people. He lives, by force of his own condition and the conditions of his environment, free and candid, so long as everything around him is free and candid — and the reverse holds in reverse. But he who is born and raised in an environment founded upon the rules of lying and deceit and other kinds of vices — he who is born and grows up in such an environment, and lives among a company affected by it and yielding to it to the utmost limits of its influence, cannot grasp the meaning of the candid, free life that no treachery and no hypocrisy corrupt. He therefore grows up evasive and treacherous, because the milieu in which he lived, and the company whose life he shared and whose ways he followed, taught him no method of living but this method, and guided him to no road but this road.

This problem, the problem of the home, has many causes. And since we are now concerned with woman, let us examine those of its causes that arise from the corruption of her condition. Divorce may be among the strongest causes of this condi-tion, for it, together with polygamy, is among the most serious social questions that afflict the life of the young generation and instill in it the moral poisons that stand between it and sound inner development; for the difference of mothers usually breeds the worst inclinations and tendencies in the souls of children. You may ask: and what is the reason for that? The reason is plain and clear: the child who grows up and is raised far from his mother grows up divided in soul, troubled in mind and thought. There is no motherly tenderness for him to take refuge in whenever he feels the inner need for that tenderness; instead there is harshness facing him wherever he turns. So he seeks out the alleys and evil companions in flight from it, and these in turn work their work upon him, training him little by little in wickedness and breathing into him all those vices I have mentioned. He lies inside the home and dissembles, because the situation in that home compels him to lying and dissembling — whether through the mother's ignorance of the child's psychology and her poor conduct toward him, or through that mother's absence from him

and the presence of another woman bound to him by no tie. He lies out-side the home too, and dissembles, because he knows that the situa-tions of all those he meets outside the home and mixes with resemble his own: they too lie, deceive, and dissemble. Then he prefers his private interest above everything, because the environment around him — the home included — has not found its way to the road that breeds confidence in his soul and leads him to breed it in the souls of others; rather, every one of its ways with him is well-nigh a cause of doubt and suspicion. The badness of conditions inside the home has led to the corruption of conditions outside, and the corruption of those conditions has ended by bringing us to this result: a nation formed of individuals and individual interests, not of communities bound together by common national interests. And if such communities do exist, they live for themselves, scattered here and there, each one folded in upon itself, not joined to the rest by those natural laws of life and society from which the solidarity of nations and their union spring. The individual in our country does not consider himself a part completing the whole which is society; rather he considers this society one of the parts of the universe which must, when interest requires, submit to that "whole" which he himself constitutes.

As for the effect of divorce upon the psychology of woman, its import is greater and its danger weightier. At the beginning of this study we divided the conditions of the Arab woman into three categories, and we saw from this division that there is the enslaved woman, the emanci-pated woman, and the enslaved-free woman who is in between. A little observation makes us see that the great majority of the women's classes in our country is made up of the first category — that is, of the enslaved. We have analyzed her psychology and made plain that the pressure of the yoke which the social milieu imposed upon her by force, and then the succession of years upon it, have extinguished in her every feeling of self and of dignity. And how should she think of her situation, or her condition, or her being — which oppression has

erased and severed — so long as the feeling from which thought is born is itself severed within her?

She is still far from such thoughts, and her life is nearer to the life of beasts than to the life of a human being. Indeed, how much this life — nay, this soul — resembles the mechanical machine, from which nothing issues except mechanically, not humanly! And why is that? Is it because this poor enslaved creature was born only to be enslaved, and exists only to be an instrument of amusement and servitude? Or is it because the claim of those who preach that she was created only for this amusement and servitude has seeped into her by contagion and worked its way through her until it became, in her, a creed? How many unexplored regions and gifts there are in woman's soul which life has not yet uncovered, because of woman's distance from this life and from its circumstances and conditions! And how many benefits society could have drawn from these gifts, had it been granted them to come out into the light and show themselves in some of the fields of life! But the kind of life she has lived for gener-ations has effaced them in her and buried them in unknown darknesses of her soul, and has made her, and her environment, consider the bond between man and woman from one side only. Do not say this is partisanship for woman; say rather that it is a defense of a human dignity which has the right to be protected — nay, to be held sacred — in every human being, whether man or woman. In defending her personal dignity I ask of man noth-ing but justice toward this creature who possesses nothing of her right in our country, and who has no power and no strength except through him. Why is the Eastern woman ignorant of the meaning of candor and of freedom of soul? Why does she lie, and resort at times to treachery, deceit, and other such methods? Is it because she is created with these traits, or because the injustice of the environment and its cruelty have driven her to these methods? Picture to yourselves the existence of this woman — an exis-tence liker to the existence of beasts than to the existence of a human being. Picture how the mentality of