Woman is Nature's peacemaker and welder. She it is who, in the home, knits the loose ends of the multiple incongruous and turbulent human elements into social unities—families, friendly communities, townships and peoples—by her annealing powers of affection and sympathy, of charity and intuitive understanding.
"Keep the Home-fires burning!" sang our soldiers. No considerations of The British Constitution, the London Stock Exchange, or Worshipful Civic Company, fired them to heroism, spurred them to victory. But for the Home-fires burning in suburban villas, in four-roomed cottages or two-room lodgings—as equally in hereditary mansions—it was, our gallants dared and died, and reaped their glorious triumph.
My father, an early and an earnest advocate of Female enfranchisement, used to counsel Lord Beaconsfield that to enfranchise women would be to establish the Conservative party for a century, at least. Because nine out of ten women were, in those days, Conservative.
Since then, Feminism has been active, however. Less by way of direct propaganda of anarchy or Bolshevism, be it said, than by fostering that masculine bent and spirit of material unrest and discontent which destroy in women all the finer, fairer ideals and attributes of their intrinsic womanhood, and those self-denying ordinances which so sweeten and dignify the humblest tasks as to content the doers of them with the inspiring sense that they are worth the while. With the result that nothing so characterises the great mass of latter-day working women as a smouldering irrational and intemperate Socialism. And the Socialism of working-women (as, too, of the majority of working-men) is based on total ignorance of the impracticability and evil of making for universal equality in a vast Scheme of Things, the values and the ultimate successes whereof depend absolutely on preserving those highly-specialised diversities and inequalities, alike of faculty and bent, into which Life, with its countless degrees of evolutionary development, has progressively graded living creatures, brute and human. The innumerable orders and classes of our sociology are as inevitable as they are invaluable. Because they serve for stages of faculty and avocation upon that biological gradient of Ascent by which we climb.
As was pointed out earlier in this book, woman, although passive and reposeful of inherence, is variable and unstable of temperament; her powers being eternally at ebb and flux, in order that she may be the medium of those evolutionary mutations which engender human progress. A nature truly perilous when too great dominance is permitted the sex in affairs so momentous as those of State-administration, upon the firm stability and permanence whereof depend so many destinies. Because this evolutionary impulsiveness of hers is dangerously liable to express itself in irresponsible, chaotic and anarchical outbreaks. As history shows, wreckage of many once mighty, but now extinct, civilisations set in when the males thereof weakly, or basely, surrendered their manhood's rights of rule to a sex disqualified by its native non-conformability to rule in national and international policies.
Should women ever come to exercise political power identical with man's, they would be liable to subvert the whole national and international administration of their country on an impulse. Not solely from craving for novelty, but, too, as result of their inherent bent toward forward and precipitate movement, and their implicit faith in change as being necessarily reform.
Nations in which the feminine element is strong betray the native fickleness thereof in perpetual change of Ministry—even in frequent revolution. This element of instability is Ireland's curse, the flaw in her people's splendid Celtic faculty.
In view of the stern and strenuous and narrowly-rationalistic creed and claims of Feminism, as too of the steel-brained, steel-willed fighting women leading it, men may scoff, with sense of false security, at odds of danger from feminine weakness and fickleness in Feminist ranks. They scoffed just so at the menace of Prussianism—whereof Feminism is the female rendering.
It must always be remembered, moreover, that the civic and political privileges ceded to Woman, the Feminist, are ceded alike to that freakish, irresponsible creature Woman, the Femininist, who, to counterbalance the decline of woman-quality in those others of her sex, adds to her number and her freakishness as those others wax in number and in stern determination. And in a House of Commons of mixed sex, Feminists would find, to their undoing, that here as elsewhere the Ultra-Feminines would speedily outnumber and out-power themselves. The Movement, inaugurated in all the stern and sterile sex-insensibility of the Feminist code, would soon be dry-rotten and corrupt with the weaknesses bred of Effeminacy.
Nor should it be forgotten that the present Feminist leaders it was who, by their dangerous Bolshevist tactics of Militant Suffragism, proclaimed the anarchy seething in themselves and their adherents.