



Produced by Michael Pullen, Michael K. Johnson, and Joe Moretti







A MISCELLANY OF MEN

By G. K. Chesterton



Contents

     THE SUFFRAGIST

     THE POET AND THE CHEESE

     THE THING

     THE MAN WHO THINKS BACKWARDS

     THE NAMELESS MAN

     THE GARDENER AND THE GUINEA

     THE VOTER AND THE TWO VOICES

     THE MAD OFFICIAL

     THE ENCHANTED MAN

     THE SUN WORSHIPPER

     THE WRONG INCENDIARY

     THE FREE MAN

     THE HYPOTHETICAL HOUSEHOLDER

     THE PRIEST OF SPRING

     THE REAL JOURNALIST

     THE SENTIMENTAL SCOT

     THE SECTARIAN OF SOCIETY

     THE FOOL

     THE CONSCRIPT AND THE CRISIS

     THE MISER AND HIS FRIENDS

     THE MYSTAGOGUE

     THE RED REACTIONARY

     THE SEPARATIST AND SACRED THINGS

     THE MUMMER

     THE ARISTOCRATIC 'ARRY

     THE NEW THEOLOGIAN

     THE ROMANTIC IN THE RAIN

     THE FALSE PHOTOGRAPHER

     THE SULTAN

     THE ARCHITECT OF SPEARS

     THE MAN ON TOP

     THE OTHER KIND OF MAN

     THE MEDIAEVAL VILLAIN

     THE DIVINE DETECTIVE

     THE ELF OF JAPAN

     THE CHARTERED LIBERTINE

     THE CONTENTED MAN

     THE ANGRY AUTHOR: HIS FAREWELL




THE SUFFRAGIST

Rightly or wrongly, it is certain that a man both liberal and chivalric,
can and very often does feel a dis-ease and distrust touching
those political women we call Suffragettes. Like most other popular
sentiments, it is generally wrongly stated even when it is rightly felt.
One part of it can be put most shortly thus: that when a woman puts up
her fists to a man she is putting herself in the only posture in which
he is not afraid of her. He can be afraid of her speech and still more
of her silence; but force reminds him of a rusted but very real weapon
of which he has grown ashamed. But these crude summaries are never quite
accurate in any matter of the instincts. For the things which are the
simplest so long as they are undisputed invariably become the subtlest
when once they are disputed: which was what Joubert meant, I suppose,
when he said, "It is not hard to believe in God if one does not define
Him." When the evil instincts of old Foulon made him say of the poor,
"Let them eat grass," the good and Christian instincts of the poor
made them hang him on a lamppost with his mouth stuffed full of that
vegetation. But if a modern vegetarian aristocrat were to say to the
poor, "But why don't you like grass?" their intelligences would be much
more taxed to find such an appropriate repartee. And this matter of the
functions of the sexes is primarily a matter of the instincts; sex and
breathing are about the only two things that generally work best
when they are least worried about. That, I suppose, is why the same
sophisticated age that has poisoned the world with Feminism is also
polluting it with Breathing Exercises. We plunge at once into a forest
of false analogies and bad blundering history; while almost any man or
woman left to themselves would know at least that sex is quite different
from anything else in the world.

There is no kind of comparison possible between a quarrel of man and
woman (however right the woman may be) and the other quarrels of slave
and master, of rich and poor, or of patriot and invader, with which the
Suffragists deluge us every day. The difference is as plain as noon;
these other alien groups never came into contact until they came into
collision. Races and ranks began with battle, even if they afterwards
melted into amity. But the very first fact about the sexes is that they
like each other. They seek each other: and awful as are the sins and
sorrows that often come of their mating, it was not such things that
made them meet. It is utterly astounding to note the way in which modern
writers and talkers miss this plain, wide, and overwhelming fact: one
would suppose woman a victim and nothing else. By this account ideal,
emancipated woman has, age after age, been knocked silly with a stone
axe. But really there is no fact to show that ideal, emancipated woman
was ever knocked silly; except the fact that she is silly. And that
might have arisen in so