Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/356

344 instinct, a woman does thus stand by her colors. Why this eager activity in the matter of temperance rather than the tariff? Because intemperance menaces the home. Why this quick sympathy with organized or unorganized charities, as opposed to the average apathy over finance? Because charity touches people whom she can love and homes which she can transfigure. And—if one may be pardoned a notion somewhat transcendental—is not her oft-observed lack of creative ability, together with her equally notable power of appreciation, due to the fact that with her an idea is not worked out so readily in purely intellectual formulations as in the material of character? The laws of mechanics as such she does not readily apprehend, but the truths of rectitude which are their moral counterpart she grasps with special illumination. The masterpieces of formal art she does not create, but she, more naturally than man, can live a life which may properly be called a poem or a picture.

And why this respect for womankind deeply rooted in the best of men? The individual character of woman is not, unfortunately, so much loftier than that of man as to compel it, and that she is the "weaker sex" hardly accounts for so large a fact. Nor does it look like a merely left-over remnant of mediæval chivalry. Is it not, at bottom, that sound and sensible men recognize and reverence the altruistic ideal, which, however faltering her loyalty, it is a woman's special privilege to perpetuate? The beautiful phrase so bedraggled by controversy—

 Das Ewig-Weibliche Zieht uns hinan—

does it not mean that the principle of love which rules a woman's life is also the loadstar of human progress?

Homes must be made, and the masculine half of us, as they make haste to proclaim with amusing emphasis, have neither the inclination nor the ability to assume the task. Says one of them, naively, "If marriage meant to a man what it does to a woman in the way of suffering, labor, and social status, I am convinced that not one man in fifty would marry." It is impossible not to be reminded of the similar disclaimer—

and the milkmaid's retort—

seems singularly appropriate, did we wish to be so impolite as to use it. But, strange as it may look to the masculine mind, women in general do choose to marry. They are not driven to it by the conditions of society, nor impelled by a blind sexual instinct, nor misled by the enthusiasm of the martyr. They know