The humanities do not harden a woman: erudition may leave her loveliness and grace of form and mind; though as proficient a Greek and Latin scholar as any of the learned Italian women of the Renaissance, yet she may be the joy of her home and the angel of the poor. A love of learning, of art, of nature, keeps long young the heart in which it has a place. But the noisy conflicts of the polling-booths and the pitiless cruelties of the laboratories will not do so. There is in every woman, even in the best woman, a sleeping potentiality for crime, a curious possibility of fiendish evil. Even her maternal love is dangerously near an insane ferocity, which at times breaks out in infanticide or child-murder. Everything which tends to efface in her gentler and softer instincts tends to make of her a worse curse to the world than any man has ever been. If, indeed, in the centuries to come she should develop into the foe of man, which Dumas fils wishes her to become, it is by no means improbable that men, in sheer self-defence, will be compelled to turn on her and chain her down into the impotency of servitude once more.
If she once leave the power which nature has given her over her lovers, her friends, her sons, to become the opponent, the jealous rival and the acrid enemy of men, then men, it may be with surety predicted, will not long keep the gloves on as they fight with her, but with the brutality which is natural to the male animal and which is only curbed, not effaced, by the graceful hypocrisies of society and of courtship, will with his closed fists send her down into that lower place of la femelle de l’homme, from which it has been the effort and the boast of Christianity and of civilisation to raise her. Woman can never truly conquer man, except by those irresistible weapons which the Queen of the Amazons leaned on in her strife with Alexander.
Man has, I repeat, been very fair in his dealings with women, as far as legislation goes; he could easily have kept her from all time to the harem, and it has been a proof of his fairness, if not of his wisdom, that he has not done so. I have but little doubt but that, before long, he will cede to her clamour, and let her seat herself beside him, or opposite to him, on the benches of his representative houses. When he does, he will, I think, regret the loss of the harem.
There is a lax and perilous inclination in the mass of mankind, in these latter days of the century, to give anything which is much asked for.
‘To yield to clamour and to pallid fears,
What wisdom, temperance and truth deny;’
to let the reins go, and the steeds, which draw the chariot of national fate, gallop headlong, whither they will, downhill if they choose. The pessimism prevalent in the classes which think, lies at the root of their indifference to change, and their apathy and indolence before fresh demands. Men who do think at all, see how unsatisfactory all things are, how unreal all religions, how fictitious the bond of marriage, how mutable the laws of property, how appalling the future of the world, when there will not be even standing-room upon it for all the billions of peoples begotten. And they are, therefore, in that mood which makes them willing to try any new thing, even as men at death’s door languidly affirm their despairing readiness to try any nostrum or panacea tendered to them.
Woman may, will, very possibly, snatch from the nerveless hand of the sick man those legal and legislative rights which she covets. The political movements of modern times have been always in the direction of giving unlimited power to blind and unmeasured masses, whose use of that which is thus rashly given them the boldest prophet dare not predict. Such movement will probably give political power to women.
I confess that I, for one, dread the day which shall see this further development of that crude and restless character of the nineteenth century, which, with sublime self-contentment and self-conceit, it has presumed to call Progress.