Where Is the Humane Leader?

Woman, in all quarters of the world, performs honorable works that at times raise her station to the rank of the gods, so full are they of sacrifice, dignity, and loftiness: the sheltering of orphans, the teaching of the homeless, the comforting of the wounded, the feeding of the hungry, the lightening of calamities by every means of tenderness and mercy. Yet all these good deeds, with all the good and blessing that is in them, appear in my eyes deficient and disfigured beside the world-wide reality that the whole world confronts, whose bitterness it suffers and whose derangement it feels.

A country is struck by an epidemic of fast-spreading diseases, and we meet it at once with compulsory vaccination, jealous lest the lives of God's creatures be sacrificed.

Then the country is visited by an epidemic of the human plague—robbery and plunder, aggression and murder—and we see those very lives whose existence we preserved at the first left abandoned to the hands of fate, which contends over them as it pleases, as though there were no serum to heal and no physician's hand to treat.

And over the whole world there spreads a social epidemic that mows down the green and the dry, that razes the landmarks of civilization, and with which the edifices of culture come crashing down—yet the hand of not one social physician stirs to destroy the force that causes it and to relieve humanity of its evils.

These diseases and those are nothing but the result of bad upbringing, corrupt morals, and disfigured programs of education—for in all our works we merely lay ointments on the wounds and dull the weight of the pains with narcotics—without striving to avoid the causes of the ills and to root out the germs of the diseases from their foundations—now that we have taken to stuffing brains with the sciences while shutting our eyes to morals, which have decayed and sunk and have become, by themselves, the most important cause of this great catastrophe that the world confronts.

For so long as we do not rear a young generation differing in thought, culture, and direction from the young generation of today, all our works are vain play and futile striving; for every one of us feels the loss of mental and psychological balance in humanity at large—and it is no longer possible to stem the tide of this world-wide tottering, above all in the brains of the leaders of thought and action, who toy with the destinies of all the peoples as one amuses himself with a ball, caring not whether it has risen to the heights of the sky or dropped to the depths of the valleys; making of the lives of individuals—who were created to enjoy the freedom of life—creatures like the animals, without soul and without opinion, led by those men's will; their freedom and their very being hang upon a word parted from those dry, hard lips that no longer utter anything but what stirs up griefs and spreads over humanity the clouds of woe.

Such has the destiny of man become, in an age beside which the ages of barbarism are now to be envied. Of old their excuse was their ignorance; today their excuse is their blind greed, which has taken to mowing down the earth and all who are upon it. And we mothers now raise our children with our hands upon our hearts, knowing that those mighty, tyrannical powers, which no longer think or work for anything but evil and annihilation, will one day stretch out their iron hands to snatch from us these pieces of our hearts and cast them into the furnace of their ambitions and their rapacity.

For this I want to call upon the mothers—the mothers of the whole world—to strive in their congresses for the destruction of all the present programs of upbringing and education, and to set about enacting new programs, upright laws, and strong statutes that will teach the sons of the new generation how to rebel against the tyrannical powers, that will beget in their souls a hatred of wars and of those who cause them, and will make them understand the value of their existence in life—that they were created to fight annihilation before its time, not to be a prey to the desires of leaders whose souls are empty of human feeling, like those who carry the destinies of the world in this generation so full of evil and woe.

Humanity has cried out against the atrocities of these mechanical leaders who have no heart, no conscience, no restraint. Where, then, shall we find the humane, world-embracing man who will take up the leadership of the wounded world—and bring it to a halt at the station of peace, who will not lead flowering, vigorous youth to annihilation with a movement of his fiery lips, nor wipe out the landmarks of civilization with an atom of his infernal inventions?

The man of peace, Gandhi, the leader of world peace, has died. Will the earth not bring forth for us a man like him in humanity, in virtue, in capability, and in mercy, to lead the world to the harbor of peace? Where is this godly man whom mankind needs today, to seize with his iron hand these ringleaders of evil and ruin and destruction?

Upbringing has been disfigured from its foundations, and the pillars of civilization have been shaken from their landmarks. Therefore I appeal to woman to strive to change the methods of upbringing and education, that she may beget in the breasts of the young a hatred of all that is evil and tyranny and aggression, and that she may found schools of peace to teach youth that they have the right to enjoy freedom and the good things of life, and to instill in their breasts resistance to evil and rebellion against every will that works for ruin.

This is the comprehensive human work that woman must undertake, now that the present laws of upbringing have been corrupted and the world's statutes disfigured.

In your hands, my sister, lies the safeguarding of the world from the catastrophe that threatens its existence. Strive, then, for the leadership; perhaps under your sway evil will vanish and peace will reign—the wish of every soul.