Advocating soldiering even for the sex, Miss Schreiner says: " ... Undoubtedly, it has not been only the peasant-girl of France, who has carried latent and hid within her person the gifts that make the supreme general."
Here is fallacy again. Joan of Arc was, beyond all things, woman. Not the man in her, but the woman in her, and her Supra-conscious womanly attributes it was which (inspiring her by way of mystical voices and visions) impelled her so to transcend her woman-nature that without knowledge of arts military or of strategic science, as, too, without experience, she was able, by intuitive prescience, to lead her compatriots to victory. For the soldiers, perceiving the Light in her face, followed in awed confidence whithersoever she led.
In earlier days of civilisation, this intuitive and visionary faculty of woman was recognised and honoured.
II
In The Human Woman, Lady Grove presents a wholly contrary view to Miss Schreiner's.
With her, woman suffers less in being shut out from the labour-market than in having been driven from the home.
"The woman has been driven from her home into the labour-market. The fact of 82 per cent. of the women of this country working for their living is an ugly rebuff to the pretty platitudes about the home," she says.
" ... The stupendous mistake that has been made up to now is in supposing that it is men's judgment only that should decide questions, and hence the hopeless state of unravelled misery existing in the world, side by side with all the wealth and wonders of the age.
"If we examine the conditions of the working-classes, after years and years of male legislation, what a hideous set of conditions we find. Intemperance, bad-housing and the cruel struggle for existence among the poorer classes. And yet we spend over £22,000,000 annually on the education of these people. Surely there is something wrong somewhere. What is it that we, seeing this condition of things at our very door, have, as women, to be so grateful for in male legislation?"
The writer fails wholly to perceive that these factors she deplores as due to defective masculine legislation are effects less of faulty measures than of faulty Humanity. Measures are the gauge of the men who frame them. And men are very much the measure of the mothers who bore them. Those which she properly characterises as the "hideous" conditions of the working-classes, "intemperance, bad-housing and the cruel struggle for existence" are circumstances legislation cannot remedy unless the hearts of legislators are moved to do this, and their hands are empowered, moreover, to do it, by the collective will of those they represent.
Except all are content to subordinate their personal interests to the general welfare, and to improve their personal morale for their own and for the common good, Acts of Parliament can do but little. Drunkenness can be penalised by legislation, difficulties put in the way of obtaining drink. But intemperance can be effectually stamped out only by individual men and women so rising to higher levels of thought and self-control as voluntarily to become sober; or by men and women so improving in brain and constitution that the craving for drink—now recognised as a disease—no longer obsesses them.
Acts of Parliament may condemn insanitary and defective dwellings, may compel landlords to repair them to degrees of decency and comfort; may pull them down and build others in their stead. But none of these measures will eradicate the bad housing of dirty and comfortless, or of demoralised and demoralising homes. The best house possible becomes bad housing for its occupants when the woman at the head of it fails to do her duty therein, in consequence of industrial labour which leaves her neither time nor energy to make a clean, well-ordered, cosy and inspiring home of it; or because her own idleness or ignorance, her drunkenness or worthlessness, results in her neglect of it. Human conditions, like human measures, result from the personalities, good or bad, capable or incapable, of those who create them.