sances, then petrified reaction cannot stand firm in the ways of its opposition. Renaissances are not resisted with worn-out ideas and with confused, flimsy illusions.
There is no fear for the right once it comes into the open, for reaction has ever been shattered before its impregnability — above all when the spirit clings to it, and hearts believe, and the awakened, rising feeling accompanies it with a new vitality that destroys every injustice hindering its firm leap toward renewal, development, and liberation.
And to give woman her political rights, and to make her a partner in work in all the national fields, is a decisive step in the history of the East toward complete liberation from the confusion of the past and the darkness of its ignorance, and a renaissance to bring forth the human self in its true and lofty meanings.
The educated woman will not consent, after today, to be a repeated copy of her ignorant grandmother crouched in the corners of chambers filled with silly illusions that darken the horizon of her thinking and bind her to purely material demands that abase the soul and extinguish the spiritual refreshment which is the beauty of life.
And I appeal to the sensible men who fear that momentous step in woman's history to be persuaded that reason and balance are among the qualities of the educated woman
who works for the good; and that chastity and self-keeping grow in the virtuous woman outside the chambers darkened with illusions, and that they very often weaken inside their curtains drawn of ignorance and superstitions.
Woman's capacities grow strong and flourish with knowledge and experience, and it is a grievous loss to the nation not to profit from the powers of the sensible, virtuous woman.
For women stamp with the stamp of their morals every generation of the succeeding generations. And the bondage of the East in the past was nothing but a trace of the bondage of woman, and of her ignorance of her right and her duty.
Is it not women who answer the first yearning born in the child's consciousness for knowledge and the growth of the self? Does not each of us remember, going back to his earliest recollections, those impressions stamped in the depths of his spirit, which the mother created or shared in creating?
No one who seeks the truth but will admit that woman creates the people that rises, inspires the civilization that comes into being, and breathes life into the thought that gives light and the mind that teaches and leads.
She cannot be stripped of the authority and power that God has bestowed upon her; all we can do is to open to her the doors of
the world, that she may use those powers, by the means of science and knowledge, for the good of the nation — thus preserving those lofty gifts with which God has singled her out from being squandered in the shadows of trifles and the evils of falsehoods, and protecting them from going to waste with the fragrance of the incense that rises in the hands of the charlatans.
The Lebanese woman today believes in the rightness of her demand and its justice, and seeks through it nothing but the reform that is required and reasonable development.
She believes that the broken wing has healed, and that it is fit to join the first wing in bearing the Lebanese national being aloft in the splendor of pride and sovereignty.
And whoever rises to share with her in the noble struggle to attain what she seeks of equality and justice in the various systems shares in winning the national battle for strength and dignity.
For the women of the whole world work beside the men to buttress their homelands and to defend their dignity.
The torch of hope, O citizens, is in the hand of the virtuous woman; it is supplied with oils from a blessed tree — so let us draw away its curtains, that it may flood the homelands with light.
Let us reassure readers, first of all, that the scandal is not of the moral kind in the famous sense... It is a scandal dug up by Mr. Walter Norblad, the Republican representative for the State of Oregon, on the day he addressed a letter to the Secretary of the Army demanding that an end be put to a new scandal in the American army: the scandal of trouser buttons.
The honorable congressman declares that an inexplicable "anomaly" requires the trousers to have buttons for suspenders, while military regulations forbid suspenders — "les bretelles" — absolutely; and he puts at twelve million the number of buttons whose cost is squandered for nothing... that is, six buttons per pair of trousers, and twelve million buttons for two million pairs of trousers...
And the worthy congressman threatens to raise the matter before Congress...