Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/392

376 Although we must retain strength as a necessary attribute of manliness, we are yet bound to look for the distinctions of manliness in the intellectual and ethical domain, especially in an age when inventions and discoveries constantly tend to diminish the value of physical strength. It is in the work of its own destruction in murder at wholesale that it still plays a chief part. What a hopeless and disgusting thought this is that we must form our masculine ideal according to the ideas of a king of Prussia, or a similar military type! And yet how many men and women are there who would not bow before the uniformed, [sic]betressed, beribboned and bearded form of a barbarian, whose entire skill and knowledge, whose whole thinking and striving, consists in the senseless and bloody craft of murdering his fellowmen! The longer his list of slain, the greater the man; the more bullets he heard whistling past him, the more admirable his courage. Picked patriots harness themselves to his triumphal chariot, and virgins, all clad in white — O Lord, forgive them, they know not what they do! — strew flowers in the path of the monster. But whoever expresses his disgust at such manliness, and allows his disgust to increase with the size of the bloody deeds, who despises such courage as the brutal insensibility of a hardened barbarian, he is branded by the vulgar judgment of thoughtless slaves and patriots as an enemy of the people or fantastic crank. How very cheap would be