Jeanette Leonard Gilder, journalist and author

JEANETTE Leonard Gilder (1849-1916) was a successful author and journalist who worked for the Chicago Tribune, Boston Saturday Evening Gazette, Boston Transcript, Philadelphia Record and Press, and other newspapers.

She was one of many thousands of women opposed to the women’s franchise in the late 19th century, a founder of the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Extension of Suffrage to Women.

Gilder argued that suffragists were utopians. Instead of a paradise on earth, they would, she argued, unleash “the wheels of purgatory.” The intensely religious zeal and impossibly bright hopes of a perfect future she believed women would bring to politics is all too familiar to us today.

An excerpt from her essay, “Why I am Opposed to Woman Suffrage:”

IT has been quite a shock to people who do not know me, but who thought they did, to find me opposed to woman’s suffrage. Because I have been for so many years a working woman, and because the profession I chose is, or was at the time I entered it, supposed to be entirely a man’s profession, they thought I wanted all the privileges of men. But I don’t. You could have counted the women journalists on the fingers of one hand at the time I entered the ranks. Nowadays you could not find fingers enough in a regiment to count them on. There are now certain branches of journalistic work that are almost entirely given over to women, and women not only edit mere departments of daily papers, but there are those who edit the Sunday editions of some of the biggest dailies.

I am a great believer in the mental equality of the sexes, but I deny the physical equality. Read More »

“WITHOUT patience nothing can be conceived by the mind, nothing can be understood, nothing can be taught. For all things look to patience. Neither faith nor hope; neither justice nor humility; neither chastity nor honesty; nor concord; nor charity; nor any act of virtue; nor even the elements of nature; are able to hold together, or keep their consistency, without the nerve, restraint, and discipline of patience. Patience is always mature: it is humble, prudent, cautious, provident, and contented under every necessity that arises. Tranquil in the day of clouds and amidst the tempests of provocation, it allows nothing to disturb the serenity of the soul. The patient man knows of neither alteration nor regret. Who can say that he ever suffers loss? Whatever he has to endure, you will find him as complete at the end of his sufferings as though he had suffered nothing. How can we calculate the results of his patience? When he seems to have undergone defeat, we find he has got the victory.”

— St. Zeno, De Patientia, c. I.

NGOs are smuggling immigrants into Europe on an industrial scale:

1. Migrant smugglers load up boats from Tripoli, Libya, deliberately using faulty boats with limited fuel

2. Faulty boats breaks down in Libyan water or nearby

3. NGOs stationed nearby pick them up and bring them to Italy

NGOs serve as a pull factor of illegal immigration and often even operate in collusion with human smugglers.

These organizations should be banned and criminalized.

(Source: Arminius News)

NOT meaning to promote Mark Dice, but this is well done.

HAVE you wondered why major retailers have taken a hands-off approach to shoplifting in recent years and why some municipalities have done the same? This is strange and it doesn’t seem to make sense. California even has a proposed bill to prohibit store employees from confronting shoplifters.

And,

In the past 10 years, nearly half of all states have boosted their thresholds for retail felony theft. Thirty-eight states now don’t consider shoplifting a felony unless $1,000 or more of merchandise gets stolen. A 2020 National Retail Federation report on organized retail crime found that two-thirds of retailers in states that had raised their felony shoplifting minimums reported growing retail theft. (Source/2019) Read More »

Johanna Helena Herolt-Graff

“[S]T. John Climachus observed that ‘to the spiritual man patience is more essential than food,’ and justly so; for food strengthens the body, and preserves it from weakness, but patience fortifies the soul, and without it no virtue can be firm and solid. But as we are bound to take more care of the soul than of the body, it is evident that we ought to be more solicitous for patience than for food. For, in the words of St. Peter Damian, ‘the man whose patience breaks down may have other virtues, but he will never have their strength and solidity. Patience is concerned in all that we have to resist, in all that we have to deny ourselves, in all that we have to endure, in all that we have to adhere to, and in all that we have to do. This includes all human acts that bear the character of duty or devotedness, whether those acts be purely interior, or come forth into the exterior life and conduct. For wherever patience fails, the act is weak and the work imperfect.

“This comprehensive view of the work of patience in man is enlarged upon by that profound thinker Tertullian in the following terms: ‘Patience protects the whole will of God in man and enters into all His commandments. It fortifies faith, governs peace, helps charity, prepares humility, conducts to penance, leads to confession, rules the flesh, preserves the spirit, bridles the tongue, controls the hand, breaks down temptations, expels scandals, and consummates martyrdom; it consoles the poor man, moderates the wealthy man, suffers not the infirm man to sink under his weakness, and allows not the strong man to consume his strength; it delights the believer, attracts the unbeliever, adorns the woman, and makes the man approved; it is loved in the youth, praised in the maturer man, and is looked up to in the aged man. Patience is beautiful in both sexes and at every age. The features of the patient one are calm and pleasant; the brow is pure, because free from the signs of sadness and of irritation; the eyes are peaceful; the mouth is sealed with discretion.’

“Yet, next to the virtue of humility, there is no Christian virtue that stands more in need of careful exposition than the virtue of patience. Although well known in a popular way, and on the surface, as it is opposed to anger, or as our sustainer under sufferings, it is but little understood as a fundamental virtue of the soul, and that only by those truly spiritual persons who are well exercised in interior self-discipline, of which this virtue is the basis. It is therefore of great importance that we should be instructed in its ways and in the methods by which it is obtained.”

— Bishop Ullathorne, Christian Patience, the Strength and Discipline of the Soul 

OBESITY is part of the dramatic cultural decline that has overtaken Ireland with the loss of its Catholic heritage.

The country is on its way to becoming the fattest in Europe.

I HOPE this recording of the ever-popular second movement of Antonin Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, also known as the New World Symphony, fills you with affection for your country today.

The symphony was composed in 1893 while Dvořák was the director of the National Conservatory of Music of America and was first performed in New York City.

The Czech composer “wrote that he would not have composed his American pieces as he had if he had not seen America. It has been said that Dvořák was inspired by the ‘wide open spaces’ of America, such as prairies he may have seen on his trip to Iowa in the summer of 1893. Notices about several performances of the symphony include the phrase ‘wide open spaces’ about what inspired the symphony and/or about the feelings it conveys to listeners.” (Source)

The piece evokes so much that is beautiful about America — things best said in sound.

THE organized riots in France are justified by the history of French colonization of Algeria.

Rarely mentioned is the motivation for French involvement. The 19th-century military raid on Algiers was intended, in part, to stop the Barbary slave trade, which had enslaved so many Europeans from the 1500’s to mid-1800s that population density along some parts of the coasts of Europe declined dramatically.

The Regency of Algiers was one of the main bases of the Barbary pirates and Barbary Slave Traders who attacked Christian ships and coastal settlements in the Mediterranean and North Atlantic. Like the rest of the Barbary Coast, the Regency of Algiers lived from the trade of slaves or goods captured from Europe, America and sub-Saharan Africa. The European powers bombarded Algiers on different occasions in retaliation and the United States provoked the Barbary Wars in order to put an end to Algerian privateering against Christian shipping.^[18]

The conquest of Algeria began in the last days of the Bourbon Restoration by Charles X of France. It aimed to put a definite end to Barbary privateering and increase the king’s popularity among the French people, particularly in Paris, where many veterans of the Napoleonic Wars lived. Algerian slave trade and piracy immediately ceased after the French conquered Algiers. (Source)

Christians sold as slaves in Algiers

Slavery in the American colonies was a piece of cake compared to slavery under the Ottomans. Boys and women were used as sex slaves and many slaves were worked to death.

Robert Davis estimates that slave traders from Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli enslaved 1 million to 1.25 million Europeans in North Africa, from the beginning of the 16th century to the middle of the 18th (these numbers do not include the European people who were enslaved by Morocco and by other raiders and traders of the Mediterranean Sea coast) (Source)

By some estimates, 10 to 18 million people, including Africans, were enslaved altogether by Arab slave traders.

In Europe,

From at least 1500, the pirates also conducted raids on seaside towns of Italy, Spain, France, England, the Netherlands and as far away as Iceland, capturing men, women and children. In 1544, Hayreddin Barbarossa captured the island of Ischia, taking 4,000 prisoners, and enslaved some 2,000–7,000 inhabitants of Lipari.^[9][10] In 1551, Ottoman corsair Dragut enslaved the entire population of the Maltese island of Gozo, between 5,000 and 6,000, sending them to Ottoman Tripolitania. In 1554 corsairs under Dragut sacked Vieste, beheaded 5,000 of its inhabitants, and abducted another 6,000.^[11] The Balearic Islands were invaded in 1558, and 4,000 people were taken into slavery.^[12] In 1618 the Algerian pirates attacked the Canary Islands taking 1000 captives to be sold as slaves.^[13] On some occasions, settlements such as Baltimore in Ireland were abandoned following a raid, only being resettled many years later. Between 1609 and 1616, England alone lost 466 merchant ships to Barbary pirates.^[14]

The French conquest of Algeria brought the slave trade to an end.

JEAN-FRANCOIS Gariépy reviews the situation in France.

You can also view the video clip here, starting at minute 43:00.

Morning Glories, Winslow Homer

MALE PAINTERS have given us countless paintings of women in summer.

They have depicted women in gardens, women on the beach, women on cliffs, women sitting under trees in silent forests. They have painted women reading books on garden benches, women lying in hammocks, women sunbathing, women with parasols, women in canoes and women swimming in the sea. They have painted moody women and entrancing women and innocent women and indolent women.

The subject of women in summer is a natural one. For the tranquility and beauty of summer moments correspond to the feminine at its best.

Men (and female artists too) have lavishly portrayed the contemplative side of women in summer paintings. Pagan artists of Greece and Rome produced female nudes, often exquisite. But they could not capture what later artists did with the fully clothed woman in a summer landscape. The soul took precedence over the sensual, without eclipsing it. (All of these paintings, by the way, would be absurd with women in pants. The dress is the ceremonial expression of the contemplative side of women. Pants are for doing, and also obliterate the inspiring, mysterious differentiation of the sexes.)

Contemplative men may become great philosophers, contemplative women rarely achieve fame in the world or the heights of intellect. Their mental activity is not any less important or essential. That’s what these paintings suggest. The world needs this stillness. There would be no philosophers without it.

Life demands activity, constant work and accomplishment from men, often cruelly. What is it worth, how can it go on, how can civilization go on, without the calm created by pools of feminine reverie? Its nothingness is indeed something.

But these are indeed aristocratic thoughts in a proletarian, Soviet-style age.

Feminists like to say men historically excluded women from the world of art. Nonsense. Women are art. In their being, not their accomplishments, these ideal women complement the glories of summer. The great sacrifices involved in producing these works (feminists speak of art as if it is power when in fact it is usually lonely abnegation and grueling work) attest to how much men are driven not just by outward beauty, although definitely that, but by this mysterious inner dimension.

[Thanks to It’s About Time for these images, which are a tiny sample of the paintings of women in summer landscapes.]

Mrs. Chase in Prospect Park, William Merritt Chase; 1886

Read More »

“JUST as it is with those who break the laws, when punishment overtakes them: they throw the blame upon those who frame the laws , but not upon themselves. In like manner do those men, filled with a satanic spirit, bring innumerable accusations against our Creator, who has both given to us the spirit of life, and established a law adapted for all; and they will not admit that the judgment of God is just.”

— St. Irenaeus, d. 202

THERE is no changing the realities of race. Anyone who says it is un-Christian to consider these realities suffers from excessive idealism and possible hubris. God made us body and soul. We cannot spiritualize our physical nature, including traits inherited from our ancestors, away. A race is an extended family. Race is more than just skin color. It involves psychology, temperament, and deeply ingrained spiritual instincts. To recognize racial realities is not to “hate” those of other races anymore than to prefer one’s family is to hate other families nor is it necessarily to embark on some equally unrealistic campaign for racial purity or total racial determinism.

Along those lines, here is a good summary from Thuletide of race in American politics, as gleaned from the 2022 presidential election:

People of First World origin (Whites and Asians) hold, per capita, more resources than people of Third World origin (Hispanics and Africans).

People of Third World origin stand to gain resources (territory, jobs, welfare, etc.) from Leftist social and economic policies (pro-mass migration, affirmative action, etc.). Therefore, ethnocentric Third Worlders are more likely to support Left-Wing politics, even if they are often socially conservative.

[As Thuletide shows elsewhere, Asians are also much more likely to support left-wing policies.]

People of First World origin stand to lose resources from Leftist policies. Therefore, ethnocentric First Worlders are more likely to support Right-Wing politics.

This is simply a case of offensive and defensive politics: The Left-Wing represents migrants and people who aim to take resources from the native population. The Right-Wing represents the native population aiming to defend their resources (and the intelligent migrants who also stand to lose resources from Leftism). Read More »

“[BIOLOGIST LOUIS] Agassiz wrote: ‘Let any one who doubts the evil of this mixture of races, and is inclined from mistaken philanthropy to break down all barriers between them, come to Brazil. He cannot deny the deterioration consequent upon the amalgamation of races, more widespread here than in any country in the world, and which is rapidly effacing the best qualities of the white man, the negro, and the Indian, leaving a mongrel, nondescript type, deficient in physical and mental energy.’

“The mongrel’s political ascendancy produces precisely the results which might have been expected. These unhappy beings, every cell of whose bodies is a battle-ground of jarring heredities, express their souls in acts of hectic violence and aimless instability. The normal state of tropical America is anarchy, restrained only by domestic tyrants or foreign masters. Garcia-Calderon exactly describes its psychology when he writes: ‘Precocious, sensual, impressionable, the Americans of these vast territories devote their energies to local politics. Industry, commerce, and agriculture are in a state of decay, and the unruly imagination of the Creole expends itself in constitutions, programmes, and lyrical discourses; in these regions anarchy is sovereign mistress.’ The tropical republics display, indeed, a tendency toward “‘atomic disintegration. … Given to dreaming, they are led by presidents suffering from neurosis.

“The stock feature of the mongrel tropics is, of course, the ‘revolution.’ These senseless and perennial outbursts are often ridiculed in the United States as comic opera, but the grim truth of the matter is that few Latin American revolutions are laughing matters. The numbers of men engaged may not be very large according to our standards, but measured by the scanty populations of the countries concerned, they lay a heavy blood-tax on the suffering peoples. The tatterdemalion “‘armies’’ may excite our mirth, but the battles are real enough, often fought out to the death with razor-edged machetes and rusty bayonets, and there is no more ghastly sight than a Latin American battle-field. The commandeerings, burnings, rapings, and assassinations inflicted upon the hapless civilian population cry to heaven. There is always wholesale destruction of property, frequently appalling loss of life, and a general paralysis of economic and social activity. These wretched lands have now been scourged by the revolutionary plague for a hundred years, and W. B. Hale does not overstate the consequences when he says: ‘Most of the countries clustering about the Caribbean have sunk into deeper and deeper mires of misrule, unmatched for profligacy and violence anywhere on earth. Revolution follows revolution; one band of brigands succeeds another; atrocities revenge atrocities; the plundered people grow more and more abject in poverty and slavishness; vast natural resources lie neglected, while populations decrease, civilization recedes, and the jungle advances.’’! Of course, under these frightful circumstances, the national character, weak enough at best, degenerates at an ever-quickening pace. Peaceful effort of any sort appears vain and ridiculous, and men are taught that wealth is procurable only by violence and extortion.”

— Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy, (Charles Scribner and Sons, 1921), p. 120

ATTENDEES at a “Pride” fest surround a street preacher and bark like dogs.

It’s all about love.

 “THE faith of our fathers never ignored the great benefits for which both individuals and nations are indebted to Saint John. So many neophytes received his name in baptism, so efficacious was the aid afforded by him in conducting his clients to sanctity, that there is not a day in the Calendar, on which there may not be honoured the heavenly birthday of one or other so named (Annus Johannis, auctore Johanne N. [Pragae, 1664]). Amongst nations, the Lombards formerly claimed Saint John as Patron, and French Canada does the same now-a-days. But whether in East or West, who could count the countries, towns, religious families, abbeys, and churches placed under this same powerful patronage: from the temple which, under Theodosius, replaced that of the ancient Serapis in Alexandria with its famous mysteries, to the sanctuary raised upon the ruins of the altar of Apollo, on the summit of Monte Cassino, by the Patriarch of monks; from the fifteen churches which Byzantium, the new Rome, consecrated within her walls in honour of the Precursor, to the august Basilica of Lateran, well worthy of its epithet, the golden Basilica, and which in the Capital of Christendom remains for ever Mother and Mistress of all churches, not alone of the City, but of the whole world! Dedicated at first to our Saviour, this latter Basilica added at an early date another title which seems inseparable from this sacred name, that of the Friend of the Bridegroom. Saint John the Evangelist, also a ‘friend of Jesus,’ whose precious death is placed by one tradition on the Twenty-fourth day of June, has likewise had his name added to the other two borne by this Basilica; but all the same, it is none the less certain, that common practice is in keeping with ancient documents, in referring, as it does, more especially to the Precursor, the title of Saint John Lateran, whereby the patriarchal Basilica of the Roman Pontiffs is always designated in these days.”

— Dom Prosper Gueranger on the Feast of St. John the Baptist, June 24th

Here is the Litany of St. John the Baptist: Read More »