of limited creative capacity — like most of these people crowding at the edge of the well — is nothing other than the preservation of the race and the building of the family entrusted to them: building it solidly, to make it an indivisible unit of a better national society!
Here I drew close to the bucket, until my face leaned over its face, touching it, lest any of its wisdoms be lost to me, for I felt that its speech had now reached a stage closely bound up with me and with the daughters of my sex; and I said to myself: enough reward for this long stand of mine at the well — enough, if I should succeed in the end in carrying this precious message to them.
And I strained my ears, craning forward, looking with heart and eye toward whatever my bucket might utter this time, and I heard it say:
Perhaps what most occupies my mind is the destiny of our family in this patch of earth. I have followed the stages that have pressed upon it as it passed from phase to phase, and I have witnessed at close hand the process by which authority seeps gradually from the hands of the fathers and passes into the hands of the rising generation, in step with the demands of modern education and in keeping with the spirit of the age. And there is one thing that is an inescapable necessity, complementary to this education in self-reliance — a thing I have felt for in our homes and in our midst and found scarcely a trace of: I mean sound national guidance. For your children, having been given freedom of thought and action, lack this conscious guidance that would foster faith and conviction in their hearts and open before their eyes broad horizons of lofty national pride and reverence for the spirit of heroism; for there is nothing like such directive education to strengthen the young generation's confidence in themselves, lift their spirits, and set them face to face with the reality of their place in
their society and in their homeland, of which they will be the stones that build its foundation, its walls, and its roof.
Your children go trailing in a thousand kinds of soft, luxurious clothing, and in delicious, nourishing foods which you offer them lavishly on silvered dishes and which they devour with spoons of gold; but these foods, however abundant in kind and in quantity, will never be wholly sound, complete in all the elements of nutrition, so long as they lack the elixir of national manhood, clear in its resolve, clear in its aim... How far are your children from this that I want for them! Do you not see with me that they are poor lost creatures in this chaotic family machine, floundering in it blindly, groping alone in the darkness, in vain, for the straight road that will bring them to the highway of peace, to an ideal family and a better society?
And what invites optimism is that the possibilities of your family today are wider in range than they were in times past; it has become able, at the least, to soar upon two wings of equal strength, whereas before this era it had but a single wing with which to beat the air, veering in its flight, dragging behind it a faithful, crippled wing that took shelter under the protection of its strong twin for fear of harm.
It is, beyond doubt, a mighty leap, that which this era has recorded for the women of this country; and no long time will pass before we feel the echo of this leap and its positive effect — and of the leaps that will follow it — in every quarter of our social life; for they will all work together to make firm the bonds of the family and knit its parts, and so help it to trace the landmarks of the road toward the society we seek.
And woman today, having recovered her full political right, has recovered her confidence in herself, and has grown certain that it is her right to be a citizen, with a capacity for work and for positive, constructive production no less than man's; and that only by their cooperation together will the two rebuild our dear homeland,
which was near to tottering and collapsing, part upon part...
•
My bucket ended its talk panting with weariness, and I turned away from it slowly, to where I might gather my scattered thoughts and look deeply into its sayings and take them in word by word, flooded by a strong feeling that its speech, for all its apparent simplicity, holds a broad practical philosophy deserving of study and of wide currency.
And as I convey to you in brief the talk of my bucket from the well of experience, I convey it with reserve, asking myself: what, I wonder, were the buckets of the people around me at the well saying, as they jostled with shoulders and elbows? And that stout giant, tall of stature — is he, I wonder, still at the well, arms flung wide, glaring at people's buckets with dull, foolish stares, unable to comprehend a single word of their wisdom, or to solve one of its locked riddles?!
Then its new government, sprung from the people, will be able to take command of its culture and take over the administration of its schools and institutes; it will shake off the garb of the Middle Ages and dare to abolish the privileges of the chieftains, the foreigners, the holders of religious endowments, the clergy, and all the other overlords—privileges of the kind France abolished as long ago as the eighteenth century.
Most of the country's wealth is in the hands of the privileged classes, who make up no more than two percent of the population. As for the people, who number some ninety-eight percent, their whole concern is the pursuit of a mouthful of bread—how, then, can we expect them to read?