Dedicated to President Alfred Naccache
Breezes of Good
The elections of the fifteenth of April kindled a hope that had all but flickered out, and hopes whispered this magic sentence into the souls of those bent brooding in upon themselves: O people, these are the first gleams of dawn!
Oh, how quick this people is to love, and to record a good deed!
And there was evening and there was morning. Here are the polling stations turned into temples, and the officials — proud men — carrying out an honest, neutral, exemplary election.
And the street? And the cudgels?? With the ministry of Messrs. Hussein Oueini, Boulos Fayad, and Edouard Noun we lived an enchanted day, on which we said: In Lebanon it is possible to put the law of the jungle to death!! And it is plain that we can bury fraud and set a rock upon it!
It is a white page that Lebanon inscribed for three men from the heart of Beirut. Not a single ballot fell into the boxes for a man who was dead! No papers went in under the names of Muhammad and George and Maroun and came out under the names of Mustafa and Nicolas and Roukoz! The number of ballots cast did not exceed the number of electors...
This, within the power of Hajj Hussein Oueini and his two companions; as for everything else, that is another story — the story of:
The Roots of Evil...
I mean by it that ancient rock crouched upon our chests!
I mean that tribal, sheikhly, feudal politics in its seven guises... standing upon the bodies of this people, monopolizing the loaf, the light, the water, the warmth, the roof, and the means of transport!
This sheikhdom that begot the faulty electoral system! The system of the great lists, behind whose great cloak grave blights take cover.
Here is the feudal lord holding the multitude of his bondsmen's votes, and so lording it over the lesser candidates — as President Naccache says — “disposing of them at his whim, imposing them, then rejecting them, and renewing the operation as though the men in his hands were nothing but spare parts.”
And the “bazaars” are flung open on their hinges, and sums of money are thrown onto the pan of the scale, and out into the field steps the “election agent” — this being whom Lebanese feudalism fashioned by degrees as God created Adam from dust — who collects from this one and buys on that one's account; and the operation of the election ends with disgust in souls and rancor and grudge in hearts. And the deputies enter the Chamber, and behold, half of them are enemies of one another.
The Vipers' Heads...
People conclude that the candidate with his two hundred thousand liras — for example — will leave the Chamber after four years with ten million in his pocket.
This may not be true... People may be indulgent and suppose that the buyer of a seat is a man sated with the prestige of money who coveted the prestige of politics and paid its price out of what God had provided him...
They may push indulgence further still and say that he is a lover of Lebanon, whose love has reached the point of luxury, so that he spent a million to serve his homeland without pay, for the sake of God... It is a supposition which — even were it true — hides behind its blessings a thousand evils and one, among them:
Accustoming the electors to sell their votes; their contempt for a national right that is, in the absolute sense, the most sacred of rights; the washing of their hands of their share in government through their elected man — when the democratic system makes them partners in government; and then their turning away from claiming their rights, because they have already collected the price of those rights in advance...
And there is the feudalism of political influence, holding in its hands all the verbs of request: command, prohibition, wish, entreaty, offer, and exhortation — and there the grammarians, God be pleased with them, leave off — plus promises, enticement, and threats!
This is but a little of the evils of our present electoral system, on whose basis we ask to enter government... In its shadow feudalism persists in organized wreckage, and runs to an extravagance whose woes outdo organized theft... It is a faulty system which nothing will change except:
The Hands of Women...
1 — By their enlisting themselves to call for a deep national reconciliation... because life has grown bitter in a small homeland torn by the violence of party spirits and the vehemence of currents...
2 — By their mounting a splendid peaceful assault upon the new Chamber, to amend the electoral law founded on the system of the great list, on the day when Article 21, which concerns woman's rights, is amended; for woman wants freedom for men and women alike!! And because she refuses, in her pride, to have women's competence, their integrity, and their bent toward good thrown into the scale of criminal, base bargainings, destructive of all dignities! And because she refuses to enter the hall of legislation except as woman enters it in the most advanced countries of the world.
3 — By demanding of the Sheikh, the First President — and he holds all the powers — that he extend a hand to the elements of good, appointing women of attested merit as “advisers” in the municipalities before the laws are amended, and as assistants whose opinion is heeded in the departments of health, first aid, education, prisons, nutrition, social affairs, and tourism and summering; and that women be taken as jurors in the courts where the fate of vagrants is decided.
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My sisters and my friends — mothers, wives, and young girls! I call upon you all. I call upon the Executive Committee for Women's Rights, the societies of Union and Solidarity, the Lebanese Women's League, Al-Nahda An-Nisaiyah, the Red Cross, the bureau of the General Arab Union, and the processions of women teachers, nuns, students, and nurses. I call you to swift, decisive action at the opening of this new term. I have seen, as you have seen, a beautiful page written by three men... and I have seen a black page written for us by the hand of that black, ill-omened inheritance!
Come, let us call for a comprehensive national reconciliation. Come, let us create new minds and a new generation. And God be with you.