Page:Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook.djvu/158

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138
Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook

speech which I will call over-emphasis—would all be manly qualities—and the evolution of the race would, according to that doctrine, lie on the lines of all sorts of over-indulgence. But when we say "manly," we mean the pick and polish of those qualities which enable a man to possess himself and to develop all his faculties; and if it denotes discipline it also denotes an insistence on freedom—freedom for development, so that all that is in him may be brought out for social use.

Now, the great poverty which modern civilization suffers from, is the undevelopment or the under-development of the bulk of its citizens. And the great wastage that we suffer from lies in the misdirection toward the over-indulgence of our material appetites—of the energies which should make for our full human development. And you may be quite sure that where in a community of over-population and poverty such as ours, the average man, as master, is demanding for himself more of these things than his share, there the average woman (where she is in economic subjection) is getting less than her share. Yet there are many people who (viewing this problem of woman's subjection where the savage in man is still uppermost) will tell you that it is "womanly" to be self-sacrificing and self-denying; they will say that it is the woman's nature to be so more than it is the man's; for, like Milton, in his definition of the ideal qualities of womanhood, they put the word