And everybody would be happy.

* * * * *

When the Titanic went down a little while ago and those few quiet men on deck began their duty in that soft, gracious moonlit night, of sorting out the people who should die from the people who should live—­if one was a woman one could live.  If one was a man one could die.

No one will quarrel with the division as the only possible or endurable one that could have been made.

But if God himself could have made the division or some super-man ship’s officer who could have represented God, could have made it, it is not hard to believe that a less superficial, a more profound and human difference between people would have been used in sorting out the people who should live from the people who should die than a difference in organs of reproduction.

The women were saved first because the men were men and because it was the way the men felt.  It expressed the men who were on the deck that night that the women should be saved first; it was the last chance they had to express themselves like men and they wanted to do it.

But if God himself could have made the division with the immediate and conclusive knowledge of who everybody was, of what they really were in their hearts, and of what they and their children and their children’s children would do for the world if they lived no one would have quarrelled with God for making what would have seemed at the moment, no doubt, very unreasonable and ungallant and impossible-looking discriminations in sorting out the people who should live from the people who should die.

Possibly even Man (using the word with a capital), acting from the point of view of history and of the race and from the point of view of making a kind of world where Titanic disasters could not happen, would have chosen on the deck of the Titanic that night, very much the way God would.

From the point of view of Man there would have been no discrimination in favour of a woman because she was a woman.

The last cry of the last man that the still listening life-boats heard coming up out of the sea that night might have been the cry of the man who had invented a ship that could not sink.

There would not have been a woman in a life-boat or a woman sinking in the sea who would not have had this man saved before a woman.

If we could absolutely know all about the people, who are the people in this world that we should want to have saved first, that we would want to have taken to the life-boats and saved first at sea?

The women who are with child.

And the men who are about to have ideas.

And the men who man the boats for them, who in God’s name and in the name of a world protect its women who are with child, and its men who are about to have ideas.

The world is different from the Titanic.  We do not need to line up our immortal fellow human beings, sort them out in a minute on a world and say to them, “Go here and die!” “Go there and live!” We are able to spend on a world at least an average of thirty-five years apiece on all these immortal human beings we are with, in seeing what they are like, in guessing on what they are for and on their relative value, and in deciding where they belong and what a world can do with them.