The Fortnightly Review: No. CCCCLXIII, New Series [‎629r] (148/239)

THE DUEL OF THE SEXES.
117
to revolt in the teeth of such enormous odds; in the face of this
“ system of iniquities ” (as a modern French writer The lowest of the four classes into which East India Company civil servants were divided. A Writer’s duties originally consisted mostly of copying documents and book-keeping. describes it), 1
“ under which, by a miracle of endurance and of vital reaction
she has not succumbed? ” This is surely no affair of mere morbid
restlessness, as Lucas Malet believes it to be. A strong and
growing sentiment is a big sociological fact. It has arisen under
conditions that we are assured are the best possible for the sex.
Why, then, should these ideally placed beings dream of change?
We know from the testimony of history what miseries will be
endured before revolt is even thought of, much more attempted.
Can we then fail to see that this revolt is a part of the great
movement that mankind is making towards a finer type of
humanity and a higher form of life? It is the stirring of growth,
of spiritual expansion, the passionate desire for more room, more
hope of fulfilling inner possibilities, and for expression, that im
perious human need that cannot safely be gainsaid.
After all, if Evolution is a fact and not an ingenious fiction,
mankind is actually changing, and if so, the symbol of things
human is not the circle—as Lucas Malet says that it is—but the
spiral.
As she reminds us; if you go far enough west you come east;
yes, but you come east with a difference; at a higher level of the
spiral—and what a difference that is ! You must go very far west
to know how great.
The wave of reaction now sweeping over the world which the
authoress thinks will submerge the woman’s claims in the next
ten years illustrates—if the symbol of Life be a spiral—merely the
tedious and roundabout line of ascent of that mysterious figure.
If we are entering upon an age of Militarism, the woman’s
cause, in common with every cause that makes a demand on
human intelligence and justice, is likely to suffer. The terror of
the nations at the slightest sign of a falling off in the population,
has its root in the supposed necessity for a vast number of human
beings to be born to make food for powder, chair a canon as some
one calls it. The unwillingness of modern women for this some
what ghastly task naturally causes anger and alarm.
But the ideals of the future do not include militarism, or even
militant commercialism. A thinker here and there is beginning
to see that incessant warfare inside and outside the boundaries of
his country is not the way to produce a reasonable or a tolerable
social life. Their hopes are fixed upon cooperative instead of
combative systems, international as well as national; on the
(1) Leopold Lacour, Humanisme InUgrale, P. V. Stock, Editeur Galerie du
Theatre Fran 9 ais, Paris.