lves
at a disadvantage. They are laying down the weapons they know best how
to use, and adopting weapons so unsuitable that they only injure the
users.

Many women, speaking on behalf of the suffragettes, protest against the
idea that women must always be "charming." And if "charm" is to be
understood in so narrow and conventionalized a sense that it means
something which is incompatible with the developed natural activities,
whether of the soul or of the body, then such a protest is amply
justified. But in the larger sense, "charm"--which means the power to
effect work without employing brute force--is indispensable to women.
Charm is a woman's strength just as strength is a man's charm. And the
justification for women in this matter is that herein they represent the
progress of civilization. All civilization involves the substitution in
this respect of the woman's method for the man's. In the last resort a
savage can only assert his rights by brute force. But with the growth of
civilization the wronged man, instead of knocking down his opponent,
employs "charm"; in other words he engages an advocate, who, by the
exercise of sweet reasonableness, persuades twelve men in a box that
his wrongs must be righted, and the matter is then finally settled, not
by man's weapon, the fist, but by woman's weapon, the tongue. Nowadays
the same method of "charm" is being substituted for brute force in
international wrongs, and with the complete substitution of arbitration
for war the woman's method of charm will have replaced the man's method
of brute force along the whole line of legitimate human activity. If we
realize this we can understand why it is that a group of women who, even
in the effort to support a good cause, revert to the crude method of
violence are committing a double wrong. They are wronging their own sex
by proving false to its best traditions, and they are wronging
civilization by attempting to revive methods of savagery which it is
civilization's mission to repress. Therefore it may fairly be held that
even if the methods of the suffragettes were really adequate to secure
women's suffrage, the attainment of the franchise by those methods would
be a misfortune. The ultimate loss would be greater than the gain.

If we hold the foregoing considerations in mind it is difficult to avoid
the conclusion that neither in their direction nor in their nature are
the methods of the suffragettes fitted to attain the end desi