III
The Feminist's faith in the masculine prerogative of Legislation, as being a possible panacea—had she but part in it—for every ill beneath the sun, is one of her gravest disqualifications for taking part therein.
Legislators who are over-confident in the efficacy of The Law express their over-confidence in terms of premature and unduly-coercive legislation. Procedure which, more often than not, frustrates the ends to which it was designed by the methods taken to secure these. Progress is personal, moreover. It is the sum of the advance of individuals. Legislation is the statutory formulation of public opinion; it is not the source of this. It merely crystallises public opinion. But before crystallisation of thought (as of chemical) sets in, saturation-point must first have been reached throughout the medium wherein it occurs.
Were any other development required to show the utter inadequacy of Legislation to attain its ends—when not reinforced by personal co-operation and initiative—this has been supplied in that latter-day demoralisation of young girls, the consequences whereof will be vastly more baneful and farther-reaching in contributing to national decline than even that other dire factor of the flower of our virile youth struck down before its prime.
Girls are fully protected by law to the age of sixteen. Yet many of the demoralised girls seen consorting freely with Tommy or Reggie, according to their class, are well below that age. Legislation is powerless, however, failing parental vigilance and co-operation to invoke its aid. Nevertheless, with its characteristic blind confidence in the male prerogative of Law, Feminism now advocates raising "the age of consent" to eighteen. But to do this would no more protect the girl under eighteen than the existing law protects the girl under sixteen—or, for that matter, protects the girl of twelve. Law can do little or nothing unless, as happens so seldom and happens too late, parents requisition its assistance for menace or for punishment. Mothers themselves should see to it that their little daughters have neither temptation nor opportunity to consent to their own ruin.
IV
We saw lately a militant rising of women against men and their laws; the object being to compel concessions from the male by way of violence. And so short-sighted were the leaders of this Movement that not only did they seek to prove their right to make laws, by breaking them, but they showed themselves ignorant of the first rudiments of combat by electing to fight the enemy with his own weapon—that weapon of Force which is man's especial Fitness and Woman's Unfitness. Woman's Unfitnesses have prevailed, it is true, in the counsels of progress, but, obviously, they have not prevailed, nor can they ever prevail by being pitted directly against masculine strengths. Her way of supremacy is one by far more subtle and sublime.
The leaders of Militancy seem never to have suspected, moreover, that while they were demanding to be liberated from all womanly privileges, they were, nevertheless, waging their deplorable skirmishes from behind a strong wall of such privileges. Men who should have adopted such tactics would have received but short and scant shrift.
Were the sex to be confronted, indeed, with that "Fair field and no favour!" for which some members of it are so clamorous, these would find it a grievously different thing from the privilege they paint it.