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CHAPTER XIV.
INDIA

Josephine Butler’s constant advocacy of Women’s Suffrage is illustrated by the following short speech given at a conference in the City Temple on July 20th, 1891.

I told your chairman that I would come forward just to tell you that I cannot say anything. Still perhaps I may be able to put one little thought before you. I am sorry that fear and timidity are growing up again, and that a fresh conspiracy of silence threatens us.

God gives us a phraseology, a pure and chaste and holy indignation, which makes it possible for us to go to the bottom of these things without offending the chastest ear. For twenty-one years I have worked with my dear fellow-workers in a public manner against these hateful laws, which one of the resolutions pronounced and which I pronounce as accursed. During these twenty-one years there was one thing which made our battle harder than it would have been. We have had to fight outside the Constitution. We have been knocking at the door of the Constitution all these years, and there are men who even now tell me that they would give us anything in the way of justice except the parliamentary vote. We have been talking about certain Members of Parliament who are not fit to occupy that position. Give the women a vote, and see what will be the result. In all my work my one strength has been the strength of the Almighty, sought and won by constant prayer; and the prayer which I now offer in my secret chamber is that the veil may be taken away, and the selfishness – the perhaps unconscious selfishness – may be removed from the hearts of men who deny women equality, and keep them outside the Constitution. Think what we could do in the cause of morality, think of the pain and trouble and martyrdom that we might be saved in the future, if we had that little piece of justice.

The same question is dealt with in a letter written in the following year to a meeting in London of the World’s Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

We may pray and we may preach about these things, and we may raise our voices to some little extent during the excitement of a contested election; but that is not enough. My friends, we must have the suffrage. It is our right, and it is cruel, and a continued injustice, to withhold it from us. It has lately been said that the women generally of the country have not shown any desire for the suffrage. Some years ago I can assert that the women of the country showed a very great desire for it. Men do not know that at the bottom of that desire, underneath many other good motives, there lies a bitterness of woe which is the most powerful stimulus towards the desire for representation in the Legislature. I am sometimes afraid that one of these days some other terrible injustice may be enacted in Parliament through which women will again suffer as they did under those laws I have alluded to. Perhaps it might not be an altogether bad thing, if it caused women to utter once more the bitter cry to which none of our legislators could pretend to be deaf. But have we not, as it is, sufficient trouble, and misery, and degradation among our own sex to make us utter even now the bitter cry – a cry however at the same time of hope, courage and confidence?

In June, 1893, Josephine Butler published The Present Aspect of the Abolitionist Cause in relation to British India: a letter “giving a recital illustrative of the truth that a golden thread of Divine guidance runs throughout the lives and work of those who give themselves to the cause of truth, leading them out of every labyrinth of difficulty towards the goal at which they aim.” She tells how information having been received from various sources that the Regulation System had been continued in several of the Indian Cantonments, notwithstanding the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act in 1888, and official denial having been made of the allegations to this effect, the British Branch of the Federation decided to make a thorough investigation of the actual state of affairs, which was carried out in the early part of 1892 by two American ladies, members of the World’s Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Mrs. Andrew and Dr. Kate Bushnell.

The wonderful manner in which Providence answered our wish and prayer to find suitable instruments for so serious an investigation I shall now relate. In the year 1878 I was staying with my sister, Madame Meuricoffre at her country home on the borders of the Lake of Geneva. One exquisite summer evening we sat together, with another friend, on the shore of the lake. The water and the snow-capped mountains were lighted up with gorgeous tints of rose and amber from the setting sun. In such an hour of calm repose it is sometimes granted to us to see with greater clearness the past, the present and the future of God’s dealings with us, and of any work to which we have been called. My mind had long been troubled by the thought of the growing and gigantic nature of the Abolitionist work in the various countries of the world, and of the need and lack of women workers. I knew that women must always continue to be at the heart and in the forefront of the work in order to ensure success. I saw around me hundreds of true and faithful women whose hearts were deeply stirred on the question. But where were those, I asked, who would form the powerful phalanx needed for the one object of continued attack on and resistance to that masterpiece of Satan, official or State recognised and regulated prostitution?

These thoughts I expressed to my sister and my friend. It was one of those moments in which, whether in sadness or perplexity, or passive waiting for light, it is sometimes given to us to realise, as with the disciples at Emmaus, that “Jesus Himself drew nigh.” We were asking ourselves: “Whence shall this army of women come? Where shall we find them? What will be the sign of their fitness for this work?” We sat some time in silence; and then I recollect there came to me one of those moments of re-assurance and hope, which are sometimes granted during such silence of the soul. I somewhat dimly recall now that there came before my mind’s eye a host of women presenting themselves from different quarters of the globe, speaking different languages, and possessing various gifts, but all having the special call and the necessary qualifications for this great conflict. It reminded me of the incident recorded in Swiss history, during one of Switzerland’s brave struggles in defence of her freedom; that occasion, I mean, when a great white mist covering the mountains in the early morning rolled upwards, and disclosed to the astonished gaze of the invading army entrenched in the valley a long procession of angels, clad in white, descending the mountain side; an apparition which so alarmed the enemy that it is said they lost nerve, turned, and were defeated. This was but a stratagem devised by a number of shrewd peasant women, inhabitants of the mountain villages, who dressed themselves in white and slowly descended the mountain, thus working upon the superstitious fears of the enemy. So the white-robed army appeared to my mental vision on this occasion. The mists cleared away, and the hosts were descending to the plains to engage in this great spiritual conflict. It was one of those mental pictures which do not fade, a prophetic thought, the fulfilment of which I have been led to remark year by year as noble women of different lands have from time to time appeared just as they were wanted in this cause. Since then I have not doubted as to the advent of the women workers who would be needed in great crises, and especially when the physical forces of the pioneers become exhausted and they must contemplate passing on and leaving the work to other hands. I shall give in the unstudied language in which Dr. Kate Bushnell and Mrs. Elizabeth Andrew recounted it to me, their own narrative of their call to this work. Dr. Kate Bushnell writes: —

“One hot summer day, while searching my Bible for light, I turned first as by accident to Joseph’s dream. As it did not interest me, and seemed inapplicable to my need, I turned the pages quickly, and my attention was next arrested by the account of Belshazzar’s dream, and Daniel’s interpretation. This seemed to me as foreign to my expectations of help as the other, and turning the leaves over to the Gospel of St. Matthew, I read there that ‘when Herod was dead, behold an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt.’ My feeling was that I had been baffled in my search for consolation and help in the sacred pages. Being very weary, I threw myself on my couch, thinking of the darkness of Egypt in my own plans. I said to the Lord that I was so stupid in understanding His guidance, that I thought He might have to send me the instructions I needed through a dream, and to guide me at times as He did His simple children of old. I fell asleep almost instantly, and dreamed that I felt myself tossed on the billows of the Atlantic on my way to England to see Josephine Butler.” [At this time we had never met nor corresponded. – J.E.B.] “It became plain to me that she had something for me to do. It was one of those brief, refreshing periods of unconsciousness, from which I awoke almost instantly, but with a strong impression that I must write to Mrs. Butler. This I did, telling her that I came to her much under such an impulse as urged Peter to go to Cornelius, and that I was deeply impressed that she could counsel me as to my future course. She replied, giving me a brief account of the situation in India, telling me that she and some of her friends had been earnestly praying that God would raise up an English-speaking woman to go to that country, and make careful enquiry into the condition of things there, with a view to ridding that conquered people of the oppressive tyranny and shame imposed upon them by the Army authorities, who she had reason to fear had never carried out the will of Parliament in abolishing the system of regulation. This letter I showed to Mrs. Andrew, and we took counsel together. Mrs. Butler had asked me to come over to England, if possible, that we might talk face to face on this matter. Mrs. Andrew was then on the eve of starting for England, and very soon after my decision was taken to join her and to begin our world’s tour together, taking in the special Indian work, if after full consultation with Mrs. Butler this should seem advisable.”

Similarly Mrs. Andrew told how she had received inspiration for this special work from reading Mr. Stead’s Life of Josephine Butler– when “the Spirit’s voice whispered to me, ‘You have not worked, you have not loved as she has worked and loved.’” The pamphlet proceeds to tell the story of these ladies’ investigations, and the wonderful way in which they touched the hearts and won the confidence of the poor Indian women. They found that all these women, “whether of high or of low caste, Hindoo or Mohammedan, and of whatever nationality, whether brought up in virtue and afterwards betrayed, or brought up from infancy in vicious surroundings,” felt a deep sense of the degradation of their position; and that “the fire of their hatred and indignation all centred upon the heart of the regulations, the examinations, and the violation of womanhood which these examinations were felt to be.” Mrs. Andrew and Dr. Kate Bushnell gave evidence before a Departmental Committee as to the action of the Cantonment officials, and the truth of their reports was amply substantiated by the further evidence which the Committee obtained in India. The Report of this Committee led to the passing, in 1895, of an Act which prohibited all examination or registration of women in the Indian Cantonments.

Josephine Butler in 1894 published The Lady of Shunem, a series of Biblical studies, “addressed to fathers and mothers, more especially to mothers.” We give three extracts from this volume.

Is it not a thought, a fact which should wake up the whole Christian world to a truer and clearer view of life as it is around us, that the first record of a direct communication from Jehovah to a woman is this of His meeting with the rejected Hagar, alone in the wilderness? It was not with Sarah, the princess, or any other woman, but with Hagar, the ill-used slave, that the God of Heaven stooped to converse, and to whom He brought His supreme comfort and guidance. This fact has been to me a strength and consolation in confronting the most awful problem of earth, i. e. the setting apart for destruction, age after age, of a vast multitude of women – of those whom we dare to call lost– beyond all others lost – hopelessly lost. We ourselves, by our utmost efforts, have only so far been able to save a few, a mere handful among the multitude; and of the others, unreached by any divinely-inspired human help, we are apt to think with dark and dismal foreboding. We forget that though they may be quite beyond the reach of our helping hands, they are never beyond the reach of His hand – His, who “being put to death in the flesh” was “quickened by the Spirit, by which also He went and preached to the spirits in prison.”

Into the vilest prison-houses of earth (I believe) He descends alone many a time, to save those souls buried out of the sight and ken of His servants and ministers, even as He – He alone, unaccompanied by any chosen ministers – descended into Hades and “preached the Gospel also to those that are dead,” that they who have been “judged according to men in the flesh” may “live according to God in the Spirit.”

That God should permit evil seems to some minds as immoral as that He should Himself create and dispense it. This portion of the subject is surrounded with difficulty and mystery. It leads us back to the great unanswered question concerning the origin of evil. Nowhere would a dogmatic utterance of any kind be more out of place and presumptuous than here.

The glimpses of truth, the broken lights which we possess concerning the divine government of the world, come to us often as a succession of paradoxes, among which however the humble seeker finds at last the truth which satisfies the heart and fortifies the spirit, if it does not seem exactly to fit in with our poor logic. God certainly suffers His children, even His highest saints, to fall now and again under the power of some of those evil things which we recognise as having been introduced into the world as the attendants of sin and death. He allows sickness to visit them. In the prolonging of such visitations however He is, I believe, sometimes only patiently waiting for the sufferer to claim deliverance; and it is frequently a long time before His child recognises the fact that he may glorify God by giving Him the opportunity of rebuking his disease as much as he is doing by an unquestioning submission. “Wilt thou be made whole?” is often His question to a sufferer, as to the cripple at the Pool of Siloam, as if He would say, “I am ready to rebuke the oppressor and to heal thee, when thou art ready to take this blessing.”

Those who are tempted to be angry with God for allowing misfortunes and evils to fall upon us, or who meet these in a spirit only of a sullen acquiescence, have not yet fully realised that it is only through conflict and through trial of our integrity that we can become in the highest sense sons and daughters of God. Christ Himself was “made perfect through suffering.” There are persons who seem to think that God could, if He pleased, by a single act of His will, by a wave of His hand, cause all evil to cease out of the universe this very day, this very hour. Whether He can do so or not is beyond our power or province to know or to enquire. But it is evident to one who studies humbly His Word and His Providence in the light of His Spirit, that God has been pleased to submit Himself for a season to a certain limitation of His power; and we may be sure that this is for an end that will be much more excellent and glorious than we can now conceive of, when the work of grace in the salvation of the world is fully accomplished.

“He could not there do many mighty works, because of their unbelief.” Here we have a clearly confessed limitation of His power, while at the same time the words point to that blessed truth and marvel of the appointed working together of God’s will and man’s will, the union of the divine and the human for the fulfilment of His loving purposes, and the final triumph of good over evil. If the above words be true that “He could not,” is not the converse true also, that He could, and that He can, do many mighty works because of the faith He finds in man? It would seem that God needs the faith of man as an allied spiritual agency, for the constant generating of the force by which He will finally “subdue all things unto Himself,” when the rebel power, the opposing will, will exist no more.

It is a wonderful and solemn thought that we, who believe in Him, we fathers and mothers, who have the strongest of all human motives to exercise the faith which He loves and approves, can supply to our God the conditions which He has told us He needs, and which He claims of us, in order to save not only our own children, but whole generations to come, who shall be fellow-workers with Him in bringing in the reign of righteousness on the earth.

I thank God that I long ago got far beyond being taunted with youth, and suspected of an enthusiasm which is a mere ardour of the blood, untried by experience of life. The sweet visions of my early youth, when I used to sit under the shade of the trees in my father’s home, and read of the holy martyrs and dream of a golden age, are nothing compared with the hope and enthusiasm which God gives me now, and which He has continued to give me while health failed, and some present hopes were blighted, and my way began to be strewn with the graves of those I loved, and I trod the lonely path of widowhood, and the world’s worst evils continued to glare in my eyes. I have had sharp, deep wounds, and long conflict of soul; but now ought not I, if anyone ought, to tell out the hopes which God gives me, and to speak of the ever-widening horizon which I see illumined by His redeeming love?

 
Return unto thy rest, O my soul;
For the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee.
 

The following paragraph is part of an interview given in Wings, the official organ of the Women’s Total Abstinence Union, January, 1895.

I have often had occasion, in the course of many years of arduous work, again and again to meet groups of my fellow-workers, especially on the Continent, who have confessed themselves subjected to periods of deep depression and disappointment. Having gone through the same experience myself, and having been driven back upon God again and again, when everything seemed dark and hopeless, He has taught me some precious lessons which I have been called to impart sometimes to others. The central truth to which I have learned to hold fast is this truth – that death must precede resurrection; that in every cause which is truly God’s cause failures and disappointments are not only familiar things, but even necessary for the final success of the cause. It is the lesson of the Cross. That scene on Calvary was for the moment, or seemed to be, the wreck of all the hopes of the followers of Christ. The spirit of the poor disciples walking on the road to Emmaus who said, “We trusted that it had been He who should have redeemed Israel,” is a true picture of the experience probably of every true reformer. But when God has Himself led us into some of His secrets, and the inner meaning of His providential guidings, we no longer despond; for we come to know that it is a law in the Kingdom of Grace that death must precede resurrection. “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” For many years past therefore I have been able, by God’s grace, not only to acquiesce in apparent failure time after time, but even in a measure to rejoice, knowing that the way is thus being prepared, both in our own hearts and in the outward circumstances, for a more complete victory in the end.