sense of honour. The criticism, of course, is characteristically banal.
Honour is a concept too tangled to be analyzed here, but it may
be sufficient to point out that it is predicated upon a feeling of
absolute security, and that, in that capital conflict between man and
woman out of which rises most of man's complaint of its
absence--to wit, the conflict culminating in marriage, already
described--the security of the woman is not something that is in
actual being, but something that she is striving with all arms to
attain. In such a conflict it must be manifest that honor can have no
place. An animal fighting for its very existence uses all possible
means of offence and defence, however foul. Even man, for all his
boasting about honor, seldom displays it when he has anything of
the first value at hazard. He is honorable, perhaps, in gambling, for
gambling is a mere vice, but it is quite unusual for him to be
honorable in business, for business is bread and butter. He is
honorable (so long as the stake is trivial) in his sports, but he seldom
permits honor to interfere with his perjuries in a lawsuit, or with
hitting below the belt in any other sort of combat that is in earnest.
The history of all his wars is a history of mutual allegations of
dishonorable practices, and such allegations are nearly always
well grounded. The best imitation of honor that he ever actually
achieves in them is a highly self-conscious sentimentality which
prompts him to be humane to the opponent who has been wounded,
or disarmed, or otherwise made innocuous. Even here his so-called
honor is little more than a form of playacting, both maudlin and
dishonest. In the actual death-struggle he invariably bites.


Perhaps one of the chief charms of woman lies precisely in the fact
that they are dishonorable, i.e., that they are relatively uncivilized.