so
unprejudiced--your women are so brave and frank--their minds are so--how
do you say?--wholesome. I intend to have my daughters educated in
England. Nowhere else in the world but in England could I have met at
a Variety Theatre a charming young lady of perfect respectability, and
enjoyed a dance with her at a public dancing saloon. And where else are
women trained to box and knock out the teeth of policemen as a protest
against injustice and violence? [Rising, with immense elan] Your
daughter, madam, is superb. Your country is a model to the rest of
Europe. If you were a Frenchman, stifled with prudery, hypocrisy and
the tyranny of the family and the home, you would understand how
an enlightened Frenchman admires and envies your freedom, your
broadmindedness, and the fact that home life can hardly be said to exist
in England. You have made an end of the despotism of the parent; the
family council is unknown to you; everywhere in these islands one can
enjoy the exhilarating, the soul-liberating spectacle of men quarrelling
with their brothers, defying their fathers, refusing to speak to their
mothers. In France we are not men: we are only sons--grown-up children.
Here one is a human being--an end in himself. Oh, Mrs Knox, if only your
military genius were equal to your moral genius--if that conquest of
Europe by France which inaugurated the new age after the Revolution had
only been an English conquest, how much more enlightened the world would
have been now! We, alas, can only fight. France is unconquerable. We
impose our narrow ideas, our prejudices, our obsolete institutions,
our insufferable pedantry on the world by brute force--by that stupid
quality of military heroism which shews how little we have evolved from
the savage: nay, from the beast. We can charge like bulls; we can spring
on our foes like gamecocks; when we are overpowered by reason, we can
die fighting like rats. And we are foolish enough to be proud of it! Why
should we be? Does the bull progress? Can you civilize the gamecock? Is
there any future for the rat? We cant even fight intelligently: when we
lose battles, it is because we have not sense enough to know when we are
beaten. At Waterloo, had we known when we were beaten, we should have
retreated; tried another plan; and won the battle. But no: we were too
pigheaded to admit that there is anything impossible to a Frenchman: we
were quite satisfied when our Marshals had six horses shot under them,