Rome was built without wheelbarrows. If you stop to think of it, a wheelbarrow is a curious and perverse piece of mechanism, a cross between a cart and a catapult, changing suddenly by the mighty magic of the lever from the one to the other. The world had got along for thousands of years without it. Then one imagines a state of siege in an Italian town, a necessity for building up battered walls faster than they had ever been built up before, a few moments' desperate concentration of mind, a hasty sketch on the back of a love-letter, and lo! -the wheelbarrow. But it wouldn't have happened at least not just then-if the chief engineer had not been Leonardo da Vinci.

It took a curious and perverse mind to make that machine. I have looked through the notebooks of Leonardo-looked, and not read, for the four languages in which they are printed, in the magnificent and many-volumed edition I have seen, do not include my own-looked in something like awe at the drawings of wings of birds and of tentative birdlike machinery which illustrate his attempt to discover the secret of flying. And while I looked I heard through the open window the throb of motors in the sky.

Before me were the facsimile sketches, torn and thumb-marked by dead hands, of Leonardo's uncompleted dreams-a great mind's guesses at the mystery of mechanism; and outside, while thou

sands waited and watched to see him die, Beachey was breaking a record.

He knew that curious Florentine-he knew that the genius inherent in machinery would yet lift men above the clouds. He did not know that the invention of a spinning-jenny would change the whole world, sweeping away all but the ruins of his own age and erecting above them a hideous factory civilization, turning skilled artisans into machine hands and superseding the prince by the capitalist. He did not dream how men would come to look on machinery with fear, and then at last with a dawning hope, seeing in its relentless evolution a destructive and transforming power which would destroy and transform this new civilization even as the last.

Nor did his curious mind penetrate to our latterday anxiety in the face of the feminine enigma. He did not dream that we should front that baffling face with an old question that has a new meaning: "Will you?"

We know well enough that Woman has behind her a long tradition of servitude. And we look at her and wonder if she will have the stamina to be free. We know that she does not yet particularly desire to think. And we look at her and wonder if she will wish to learn. We know that she has a jealous and narrow individualism. And we look at her and wonder if she will subject herself unreluctantly to those larger social processes which alone

can make of her a real individual. We know that she submits to being the victim of Life even as the Moslem submits to being the victim of Death. And we look at her and wonder if she will achieve conscious and purposeful control over her terrible biological potencies. We know that the tissues of her soul are ravaged by the poisonous bacteria of Romance. And we look at her and wonder if she will ever gain a practical immunity from that disease. We see in her tremendous and fine things, and we are humble before them. We know that she has begun to dream greatly. And we face the delicate scorn of her smile and ask again: "Will you?"

In the face of the old painting there is nothing of this. Nothing? Perhaps we do Leonardo an injustice. Perhaps he too wondered what we are wondering to-day. Perhaps he was as well acquainted as we with that dynamic feminine discontent which one as yet dare not quite trust. And perhaps he guessed, too, the future of the distaff as he guessed the future of the flying-machine. We may yet come across an old notebook, torn and thumb-marked by dead hands, that will set the enigma of the wheelbarrow side by side with the enigmatic smile of Mona Lisa-and we shall read in something like awe Leonardo da Vinci's guesses at the two great riddles of the world.

1914

II. Feminism for Men

F

SI. THE EMANCIPATION OF MAN

EMINISM is going to make it possible for the first time for men to be free.

At present the ordinary man has the choice

between being a slave and a scoundrel.

For the ordinary man is prone to fall in love and marry and have children.

frequently has a mother.

Also the ordinary man

He wants to see them

all taken care of, since they are unable to take care Yet, if he has them to think about,

of themselves.

he is not free.

A free man is a man who is ready to throw up his job whenever he feels like it. Whether he is a bricklayer who wants to go out on a sympathetic strike, or a poet who wants to quit writing drivel for the magazines, in any case if he doesn't do what he wants to do, he is not free.

To disregard the claims of dependent women, to risk their comfort in the interest of self or of society at large, takes a good deal of heroism-and some scoundrelism, too.

Some of the finest natures to be found among men

are the least free. It is the most sensitive who hesitate and are lost to the world and their own souls.

And this will be true so long as women as a sex are dependent on men for support. It is too much to ask of a man to be brave, when his bravery means taking the food out of the mouth of a woman who cannot get food except from him. The bravest things will not be done in the world until women do not have to look to men for support.

The change is already under way. Irresistible economic forces are taking more and more women every year out of the economic shelter of the home into the great world, making them workers and earners along with men. And every conquest of theirs, from an education which will make them fit for the world of earning, to "equal pay for equal work," is a setting free of men. The last achievement will be a social insurance for motherhood, which will enable women to have children without taking away a man's freedom from him. Then a man will be able to tell his employer that "he and his job can go bark at one another," without being a hero and a scoundrel at the same time.

Capitalism will not like that. Capitalism does not want free men. It wants men with wives and children who are dependent on them for support. Mothers' pensions will be hard fought for before they are ever gained. And that is not the worst.