THE MIND OF WOMAN 287 



under the rule of the male mind. While Western 

 countries, in order to carry on war, have drawn 

 mortgages on the future which stagger the imagina- 

 tion, there had not arisen up to the date of the 

 world war of 1914 any democracy which possessed 

 the power of subordinating itself to an ideal in the 

 future even to the limited extent of paying off its 

 national debt in times of peace in the interests of 

 posterity. The lack of this capacity to conceive 

 the importance of the future is visible in nearly all 

 public and class movements in the West. How 

 many workmen, asks a living writer, with the 

 object of reducing all such idealisms to absurdity, 

 would refuse an annuity of 200 a year on the chance 

 that by doing so he might raise the rate of wages 

 i per cent 300 years hence ? The more practical the 

 nation, the more successful the class of men in the 

 struggle for their own interests, the more absurd does 

 such a standard of renunciation appear to them. 



As soon as we get down to the realities which lie 

 behind the science of Power in civilization, it will 

 be perceived that in all that pertains to the emotion 

 of the ideal at those higher levels at which it 

 is most powerfully capable of influencing public 

 opinion in sustained effort directed to an objective 

 beyond the present, the mind of woman has in 

 reality already outstripped the mind of the male 



