Good Dr. ARTHUR SHADWELL, who lends lustre to a name Which DRYDEN in his satires oft endeavoured to defame, Has lately been discussing in a high-class magazine The trials that confront us in the year Nineteen Seventeen.
He is not a smooth-tongued prophet; no, he takes a serious view; We must make tremendous efforts if we’re going to win through; And though he’s not unhopeful of the issue of the fray He finds abundant causes for misgiving and dismay.
Our optimistic journals his exasperation fire, And the idlers and the loafers stimulate his righteous ire; But it is the flapper chiefly that in his gizzard sticks, And he’s down upon her failings like a waggon-load of bricks.
She’s ubiquitous in theatres, in rail and ’bus and tram, She wears her “blouses open down to the diaphragm,” And, instead of realizing what our men are fighting for, She’s an orgiastic nuisance who in fact _enjoys_ the War.
It’s a strenuous indictment of our petticoated youth And contains a large substratum of unpalatable truth; Our women have been splendid, but the Sun himself has specks, And the flapper can’t be reckoned as a credit to her sex.
Still it needs to be remembered, to extenuate her crimes, That these flappers have not always had the very best of times; And the life that now she’s leading, with no Mentors to restrain, Is decidedly unhinging to an undeveloped brain.
Then again we only see her when she’s out for play or meals, And distresses the fastidious by her gestures and her squeals, But she is not always idle or a decorative drone, And if she wastes her wages, well, she wastes what is her own.
Still to say that she’s heroic, as some scribes of late have said, Is unkind as well as foolish, for it only swells her head; She oughtn’t to be flattered, she requires to be repressed, Or she’ll grow into a portent and a peril and a pest.
Dr. SHADWELL to the PREMIER makes an eloquent appeal In firm and drastic fashion with this element to deal; And ’twould be a real feather in our gifted Cambrian’s cap If he taught the peccant flapper less flamboyantly to flap.
But, in our way of thinking, ’tis for women, kind and wise, These neglected scattered units to enrol and mobilize, Their vagabond activities to curb and concentrate, And turn the skittish hoyden to a servant of the State.