y proclaims that this is a survival of
Marriage by Capture. I wonder he never says that the veil thrown over
the bride is really a net. I gravely doubt whether women ever were
married by capture I think they pretended to be; as they do still.

It is equally obvious that these two necessary sanctities of thrift
and dignity are bound to come into collision with the wordiness,
the wastefulness, and the perpetual pleasure-seeking of masculine
companionship. Wise women allow for the thing; foolish women try to
crush it; but all women try to counteract it, and they do well. In many
a home all round us at this moment, we know that the nursery rhyme is
reversed. The queen is in the counting-house, counting out the money.
The king is in the parlor, eating bread and honey. But it must be
strictly understood that the king has captured the honey in some heroic
wars. The quarrel can be found in moldering Gothic carvings and in
crabbed Greek manuscripts. In every age, in every land, in every tribe
and village, has been waged the great sexual war between the Private
House and the Public House. I have seen a collection of mediaeval
English poems, divided into sections such as "Religious Carols,"
"Drinking Songs," and so on; and the section headed, "Poems of Domestic
Life" consisted entirely (literally, entirely) of the complaints
of husbands who were bullied by their wives. Though the English was
archaic, the words were in many cases precisely the same as those which
I have heard in the streets and public houses of Battersea, protests on
behalf of an extension of time and talk, protests against the nervous
impatience and the devouring utilitarianism of the female. Such, I say,
is the quarrel; it can never be anything but a quarrel; but the aim of
all morals and all society is to keep it a lovers' quarrel.

*****

VII. THE MODERN SURRENDER OF WOMAN

But in this corner called England, at this end of the century, there has
happened a strange and startling thing. Openly and to all appearance,
this ancestral conflict has silently and abruptly ended; one of the two
sexes has suddenly surrendered to the other. By the beginning of the
twentieth century, within the last few years, the woman has in public
surrendered to the man. She has seriously and officially owned that the
man has been right all along; that the public house (or Parliament) is
really more important than the private house; that politics are not
(as woman had always ma