Meanwhile, I shall doubtless be told that it is unfair to compare the woman’s club, with its didactic aim, and the scientific association of trained and interested investigators.  It is true that we have plenty of clubs—­some of men alone, some of both sexes—­whose object is to listen to interesting and instructive papers on a set subject, often forming part of a pre-arranged programme.  These, however, need our attention here only so far as the papers are prepared by members of the club, and in this case they are in precisely the same class as the woman’s club.  In many cases, however, the paper is merely the excuse for a social gathering, perhaps at a dinner or a luncheon.  Of course if the paper or lecture is by an expert invited to give it, the case falls altogether outside of the region that we are exploring.

I am condemning here all clubs, formed for an avowed educational or cultural purpose, that adopt set programmes and assign the subjects to their own members.  I am deploring the kind of reading to which this leads, the kind of papers that are prepared in this way, and the kind of thought and action that are the inevitable outcome.

It would seem that the women’s clubs now form an immense majority of all organisations of this kind and that there are reasons for warning women that they are specially prone to this kind of mistake.

The diversity of interests of the average man, the wideness of his contacts—­the whole tradition of his sex—­tends to minimise the injury that may be done to him, intellectually and spiritually, by anything of this kind.  The very fact that he is the woman’s inferior spiritually, and in many cases, in intellect, also—­although probably not at the maximum—­relieves him, in great part, of the odium attaching to the error that has been described.  Women are becoming keenly alive to the deficiencies of their sex-tradition; they are trying to broaden their intellectual contacts—­that is the great modern feminist movement.  Some of those who are active in it are making two mistakes—­they are ignoring the differences between the sexes and they are trying to substitute revolution for evolution.  In this latter error they are in very good company—­hardly one of the great and the good has not made it, at some time and in some way.  Revolution is always the outcome of a mistake.  The mistake may be antecedent and irrevocable, and the revolution therefore necessary, but this is rarely the case.  The revolutionist runs a risk common to all who are in a hurry—­he may break the object of his attention instead of moving it.  When he wants to hand you a dish he hits it with a ball-bat.  Taking a reasonable amount of time is better in the long run.

That there is no royal road to knowledge has long been recognised.  The trouble with most of us is that we have interpreted this to mean that the acquisition of knowledge must always be a distasteful process.  On the contrary, the vivid interest that is the surest guide to knowledge is also the surest smoother of the path.  Given the interest that lures the student on, and he will spend years in surmounting rocks and breaking through thorny jungles, realising their difficulties perhaps, but rejoicing the more when those difficulties prove no obstacles.