45. Effects of the War
The present series of wars, it seems likely, will continue for twenty
or thirty years, and perhaps longer. That the first clash was
inconclusive was shown brilliantly by the preposterous nature of the
peace finally reached--a peace so artificial and dishonest that the
signing of it was almost equivalent to anew declaration of war. At
least three new contests in the grand manner are plainly insight--one
between Germany and France to rectify the unnatural tyranny of a
weak and incompetent nation over
a strong and enterprising
nation, one between Japan and the United States for the mastery of
the Pacific, and one between England and the United States for the
control of the sea. To these must be added various minor struggles,
and perhaps one or two of almost major character: the effort of
Russia to regain her old unity and power, the effort of the Turks to
put down the slave rebellion (of Greeks, Armenians, Arabs,
etc.)which now menaces them, the effort of the Latin-Americans to
throw off the galling Yankee yoke, and the joint effort of Russia and
Germany (perhaps with England and Italy aiding) to get rid of such
international nuisances as the insane polish republic, the petty states
of the Baltic, and perhaps also most of the Balkan states. I pass
over the probability of a new mutiny in India, of the rising of China
against the Japanese, and of a general struggle for a new alignment
of boundaries in South America. All of these wars, great and small,
are probable; most of them are humanly certain. They will be
fought ferociously, and with the aid of destructive engines of the
utmost efficiency. They will bring about an unparalleled butchery of
men, and a large proportion
of these men will be under forty
years of age.
As a result there will be a shortage of husbands in Christendom, and
as a second result the survivors will be appreciably harder to snare
than the men of today. Every man of agreeable exterior and easy
means will be pursued, not merely by a few dozen or score of
women, as now, but by whole battalions and brigades of them, and
he will be driven in sheer self-defence into very sharp bargaining.
Perhaps in the end the state will have to interfere in the business, to
prevent the potential husband going to waste in the turmoil of
opportunity.
Just what form this interference is likely to take has not yet appeared
clearly. In France there is already a wholesale legitimization of
children born out of wedlock and in Eastern Europe there has been
a clamour for the legalization of polygamy, but these devices do not
meet the main problem, which is the encouragement of monogamy
to the utmost. A plan that suggests itself is the amelioration of the
position of the monogamous husband, now rendered increasingly
uncomfortable by the laws of most Christian states. I do not think
that the more intelligent sort of women, faced by a perilous
shortage of men, would object seriously to that amelioration.
They must see plainly that the present system, if it is carried much
further, will begin to work powerfully against their best interests, if
only by greatly reinforcing the disinclination to marriage that already
exists among the better sort of men. The woman of true discretion,
I am convinced, would much rather marry a superior man, even on
unfavourable terms, than make John Smith her husband, serf and
prisoner at one stroke.
The law must eventually recognize this fact and make provision for
it. The average husband, perhaps, deserves little succour. The
woman who pursues and marries him, though she may be moved by
selfish aims, should be properly rewarded by the state for her
service to it--a service surely not to be lightly estimated in a military
age. And that reward may conveniently take the form, as in the
United States, of statutes giving her title to a large share of his real
property and requiring him to surrender most of his income to her,
and releasing her from all obedience to him and from all obligation
to keep his house in order. But the
woman who aspires to
higher game should be quite willing, it seems to me, to resign some
of these advantages in compensation for the greater honour and
satisfaction of being wife to a man of merit, and mother to his
children. All that is needed is laws allowing her, if she will, to
resign her right of dower, her right to maintenance and her
immunity from discipline, and to make any other terms that she may
be led to regard as equitable. At present women are unable to make
most of these concessions even if they would: the laws of the
majority of western nations are inflexible. If, for example, an
Englishwoman should agree, by an ante-nuptial contract, to submit
herself to the discipline, not of the current statutes, but of the elder
common law, which allowed a husband to correct his wife
corporally with a stick no thicker than his thumb, it would be
competent for any sentimental neighbour to set the agreement at
naught by haling her husband before a magistrate for carrying it out,
and it is a safe wager that the magistrate would jail him.
This plan, however novel it may seem, is actually already in
operation. Many a
married woman, in order to keep her
husband from revolt, makes more or less disguised surrenders of
certain of the rights and immunities that she has under existing laws.
There are, for example, even in America, women who practise the
domestic arts with competence and diligence, despite the plain fact
that no legal penalty would be visited upon them if they failed to do
so. There are women who follow external trades and professions,
contributing a share to the family exchequer. There are women
who obey their husbands, even against their best judgments. There
are, most numerous of all, women who wink discreetly at husbandly
departures, overt or in mere intent, from the oath of chemical purity
taken at the altar. It is a commonplace, indeed, that many happy
marriages admit a party of the third part. There would be more of
them if there were more women with enough serenity of mind to see
the practical advantage of the arrangement. The trouble with such
triangulations is not primarily that they involve perjury or that they
offer any fundamental offence to the wife; if she avoids banal
theatricals, in fact, they commonly have the effect of augmenting
the husband's devotion
to her and respect for her, if only as the
fruit of comparison. The trouble with them is that very few men
among us have sense enough to manage them intelligently. The
masculine mind is readily taken in by specious values; the average
married man of Protestant Christendom, if he succumbs at all,
succumbs to some meretricious and flamboyant creature, bent only
upon fleecing him. Here is where the harsh realism of the
Frenchman shows its superiority to the sentimentality of the men of
the Teutonic races. A Frenchman would no more think of taking a
mistress without consulting his wife than he would think of standing
for office without consulting his wife. The result is that he is
seldom victimized. For one Frenchman ruined by women there are
at least a hundred Englishmen and Americans, despite the fact that a
hundred times as many Frenchmen engage in that sort of recreation.
The case of Zola is typical. As is well known, his amours were
carefully supervised by Mme. Zola from the first days of their
marriage, and inconsequence his life was wholly free from scandals
and his mind was never distracted from his work.
