by the imperial army and navy did not come
from women, but from sentimental men; in England and the United States
there is no record that any woman ever raised her voice against the
blockade which destroyed hundreds of thousands of German children. I was
on both sides of the bloody chasm during the war, and I cannot recall
meeting a single woman who subscribed to the puerile doctrine that, in
so vast a combat between nations, there could still be categories of
non-combatants, with aright of asylum on armed ships and in garrisoned
towns. This imbecility was maintained only by men, large numbers of whom
simultaneously took part in wholesale massacres of such non-combatants.
The women were superior to such hypocrisy. They recognized the nature
of modern war instantly and accurately, and advocated no disingenuous
efforts to conceal it.

14. Pseudo-Anaesthesia

The feminine talent for concealing emotion is probably largely
responsible for the common masculine belief that women are devoid of
passion, and contemplate its manifestations in the male with something
akin to trembling. Here the talent itself is helped out by the fact that
very few masculine observers, on the occasions when they give attention
to the matter, are in a state of mind conducive to exact observation.
The truth is, of course, that there is absolutely no reason to believe
that the normal woman is passionless, or that the minority of women who
unquestionably are is of formidable dimensions. To be sure, the peculiar
vanity of men, particularly in the Northern countries, makes them place
a high value upon the virginal type of woman, and so this type tends to
grow more common by sexual selection, but despite that fact, it has by
no means superseded the normal type, so realistically described by the
theologians and publicists of the Middle Ages. It would, however, be
rash to assert that this long continued sexual selection has not made
itself felt, even in the normal type. Its chief effect, perhaps, is to
make it measurably easier for a woman to conquer and conceal emotion
than it is for a man. But this is a mere reinforcement of a native
quality or, at all events, a quality long antedating the rise of the
curious preference just mentioned. That preference obviously owes its
origin to the concept of private property and is most evident in those
countries in which the largest proportion of males are property owners,
i.e., in which the property-owning ca