When this state is reached, if the girl has no vigilant protector or guardian, and the man is not strongly endowed with social instinct, the result is usually and inevitably seduction, particularly if the man shows some mastery in sex, and some understanding of it too. And, indeed, when one considers the forces that are active here; when, moreover, one considers the temptations that are elevated here to the nth power, the wonder is not that seduction occasionally occurs among positive couples, but that it does not always occur, that it is not the rule. Only man’s social instinct can prevent it. Only man’s social instinct remains, and is strong enough to prevent it. Do not, however, let us confound the social instinct of the positive man, which is strong enough to stand up to his reproductive instinct, to control it, and to make it wait and consider responsibilities, with the so-called “self-control” of the negative young man, who could love his negative girl for half a century without ever desiring more than to squeeze her pale thin hand, while she feels exactly the same about him.[36]
Of course, in countries like France, where positiveness on both sides is at such a high pitch of intensity that it actually fills the atmosphere of every room and makes every mixed company electric, and also where the social instinct of men is declining more and more every year, the only possible check on wholesale seductions is a vigilant and inexorable protector or guardian, who watches over the jeune fille de famille, until she is married, and does so with such unabating zeal that it can truly be said that a respectable French girl is always being watched.
As a matter of fact, if the same custom of vigilant supervision of the young girl does not prevail in England, it is a bad rather than a good sign.
It is a bad sign for the following reasons: (1) It is waived either because it is a generally recognized thing that the Englishman’s social instinct is of a higher order than the Frenchman’s (which is not the case); or (2), because it is a generally recognized fact that the Englishman is safer, i.e. less inflammable, i.e. less exuberant sexually, i.e. less positive than the Frenchman (which is the case).
I think it would be hard to prove that the social instinct of the Englishman is of a higher kind than that of the Frenchman. There is nothing to show that there is more order in England than in France, more social harmony, more mastery of social problems. There are absolutely no grounds whatever for assuming that there is less social misery in England than in France, less social muddle, less social strife. Nor if we go to the next highest products of the social instinct, which are represented by the sense of order manifesting itself in artistic productions, can we say that there is more Art, or a higher kind of Art, in England than in France. In fact, if we draw these comparisons at all, we must in fairness conclude that if there is any difference, that difference is undoubtedly to the advantage of the Frenchman. But for the sake of this discussion it is sufficient for me to assume that the social instincts of the Frenchman and Englishman respectively are about equal.
Well, then, if this is so, it must be some other circumstance that accounts for the enormous freedom allowed in this country to the girl turned sixteen, in her intercourse with men of her own generation and older.
There can be no doubt that, in the first place, the English girl is generally a little less positive to Life and therefore to man than the French girl; this accounts for a good deal. There can be no doubt either that there is a very much larger sprinkling of negative girls in England than in France—girls, that is to say, who are happy and content as spinsters, or whose passions are so tepid as to enable them to endure platonic relations with men, and to resist men quite successfully for interminable periods.
A few facts alone, apart from the evidence that can be gathered first hand by all those who know France and England well, will be sufficient to prove this.
In 1910, although France had for many years admitted women to the hospitals, to the Bar and to the chemist’s dispensary, there were out of a total of 13,000 French doctors only eighty-three women[37]; there were only two women barristers—one in Paris and one at Toulouse, and there were only three women chemists—one in Paris and two at Montpelier.
To take the profession of the Bar alone, think how very many more women-barristers we should have in England in the space of five years if the Bar had been opened to women!