The fact that women have a greater capacity than men for controlling
and concealing their emotions is not an indication that they are more
civilized, but a proof that they are less civilized. This capacity, so
rare today, and withal so valuable and worthy of respect, is a
characteristic of savages, not of civilized men, and its loss is one of
the penalties that the race has paid for the tawdry boon of
civilization. Your true savage, reserved, dignified, and courteous,
knows how to mask his feelings, even in the face of the most desperate
assault upon them; your civilized man is forever yielding to them.
Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical;
especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of
crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace
alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series
of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the
will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and
intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of
them. They are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are
ended only when it has spent its ferine fury. Here the effect of
civilization has been to reduce the noblest of the arts, once the
repository of an exalted etiquette and the chosen avocation of the very
best men of the race, to the level of a riot of peasants. All the wars
of Christendom are now disgusting and degrading; the conduct of them
has passed out of the hands of nobles and knights and into the hands of
mob-orators, money-lenders, and atrocity-mongers. To recreate one’s
self with war in the grand manner, as Prince Eugene, Marlborough and
the Old Dessauer knew it, one must now go among barbarian peoples.
Women are nearly always against war in modern times, for the reasons
brought forward to justify it are usually either transparently
dishonest or childishly sentimental, and hence provoke their scorn. But
once the business is begun, they commonly favour its conduct outrance,
and are thus in accord with the theory of the great captains of more
spacious days. In Germany, during the late war, the protests against
the Schrecklichkeit practised by the imperial army and navy did not
come from women, but from sentimental men; in England and the United
States there is no record that any woman ever raised her voice against
the blockade which destroyed hundreds of thousands of German children.
I was on both sides of the bloody chasm during the war, and I cannot
recall meeting a single woman who subscribed to the puerile doctrine
that, in so vast a combat between nations, there could still be
categories of non-combatants, with a right of asylum on armed ships and
in garrisoned towns. This imbecility was maintained only by men, large
numbers of whom simultaneously took part in wholesale massacres of such
non-combatants. The women were superior to such hypocrisy. They
recognized the nature of modern war instantly and accurately, and
advocated no disingenuous efforts to conceal it.