women live together in love, comfort, happiness and security such as the rest of the world knows in no way so completely; in these homes and their surroundings “laughing children are lifted and caressed” in such freedom and safety as is not known in any other country outside the ordered realms of our Empire.

These self-governed happy homes of working people such as you and I are, represent the true wealth, splendour and majesty of the wide-spread Dominions. To preserve these homes and their laughing children from the despotism of the Hun and the anarchy of the disrupters of Poland and Finland is, in sober truth, the victory we are seeking.

These homes and the true freedom they denote are the visible triumph and tangible justification of that form of government which has been the growth of our centuries of security. We live, of course, under democratic government, but that alone does not ensure the glory I am attesting. The same claim is made for the United States, Germany, Russia or Spain, but, in their various degrees, those countries merely prove that democracy alone is not enough to guarantee the personal freedom we British deem essential for our happiness.

The added feature that mellows and strengthens our governance is that spirit of tolerance, mutual forbearance and compromise which colours the whole proud history of representative government virtually throughout the British Empire.

This is the peculiar genius in the practice of democracy that is the characteristic of the English people alone. This spirit of tolerance, which connotes and incorporates a sense of humour, alone enables the benevolent intentions underlying all ideas of popular government to be fulfilled. This leaven alone has enabled the countries of the Empire to avoid those dangers of party or clique domination which undermine the democratic government of other countries.

This tempered democracy modified and controlled by a sane respect for the rights and opinions of minorities, is responsible for the large measure of personal freedom enjoyed throughout the British Empire. It is the warrant for the popular belief that “the Englishman's home is his castle.” “Government of the people by the people for the people” is a saying that was uttered by a noble man who meant well, but, as with all his countrymen, the true inner meaning of democracy escaped him. Government of the minority by the majority for the party does not sound so well nor does it give that complete endowment of family freedom and security that is our glorious heritage. In no country outside the British sway are “laughing children lifted and caressed” with true carefree abandonment and with full detachment from things that are not essential to the family life.

Probably the nearest approach to this freedom is found in Finland and Denmark, and possibly in the Scandinavian peninsula, Holland and France follow next and far-behind comes the United States of America.

Politicians may glibly quote other shibboleths as the hall-mark of British liberty. Women, with their greater share of intuitive commonsense, remain unmoved when such ideals as “one man one vote,” “proportional representation,” “the Habeas Corpus Act,” “free compulsory secular national education,” or even the desirability of marrying one's deceased wife's sister are given undue prominence in the election campaign, but surely deep in their hearts they thrill, even as every decent man does, to the certain knowledge that the lifting and caressing of laughing children is the chief and stable glory of our Empire.

There may be unfortunate females who would dispute the accuracy of my assertions, but surely everyone of these will admit that the love and beauty of family life is incomparably better served by British rule than by German. The Dean of Canterbury gives his near-episcopal authority in his booklet “Act Now” (the booklet, by the way, can be bought for 2d.) for the statement that “a (German) child's nursery rhyme runs as follows:—

What puffs and patters,
What clicks and clatters?
I know what. Oh what fun!
It's a lovely gatling gun.”

He tells us that in Germany school girls are admonished “to look on soldiering, not as a necessary evil, but as a sacred duty.” Further, he quotes from a German educational handbook, “the militarization of the entire female population is the declared task of this generation.”

There may even be misguided females who would sneer at the false sentimentality of my remarks and would quote the falling birthrate and the importance of a career in refutation. May the Lord have mercy on them.

There may be bright young things who would sniff at the old-fashioned nature of my arguments. Of course, they are old-fashioned. We who live page 15 in a changing world (this nonsensical jargon should appeal to them, not knowing that the description was not less true in the days when oldfashioned Horace and more absurdly medieval Ecclesiasticus repeated it than it is to-day) can only go back to fundamentals for our wisdom. They are not so old-fashioned as the rising sun beyong the wine-flecked sea, as the silver moon on stiller waters, as the whisperings of nymphs in the brake and the music of pipes in the valley. “Such, too, are the grandeurs of the dooms we have imagined for the mighty dead,” and “magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.” Death and birth, and love and duty are all old-fashioned, and the first hussy who permed her hair, and plucked her eyebrows, and painted her fingerand toenails, and explained to her astounded brothers that one really had to be modern was long dead before the Pyramids were thought of. Yes, thank God, the arguments are old-fashioned.

The ordinary loving and lovable woman who agrees substantially with me will find her duty close to hand and not too formidable. Believing firmly in the desirability of an Allied victory, she will quietly impart confidence and the “will to win” to all around her.

Neither Germany nor all other powers of anarchy, will ever defeat England—only England can do that. Patriotism, as James Branch Cabell has pointed out, is more feminine than masculine in its outlook. He says:

“In battling for the honour of, one's birthplace each hand is lifted in defence, not merely of opinions, but of the very field in which it once was dust: and he that is slain does but repay through burial a loan from his mother. So it is with actual and very profound reason that we are not reasonable about the display of our patriotism: for no man, of whatever nationality, is called on to be reasonable where his mother's welfare is concerned, or, to however small degree, her honour seems impugned. In such a quandary he strikes.”

The pacifist therefore is a decadent who resorts to reason where such resort is, in the last analysis, a denial of his mother.

Woman's duty to-day is to quietly and with dignity inculcate and foster in her menfolk the patriotism (one would like to call it matriotism) that is to some extent being choked out in the lush growth of civilisation. Her men are but children of a larger growth who in the darkness turn to her, more often than she realises, for renewal of their confidence and confirmation of their essential safety. We are one and all afraid to go home in the dark, but woman's love and courage lights for each of us a lamp for our stumbling footsteps.

The outlook is dark, but not all desperate. There have already been deeds that thrill and hearten us. The defence of Finland shows that the will to win can withstand countless battalions on the march and armies in the sky. The German submarine that dared the entrance to Scapa Flow showed us what can be done if we remain steadfast and determined. The defeat of the “Graf Spee” and the release of the prisoners on the “Altmarck” beaconed the cheering fact that still “The Navy's here.” The very fact that, in this recount of high and stirring deeds that stand out for all men to see, only one was performed by Germany as against three by her enemies is a cheering omen. In the meantime the seas of the world are still English seas (as Crossley wrote in 1910):—

“Whether it be the harsh
And bitter seas of the North,
Flurried by little winds,
And pushed by piping gales
Against the winking stars;
Or the still blue middle seas;
Or where the daffodil moon
Slips down an amethyst sky
To walk with silver feet
On the Southern, soft lagoon,
It is the English sea …”