 In Defence of Women, by H. L. Menken, Section 5, Marriage, Part 2. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. 21. The Effect on the Race. It is, of course, not well for the world, that the highest sort of men are thus selected out, as the biologists say, and that their superiority dies with them, whereas the ignoble tricks and sentimentalities of lesser men are infinitely propagated. Despite a popular delusion that the sons of great men are always dulls, the fact is that intellectual superiority is inheritable quite as easily as bodily strength, and that fact has been established beyond caviel by the laborer-sinquires of Galton, Pearson, and the other anthropometricians of the English school. If such men as Spinoza Kant, Schopenhauer Spencer, and Nietzsche had married and begotten sons, those sons it is probable would have contributed as much to philosophy as the sons and grandsons of Weitbach contributed to music, were those of a Rasmus Darwin to biology, or those of Henry Adams to politics, or those of Hemelka Barker to the art of war. I have said that Herbert Spencer's escape from marriage facilitated his life-work, and so served the immediate good of English philosophy. But in the long run it will work for a detriment, for he left no sons to carry on his labours, and the remaining Englishmen of his time are unable to supply the lack. His celibacy indeed made English philosophy co-extensive with his life, since his death the whole body of metaphysical speculation produced in England has been of little more practical value to the world than a drove of hogs. And precisely the same way the celibacy of Schopenhauer Kant and Nietzsche has reduced German philosophy to feebleness. Even setting aside this direct influence of heredity there is the equally potent influence of example and tuition. It is a gigantic advantage to live on intimate terms with the first-rate man and have his care. Hemelka not only gave Carthigians a great general and his actual son, he also gave them a great general and his son-in-law trained in his camp. But the tendency of first-rate men to remain a bachelor is very strong, and Sidney Lee once showed that of all the great writers of England since the Renaissance more than half were either celibate or lived apart from their wives. Even the married ones revealed the tendency plainly, for example, consider Shakespeare. He was forced into marriage while still a minor by the brothers of Anne Hathaway, who was several years a senior, and had debouched him and gave out that she was enciente by him. He escaped from her abhorrent embraces as quickly as possible, and thereafter kept as far away from her as he could. His very distaste for marriage indeed was the cause of his residence in London and hence in all probability of the labours which made him immortal. In different parts of the world, various expedients have been resorted to to overcome this reluctance to marriage among the better sort of men. Christianity in general combats it on the ground that it is offensive to God, though at the same time leaning towards an enforced celibacy among its own agents. This discrepancy is fatal to the position. On the one hand, it is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted his own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin. And on the other hand, it is obvious that the average cleric would be damaged but little and probably improved appreciably by having a wife to think for him and to force him to virtue an industry and to aid him otherwise in a sorted profession. Where religious superstitions have died out, the institution of the dot prevails, an idea borrowed by Christians from the Jews. The dot is simply a bribe designed to overcome the disinclination of the male. It involves a frank recognition of the fact that he loses by marriage, and it seeks to make up for that lost by a money payment. Its obvious effect is to give young women a wider and better choice of husbands. A relatively superior man, otherwise quite out of reach, may be bought into camp by the assurance of economic ease and what is more. He may be kept in order after he has been taken by the consciousness of his gain. Among hard-headed and highly practical people, such as Jews in the French, the dot flourishes, and its effect is to promote intellectual suppleness in the race. For the average child is thus not inevitably the offspring of a woman and a noodle, as with us, but maybe the offspring of a woman and a man of reasonable intelligence. But even in France the very highest class of men tend to evade marriage. They resist money almost as unanimously as their Anglo-Saxon brethren resist sentimentality. In America the dot is almost unknown, partly because money-getting is easier to men than in Europe and is regarded as less degrading, and partly because American men are more naïve than French men and are thus readily intrigued without actual bribery. But the best of them nevertheless lean to celibacy and plans for overcoming their habit are frequently proposed and discussed. One such plan involves a heavy tax on bachelors. The defect in it lies in the fact that the average bachelor for obvious reasons is relatively well to do, and would pay the tax rather than marry. Moreover the payment of it would help to salvage his own conscience, which is now made restive, I believe, by a modeling feeling that he is shirking his duty to the race, and so he would be confirmed and supported in his determination to avoid the altar. Still further? He would escape the social odium which now attaches to his celibacy, for whatever a man pays for is regarded as his right. As things stand, that odium is of definite potency, and undoubtedly has its influence upon a certain number of men in the lower ranks of bachelors. They stand, so to speak, in the twilight zone of bachelorhood, with one leg furtively over the altar rail. It needs only an extra pull to bring them to the sacrifice. But if they could compound for their immunity by a cash indemnity, it is highly probable that they would take on a new resolution, and in the end they would convert what remained of their present disrepute into a source of egoistic satisfaction, as is done indeed by a great many bachelors even today. These last immoralists are privy to the elements which enter into that disrepute, the ire of women whose devices they have resisted, and the envy of men who have succumbed. 22. Compulsory Marriage I myself once proposed an alternative scheme. To wit, the prohibition of sentimental marriages by law, and the substitution of matchmaking by the common hangman. This plan, as revolutionary as it may seem, would have several plain advantages, for one thing. It would purge the serious business of marriage of the romantic falder all that now corrupts it, and so make for the peace and happiness of the race. For another thing, it would work against the process which now selects out, as I have said, those men who are most fit, and so throws the chief burden of paternity upon the inferior to the damage of posterity. The hangman, if he made his selections arbitrarily, would try to give his office permanence and dignity by choosing men whose marriage would meet with public approbation. That is, men obviously of sound stock and talents. That is, the sort of men who now habitually escape. And if he made his selection by the hazard of the die, or by drawing numbers out of a hat or by any other such method of pure chance, that pure chance would fall indiscriminately upon all orders of men, and the upper orders would thus lose their present comparative immunity. True enough, a good many men would endeavor to influence him privately to their own advantage, and it is probable that he would occasionally succumb. But it must be plain that the men most likely prevail, and that enterprise would not be philosophers but politicians, and so there would be some benefit to the race even here. Posterity surely suffers no very heavy loss when a congressman, a member of the House of Lords, or even an ambassador or prime minister, dies childless. But when a Herbert Spencer goes to the grave without leaving sons behind him, there is a detriment to all the generations of the future. I did not offer the plan, of course, as a contribution to practical politics, but merely as a sort of hypothesis to help clarify the problem. Many other theoretical advantages appear in it, but its execution is made impossible, not only by the inherent defects, but also by a general disinclination to abandon the present system, which at least offers certain attractions to concrete men and women, despite its unfavorable effects upon the unborn. Women would oppose the substitution of chance or arbitrary fiat for the existing struggle, for the plain reason that every woman is convinced, and no doubt rightly, that her own judgment is superior to that of either the common hangman or the gods, and that her own enterprise is more favorable to her opportunities. And men would oppose it because it would restrict their liberty. Their liberty, of course, is largely imaginary. In its common manifestation, it is no more at bottom than the privilege of being bamboozled and made amok up by the first woman who ventures to essay the business. But nonetheless it is quite as precious to men as any other of the ghosts that their vanity conjures up for their enchantment. They cherish the notion that unconditioned volition enters into the matter and that under volition there is not only a high degree of fugacity, but also a touch of the daring and the devilish. A man is often almost as much pleased and flattered by his own marriage as he would be by the achievement of what is curately called a seduction. In the one case, as in the other, his emotion is one of triumph. The substitution of pure chance would take away that soothing unction. The present system, to be sure, also involves chance. Every man realizes it, and even the most bombastic bachelor has moments in which he humbly whispers. There, but for the grace of God, go I. But that chance has a sugar coating. It is swathed in egoistic illusion. It shows less stark and intolerable chanciness, so to speak, than the bald hazard of the die. Thus men prefer it and shrink from the other. In the same way I have no doubt the majority of foxes would object to choosing lots to determine the victim of a projected fox hunt. They prefer to take their chances with the dogs. 23. Extra-legal Devices It is, of course, a rhetorical exaggeration to say that all first-class men escape marriage, and even more of an exaggeration to say that their high qualities go wholly untransmitted to posterity. On the one hand, it must be obvious that an appreciable number of them, perhaps by reason of their very detachment and preoccupation, are intrigued into the holy estate, and that not a few of them enter deliberately, convince that it is safe as form of liaison possible under Christianity. And on the other hand, one must not forget the biological fact that it is quite feasible to achieve offspring without the imprimatur of church and state. The thing indeed is so commonplace that I need not risk a scandal by uncovering it in detail. What I allude to, I need not add, is not that form of irregularity which curses innocent children with the stigma of illegitimacy, but that more refined and thoughtful form which safeguards their social dignity while protecting them against inheritance from their legal fathers. 24. English Philosophy As I have shown, suffers by the fact that Herbert Spencer was too busy to permit himself any such romantic altruism. That's as American literature gains enormously, by the fact that Walt Whitman had ventured, leaving seven sons behind him, three of whom were now well-known American poets, and in the forefront of the New Poetry Movement. The extent of this correction of a salient evil of monotony is very considerable. Its operations explain the private disrepute of perhaps a majority of first-rate men. Its advantages have been set forth in George Morris, quote, Euphorion in Texas, end quote, though in a clumsy and sentimental way. What is behind it is the profound race-sense of women, the instinct which makes them regard the unborn in their every act, perhaps, too, the fact that the interests of the unborn are here identical, as in other situations, with their own egoistic aspirations. As the popular philosophy has shrewdly observed, the objections to polygamy do not come from women, for the average woman is sensible enough to prefer half or a quarter or even a tenth of a first-rate man than a whole devotion of a third-rate man. Considerations of much the same sort also justify polyandry, if not morally, than at least biologically. The average woman, as I have shown, must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain. He is anything but her ideal. In consequence she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is their father, nor can she help feeling guilty about it, for she knows that he is their father only by reason of her own initiative in the proceedings anterior to her marriage. If now, an opportunity presents itself to remove that handicap from at least some of them, and at the same time to realize her ideal and satisfy her vanity, if such a chance offers, it is no wonder that she occasionally embraces it. Here we have an explanation of many lamentable and otherwise inexplicable violations of domestic integrity. The woman in the case is commonly dismissed as vicious, but that is no more than a new example of the common human tendency to attach the concept of viciousness to whatever is natural and intelligent and above the comprehension of politicians, theologians, and greengrocers. 24. Intermezzo and Monogamy The prevalence of monogamy in Christendom is commonly ascribed to ethical motives. This is quite as absurd as acribing wars to ethical motives, which of course is frequently done. The simple truth is that ethical motives are no more than deductions from experience, and that they are quickly abandoned whenever experience turns against them. In the present case, experience is still overwhelming on the side of monogamy. Civilized men are in favor of it because they find that it works. And why does it work? Because it is the most effective of all available antidotes to the alarms and terrors of passion. Monogamy in brief kills passion. And passion is the most dangerous of all the surviving enemies to what we call civilization, which is based upon order, decorum, restraint, formality, industry, regimentation. The civilized man, the ideal civilized man, is simply one who never sacrifices the common security to his private passions. He reaches perfection when he even ceases to love passionately, when he reduces the most profound of all of his instinctive experiences from the level of an ecstasy to the level of a mere device for replenishing the armies and workshops of the world, keeping clothes and repair, reducing the infant death rate, providing enough tenants for every landlord, and making it possible for the poles the eye to know where every citizen is at every hour of the day or night. He accomplishes this not by producing satiety, but by destroying appetite. It makes passion formal and uninspiring, and so gradually kills it. The advocates of monogamy, deceived by its moral overtones, fail to get all the advantage out of it that is in it. Consider, for example, the important moral business of safeguarding the virtue of the unmarried, that is, of the still-passionate. The present plan in dealing, say, with a young man of twenty, is to surround him with scarecrows and prohibitions, to try and convince him logically that passion is dangerous. This is both supraerogation and imbecility, supraerogation because he already knows that it is dangerous, and imbecility because it is quite impossible to kill a passion by arguing against it. The way to kill it is to give it rain under unfavorable and dispiriting conditions, to bring it down by slow stages to the estate of an absurdity and an horror. How much more, then, could be accomplished if the wild young man were forbidden polygamy before marriage, but permitted monogamy? The prohibition in this case would be relatively easy to enforce, instead of impossible, as in the other. Curiosity would be satisfied, nature would get out of her cage, even romance would get an inning. Ninety-nine young men out of a hundred would submit, if only because it would be much easier to submit than to resist. And the result? Obviously it would be laudable, that is, accepting current definitions of the laudable. The product after six months would be a revel regimented into solution young man, as devoid of disquieting and demoralizing passion as an ancient deity. In brief, the ideal citizen of Christendom. The present plan surely failed to produce the satisfactory crop of such ideal citizens. On the one hand, its impossible prohibitions called a multitude of lamentable revolts, often ending in a silly sort of running amuck. On the other hand, they fill the YMCA's with scared boltrunes full of indescribably disgusting 40-inch suppressions. Neither group supplies many ideal citizens. Neither promotes the sort of public morality that it is aimed at. Twenty-five. Late Marriages. The marriage of a first-rate man when it takes place at all commonly takes place relatively late. He may succumb in the end, but he is almost always able to postpone the disaster a good deal longer than the average poor Claude Pate or normal man. If he actually marries early, it is nearly always proof that some intolerable external pressure has been applied to him, as in Shakespeare's case, or that his mental sensitiveness approaches downright insanity, as in Shelley's. This fact, curiously enough, has escaped the observation of an otherwise extremely astute observer, namely, have Loc Ellis. In his study of British genius, he notes the fact that most men of unusual capacities are the sons of relatively old fathers. But instead of exhibiting the true cause thereof, he ascribes it to a mysterious quality whereby a man already in decline is capable of beginning better offspring than one in full vigor. This is a palpable absurdity. Not only because it goes counter to facts long-established by animal breeders, but also because it tacitly assumes that talent, and hence the capacity for transmitting it, is an acquired character and that this character may be transmitted. Nothing can be more unsound. Talent is not an acquired character, but a congenital character, and the man who was born with it has it in early life quite as well as in later life, though his manifestation may have to wait. James Mill was yet a young man when his son, John Stuart Mill, was born, and not one of his principal books had been written. But though the elements of political economy and the analysis of the human mind were thus but vaguely formulated in his mind, if they were actually so much as formulated at all, it was fifteen years before he wrote them, he was still quite able to transmit the capacity to write them to his son. And that capacity showed itself years afterwards in the latter's Principles of Political Economy and Essay on Liberty. But Ellis' faulty inference is still based upon a sound observation. To wit, that the sort of man capable of transmitting high talents to his son is ordinarily a man who does not have a son at all, at least in wedlock, until he advanced into middle life. The reasons which impel him to yield even then are somewhat obscure, but two or three of them, perhaps, may be vaguely discerned. One lies in the fact that every man, whether of the first class or of any other class, tends to decline in mental agility as he grows older, though in the actual range and profundity of his intelligence he may keep on improving until he collapses into senility. Obviously, it is mere agility of mind and not profundity that is of no value and effect and so tricky and deceptive a combat as the duel of sex. The aging man, with his agility gradually withering, is thus confronted by a woman in whom it still luxuriates as a function of their relative youth. Not only do women of his own age aspire to ensnare him, but also women of all ages back to adolescence. Hence his average or typical opponent tends to be progressively younger and younger than he is, and in the end the mere advantage of his youth may be sufficient to tip over in his tottering defenses. This, I take it, is why oldest men are so often intrigued by girls in their teens. It is not that age caused muddlingly to youth, as the poets would have of it. It is that age is no match for youth, especially when age is male and youth is female. The case of the late Heinrich Ibsen was typical. At forty Ibsen was a sedate family man, and it is doubtful that he ever so much as glanced at a woman. All his thoughts were upon the composition of the League of Youth, his first social drama. At fifty he was almost as preoccupied. A doll's house was then hatching. At sixty, with his best work all done, his decline begun. He succumbed preposterously to a flirtatious damsel of eighteen. And thereafter, until actual insanity released him, he mooned like a provincial actor in a sentimental melodrama. Had it not been indeed for the fact that he was already married, and to a very sensible wife, he would have run off with his flapper and so made himself publicly ridiculous. Another reason for the relatively late marriages of superior men is found, perhaps, in the fact that, as a man grows older, the disabilities he suffers by marriage tend to diminish and the advantages to increase. At thirty a man is terrified by the inhibitions of monogamy and his little taste for the so-called comforts of home. At sixty he is beyond amorous adventure and is in need of creature ease and security. What he is often as conscious of in these later years is his physical decay. He sees himself as an imminent danger of falling into neglect and helplessness. He is thus confronted by a choice between getting a wife or hiring a nurse, and he commonly chooses the wife as the less expensive and exacting. The nurse, indeed, would probably try to marry him anyhow, if he employs her in place of a wife he commonly ends by finding himself married, and minus a nurse, to his confusion and discomforture, and to the far greater discomforture of his heirs and his signs. This process is so obvious and so commonplace that I apologize formally for rehearsing it. What it indicates is simply this—that a man's instinctive aversion to marriage has grounded upon a sense of social and economic self-sufficiency, and that it descends into a mere theory when this self-sufficiency disappears. After all, nature is on the side of mating, and hence on the side of marriage, and vanity is a powerful ally of nature. If men, at the normal mating age, had half as much to gain by marriage as women gain, then all men would be as ardently in favor of it as women are. End of Section 5. MARRIAGE PART II. In Defense of Women. Section 6. MARRIAGE PART III. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. 26. DISPERATE UNIONS. This brings us to a fact frequently noted by students of the subject, that first-rate men, when they marry at all, tend to marry noticeably inferior wives. The causes of this phenomena so often discussed and so seldom illuminated should be plain by now. The first-rate man, by postponing marriage as long as possible, often approaches it in the end with his faculties crippled by senility, and is thus open to the advances of women whose attractions are wholly meretricious. For example, empty flappers, scheming widows, and trained nurses with a highly developed professional technique of sympathy. If he marries at all, indeed he must commonly marry badly, for women of genuine merit are no longer interested in him. What was once a lodestar is now no more than a smoking smudge. It is this circumstance that accounts for the low caliber of a good many first-rate men's sons, and gives a certain support to the common notion that they are always third-raters. Those sons inherit from their mothers as well as from their fathers, and the bad strain is often sufficient to obscure and nullify the good strain. Mediocrity, as every Mendelian knows, is a dominant character, and extraordinary ability is a recessive character. In a marriage between an able man and a commonplace woman, the chances that any given child will resemble the mother are, roughly speaking, three to one. The fact suggests the thought that nature is secretly against a Superman, and seeks to prevent his birth. We have, indeed, no ground for assuming that the continued progress visualized by men is an actual accord with the great flow of elemental forces. Devolution is quite as natural as evolution, and may be just as pleasing, or even a good deal more pleasing to God. If the average man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame. All animal-breeders know how difficult it is to maintain the fine strain. The universe seems to be in a conspiracy to encourage the endless reproduction of peasants and socialists, but a subtle and mysterious opposition stands eternally against the reproduction of philosophers. For corollary, it is notorious that women of merit frequently marry second-rate men and bear them children, thus aiding in the war upon progress. One is often astonished to discover that the white of some sordid and prosaic manufacturer or banker or professional man is a woman of quick intelligence and genuine charm, with intellectual interests so far above his comprehension that he is scarcely so much as aware of them. Again, there are the leading feminists, women artists and other such captains of the sex. Their husbands are almost always inferior men, and sometimes downright fools. But not paupers, not incompetence in a man's world, not bad husbands. What we here encounter, of course, is no more than a fresh proof of the sagacity of women. The first-rate woman is a realist. She sees clearly that in a world dominated by second-rate men, the special capacities of the second-rate men are esteemed above all other capacities, and given the highest rewards, and she endeavors to get her share of those rewards by marrying a second-rate man at the top of his class. The first-rate man is an admirable creature. His qualities are appreciated by every intelligent woman, as I have just said. It may be reasonably argued that he is actually superior to God. But his attractions, after a certain point, do not run in proportion to his desserts. On that he ceases to be a good husband. Hence, the pursuit of him is chiefly maintained not by women who are his peers, but by women who are his inferiors. Here we unearth another factor, the fascination of what is strange, the charm of the unlike—Hilio Gabalisma. As Shakespeare has put it, there must be some mystery in love, and there can be no mystery between intellectual equals. I daresay that many a woman marries an inferior man not primarily because he is a good provider, though it is impossible to imagine her overlooking this, but because his very inferiority interests her, and makes her want to remit it and mother him. Egoism is in the impulse. It is pleasant to have a feeling of superiority, and to be assured that it can be maintained. If now that feeling be mingled with sexual curiosity and economic self-interest, it is obviously supplied sufficient motivation to account for so natural and banal a thing as a marriage. Perhaps the greatest of all these factors is the mere disparity, the naked strangeness. A woman could not love a man as the phrase is, who wore skirts and penciled his eyebrows, and by the same token she would probably find it difficult to love a man who matched perfectly her own sharpness of mind. What she most esteems in marriage, on the psychic plane, is the chance it offers for the exercise of that caressing irony which I have already described. She likes to observe that her man is a fool. Dear perhaps, but nonetheless damned. Her so-called love for him, even at its highest, is always somewhat pitying and patronizing. Twenty-seven. The Charm of Mystery. Monogamous marriage, by its very conditions, tends to break down this strangeness. It forces the two contracting parties into an intimacy that is too persistent and unmitigated. They are in contact at too many points and too steadily. By and by all the mystery of the relation is gone, and they stand in the unsexed position of brother and sister. Thus that, quote, maximum of temptation, of which Shaw speaks, has within itself the seeds of its own decay. A husband begins by kissing a pretty girl, his wife. It is pleasant to have her so handy and so willing. He ends by making Machiavellian efforts to avoid kissing the everyday sharer of his meals, books, bath-dowels, pocket-books, relatives, ambitions, secrets, malaces, and business. A proceeding about as romantic as having his boots blacked. The thing is too horribly dismal for words. Not all the native sentimentality of man can overcome the distaste and boredom to get into it. Not all the histrionic capacity of woman can attach any appearance of gusto and spontaneity to it. An estimable lady psychologist of the American Republic, Mrs. Marion Cox, in a somewhat floored book entitled Ventures into Worlds, has a sagacious essay upon this subject. She calls the essay, quote, Our Ancestuous Marriage, end, quote, and argues accurately that once the adventure descends to habitual, it takes on an offensive and degrading character. The intimate approach to give genuine joy must be a concession, a feat, a persuasion, a victory. Once it loses that character, it loses everything. Such a destructive conversion is affected by the average monogamous marriage. It breaks down all mystery and reserve. For how can mystery and reserve survive the use of the same hot water-bag and a joint concern about butter and egg-bills? What remains, at least on the husband's side, is a steam. The feeling one has for an amiable aunt. And confidence, the emotion evoked by a lawyer, a dentist, or a fortune teller. And habit, the thing which makes it possible to eat the same breakfast every day and to wind up one's watch regularly and to earn a living. Mrs. Cox, if I remember her dissertation correctly, proposes to prevent this stodgy deflogistication of marriage by interrupting its course, that is, by separating the parties now and then so that neither will become too familiar and commonplace to the other. By this means, she argues, curiosity will be periodically revived, and there will be a chance for personality to expand acapella. And so each reunion will have in it something of the surprise, the adventure and the virtuous satanry of the honeymoon. The husband will not come back to precisely the same wife that departed from, and the wife will not welcome precisely the same husband. Even supposing them to have gone on substantially as if together, they will have gone on out of sight and hearing of each other. Thus each will find the other, to some extent at least, a stranger and hence a bit challenging and hence a bit charming. The scheme has merit. More, it has been tried often and with success. It is indeed a familiar observation that the happiest couples are those who are occasionally separated, and the fact has been embalmed in the trite maxim that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Perhaps not actually fonder, but at any rate more tolerant, more curious, more eager. Two difficulties, however, stand in the way of the widespread adoption of the remedy. One lies in its causeliness. The average couple cannot afford a double establishment, even temporarily. The other lies in the fact that it inevitably arouses the enviable nature of those who cannot adopt it, and so causes a gambling of scandal. The world invariably suspects the worse. Let man and wife separate to save their happiness from suffocation in the kitchen, the dining room, and the cannubial chamber, and it will immediately conclude that the corpse is already laid out in the drawing room. Twenty-eight. Woman as Wife This boredom of marriage, however, is not nearly so dangerous a menace to the institution as Mrs. Cox, with evangelistic enthusiasm, permits herself to think it is. It bears most harshly upon the wife, who is almost always the more intelligent of the pair. In the case of the husband, its pains are usually lightened by that sentimentality with which men dilute to disagreeable, particularly in marriage. Moreover, the average male gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of a natural state to him. Man who spends six or eight hours a day acting as a teller in a bank, or sitting upon the bench of a court, or looking to the inexpressibly trivial details of some process of manufacturing, or writing imbecile articles for a newspaper, or managing a tramway or administering ineffective medicines to stupid and uninteresting patients, a man so engaged during all his hours of labor, which means a normal typical man, is surely not one to be oppressed unduly by the dull round of domesticity. His wife may bore him hopelessly as mistress, just as any other mistress inevitably bores a man, though surely not quickly and so painfully as a lover bores a woman, but she is not apt to bore him so badly in her other capacities. What he commonly complains about in her, in truth, is not that she tires him by her monotony, but that she tires him by her variety. Not that she is too static, but she is too dynamic. He is weary when he gets home, and asks only the dull piece of a hog in comfortable style. This piece is broken by the greater restlessness of his wife, the fruit of her greater intellectual resilience and curiosity. Of far more potency as the cause of cannubial discord is the general inefficiency of a woman at the business is what is called keeping house, a business founded upon a complex of trivial technicalities. As I've argued at length, women are congenitally less fitted for mastering these technicalities than men. The enterprise always costs them more effort, and they are never able to reinforce mere diligent application with that obtuse enthusiasm which men commonly bring to their tawdry and childish concerns. But in addition to the natural incapacity, there is a reluctance based upon the deficiency in incentive, and that deficiency in incentive is due to the model and sentimentality with which men regard marriage. In this sentimentality lies the germ that most of the evils which beset the institution in Christendom, and particularly in the United States, where sentiment is always carried to inordinate lengths. Having abandoned the medieval concept of women as temptress, the men of the Nordic race have revived the correlative medieval concept of women as angel. And to bolster up that character, they have created for her a vast and growing mass of immunities, culminating of late years in the astounding doctrine that, under the contract of marriage, all the duties lie upon the man, and all the privileges appertain to the woman. In part, this doctrine has been established by the intellectual empress' and audacity of woman. Bit by bit, playing upon masculine stupidity and sentimentality in lack of strategical sense, they have formulated it, developed it, and entrenched it in custom and law. But in other part, it is the plain product of the donkiest vanity which makes almost every man view the practical incapacity of his wife as, in some vague way, a tribute to his own high-mindedness and consideration. Whatever revolt against her immediate indolence and efficiency, his ideal is nearly always a situation in which he will figure as a magnificent drone, a sort of empress without portfolio, entirely discharged from every unpleasant labor and responsibility. Twenty-nine. Marriage and the Law This was not always the case. No more than a century ago, even by American law, the most sentimental in the world, the husband was the head of the family firm, lordly and autonomous. He had authority over the purse-strings, over the children, and even over his wife. He could enforce his mandates by appropriate punishment, including the corporal. His sovereignty and dignity were carefully guarded by legislation, the product of thousands of years of experience and ratiosination. He was safeguarded in his self-respect by the most elaborate and efficient devices, and they had the support of public opinion. Consider now the changes that a few short years have wrought. Today, by the laws of most American states, laws proposed in most cases by modeling and often notoriously extravagant agitators and passed by sentimental orgy, all of the old rights of the husband have been converted into obligations. He no longer has any control over his wife's property. She may devote its income to the family, or she may squander that income upon his audio follies, and he can do nothing. She has equal authority in regulating and disposing of the children, and, in the case of infants, more than he. There is no law compelling her to do her share of the family labor. She may spend her whole time in cinema theaters or getting about the shops as she will. She cannot be forced to perpetuate the family name as she does not want to. She cannot be attacked with masculine weapons, for example, fists and firearms, when she makes an assault with feminine weapons, for instance, snuffling, invective, and sabotage. Finally, no law penalty can be visited upon her if she fails absolutely, either deliberately or through mere incapacity, to keep the family habitat clean, the children in order, and the victuals eatable. Now view the situation of the husband. The instantly submits to marriage his wife obtains a large and ineliable share in his property, including all he may acquire in future. In most American states the minimum is one-third, and failing children one-half. He cannot dispose of his real estate without her consent. He cannot even deprive it of her by will. She may bring up his children carelessly and idiotically, cursing them with abominable manners and poisoning the nascent minds against him, and he has no redress. She may neglect her home, gossip and lounge about all day, put impossible food upon his table, steal his small chains, pry into his private papers, hand over his home to the periplinetta Americana, accuse him forcibly of preposterous adulteries, affront his friends and lie about him to the neighbors, and he can do nothing. She may compromise his honor by indecent dressing, letters to moving picture actors, and expose him to ridicule by going into politics, and he is helpless. Let him undertake the slightest rebellion over and beyond mere rhetorical protest, and the whole force of the state comes down upon him. If he corrects her with the bastonado or locks her up, he is good for six months in jail. If he cuts off her revenues, he is incarcerated until he makes them good, and if he seeks or sees in flight, taking the children with him, he is presumed by the gendarmory, brought back to his duties, and depicted in the public press as a scoundrel kidnapper, fit only for the nout. In brief, she is under no legal necessity whatsoever to carry her part of the compact at the altar of God, where he faces instant disgrace and punishment for the slightest failure to observe its last letter. For a few grave crimes of commission, true enough, she may be preceded against. Open adultery is a recreation that is denied to her. She cannot poison her husband. She must not assault him with edged tools or leave him altogether, or strip off her few remaining garments and go naked. But for the vastly more various and numerous crimes of omission, and in some they are more exasperating and intolerable than even overt felony, she cannot be brought to book at all. The scene I depict is American, but it will soon extend its horrors to all Protestant countries. The newly enfranchised women of every one of them cherish long programs of what they call social improvement, and practically the whole of that improvement is based upon devices for augmenting their own relative autonomy and power. The English wife of tradition, so thoroughly a thym covair, is being displaced by a gattabout, truculine irresponsible creature, full of strange new ideas about her rights, and strongly disinclined to submit to her husband's authority, or to devote herself honestly to the upkeep of his house, or to bear him a biological sufficiency of heirs. And a German Hausfrau, one so innocently consecrated to Kirschkutsch in Kinder, is going the same way. 30. The Emancipated Housewife What has gone on in the United States during the past two generations is full of lessons and warnings for the rest of the world. The American housewife of an earlier day was famous for unremitting diligence. She not only cooked, washed, and ironed, she also made shift to master such more complex arts as spinning, baking, and brewing. Her expertness, perhaps, never reached a high level. But at all events she made a gallant effort. But that was long, long ago, before the new Enlightenment rescued her. Today, in her average incarnation, she is not only incompetent, a lack, as I have argued, rather beyond her control. She is also filled with the notion that a conscientious discharge of her fumerating duties is, in some vague way, discredible and degrading. To call her a good cook, I dare say, was never anything but flattery. The early American cuisine was probably a fearful thing, indeed. But today the flattery turns into a sort of libel, and she resents it, or, at all events, does not welcome it. I used to know an American literary man educated on the continent, who married a woman because she had exceptional gifts in this department. Years later, at one of her dinners, a friend of her husband tried to please her by mentioning the fact to which he had always been privy. But instead of being complimented, as a man might have been told that his wife married him because he was a good lawyer, or surgeon, or blacksmith, this unusual housekeeper suffering a renaissance of usualness denounced the guest as a liar, ordered him out of the house, and threatened to leave her husband. This disdain of office's debt, after all are necessary, and might as well be faced with some show of cheerfulness, takes on the character of a definite cult in the United States. And this stray woman who attends to them faithfully has laughed at as a drudge and a fool, just as she has apt to be dismissed as a brood sow. I quote literally, craving absolution for the phrase, a jury of men during the late war on very thin patriotic grounds jailed the author of it, if she favors her lord with viable issue. One result is the notorious villainous of American cookery, a villainousness so painful to a cultured uvula that a French hack driver, if his wife set its masterpieces before him, would brainer with his linoleum hat. To encounter a decent meal in an American home of the middle class, simple, sensibly chosen, and competently cooked becomes almost a startling as to meet a YMCA secretary in a bordello, and a good deal rarer. Such a thing in most of the large cities in the republic scarcely has any existence. If the average American husband wants a sound dinner, he must go to a restaurant to get it, just as if he wants to refresh himself with the society of charming and well-behaved children. He has to go to an orphan asylum. Only the immigrant can take his ease and invite his soul within his own house. End of Part 3. It is my sincere hope that nothing I have here exhibited will be mistaken by the nobility and gentry for moral indignation. No such feeling in truth is in my heart. Moral judgments, as old Friedreich used to say, are foreign to my nature. Setting aside the vast herd which shows no definite character at all, it seems to me that the minority distinguished by what is commonly regarded as an excess of sin is very much more admirable than the minority distinguished by an excess of virtue. My experience of the world has taught me that the average wine-biber is far better fellow than the average prohibitionist, and that the average rogue is better company than the average poor drudge, and that the worst white slave trader of my acquaintance is a decenter man than the best vice crusader. In the same way I am convinced that the average woman, whatever her deficiencies, is greatly superior to the average man. The very ease with which she defies and swindles him in several capital situations of life is the clearest of proofs of her general superiority. She did not obtain her present high immunities as a gift from the gods, but only after a long and often bitter fight, and in that fight she exhibited forensic and tactical talents of a truly admirable order. There was no weakness of man that she did not penetrate and take advantage of. There was no trick that she did not put to effective use. There was no device so bold and inordinate that it daunted her. The latest and greatest fruit of this feminine talent for combat is the extensions of the suffrage, now universal in the Protestant countries, and even advancing in those of the Greek and Latin rites. This fruit was garnered not by an attack on Maas, but by a mere foray. I believe that the majority of women, for reasons that I presently expose, were not eager for the extension and regarded as of small value to-day. They know that they can get what they want without going to the actual polls for it. Moreover, they are out of sympathy with the most brumagin reforms advocated by the professional suffragists, male and female. The mere statement of the current suffragist platform, with its long list of quacksure cures for all the sorrows of the world, is enough to make them smile sadly. In particular, they are skeptical of all reforms that depond upon the mass action of immense numbers of voters, large sections of whom were wholly devoid of sense. A normal woman indeed no more believes in democracy in the nation than she believes in democracy at her own fireside. She knows that there must be a class to order and a class to obey, and that the two can never coalesce. Nor is she susceptible to the stock sentimentalities upon which the whole democratic process is based. This was shown very dramatically in the United States at the national election of 1920, in which the late Woodrow Wilson was brought down to colossal and ignomious defeat, the first general election in which all American women could vote. All the sentimentality of the situation was on the side of Wilson, and yet fully three-fourths of the newly enfranchised women voters voted against him. He is, despite his talents for deception, a poor popular psychologist, and so he made an inept effort to fetch the girls by tear-squeezing. Every connoisseur will remember his bathos about breaking the heart of the world. Well, very few women believe in broken hearts, and the cause is not far to seek. Practically every woman above the age of twenty-five has a broken heart. That is to say, she has been vastly disappointed, either by falling to nab some pretty fellow that her heart was set on, or worse, by actually nabbing him and then discovering him to be a bound or an imbecile, or both. Thus walking the world with broken hearts, women know that the injury is not serious. When he pulled out the vax angelica stop, and began sobbing and snuffling and blowing his nose tragically, the learned doctor simply drove all the women voters into the arms of the honorable Warren Gamaliel Harding, who was too stupid to invent any issues at all, but simply took negative advantage of the distrust aroused by his opponent. Thus the women of Christendom become at ease at the use of the ballot, and get rid of the preposterous heritans who got it for them, and who now seek to tell them what to do with it. They will proceed to a scotching of many of the sentimentalities which currently corrupt politics. For one thing, I believe that they will initiate measures against democracy, the worst evil of the present-day world. When they come to the matter, they will certainly not ordain the extension of the suffrage to children, criminals, and the insane, in brief that those even more inflammable and novish than the male hinds who've enjoyed it for so long, they will try to bring about its restriction, bit by bit, to the small minority that is intelligent, agnostic, and self-possessed, say six women to one man. Thus out of their greater instinct for reality they will make democracy safe for a democracy. The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woes, is his dependous capacity for believing the incredible. He is forever embracing delusions, and each new one is worse than all that have gone before. But where is the delusion that women cherish? I mean habitually, firmly, passionately. Who will draw up a list of propositions held and maintained by them in sober earnest that are obviously not true? I allude here, of course, to genuine women, not to suffragettes and other such pseudo-males. As for me, I should not like to undertake such a list. I know of nothing, in fact, that properly belongs to it. Men is a class, believe in none, of the ludicrous rights, duties, and pious obligations that men are forever gabbing about. Their superior intelligence is in no way more eloquently demonstrated by their ironical view of all such phantasmagoria. Their habitual attitude towards men is one of a luffe to stain, and their habitual attitude towards what men believe in, and get in the sweats about, and bellow for, is substantially the same. It takes twice as long to convert a body of women to some new fallacy, as it takes to convert a body of men. And even then they halt, hesitate, and are full of mordant criticisms. The women of Colorado had been voting for twenty-one years before they succumbed to prohibition sufficiently to allow the man-voters of the state to adopt it. Their own majority voice was against it to the end. During the interval the men-voters of a dozen non-suffrage American states had gone shrieking to the mourners' bench. In California, in franchise in 1911, the women rejected the dry revelation in 1914. National prohibition was adopted during the war without their votes. They did not get the franchise throughout the country until it was in the Constitution. And it is without their support today. The American man, despite his reputation for lawlessness, is actually very much afraid of the police, and in all the regions where prohibition now actually is enforced, he makes excuses for his poltronist acceptance of it by arguing that it will do him good in the long run, or that he ought to sacrifice his private desires to the common-wheel. But it is almost impossible to find an American woman of any culture who is in favor of it. One in all they are opposed to the turmoil and corruption that it involves, and resentful of the invasion of liberty underlying it. Being realists they have no belief in any program which proposes to cure the national swindishness of men by legislation. Every normal woman believes, and quite accurately, that the average man is very much like her husband, John, and she knows very well that John is a weak, silly, and navish fellow, and that any effort to convert him into an archangel overnight is bound to come to grief. As for her view of the average creature of her own sex, it is marked by a cynicism so penetrating and so destructive that a clear statement of it would shock beyond endurance. 32. The Woman Voter Thus there is not the slightest chance that the enfranchised woman of Protestantdom, once they become at ease in the use of the ballot, will give any heed to the ex-suffragettes who now presume to lead and instruct them in politics. Years ago I predicted that these suffragettes, tried out by victory, would turn out to be idiots. They are now hard at work proving it. Half of them devote themselves to advocating reforms chiefly of a sexual character, so utterly preposterous that even male politicians and newspaper editors laugh at them. The other halves succumb absurdly to the blandishments of the old-time male politicians, and so enroll themselves in the great political parties. A woman who joins one of these parties simply becomes an imitation man, which is to say a donkey. Thereafter she is nothing but an obscure cog in an ancient and creaking machine, the sole intelligible purpose of which is to maintain a horde of scoundrels in public office. Her vote is instantly set off by the vote of some sister who joins the other Camorra. Parenthetically I may add that all the ladies to take this political emulation seem to me to be frightfully plain. I know those of England, Germany, and Scandinavia only by their portraits in the illustrated papers, but those of the United States I have studied at close range at various large political gatherings, including two national conventions first following the extension of the suffrage. I am surely no fastidious fellow. In fact, I prefer a certain melancholy decay in women to the loud circus wagon brilliance of youth. But I give you my word that there were not five women at either national convention who could have embraced me in camera without first giving me plural. Some of the chief stateswomen on show, in fact, were so downright hideous that I felt faint every time I had to look at them. The reform-mongering suffragists seemed to be equally devoid of the more caressing gifts. They may be filled with altruistic passion, but they certainly have bad complexions, and not many of them know how to dress their hair. Nine-tenths of them advocate reforms aimed at the alleged lubricity of the male, the single standard medical certificates for bridegroom, birth control, and so on. The motive here, I believe, is mere rage and jealousy. The woman who has not pursued sets up the doctrine that pursuit is offensive to her sex and wants to make it a felony. No genuinely attractive woman has any such desire. She likes masculine admiration, however violently expressed, and is quite able to take care of herself. More. She is well aware that very few men are bold enough to offer it without plain invitation, and this awareness makes her extremely cynical of all women who complain of being harassed, beset, stormed, and seduced. All the more intelligent women that I know indeed are unanimously of the opinion that no girl in her right senses has ever been actually seduced since the world began. Whenever they hear of a case, they sympathize with the man. Yet more the normal women of lively charms roving about among men always tries to draw the admiration of those who are previously admired elsewhere. She prefers the professional to the amateur, and estimates her skill by the attractiveness of the huntresses who have hitherto stalked it. The iron-faced suffragist propagandist, if she gets a man at all, must get one wholly without sentimental experience. If he has any, her crude maneuvers make him laugh and he is repelled by her lack of pultritude and amiability. All such suffragists save a few miraculous beauties, marry ninth-rate men when they marry at all. They have to put up with the sort of cast-offs who are almost ready to fall in love with lady physicists, embryologists, and embalmers. Fortunately for the human race, the campaigns of these indignant varagos will come to naught. Men will keep on pursuing women until hell freezes over, and women will keep luring them on. If the latter enterprise were abandoned, in fact, the whole game of love would play out, for not many men take any notice of women spontaneously. Nine men out of ten would be quite happy, I believe, if there were no women in the world once they'd grown accustomed to the quiet. Practically all men are there happiest when they are engaged upon activities, for example, drinking, gambling, hunting, business, adventure, to which women are not ordinarily admitted. It is women who seduce them for such celibate doings. The hair postures and gyrates in front of the hound. The way to put an end to the gaudy crimes that the suffragist alarmists talk about is to shave the heads of all the pretty girls in the world and pluck out their eyebrows and pull out their teeth and put them in khaki and forbid them to regal on dance floors or to wear scents or to use lipsticks or to roll their eyes. Reform, as usual, mistakes the fish for the fly. 33. A Glance Into The Future The present public prosperity of the ex-suffragists is chiefly due to the fact that the old-time male politicians, being naturally very stupid, mistake them for spokesmen for the whole body of women and so show them politeness. But sooner late, and probably disconcertingly soon, the great mass of sensible and agnostic women will turn upon them and depose them, and thereafter the women vote will be no longer to dispose of the bogus great thinkers and messiahs. If the suffragists continue to fill the newspapers with nonsense, once that change has been effected, it will be only as a minority sect of tolerated idiots, like to spend boardians, Christian scientists, Seventh Day Adventists, and other such fanatics of today. This was the history of the extension of suffrage in all of the American states that made it before the national enfranchisement of women, and it will be repeated in the nation at large and in Great Britain and on the continent. Women are not taken in by quackery as readily as men are. The hardness of their shell of logic makes it difficult to penetrate to their emotions. For one woman who testifies publicly that she has been cured of cancer by some swindling patent medicine, there are at least 20 masculine witnesses. Even such frauds as the favorite American elixir, Lydia Pinkham's vegetable compound, which are ostensibly remedies for specific femininils anatomically impossible in the male, are chiefly swallowed, so an intelligent jugus tells me, by men. My own belief, based on elaborate inquiries and long meditation, is that the grant of the ballot to women marks the concealed but nonetheless real beginning of an improvement in our politics, and in the end in our whole theory of government. As things stand, an intelligent grappling with some of the capital problems of the commonwealth is almost impossible. A politician normally prospers under democracy, not in proportion as his principles are sound and his honor incorruptible, but in proportion as he excels in the manufacture of sonorous phrases, and the invention of imaginary perils, and imaginary defenses against them. Our politics thus degenerates into a mere pursuit of hobgoblin, and in the end, the male voter, a coward as well as an ass, is forever taking fright in a new one and electing some mount mount to lay it. For a hundred years past the people of the United States, the most terrible existing democratic state, have scarcely had a political campaign that was not based upon some preposterous fear, first of slavery, and then of the man you meet as slave, first of capitalism, and then of communism, first of the old, and then of the novel. It is a peculiarity of women that they are not easily set off by such alarms, that they do not fall readily into such facile tumults and phobias. What starts a male meeting to snuffling and trembling most violently is precisely the thing that would cause a female meeting to sniff. What we need to ward off mobocracy and safeguard a civilized form of government is more of this sniffing. What we need, and in the end it must come, is a sniff so powerful that it will call a halt upon the navigation of the ship from the forecastle, and put a competent staff on the bridge, and lay a course that is describable in intelligible terms. The officers nominated by the male electorate in modern democracies before the extension of the suffrage were usually chosen not for their competence, but for their mere talent for idiocy. They reflected accurately the male weakness for whatever is rhetorical and sentimental and feeble and untrue. Consider, for example, what happened in a salient case. Every four years, the male voters of the United States choose from among themselves one who was put forward as the man most fit of all resident men to be the first citizen of the Commonwealth. He was chosen after interminable discussion. His qualifications were thoroughly canvassed. Very large powers and dignities were put into his hands. Well, what did we commonly find when we examined this gentleman? We found not a profound thinker, not a leader of sound opinion, not a man of notable sense, but merely a wholesaler of notions so infantile that they must needs discussed a sentient suckling in brief, a spouting geyser of fallacies and sentimentalities, a cataract of unsupported assumptions and hollow moralizing, a tedious phrase merchant and a platitudinarian, a fellow whose noblest flights of thought were flattered when they were called comprehensible, specifically a Wilson, a Taft, a Roosevelt, or a Harding. This was the male champion. I do not venture upon the cruelty of comparing his bombastic flummeries to the clear reasoning of a woman of like family position. All I ask of you is that you weigh them for sense for shrewdness for intelligent grasp of a secure relation for intellectual honesty and courage with the ideas of the average midwife. 34 The suffragette. I have spoken with some disdain of the suffragette. What is the matter with her, fundamentally, is simple. She is a woman who has stupidly carried her envy of certain of the superficial privileges of men to such a point that it takes on the character of an obsession and makes her blind to their valueless and often chiefly imaginary character. In particular, she centers this frenzy of hers upon one definitive privilege to wit, the alleged privilege of promiscuity and amor, the modern duate senior. Read the books of the chief lady's seven oralis and you will find running through them a hysterical denunciation of what is called the double standard of morality. There is, indeed, a whole literature devoted exclusively to it. The existence of this double standard seems to drive the poor girl's half frantic. They bellow rockously for its abrogation and demand that the frivolous male be visited with even more idiotic penalties than those which now visit the aberrant female. Some even advocate gravely his mutilation by surgery, that he may be forced into rectitude by a physical disability for sin. All this, of course, is hocus pocus and judicious are not deceived by it for an instance. What these virtuous belldoms actually desire in their hearts is not that the male be reduced to chemical purity, but that the franchise of dalliance be extended to themselves. The most elementary acquaintance with Freudian psychology exposes their secret animus. Unable to ensnare males under the present system, or at all events, unable to ensnare males sufficiently appetizing to arouse the envy of other women, they leap to the theory that it would be easier if the rules were less exacting. This theory exposes their deficiency in the chief character of their sex, accurate observation. The fact is that, even if they possess the freedom that men are supposed to possess, they would still find it difficult to achieve their ambition, for the average man, whatever is stupidity, is at least keen enough in judgment to prefer a single wink from a genuinely attractive woman to the last delirious favors of the typical suffragette. Thus the theory of the whoopers and snorders of the cause and its esoteric as well as in its public aspect is unsound. They are simply women who, in their tastes and processes of mind, are two-thirds men, and the fact explains their failure to achieve presentable husbands, or even consolidatory betrayal quite as effectively to explain their ready credence they give political and philosophical absurdities. End of Section 7, Woman Suffrage, Part 1. In Defense of Women, by H. L. Menken, Section 8, Woman Suffrage, Part 2. This is LibriVox Recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. 35. A Mythical Daredevil. The truth is that the picture of male carnality as such women conjure up belongs almost wholly to fable, as I've already observed in dealing with the sophistries of Dr. Eliza Burt Gamble, a parologist on a somewhat higher plane. As they depict him in their fevered treatises on illegitimacy, white slave trading and ophthalmonean atorum, the average male adult of the Christian and cultured countries leads a life of gaudy libricity, rolling magnificently from one liaison to another, and with an almost endless queue of ruin milleners, dancers, chairwoman parlor maids and waitresses behind him, all dying of poison and despair. The life of man, as these furiously envious ones see it, is the life of a leading actor in a boulevard review. He is a polygamous, multigamous, myriadigamous, an insatiable and unconscionable debauché, a monster of promiscuity, prodigiously unfaithful to his wife and even to his friends' wives, fathomously libidimous and superbly happy. Needless to say, this picture bears no more relation to the facts than a dissertation on major strategy by a military, quote, expert promoted from dramatic critic. If the chief suffragette scaremongers, I speak without any embarrassing naming of names, were attractive enough to men, to get near enough to men to know enough about them for their purpose, they would paralyze the dork of societies with no such cajoling libels. As a matter of sober fact, the average man of our time and race is quite incapable of all these incandescent and intriguing divertisements. He is far more virtuous than they make him out, far less schooled in sin, far less enterprising and ruthless. I do not say, of course, that he is pure and hard, for the chances are that he isn't. What I do say is that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, he is pure and act, and even in the face of temptation. And why? For several main reasons not to go into minor ones. One is that he lacks the courage. Another is that he lacks the money. Another is that he is fundamentally moral and has a conscience. It takes more sinful initiative than he has in him to plunge into any affair, save the most casual and sorted. It takes more ingenuity and intrepidity than he has in himself to carry it off. It takes more money than he can conceal from his consort to finance it. A man may force his actual wife to share the direst poverty, but even the least vampirist woman of the third part demands to be courted in what, considering his station in life, is the grand manor, and the expenses of that grand manor scare all off save a small minority of specialists in deception. So long indeed, as a wife knows her husband's income accurately, she has a sure means of holding him to his oaths. Even more effective than the fiscal battery is the barrier of pultrunery. The one character that distinguishes man from the other Highler for de Brata, indeed, is his excessive timorousness, his easy yielding to alarms, his incapacity for adventure without a crowd behind him. In his normal incarnation he is no more capable of initiating an extra legal affair, at all events above the mawkish harmlessness of a flirting match with a cigar girl in a cafe, than he is of scaling the battlements of hell. He likes to think of himself doing it, just as he likes to think of himself leading a cavalry charge or climbing the Matterhorn. Often, indeed, his vanity leads him to imagine the thing done, and he admits by winks and blushes that he is a bad one. But at the bottom of all that tawdry pretense there is usually nothing more material than an oafish smirk at some disgusted shop girl, or a scraping of shins under the table. Let any woman who is disquieted by reports of her husband's derelictions figure to herself how long it would have taken him to propose to her if left to his own enterprise, and let her ask herself for so pulsinamious a creature could be imagined in the role of Don Giovanni. Finally there is his conscience, the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint-heartedness and countless generations, with vague religious fears and superstitions to Levin and Mellowid. What? A conscience? Yes, dear friends, a conscience. That conscience may be imperfect, inept, unintelligent, brumagam. It may be indistinguishable at times from the mere fear that someone may be looking. It may be shot through with hypocrisy, stupidity, play-acting, but nevertheless, as consciousness go in Christendom it is generally entitled to the name, and it is always in action. A man, remember, is not a being in vacchio. He is the fruit and slave of the environment that bathes him. One cannot enter the House of Commons, the United States Senate, or a prison for felons without becoming, in some measure, a rascal. One cannot fall overboard without shipping water. One cannot pass through a modern university without carrying away scars. And by the same token one cannot live and have ones being in a modern democratic state year in and year out without falling to some extent at least under that moral obsession which is the hallmark of the mob man set free. A citizen of such a state, his nose buried in Nietzsche, man and superman, and other such advanced literature may caress himself with the notion that he is an amoralist, that his soul is full of soothing sin, that he has cut himself loose from the revelation of God. But all the while there is a part of him that remains a sound Christian, a moralist, a right thinking and forward-looking man. And that part, in time of stress, asserts itself. It may not worry him on ordinary occasions. It may not stop him when he swears or takes a nip of whiskey behind the door or goes motoring on Sunday. It may even let him alone when he goes to a leg show. But the moment a concrete tempter rises before him, her nose snow-white, her lips rouge, her eyelashes drooping provokingly, the moment such an abandoned wench has at him, and his lack of ready funds begins to conspire with his lack of courage to assault and wobble him. At that precise moment his conscience flares in the function, and so finishes his business. First he sees difficulty, then he sees danger, then he sees wrong. The result? The result is that he slinks off intrepidation and another vampire is baffled over prey. It is, indeed, the secret scandal of Christendom, at least in the Protestant regions, that most men are faithful to their wives. You will travel a long way before you find the married man who admits that he is, but the facts are the facts, and I am surely not one to flout them. Thirty-six. The Origin of a Delusion. The origin of delusion, that the average man is a Leopold II or Augustus the Strong, with the amorous experience of a guinea pig, is not far to seek. It lies in three factors, the which I rehearse briefly. One. The idiotic vanity of men, leading to the secular, eternal boasting, either by open lying or sinister hints. Two. The notions of vice crusaders, nonconformist divines, YMCA secretaries, and other such libidinous paltrums as to what they would do themselves if they had the courage. Three. The ditto of certain suffragettes as to ditto ditto. Here you have the genesis of a generalization that gives the less critical sort of woman a great deal of needless uneasiness and vastly augments the natural conceit of men. Some pornographic old fellow, and the discharge of his duties as director of an anti-vice society, puts in an evening plowing through such books as The Memoirs of Fanny Hill, Casanova's Confessions, The Cynetric Omomness of Gaius Petronius, and Two Samuel. From this perusal he arises with the conviction that life amid the red lights must be one stupendous world of deviltry, that the clerky season, broadway or Piccadilly at night, are out for revels that would have called protest in Sodom and Nineveh, that the average man who chooses hell leads an existence comparable to that of a Mormon bishop, that the world outside the Bible class is packed like a sardine can would pertain salesgirls, that every man who doesn't believe that Jonah swallowed the well spends his whole leisure leaping through the seventh hoop of the decalogue. Quote, if I were not saved and anointed of God, and, quote, whispers the vice director into his own ear, quote, this is what I, the reverend Dr. Jasper Barebones, would be doing. The late King David did it, he was a human, and hence a moral. The late King Edward VII was not beyond suspicion. The very numeral in his name has his suggestions. Millions of others go the same route, ergo, up guards, and Adam. Bring me the pad of blank warrants, order out the searchlights and scaling ladders, swear in four hundred more policemen, let to chase these hell hounds out of Christendom and make the world safe from monogamy, poor working girls, and infant damnation. End, quote. Thus the hound of heaven, arguing fallaciously from his own secret aspirations. Where he makes his mistake isn't assuming that the unconsecrated, while sharing his longing to debouch and to portray, are free from his other weaknesses. For example, his timidity, his lack of resourcefulness, his conscience. As I have said, they are not. The vast majority of those who appear in the public haunts of sin are there not to engage in novert acts of rivalry, but merely to tremble agreeably upon the edge of the abyss. They are the same skittish experimentalist precisely who throng the midway at World's Fair and go to smutty shows and take in sex magazines and read the sort of books that our vice-crusading friend reads. They like to conjure up the charms of carnality and help out their so much sluggish imaginations by actual peeps at it. But when it comes to taking a forthright header into the sulfur, they usually fail to muster up the courage. For one clerk who succumbed to the hours of the pave, there are five hundred who succumbed to lack of means, the warnings of the sex hygienists, and their own depressing consciences. For one clubman, that is, bagman or suburban vestryman, who invades the women's shops, engages the affection of some innocent miss, lures her into infamy and then sells her to the Italians, there are one thousand who never get any further than asking the price of cologne water and discharging of few furtive winks. And for one husband of the Nordic race who maintains the blonde chorus girl in oriental luxury around the corner, there are ten thousand who are as true to their wives year in and year out as so many convicts in the death house, and would be no more capable of any such loathsome malpractice, even in the face of free opportunity than they would be of cutting off the ears of their young. I am sorry to blow up so much romance. In particularly, I am sorry for the suffragettes who specialize in the double standard. For when they get into pantaloons at last and have the new freedom, they will discover to their sorrow that they have been pursuing a chimera, that there is really no such animal as the male anarchists they have been denouncing and envying, that the wholesale furnacation of man, at least under Christian democracy, has little more actual existence than honest advertising or sound cooking. They have followed the pornomaniacs in embracing a piece of bun comb, and when the day of deliverance comes, it will turn to ashes in their arms. Their error, as I say, lies in overestimating the courage and enterprise of man. They themselves, barring mere physical valor, a quality in which the average man, as far exceeded by the average jackal or wolf, have more of both. If the consequences to a man of the slightest dissent from Virginia were one-tenth as swift and barbarous as the consequences to a young girl in light case, it would take a division of infantry to judge up a single male flouter of that lex talonius in the whole western world. As things stand today, even with the odds so greatly in his favor, the average male hesitates and is thus not lost. Turn to the statistics of the vice crusaders if you doubt it. They show that the weekly receipts of female recruits upon the wharves of sin are always more than the demand that more young women enter upon the vermilion career that can make a respectable living at it, that the pressure of the temptation they hold out is the chief factor in corrupting our undergraduates. What was the first act of the American Army when it began summoning its young clerks and college boys and plow hands to constriction camps? Its first act was to mark off a socor moral zone around each camp and to secure it with trenches and machine guns and to put a lot of volunteer term against patrolling it, that the assembled jeunesse might be protected in their rectitude from the moral advances of the adjacent milkmaids and poor working girls. 37 Women as Martyrs I have given three reasons for the prosperity of the notion that man is a natural polygamist bent eternally upon fresh dives in the lake of brimstone number seven. To these another should be added. The thirst for martyrdom which shows itself in so many women, particularly under the higher forms of civilization. This unhealthy appetite in fact may be described as one of civilization's diseases. It is almost unheard of in more primitive societies. The savage woman, unprotected by her rude culture and forced to heavy and incessant labor, has retained her physical strength and with it her honesty and self-respect. The civilized woman, gradually degenerated by a greater ease and helped down that hill by the pretensions of civilized man, has turned her infirmity into a virtue, and so affects a feebleness that is actually far beyond the reality. It is by this route that she can most effectively disarm masculine distrust and get what she wants. Man is flattered by any acknowledgment, however insincere, of a superior strength and capacity. He likes to be leaned upon, appealed to, followed dastily, and this tribute to his might caresses him on the psychic plane as well as on the plane of the obviously physical. He not only enjoys helping a woman over a gutter, he also enjoys helping her dry her tears. The result is the vast pretense that characterizes the relation of the sexes under civilization. The double pretense of man's cunning and autonomy and of woman's dependence and deference. Man is always looking for someone to boast to. Woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on. This feminine affectation, of course, has gradually taken on the force of a fixed habit, and so it has gotten certain support by a familiar process of self-delusion in reality. The civilized woman inherits that habit as she inherits her cunning. She has borne half-convince that she is really as weak and helpless as she later pretends to be, and the prevailing folklore offers her endless corroboration. One of the resultant phenomena is the light and martyrdom that one so often finds in women, and particularly in the least alert and introspective of them. They take a heavy, unhealthy pleasure in suffering. It suddenly pleases them to be hard put upon. They like to picture themselves as slaughtered saints. Thus they always find something to complain of. The very conditions of domestic life give them a super abundance of clinical material. And if, by any chance, such material shows a falling off, they are uneasy and unhappy. Let a woman have a husband whose conduct is not reasonably open to question, and she will invent mythical offenses to make him bearable. And if her invention fails, she will be plunged into the utmost misery and humiliation. This fact probably explains many mysterious divorces. The husband was not too bad, but too good. For public opinion among women, remember, does not favor the woman who is full of a placid contentment and has no masculine torch to report. If she says that her husband is wholly satisfactory, she is looked upon as a numbskull even more dense than he is himself. A man, speaking of his wife to other men, always praises her extravagantly. Boasting about her soothes his vanity, he likes to stir up the envy of his fellows. But when two women talk of their husbands, it is mainly atrocities that they describe. The most esteemed woman gossip is the one with the longest and most various repertoire of complaints. This yearning for martyrdom explains one of the commonly noted characters of women, their eager flair for bearing physical pain. As we have seen, they have actually a good deal less endurance than men. Massive injuries shock them more severely and kill them more quickly. But when a QLG is unaccompanied by any profounder phenomena, they are undoubtedly able to bear it with a far greater show of resignation. The reason is not far to seek. In pain, a man sees only an invasion of his liberty, strength, and self-esteem. It flores him, masters him, and makes him ridiculous. But a woman, more subtle and devious in her processes of mind, senses the dramatic effect that the spectacle of her suffering makes upon the spectators, already filled with compassion for her feebleness. She would thus much rather be praised for facing pain with a martyr's fortitude than for devising some means of getting rid of it. The first thought of a man. No woman could have invented chloroform, nor, for that matter, alcohol. Both drugs offer an escape from situations and experiences that, even in aggravated forms, women relish. The woman who drinks as men drink, that is, to raise her threshold of sensation and ease the agony of living, nearly always shows a deficiency in feminine characters and an undue preponderance of masculine characters. Almost invariably, you will find her vain and boastful, and full of other marks of that bombastic exhibitionism, which is so sterlingly male, end of, in defense of women, woman's suffrage, part two, in defense of women by H. L. Menken, section nine, woman's suffrage, part three. This is a LibriVox recording. Among all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. 38. Pathological Effects. This feminine craving for martyrdom, of course, often takes on a downright pathological character, and so engages a psychiatrist. Women show many other traits of the same sort. To be a woman under our Christian civilization, indeed, means to live a life that is heavy with repression and dissimulation. And this repression and dissimulation in the long run cannot fail to produce effects that are indistinguishable from disease. You will find some of them described at length in any handbook on psychoanalysis. The Viennese, Adler, and the Dain, Paul Bjer, argue, indeed, that womanliness itself, as it is encountered under Christianity, is a disease. All women suffer from a suppressed revolt against the inhibitions forced upon them by our artificial culture. And this suppressed revolt by well-known Freudian means produces a complex of mental symptoms that is familiar to all of us. At one end of the scale we observe the suffragette with her grotesque adoption of the male belief in laws, phrases, and talismans, and her hysterical demand for a sexual libertarianism that she could not put to use if she had it. And at the other end we find the snuffling and neurotic woman with her bogus martyrdom, her extravagant pruderies, and her pathological delusions. As Ibsen observed long ago, this is a man's world. Women have broken many of their old chains, but they are still enmeshed in a formidable network of man-made taboos and sentimentalities, and it will take them another generation, at least, to get genuine freedom. That this is true is shown by the deep unrest that yet marks the sex, despite its recent progress towards social, political, and economic equality. It is almost impossible to find a man who honestly wishes that he were a woman, but almost every woman, at some time or other in her life, is gnawed by a regret that she is not a man. Two of the hardest things that women have to bear are A. The stupid masculine disinclination to admit their intellectual superiority, or even their equality, or even their possession of a normal human equipment for thought. And B. The equally stupid and masculine doctrine that they constitute a special and ineffable species of vertebrata without the natural instincts and appetites of the order, to adapt a phrase from Heckel that they are transcendental and almost gaseous mammals, and marked by a complete lack of certain salient mammalian characters. The first imbecility has already concerned us at length. One finds traces of it even in the works professively devoted to disposing of it. In one such book, for example, I come upon this, quote, What all the skill and constructive capacity of the physicians in the Crimean War feel to accomplish Florence Nightingale accomplished by her beautiful femininity and nobility of soul, end quote. In other words, by her possession of some recondite and indescribable magic, sharply separated from the ordinary mental processes of man. The theory is unsound and preposterous. Miss Nightingale accomplished her useful work not by magic, but by hard common sense. The problem before her was simply one of organization. Many men had tackled it, and all of them had failed stupendously. What she did was to bring her feminine sharpness of wit, her feminine clear thinking to bear upon it. Thus attacked, it yielded quickly, and once it had been brought to order it was easy for other persons to carry on what she had begun. But the opinion of a man's world still prefers to credit her success to some mysterious, angelical quality, unstatable in lucid terms and having no more reality than the divine inspiration of an archbishop. Her extraordinarily acute and accurate intelligence is thus conveniently put upon the table, and the amoral, apropos man is kept in violet. To confess, frankly, that she had more sense than any male Englishmen of her generation, would be to utter a truth too harsh to be bearable. The second delusion commonly shows itself in the theory, already discussed, that women are devoid of any sex instinct. That they submit to the odious caresses of the leperious male only by a powerful effort of will and with the sole object of discharging their duty to posterity. It would be impossible to go into this delusion with proper candor and at due length in the work designed for reading aloud than the domestic circle. All I can do is refer to student to books of any competent authority on the psychology of sex, say Ellis, or to the confidences, if they are obtainable, of any complacent bachelor of his acquaintance. 39. Women as Christians The glad tidings preached by Christ were obviously highly favourable to women. He lifted them to equality before the Lord when their very possession of souls was still doubted by the majority of rival theologians. Moreover, he esteemed them socially and set value upon their sagacity, and one of the most disdained of their sex, a lady formerly in public life, was among his regular advisers. Meralitry is thus by no means the invention of the medieval popes as Protestant theologians would have us believe. On the contrary, it is plainly discernible in the four Gospels. What the medieval popes actually invented, or to be precise, reinvented, for they simply borrowed the elements of it from St. Paul, was the doctrine of women's inferiority, the precise opposite of the thing credited to them. Committed, for sound reasons of discipline, to the celibacy of the clergy, they had to support it by depicting all traffic with women in the light of a hazardous, nagnominious business. The result was the deliberate organization and development of the theory of female triviality, lack of responsibility, and general looseness of mind. Woman became a sort of devil, but without the admired intelligence of the regular demons. The appearance of women saints, however, offered a constant and embarrassing criticism of this idiotic doctrine. If occasional women were fit to sit upon the right hand of God, and they were often proving it and forcing the church to acknowledge it, then surely all women could not be as bad as the books made them out. There thus arose the concept of the angelic women, the natural Vestal, we see her at full length in the romances of medieval chivalry. What emerged in the end was a sort of double doctrine. First, that women were devils, and secondly, that they were angels. This preposterous dualism has merged, as we have seen, into a compromised dogma in modern times. By that dogma it is held on the one hand that women are unintelligent and immoral, and on the other hand that they are free from all those weaknesses of the flesh which distinguish men. Thus, roughly speaking, is the notion of the average male numbskull today. Christianity has thus both libeled women and flattered them, but with the weight always on the side of the libel. It is therefore at bottom their enemy, as the religion of Christ now wholly extinct, was their friend. And as they gradually throw off the shackles that abound them for a thousand years they show appreciation of the fact. Women, indeed, are not naturally religious, and they are growing less and less religious as year chases year. Their ordinary devotion has little, if any, pious exaltation in it. It is a routine practice forced on them by the masculine notion that an appearance of holiness is proper to their lowly station, and a masculine feeling the churchgoing somehow keeps them in order and out of doings that would be less reassuring. When they exhibit any genuine religious fervor, its sexual character is usually so obvious that even the majority of men are cognizant of it. Women never go flocking ecstatically to a church in which the agent of God in the pulpit is an utterly asthmatic with a watchful wife. When one finds them driven to frenzies by the merits of the saints, and weeping over the sorrows of the heathen, and rushing out to haul the whole vicinage up the grace, and spending hours on their knees in hysterical abasement for the head of the throne, it is quite safe to assume, even without an actual visit, that the ecclesiastica has worked the miracle as a fair and toothsome fellow, and a good deal more aphrodisiacal than learned. All the great preachers to women in modern times have been men of suave and ingratiating habit, and the great majority of them, from Henry Ward Beecher up and down, have been taken sooner, late, and transactions far more suitable to de Boudoir than to the footstool of the Almighty. Their famous killings have always been made among the silliest sort of women, the sort in brief who fall so short of the normal ecumen of their sex, that they are bemused by mere beauty in men. Such women are in the minority, and so the sex shows a good deal fewer religious enthusiasts per mill than the sex of sentiment and belief. Attending several years ago the gladiatorial shows of the reverend Dr. Billy Sunday, the celebrated American pulpit clown, I was constantly struck by the great preponderance of males in the pen devoted to the saved. Men of all ages and in enormous numbers came swarming to the altar loudly bawling for help against their sins, but the women were anything but numerous, and the few who appeared were chiefly either clorotic, adolescence or pathetic old sowshen-western. For six nights running I sat directly beneath the gifted exhorted without seeing a single female convert of what statisticians call the child-bearing age, that age the age of maximum intelligence and charm. Among the male simpletons bagged by his yells during this time were the president of a railroad, half a dozen rich bankers and merchants, and the former governor of an American state. But not a woman of comparable position or dignity, not a woman that any self-respecting bachelor would care to chuck under the chin. This cynical view of religious emotionalism and with it of the whole stock of ecclesiastical balder-dash is probably responsible, at least in part, for the reluctance of women to enter upon the sacerdotal career. And those Christian sects would still bar them from the pulpit. Usually on the imperfectly concealed ground that they are not equal to its alleged demands upon the morals and the intellect, one never hears of them protesting against the prohibition. They are quite content to leave the degrading imposture to men who were better fitted for it by talent and conscience. And in those barokes sects, chiefly American which admit them, they show no eagerness to put on the stole unchossable. When the first clergy woman appeared in the United States, it was predicted by alarmist that men would be driven out of the pulpit by the new competition. Nothing of the sort has occurred, nor is it in prospect. The whole core of female divines in the country might be herded into one small room. Women, when literate at all, are far too intelligent to make effective ecclesiastics. Their sharp sense of reality is an endless opposition to the whole sacerdotal masquerade, and their cynical humor stands against a snorting that is inseparable from pulpit oratory. Those women who enter upon the religious life are almost invariably moved by some motive distinct from your pie's inflammation. It is a commonplace, indeed, that in Catholic countries girls are driven into convents by economic considerations or by disasters of a more far oftener than they are drawn there by the hope of heaven. Read the lives of the female saints, and you will see how many of them tried marriage and failed at it before they ever turned to religion. In Protestant lands very few women adopted as a profession at all, and among the few a secular impulse is almost always visible. The girl who is suddenly overcome by a desired administer to the heathen in foreign lands is nearly invariably found on inspection to be a girl harboring a theory that it would be agreeable to marry some heroic missionary. In point of fact, she duly marries him. At home, perhaps, she has found it impossible to get a husband, but in the remote or marches of China, Senegal, and Somaliland with no white competition present, it is equally impossible to fail. Forty. Piety as a social habit. What remains of the alleged piety of women is little more than a social habit, reinforced in most communities by a paucity of other and more inviting d'evertesse mons. If you have ever observed the women of Spain and Italy at their devotions, you need not be told how much the worship of God may be a mere excuse for relaxation and gossip. These women, in their daily lives, are surrounded by a formidable network of medieval taboos. Their normal human desire for ease and freedom and intercourse is opposed by masculine distrust and superstition. They meet no strangers, they see and hear nothing new. In the house to the most high, they escape from that vexing routine. Here they may brush shoulders with a crowd, here, so to speak, they may crane their mental necks and stretch their spiritual legs. Here, above all, they may come into some sort of contact with men relatively more affable, cultured, and charming than their husbands and fathers, to wit, with the reverent clergy. Elsewhere in Christendom, the women are not quite so relentlessly washed and penned up. They feel much the same need of variety and excitement, and both are likewise on tap in the temples of the Lord. No one, I am sure, need be told that the average missionary society or church-showing circle is not primary religious organization. Its actual purpose is precisely that of the absurd clubs and secret orders to which the lower and least resourceful classes of men belong. It offers a mean of refreshment, of self-expression, a personal display, a political manipulation and boasting, and, if the pastor happens to be interesting, of discrete and almost lawful intrigue. In the course of a life largely devoted to the study of pietistic phenomena, I have never met a single woman who carried an authentic dam for the actual heathen. The attraction in their salvation is almost purely social. Women go to church for the same reason that farmers and convicts go to church. Finally, there is the aesthetic lure. Religion, in most parts of Christendom, holds out the only bait of beauty that the inhabitants are ever cognizant of. It offers music, dim lights, relatively ambitious architecture, eloquence, formality and mystery, the caressing meaningless list that is at the heart of poetry. Women are far more responsive to such things than men, who are ordinary quite as devoid of aesthetic sensitiveness as so many oxen. The attitude of the typical man toward beauty in its various forms is, in fact, an attitude of suspicion and hostility. He does not regard of work of art as merely a nerd and stupid. He regarded as, in some indefinable way, positively offensive. He sees the artist as a professional voluptuary and scoundrel, and would no more trust him in his household than he would trust a colored clergyman in his henyard. It was men and not women who invented such sordid and literal faiths as those of the Mennonites, Dunkards, Wesleyans and Scotch Presbyterians, with their antithopy to beautiful ritual, their obscene button-holding of God, their great talent for reducing the ineffable mystery of religion to a mere balling of idiots. The normal women, in so far as she has any religion at all, moves irresistibly towards Catholicism with his poetical obscurantism. The evangelical Protestant sects have a hard time holding her. She can no more be an actual Methodist than a gentleman can be a Methodist. This inclination towards beauty, of course, is dismissed by the average male blockhead as no more than a feeble sentimentality. The truth is that it is precisely the opposite. It is surely not sentimentality to be moved by the stately and mysterious ceremony of the mass, or even say by those timid imitations of it which one observes in certain Protestant churches. Such proceedings, whatever their defects from the standpoint of a pure aesthetic, are at all events vastly more beautiful than any of the private acts of the folk who take part in them. They lift themselves above the barren utilitarianism of everyday life, and no less above the modern sentimentalities that men seek pleasure in. They offer a means of escape, convenient and inviting from the sordid routine of thought and occupation which women revolt against so pertinaciously. 41. The Ethics of Women I have said that the religion preached by Jesus, now wholly extinct in the world, was highly favorable to women. This was not saying, of course, that women have repaid the compliment by adopting it. They are, in fact, in different Christians in the primitive sense, just as they are bad Christians in the antagonistic modern sense, and particularly on the side of ethics. If they actually accept the renunciations commanded by the Sermon on the Mount, it is only in an effort to flout their substance under cover of their appearance. No woman is really humble, she is merely politic. No woman, with a free choice before her, chooses self-immolation. The most she genuinely desires in that direction is a spectacular martyrdom. No woman delights in poverty, no woman yields when she can prevail. No woman is honestly meek. In their practical ethics, indeed, women pay little heed to the precepts of the founders of Christianity, and the fact has passed into proverb. Their gentleness, like the so-called honor of men, is visible only in situations which offer them no menace. The moment a woman finds herself confronted by an antagonistic, genuinely dangerous, either to her own security or to the well-being of those under her protection, say a child or husband, she displays a bellicosity which stops at nothing, however outrageous. In the courts of law, one occasionally encounters a male extremist who tells the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, even when it is against his cause, but no such woman has ever been on view since the days of Justinian. It is, indeed, an axiom of the bar that women invariably lie upon the stand, and the whole effort of a barrister who has one for a client, is devoted to keeping her within bounds, that the obtuse suspicions of the male jury may not be unduly aroused. Women lit against almost always win their cases, not as is commonly assumed because Germans fall in love with them, but simply and solely because they are clear-headed, resourceful, implacable, and without qualms. What is here visible on the halls of justice in the face of a vast technical equipment for combating mendacity is ten times more obvious in the freer fields. Any man who is so unfortunate as to have serious controversy with a woman, let's say, in the departments of finance, theology, or amor, must inevitably carry away from it a sense of having passed through a dangerous and almost gruesome experience. Women not only bite in the clinches, they bite even in open fighting. They have a dental reach, so to speak, of amazing length. No attack is so desperate that it will not undertake it once they are aroused. No device is so unfair and horrifying that it stays them. In my early days, desiring to improve my prose, I served for a year or so as a reporter for a newspaper and a police court, and during that time I heard perhaps 400 cases of so-called wife-beating. The husbands, in their defense, almost invariably pleaded justification, and some of them told such tales of studied atrocity at the domestic hearth, both psychic and physical, that the learned magistrate discharged them with tears in his eyes and the very catch-pulls in the courtroom had to blow their noses. Many more men than women go insane, and many more married men than single men. The fact puzzles no one who has had the same opportunity that I had to find out what goes on year in and year out behind the doors of apparently happy homes. A woman, if she hates her husband, and many of them do, can make life so sour and obnoxious to him that even death upon the gallows seems sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is often and perhaps almost invariably quite justified. To be the wife of an ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to bear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and stupidity, his pulling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a cock on a dung-hill, his anesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome cluminess and amor, all these things must revolt any women above the lowest. To be the object of Ophi's affections of such a creature, even when they are honest and profound, cannot be expected to continue in joy to a woman of sense and refinement. His performance as a gallant as onward to Balzac long ago observed unescapably suggest to guerrilla's efforts to play the violin. Women survive the tragic comedy only by dint of their great capacity for play-acting. They are able to act so realistically that often they deceive even themselves. The average woman's contentment, indeed, is no more than a tribute to her histrionism. Numerable revolts in secret even so, and one sometimes wonders that so few women with the things so fast and so safe poison their husbands. Perhaps it's not quite as rare as vital statistics make it out. The death rate among husbands is very much higher than among wives. More than once, indeed, I've gone to the funeral of an acquaintance who died suddenly and observed a curious glitter in the eyes of the inconsolable widow. Even in this age of emancipation, normal women have serious lives saved with their husbands and potential husbands. The business of marriage is their dominant concern from adolescence to senility. When they step outside their habitual circle, they show the same alert and eager warring as that they exhibit within it. A man who is dealings with them must keep his wits about him, and even when he is most cautious he is often flabbergasted by the sudden and unconscionable forays. Whenever a woman eats heady-green, eats sweating blood from turnips, eats the terror of all the mad-users of the neighborhood. The man who tackles such an Amazon-a-barter takes his fortune into his hands. He has little more chance of success against the feminine technique in business than he has against the feminine technique in marriage. In both arenas the advantage of women lies in their freedom from sentimentality. In business they address aspirations and how more appropriate of their antagonists. And in the duel of sex they fence not to make points, but to disable and disarm. A man when he succeeds in throwing off a woman who has attempted to marry him always carries away a model and sympathy for her in her defeat in dismay. But no one ever heard of a woman who pitied the poor fellow exhibit them proudly and boast about them to other women. End of section 9 Woman's Suffrage Part 3