Your Pardon, Madam... They Know Not What They Do!...

This is a frank word of truth from a noble champion, in which he replies to "The Woman's Word" published in the previous issue by the editor-in-chief — may Mr. Rashad Darghouth permit us to shake his hand and thank him..

Do not let what is fabricated by those who have angered you distress you, Madam. They are the enemies of their own society, not merely the enemies of woman. But no — God forgive me! Enmity presupposes a sense of dignity and of responsibility, and therefore requires the existence of "personality" in those who bear it. And these men who have angered you have neither dignity nor personality. Perhaps they have no mothers, and no sisters!

Had they been of the people... of the men in whom manhood is complete, they would not have resorted to "slandering" woman, and the truth; nor would they, in their raving, be degrading — deliberately, with forethought and design — this being with whose loss we lost ourselves and our society, ever since she lost herself and her sense of being a useful member of the ailing Eastern society.

You call upon men of letters and journalists to rise above "these slanders and trivialities.. — and to leave woman alone and attend to themselves..."

And when was the true "man of letters," or the "journalist" who deserves that title, ever of this class that grovels under inferiority complexes of every color and kind? Can a man be a "man of letters" unless he respects woman, and honors in her that which she shares with him — the power of creation and construction: the creation of living beings, and the building of a sound society?

And can a writer be a "journalist" if he does not take his inspiration from the good of society — of which woman is the half that breathes life and vitality into it, and guarantees to it and to its traditions continuance and permanence, through constructive work and through directed upbringing?

Your pardon, Madam — it would have been right for you to despise these men who pronounce upon what they do not know, and degrade her whom it is their duty to hold sacred; but they — their own souls having grown cheap to them, as their mothers and their sisters.. and their wives and their daughters have grown cheap — know not what they do.

And if we, who have struggled for a quarter of a century for the advancement of our society, disown woman today, then we are doing the work of the stupid "cocoon," which undoes what it has built and wrecks its house upon its own head.

The worst of these "fools" are the scribblers who can find no subject with which to amuse in their tedious tales and their monotonous, rehashed stories except... degraded sexual impulses. They paint woman in pictures after which I do not know how they can face their mothers — if they have mothers — nor can I comprehend how their wives can tolerate them afterward, if they are... men!

It is my firm belief that these — adolescents and grown men alike — have been afflicted with a kind of perversion, and have turned, like the fox enraged at the high-hung cluster of grapes, to tearing at this being whom God created, as He created the other being. And she is as every being is: good if you make her good, and corrupt if you corrupt her. Among men there are devils fit for nothing but firewood for hell; and their like among women are fit for nothing... but shame.

Your pardon, Madam! Forgive these men and their kind, for they know not what they do, and do not understand what they write!

Perhaps they mean to prove to you and to us, and to the sensible of every sex, that intellectual freedom — when it oversteps its reasonable bounds — turns into something worse than its opposite — worse than the tyranny to which so many innocents have fallen victim — but which, in this East at least, has preserved for us certain sanctities, and morals, and virtues.

And these men, sick with inferiority complexes, dwarfs in soul, are trying to destroy those sacred things! But we shall not let them do it!

R. D.