In the interesting Buddhist book, "The Wheel of the Law," translated by
Henry Alabaster, there is an account of a certain priest who used to bless
a great king, saying, "May your majesty have the firmness of a crow, the
audacity of a woman, the endurance of a vulture, and the strength of an
ant." The priest then told anecdotes illustrating all of these qualities.
Who has not known occasions wherein some daring woman has been the Joan of
Arc of a perfectly hopeless cause, taken it up where men shrank, carried it
through where they had failed, and conquered by weapons which men would
never have thought of using, and would have lacked faith to employ even if
put into their hands? The wit, the resources, the audacity of women, have
been the key to history and the staple of novels, ever since that larger
novel called history began to be written.
How is it done? Who knows the secret of their success? All that any man can
say is that the heart takes a large share in the magic. Rogers asserts in
his "Table-Talk," that often, when doubting how to act in matters of
importance, he had received more useful advice from women than from men.
"Women have the understanding of the heart," he said, "which is better than
that of the head." Then this instinct, that begins from the heart, reaches
other hearts also, and through that controls the will. "Win hearts," said
Lord Burleigh to Queen Elizabeth, "and you have hands and purses;" and the
greatest of English sovereigns, in spite of ugliness and rouge, in spite of
coarseness and cruelty and bad passions, was adored by the nation that she
first made great.
It seems to me that women are a sort of cavalry force in the army of
mankind. They are not always to be relied upon for that steady "hammering
away," which was Grant's one method; but there is a certain Sheridan
quality about them, light-armed, audacious, quick, irresistible. They go
before the main army; their swift wits go scouting far in advance; they are
the first to scent danger, or to spy out chances of success. Their charge
is like that of a Tartar horde, or the wild sweep of the Apaches. They are
upon you from some wholly unexpected quarter; and this respectable,
systematic, well-drilled masculine force is caught and rolled over and over
in the dust, before the man knows what has hit him. Even if repelled and
beaten off, this formidable cavalry is unconquered: routed and in
confusion to-day, it comes back upon you to-morrow--fresh, alert, with
new devices, bringing new dangers. In dealing with it, as the French
complained of the Arabs in Algiers, "Peace is not to be purchased by
victory." And, even if all seems lost, with what a brilliant final charge
it will cover a retreat!
Decidedly, we need cavalry. In older countries, where it has been a merely
undisciplined and irregular force, it has often done mischief; and public
men, from Demosthenes down, have been lamenting that measures which the
statesman has meditated a whole year may be overturned in a day by a woman.
Under our American government we have foolishly attempted to leave out this
arm of the service altogether; and much of the alleged dulness of our
American history has come from this attempt. Those who have been trained in
the various reforms where woman has taken an equal part--the anti-slavery
reform especially--know well how much of the energy, the dash, the daring,
of those movements have come from her. A revolution with a woman in it is
stronger than the established order that omits her. It is not that she is
superior to man, but she is different from man; and we can no more spare
her than we could spare the cavalry from an army.