instincts. For the things which are the
simplest so long as they are undisputed invariably become the subtlest
when once they are disputed: which was what Joubert meant, I suppose,
when he said, "It is not hard to believe in God if one does not define
Him." When the evil instincts of old Foulon made him say of the poor,
"Let them eat grass," the good and Christian instincts of the poor
made them hang him on a lamppost with his mouth stuffed full of that
vegetation. But if a modern vegetarian aristocrat were to say to the
poor, "But why don't you like grass?" their intelligences would be much
more taxed to find such an appropriate repartee. And this matter of the
functions of the sexes is primarily a matter of the instincts; sex and
breathing are about the only two things that generally work best
when they are least worried about. That, I suppose, is why the same
sophisticated age that has poisoned the world with Feminism is also
polluting it with Breathing Exercises. We plunge at once into a forest
of false analogies and bad blundering history; while almost any man or
woman left to themselves would know at least that sex is quite different
from anything else in the world.
There is no kind of comparison possible between a quarrel of man and
woman (however right the woman may be) and the other quarrels of slave
and master, of rich and poor, or of patriot and invader, with which the
Suffragists deluge us every day. The difference is as plain as noon;
these other alien groups never came into contact until they came into
collision. Races and ranks began with battle, even if they afterwards
melted into amity. But the very first fact about the sexes is that they
like each other. They seek each other: and awful as are the sins and
sorrows that often come of their mating, it was not such things that
made them meet. It is utterly astounding to note the way in which modern
writers and talkers miss this plain, wide, and overwhelming fact: one
would suppose woman a victim and nothing else. By this account ideal,
emancipated woman has, age after age, been knocked silly with a stone
axe. But really there is no fact to show that ideal, emancipated woman
was ever knocked silly; except the fact that she is silly. And that
might have arisen in so many other ways. Real responsible woman has
never been silly; and any one wishing to knock her would be wise (like
the streetboys) to knock and run away. It is ultimately idiotic to
compare thi
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