31. The Crowning Victory
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
them 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 hat 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.
