FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 3:  Short History of the English People, by J.R.  Green, p. 247.]

[Footnote 4:  See a little White Cross paper entitled, Medical Testimony.]

CHAPTER IV

THE SECRET AND METHOD

There is a simile of Herbert Spencer’s, in his book on Sociology, which has often helped me in dealing with great moral problems.  He says: 

“You see that wrought-iron plate is not quite flat; it sticks up a little here towards the left, ‘cockles,’ as we say.  How shall we flatten it?  Obviously, you reply, by hitting down on the part that is prominent.  Well, here is a hammer, and I give the plate a blow as you advise.  Harder, you say.  Still no effect.  Another stroke.  Well, there is one, and another, and another.  The prominence remains, you see; the evil is as great as ever, greater, indeed.  But this is not all.  Look at the warp which the plate has got near the opposite edge.  Where it was flat before it is now curved.  A pretty bungle we have made of it!  Instead of curing the original defect, we have produced a second.  Had we asked an artisan practised in ‘planishing,’ as it is called, he would have told us that no good was to be done, but only mischief, by hitting down on the projecting part.  He would have taught us how to give variously directed and specially adjusted blows with a hammer elsewhere, so attacking the evil not by direct but by indirect actions.  The required process is less simple than you thought.  Even a sheet of metal is not to be successfully dealt with after those common-sense methods in which you have so much confidence.  ’Do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?’ asked Hamlet.  Is humanity more readily straightened than an iron plate?"[5]

Now, in our moral “planishing” we need to know where and how to direct our blows, lest in endeavoring to lessen the evil we not only increase the evil itself, but produce other evils almost as great as the one we intended to cure.  The mistake that we commit—­and this is, I think, especially true of us women—­is to rush at our moral problems without giving a moment’s thought to their causes, which often lie deep hidden in human nature.  Our great naturalist, Darwin, gave eight years’ study to our lowly brother, the barnacle; he gave an almost equal amount of time to the study of the earthworm and its functions, revealing to us, in one of his most charming books, how much of our golden harvest, of our pastures, and our jewelled garden-beds, we owe to this silent and patient laborer.  Yet we think that we can deal with our higher and more complex human nature without giving it any study at all.  We hit down directly on its moral inequalities, without giving a thought to what has caused the imperfection, when constantly, as in the sheet of metal which has to be straightened, the moral disorder has to be met, not directly, but indirectly—­not at the point of the disorder itself, but of its often unsuspected cause.  Purity, like health, like happiness, like so many of the higher aims of our life, has to be attained altruistically.  Seek them too directly, and they elude our grasp.  Like the oarsman, we have often to turn our back upon our destination in order to arrive at our end.