But do not become cynical on this subject. Society has a great
multitude of grand men who know how to make home happy. When they come
to be husbands they evince a nobility of nature and a self-sacrificing
spirit that surprise even the wife. These are the men who cheerfully
sit in dark and dirty business offices, ten feet by twelve, in summer
time hard at work while the wives and daughters are off at Saratoga,
Mount Desert, or the White Sulphur. These are the men who, never
having had much education themselves, have their sons at Yale, and
Harvard, and Virginia University. These are the men who work
themselves to death by fifty years of age, and go out to Greenwood
leaving large estate and generous life-insurance provision for their
families.
There are husbands and fathers here by the hundreds who would die for
their households. If outlawry should ever become dominant in our
cities they would stand in their doorway, and with their own arm would
cleave down, one by one, fifty invaders face to face, foot to foot,
and every stroke a demolition. This is what makes an army in defence
in a country fight more desperately than an army of conquest. It is
not so much the abstract sentiment of a flag as it is wife, and
children, and home that turns enthusiasm into a fury. The world has
such men by the million, and the homunculi that infest all our
communities must not hinder women from appreciating the glory of true
manhood.