Our Social Problems

A tourist who visited Beirut some time ago was asked how he found the capital of Lebanon! He answered at once that it was a great garage for the grandest and newest motorcars, a collection of night-spots and cabarets, and a league of nations of beautiful "artistes"!

There is some exaggeration in this remark, but there is also much painful, wounding truth in it. I shall not speak of the motorcars that drain the country's wealth, nor of the night-spots; but I shall say a little about these "artistes."

In our society today there are family and moral tragedies — if I do not say social and national tragedies. It is a sweeping current that carries our men off to the night-clubs and their like. The husband does not last long before one of these sirens bewitches him with her lures; he deserts the marital home and spends upon her lavishly, while his children and his wife pass their nights on thorns and grief.

And we find the young man lolling in the arms of some "artiste," neglecting to complete the higher studies upon which the greatest hopes are pinned to secure the bright future he looks forward to. He leaves his home for a few weeks — a few months, rather — and the affair may even stretch as far as his marrying her, without weighing matters and their consequences. Then after a while she deserts him, hunting for fresh, fat game, or he tires of her company and returns in his turn to his family, bankrupt in health, in money, and in morals — to say nothing of the moral shock he suffers at the very outset of his life. Then he takes up his old life again with another siren, and slides into the abyss. Where is manhood? Where, indeed, are strength of will and firmness of character?

And who, one wonders, is responsible for these tragedies? Is it the man himself, who has lost his manhood and become soft and servile, seduced by cheap pleasures and the dregs of womankind? Or is it the Ministry of Social Affairs, which has encouraged the young toward moral decay by leaving the door wide open to the importation of this degraded type of woman in the name of art and beauty — though in truth it is in the name of vice and temptation?

Or is it woman herself, who has neglected her essential duty of providing happiness and a warm married life in the home, preferring the deceptive, empty shows of modern civilization — so that the man has deserted his home and taken to the night-spots?

In my belief, the greatest responsibility falls upon the cultivated, conscious Lebanese woman, for it is she who must treat this fundamental problem herself. Let her sacrifice a little of her ease, and let her use her own methods, with her intelligence and her quick wit, after she has studied the temperament of her husband and her children — providing them with the ways of happiness and love, and giving the home its vitality and its cheer, so that she restores to the man his precious confidence in her.

Then let a committee be formed from the Women's Union to approach the competent Ministry of Social Affairs, to demand — and to press the demand — that the importation of this type of woman be curbed, and that these endless massed armies be sent back where they came from, for the preservation of the very being of the Lebanese family; for they are sweepers of pockets, and a menace to health, to morals, and to society.