hing of the first value at hazard. He is honorable, perhaps, in
gambling, for gambling is a mere vice, but it is quite unusual for him
to be honorable in business, for business is bread and butter. He is
honorable (so long as the stake is trivial) in his sports, but he seldom
permits honor to interfere with his perjuries in a lawsuit, or with
hitting below the belt in any other sort of combat that is in earnest.
The history of all his wars is a history of mutual allegations of
dishonorable practices, and such allegations are nearly always well
grounded. The best imitation of honor that he ever actually achieves in
them is a highly self-conscious sentimentality which prompts him to be
humane to the opponent who has been wounded, or disarmed, or otherwise
made innocuous. Even here his so-called honor is little more than a form
of playacting, both maudlin and dishonest. In the actual death-struggle
he invariably bites.

Perhaps one of the chief charms of woman lies precisely in the fact that
they are dishonorable, i.e., that they are relatively uncivilized. In
the midst of all the puerile repressions and inhibitions that hedge them
round, they continue to show a gipsy spirit. No genuine woman ever
gives a hoot for law if law happens to stand in the way of her private
interest. She is essentially an outlaw, a rebel, what H. G. Wells
calls a nomad. The boons of civilization are so noisily cried up by
sentimentalists that we are all apt to overlook its disadvantages.
Intrinsically, it is a mere device for regimenting men. Its perfect
symbol is the goose-step. The most civilized man is simply that man who
has been most successful in caging and harnessing his honest and natural
instincts-that is, the man who has done most cruel violence to his own
ego in the interest of the commonweal. The value of this commonweal is
always overestimated. What is it at bottom? Simply the greatest good to
the greatest number--of petty rogues, ignoramuses and poltroons.

The capacity for submitting to and prospering comfortably under this
cheese-monger's civilization is far more marked in men than in women,
and far more in inferior men than in men of the higher categories. It
must be obvious to even so pathetic an ass as a university professor of
history that very few of the genuinely first-rate men of the race
have been, wholly civilized, in the sense that the term is employed
in newspapers and in the pulpit. Think of Caesar, Bonaparte, Luth