It is a mistake to suppose that, because men bear arms in war, they are the chief sufferers in war, or make the chief sacrifices. The sexes suffer equally, for to win victory they make mutual and equal sacrifices, and in defeat they suffer mutually every conceivable and every inconceivable laceration of body, pride, and honor.
The supposition is erroneous that woman is less brave or less militant in war than man. In times of peace, when her help is not needed in the sterner affairs of life, she may be as gentle as a dove and as kind as a purring kitten; but, when her help is needed in stern affairs, she is never found wanting. When the cubs are in danger, "the female of the species is more deadly than the male."
The abject condition of Belgian women and children since the German invasion is merely typical of what women and children must inevitably suffer at the hands of invaders. It matters not whether a country be invaded by Germans, Frenchmen, or Englishmen, or by Americans. The stern exigencies of war require that the invaders shall bend every energy and employ every resource to the attainment of the main purpose—victory. The invaders themselves are compelled to make extreme sacrifices, and to bear extreme suffering and privation, and are not in a mood to take on more burden or to suffer extra privations, and, above all, to risk success, in order to alleviate the suffering of the enemy's women and children. Sympathy and mercy, however, do often lead them to be far kinder than would best suit the demands of stern necessity.
It was when Sherman found himself compelled to drive out the civil inhabitants of Atlanta, to prepare for his march to the sea, that in reply to protests on behalf of the women and children, he made his world-famous declaration, "War is hell; and we cannot civilize it or refine it."
The supreme duty of a nation is to safeguard its people from such a crisis and such a calamity. It is useless to lament the miseries of our women and children, after we have, through neglect of national defenses, brought the calamities of war upon them.
With strange inconsistency, the women of the Woman's Peace Party, though they bemoan the lot of the poor women and children of Belgium, are by their own acts inviting the same calamity to fall upon themselves and on their children.
Herbert Spencer observed that individual life is a tendency to establish an equilibrium between internal and external forces. This observation applies also to the life of social organizations, except that, when applied to nations, it should be differently stated, as follows—the life of a nation is the tendency to establish an equilibrium between internal forces, and also between those forces and external forces.
Opposing forces separately tend toward instability of equilibrium, but collectively, by operating against one another, they tend to the establishment of an equilibrium. Individual action in a group of individuals tends to heterogeneity, aggregated action to homogeneity. One of the mainsprings of progress is the pertinacity of enthusiasts and faddists. Even the self-appointed ego-fanatic moral reformers are often useful, because they tend to throw society out of balance. This rouses the great mass of the people to inquiry and raises them to a broader understanding, with the result that, in the end, pernicious propagandists, who have overshot the mark, are brought back nearer the mark, and the sane mass of the people brought nearer the mark. A fanatic reformer sometimes injects dynamic force into a static condition. It seems to be a rational assumption, therefore, that, in all things where organized feminist fanaticism of both men and women is today working evil, the great body of sane and normal men and women ought to exert their united influence to the full as a stabilizer, or equilibrator of the social organization.