Читать книгу The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - Ellice Hopkins - Страница 3

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This little book has been written under great physical disabilities, chiefly while wandering about in search of health, and consequently far from the libraries which would have enabled me to give proper references to all my quotations. Often for a whole year I have been unable to touch it; but again and again I have returned to my task, feeling it worth any risk to mind or body if only in the end its words might prove of some service to the educated mothers of England and America.

Under these circumstances, I know I may plead for indulgence as to any defects its pages may present.

But now that, after six years, I have realized the pretty Eastern proverb, "By patience and perseverance, and a bottle of sweet-oil, the snail at length reaches Jerusalem,"—now that by God's unfailing help I have finished my difficult task, I can but commit the book into the hands of the women who have implanted in me, next to my faith in God, faith in the "Power of Womanhood," and whose faithful adherence and co-operation remain the deepest and most grateful memory of my life. Most of the ordinary means of circulation are closed to a book of this nature. The doors of circulating libraries are for the most part shut; notices in papers for the general public are necessarily few; nor can I any longer hope, as I once did, to visit America, and give it a wide circulation by my own efforts. I can but stretch out my hands to my many dear unknown friends in America—hands which have grown too weak to hold the sword or lift the banner in a cause for which I have laid down my all—and ask any mother who may find help or strength in this book to help me in return by placing it in the hands of other mothers of boys she may know, especially—I would plead—young mothers. Do not say they are too young to know. If they are not too young to be the mothers of boys, they are not too young to know how to fulfil the responsibility inherent in such motherhood. They at least can begin at the beginning, and not have occasion to say, as so many mothers have said to me, with tears in their eyes, "Oh, if I could only have heard you years ago, what a difference it would have made to me! But now it is too late."

Enable me thus, by your aid, to do some helpful work for that great country which I have ever loved as my own; and which with England is appointed in the Providence of God to lead in the great moral causes of the world.

If, indeed, each mother whom, either by word or deed, I may have helped would do me this service of love now that I am laid aside, not yielding to the first adverse criticism, which is so often only a cry of pain or prejudice, but patiently working on at enlightening and strengthening the hands of other mothers in her own rank of life, what vital work would be done:—work so precious in its very nature, so far-reaching in its consequences, that all the travail and anguish I have endured, all the brokenness of body and soul I have incurred, would not so much as come into mind for joy that a truer manhood is being born into the world, even the manhood of Him who—

"Came on earth that He might show mankind

What 'tis to be aman: to give, not take; To serve, not rule; to nourish, not devour;

To help, not crush; if needs, to die, not live."

2 Belle Vue Gardens

Walpole Road, Brighton,

Nov. 1, 1899.