IV
That women may do useful work in male departments of politics and economics is quite beside the question. Far more valuable work is needed and is possible from them in their own especial fields of aptitude. In these latter, moreover, they would be fostering, in place of sacrificing, that morale and those distinctive talents Nature has specialised in them. While their withdrawal in toto from male political and economic functions would put men on their mettle, and stimulate their efforts and achievement therein.
Woman's influence, like that of Religion, is most potent when it is indirect and inspirational. Like the Church, when she exchanges her indirect and devotional ministrations for direct and material ones, temporal or militant, she destroys herself or the peoples she dominates. Or she destroys both.
It is common fallacy that so long as the world's work is done and its affairs tolerably well conducted, it is of no significance whatsoever by which sex these ends are attained.
Sight is lost of the intrinsic truth that Life exists for Man—not Man for Life; its purpose being the evolution of the human Species by way of the evolution of human Faculty. The world's work has no slightest value save as spur and instrument of human education. And the evolution of the dual orders of human Faculty having differentiated the human Species into two sexes, each representing a wholly different order of Faculty—obviously the perfection of both orders of Faculty and, accordingly, the further evolution of both sexes wherein these orders are respectively specialised, can be attained only by the exercise, by each order, of the rôle and the functions that best evoke its powers. If, therefore, the male sex repudiates its allotted rôle and functions, and forfeits, in consequence, the education of its distinctive talents and moral, by shelving its responsibilities upon the other sex, howsoever capable a substitute this other sex may prove itself, man acts as foolishly and fatuously as the schoolboy who shirks his schooling and the discipline thereof, by enlisting his capable sister to do his lessons for him.
It is, at the same time, man's duty and his privilege manfully to shoulder and ably to perform his own allotted part in Life's affairs. Evading this, or from a false conception of chivalry allowing woman to usurp a share therein, he degenerates inevitably; in default of his natural spur to development. Moreover he obliges—or connives at woman doing likewise, in respect of her allotted part.
That he has already grown so slack, his virile pride and enterprise have so far lapsed, as to reconcile him to woman's usurpation of his masculine functions and prerogatives should warn him of incipient dry-rot in him. As too, the portentous fact that had he not declined in physical and mental calibre, she could never so readily and efficiently have taken his place as we have seen her doing. So efficiently, indeed, that he will be hard put to it to regain and to retain his lost professional and industrial footing, by proving himself appreciably the better man.
As Dr. Havelock Ellis says, if they are to cope with the new Feminism, men must needs look to their laurels and produce a new Masculinism. For truly these weak-chinned, neurotic young men of the rising generation are no match at all for the heavy-jawed, sinewy, resolute young women Feminist aims and methods are giving us.
On every side, in politics, literature, journalism, oratory, commerce, even in scientific invention, women are swiftly coming up abreast of men, and threaten shortly to out-distance them.—And this upon their own ground.