love, which has influenced woman because love is still her chief
business. To this day, though it dies slowly, the male attitude is still
the attitude to a toy. It is the attitude of Nietzsche when saying, "Man
is for war, woman for the recreation of the warrior." This idea is so
prevalent that Great Britain, in its alleged struggle against
Nietzschean ideas, is making abundant use of the Nietzschean point of
view. No wonder, for the idea runs not only through men but through
Englishmen: "woman is the reward of war,"--that is a prevalent idea,
notably among men who make war in the neighborhood of waste-paper
baskets. It has been exemplified by the British war propaganda in every
newspaper and in every music hall, begging women to refuse to be seen
with a man unless he is in khaki. It has had government recognition in
the shape of recruiting posters, asking women "whether their best boy is
in khaki." It has been popularly formulated on picture postcards
touchingly inscribed, "No gun, no girl."

All that--woman as the prize (a theory repudiated in the case of Belgian
atrocities)--is an idea deeply rooted in man. In the eighteen-sixties
the customary proposal was, "Will you be mine?" Very faintly signs are
showing that men will yet say, "May I be yours?" It will take time, for
the possessive, the dominating instinct in man, is still strong; and
long may it live, for that is the vigor of the race. Only we do not want
that instinct to carry man away, any more than we want a well-bred horse
to clench its teeth upon the bit and bolt.

We want to do everything we can to get rid of what may be called the
creed of the man of the world, which is suggested as repulsively as
anywhere in Mr. Rudyard Kipling's _Departmental Ditties_:

"My Son, if a maiden deny thee and scufflingly bid thee give o'er,
Yet lip meets with lip at the lastward--get out! She has been there
before.
They are pecked on the ear and the chin and the nose who are lacking
in lore.

"Pleasant the snaffle of Courtship, improving the manners and carriage;
But the colt who is wise will abstain from the terrible thornbit of
Marriage.
Blister we not for _bursati_? So when the heart is vext,
The pain of one maiden's refusal is drowned in the pain of the next."

There is a great deal of this sort of thing in Moliere, in Thackeray, in
Casanova. The old idea of woman eluding and lying; of woman stigmatized
if she has "been there before", whil