文档介绍：A MISCELLANY OF MEN
A MISCELLANY OF
MEN
By G. K. CHESTERTON
1
A MISCELLANY OF MEN
THE SUFFRAGIST
Rightly or wrongly, it is certain that a man both liberal and chivalric,
can and very often does feel a dis-ease and distrust touching those political
women we call Suffragettes. Like most other popular sentiments, it is
generally wrongly stated even when it is rightly felt. One part of it can be
put most shortly thus: that when a woman puts up her fists to a man she is
putting herself in the only posture in which he 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 grown ashamed.
But these crude summaries are never quite accurate in any matter of the
instincts. For the things which are the simplest so long as they are
undisputed invariably e 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 one does not 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 hang him on a lamppost with his
mouth 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 an appropriate
repartee. And this matter of the functions of the sexes is primarily a
matter of the instincts; sex and breathing are about the only two things that
generally work best when they are least worried about. That, I suppose,
is why the same sophisticated age that has poisoned the world with
Feminism is also polluting it with Breathing Exercises. We plunge at
once into a forest of false analogies and bad blundering history; while
almost any man or woman left to themselves would know at least that sex
is quite different from anything else in the world.
There is no kin