Women Against Cruelty by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2021-04-20T15:11:24+00:00

We hear of love, and pity, and Christian charity; we see torpedoes and hellish inventions of incredible power to destroy our fellow-creatures … The civilised world boasts of its progress in civilisation … but those countries which command respect … are the possessors of the big battalions. ‘Force,’ the great law of nature, will assert its power and rule.¹⁰

Herbert Spencer in The Study of Sociology, first published in 1873, had given these ideas a more sophisticated expression and a more comprehensive frame of reference. Europe was, he thought, presently at a median stage of development between a state of brutishness and a more advanced stage of civilisation. At this historical juncture, competition between nations and imperial conquest demanded extreme aggression; but commercial and social progress demanded, contrarily, an ability to co-operate and conciliate, symbolised by the message of Christianity. These ‘two religions’ of ‘enmity’ and ‘amity’ were, seemingly, incompatible as rules of conduct, and existed only in a precarious balance or alternation; but their power over men’s minds was actually far from equal. Like White Baker, Spencer concluded that ‘The religion of enmity nearly all men actually believe. The religion of amity most of them merely believe they believe’.¹¹ The word ‘men’ here has a sexual force. Spencer thought too poorly of the mental capacity of women to envisage their securing a complete triumph for ‘amity’, which would anyway be against the nation’s interests; nevertheless, their maternal instincts and their age-old need to bow to the will of more powerful men induced a characteristic ‘love of the helpless’ and pity for the suffering, based on intuition and religious faith: qualities that were the polar opposite of those required of males.¹²

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