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 veryoften does feel a dis-ease and distrust touching those political women we callSuffragettes. Like most other popular sentiments, it is generally wrongly statedeven when it is rightly felt. One part of it can be put most shortly thus: that when awoman puts up her fists to a man she is putting herself in the only posture in whichhe is not afraid of her. He can be afraid of her speech and still more of her silence;but force reminds him of a rusted but very real weapon of which he has grownashamed. But these crude summaries are never quite accurate in any matter of theinstincts. For the things which are the simplest so long as they are undisputedinvariably become the subtlest when once they are disputed: which was whatJoubert meant, I suppose, when he said, "It is not hard to believe in God if one doesnot define Him." When the evil instincts of old Foulon made him say of the poor,"Let them eat grass," the good and Christian instincts of the poor made them hanghim on a lamppost with his mouth stuffed full of that vegetation. But if a modernvegetarian aristocrat were to say to the poor, "But why don't you like grass?" theirintelligences would be much more taxed to find such an appropriate repartee. Andthis matter of the functions of the sexes is primarily a matter of the instincts; sexand 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 haspoisoned the world with Feminism is also polluting it with Breathing Exercises. Weplunge at once into a forest of false analogies and bad blundering history; whilealmost any man or woman left to themselves would know at least that sex is quitedifferent from anything else in the world.