ELIZABETH CADY STANTON
It appalls the normal mind to stop and consider the criminal blunders made by the educated Prussian and the educated Englishman prior to 1914. No statesman had the vision to see what was going to happen to the man-made world.
Since it is a question of intuition and feeling versus cold reason and business logic, let us see which side is the more vital and all-enduring. Let us consider for a brief space what it is that influences people. Let us consider the influence exerted by the arts. What is music? Emotion created by sound vibrations. What is dramatic acting? Emotion created by vocal vibrations combined with gesture and physical movement. Has anyone ever witnessed automatic acting that left a profound impression?
Orators become famous when they unite deep feeling with knowledge. But what gives expression? The power of awakening emotion in others. Feeling is always more convincing than intellect. Intellect is full of theories, notions and superstitions. But where you find deep feeling combined with knowledge, you will find reason directed by qualities which pass through the surface and attain the heart-throbs of the real.
There are many kinds of emotion. There is the hard emotion of anger, the confused emotion of fear, the painful emotion of jealousy, the indescribable emotion of despair, the radiant emotion of joy. But the greatest emotion of all is that of knowledge united to feeling.
Men, as a rule, speak of emotion as a weakness, and they confuse it with impulse—a very different thing. Impulse is often the result of weak nerves, uncontrolled by the will; but we must not confuse it with the emotional quality which underlies all great achievement in art, literature, philosophy and personality. The more impulsive the individual is, the more primitive the reasoning faculty.
English and American business men are limited in general knowledge. I have never been able to discover any distinctive difference between the two. In France and Italy many business men are able to discuss art, literature and music on the same level with the masters. The Latin races and the Celtic races possess a culture that can be traced back for two or three thousand years, but Anglo-Saxon culture only to the time of the Saxon invasion. The Anglo-Saxons were the mushrooms of our civilization. They were a stolid business people who lacked creative genius.
The outstanding intellect of England today is Celtic. The Scotch, the Irish and the Welsh combine emotion and power with tenacity of purpose, and it is this Celtic element that keeps America in the front rank of nations.
What women have been opposing is the primitive monotony of the Anglo-Saxon trend. It has meant a mixture of politics and commerce so primitive and so naive that Frenchmen are amazed when they visit America and note the striking difference between the culture of the women and the mentality of the average man.