Women -- Canada; Women -- Conduct of life; Women -- History; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
The conditions which prevail at the present time are atrocious and help
to make criminals. The worst crimes have not even a name yet, much
less a punishment. What about the crime of working little children and
cheating them out of an education and a happy childhood? There is no
name for it! What about misrepresenting land values and selling lots
to people who have never seen them and who simply rely upon the owner's
word; taking the hard-earned money from guileless people and giving
them swamp land, miles out of the city limits, in return! They tell a
story about a real-estate man who sold Edmonton lots to some people in
the East, assuring them that the lots were "close in," but when the
owner of the lots went to register them, he found they could not be
registered in Alberta--they belonged in British Columbia, the next
province!
This sort of thing is considered good business, if you can "get away
with it." According to our masculine code of morals--it's "rather
clever"--they say. "You cannot help but admire his nerve!" But not
long since a hungry man stole a banana from a fruit stand and was sent
to jail for it, for the dignity of the law has to be upheld, and the
small thief is the easiest one to deal with and make an example of.
Similarly Chinamen are always severely dealt with. Give it to him! He
has no friends!
What about the crime of holding up the market, so that the price of
bread goes up, causing poor men's children to go hungry? There is no
name for it!
What about allowing speculators to hold great tracts of land
uncultivated, waiting for higher prices, while unemployed men walk the
streets, hungry and discouraged, cursing the day they were born: big
strong fellows many of them, willing to work, craving work, but with
work denied them. Yesterday one of them jumped from the High Level
Bridge into the icy waters of the Saskatchewan, leaving a note behind
him saying simply he was tired of it all, and could stand no more--he
"would take a chance on another world." The idle land is calling to
the idle man, and the world is calling for food; and yet these great
tracts of wheat lands lie just outside our cities, untouched by plow or
harrow, and hungry men walk our streets. The crime which the state
commits in allowing such a condition to prevail is as yet unnamed.
Women have carried many a sore thought in their hearts, feeling that
they have been harshly dealt with by their men folk, and have laid the
blame on the individual man, when in reality the individual has not
been to blame. The whole race is suffering from masculinity; and men
and women are alike to blame for tolerating it.
The baby girl in her cradle gets the first cold blast of it. "A girl?"
says the kind neighbor, "Oh, too bad--I am sure it was quite a
disappointment!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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