None the less, human nature being what it is, militancy was inevitable, and the wise will look at the situation, not as it was, or might be, but as it is. We must consider what effect that situation is having on the national character. Every little outrage committed on men by women is met by a little outrage committed on women by men; and each time one of these mutual outrages takes place, tens of thousands of minds in this country are blunted in that most sensitive quality, gentleness. It is idle to pretend that women have not stood, and do not still stand, to men as the chief reason for being gentle; that men have not, and do not still stand to women, in the same capacity. By every little mutual outrage, then, the beneficence of sex is being weakened, its maleficence awakened throughout the land. And the harm which is thus being done is so impalpable, so subtle, as to be beyond the power of most to notice at all, and surely beyond the power of statesmen to assess. That is the mischief. The scent is stealing away out of the flower of our urbanity. It will be long before the gardeners discover how odourless and arid that flower has become. For it is not so much the action of the militant women themselves, nor that of those who are suppressing them, which is doing this subtle harm. It is the effect of this scrimmage on the spectators; the coarsening, and hardening, and general embitterment; the secret glorification of the worst side of the sex instinct; the constant exaltation of the rule of force; the rapid growth of a rankling sense of injustice amongst tens of thousands of women. To say that hundreds of thousands of women are opposed, or indifferent, to the full emancipation of their sex is not, in truth, to say very much. No civilizing movement was ever brought to fruition save in the face of the indifference or opposition of the majority. What proportion of agricultural labourers were actively concerned to win for themselves the vote? How small a fraction of the people actively demanded free education! But when these privileges were won, what number of those for whom they were won would have been willing to resign them? If women were fully emancipated to-morrow, many would certainly resent what they would deem a blow at the influence and power already wielded by them in virtue of their sex. But in two years’ time how many would be willing to surrender their freedom? As certainly, not ten in a hundred! To compare the disapproval of women raised against their wills to a state of emancipation in which they can remain inactive if they like with the bitter resentment spreading like slow poison in the veins of those who fruitlessly demand emancipation is to compare the energy of vanishing winter snow with that of the spring sun which melts it.