THE BIKE BACILLUS.
THE Women's Rescue League met recently at
Washington and launched a double-shotted anathema at
the female bike fiend. The Leaguers attribute to the
bicycle craze “the alarming increase” in the
number of courtesans, and call upon ministers and
respectable women everywhere to denounce cycling by
the sex as “vulgar and indecent.” Nor do they
stop there. The bike, in their opinion, is irremediably bad.
While destroying the morals of the maid, it wreeks the
prospective motherhood of the matron. It is provocative
of diseases peculiar to women, and calculated to
transform the sex into a grand army of invalids. These
are a few of the reasons why the Women's Rescue
League is scattering tacks in the pathway of the
pneumatic tire. There are others.
Those whose specialty is the conservation of
virtue should carefully study the causation of vice. In
dealing with the red-light district, an ounce of prevention
is worth a pound of cure. To remove the causes which
produce courtesans were a nobler work than to drag
debased woman
hood out of the depths. Doubtless the Rescuers
imagine they have made a new discovery of inestimable
benefit to society—have laid the ax to the root of that evil
of which the bawdy-house is the flower and Hell the
fruitage. After patient research in the science of sexual
criminology, they have determined that the bicycle is
naughty without being nice. It is perversity personified.
It is the incarnation of cussedness, the avatar of evil.
Turn it which way you will, it rolls into the primrose path
of dalliance, whose objective point is the aceldama. No
more do woman's feet “take hold on Hell”: she
goes scorching over the brink with her tootsies on the
handle-bar. So say the ladies of the Rescue League.
What are we going to do about it? Clearly it
were useless to denounce a “craze,” sheer folly
to argue against a “fad.” We had better save
our breath to cool our broth. The ministers cannot be
depended on to lend their moral support to this new
movement against the Magdalen maker—they have
bought bikes and are chasing the girl in bloomers.
One-half the great she-world's on wheels—the other
wondering how it feels to ride clothespin fashion. Clearly
the Women's Rescue League cannot stem the tide—not
even with the help of the ICONOCLAST and ex-Governor
Hogg; it must either straddle a bike and join in the
stampede, climb a fence or get run over. Hevings! is
there no help for us—no halting-place this side of
hetairism? Are we all pedaling at breakneck pace to the
Grove of Daphne, where lust is law? Is the bike
transforming this staid old world into one wild bacchic
orgy or phallic revel? Have we toiled afoot thus far up
the social mountainside, only to go bowling down on a
pneumatic tire—“as low as to the fiends?”
Head us, somebody! Police!
Just why the bicycle affects woman so
unfavorably, the Leaguers do not inform us. We are left
to surmise why
tramping a bike should make her more reckless than
treading a sewing-machine; why exercise in the open air
should be more deleterious to health and morals than the
round dance in a heated ball-room, or even the
delightfully dangerous back-parlor hug; why segregation
on the cycle should be more potent to evoke those
passions which make for perdition than the narrow-seated buggy, with its surreptitious pressure of limb to
limb and the moral euthanasia which the man of the
world knows so well how to distill into the ear of
womanhood. Why the bike should be more dangerous to
morals than the French fiddle mentioned by Shakespeare
appears to be a question solely within the province of the
pathologist. As pantagruelism is proceeding almost
exclusively on micrological lines, we may expect that,
sooner or later, some “eminent physician” will
startle the world by discovering the bicycle bacillus. All
our ills appear to be caused by minute insects that get
inside of us, demoralize our system of government and
inaugurate a reign of anarchy. Everything, from
mugwumpery to the meddler's itch, from corns to crime,
is now traced to the pernicious activity of some
microbian. Even our currency system is blasted by
goldbugs, and Prohibition milk-sickness is being treated
with vermifuge. A Kansas M.D. has succeeded in hiving
the old-age microbe, and is now treating the ballet girls
whom Weis & Greenwall and Rigsby & Walker will bring
South next winter, while a New York empiric has
discovered the insanity insect and is fumigating the brain
of the Rev. Mr. Parkhurst. Thus does medical science go
marching from conquest to conquest, reforming and
rejuvenating this wicked and suffering world. Clearly the
Rescue League should have cried for aid to the doctors of
medicine instead of to the doctors of divinity. If the
bicycle bacillus can be caught and killed, the red-light
district will disappear and
the Rescuers turn their wonderful energies in new
directions. Once the existence of this nymphomania-micro-coccus—as we philomaths would call it—is established,
the rest will be dead easy. Whether patients will be
treated externally or internally depends, of course, upon
the habits of the infinitesimal vulture that is feeding on
our social vitals. We do not know as yet whether it is a
moral microbe or a physical phylloxera. If the former, the
mind will have to be taken out, sand-papered, carefully
rinsed in a strong aseptic solution and treated with
soothing antaphrodisiacs after each meet of the bicycle
brigade; if the latter, the evil can easily be obviated by
providing the softer sex with medicated cycling suits, or
half-soling their bloomers with asbestos. If the Rescuers
really have the good of their frail sisters at heart they
should cooperate with the physician—should provide
themselves with compound microscopes and search
assiduously for baccili, instead of appealing to preachers
who may themselves be veritable breeding grounds for
the most destructive of all bacteria. It may be necessary,
in order to compel success, for the Rescuers to sacrifice
themselves upon the altar of science, to become martyrs
to the cause. In striving to save others from the
pestilence that walketh in darkness, they may be
themselves destroyed; but the true reformer draws back
from no danger. Let them take their lives in their hands,
if need be, boldly seize the bicycle bacillus by the ears
and bump his head.
The crisis is indeed acute; still we may rely
on science to save us. It is possible that the first step in
that direction has been already taken, for is not the
insanity germ discovered by the New York doctor
responsible for the “bicycle craze” as well as
the reform frenzy? And if a “free-silver lunatic”
or “goldbug crank” can be permanently cured
by the simple expedient of boring a hole
in his lumbar region and drawing off the cerebro-spinal
fluid, and in it the microbes that build wheels in his head,
is there not hope that the bicycle habit may be altogether
abolished by the return of the “fiends” to
mental normality? Now that Dr. Babcock has learned to
cast out devils, will not the world be redeemed? Cert!
Let the Women's Rescue League take courage, and bask
in the sunny optimism of the ICONOCLAST. We'll soon
have all the various brands of bacteria in the bouillon;
then there'll be nobody to rescue, nothing to reform, and
the Leaguers and the public can take a much needed
rest.
In all seriousness, I opine that the bike is a
harmless instrument when properly handled. The trouble
is not so much with the evasive machine as with the
woman who straddles it. It will carry its rider to church
as rapidly as to the Reservation. Doubtless many women
employ it to seek opportunities for evil—as a means of
attracting the attention of libidinous men; but had the
bike never been built, they would find some other way
into the path of sin—would get there just the same.
There were courtesans before it came; there will be
demimondaines ages after its departure. Mary
Magdalen either walked or rode a mule Aspasia was a
“scorcher,” but she couldn't “coast.”
Helen of Troy never saw a pneumatic tire. Semiramis
preferred a side-saddle. Cleopatra didn't attract Col
Antony's attention by mounting a machine in the market
place. The bike is no more an incentive to bawdry than
is a wheelbarrow. It doesn't make a woman depraved; it
only renders her ridiculous.
