Ernest Belfort Bax

“ The bravest and strongest man is as weak as a child before the overwhelming force of the State. Any woman can at will summon to her aid a power no man can resist. And behind this force of law rests the equally irresistible force of public opinion. All this, under the present dispensation, is arrayed against the man accused by a woman. The woman accuser wields the whole power of the Courts and the community, backed up by the press and public opinion. Her physical strength is an irrelevant matter, her real force lies in the state of public opinion before which the man becomes helpless. ”

“ John Stuart Mill is dead! but his eloquent wail of the subjection of women is never let die—it rings in our ears every day. It is solemn, it is pathetic; it overflows with the chivalric sentiment which Mill professes to repudiate as out of date, like the clanship and hospitality of the wandering Arab, but which nevertheless, is so strongly developed in the average male. It has become the gospel of women's pretended wrongs, and has caused the ingenuous youth of Oxford and Cambridge to blush for their fellow males. ”

“ The wife has but to scream and appeal to the nearest policeman, and prison, separation, custody of children, and maintenance, are decreed as matters of course.
A woman can habitually repudiate her duties, neglect her children, pawn her husband's and children's clothes, waylay her husband at his work, and disgrace him before his friends, procure his dismissal, assault him, and there is no remedy open to the working man. To tell him that he can appeal to the Divorce Court at a cost of forty pounds, is a piece of savage and scornful irony. ”

“ The battle against ecclesiastical abuses, again, in its turn, focussed the ever-smouldering discontent with abuses in general; and this time, not in one district only, but simultaneously over the whole of Germany. The movement inaugurated by Luther gave to the peasant groaning under the weight of baronial oppression, and the small handicraftsman suffering under his Ehrbarkeit, a rallying-point and a rallying cry.
In history there is no movement which starts up full grown from the brain of any one man, or even from the mind of any one generation of men, like Athene from the head of Zeus. ”

“ The wonder is, indeed, not so much that the great capitalist class, possessing the monopoly of every organ of public opinion, of the whole press, and of every hall and meeting place, were able to drown the voice of truth and justice by their noisy bluff and bullying, but rather that despite all the clamour, and without any Socialist press at the time worth speaking of, the true meaning and facts of the Commune should have come to light as much as they did. ”

“ Delenda est Prussia, understanding thereby not, of course, the inhabitants of Prussian territory as such, but Prussia as a State-system and as an independent Power in Europe, must be the watchword in the present crisis of every well-wisher of Humanity, Germany included. A united Germany, if that be insisted upon, by all means let there be—a federation of all the German peoples with its capital, for that matter, as of old, at Frankfurt-on-the-Main, but with no dominant State and, if possible, excluding Prussia altogether, but certainly as constituted at present. ”

“ This is quite apart from the peculiar privilege of women to waste a man's time and money in a pretended engagement, possibily to lure on a more wealthy lover—and to be exempt from penalty. Their privilege to commit perjury and slander with impunity plays a great part in the decision of any case in which a woman's contract is concerned. All stockbrokers, insurance agents, solicitors, and bankers, and business men generally, know how hopeless, as a rule, is any prospect of getting a contract enforced against a woman. ”

“ To the intrinsic difficulty of defence presented by the very nature of the alleged offence, the poverty of the man accused often adds a terrible aggravation. The rich man can protect himself by all the resources of legal defence; the poor man is left to the mercy of the wolves by his poverty; which, although it may protect him from blackmail, yet gives him no security against malignant spite—perhaps the most fruitful source of false accusations. ”

“ As the shadows deepen and darkness falls upon the plain, our visitor joins the groups which are now fast leaving the meadow, and repasses the great embrasure just as the rushlights begin to twinkle in the windows, and a swinging oil-lamp to cast a dim light here and there in the streets. But as his company passes out of a narrow lane debouching on to the chief market-place their progress is stopped by the sudden rush of a mingled crowd of unruly apprentices and journeymen returning from their sports, with hot heads well beliquored. ”

“ In default of any real injustice pressing on the woman the Feminist is constrained to make as much capital as possible out of the merest semblance of a grievance he can lay his hand on. The reasons for this distinction which the law draws between the husband and the wife, it is obvious enough, are perfectly well grounded. It is based mainly on the simple fact that while a woman by her adultery may foist upon her husband a bastard which he will be compelled by law to support as his own child, in the husband’s case of having an illegitimate child the wife and her property are not affected. ”

“ It were better that every bishop were murdered, every foundation or cloister rooted out, than that one soul should be destroyed, let alone that all souls should be lost for the sake of their worthless trumpery and idolatry. Of what use are they who thus live in lust, nourished by the sweat and labour of others, and are a stumbling-block to the word of God? They fear bodily uproar and despise spiritual destruction. Are they wise and honest people? If they accepted God's word and sought the life of the soul, God would be with them, for He is a God of peace, and they need fear no uprising ”

“ A survival of the days when the physical force of the man was allowed by the State to play a part in his quarrels with women, survive in the public delusion that it is impossible for a man to be oppressed by women. How can men be legally oppressed by women? Are not men, if worthy of the name, able to defend themselves? ”

“ THE ENTRY OF THE VERSAILLESE.
Sunday, the 21st of May, was one of those glorious spring days in which the avenues of the Champs Elysées and the Tuilleries Gardens show up in the clear air a splendour of young foliage, to which hardly another capital in Europe than Paris can offer a parallel. This afternoon a monster open-air concert was being held under the trees in the Tuilleries Gardens by order of the Commune, for the benefit of the widows and orphans of National Guards slain in defence of Paris. Thousands of Parisians in holiday attire thronged the grounds. ”

“ Impunity for Treacherous Confession of Guilt.
Here we have a most striking rule—No woman is supposed to be a cowardly traitor if she turns "wife's evidence" against a man, and truly alleges that he had illicit relations with herself. She is assisting justice, promoting morality, showing true repentance by open confession, and aiding in the women's trade union object of keeping down man, the slave! Her treachery to her accomplice is condoned.
But a man who would dare to turn "husband's evidence" against a wife, cannot be found within the four seas. The reason stares one in the face. ”

“ The deep-reaching importance and effective spread of movements was infinitely greater in the Middle Ages than in modern times. The same phenomenon presents itself to-day in barbaric and semi-barbaric communities. At first sight one is inclined to think that there has been no period in the world's history when it was so easy to stir up a population as the present, with our newspapers, our telegraphs, our postal arrangements and our railways. But this is just one of those superficial notions that are not confirmed by history. ”

“ There are no charges so easy to bring and so difficult to refute as accusations of sexual crime. So well is this recognised that the most innocent man would gladly pay any sum rather than face such a charge. The only defence is the proof of a negative, always difficult and sometimes impossible, even to the most innocent. A moral and well-spent life, a high character, the esteem of friends alike wither before this blasting charge; they even add fuel to it. This is shown by the extraordinary remark of one of our judges: "A good character only means that a man has not yet been found out." ”

“ Strange it is that to an extent unparalleled in any other movement the vilifiers of the Commune succeeded immediately in travestying the situation and giving currency to the grotesque notion among the unthinking of the Commune as responsible for the horrors of its own suppression! Never before has a murderer been so successful in casting the obloquy of his own foul crime upon his innocent victim whose mouth he has closed in death. ”

“ If the man who “in whole or in part” lives on the proceeds of a woman’s prostitution is of necessity a degraded wretch outside the pale of all humanity, as he is represented to be by the flogging fraternity, how about the employer or employeress of female labour who bases his or her scale of wages on the assumption that the girls and women he or she employs, supplement these wages by presents received after working hours, for their sexual favours—in other words, by prostitution? ”

“ But even more than the revolutionary literature were the wandering preachers effective in working up the agitation which culminated in the Peasants' War of 1525. The latter comprised men of all classes, from the impoverished knight, the poor priest, the escaped monk, or the travelling scholar, to the peasant, the mercenary soldier out of employment, the poor handicraftsman, of even the beggar. Learned and simple, they wandered about from place to place, in the market place of the town, in the common field of the village, from one territory to another, preaching the gospel of discontent. ”

“ The incessant clamour of a hysterical press leads them to suppose that in any quarrel with a man, the man must be wrong, the woman never can be wrong. The shrieks of the "new woman" propaganda suggest to women that in making most infamous use of her weapons she is upholding the cause of her "sisters." Furthermore the new mammon-worship which has infected all modern English life has produced among the average middle class woman an unspoken theory—that the sole duty of man is to make money for his wife. ”

“ In conclusion I can only express the hope that honest, straightforward men who have been bitten by Feminist wiles will take pause and reconsider their position. Whatever sentiment or sympathy they may have with the aims of the movement intrinsically, it ought to be not too much to expect them to view with contempt and abhorrence the mass of disingenuous falsehood and transparent subterfuge, which the votaries of Feminism systematically seek to palm off upon a public opinion—only too easily gullible in this matter—as true fact and valid argument. ”

“ To talk about the "head of the state" when alive as merely the representative of an impersonal political entity, to talk of him when executing some cruel function in the name of "law and order" as a mere mechanical figure "doing his duty," and, when assassinated, as "the man, the brother and the father of his family" over whose fate we are supposed to weep our eyes out, is a little too thin. Every sphere of life has its dangers, the chief danger attending the headship of a Government being assassination. ”

“ The rise and rapid growth of the Social Democratic movement is perhaps the most striking fact in the recent history of Germany. The same may be said, of course, of the growth of Socialism everywhere during the same period. But in Germany it has for a generation past, or even more, occupied an exceptional position, alike as regards the rapidity of its increase, its direct influence on the masses, and its party organization. Modern Socialism, as a party doctrine, is, moreover, a product of the best period of nineteenth-century German thought and literature. ”

“ The most curious of all concomitants of the legal subjection of men in England arise, first, that many men are not conscious of the real state of the law, and secondly, that a very loud-voiced minority of women, reinforced by sycophantic males, represent the law as being the apotheosis of unjust sex-privileges on the part of men. ”

“ There were a few honest middle-class men to be found who, though caring nothing for the Commune, and with no sympathy for its aims, yet refused to join in the great class-conspiracy of vilification, and who, at all events up to their lights, spoke the truth as to what they had seen and heard in Paris under the red flag, who bore witness to the noble disinterestedness of the defenders of the Cause, and to the foulness of their persecutors. ”

“ At this point it may be well to say a word on the one rule of the divorce law which Feminists are perennially trotting out as a proof of the shocking injustice of the marriage law to women: that to obtain her divorce the woman has to prove cruelty in addition to adultery against her husband, while in the case of the husband it is sufficient to prove adultery alone. ”

“ The idea of ordinary men, or of the vast majority, holding their religion as anything else than a very pious opinion absolutely unconnected with their daily life, public or private, has already become almost inconceivable to us. In all the writings of the time, the theological interest is in the forefront. The economic and social groundwork only casually reveals itself. This it is that makes the reading of the sixteenth-century polemics so insufferably jejune and dreary. ”