There may be people who would like a world that was all engineers or all poets-but most of us would like to have a certain number of each though here again, we should all differ about the desirable proportion of engineering to poetry.
When we balance the poet against the engineer, we are faced with a fundamental difference of temperament-so that here our question is complicated by the enormous social problem whether poetry or engineering is "better" for the State, or for humanity in general.
There might be exceptions on either side: it is largely a matter of heredity and education. "A woman is as good as a man" is as meaningless as to say, "a Kaffir is as good as a Frenchman" or "a poet is as good as an engineer" or "an elephant is as good as a racehorse"- it means nothing whatever until you add: "at doing what?" In a religious sense, no doubt, the Kaffir is as valuable in the eyes of God as a Frenchman-but the average Kaffir is probably less skilled in literary criticism than the average Frenchman, and the average Frenchman less skilled than the average Kaffir in tracing the spoor of big game. It cannot be settled by loud slogans or hard-and-fast assertions like "a woman is as good as a man"-or "woman's place is the home"-or "women ought not to take men's jobs." The minute one makes such assertions, one finds one has to qualify them. The question of "sex-equality" is, like all questions affecting human relationships, delicate and complicated. I do not know that it is very easy to explain, without offence or risk of misunderstanding, exactly what I do mean, but I will try. As a result I was, perhaps not unnaturally, invited to explain myself. In fact, I think I went so far as to say that, under present conditions, an aggressive feminism might do more harm than good.
I replied-a little irritably, I am afraid-that I was not sure I wanted to "identify myself," as the phrase goes, with feminism, and that the time for "feminism," in the old-fashioned sense of the word, had gone past. When I was asked to come and speak to you, your Secretary made the suggestion that she thought I must be interested in the feminist movement.
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