“Every little village has its town house, with club rooms of all sorts; the people flock together freely, for games, for talk, for lectures, and plays, and dances, and sermons—it is universal. And in the city—you don’t see a saloon on every corner, but you do see almost as many places where you can ‘meet a man’ and talk with him on equal ground.”
“Meet a woman, too?” I suggested.
“Yes; especially, yes. People can meet, as individuals or in groups, freely and frequently, in city or country. But men can not flock by themselves in special places provided for their special vices—without taking a great deal of extra trouble.”
“I should think they would take the trouble, then,” said I.
“But why? When there is every arrangement made for a natural good time; when you are not overworked, not underfed, not miserable and hopeless. When you can drop into a comfortable chair and have excellent food and drink in pleasant company; and hear good music, or speaking, or reading, or see pictures; or, if you like, play any kind of game; swim, ride, fly, do what you want to, for change and recreation—why long for liquor in a low place?”
“But the men—the real men, people as they were,” I insisted. “You had a world full of drinking men who liked the saloon; did you—what do you call it?—eliminate them?”
“A few of them, yes,” he replied gravely. “Some preferred it; others, thoroughgoing dipsomaniacs, we gave hospital treatment and permanent restraint; they lived and worked and were well provided for in places where there was no liquor. But there were not many of that kind. Most men drank under a constant pressure of conditions driving them to it, and the mere force of habit.
“Just remember that the weight and terror of life is lifted off us—for good and all.”
“Socialism, you mean?”
“Yes, real socialism. The wealth and power of all of us belongs to all of us now. The wolf is dead.”
“Other things besides poverty drove a man to drink in my time,” I ventured.
“Oh, yes—and some men continued to drink. I told you there was liquor to be had—good liquor, too. And other drug habits held on for a while. But we stopped the source of the trouble. The old men died off, the younger ones got over it, and the new ones—that’s what you don’t realize yet: We make a new kind of people now.”
He was silent, his strong mouth set in a kind smile, his eyes looking far up the blue river.
“Well, what comes next? What’s done it?” I demanded. “Religion, education, or those everlasting women?”
He laughed outright; laughed till the boat rocked.
“How you do hate to admit that it’s their turn. John! Haven’t we had full swing—everything in our hands—for all historic time? They have only begun. Thirty years? Why, John, they have done so much in these thirty years that the world’s heart is glad at last. You don’t know—”
I didn’t know. But I did feel a distinct resentment at being treated like an extinct species.
“They have simply stepped on to an eminence men have been all these years building,” I said. “We have done all the hard work—are doing it yet, for all I see. We have made it possible for them to live at all! We have made the whole civilization of the world—they just profit by it. And now you speak as if, somehow, they had managed to achieve more than we have!”
Owen considered a while thoughtfully. “What you say is true. We have done a good deal of the work; we did largely make and modify our civilization. But if you read some of the newer histories—” he stopped and looked at me as if I had just happened. “Why you don’t know yet, do you? History has been rewritten.”
“You speak as if ‘history’ was a one act play.”
“I don’t mean it’s all done, of course—but we do have now a complete new treatment of the world’s history. Each nation its own, some several of them, there’s no dead level of agreement, I assure you. But our old androcentric version of life began to be questioned about 1910, I think—and new versions appeared, more and more of them. The big scholars took it up, there was new research work, and now we are not so glib in our assurance that we did it all.”
“You’re getting pretty close to things I used to know something about,” I remarked drily.
“If you knew all that was known, then, you wouldn’t know this, John. Don’t you remember what Lester Ward calls ‘the illusion of the near’—how the most familiar facts were precisely those we often failed to understand? In all our history, ancient and modern, we had the underlying assumption that men were the human race, the people who did things; and that women—were ‘their women.’ ”
“And precisely what have you lately discovered? That Horatio at the bridge was Horatio, after all? That the world was conquered by an Alexandra—and a Napoleona?” I laughed with some bitterness.
“No,” said Owen gently, “There is no question about the battles—men did the fighting, of course. But we have learned that ‘the decisive battles of history’ were not so decisive as we thought them. Man, as a destructive agent did modify history, unquestionably. What did make history, make civilization, was constructive industry. And for many ages women did most of that.”
“Did women build the Pyramids? The Acropolis? The roads of Rome?”
“No, nor many other things. But they gave the world its first start in agriculture and the care of animals; they clothed it and fed it and ornamented it and kept it warm; their ceaseless industry made rich the simple early cultures. Consider—without men, Egypt and Assyria could not have fought—but they could have grown rich and wise. Without women—they could have fought until the last man died alone—if the food held out.
“But I won’t bother you with this, John. You’ll get all you want out of books better than I
