pt,
ignorant, coarse, immoral--they would themselves have made haste to
disavow their heroines and seek less malodorous "maidens" for
embodiments of their exalted fancies of love[128]. Richard Wagner was
promptly disillusioned when he came across some of those modern
shepherdesses, the Swiss dairy-maids. "There are magnificent women
here in the Oberland," he wrote to a friend, "but only so to the eye;
they are all tainted with rabid vulgarity."

III. WAR

Herbert Spencer has devoted some eloquent pages[129] to showing that
along with chronic militancy there goes a brutal treatment of women,
whereas industrial tribes are likely to treat their wives and
daughters well. To militancy is due the disregard of women's claims
shown in stealing or buying them, the inequality of status between the
sexes entailed by polygamy; the use of women as laboring slaves, the
life-and-death power over wife and child. To which we may add that war
proves an obstacle to love, by fostering cruelty and smothering
sympathy, and all the other tender feelings; by giving the coarsest
masculine qualities of aggressiveness and brute prowess the aspect of
cardinal virtues and causing the feminine virtues of gentleness,
mercy, kindness, to be despised, and women themselves to be esteemed
only in so far as they appropriate masculine qualities; and by
fostering rape and licentiousness in general. When Plutarch wrote that
"the most warlike nations are the most addicted to love," he meant, of
course, lust. In wars of the past no incentive to brutal courage
proved so powerful as the promise that the soldiers might have the
women of captured cities. "Plunder if you succeed, and paradise if you
fall. Female captives in the one case, celestial houris in the
other"--such was, according to Burckhardt, the promise to their men
given by Wahabi chiefs on the eve of battle.

IV. CRUELTY

Love depends on sympathy, and sympathy is incompatible with cruelty.
It has been maintained that the notorious cruelty of the lower and
war-like races is manifested only toward enemies; but this is an
error. Some of the instances cited under "Sentimental Murder" and
"Sympathy" show how often superstitious and utilitarian considerations
smother all the family feelings. Three or four more illustrations may
be added here. Burton says of the East Africans, that "when childhood
is past, the father and son become natural enemies, after the manner
of wild beasts." The Bedouins are