Socialism
“What about Socialism?”
“Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism are as yet the most obtrusive results of this universal-mind disturbance, due to recognition of the evils that affect the body of Man. The giant, on opening his eyes, is furious at his rags and tatters, and the sores which they disclose. Man, newly awakened, is disgusted at his general condition—and that disgust is at the bottom of all the ‘revolutionary’ unrest which we see to-day in the western world.
“I spoke to you of set-backs. Should that unrest develop into a storm, the progress of the world would receive one of the set-backs it is well accustomed to.”
“What do you mean by a storm?”
“I mean a revolution. An attempt by sudden and violent meansto tear up the rags and heal the ulcers of Man. For instance, were Socialism in its extreme form to become the directing power of Man to-morrow, were every man in the world to be equalized materially, the world would be put back on its path of progress immeasurably.”
“Why?”
“Because the Socialists’ plan is constructed on a fallacy, and were it to be followed by Humanity, it would mean utter disruption of all social communities.”
“What is the fallacy?”
The Fallacy
“THE fallacy is this: The idea that the individual is the essential cell of the community, and that the energy and life of any community spring from the individual. This is not so. The essential cell of the community is the Family, or, in other words, the Home, and all the energy and life of the community spring from the Home.
“The reason of this is simple.The Home is bisexual, the individual unisexual.
“All the vitality of a community arises from the interplay of the two sexes one upon the other, and this interplay, to be productive of communal life and good, must take place in the Home. Individual men and individual women utterly divorced from a home of any sort lose force and deteriorate, and become warped and dwarfed.
“Sexual force, that is to say, the force that draws man to woman, that produces Love and Children, and love of children, and the love of children for their parents and for each other—sexual force, the fiery grandfather of affection and filial love, can only be developed as a force for communal good and individual good in the Home.
The Home Is Everything
“The Home iseverything.
“It is the foundation of the community, it is the essential cell of the world. You cannot injure the community without injuring the home, and you cannot injure the home without injuring the community.You cannot improve the condition of the community radically by pooling all the money and distributing it among the homes, or by pooling all the means of production and wealth creation and distributing work tickets to the Home-makers. Such a distribution of the means of living would leave utterly untouched the diseases that prey on the homes of the nation and would touch with a killing hand thevitalityof the Home.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Its Construction
“Simply this. Every home is a tiny nation built exactly on the plan of the big nation, of which it forms a unit and which, in fact, is its counterpart in large.
“The home has its head, just as the nation has its head. Like the nation, it is bisexual; it has its exchequer, its fighting force, its ethical laws, its ambitions, its alliances, and its frontiers. It trades with other homes and combinations of homes just as the nation trades with other nations. It has its imports and its exports. It hasits foreign loans and national credit. It has its internal and external politics. It has all these, whether it be a man and wife living in rooms or a family of twenty, and it is the facsimile of the nation simply because the nation is not a differentiation of it but an aggregation of it. What is done to the nation is done to the home.
Its Power
“A home, or a family, if you like the term better, is a ganglion of forces. Love and Pride, Economy (or the saving instinct) and Ambition, not to speak of Affection, are the best of these forces, just as the best forces in the nation are Love, Pride, Ambition, not to speak of Patriotism.
“Inseparably connected with these fine forces are other most powerful forces: Greed, Ostentation, Chauvinism (for a family can be Chauvinistic as well as a nation), Love of Domination, etc.
Its Death Blow
“Now, the forcible toeing the line byeach familyto a fixed income and ambition would hit the life of the home a death blow.
“I will give you one instance. Ambition would be tom up by the roots. God only knows all the fine things that are clinging to the roots of Ambition. Man knows a few of them. Fathers of families deny themselves and work hard that they may see their sons and daughters advance in the world; knowing, as they do, that material advance is bound up with good conduct, they look to their own conduct and the teaching of their children. Mothers do the same.
“Look at life as you know it, and tell me frankly, is not this true? That the destruction of Ambition in the family would tend largely to destroy the energy and life of the family and its power as a centre of force.”
“It is true.”
“Yet your Advanced Socialist, with his eyes fixed on what he calls ‘the State,’ does not reckon on this, and his theory, were it turned to practice, would destroy Ambition.
“Then, again, Pride, not pride in high deeds, but pure, low-down,material pride—how nasty it is, but what a tremendous force it is! From the cock that crows to the State that prospers, it is ubiquitous as sodium. It is purely human and animal, yet it is one of the major forces that hold the family together and make it living.
“Yet, if Ambition goes, material Pride must go—absolutely. Then take the Hoarding Instinct. This would be absolutely destroyed by your Advanced Socialist, yet without the Hoarding Instinct, which, in a more or less attenuated form, is the Saving Instinct, family morality would cut a poor show. Self-denial would vanish and that demi-virtue, Carefulness.
“You will notice that I am keeping entirely to material instincts and things, and I will rise to the height of saying that the teaching of the destruction of the Hoarding Instinct by Socialists is a blasphemous teaching, and the blasphemy is against the Holy Spirit of Good. I have left the individual for the family, but the destruction of thisinstinct would wreck the individual as well as the family.
“Ambition, Pride, the Hoarding Instinct, are not passions; they are Laws that govern the growth of life, and they are as immutable as the laws of gravity.
“Without going further, I shall content myself with the destruction of Ambition, Pride, and the Hoarding Instinct, and leave the family robbed of them by the Advanced Socialist—and withered in its growth. I shall come back to the point I started from—the Home. Your Socialist talks of the State.
“I say again—There is absolutely no such thing. There is only a collection of homes.
“Behind the word State he hides his absolute ignorance of fundamentals. He fancies, as I said before, that the nation is an aggregation of individuals, and on that assumption he concludes that each individual should be tuned to the pitch of the mass, so that all should sing in harmony.
“But the nation in reality is notan aggregation of individuals at all; it is an agglutination of Families or Homes.
“The word State, as implying a homogeneous and isolated power, is philosophically meaningless. The State is not a separate entity from the Home. It is only, in the administrative sense, a name for the common executive which the homes of the nation have created to conduct their external affairs individually as between themselves, and collectively as between other common governments or executives.
“When the Advanced Socialist talks of the welfare of the State he is talking of the welfare of the majority of individuals. When he talks of the State seizing the common wealth, he means that the majority of individuals will seize it and distribute it among themselves and the minority. He has absolutely forgotten those separate hives of sex life, industry, ambition, antagonism to other hives, and energy, which are the real units of the nation, the Families, which are bytheir constituent vices and virtues the breeding-grounds of all social energy and virtues.
“And he would advance the world on its progress by seizing with the brute force of individuals dominion over the homes of the nation. He would allow an executive created by force to dictate to each home its foreign and domestic policy; he would limit its imports and exports, destroy its ambitions, plunder its hoard, and make slaves of its individuals.
“That is Socialism pure and simple. Arsenic could not be simpler or purer as a poison to the common good and the vitality of any social community.”
Building, Not Breaking
“AND you?”
“I would push the world on, as I said before, by building from below and by purely material means. Instead of hitting the family a blow in its vital part, I would foster its wellbeing. I would give it drains and ventilation; I would, from thecommon fund that all the families have pooled in the taxes, make better the houses; I would even call upon the more prosperous families to help the poorer, but my one aim and object would be the protection of the family in all that makes for its vitality.
“I would foster family ambition and the saving and hoarding instinct, and cooking and household management and everything that would keep heads of families by the hearth instead of talking Syndicalism in pot-houses and scandal in clubs. I can not say all I would do, but broadly I would do everything possible for material betterment and everything possible for the betterment of Family Life.
“And that is what will happen, Socialism or no Socialism. We began by talking of the world as a globe of fire; we went on to hills and seas, saurians, animals, men, civilised men, Man with a universal mind.
“We have reached the world as it is—a collection of families ormolecules, constituting Man with a universal mind.
The Danger of Dreams
“That mind, new-born, is filled with dreams and illusions: Anarchism, Socialism, Syndicalism, and so forth.
“Let Man remember this: He was built out of facts, not theories; matter, not fancies; families, not individuals; and that to grow in the fashion that these new theorists would have him grow, he would have to destroy the molecules that constitute him and resolve himself into his original atoms.”
“What is a molecule?”
“A molecule is a family of atoms.”
The Human Equation
“YOU are, then, opposed to any fixed plan for the betterment of the world. You would simply work by bettering material conditions?”
“I am not opposed to any fixed plan. I only say this, that all the fixed plans I have seen are unworkable, and from one cause.”
“What is that?”
“The framers of them have forgotten thatany plan for betterment of the world is absolutely unworkable that leaves out the Human Equation.
“That is not a saying of mine. It is a Law. And, what is more, it is part of a universal law. You cannot improve the condition of vegetation unless you allow for theweakness as well as the virtues and strength of vegetable life, nor can you improve the condition of mankind unless you allow for its weaknesses and sins and follies as well as for its virtues and its strength.
“What I have said to you about Socialism is not anex-partestatement by a man opposed to Socialism. I am opposed to nothing but error, and when I see Laws as fixed and as immutable as Bode’s Law or the law of gravity disregarded by men who are proposing to reform the world, and when I point out these fatal flaws in their reasoning, that does not mean that I am opposed to all plans for reforming the world, but it does mean that I would test by everyday logic any plan for everyday use.
“Will it work? Will it perform the work for which it was invented as a kinetic engine?
“Those are the two questions on which the capitalist satisfies himself first before he invests his money in any invention in mechanics.
“Then he asks, will it wear without undue destruction of parts?
“Then he satisfies himself as to its economics. Any plan of world reform which leaves out the Human Equation is equivalent to an engineering plan which leaves out of consideration details like the Law of the Dead Centre or the Law of Expansion and contraction of metals.
“If you will examine any great engineering plan, whether it be the plan for a bridge or a marine engine, you will find that it is a simple bouquet of natural laws, all brought together by the engineer for a definite purpose, and every law is stamped with the + or - stamp of nature. They are the laws of weakness and the laws of strength, and these wonderful laws that preside over matter so interpenetrate one another that you cannot divorce them one from the other. They may be said to form alloys. Thus the law that rules over the breaking strain is at once the law of strength and weakness. The giant that lives in water springs intosteam under the conditions of the + law that gives him strength, but never for a moment does he escape from the - law of condensation which is ever ready to reduce him to water again in a twinkling. And so on.
“Now, the task of the engineer isnotto eliminate the - laws from nature, but to account for them, and, if possible, to make them, by a trick of genius, work for him. The engineer does not attempt to destroy Inertia, the weakness that lives in the dead centre of things; he counteracts the idleness of inertia by means of the fly-wheel.
“The weakness of Steam under the law of condensation becomes in the hands of the engineer the strength of the steam-engine. The bursting power of steam, which is ever at war with the weakness of the boiler metal, he counteracts by the safety-valve. He must allow for everything, or his machine either will not work or bursts into a thousand fragments.
“And do you imagine for a moment that human passions and energy, strength and weakness, are less potent than the forces and weaknesses which the engineer has to account for in his plan? Do you fancy that Inertia is confined to metals, and friction to working parts of machinery? Do you fancy that the social engineer, dealing with powerful and explosive forces, can plot out a social machine without taking into consideration the weaknesses which are complementary to the forces with which he has to deal?
“Yet, in all the plans I have examined, from Socialism to Syndicalism, not one engineer has submitted to me a plan in which human passions and energy, strength and weakness, are allowed for.
“That is a fact.
“I shall give you just one little instance, taken from Syndicalism.
“We shall destroy all businesses, says the Syndicalist, by vexatious strikes. The capitalist, having vanished (struck out), the hands will work the business.
Syndicalism
“Just so. But he forgets that all businesses, like all men, die in time. Suppose all businesses were converted into Syndicalist businesses worked by all the hands, in a world of Syndicalist businesses—they would not escape from the law of decay and death which hangs over everything material. Businesses would die, and new businesses would have to be born under Syndicalism, just as in our world. The competition would be just as keen and the factors of death just as potent. But the factors of life would not be as potent. How would a new business be born to live under Syndicalism?
“Let us suppose that six men, by energy, hard work, a little money, and self-denial (all necessary), found a small business. It grows and prospers, and in a year’s time they find that they must introduce new labour to cope with the work. But the new hands are all Syndicalists. They don’t want wages, they must have their share in the business. They are taken on, six of them.
“We now have twelve men working a growing and prospering concern. Unless they are absolute fools, they must recognize that expansion to them means simply more danger and worry, for expansion is impossible without more labour, and all the new labour introduced only sops up the profits like a sponge, and even were the profits to increase out of proportion to the total labour employed, that increase of individual profit would in the majority of businesses be small—in numerous businesses it would be non-existent. Why should they expand and risk what they have got—for all expansion in business means risk—simply to benefit potential labourers?
“The law of Inertia comes at once into play, without any flywheel to counterbalance it. The business ceases to grow, and, a hundred to one, dies.
“That is only one of the flaws in the Syndicalist’s design. His machine has not been constructed with a view to this and other humanweakness. In a world of automata it might work; in a world of flesh and blood it wouldn’t. In short, Syndicalism could destroy all the businesses of the world quite easily, but it could not build them again.
The Theories
“Syndicalism, Socialism, Anarchism cannot stand for a moment under the eye of analysis without tumbling to pieces as practical inventions.
“They seem daring and ingenious, but they are dishonouring to virile thought.
“Let us change for a moment and ask ourselves, not what we would say to the engineer who disregarded natural laws, but what would we say of a playwright who proposed to present life to us in a play constructed without a proper view to human passions, weaknesses, and fallibility, as well as to human virtue, altruism, etc.?
“We would say at once: It is not possible. He may write such a play, but it would have this fault: it would represent no society that ever lived in the world, and in athousand years hence it would be as valueless as it is to-day.
“And that is, in fact, what you might say of all the Theorists in Humanity I know. They have written plays for men to act in that are quite valueless to-day, would have been quite valueless a thousand years ago, and will be quite valueless a thousand years hence.
“They have left out Human Nature.”
The Laws of Nature
“THE Statesman who would leave the world better than he found it must take Human Nature as it is, and, instead of attempting to make it grow in direct violation of the laws that rule it, he must assist it to grow in accordance with those laws.
“Those laws are in the main good.
“As I have pointed out to you, they are the laws that cultivated crocodiles so that at last they became men, that cultivated a hell of fire until it became a habitable world, and that will cultivate men until they become better than present-day men.
“The Reformer must study those laws. He must look at the worldgenerously and widely, and from the very beginning of things. He must have communion with the great earth spirit which has brought all of us to where we are, and, humbling himself to the dust, study the working of that spirit through the ages.
“He will, unless he is blind, inevitably see one truth: that this great spirit has never meddled with the growth of life and thought, but has laboured Titanically to prepare the conditions favourable to that growth.
“It led life by the fin and claw till life developed hands and a mind wherewith to develop its own conditions favourable to growth. And all the improvements of the world since then have followed that law, the Law of Improvement of Conditions, not any vague Law for the Improvement of Life.
“When Life left the trees and found or dug caves to live in, it left behind it, as a record of its first shelter and home and improved condition, the first vague scratchingsof Art. You may be sure that could it have found a record we would discover also in those caves some sign of the first glimmer of Love.
“The cave was the first home of the germ of civilisation, and the man who built the first hut laid the foundations of all the palaces and cathedrals of earth.
“The man who improved the condition of the first square yard of land laid the foundation of all worldly prosperity, and the man who made the first hinge of hide for the first door destroyed a barricade and laid down the first condition for hospitality.
“Whenever man has fallen away from the teaching of this law, he has always fallen.
Athens, Egypt, Rome
“Athens rose to the heights of the Acropolis, but she failed in the furtherance of those conditions necessary for the development of the world—witness her streets. Rome rose to splendour and fell in ruins simply because of her failure in the development of material conditionsto feed and foster Progress—witness her roads—made for armies to march on. Egypt destroyed herself with dreams of mysticism and power useless to the development of life—witness the Pyramids and the Sphinx.
The Work of the Barbarians
“All these so-called civilizations failed because they were inhuman in the path of progress.
“They were not developments, but essays in development. Their civilizations had no relation to the broad Human Family, and gave no platform for that family to develop on. Athens, Rome, Egypt carried Arts, Power, Mysticism to the heights, while down on the plains the tillers of the soil, the serfs, and the barbarians carried on Human Nature.
“Athens, Rome, and Egypt, like some modern philosophers, took no account of human weaknesses. Examine their laws and codes, their policy, and their view-points, and you will at once see that their platform was so narrow that only a class could stand on it, and thattheir atmosphere was stifling to Man. Human nature could not develop in it. There was no liberty for growth. Human nature had reached a certain point; it made blind attempts to rise higher. It rose to heights of Egyptian power and mysticism, and fell; to heights of Athenian art and philosophy, and fell; to heights of Roman splendour, and fell. It was like an animal trying to leave a sea, and falling back at each attempt by reason of the crumbling of the shore under its weight.
“It had not found the resting-place of solid rock. The hard rock of Liberty and material good and material Reason and material development.
Bacon
“At last it found the rock by the man’s hand that could only find and cling to that rock. That hand was Bacon’s. It was so essentially material and human that it could distinguish rock from friable sand, and so powerful that, having found a hold, it never let go.
“Bacon was the first modern manto seize the earth spirit’s law that development is only possible when conditions for development have been already prepared.
“His ‘Fruit’ was another word for conditions.
“His genius recognized intuitively that the only way to develop Man is to let Man develop, and the only way to let him develop is to give him liberty, mentally and physically, and a safe and sheltered platform.
“Better his material conditions.”
****
“You asked me, was I opposed to any ‘plan’ for the Development of Humanity, and I replied, and reply, in effect, that I am not, always providing that it allowed for human development along human lines.
“That is the sum total of the matter, and the first essential of Man in his relation to the world.”
No Such Thing as Woman
“AND what about woman’s relationship to the world?”
“There is no such thing as woman.”
“Oh! Oh!”
“There are only women. To talk of Woman as a being apart from man is absurd. When I used the word Man in talking of the universal mind, I included women. The word Man as used to represent men is a falsity in that it excludes women. The word Woman is absurd, however you take it.
“Men and women are cut out of the same piece of stuff—Human Nature. The woman is cut a bit smaller, and her outline is a bit different, that is all.
“Mentally it is just the same as physically. She is cut, as a rule,a bit smaller, and the outline of her mind is a bit different. But it is only a difference in size and outline. The stuff is the same. And the outline of the one is complementary to the outline of the other; where the woman’s outline sinks in the man’s sticks out, andvice versa. Mentally and physically it is the same; they are, in fact, the two parts of that great jig-saw puzzle, Humanity.
“The Male and Female are not a necessity of Life. They are only a necessity of higher vegetable and animal life. A large number of lower organisms propagate unsexually—the monera, the am[oe]bæ, foraminifera, radiolara, etc. These increase either by splitting in two or putting out buds. The Male and Female are not, then, a radical necessity of life, but they are a radical necessity in development and in progress from a lower to a higher form of life. The Male and Female are not, as I will try to point out, of the essence of life, but of the essence of the forms of life.
“We must imagine that the first germ of life was sexless, a cellular structure that multiplied by splitting in two. We must imagine that because the rigid law of advance from the simple to the complex imposes on us the assumption that the first form of life must have been the simplest, and the simplest is the organism that develops by fission.
“There was a tremendous moment, then, when all earthly life lived and moved without sign of sex; cellular forms all alike, all developing alike, and by the same method.
“Had all these forms continued unchanged, the world would now be just as then. But a change came, due, we must suppose (from analogy), not to a change in the radical nature of these organisms, but to a change in the external conditions affecting some of them. The food environment, or the temperature environment, or the electrical environment surrounding some of these organisms, or some other unknown but always external influence, wrought a change in some of these lowly forms of life. The mother of Form—Differentiation—was the result.
“The organisms affected by Differentiation had to reproduce themselves by producing other organisms in a slightly different form, either lower than themselves, or on the same plane as themselves, or higher than themselves.
“Had they taken the first course, Differentiation would have meant destruction and death to all the organisms it touched. The second course was absolutely impossible. A simple organism cannot alter itself without ascending or descending; if it becomes the least degree more complex, it ascends; if it becomes the least degree less complex, it descends. It cannot alter its nature or its form in a horizontal direction. It is absolutely condemned to the vertical, and must go up or down.
“These basic simple organisms, then, that formed the foundation for all life, must have responded totheir change in environment by ascending, that is, by becoming more complex. They must have done this, or else have descended to death. They were making for the great goal, Sex.
“How they reached that goal may be a story yet to be read by Science, but reach it they did on the day that two of these simple-minded organisms reproduced themselves, not by individual fission, but by mutual union.
“It was not a radical change in the life of the organisms; it was only a radical change in the method by which that life was reproduced.
“It was a change in business methods. It was co-operation, pure and simple, between two organisms in the production of other organisms. Before that day, the whole business had to be done by one individual; after that day it was done by partners, one called Male, the other Female.
Sex a Partnership
“Now, what is the essence of partnership? Mutual assistance. In a labour partnership where thebusiness is in the least complex, two men would be of very little assistance to each other who insisted always on doing the same job, or the same part of a job. There must always be a top sawyer and a bottom sawyer, a man who does what the other cannot do, or gives what the other has not got.
“It is exactly the same in the business of life-production, and the instant that Form could demonstrate them, the two partners appeared, and the instant that the new business of Life originated by this partnership became acute and competitive, the partners found themselves leagued together not only for the production of life, but for the defence of that life.
“But that carries us beyond my immediate point, which is that the terms Male and Female do not connote separate origins for the objects they apply to, nor essential differences between those objects. The two partners are essentially the same, only that one has got his hands horny from doing the roughjobs of the partnership and the other has kept her hands soft; one has developed mammary glands by doing her business in the partnership, the other has developed his biceps in doing his. One has developed certain attributes of mind in fighting the world, the other certain other attributes in keeping the home. One has developed certain organs for reproduction, the other—others.”
“Yet you deny the existence of Woman.”
“Absolutely. But I do not deny the existence of Sex, always holding that, though Sex is the most powerful factor in development, it has nothing to do with the essence of life. If it had, you would find men and women different from one another in essentials. They are not.
“As human beings they are exactly the same,onlythat you find some passions and attributes more developed in men, others more developed in women. But there is not a passion or attribute belongingto men that is not shared in by women, andvice versa.”
“But there is a vast difference between women and men.”
“Of course there is, but it is only a difference, not a division; moreover, it is only a surface difference, for the deeper you go into their natures, the less apparent is that difference. Use the touchstone of the profound emotions. Who has not seen a strong man weep like a woman, or a weak woman show the heroism of a man? Does sorrow affect men less than women? Does great joy affect women more than men?
“Is love a thing apart from man, and is it woman’s whole existence? It is not. That claptrap was born of Fancy, and the passion for saying a catchy thing. The love of men for women is just as powerful and as intimately connected with their existence as the love of women for men. Fidelity, the only true sign of real love, is exhibited by men in just the same proportion (allowing for the greater temptations of men) as it is by women.
“No; men and women are absolutely the same as human beings in all things essential, and the man who denies that is the man who sees the world with only one eye, and only uses the surface of his brain.
“Men and women arepartners. Partners in a difficult business. They have been partners for millions of years, and the differences between them are caused by the exigencies of the partnership.
Men—Women, and Women—Men
“Even in those surface mental differences that mark sex a man will often approximate to a woman in some particulars, and a woman to a man. These surface differences are not unalterable.
“Take the love of gossip. Listen to the talk of army men and navy men and club men.
“Take Vanity, and look at the nuts and the dudes and the macaronis.
“Take curiosity, and remember Coventry. Take love of dress—”
“And remember Mr. ——,” said she, laughing.
“Exactly. And let any one whowould controvert me consider his friends and relations critically, and tell me, with his hand on his heart, are the males destitute of female attributes and the females of male?
“They are not. They are all human beings, and to class them philosophically under the two divisions, Woman and Man, is a profound error and a commonplace error.
“It has led men to look on women as mysterious beings with essential motive springs and essential mental clockwork quite different from that of men.
“It has led to frightful volumes of gas being generated in certain skulls, like the skull, for instance, of X——, and some of the leaders of the Feminist movement, and the escape of this gas is making an alarming noise.
“When Ellen Key, for instance, says that ‘Human souls can be divided into organic and inorganic,’ and that ‘Ibsen makes the masculine soul inorganic, definitive, finished, determined; the femininesoul, on the other hand, he more often makes organic, growing in evolution,’ what does she mean?
“All this loose talk about souls being organic and inorganic I would not exchange for one small concrete fact—such as that Mrs. Jones is a better man than her husband, or that John Smith ‘ought to have been born a girl,’ facts that help to prove that not only are men’s and women’s bodies and ‘souls’ made of the same stuff, but that the sex difference is so unfixed a quality that we find women who are to all intents and purposes men, and men women.
“I will be bold enough to lay down a law based on experience, History, and Common-sense.
“There is not a womanly attribute of either body or soul that has not been born of the stuff that men are made of, and there is not an attribute of women that has not been developed to its womanly pitchnotby virtue of any mysterious energy rising from the source of ‘woman,’ but by purely externalconditions. And the same with regard to men.
Conditions, Again
“There you have the old ‘conditions’ coming up again. Let us get at facts.
“The æsthetic sense is pre-eminently womanly. You will say, at once, ‘This is not so. Women are rarely as good artists as men.’ I was not talking of art, but of the æsthetic sense.
“Every male artist inherits this sense from his mother. I am speaking from long observation and experience. It is the woman in the artist that paints; the woman in the poet that feels; the woman in the novelist that colours the work. Every man has the æsthetic sense more or less developed, but women have it,as a mass, more developed than men. Who, for instance, puts the flowers in the cottager’s window?
“I do not believe that the æsthetic sense in the greatest artist is more developed than it is in hundreds of thousands of women who never touch art. His power ofcraftsmanship, purely material and mechanical, and his power of constructive imagination raise him to the heights, and these powers only come from the superior conditions favourable to them under which men have dwelt.
“Go into any house, and you can tell if a woman lives there. Some delightful trace or touch betrays the fact. It may be a few flowers—it may be this or that, but the æsthetic touch is there; and in the home it is chiefly the woman who brings it. Now, why has woman developed this delightful attribute? It is a property of the mind; but men have it, too. Why has she developed it out of proportion to the man’s development in this particular?
“Since she shares it with the man, it is a common attribute, and it is the purest common-sense to believe that she developed it simply because the conditions affecting her life were more favourable to its growth than the conditions affecting the life of the man.
“Though the first scratchings of art in the cave-men’s dwellings were, most likely, the work of a man, who gave him the æsthetic basis of his artistic sense? Arguing from what we know—his mother.
“And why did his mother cultivate this sense more than his father?
“If you had seen his father tearing through forests after, and sometimes in front of, infuriated wild beasts, while his mother kept cave and looked after the children, you would have a complete and pictorial answer to that question.
“Even the weariness of the chase is disastrous to the æsthetic sense. Look at all the hunting men and women you know, if you doubt what I say.
“So, then, without any transcendental talk about ‘souls’ being organic or inorganic, we may say, arguing common-sensically, that women have developed one of the most distinguishing ‘womanly’ attributes, not because she is a woman, but because she is a humanbeing, and the conditions under which she has always lived have tended toward that development.
“Again—the love of a mother for her offspring, the one attribute of all attributes most distinctly and profoundly ‘womanly’: is it different in kind or essence from the love of a father for his offspring? Surely not, but it is more complex, more intimate, and more tender and more lovable, simply because the conditions under which it has grown have been more favourable to the development of this complexity, intimacy, and tenderness.
“It is the same beautiful thing, but more peculiarly cultivated, and it has grown in complexity while the man has been hunting, or trading, or fighting the world in some other way.
“Go through the whole category of those attributes whose superior development makes woman the flower of the earth. You will find not one which has developed on its own account owing to some mysterious chemistry of being peculiarto Woman,—all have developed from the common soil of humanity, owing to the superior conditions for their development in women.
“And the chief of those conditions has been Protection. The old conditions come up again. The man when he was hunting and killing beasts for his wife and children, and fighting for their existence, never imagined that he was by his labours founding Art and Poetry. He was. He was giving their germs conditions to grow in. Love, tenderness, gentleness, affection, morality: all were there in the cave with the woman. She suckled them with her children; she trained them in their growth with kisses—and slaps. They were the man’s no less than the woman’s, common to both their natures, but he left them in the cave with her to take care of, while he went hunting.
“Conditions have made woman what she is: the best and most beautiful thing in the world. And now Feminists want to change those conditions, just as Socialistswant to change the conditions affecting man.
“Both strike at the Home.”