ething
that is dead, they appeal to something that may never be born.

There is another cause of this strange servile disease in American
democracy. It is to be found in American feminism, and feminist America
is an entirely different thing from feminine America. I should say that
the overwhelming majority of American girls laugh at their female
politicians at least as much as the majority of American men despise
their male politicians. But though the aggressive feminists are a
minority, they are in this atmosphere which I have tried to analyse; the
atmosphere in which there is a sort of sanctity about the minority. And
it is this superstition of seriousness that constitutes the most solid
obstacle and exception to the general and almost conventional pressure
of public opinion. When a fad is frankly felt to be anti-national, as
was Abolitionism before the Civil War, or Pro-Germanism in the Great
War, or the suggestion of racial admixture in the South at all times,
then the fad meets far less mercy than anywhere else in the world; it is
snowed under and swept away. But when it does not thus directly
challenge patriotism or popular ideas, a curious halo of hopeful
solemnity surrounds it, merely because it is a fad, but above all if it
is a feminine fad. The earnest lady-reformer who really utters a warning
against the social evil of beer or buttons is seen to be walking clothed
in light, like a prophetess. Perhaps it is something of the holy aureole
which the East sees shining around an idiot.

But I think there is another explanation, feminine rather than feminist,
and proceeding from normal women and not from abnormal idiots. It is
something that involves an old controversy, but one upon which I have
not, like so many politicians, changed my opinion. It concerns the
particular fashion in which women tend to regard, or rather to
disregard, the formal and legal rights of the citizen. In so far as this
is a bias, it is a bias in the directly opposite direction from that now
lightly alleged. There is a sort of underbred history going about,
according to which women in the past have always been in the position of
slaves. It is much more to the point to note that women have always been
in the position of despots. They have been despotic because they ruled
in an area where they had too much common sense to attempt to be
constitutional. You cannot grant a constitution to a nursery; nor can
babies assemble like barons and extor