A Reproach ...

Submitted, with all respect, to His Excellency the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Philippe Takla.

At the beginning of this summer, "The Woman's Voice" gave your valuable letter to the women of Lebanon the highest place and the dearest standing; and if anything pains this magazine, it is that it is obliged today to take toward you — you being who you are in culture, learning, and good repute — the stance of the loving reprover.

It goes without saying that you will give this reproach its true and rightful place, because you appreciate woman's sincerity, her devotion, her inclination toward the good, her freedom from self-interest, and her stand — ever since she first sent forth her voice across the pages of the newspapers or from the platforms — the stand of the conscious, responsible citizeness who says:

"Every individual is for the whole, and the whole is for every individual."

This woman has stumbled at times, and ventured at times, and been rash at times; but no one can say that she has not been truthful, faithful, and frank at every moment and in every circumstance.

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And now, Your Excellency, our friend the Minister: you reproach the press because it shows Lebanon in a light that repels the emigrants from the homeland, and you hang upon its neck the responsibility for a sorry reputation that does no honor to Lebanon in the world of the West.

This press — these traveling schools moving among the shops, the hamlets, and the villages; these bells ringing out among the illiterate, who look on, and burn with longing, and sell the vineyard and the house to educate their sons! This press, princess of laudable enticement, is all these armies of the people of letters: beginning with Faris Nimr, Yaqub Sarruf, Georges Zaydan, and Khalil Sarkis; passing through the martyrs Ahmad Hassan Tabbara, al-Mahmasani, Abdul Ghani al-Uraysi, and Philippe and Farid al-Khazen; and ending with Camille Chamoun, Ghassan Tueni, Mohammad al-Baalbaki, Rushdi Ma'alouf, Michel Chiha, Georges Naccache, and their brethren — these inheritors of the misery of men of letters and the cares of literature.

No, Your Excellency: this literature has not repelled the emigrants — for the emigrants will be repelled by nothing! And because the story of their love for this homeland is like Gibran's tale of Jesus' love for the Magdalene, in the hour when he said to her:

O Mary, men have loved you for the sake of their own pleasures; but I love you for your own self!

No, cultured Sir! This press and this literature will not turn the Lebanese across the seas away from visiting Lebanon, and they will not drive them to despair of Lebanon's "great men," because their love for these snows and these cedars is like the love of that mother who favors, among her children, "the sick one until he is healed, the absent one until he returns, and the little one until he grows up!"

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Have you seen, our friend the Minister, a cradle in which you carried your little one to his grandparents in Brazil? That cradle lined with down and with silk, and trimmed with cloud-like billows of costly lace resembling air or the vapor of water? Have you seen those boxes gilded with a thousand and one arts, which young men present to their fiancées on the eves of the feast? Literature and men of letters dream of making of their Lebanon something beautiful and perfected, something clean and splendid, recalling the cradles lined with down and silk, and the gifts of lovers on the eves of the feast.

This — and the chariot of time now travels at the speed of these airplanes... So do not blame the people of letters if they hurry time along! Do not chide them if they wish to taste "the bliss of the earthly paradise" before their departure for the heavenly gardens.

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You called upon us from the London radio to cling to the fringes of order as the British people cling! Would you count it boldness and presumption if "the woman's voice in Lebanon" said to you:

Will you not first give us a sound government like the one in whose shade the contented, happy British people rests??

Do you blame this rising youth, aspiring to an eminent place in the world of progress, if he feels a lump in his throat when he goes down to the harbor on the day the steamships arrive? And when he walks the streets of this capital and sees its walls and its corners? And when the chaos of the traffic takes hold of all his senses? And when he hears these foul words that these people keep chewing over? And when he reads the sentences of imprisonment passed upon men of letters and masters of the press?

Is this youth truly to be blamed, truly to be imprisoned, when he is greeted by news of a standing, in the well-ordered countries, that our ministers might be envied — and then descends from the clouds of grandeur and collides with this reality? Is this press guilty if it suffers, and if it feels that life is passing swiftly, and so hastens toward a day when Lebanon will be as well-ordered as Great Britain?

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Your Excellency, our respected young Minister, I beg of you to take it from a woman: the Lebanese people, women and men, may well grieve that there is in the government a conscious, cultured young man such as Your Excellency — and that Lebanon is still as you see it..

And perhaps it would be well for us all to take to heart, women and men alike, a piece of wisdom uttered by a little girl, one of the emigrants' children, who said:

"Auntie! Whoever walks through your capital would think your 'homeland' the height of ugliness! But thank God there are the mountain, and the forests, and the cedars, and the shore, and Baalbek!"