er me. It had become the
life-theme--to bring a breath from the open splendour of the future to
the matings of men and women. I have never been able to understand how
anything can be expected of men, if women are not great. I have never
been able to understand how men and women can take each other as a
matter of course. Most of all, I have been unable to understand how
women can accept the man-idea of things.

The great killing in Europe was brought about because women have
accepted the man-idea of life. Women are in this sense immediately
responsible for the war, because they have not been true to the
limitless potentialities of their being. Still from the very hour when
man realised his greater bodily strength, continual pressures have
fallen upon woman to break her dream. The Hebrew Scriptures show best
the processes that have been brought to bear upon women--from the
establishment of the patriarchal idea to the final going down into
Egypt.

It is in the nature of women to please men, but they have not been
allowed through the centuries to please men in their own way. Man wanted
to be pleased according to his idea--and women, in accepting that, have
prostituted themselves. Men have united with submissive women to bring
forth children farther and farther from the dream. Man's idea is
possession; that which is possessed is not free. Man's thought is to
make woman conform to his ideas; and that which conforms, at once
betrays the first law of the growth to greatness--that of being true to
one's self.

The veil, the mouth-veil, the crippled foot, the harem, the barred
lattice, the corset, the eunuch, the denial of education to women, the
very text of the marriage-rites in all countries, are man's ideas of
keeping woman for himself, from herself. The Orient is rotted with this
conception.

Would you like to know where man's ideas--man's plan of Conception--is
most utterly outraged? _In the coming of Messiahs._ The Josephs are
mainly dangling. They are in the mere passage of events, having to do
neither with heights nor depths.

One of the deepest human instincts of the male is that woman is a
wanton. It breaks out still in the best of men, wherever the
sex-principle overpowers the mind. This is well-covered ground. I would
suggest only that the present horrible chaos of human affairs, while
directly the fault of the absence of rational idealism in the world, has
been brought about in reality by the man-pressure whi