The wave of freedom swept over man all of a sudden; he slipped free of every bond, and a rapture of exultation took hold of him in which the plan of balance was lost. His thinking and his endeavors came to sway between the two pans of a scale, and it was no longer possible for them to settle upon a clear course. The past, to which he refuses to return, was lost to him, and the obscure present grew perplexing; so he stood casting his experiments about, without any regard to their results — although the situation demands thought and deliberation, wisdom, sobriety, and integrity.

We used to be led in our thinking and our doings, and overnight we became leaders of thought, of plans, and of deeds. And how much danger there is in this sudden mastery, for one long accustomed to servitude — danger to his own soul, and to the soul of him to whom the direction and execution of his will in his affairs has been entrusted.

Add to this what generally follows from the results of the great wars: a general moral chaos that overwhelms the people's spirit, will, and inclinations, so that it becomes like a man intoxicated, wanting something without knowing what it is, and striving toward a goal whose nature it does not know. It feels within itself a war of the soul in which matter triumphs over spirit, and feels in the air a pressing force that stifles its breath; so it strives to slip free of everything around it, but finds itself overpowered. Then a black melancholy takes hold of it, and a pessimism toward everything about it; the order of its thinking and its deeds is thrown into disarray, its inclinations swerve from the road of wisdom and deliberation, and it turns to deciding matters that bear no relation to reason: injustice in rule, tyranny over the weak, making lawful what is forbidden, trifling with the neighbor's right, violating the sanctity of the friend, and shutting its eyes to the safeguarding of the most sacred things it possesses — because inner collapse has robbed it of intellectual balance, so that it has become a slave to its incli-nations and passions, and all its conduct has become subject to this new feeling that has seized its soul.

And this, as I have said, is the result of two factors: the first, the sudden transformation; the second, the world war.

These, then, are unnatural factors, and they have touched the soul of woman as well as of man; like him, she has come not to know what she wants, and

to do deeds that belong neither to her nor to her nature in anything.

She demanded freedom and obtained it; she wished to hold the reins of learning and acquired it; but in return for this double blessing of learning and freedom she took a step far wider than her learning, her thinking, and her natural readiness could warrant, in her absolute freedom of the widest range.

For while she charms you with her sober conversation, the force of her expression, and the breadth of her thought, working in all manner of associations, behold, the next moment she appears like another creature, tied to the first by no tie and joined to it by no link: one of them leaves her house, her children, and her duties in the keeping of those who have no acquaintance with learning or breeding, to sit with a company of women friends around a green table at which she forgets her personality, her learning, her ability, and her position — a table that robs her of her own self-respect.

Consider the case of a friend who visits me in my house: I receive her with every welcome, and she in turn returns me this friendliness. But how quickly this courtesy is transformed when she sits down behind the table! Then guest and hostess find themselves in a state that agrees in nothing with dignity or hospitality, for each of them bends her efforts to gain the victory over her companion and to strip her of the money in her pocket — which is to say that all the player's better feelings turn into a greed that cannot be explained except as thievery.

This is a large dose of frankness — and of truth as well. For however we prettify the word thievery, setting it in a gilt frame and calling it honorable thievery, the frame is counterfeit, and it is thievery in the fullest sense of the word. For the thief who steals out of need is overtaken by the law with stern punishment; but the guest who enters my house to rob me of what is in my pocket deserves, by the code of the green table, every kind of honor and reverence.

Consider this crooked law, then, and come, let us place the lady who works in the social field, sacrific-ing her comfort in the service of suffering humanity, in one pan of the scale, and our card-playing lady, heedless of everything that is humane work, in the other pan: which of them, do you suppose, will weigh heavier and take the lead in the arena of admiration and respect?

My literary friend Salma Sayegh said in one of her lectures: "The mothers who have gone will not return." It is a truth not free of wounding frankness, but a truth that none of us can deny.

The mother of yesterday held no high diplomas, but she was a mother by her exemplary child-rearing and by consecrating her hours to her house, her husband, and her children. As for the mother of today,