roy Comradeship.

All true comradeship has in it those three elements which I have
remarked in the ordinary exclamation about the weather. First, it has
a sort of broad philosophy like the common sky, emphasizing that we are
all under the same cosmic conditions. We are all in the same boat, the
"winged rock" of Mr. Herbert Trench. Secondly, it recognizes this bond
as the essential one; for comradeship is simply humanity seen in that
one aspect in which men are really equal. The old writers were entirely
wise when they talked of the equality of men; but they were also very
wise in not mentioning women. Women are always authoritarian; they
are always above or below; that is why marriage is a sort of poetical
see-saw. There are only three things in the world that women do not
understand; and they are Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. But men
(a class little understood in the modern world) find these things the
breath of their nostrils; and our most learned ladies will not even
begin to understand them until they make allowance for this kind of cool
camaraderie. Lastly, it contains the third quality of the weather, the
insistence upon the body and its indispensable satisfaction. No one
has even begun to understand comradeship who does not accept with it a
certain hearty eagerness in eating, drinking, or smoking, an uproarious
materialism which to many women appears only hoggish. You may call the
thing an orgy or a sacrament; it is certainly an essential. It is at
root a resistance to the superciliousness of the individual. Nay, its
very swaggering and howling are humble. In the heart of its rowdiness
there is a sort of mad modesty; a desire to melt the separate soul into
the mass of unpretentious masculinity. It is a clamorous confession of
the weakness of all flesh. No man must be superior to the things that
are common to men. This sort of equality must be bodily and gross and
comic. Not only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick.

The word comradeship just now promises to become as fatuous as the word
"affinity." There are clubs of a Socialist sort where all the members,
men and women, call each other "Comrade." I have no serious emotions,
hostile or otherwise, about this particular habit: at the worst it is
conventionality, and at the best flirtation. I am convinced here only
to point out a rational principle. If you choose to lump all flowers
together, lilies and dahlias and tulips and chrysanthemums and