G K Chesterton

A Miscellany of Men G K Chesterton

Rightly or wrongly, it is certain that a man both liberal and chivalric, can and very often does feela dis-ease and distrust touching those political women we call Suffragettes. Like most other popularsentiments, it is generally wrongly stated even when it is rightly felt. One part of it can be put mostshortly thus: that when a woman puts up her fists to a man she is putting herself in the only posturein which he is not afraid of her. He can be afraid of her speech and still more of her silence; butforce reminds him of a rusted but very real weapon of which he has grown ashamed. But thesecrude summaries are never quite accurate in any matter of the instincts. For the things which are thesimplest so long as they are undisputed invariably become the subtlest when once they are disputed: which was what Joubert meant, I suppose, when he said, "It is not hard to believe in God if onedoes not define Him." When the evil instincts of old Foulon made him say of the poor, "Let themeat grass," the good and Christian instincts of the poor made them hang him on a lamppost with hismouth stuffed full of that vegetation. But if a modern vegetarian aristocrat were to say to the poor,"But why don't you like grass?" their intelligences would be much more taxed to find such anappropriate repartee. And this matter of the functions of the sexes is primarily a matter of theinstincts; sex and breathing are about the only two things that generally work best when they areleast worried about. That, I suppose, is why the same sophisticated age that has poisoned the worldwith Feminism is also polluting it with Breathing Exercises. We plunge at once into a forest of falseanalogies and bad blundering history; while almost any man or woman left to themselves wouldknow at least that sex is quite different from anything else in the world