In the midst of all the puerile repressions and inhibitions that hedge
them round, they continue to show a gipsy spirit. No genuine
woman ever gives a hoot for law if law happens to stand in the way
of her private interest. She is essentially an outlaw, a rebel, what H.
G. Wells calls a nomad. The boons of civilization are so noisily
cried up by sentimentalists that we are all apt to overlook its
disadvantages. Intrinsically, it is a mere device for regimenting men.
Its perfect symbol is the goose-step. The most civilized man is
simply that man who has been most successful in caging and
harnessing his honest and natural instincts-that is, the man who
has done most cruel violence to his own ego in the interest of the
commonweal. The value of this commonweal is always
overestimated. What is it at bottom? Simply the greatest good to
the greatest number--of petty rogues, ignoramuses and poltroons.


The capacity for submitting to and prospering comfortably under
this cheese-monger's civilization is far more marked in men than in
women, and far more in inferior men than in men of the higher
categories. It must be obvious to even so pathetic an ass as a
university professor of history that very few of the genuinely
first-rate men of the race have been, wholly civilized, in the sense
that the term is employed in newspapers and in the pulpit. Think of
Caesar, Bonaparte, Luther, Frederick the Great, Cromwell,
Barbarossa, Innocent III, Bolivar, Hannibal, Alexander, and to come
down to our own time, Grant, Stonewall Jackson, Bismarck,
Wagner, Garibaldi and Cecil Rhodes.