The Fortnightly Review: No. CCCCLXIII, New Series [‎630r] (150/239)

THE DUEL OF THE SEXES.
119
there is no appeal. Cruel and awful are the consequences of
disobedience.
The favourable relationship between production and consumers
—for instance, in the individual case of a family—gradually alters
as the numbers increase, and so the margin of comfort and leisme
steadily lessens till it finally disappears, and existence becomes a
mere struggle to find means to continue the struggle, deprived of
all that makes life worth having or worth bestowing on others.
And this is the Pandemonium that women are asked to feed with
a constant stream of luckless beings to be ground to powder in the
vast horrible mill that we call society, whose wheels are kept
turning by the tragic force of w T asted, degraded lives.
Some day, when the “ woman question” has indeed been sub
merged because to our successors it will seem preposterous tl^at
any human being should have to plead for human rights, the long
duel of the sexes will be laid at last to rest, and man and woman
will find themselves free, for the first time, to build the House of
Life, spacious and splendid, as they alone in liberty and sympathy
of spirit can create it.
Not till then can it cease to be true that man by his own fault
(as Leopold Lacour proclaims), ” has not only to tread the rough
paths of civilisation alone, but finds at every step his natural ally,
his companion by divine right : woman, against him.
And now for the paradox that seems to lie at the heart of all
the deeper facts of existence.
The old tradition which for weary centuries has sacrificed the
individual life of the woman for the husband, the family and the
race, has in fact inflicted the deepest conceivable injuries upon all
three.
Happiness for men and women in close relationship it has ren
dered scarcely possible; it has made of them strangers and secret
enemies j friendships between them it has so hampered and hunted
that they have generally relinquished it in sheer discouragement;
love it has handcuffed and dragooned till the wild thing has droop id
and died, an old, old tragedy of how many a “happy home” !
And as for the family and the race, they have shared in the mis
fortunes of their founders. They have been despoiled of life’s best
possibilities, doomed to the crudest mischances of education, de
prived of the means of development, training, access to the
fruits of accumulating knowledge, and all this in proportion as
the mother’s existence and intelligence have been subordinated
to “ duty ” in the special sense in which that word is applied to
the much-admonished sex.