hilosophy of the sexes
by their feminism than the Arabs did by their anti-feminism. A woman
can find her home on the hustings even less than in the harem;
but such movements do not really attempt to find a final home for
anybody or anything. Bolshevism is a movement; and in my opinion
a very natural and just movement considered as a revolt against
the crude cruelty of Capitalism. But when we find the Bolshevists
making a rule that the drama "must encourage the proletarian spirit,"
it is obvious that those who say so are not only maniacs but,
what is more to the point here, are monomaniacs. Imagine having
to apply that principle, let us say, to "Charley's Aunt."
None of these things seek to establish a complete philosophy
such as Aquinas founded on Aristotle. The only two modern men
who attempted it were Comte and Herbert Spencer. Spencer, I think,
was too small a man to do it at all; and Comte was a great enough
man to show how difficult it is to do it in modern times.
None of these movements can do anything but move; they have not
discovered where to rest.

And this fact brings us back to the man of the desert, who moves
and does not rest; but who has many superiorities to the restless
races of the industrial city. Men who have been in the Manchester
movement in 1860 and the Fabian movement in 1880 cannot sneer
at a religious mood that lasted for eight hundred years.
And those who tolerate the degraded homelessness of the slums
cannot despise the much more dignified homelessness of the desert.
Nevertheless, the thing is a homelessness and not a home; and there
runs through it all the note of the nomad. The Moslem takes literally,
as he takes everything, the truth that here we have no abiding city.
He can see no meaning in the mysticism of materialism,
the sacramental idea that a French poet expressed so nobly,
when he said that our earthly city is the body of the city of God.
He has no true notion of building a house, or in our Western
sense of recognising the kindred points of heaven and home.
Even the exception to this rule is an exception at once terrible
and touching. There is one house that the Moslem does build
like a house and even a home, often with walls and roof and door;
as square as a cottage, as solid as a fort. And that is his grave.
A Moslem cemetery is literally like a little village. It is a village,
as the saying goes, that one would not care to walk through at night.
There is something s