It is my sincere hope that nothing I have here exhibited will be
mistaken by the nobility and gentry for moral indignation. No such
feeling, in truth, is in my heart. Moral judgments, as old Friedrich
used to say, are foreign to my nature. Setting aside the vast herd
which shows no definable character at all, it seems to me that the
minority distinguished by what is commonly regarded as an excess of sin
is very much more admirable than the minority distinguished by an
excess of virtue. My experience of the world has taught me that the
average wine-bibber is a far better fellow than the average
prohibitionist, and that the average rogue is better company than the
average poor drudge, and that the worst white, slave trader of my
acquaintance is a decenter man than the best vice crusader. In the same
way I am convinced that the average woman, whatever her deficiencies,
is greatly superior to the average man. The very ease with which she
defies and swindles him in several capital situations of life is the
clearest of proofs of her general superiority. She did not obtain her
present high immunities as a gift from the gods, but only after a long
and often bitter fight, and in that fight she exhibited forensic and
tactical talents of a truly admirable order. There was no weakness of
man that she did not penetrate and take advantage of. There was no
trick that she did not put to effective use. There was no device so
bold and inordinate that it daunted her.
The latest and greatest fruit of this feminine talent for combat is the
extension of the suffrage, now universal in the Protestant countries,
and even advancing in those of the Greek and Latin rites. This fruit
was garnered, not by an attack en masse, but by a mere foray. I believe
that the majority of women, for reasons that I shall presently expose,
were not eager for the extension, and regard it as of small value
today. They know that they can get what they want without going to the
actual polls for it; moreover, they are out of sympathy with most of
the brummagem reforms advocated by the professional suffragists, male
and female. The mere statement of the current suffragist platform, with
its long list of quack sure-cures for all the sorrows of the world, is
enough to make them smile sadly. In particular, they are sceptical of
all reforms that depend upon the mass action of immense numbers of
voters, large sections of whom are wholly devoid of sense. A normal
woman, indeed, no more believes in democracy in the nation than she
believes in democracy at her own fireside; she knows that there must be
a class to order and a class to obey, and that the two can never
coalesce. Nor is she susceptible to the stock sentimentalities upon
which the whole democratic process is based. This was shown very
dramatically in the United States at the national election of 1920, in
which the late Woodrow Wilson was brought down to colossal and
ignominious defeat—the first general election in which all American
women could vote. All the sentimentality of the situation was on the
side of Wilson, and yet fully three-fourths of the newly-enfranchised
women voters voted against him. He is, despite his talents for
deception, a poor popular psychologist, and so he made an inept effort
to fetch the girls by tear-squeezing: every connoisseur will remember
his bathos about breaking the heart of the world. Well, very few women
believe in broken hearts, and the cause is not far to seek: practically
every woman above the age of twenty-five has a broken heart. That is to
say, she has been vastly disappointed, either by failing to nab some
pretty fellow that her heart was set on, or, worse, by actually nabbing
him, and then discovering him to be a bounder or an imbecile, or both.
Thus walking the world with broken hearts, women know that the injury
is not serious. When he pulled out the Vox angelica stop and began
sobbing and snuffling and blowing his nose tragically, the learned
doctor simply drove all the women voters into the arms of the Hon.
Warren Gamaliel Harding, who was too stupid to invent any issues at
all, but simply took negative advantage of the distrust aroused by his
opponent.
Once the women of Christendom become at ease in the use of the ballot,
and get rid of the preposterous harridans who got it for them and who
now seek to tell them what to do with it, they will proceed to a
scotching of many of the sentimentalities which currently corrupt
politics. For one thing, I believe that they will initiate measures
against democracy—the worst evil of the present-day world. When they
come to the matter, they will certainly not ordain the extension of the
suffrage to children, criminals and the insane in brief, to those ever
more inflammable and knavish than the male hinds who have enjoyed it
for so long; they will try to bring about its restriction, bit by bit,
to the small minority that is intelligent, agnostic and
self-possessed—say six women to one man. Thus, out of their greater
instinct for reality, they will make democracy safe for a democracy.
The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woes, is his
stupendous capacity for believing the incredible. He is forever
embracing delusions, and each new one is worse than all that have gone
before. But where is the delusion that women cherish—I mean habitually,
firmly, passionately? Who will draw up a list of propositions, held and
maintained by them in sober earnest, that are obviously not true? (I
allude here, of course, to genuine women, not to suffragettes and other
such pseudo-males). As for me, I should not like to undertake such a
list. I know of nothing, in fact, that properly belongs to it. Women,
as a class, believe in none of the ludicrous rights, duties and pious
obligations that men are forever gabbling about. Their superior
intelligence is in no way more eloquently demonstrated than by their
ironical view of all such phantasmagoria. Their habitual attitude
toward men is one of aloof disdain, and their habitual attitude toward
what men believe in, and get into sweats about, and bellow for, is
substantially the same. It takes twice as long to convert a body of
women to some new fallacy as it takes to convert a body of men, and
even then they halt, hesitate and are full of mordant criticisms. The
women of Colorado had been voting for 21 years before they succumbed to
prohibition sufficiently to allow the man voters of the state to adopt
it; their own majority voice was against it to the end. During the
interval the men voters of a dozen non-suffrage American states had
gone shrieking to the mourners’ bench. In California, enfranchised in
1911, the women rejected the dry revelation in 1914. National
prohibition was adopted during the war without their votes—they did not
get the franchise throughout the country until it was in the
Constitution—and it is without their support today. The American man,
despite his reputation for lawlessness, is actually very much afraid of
the police, and in all the regions where prohibition is now actually
enforced he makes excuses for his poltroonish acceptance of it by
arguing that it will do him good in the long run, or that he ought to
sacrifice his private desires to the common weal. But it is almost
impossible to find an American woman of any culture who is in favour of
it. One and all, they are opposed to the turmoil and corruption that it
involves, and resentful of the invasion of liberty underlying it. Being
realists, they have no belief in any program which proposes to cure the
natural swinishness of men by legislation. Every normal woman believes,
and quite accurately, that the average man is very much like her
husband, John, and she knows very well that John is a weak, silly and
knavish fellow, and that any effort to convert him into an archangel
overnight is bound to come to grief. As for her view of the average
creature of her own sex, it is marked by a cynicism so penetrating and
so destructive that a clear statement of it would shock beyond
endurance.