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all occupations were entirely open to women, I believe that a great many women would distinguish themselves in all but the highest range, and that, in a corrupted state of public opinion, a very large number of women would waste their lives in struggling after distinction.

Would waste their lives, I say. For they would be striving, with pain and toil and the sacrifice of all true womanly joys, to obtain a lower prize for which they are not best fitted, in lieu of a loftier prize for which they are preeminently fit. A lower prize, although possibly one richer in money, in fame, or in power, but essentially a coarser and more material aim. And in an age like this there is too much reason to fear that ambition, and the thirst for gain and supremacy, would tempt into the unnatural competition many a fine and womanly nature. Our daughters continually desire to see their names in newspapers, to display the cheap glories of academic or professional honors, to contemplate their bankers' pass books in private, and to advertise in public their athletic record.

Let us teach them that this specious agitation must ultimately degrade them, sterilize them, unsex them. The glory of woman is to be tender, loving, pure, inspiring in her home; it is to raise the moral tone of every household, to refine every man with whom, as wife, daughter, sister, or friend, she has intimate converse; to form the young, to stimulate society, to mitigate the harshness and cruelty and vulgarity of life everywhere. And it is no glory to woman to forsake all this and to read for honors with towelled head in a college study, to fight with her own brother for a good "practice," to spend the day in offices and the night in the "House." These things have to be done and men have to do them; it is their nature. But the other, the higher duties of love, beauty, patience, and compassion, can only be performed by women, and by women only so long as it is recognized to be their true and essential field.

It is impossible to do both together. Women must choose to be either women or abortive men. They cannot be both women and men. When men and women are once started as

competitors in the same fierce race, as rivals and opponents instead of companions and helpmates, with the same habits, the same ambitions, the same engrossing toil, and the same public lives, Woman will have disappeared, society will consist of individuals distinguished physiologically, as are horses or dogs, into male and female specimens. Family will mean groups of men and women who live in common, and Home will mean the place where the group collects for shelter.

The Family is the real social unit, and what society has to do is to promote the good of the Family. And in the Family woman is as completely supreme as is man in the State. And for all moral purposes the Family is more vital, more beautiful, more universal than the State. To keep the Family true, refined, affectionate, faithful, is a grander task than to govern the State; it is a task which needs the whole energies, the entire life of Woman. To mix up her sacred duty with the coarser occupations of politics and trade is to unfit her for it as completely as if a priest were to embark in the business of a moneylender. That such primary social truths were ever forgotten at all is one of the portents of this age of skepticism, mammonworship, and false glory. Whilst the embers of the older Chivalry and Religion retained their warmth, no decent man, much less woman, could be found to throw ridicule on the chivalrous and saintly ideal of woman as man's guardian angel and queen of the home. But the ideals of Religion of old are grown faint and out of fashion, and the priest of to-day is too often willing to go with the times. Is it to be left to the Religion of Humanity to defend the primeval institutions of society? Let us then honor the old-world image of Woman as being relieved by man from the harder tasks of industry, from the defense and management of the State, in order that she may set herself to train up each generation to be worthier than the last, and may make each home in some sense a heaven of peace on earth.

XIX

THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR1

WILLIAM JAMES

[The Moral Equivalent of War, the last public utterance of William James, is significant as expressing the opinions of a practical psychologist on a question of growing popular interest. For the past fifteen years the movement for promoting international peace has been enlisting the support of organizations and individuals the world over. That this is a question on which much may be said for the opposition, James, though a pacificist, admits with his usual fair-mindedness, pointing out that militarism is the sole nourisher of certain human virtues that the world cannot let die, and that until the peace party devises some substitute, some moral equivalent, for the disciplinary value of war, their utopian goal is neither desirable nor possible. His own solution is advanced not as a practical measure, but merely as an illustration to show that the world is full of opportunities for the peaceful development and continuation of the martial qualities of human life.

This essay was written for general dissemination as a publication of the American Association for International Conciliation, February, 1910. As it not only presents a peace program but defines as well the most familiar arguments of the war party, no militarist article has been included, although it may be mentioned that a suggestive apology for war is to be found among De Quincey's Essays and also in Ruskin's Crown of Wild Olive. Additional documents on conciliation, approaching the question from innumerable points of view, are published by the Association mentioned above.]

THE war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals from the ups and downs of politics and the

1 Reprinted by permission of the American Association for International Conciliation, and of Messrs. Longmans, Green, and Company, publishers of Memories and Studies, by William James.

vicissitudes of trade. There is something highly paradoxica in the modern man's relation to war. Ask all our millions, north and south, whether they would vote now (were such a thing possible) to have our war for the Union expunged from history, and the record of a peaceful transition to the present time substituted for that of its marches and battles, and probably hardly a handful of eccentrics would say yes. Those ancestors, those efforts, those memories and legends, are the most ideal part of what we now own together, a sacred spiritual possession worth more than all the blood poured out. Yet ask those same people whether they would be willing in cold blood to start another civil war now to gain another similar possession, and not one man or woman would vote for the proposition. In modern eyes, precious though wars may be, they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, only when an enemy's injustice leaves us no alternative, is a war now thought permissible.

It was not thus in ancient times. The earlier men were hunting men, and to hunt a neighboring tribe, kill the males, loot the village and possess the females, was the most profitable, as well as the most exciting, way of living. Thus were the more martial tribes selected, and in chiefs and peoples a pure pugnacity and love of glory came to mingle with the more fundamental appetite for plunder.

Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors. Showing war's irrationality and horror is of no effect upon him. The horrors make the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life in extremis; war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us.

History is a bath of blood. The Iliad is one long recital of how Diomedes and Ajax, Sarpedon and Hector, killed. No detail of the wounds they made is spared us, and the Greek mind fed upon the story. Greek history is a panorama of jingoism and imperialism - war for war's sake, all the citizens

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being warriors. It is horrible reading, because of the irrationality of it all save for the purpose of making "history" and the history is that of the utter ruin of a civilization in intellectual respects perhaps the highest the earth has ever seen. Those wars were purely piratical. Pride, gold, women, slaves, excitement, were their only motives. In the Peloponnesian war,. for example, the Athenians asked the inhabitants of Melos (the island where the "Venus of Milo" was found), hitherto neutral, to own their lordship. The envoys meet, and hold a debate which Thucydides gives in full, and which, for sweet reasonableness of form, would have satisfied Matthew Arnold. "The powerful exact what they can," said the Athenians, "and the weak grant what they must." When the Meleans say that sooner than be slaves they will appeal to the gods, the Athenians reply: "Of the gods we believe and of men we know that, by a law of their nature, wherever they can rule they will. This law was not made by us, and we are not the first to have acted upon it; we did but inherit it, and we know that you and all mankind, if you were as strong as we are, would do as we do. So much for the gods; we have told you why we expect to stand as high in their good opinion as you." Well, the Meleans still refused, and their town was taken. "The Athenians," Thucydides quietly says, "thereupon put to death all who were of military age and made slaves of the women and children. They then colonized the island, sending thither five hundred settlers of their own."

Alexander's career was piracy pure and simple, nothing but an orgy of power and plunder, made romantic by the character of the hero. There was no rational principle in it, and the moment he died his generals and governors attacked one another. The cruelty of those times is incredible. When Rome finally conquered Greece, Paulus Æmilius was told by the Roman Senate to reward his soldiers for their toil by "giving" them the old kingdom of Epirus. They sacked seventy cities and carried off a hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants as slaves. How many they killed I know not; but in Etolia they killed all the

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