call
them all daisies, you will find that you have spoiled the very fine word
daisy. If you choose to call every human attachment comradeship, if
you include under that name the respect of a youth for a venerable
prophetess, the interest of a man in a beautiful woman who baffles him,
the pleasure of a philosophical old fogy in a girl who is impudent and
innocent, the end of the meanest quarrel or the beginning of the most
mountainous love; if you are going to call all these comradeship, you
will gain nothing, you will only lose a word. Daisies are obvious and
universal and open; but they are only one kind of flower. Comradeship is
obvious and universal and open; but it is only one kind of affection;
it has characteristics that would destroy any other kind. Anyone who
has known true comradeship in a club or in a regiment, knows that it is
impersonal. There is a pedantic phrase used in debating clubs which is
strictly true to the masculine emotion; they call it "speaking to the
question." Women speak to each other; men speak to the subject they are
speaking about. Many an honest man has sat in a ring of his five
best friends under heaven and forgotten who was in the room while he
explained some system. This is not peculiar to intellectual men; men are
all theoretical, whether they are talking about God or about golf. Men
are all impersonal; that is to say, republican. No one remembers after
a really good talk who has said the good things. Every man speaks to a
visionary multitude; a mystical cloud, that is called the club.

It is obvious that this cool and careless quality which is essential to
the collective affection of males involves disadvantages and dangers.
It leads to spitting; it leads to coarse speech; it must lead to these
things so long as it is honorable; comradeship must be in some degree
ugly. The moment beauty is mentioned in male friendship, the nostrils
are stopped with the smell of abominable things. Friendship must be
physically dirty if it is to be morally clean. It must be in its shirt
sleeves. The chaos of habits that always goes with males when left
entirely to themselves has only one honorable cure; and that is the
strict discipline of a monastery. Anyone who has seen our unhappy young
idealists in East End Settlements losing their collars in the wash and
living on tinned salmon will fully understand why it was decided by the
wisdom of St. Bernard or St. Benedict, that if men were to live without
w