And yet—our Herminia was a woman after all. Some three years later,
when Harvey Kynaston came to visit her one day, and told her he was
really going to be married—what sudden thrill was this that passed
through and through her. Her heart stood still. She was aware that she
regretted the comparative loss of a very near and dear acquaintance.
She knew she was quite wrong. It was the leaven of slavery. But these
monopolist instincts, which have wrought more harm in the world we live
in than fire or sword or pestilence or tempest, hardly die at all as
yet in a few good men, and die, fighting hard for life, even in the
noblest women.
She reasoned with herself against so hateful a feeling. Though she knew
the truth, she found it hard to follow. No man indeed is truly
civilised till he can say in all sincerity to every woman of all the
women he loves, to every woman of all the women who love him, “Give me
what you can of your love and of yourself; but never strive for my sake
to deny any love, to strangle any impulse that pants for breath within
you. Give me what you can, while you can, without grudging, but the
moment you feel you love me no more, don’t pollute your own body by
yielding it up to a man you have ceased to desire; don’t do injustice
to your own prospective children by giving them a father whom you no
longer respect, or admire, or yearn for. Guard your chastity well. Be
mine as much as you will, as long as you will, to such extent as you
will, but before all things be your own; embrace and follow every
instinct of pure love that nature, our mother, has imparted within
you.” No woman, in turn, is truly civilised till she can say to every
man of all the men she loves, of all the men who love her, “Give me
what you can of your love, and of yourself; but don’t think I am so
vile, and so selfish, and so poor as to desire to monopolise you.
Respect me enough never to give me your body without giving me your
heart; never to make me the mother of children whom you desire not and
love not.” When men and women can say that alike, the world will be
civilised. Until they can say it truly, the world will be as now a
jarring battlefield for the monopolist instincts.
Those jealous and odious instincts have been the bane of humanity. They
have given us the stiletto, the Morgue, the bowie-knife. Our race must
inevitably in the end outlive them. The test of man’s plane in the
scale of being is how far he has outlived them. They are surviving
relics of the ape and tiger. But we must let the ape and tiger die. We
must cease to be Calibans. We must begin to be human.
Patriotism is the one of these lowest vices which most often
masquerades in false garb as a virtue. But what after all _is_
patriotism? “My country, right or wrong, and just because it is my
country!” This is clearly nothing more than collective selfishness.
Often enough, indeed, it is not even collective. It means merely, “_My_
business interests against the business interests of other people, and
let the taxes of my fellow-citizens pay to support them.” At other
times it means pure pride of race, and pure lust of conquest: “_My_
country against other countries! _My_ army and navy against other
fighters! _My_ right to annex unoccupied territory against the equal
right of all other peoples! _My_ power to oppress all weaker
nationalities, all inferior races!” It _never_ means or can mean
anything good or true. For if a cause be just, like Ireland’s, or once
Italy’s, then ’tis a good man’s duty to espouse it with warmth, be it
his own or another’s. And if a cause be bad, then ’tis a good man’s
duty to oppose it, tooth and nail, irrespective of your patriotism.
True, a good man will feel more sensitively anxious that strict justice
should be done by the particular community of which chance has made him
a component member than by any others; but then, people who feel
acutely this joint responsibility of all the citizens to uphold the
moral right are not praised as patriots but reviled as unpatriotic. To
urge that our own country should strive with all its might to be
better, higher, purer, nobler, more generous than other countries—the
only kind of patriotism worth a moment’s thought in a righteous man’s
eyes, is accounted by most men both wicked and foolish.
Then comes the monopolist instinct of property. That, on the face of
it, is a baser and more sordid one. For patriotism at least can lay
claim to some sort of delusive expansiveness beyond mere individual
interest; whereas property stops short at the narrowest limits of
personality. It is no longer “Us against the world!” but “Me against my
fellow-citizens!” It is the last word of the intercivic war in its most
hideous avatar. Look how it scars the fair face of our common country
with its anti-social notice-boards, “Trespassers will be prosecuted.”
It says in effect, “This is my land. As I believe, God made it; but _I_
have acquired it, and tabooed it to myself, for my own enjoyment. The
grass on the wold grows green; but only for me. The mountains rise
glorious in the morning sun; no foot of man, save mine and my gillies’,
shall tread them. The waterfalls leap white from the ledge in the glen;
avaunt there, non-possessors; your eye shall never see them. For you
the muddy street; for me, miles of upland. All this is my own. And I
choose to monopolise it.”
Or is it the capitalist? “I will add field to field,” he cries aloud,
despite his own Scripture; “I will join railway to railway. I will
juggle into my own hands all the instruments for the production of
wealth that my cunning can lay hold of; and I will use them for my own
purposes against producer and consumer alike with impartial egoism.
Corn and coal shall lie in the hollow of my hand. I will enrich myself
by making dear by craft the necessaries of life; the poor shall lack,
that I may roll down fair streets in needless luxury. Let them starve,
and feed me!” That temper, too, humanity must outlive. And those who
are incapable of outliving it of themselves must be taught by stern
lessons, as in the splendid uprising of the spirit of man in France,
that their race has outstripped them.
Next comes the monopoly of human life, the hideous wrong of slavery.
That, thank goodness, is now gone. ’Twas the vilest of them all—the
nakedest assertion of the monopolist platform: “You live, not for
yourself, but wholly and solely for me. I disregard your claims to your
own body and soul, and use you as my chattel.” That worst form has
died. It withered away before the moral indignation even of existing
humanity. We have the satisfaction of seeing one dragon slain, of
knowing that one monopolist instinct at least is now fairly bred out of
us.
Last, and hardest of all to eradicate in our midst, comes the monopoly
of the human heart, which is known as marriage. Based upon the
primitive habit of felling the woman with a blow, stunning her by
repeated strokes of the club or spear, and dragging her off by the hair
of her head as a slave to her captor’s hut or rock-shelter, this ugly
and barbaric form of serfdom has come in our own time by some strange
caprice to be regarded as of positively divine origin. The Man says now
to himself, “This woman is mine. Law and the Church have bestowed her
on me. Mine for better, for worse; mine, drunk or sober. If she
ventures to have a heart or a will of her own, woe betide her! I have
tabooed her for life: let any other man touch her, let her so much as
cast eyes on any other man to admire or desire him—and, knife, dagger,
or law-court, they shall both of them answer for it.” There you have in
all its native deformity another monopolist instinct—the deepest-seated
of all, the grimmest, the most vindictive. “She is not yours,” says the
moral philosopher of the new dispensation; “she is her own; release
her! The Turk hales his offending slave, sews her up in a sack, and
casts her quick into the eddying Bosphorus. The Christian Englishman,
with more lingering torture, sets spies on her life, drags what he
thinks her shame before a prying court, and divorces her with
contumely. All this is monopoly, and essentially slavery. Mankind must
outlive it on its way up to civilisation.”
And then the Woman, thus taught by her lords, has begun to retort in
these latter days by endeavoring to enslave the Man in return. Unable
to conceive the bare idea of freedom for both sexes alike, she seeks
equality in an equal slavery. That she will never achieve. The future
is to the free. We have transcended serfdom. Women shall henceforth be
the equals of men, not by levelling down, but by levelling up; not by
fettering the man, but by elevating, emancipating, unshackling the
woman.
All this Herminia knew well. All these things she turned over in her
mind by herself on the evening of the day when Harvey Kynaston came to
tell her of his approaching marriage. Why, then, did she feel it to
some extent a disappointment? Why so flat at his happiness? Partly, she
said to herself, because it is difficult to live down in a single
generation the jealousies and distrusts engendered in our hearts by so
many ages of harem life. But more still, she honestly believed, because
it is hard to be a free soul in an enslaved community. No unit can
wholly sever itself from the social organism of which it is a
corpuscle. If all the world were like herself, her lot would have been
different. Affection would have been free; her yearnings for sympathy
would have been filled to the full by Harvey Kynaston or some other. As
it was, she had but that one little fraction of a man friend to solace
her; to resign him altogether to another woman, leaving herself
bankrupt of love, was indeed a bitter trial to her.
Yet for her principles’ sake and Dolly’s, she never let Harvey Kynaston
or his wife suspect it; as long as she lived, she was a true and
earnest friend at all times to both of them.