The hard democracy of to-day will take no note of the relation of master and dependent. Each individual has all the rights which do not come violently in contact with other's rights, and has no duties which are not regulated by the law. Unselfishness is not contemplated in its scheme. Every individual has a right to all the goods of life he can get.
Women are beginning to accept these stern theories; beginning to apply the cruel logic of individualism. So far from the power to win his favour being her one hope of advancement or success, she does not hesitate to say on occasion that to yield to his affections is likely to hamper her in the race for fame or achievement. So far from the giving of an heir to his greatness being the highest possibility of her existence, she sometimes complains that such duties are an unfair demand upon her energies, which she wishes to devote exclusively to her own ends.
The universal unpopularity of domestic service proves that the duties of a woman are in themselves neither agreeable nor interesting. Where is the man in all the world who would exchange even the most laborious of his occupations for his wife's daily existence? The only considerations that can permanently reconcile human beings to unattractive labours is first the sentiment of loyalty—that such labours are performed for one who is loved and admired—and second the fine, noble old habit of submission. These incentives to duty, these helps to happiness, man has taken from woman by weakly shuffling off his mastership.
I accuse man of having wilfully cast from him the noblest crown in the world—of having wrongfully abdicated. War has at least this merit that it forces him to drop the vulgar careless ease of the bourgeois and resume for the time at least those bold and vigorous virtues which made him woman's hero and her cheerfully accepted master.
June 13.
Life.
It is a toy: a jingling bauble gay,
That children grasp with wondering, wide-eyed pleasure;
Soil it with too fierce use, and find their treasure
But rags and tinsel, which at close of day
Falls from their weary hands. It is a page
Whereon the child scribbles unmeaning scrawls.
Youth's glowing pen indites sweet madrigals.
Man tells a history, and sad old age—
Seeing that all the space that he hath writ before
But wrote in varying ways his folly large—
Sets "Vanity" upon the meagre marge.
And last Time prints "The End" and turns it o'er.