theory that it would be easier if
the rules were less exacting. This theory exposes their deficiency in
the chief character of their sex: accurate observation. The fact is
that, even if they possessed the freedom that men are supposed to
possess, they would still find it difficult to achieve their ambition,
for the average man, whatever his stupidity, is at least keen enough in
judgment to prefer a single wink from a genuinely attractive woman to
the last delirious favours of the typical suffragette. Thus the theory
of the whoopers and snorters of the cause, in its esoteric as well as
in its public aspect, is unsound. They are simply women who, in their
tastes and processes of mind, are two-thirds men, and the fact explains
their failure to achieve presentable husbands, or even consolatory
betrayal, quite as effectively as it explains the ready credence they
give to political an philosophical absurdities.

35. A Mythical Dare-Devil

The truth is that the picture of male carnality that such women conjure
up belongs almost wholly to fable, as I have already observed in
dealing with the sophistries of Dr. Eliza Burt Gamble, a paralogist on a
somewhat higher plane. As they depict him in their fevered treatises on
illegitimacy, white-slave trading and ophthalmia neonatorum, the average
male adult of the Christian and cultured countries leads a life of gaudy
lubricity, rolling magnificently from one liaison to another, and
with an almost endless queue of ruined milliners, dancers, charwomen,
parlour-maids and waitresses behind him, all dying of poison and
despair. The life of man, as these furiously envious ones see it, is
the life of a leading actor in a boulevard revue. He is a polygamous,
multigamous, myriadigamous; an insatiable and unconscionable debauche, a
monster of promiscuity; prodigiously unfaithful to his wife, and even to
his friends' wives; fathomlessly libidinous and superbly happy.

Needless to say, this picture bears no more relation to the facts than
a dissertation on major strategy by a military "expert" promoted from
dramatic critic. If the chief suffragette scare mongers (I speak without
any embarrassing naming of names) were attractive enough to men to get
near enough to enough men to know enough about them for their purpose
they would paralexia the Dorcas societies with no such cajoling libels.
As a matter of sober fact, the average man of our time and race is quite
incapable of all these in