It needs no saying by me, that, apart from the Feminist extremist faction, the Woman's Movement includes a number of the sex characterised by the noblest ideals and impulse, as by the finest achievements; their creed and aims being pure of self-seeking or materialist ambitions for themselves or for their kin. And these it is to whom we owe it, that, amid the clamour and the combat of those others, the spirit of true Womanhood, devoted, wise and altruistic, is making itself felt everywhere in modern thought and modern progress. Such women for the most part discredit Feminism, in many cases directly oppose both its doctrine and practice.
VIII
The huge numerical preponderance of women must, of itself, presently swamp all masculine power and initiative in State affairs unless the political functions of the sexes be separated. Thenceforward, Vox populi must be the voice of Woman—man's having ceased to be heard.
And man's chiefest menace lies, be it reiterated to the point of tedium, in that momentous fact of the biological investment in woman, of the Racial Trustfund. For this is, at the same time, his sole heritage and that of the nation. And not only does it constitute her the custodian of Human Life and Faculty but it makes her arbitress as well of man's and of the nation's destiny.
In yielding his House of Parliament, man has surrendered not only his highest and most characteristic prerogative, but he has yielded the last exclusive stronghold of his manhood. An entrenchment indispensable to his difficult task of holding his own against a sex overwhelmingly superior in number, and chartered, by right of womanhood, with time-honoured baffling privileges which handicap and defeat him at all turns. A sex Nature has armoured with charms, moreover, and with weaknesses for his disarming; by appeal, on the one hand, to his chivalry, on the other, to his senses.
Entrenched in his last stronghold, he stood some chance of exerting his allotted dominance in life's affairs. All his strongholds invaded, he stands none.
For the rest, it can only be said that men who should reject their own, and elect members of the opposite sex to represent them in Parliament, would by that vote alone of non-confidence in the ability or the good faith of their kind, proclaim the human male a pitiful failure in species; an order without specialisation of brain, of character, or of moral, to give it essential values in Human concerns.
Woman, on the other hand, would stand acclaimed a Super-Being. One not only highly-specialised by God and Nature, as creatrix of the Race, and endowed with gifts to be the Racial nurse and guide and teacher, but, added to these most vital of human capacities, she would stand accredited by man with such superior qualifications also for the administration of the State as to lead him to adjudge her his superior in this capacity likewise. While her still further pre-eminence is now to be emphasised by pitting her on equal terms against the male, in all the Arts and Crafts, the professions and the businesses.
Truly—poor Super-Being that she is to be—burdened and spent by her super-tax of faculties and functions, she will need, indeed, to break into the Racial Trust-Fund, in order to equip herself for these her multifarious exactions. Because not only will it be her affliction to produce the Race and mother it, but she must provide for it too; moreover, must doctor it, play lawyer, parson and accountant to it; paint its pictures, mould its statuary, plan its architecture, build its houses, compose its music, blow its trumpets, beat its drums; and, over and beyond all these, must administer its politics, and serve it presently, no doubt, as Premier, Primate and Chancellor.
While it must be merely a matter of brief time, when, to her other tasks, will be added the manning of its Army, its Navy and Air-Services, and the serving of its guns.