They showed that upon the mind of England’s greatest captain of the sea the tender influence of the old mother, and the old home in distant England, survived all the variableness of his character, all the supreme efforts of his career, and that a gentleness and an almost womanly yearning for affection were the qualities that ruled the soul of the most desperate ocean fighter the world had seen since Drake.  They showed that the heart of the sternest warrior may be beautiful with the humanities.  How does the old song go?—­“The bravest are the tenderest”—­that is it.

So fear not that mother’s influence will weaken you.  It will do nothing of the kind.  It will strengthen you.  It will make you want to fight only for something worth fighting for.  But when you fight for that, it will make you fight to the death.  And what is the use of fighting at all unless it be to the death.  A brawl is not conflict, bravado is not bravery.

I know there is another side to this question.  It has been recently stated by a resourceful Oriental.  He said that the influence of women on the Occidental man is effeminizing our civilization.  He declared that the mother gives the boy his first training, teaches him to talk, etc., which is natural and therefore right and proper.

But then, said our Asiatic critic, we give our boys to women school-teachers, who educate them until they are ready for college, and then, as soon as they are ready for college, they begin to “call on the young women,” and generally frequent the society of the softer sex until the time arrives for them to marry.

So that, according to this Oriental, we are under the direct influence of woman from the cradle to the grave; and he points out that gradually (imperceptibly, perhaps, to our own eyes) an effeminizing process occurs in mind and character.  As a result of this, he maintains, our men increasingly fear hardships and seek to avoid them; and life and even personal appearance are given a value which is absurd, considering the inevitableness of death in any event, the perfectly unthinkable number of myriads of human beings who exist, have existed, and will exist hereafter.

This philosopher of the East, therefore, claims that we will in the end be no match at all for the Orientals, and that the yellow race, which has been merely resting while we Caucasians have been having our brief innings, is now to the bat again.  And there was a lot more to the same effect.

This is of course the Asiatic way of looking at things.  There may be something in what he says about the continuity of female influence softening our Western civilization.  Certainly the present war shows that the Japanese women, who were only yesterday altogether Oriental in habits and ideals, have produced a race of strong men, so far as physical daring and hardihood is concerned.  The influence of women on these men ceased with childhood—­even then it was a Spartan influence.