In these countries there is practically no difference between a woman and a slave, and even a beast of burden. The Arab, the Kaffir, the Zulu, the Soudanese, can be seen on horseback, or walking majestically with a blanket slung over his shoulder, while his womankind are following, carrying a baby on their backs, a pail of water or a cask of beer on their heads, and the rest of the burden in their hands.
These primitive creatures find all this quite natural, men as well as women, and their greatest source of amusement is to see a white man carry his wife's umbrella. How they pity and scorn that poor white man!
They look at him, and seem to say: 'Aren't you a man?' The more these men treat their women as inferior beings, the more highly the women think of the men, and the more respect they feel for them. And we would probably do the same if love, which we men do take seriously, did not subject, and even enslave, us to women.
Indeed, this would be our right—our Divine right—and women, I repeat, are very impolitic to compel us to remind them of what happened at the beginning.
We men have a Divine right to rule over women, and if we use that power given to us only with the greatest moderation, it is because we love women seriously.
This love for you, ladies, is your only safeguard. See how imprudent of you it is to come and ask us if we take love seriously.
Not only do we take love seriously, but I believe that there is nothing else in this world that is taken so seriously.
Love is the only universally serious thing in the world. Ask scientists what they think of actors. They will tell you that there is no such despicable profession in the world. Yet actors—and rightly, too—take their art seriously.
Literature and music appear to those who cultivate them the most absolutely serious things in existence, yet men of business, whose chief object in life is money-making, shrug their shoulders, and feel ready to say, like a London Lord Mayor to his son, who wanted to devote his life to literature: 'I will be very much obliged to you if you will decide on choosing an honest and respectable calling.'