DECLINE AND FALL OF ANCIENT CIVILISATIONS DUE TO FEMINISM

"This is the function of our and every age, to grasp the knowledge already existing, to make it our own, and in so doing to develop it further and raise it to a higher level. In thus taking it to ourselves we make it different from what it was."—Hegel.

I

Ancient history is depressing study.

It shows us peoples rising slowly and laboriously out of states of barbarism to high degrees of culture and enlightenment, and then, more or less suddenly, falling upon decline; lapsing to total extinction, even. One after another, we may watch them climb the Evolutionary Hill, then slacken pace and struggle on spasmodically. Till presently we find them steadily losing ground; slowly at first, but, gathering momentum, regressing more and more rapidly, until finally they are seen racing headlong to destruction.

Of some among the proudest and the greatest Civilisations, so absolute has been their ultimate extinction that nothing more than ruined temples and some statuary remain to mark their quondam glory.

Biologists tell us this is natural. Races, they say—like individuals—have only a certain life-tenure. They are born, develop, attain maturity, lapse to old age and then die; just as men do.

The analogy is not sound, however. Because although individual men die, the stock they leave behind, if duly preserved and replenished by fresh blood, may live indefinitely. Moreover, such records as remain show that these past civilisations died, obviously, not of natural old age—but of disease. Natural old age is sane and wise, and self-controlled; healthful in mind and in body. Whereas the main features characterising the decline of these great powers, were viciousness and licentiousness; physical, mental and moral corruption. Theirs was no passing in gradual waning of strength and quiet dissolution; not even in senility. They may be described, on the contrary, as having rushed helter-skelter upon death in full vigour of their prime. We see in them, indeed, all the vehemence and self-destructive forces of "sthenic" disease—disease as it occurs in strong men struck down in full health. They died in riot, venality, and lust, and every other form of vice and evil. Clearly, they died unnaturally—of disease, not naturally of old age.

How and why then did this happen? How and why should disease thus have stricken these in mid-career? Since history shows the political institutions, the laws and the administration of many of such mighty decadents to have reached high levels of excellence, in respect of justice and intelligence, while Culture, Art and Industry were likewise notable among them, the causes of their downfall must be looked for elsewhere than in their sociology.

And since all human processes, sociological as well as natural, have their roots in Biology, we are led to examine such records as remain, for evidences of biological failure. Healthy and vigorous races do not decline in consequence of unjust laws or maladministration. If they are healthy and vigorous, they reform these.

II

Investigation shows one striking feature as having been common to most of these great decadences. In nearly every case, the dominance and licence of their women were conspicuous. And realising Woman's portentous rÔle in Racial advance, it is difficult to believe anything but that her rÔle must be equally potent in Racial decline.

A nation becomes decadent because the individuals composing it have become decadent. The individuals composing it can only have become progressively decadent by progressive hereditary decadences. And since Woman is the racial reservoir and the Agency of Evolution, hereditary decline of individuals and nations must have its source in a decline of mother-power.

History confirms this view. It shows the progress and waxing supremacy of these great powers to have been concurrent with rising levels of womanly character and virtue, with high regard for woman by man, with high estimation and observance by woman of the functions of motherhood and of The Home. While neglect of the home, contempt for and evasion of the duties of motherhood, immorality and general licence among their women characterised their downfall.

And comparing some modern developments with these records of Ruin, one can but be struck by notable resemblances between these latter and the present-day trend of all our greater civilisations.

In the decline of Rome, the Roman women went to two extremes. A tendency that shows increasingly among our modern womanhood. They separated into two main orders. "Blue-stocking" and "Rake," they were then designated. "Mannish" and "Womanish," or "Feminist" and "Ultra-Feminine," better characterise their latter-day presentments.

In America, these two orders of women are known as the "College" and the "Society" types, respectively. The "College" type makes a cult of masculinity of body and of brain. The "Society" type makes a cult of feminine graces and social accomplishments.

In the poorer, as in the superior classes of all nations, similar extremes are found. One order is virile and hard-working; and for the most part plain and moral. The other is womanish and pretty; and for the most part frail.

With us—as with those earlier peoples—the demand for liberty and unrestricted economic opportunities for women is occasioning contempt for and evasion of the functions of wife and of mother, emancipation from the home, increasing absorption in public affairs, fever for pleasure, lapse of womanly traditions and morale. All of which developments passed rapidly, in those others, into general laxity, licence and corruption; culminating finally in total ruin. With them, the claims of Home and of The Family became, as they are becoming more and more with us, secondary merely and subsidiary to other pursuits; to personal ambitions, public careers, to pleasures, excitements, crazes for notoriety. Woman's inherent erraticism—defect of her intrinsic spontaneity, her bent for novelty and strong sensation—degenerated, under the licence accorded her in ancient Rome, into the appalling orgies of The Bacchanalia; which were instituted by the sex.

Women attended the displays of gladiators. They watched the wild beasts tear their victims. They themselves dressed as gladiators, and held mimic combats. By cult of muscle, they grew taller than the men.

Sallust writes thus of a notorious Roman matron:

"Sempronia had committed many crimes of a boldness worthy of a man. Blest alike in family and beauty, in husband and children, she was well-read in Greek and Roman literature; could sing, play and dance more gracefully than any honest woman need; had many of the other accomplishments of a riotous life. She cared for nothing less than for decency and modesty."

Fifty years later, Seneca takes up the story of a rapid decadence: "The ladies do not reckon the years by the number of the Consuls, but by the number of their husbands."

Much the same licence, extravagance and viciousness of the sex characterised the greater number of those other old-world wreckages.

The higher Woman-attributes ceased to evolve; ceased to be exercised; ceased to inspire. Women cultivated solely, or pre-eminently, the male-side of their natures; muscle, intellect, ambition, concrete activities, indulgence of sex-instincts. By power of which masculine and alien proclivities, they increasingly dominated the men, in whom the virile traits had proportionally declined. Thus, more and more, the purifying, uplifting and inspiring potence of true Womanhood, together with the softening refinements of The Home, became ever further withdrawn from the national life. Thus corruption undermined; and chaos finally engulfed.

III

Things were different in Ancient Greece.

It has been said that Greece fell because she did not give her women liberty. For a time comes, in the development of every nation, when its women must be freed. Or decadence sets in inevitably. And some of those old civilisations declined, undoubtedly, from lack of progress in this respect.

It would seem that the first sips of liberty require to be administered to the sex with caution, however; the effects observed carefully, the doses increased warily. Otherwise, impulsive and impressionable as they are, women lose their heads; become intoxicated, and get out of hand. And once women get out of hand, it is next to impossible to bring them again under control (as was seen in the outbreaks of Feminist militancy). Civilisation forbids that men shall deal with them as with masculine rebels. And fenced thus behind the privileges of their own sex, when armed with the prerogatives of the other, they may prove dangerously difficult customers.

In ancient Greece, the wives and mothers and the other reputable women had but little or no freedom. They lived, for the most part, in seclusion; dull and unintelligent and uneventful lives. There was no pure, wholesome, and inspiring social life. The only women who were free were the hetairai, those famous ladies who shed a lurid brilliance over the corruption and decline of this great State—a decline wherewith they had, most certainly, much to do. A faction apart from the wives and mothers—although many among them were courtesans, they stood apart too from the courtesan class. Women who had found in the unfreed state of the wife and mother of their epoch, inadequate scope for their impulses and talents, they broke away from domestic conditions, to form a coterie of free lances—a cultured, brilliant and alluring band of renegades, sought and esteemed for their beauty and intelligence by all men; aristocrat, philosopher, and pleasure-seeker.

More likely than that Greece fell because she did not emancipate her women, it is that she fell because the women who emancipated themselves abandoned the rÔles of wife, of mother, and other reputable functions. For these Grecian hetairai comprised, in the main, the flower of their generation. One sees them, indeed, as brilliant Racial poison-blossoms, greedily appropriating and exploiting to their own purposes the nation's beauty and the nation's talent, its aspirations, potence, passion—without transmitting any of these racial attainments to a later generation. In place of endowing their kind with such nobler light and faculty, inspiration and sweetness, as supply a people's evolutionary impulse, they abandoned the home and the sacred and spiritualising functions of true wifehood, and of the motherhood of such higher living types as are indispensable to lead a nation's progress.

A kindred movement—modified, for the present, by the more enlightened traditions of our Century—is foreshadowing itself across the higher civilisations of our day. More and more, our better types of women (the misinterpretations of the Feminist Movement having imparted a distorted bias and direction to their powers) are similarly abandoning the Home, or are withdrawing their best interests and talents from it; are evading wholly, or are gravely restricting their maternal obligations to the Race; regarding children as bye-products, merely, of life—vastly less important than some hobby or career. In place of realising the new generation as the Vanguard of Life and Evolution; that which beyond every other human achievement counts in the Universe.

Worse than this even, more and more, everywhere, women are failing in the maternal power of transmitting to offspring the health, the beauty, the abilities and aspirations which are the model and ideals of our age.

IV

A menace to the Race more alarming than that of the hard and mannish woman (who, because of her lack of womanly attractiveness, is debarred, in considerable degree, from marriage) is another and less ungraciously obvious deviation from The Normal—an order of the sex, modern and artificial, and rapidly increasing in number, over-civilised and highly-feminised both of physique and of temperament, which may be described as an Ultra-Feminine, or, in contradistinction to the Feminist, as a Feminist order.

Their womanhood but lightly rooted in neurotic systems, the women of this sect are unstable and erratic, seeking distraction for their restless, ill-balanced forces, in cards, crazes, drugs; fads and freaks. Unfitted for wifehood and motherhood—some by faulty heredity, but a far greater number by educational strain and consequent warp—some of these ultra-feminised and frequently interesting creatures absorb themselves feverishly in public movements; religious, social or political. Some are persons of irreproachable morale and ideals; devoted, gifted, wholly admirable. And being wives not seldom of men as talented, it is deplorable that warp of culture, unfitting them for motherhood, should have left such to waste their powers and aspirations in beating the thin air merely of Utopian propaganda. When, otherwise, they might have led the true and only way of Progress by endowing the Race with living presentments and evolving treasuries of the parental ideals and endowments.

The greater her charm, the nobler her character and talent, the more the pity is when woman is defective in the power to transmit her high qualities, or has power to transmit these in inferior degree only; thus sealing up for ever, or gravely impoverishing a vital spring of living faculty and individualism—a unique line of Human Ascent which no other stock can supply, and one which may have been leading up to the production of genius such as the world has not yet known.

Another—and quite different—sub-order of this neurotic (and partially-sterilised) type, in losing its higher potential of motherhood has lost the racial instinct wherein personal virtue is rooted. The lives of these are free and irregular. Not measures, but men, are their vogue; to serve as admirers of their charm and talents, as spectators of their temperamental extravagances. Incapable of the emotions of love, they seek, are discontented, and seek further when they do not find in its excitements, the joys and contentment that reside alone in deep and abiding emotions. The poise and repose, the charm, the refreshment and the inspiration of true Womanhood are lacking in them. They demand increasing novelty and change of venue for their ill-ballasted powers and capricious sensibilities. And this precisely in proportion as they are deficient in those womanly emotions and illusions which endue the least and simplest things with glamour and with beauty.

This type, which can scarcely be said to live, but merely to frolic through life, is pre-eminently dangerous to progress. Because, while possessing the psychology, the appeal and influence of women, some of these have cast off, utterly, the traditions, the nobler aspirations and the functions of the best womanhood.

V

It is universally admitted that a bad woman is far more wicked than a bad man is. She is more callous, ruthless, wanton and debased. The irresponsibility regarding concrete affairs (innate in a sex whereof The Concrete is only secondarily the province) makes her a dangerous and a demoralising factor when her acquired male brain and activities (for the clever, bad woman is always of masculine bent) over-ride her own natural aptitudes. Because the powers she has artificially acquired—in substitution for her native ones—do not alter her inherent constitution of a creature builded upon instincts; instincts which her native higher qualities are alone adequate to guide and inspire. One may acquire some of the characteristics of an opposite sex, but never the morale; which is inborn and inherent to the natural sex-characteristics.

Faculty declines in the inverse order of its development. The bloom and beauty of the peach and of the flower are the last things to come—and the first to go. So, in forfeiting her womanly qualities, woman forfeits earliest the best of these. Love and purity and spiritual aspiration perish first; with the result that the lower-grade female Subconscious emotionalism, instinct and palpitant with animal impulse, comes into play.

Man requires to degenerate to far inferior levels than is the case with woman, before he so loses his normal rationalism as to forfeit his sense of proportion and of his responsibility with regard to material affairs, and that stern obligation to conform to environmental conditions which has been the impelling force of male development. Irresponsibility is in him an acquired—and a feminine—defect; not an inherent failing of his sex. The very basis of the manly character is a recognition of the male responsibility in life's affairs. It was the impulse of man's primal struggle. It is the mark of his civilised manhood.

Irresponsibility is, on the contrary, innate in woman. It is part of that spontaneity, plasticity, and versatility which have engendered the racial evolutionary mutations; and by way of these have engendered the progressive transitions to ever higher forms. And indispensable as her native mutability is in making her the agency of evolutionary change, it is an insecure and a dangerous basis for too heavy a super-structure of male characteristics, physical or mental; as also for too heavy a burden of male responsibilities. It disqualifies her for liberty and scope of action identical with man's, in material affairs.

The further we fit her, moreover (beyond her normal capacity), for such affairs, by artificially equipping her with masculine aptitudes, the more we unfit her for her evolutionary rÔle of spontaneous advance. Her chiefest values lie in the spring and the plasticity which enable her to adapt her nature to the evolutionary impulses of life inherent in her; and thereby to engender further human evolution. For this, it is important that she shall not be moulded on those firmer and more definitely prescribed lines of masculine development which are indispensable to the pioneering of material progress. Nor should her powers be equally differentiated, or similarly expended. They must be left, in far greater degree, conserved, unformulate and unadapted.

Normally, she is the child of Nature, in whom (because she is the mother of the human child, who shapes to the maternal model) Nature is unfolding the type of our Perfecting Humanity. She should remain, therefore, more or less in the native and spontaneously fructifying state conducive to evolutionary unfoldment. When she adapts as closely to concrete conditions as it is imperative for man to do, not only does she exhaust the potential fertility indispensable to the further evolution and growth of racial faculty, but her powers lose that mode of flux which enables them to tide to higher levels.

While man stands for Civilisation, woman stands for Nature. Generatrix of Life, she is instinct with vital impulses. And when these are not expended, as is normal, in the creation of and ministration to living and beloved beings, they generate warped, erratic and chaotic aberrations. Because, no matter to what degree she may acquire masculine characteristics and aptitudes, she remains, at core, a creature of instinct; not of reason. As a creature of instinct she is invaluable to life—because Life is moulded upon instinct. But instinct and rationalism function on different planes of mentality. To over-develop rationalism in her is to quench emotionalism in her, and the higher illumination of her Supra-conscious faculties; thus rendering her the prey of smouldering subconscious impulses which burst fitfully and mischievously into flame.

For Progress, man must be always the leading half and controller in politics and civic affairs. These are his province. His sex stands for permanence and conformity—and, accordingly, for uniformity. And uniformity is the model for Civilisation, making as it does for justice and the common good.

Woman's non-conformability adapts her admirably to the personal relations of life, but not to the political. Man builds institutions and administers them by more or less rigid impersonal rule. Woman transforms them into homes, and humanises them by individual concessions and exceptions.

So the two are supplement and complement in the public as in the natural sphere. But their respective rÔles are contrary in every mode and issue. Man's conformity, political and civic, is continually leavened by the element of non-conformity and change he inherits from his mother, with her other Woman-traits. But in him, her spontaneity and impulse are so intelligised and stabilised by his masculine rationalism and bent for order that, in place of operating emotionally and spasmodically, they become tempered and restrained. Under his administration, material advance proceeds slowly, but surely and securely. His masculine intelligence and sense of responsibility cause him to adjust the maternal evolutionary impulses,—which he inherits as reformatory and revolutionary impulses—to the exigencies of practicability, and the requirements of circumstance.

VI

There is no more difficult, or possibly mischievous, person than a strong and clever woman whose over-developed masculine energies and abilities are controlled neither by a man's reason and sense of responsibility, nor by a woman's natural disabilities, affections and restraints. She is sometimes prodigiously clever; adding to her male talents a woman's fertility, versatility, adaptability, complexity and intuitiveness. And yet with all their gifts, such women accomplish little but harm—alike to themselves and others.

Erratic, fickle, irrepressible, they are perpetually flying off at tangents. Now they are one thing too much. Now they are the opposite—in an equal extreme.

Medleys of contradictions and perversities, they are no sooner repressed in one direction, or become fatigued by the monotony of any single line of action, than they burst forth in some other. Their abnormal mentality and energy, allied to their innate impulsiveness and craving for change, impel them to break loose from those bonds of affection, of tradition and of aspiration, which are woman's safeguards. There is in the nature of most women, this dangerous quicksand of irresponsibility, which may, in crises, topple and submerge the soundest structure of education and of habit builded over it. This is seen in the abandon and anarchy of the sex in riots and in revolutions.

Such women rebels become increasingly a law unto themselves, and see no reason why all others should not do likewise. They lack the masculine grip of concrete principles to recognise that general lawlessness and individual liberty cannot co-exist. Because where every man is free to do as he pleases, no man is free to do as he pleases, owing to some other man's abuse of his liberty encroaching on that of his neighbours.

Women of this order are the Cleopatras, Agrippinas, Messalinas and the Catharines of Russia; the de Pompadours, de StaËls, Georges Sands, and the innumerable other self-centred, unconscionable female-egotists whose extravagances shriek discordant down the ages.

Lacking both a woman's morals and a man's ethics, they are freaks of Nature; or are Frankensteins of abnormal culture. When they are not Empresses, to indulge in shameful licence—their male abilities exaggerating their woman-instincts to the dimensions of megalomanias—their inordinate ambitions make them mistresses of crowned heads, or of others whose rank or wealth supplies their mistresses with means and scope for their unbridled prodigalities. Privileged by their sex and by masculine favour, their lawlessness protected from its merited penalties by the law-abiding of their fellows, they become intoxicated—frequently insane—as result of their successes and excesses. The famous courtesans have been (and are still) for the most part women of this ilk; persons of steel brain and will, without a woman's aspirations or emotions to soften their self-centredness; nor a man's code to discipline their wantonness. They make men the instruments and the victims of their feminine defects, which are all—or nearly all—of woman they possess; self-consciousness distorted to a monstrous vanity, emotions dwarfed to greeds and lusts.

One after another, they exploit their victims, by exercise, precisely, of the same masculine business-abilities and ruthlessness which make men fraudulent company-promoters, profiteers, or sweaters of the poor. When one has served their purpose, they cast him off for another. Cold-blooded, clever, and emotionless, although sometimes sensual in a fashion purely male (in keeping with their other male proclivities) they are adventuresses, spies, poisoners, adultresses, monsters; abiding reproach to a noble sex; terrible example of the fate awaiting that sex, as penalty for abnormal development of masculine characteristics beyond the capacity of its Woman-traits to counterpoise and guide.

Power, which strengthens and steadies all but weak men, only too often drives women to destruction. A factor in this is that those privileges of their sex which have become, more or less, their civilised prerogative, preserve them from the salutary harsh and stern rebuffs which men in like circumstance inevitably encounter.

If women are to have scope and authority identical with men's, then they must forgo all privileges; must come out from their fence behind strong arms and chivalry to meet masculine blows in the face, economic and ethical—if not actual, indeed, as PrÉvost has predicted.

And then, Heaven help them—and men—and the Race!