One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
pluck a flower or fruit along the pathway border to which
they are confined), speedily, alas, exhibits them at a mad
scramble across the pleasure-beds. They know not moderation.
Neither for their own sakes nor for the sakes of Posterity
will they hold from excess, when they are not pledged to
shun it.
The reason is, that their minds cannot conceive the abstract,
as men do.
But there are grounds for supposing that the example before
them of a sex exercising self-control in freedom, would
induce women to pledge themselves to a similar abnegation,
until they gain some sense of touch upon the impalpable
duty to the generations coming after us thanks to the voluntary
example we set them.
The stupendous task, which had hitherto baffled Skepsey
in the course of conversational remonstrances with his wife;—
that of getting the Idea of Posterity into the understanding
of its principal agent, might then be mastered.
Therefore clearly men have to begin the salutary movement:
it manifestly devolves upon them. Let them at once
take to rigorous physical training. Women under compulsion,
as vessels: men in their magnanimity, patriotically, voluntarily.
Miss Graves must have had an intimation for him; he guessed
it; and it plunged him into a conflict with her, that did not
suffer him to escape without ruefully feeling the feebleness of
his vocabulary: and consequently he made a reluctant appeal
to figures, and it hung upon the bolder exhibition of lists and
tables as to whether he was beaten; and if beaten, he was morally
her captive; and this being the case, nothing could be more
repulsive to Skepsey; seeing that he, unable of his nature passively
or partially to undertake a line of conduct, beheld himself
wearing a detestable ‘ribbon,’ for sign of an oath quite
needlessly sworn (simply to satisfy the lady overcoming him
with nimbler tongue), and blocking the streets, marching in
bands beneath banners, howling hymns.
Statistics, upon which his master and friends, after exchanging
opinions in argument, always fell back, frightened him.
As long as they had no opponents of their own kind, they
swept the field, they were intelligible, as the word ‘principle’
had become. But the appearance of one body of Statistics
invariably brought up another; and the strokes and
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