es in overestimating the courage and enterprise
of man. They themselves, barring mere physical valour, a quality in
which the average man is far exceeded by the average jackal or wolf,
have more of both. If the consequences, to a man, of the slightest
descent from virginity were one-tenth as swift and barbarous as the
consequences to a young girl in like case, it would take a division of
infantry to dredge up a single male flouter of that lex talionis in
the whole western world. As things stand today, even with the odds so
greatly in his favour, the average male hesitates and is thus not lost.
Turn to the statistics of the vice crusaders if you doubt it. They show
that the weekly receipts of female recruits upon the wharves of sin
are always more than the demand; that more young women enter upon the
vermilion career than can make respectable livings at it; that the
pressure of the temptation they hold out is the chief factor in
corrupting our undergraduates. What was the first act of the American
Army when it began summoning its young clerks and college boys and
plough hands to conscription camps? Its first act was to mark off a
so-called moral zone around each camp, and to secure it with trenches
and machine guns, and to put a lot of volunteer termagants to patrolling
it, that the assembled jeunesse might be protected in their rectitude
from the immoral advances of the adjacent milkmaids and poor working
girls.

37. Women as Martyrs

I have given three reasons for the prosperity of the notion that man
is a natural polygamist, bent eternally upon fresh dives into Lake
of Brimstone No. 7. To these another should be added: the thirst for
martyrdom which shows itself in so many women, particularly under the
higher forms of civilization. This unhealthy appetite, in fact, may be
described as one of civilization's diseases; it is almost unheard of
in more primitive societies. The savage woman, unprotected by her rude
culture and forced to heavy and incessant labour, has retained her
physical strength and with it her honesty and self-respect. The
civilized woman, gradually degenerated by a greater ease, and helped
down that hill by the pretensions of civilized man, has turned her
infirmity into a virtue, and so affects a feebleness that is actually
far beyond the reality. It is by this route that she can most
effectively disarm masculine distrust, and get what she wants. Man is
flattered by any acknowledgment, ho