Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/393

Rh and manly courage if we had to concede it to all those  who have stood in a "shower of bullets," or looked into the mouths of cannon! Every Russian musketeer would by this test occupy a higher plane than the noblest and most courageous tribune of the people. Let those be most highly appreciated as men who, although they are enemies of the murderous craft, still risk their lives against barbarians for humane ends; but so long as we do not place this bloody craft itself, and all those that do homage to it, together with their distinctions and heroic deeds, their glamour and their fame, under the ban of our contempt and disgust, so long as we do not acknowledge it to have a brutal rather than a manly character, so long have we no idea of true manliness. Where manliness shall and must still be decorated with blood, let it be at least with the blood of barbarians or tyrants.

But the contemptibility of these greatly admired models of manliness, reared in the barracks, becomes downright unfathomable, if we view them in the light of a combination of slaves and barbarians. What caricatures of men do those proud commanding heroes present who, in the thunder of cannons, gallop at the head of thousands of drilled homicides, in order to shrink back tremblingly before the glance of an august superior, and who would perish under the frown of a most gracious master! Even the most dreadful become caricatures like these through their servility. There is no