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Title: The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage

Author: Almroth Wright

Release Date: February 1, 2004 [EBook #5183]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Thomas Pollock

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ***

THE

UNEXPURGATED CASE

AGAINST

WOMAN SUFFRAGE

BY

SIR ALMROTH E. WRIGHT

M.D.,  F.R.S.

NEW YORK

PAUL B. HOEBER

69 EAST 59TH S TREET

Copyright, 1913

BY  PAUL  B.  HOEBER

CONTENTS

PAGE

PREFACE    .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .     11

INTRODUCTION    .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .     21

Programme of This Treatise--Motives from which

Women Claim the Suffrage--Types of Men who Sup-

port the Suffrage--John Stuart Mill.

PART I

ARGUMENTS WHICH A RE ADDUCED IN S UP -

PORT OF WOMAN'S S UFFRAGE

I

ARGUMENTS FROM ELEMENTARY NATURAL

RIGHTS   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .    33

Signification of the Term "Woman's Rights"--Argu-

ment from "Justice"--Juridical Justice--"Egalitarian

Equity"--Argument from Justice Applied to Taxation

--Argument from Liberty--Summary of Arguments

from Elementary Natural Rights.

II

ARGUMENTS FROM INTELLECTUAL GRIEV-

ANCES OF WOMAN  .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .    54

Complaint of Want of Chivalry--Complaint of "In

sults"--Complaint of "Illogicalties"--Complaint of

"Prejudices"--The Familiar Suffragist Grievance of

the Drunkard Voter and the Woman of Property Who

is a Non-Voter--The Grievance of Woman being Re-

quired to Obey Man-Made Laws.

III                                   PAGE

ARGUMENTS WHICH TAKE THE FORM OF

"COUNSELS OF PERFECTION" ADDRESSED

TO MAN  .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   72

Argument that Woman Requires a Vote for her Pro-

tection--Argument that Woman ought to be Invested

with the Responsibilities of Voting in Order that She

May Attain Her Full Intellectual Stature.

PART II

ARGUMENTS AGAINST THE CONCESSION OF THE

PARLIAMENTARY SUFFRAGE TO WOMAN

I

WOMAN'S DISABILITY IN THE MATTER OF

PHYSICAL FORCE  .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   79

International Position of State would be Imperilled by

Woman's Suffrage--Internal Equilibrium of State

would be Imperilled.

II

WOMAN'S DISABILITY IN THE MATTER OF IN-

TELLECT    .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   88

Characteristics of the Feminine Mind--Suffragist Illu-

sions with Regard to the Equality of Man and Woman

as Workers--Prospect for the Intellectual Future of

Woman--Has Woman Advanced?

III

WOMAN'S DISABILITY IN THE MATTER OF PUB-

LIC MORALITY   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   98

Standards by which Morality can be Appraised--Con-

flict between Different Moralities--The Correct

Standard of Morality--Moral Psychology of Man and

Woman--Difference between Man and Woman in Mat-

ters of Public Morality.

IV                                                 PAGE

MENTAL OUTLOOK AND PROGRAMME OF THE

FEMALE LEGISLATIVE REFORMER  .   .  114

V

ULTERIOR ENDS WHICH THE WOMAN'S SUF-

FRAGE MOVEMENT HAS IN VIEW  .   .   .   136

PART III

IS THERE, IF THE SUFFRAGE IS B ARRED, A NY

PALLIATIVE OR C ORRECTIVE FOR THE

DISCONTENTS OF WOMAN ?

I

PALLIATIVES OR CORRECTIVES FOR THE DIS-

CONTENT OF WOMAN  .   .   .   .   .   .   .   155

What are the Suffragist's Grievances?--Economic and

Physiological  Difficulties of Woman--Intellectual

Grievances of Suffragist and Corrective.

APPENDIX

LETTER ON MILITANT HYSTERIA   .   .   .   .   .   .   167

PREFACE

IT has come to be believed that everything

that has a bearing upon the concession of the

suffrage to woman has already been brought

forward.

In reality, however, the influence of women

has caused man to leave unsaid many things

which he ought to have said.

Especially in two respects has woman re-

stricted the discussion.

She has placed her taboo upon all general-

isations about women, taking exception to

these on the threefold ground that there would

be no generalisations which would hold true of

all women; that generalisations when reached

possess no practical utility; and that the ele-

ment of sex does not leave upon women any

general imprint such as could properly be

brought up in connexion with the question of

admitting them to the electorate.                                               11

Woman has further stifled discussion by

placing her taboo upon anything seriously un-

flattering being said about her in public.

I would suggest, and would propose here

myself to act upon the suggestion, that, in con-

nexion with the discussion of woman's suf-

frage, these restrictions should be laid

aside.

In connexion with the setting aside of the

restriction upon generalising, I may perhaps

profitably point out that all generalisations,

and not only generalisations which relate to

women, are ex hypothesi [by hypothesis] subject to individual

exceptions. (It is to generalisations that the

proverb that "the exception proves the rule"

really applies.)  I may further point out that

practically every decision which we take in or-

dinary life, and all legislative action without

exception, is based upon generalisations; and

again, that the question of the suffrage, and

with it the larger question as to the proper

sphere of woman, finally turns upon the ques-

tion as to what imprint woman's sexual sys-                              12

tem leaves upon her physical frame, character,

and intellect: in more technical terms, it turns

upon the question as to what are the secondary

sexual character[istic]s of woman.

Now only by a felicitous exercise of the fac-

ulty of successful generalisation can we arrive

at a knowledge of these.

With respect to the restriction that nothing

which might offend woman's amour propre [self love]

shall be said in public, it may be pointed out

that, while it was perfectly proper and equit-

able that no evil (and, as Pericles proposed,

also no good) should be said of woman in pub-

lic so long as she confined herself to the do-

mestic sphere, the action of that section of

women who have sought to effect an entrance

into public life, has now brought down upon

woman, as one of the penalties, the abrogation

of that convention.

A consideration which perhaps ranks only

next in importance to that with which we have

been dealing, is that of the logical sanction of

the propositions which are enunciated in the                              13

course of such controversial discussions as that

in which we are here involved.

It is clearly a precondition of all useful dis-

cussion that the author and reader should be in

accord with respect to the authority of the gen-

eralisations and definitions which supply the

premisses for his reasonings.

Though this might perhaps to the reader

appear an impractical ideal, I would propose

here to attempt to reach it by explaining the

logical method which I have set myself to fol-

low.

Although I have from literary necessity em-

ployed in my text some of the verbal forms of

dogmatism, I am very far from laying claim

to any dogmatic authority.  More than that, I

would desire categorically to repudiate such a

claim.

For I do not conceal from myself that, if I

took up such a position, I should wantonly be

placing myself at the mercy of my reader.

For he could then, by merely refusing to see                             14

in me an authority, bring down the whole edi-

fice of my argument like a house of cards.

Moreover I am not blind to what would hap-

pen if, after I claimed to be taken as an author-

ity, the reader was indulgent enough still to go

on to read what I have written.

He would in such a case, the moment he en-

countered a statement with which he disagreed,

simply waive me on one side with the words,

"So you say."

And if he should encounter a statement with

which he agreed, he would in his wisdom, cen-

sure me for neglecting to provide for that

proposition a satisfactory logical founda-

tion.

If it is far from my thoughts to claim a right

of dictation, it is equally remote from them to

take up the position that I have in my argu-

ments furnished proof of the thesis which

I set out to establish.

It would be culpable misuse of language to

speak in such connexion of proof or disproof .                        15

Proof by testimony, which is available in con-

nexion with questions of fact, is unavailable in

connexion with general truths; and logical

proof is obtainable only in that comparatively

narrow sphere where reasoning is based--as in

mathematics--upon axioms, or--as in certain

really crucial experiments in the mathematic

sciences--upon quasi-axiomatic premisses.

Everywhere else we base our reasonings on

premisses which are simply more or less prob-

able; and accordingly the conclusions which

we arrive at have in them always an element

of insecurity.

It will be clear that in philosophy, in juris-

prudence, in political economy and sociology,

and in literary criticism and such like, we are

dealing not with certainties but with proposi-

tions which are, for literary convenience, in-

vested with the garb of certainties.

What kind of logical sanction is it, then,

which can attach to reasonings such as are to

be set out here?

They have in point of fact the sanction which                        16

attaches to reasonings based upon premisses

arrived at by the method of diacritical judg-

ment.

It is, I hasten to notify the reader, not the

method, but only the name here assigned to it,

which is unfamiliar.  As soon as I exhibit it

in the working, the reader will identify it as

that by which every generalisation and defini-

tion ought to be put to the proof.

I may for this purpose take the general

statements or definitions which serve as prem-

isses for my reasonings in the text.

I bring forward those generalisations and

definitions because they commend themselves

to my diacritical judgment.  In other words, I

set them forth as results which have been

reached after reiterated efforts to call up to

mind the totality of my experience, and to de-

tect the factor which is common to all the in-

dividual experiences.

When for instance I propose a definition, I

have endeavoured to call to mind all the dif-

ferent uses of the word with which I am fa-                               17

miliar--eliminating, of course, all the obviously

incorrect uses.

And when I venture to attempt a generalisa-

tion about woman, I endeavour to recall to

mind without distinction all the different

women I have encountered, and to extricate

from my impressions what was common to all,

--omitting from consideration (except only

when I am dealing specifically with these) all

plainly abnormal women.

Having by this procedure arrived at a gen-

eralisation--which may of course be correct

or incorrect--I submit it to my reader, and

ask from him that he should, after going

through the same mental operations as myself,

review my judgment, and pronounce his ver-

dict.

If it should then so happen that the reader

comes, in the case of any generalisation, to the

same verdict as that which I have reached, that

particular generalisation will, I submit, now

go forward not as a datum of my individual

experience, but as the intellectual resultant of                            18

two separate and distinct experiences.  It will

thereby be immensely fortified.

If, on the other hand, the reader comes to

the conclusion that a particular generalisation

is out of conformity with his experience, that

generalisation will go forward shorn of some,

or perchance all, its authority.

But in any case each individual generalisa-

tion must be referred further.

And at the end it will, according as it finds,

or fails to find, acceptance among the thought-

ful, be endorsed as a truth, and be gathered

into the garner of human knowledge; or be

recognised as an error, and find its place with

the tares, which the householder, in time of the

harvest, will tell the reapers to bind in bundles

to burn them.

A. E. W.                               19

1913.

INTRODUCTION

Programme of this Treatise--Motives  from which

Women Claim the Suffrage--Types of Men who

Support the Suffrage--John Stuart Mill.

THE task which I undertake here is to show

that the Woman's Suffrage Movement has no

real intellectual or moral sanction, and that

there are very weighty reasons why the suf-

frage should not be conceded to woman.

I would propose to begin by analysing the

mental attitude of those who range themselves

on the side of woman suffrage, and then to pass

on to deal with the principal arguments upon

which the woman suffragist relies.

The preponderating majority of the women

who claim the suffrage do not do so from mo-

tives of public interest or philanthropy.

They are influenced almost exclusively by

two motives: resentment at the suggestion that                          21

woman should be accounted by man as inher-

ently his inferior in certain important re-

spects; and reprehension of a state of society

in which more money, more personal liberty

(In reality only more of the personal liberty

which the possession of money confers), more

power, more public recognition and happier

physiological conditions fall to the share of

man.

A cause which derives its driving force so

little from philanthropy and public interest

and so much from offended amour propre and

pretensions which are, as we shall see, unjusti-

fied, has in reality no moral prestige.

For its intellectual prestige the movement

depends entirely on the fact that it has the

advocacy of a certain number of distinguished

men.

It will not be amiss to examine that ad-

vocacy.

The "intellectual" whose name appears at

the foot of woman's suffrage petitions will,

when you have him by himself, very often                                 22

Make confession:--"Woman suffrage," he

will tell you, "is not the grave and important

cause which the ardent female suffragist

deems it to be.  Not only will it not do any

of the things which she imagines it is going to

do, but it will leave the world exactly where

it is.  Still--the concession of votes to women

is desirable  from the  point of view of sym-

metry of classification; and it will soothe the

ruffled feelings of quite a number of  very

worthy women."

It may be laid down as a broad general rule

that only two classes of men have the cause of

woman's suffrage really at heart.

The first is the crank who, as soon as he

thinks he has discerned a moral principle, im-

mediately gets into the saddle, and then rides

hell-for-leather, reckless of all considerations

of public expediency.

The second is that very curious type of man,

who when it is suggested in his hearing that the

species woman is, measured by certain intel-

lectual and moral standards, the inferior of the                          23

species man, solemnly draws himself up and

asks, "Are you, sir, aware that you are insult-

ing my wife?"

To this, the type of man who feels every un-

favourable criticism of woman as a personal

affront to himself, John Stuart Mill, had

affinities.

We find him writing a letter to the Home

Secretary, informing him, in relation to a Par-

liamentary Bill restricting the sale of arsenic

to male persons over twenty-one years, that it

was a "gross insult to every woman, all women

from highest to lowest being deemed unfit to

have poison in their possession, lest they shall

commit murder."

We find him again, in a state of indignation

with the English marriage laws, preluding his

nuptials with Mrs. Taylor by presenting that

lady with a formal charter; renouncing all au-

thority over her, and promising her security

against all infringements of her liberty which

might proceed from himself.                                                    24

To this lady he is always ascribing credit for

his eminent intellectual achievements.  And

lest his reader should opine that woman stands

somewhat in the shade with respect to her own

intellectual  triumphs, Mill undertakes the

explanation.  "Felicitous thoughts," he tells

us, "occur by hundreds to every woman of in-

tellect.  But they are mostly lost for want of a

husband or friend  .  .  .  to estimate them

properly, and to bring them before the world;

and even when they are brought before it they

generally appear as his ideas."

Not only did Mill see woman and all her

works through an optical medium which gave

images like this; but there was upon his ret-

ina a large blind area.  By reason of this

last it was inapprehensible to him that there

could be an objection to the sexes co-operating

indiscriminately in work.  It was beyond his

ken that the sex element would under these

conditions invade whole departments of life

which are now free from it.  As he saw things,                          25

there was in point of fact a risk of the human

race dying out by reason of the inadequate im-

perativeness of its sexual instincts.

Mill's unfaithfulness to the facts cannot,

however, all be put down to constitutional de-

fects of vision.  When he deals with woman

he is no longer scrupulously conscientious.

We begin to have our suspicions of his up-

rightness when we find him in his Subjection

of Women laying it down as a fundamental

postulate that the subjection of woman to man

is always morally indefensible.  For no up-

right mind can fail to see that the woman who

lives in a condition of financial dependence

upon man has no moral claim to unrestricted

liberty.  The suspicion of Mill's honesty

which is thus awakened is confirmed by

further critical reading of his treatise.  In

that skilful tractate one comes across, every

here and there, a suggestio falsi [suggestion of a falsehood], or a sup-

pressio veri [suppression of the truth], or a fallacious analogy nebulously

expressed, or a mendacious metaphor, or a

passage which is contrived to lead off attention                        26

from some weak point in the feminist case.1

Moreover, Mill was unmindful of the obliga-

tions of intellectual morality when he allowed

his stepdaughter, in connexion with feminist

questions, to draft letters 2 which went forward

as his own.

There is yet another factor which must be

kept in mind in connexion with the writings

of Mill.  It was the special characteristic of

the man to set out to tackle concrete problems

and then to spend his strength upon abstrac-

tions.

In his Political Economy, where his proper

subject matter was man with his full equip-

ment of impulses, Mill took as his theme an

abstraction: an economic man who is actuated

solely by the desire of gain.  He then worked

out in great elaboration the course of conduct

which an aggregate of these puppets of his

imagination would pursue.  Having  per-                                   27

1 Vide [See] in this connexion the incidental references to Mill

on pp. 50, 81 footnote, and 139.

2 Vide Letters of John Stuart Mill , vol. ii, pp. 51, 79, 80,

100, 141, 157, 238, 239, 247, 288, and 349.

suaded himself, after this, that he had in his

possession a vade mecum [handbook] to the comprehension

of human societies, he now took it upon him-

self  to expound the principles which govern

and direct these.  Until such time as this pro-

cedure was unmasked, Mill's political econ-

omy enjoyed an unquestioned authority.

Exactly the same plan was followed by Mill

in handling the question of woman's suffrage.

Instead of dealing with woman as she is, and

with woman placed in a setting of actually sub-

sisting conditions, Mill takes as his theme a

woman who is a creature of his imagination.

This woman is, by assumption, in mental en-

dowments a replica of man.  She lives in a

world which is, by tacit assumption, free from

complications of sex.  And, if practical con-

siderations had ever come into the purview of

Mill's mind, she would, by tacit assumption, be

paying her own way, and be making full per-

sonal and financial contributions to the State.

It is in connexion with this fictitious woman

that Mill sets himself to work out the benefits                            28

which women would derive from co-partner-

ship with men in the government of the State,

and those which such co-partnership would

confer on the community.  Finally, practis-

ing again upon himself the same imposition as

in his Political Economy, this unpractical

trafficker in abstractions sets out to persuade

his reader that he has, by dealing with fictions

of the mind, effectively grappled with the

concrete problem of woman's suffrage.

This, then, is the philosopher who gives in-

tellectual prestige to the Woman's Suffrage

cause.

But is there not, let us in the end ask our-

selves, here and there at least, a man who is of

real account in the world of affairs, and who

is--not simply a luke-warm Platonic friend or

an opportunist advocate--but an impassioned

promoter of the woman's suffrage movement?

One knows quite well that there is.  But

then one suspects--one perhaps discerns by

"the spirit sense"--that this impassioned pro-

moter of woman's suffrage is, on the sequest-                           29

ered side of his life, an idealistic dreamer: one

for whom some woman's memory has become,

like Beatrice for Dante, a mystic religion.

We may now pass on to deal with the argu-

ments by which the woman suffragist has

sought to establish her case.                                                     30

PART I

ARGUMENTS WHICH ARE ADDUCED

IN SUPPORT OF WOMAN'S

SUFFRAGE

I

ARGUMENTS FROM ELEMENTARY NATURAL

RIGHTS

Signification of the Term "Woman's Rights"--Argument

from "Justice"--Juridical Justice-"Egalitarian

Equity"--Argument from Justice Applied to Tax-

ation--Argument from Liberty--Summary of Argu-

ments from Elementary Natural Rights.

LET US note that the suffragist does not--

except, perhaps, when she is addressing her-

self to unfledged girls and to the sexually em-

bittered--really produce much effect by in-

veighing against the legal grievances of woman

under the bastardy laws, the divorce laws, and

the law which fixes the legal age of consent.

This kind of appeal does not go down with the

ordinary man and woman--first, because there

are many who think that in spite of occasional

hardships the public advantage is, on the whole,

very well served by the existing laws; secondly,                        33

because any alterations which might be desir-

able could very easily be made without recourse

to woman's suffrage; and thirdly, because the

suffragist consistently acts on the principle of

bringing up against man everything that can

possibly be brought up against him, and of

never allowing anything to appear on the credit

side of the ledger.

The arguments which the woman suffragist

really places confidence in are those which are

provided by undefined general principles,

apothegms set out in the form of axioms, form-

ulæ which are vehicles for fallacies, ambigu-

ous abstract terms, and "question-begging"

epithets.  Your ordinary unsophisticated man

and woman stand almost helpless against argu-

ments of this kind.

For these bring to bear moral pressure upon

human nature.  And when the intellect is con-

fused by a word or formula which conveys an

ethical appeal, one may very easily find one-

self committed to action which one's unbiased

reason would never have approved.  The very                         34

first requirement in connexion with any word

or phrase which conveys a moral exhortation

is, therefore, to analyse it and find out its true

signification.  For all such concepts as justice,

rights, freedom, chivalry--and it is with these

that we shall be specially concerned--are, when

properly defined and understood beacon-lights,

but when ill understood and undefined, stum-

bling-blocks in the path of humanity.

We may appropriately begin by analys-

ing the term "Woman's Rights" and the cor-

relative formula "Woman has a right to the

suffrage."

Our attention here immediately focuses upon

the term right.  It is one of the most important

of the verbal agents by which the suffragist

hopes to bring moral pressure to bear upon

man.

Now, the term right denotes in its juridical

sense a debt which is owed to us by the State.

A right is created when the community binds

itself to us, its individual members, to intervene

by force to restrain any one from interfering                              35

with us, and to protect us in the enjoyment of

our faculties, privileges, and property.

The term is capable of being given a wider

meaning.  While no one could appropriately

speak of our having a right to health or any-

thing that man has not the power to bestow, it

is arguable that there are, independent of and

antecedent to law, elementary rights: a right

to freedom; a right to protection against per-

sonal violence; a right to the protection of our

property; and a right to the impartial admin-

istration of regulations which are binding

upon all.  Such a use of the term right could

be justified on the ground that everybody

would be willing to make personal sacrifices,

and to combine with his fellows for the pur-

pose of securing these essentials--an under-

standing which would almost amount to legal

sanction.

The suffragist who employs the term

"Woman's Rights" does not employ the word

rights in either of these senses.  Her case is                              36

analogous to that of a man who should in a

republic argue about the divine right of kings;

or that of the Liberal who should argue that

it was his right to live permanently under a

Liberal government; or of any member of a

minority who should, with a view of getting

what he wants, argue that he was contending

only for his rights.

The woman suffragist is merely bluffing.

Her formula "Woman's Rights" means simply

"Woman's Claims."

For the moment--for we shall presently be

coming back to the question of the enforce-

ment of rights--our task is to examine the

arguments which the suffragist brings forward

in support of her claims.

First and chief among these is the argument

that the Principle of Justice prescribes that

women should be enfranchised.

When we inquire what the suffragist under-

stands under the Principle of Justice, one re-

ceives by way of answer only the petitio prin-                         37

cipii [question begging] that Justice is a moral principle which

includes woman suffrage among its implica-

tions.

In reality it is only very few who clearly ap-

prehend the nature of Justice.  For under

this appellation two quite different principles

are confounded.

The primary and correct signification of the

term Justice will perhaps be best arrived at by

pursuing the following train of considera-

tions:--

When man, long impatient at arbitrary and

quite incalculable autocratic judgments, pro-

ceeded to build up a legal system to take the

place of these, he built it upon the following

series of axioms:--(a)   All actions of which

the courts are to take cognisance shall be classi-

fied.   (b)   The legal consequences of each

class of action shall be definitely fixed.   ( c)

The courts shall adjudicate only on questions

of fact, and on the issue as to how the particu-

lar deed which is the cause of action should be

classified.  And (d) such decisions shall carry                           38

with them in an automatic manner the ap-

pointed legal consequences.

For example, if a man be arraigned for the

appropriation of another man's goods, it is an

axiom that the court (when once the questions

of fact have been disposed of) shall adjudicate

only on the issue as to whether the particular

appropriation of goods in dispute comes un-

der the denomination of larceny, burglary, or

other co-ordinate category; and that upon this

the sentence shall go forth: directing that the

legal consequences which are appointed to that

particular class of action be enforced.

This is the system every one can see ad-

ministered in every court of justice.

There is, however, over and above what has

just been set out another essential element in

Justice.  It is an element which readily

escapes the eye.

I have in view the fact that the classifications

which are adopted and embodied in the law

must not be arbitrary classifications.  They

must all be conformable to the principle of                                39

utility, and be directed to the advantage of

society.

If, for instance, burglary is placed in a class

apart from larceny, it is discriminated from it

because this distinction is demanded by con-

siderations of public advantage.  But consid-

erations of utility would not countenance, and

by consequence Justice would not accept, a

classification of theft into theft committed by

a poor man and theft committed by a rich man.

The conception of Justice is thus everywhere

interfused with considerations of utility and ex-

pediency.

It will have become plain that if we have in

view the justice which is administered in the

courts--we may here term it Juridical Justice

--then the question as to whether it is just

to refuse the suffrage to woman will be deter-

mined by considering whether the classification

of men as voters and of women as non-voters is

in the public interest.  Put otherwise, the ques-

tion whether it would be just that woman

should have a vote would require the answer                            40

"Yes" or "No," according as the question

whether it would be expedient or inexpedient

that woman should vote required the answer

"Yes" or "No."  But it would be for the elect-

orate, not for the woman suffragist, to decide

that question.

There is, as already indicated, another prin-

ciple which passes under the name of Justice.

I have in view the principle that in the distri-

bution of wealth or political power, or any

other privileges which it is in the power of the

State to bestow, every man should share equally

with every other man, and every woman

equally with every man, and that in countries

where Europeans and natives live side by side,

these latter should share all privileges equally

with the white--the goal of endeavour being

that all distinctions depending upon natural

endowment, sex, and race should be effaced.

We may call this principle the Principle of

Egalitarian Equity--first, because it aims at

establishing a quite artificial equality; secondly,

because it makes appeal to our ethical in-                                41

stincts, and claims on that ground to override

the distinctions of which formal law takes ac-

count.

But let us reflect that we have here a prin-

ciple which properly understood, embraces in

its purview all mankind, and not mankind only

but also the lower animals.  That is to say, we

have here a principle, which consistently fol-

lowed out, would make of every man and

woman in primis [at first] a socialist; then a woman suf-

fragist; then a philo-native, negrophil, and an

advocate of the political rights of natives and

negroes; and then, by logical compulsion ant

anti-vivisectionist, who accounts it unjust to

experiment on an animal; a vegetarian, who

accounts it unjust to kill animals for food;

and findly one who, like the Jains, accounts

it unjust to take the life of even verminous in-

sects.

If we accept this principle of egalitarian

equity as of absolute obligation, we shall have

to accept along with woman's suffrage all the

other "isms" believed in, and agitated for, by                             42

the cranks who are so numerously represented

in the ranks of woman suffragists.

If, on the other hand, we accept the doc-

trine of egalitarian equity with the qualifica-

tion that it shall apply only so far as what it

enjoins is conformable to public advantage,

we shall again make expediency the criterion of

the justice of woman's suffrage.

Before passing on it will be well to point

out that the argument from Justice meets us

not only in the form that Justice requires that

woman should have a vote, but also in all sorts

of other forms.  We encounter it in the writ-

ings of publicists, in the formula Taxation

carries with it a Right to Representation; and

we encounter it in the streets, on the banners

of woman suffrage processions, in the form

Taxation without Representation is Tyranny.

This latter theorem of taxation which is dis-

played on the banners of woman suffrage is, I

suppose, deliberately and intentionally a sug-

gestio falsi.  For only that taxation is tyran-

nous which is diverted to objects which are not                        43

useful to the contributors.  And even the suf-

fragist does not suggest that the taxes which

are levied on women are differentially applied

to the uses of men.

Putting, then, this form of argument out

of sight, let us come to close quarters with the

question whether the payment of taxes gives

a title to control the finances of the State.

Now, if it really did so without any regard

to the status of the claimant, not only women,

but also foreigners residing in, or holding

property in, England, and with these lunatics

and miners with property, and let me, for the

sake of a pleasanter collocation of ideas, has-

tily add peers of the realm, who have now no

control over public finance, ought to receive

the parliamentary franchise.  And in like

manner if the payment of a tax, without con-

sideration of its amount, were to give a title

to a vote, every one who bought an article

which had paid a duty would be entitled to a

vote in his own, or in a foreign, country ac-                              44

cording as that duty has been paid at home or

abroad.

In reality the moral and logical nexus be-

tween the payment of taxes and the control of

the public revenue is that the solvent and self-

supporting citizens, and only these, are en-

titled to direct its financial policy.

If I have not received, or if I have refunded,

any direct contributions I may have received

from the coffers of the State; if I have paid

my pro rata share of its establishment charges

--i.e. of the costs of both internal administra-

tion and external defence; and I have further

paid my proportional share of whatever may

be required to make up for the deficit incurred

on account of my fellow-men and women who

either require direct assistance from the State,

or cannot meet their share of the expenses of

the State, I am a solvent citizen; and if I fail

to meet these liabilities, I am an insolvent cit-

izen even though I pay such taxes as the State

insists upon my paying.                                                            45

Now if a woman insists, in the face of warn-

ings that she had better not do so, on taxing

man with dishonesty for withholding from her

financial control over the revenues of the

State, she has only herself to blame if she is

told very bluntly that her claim to such control

is barred by the fact that she is, as a citizen

insolvent.  The taxes paid by women would

cover only a very small proportion of the

establishment charges of the State which would

properly be assigned to them.  It falls to man

to make up that deficit.

And it is to be noted with respect to those

women who pay their full pro rata contribu-

tion and who ask to be treated as a class apart

from, and superior to, other women, that only

a very small proportion of these have made

their position for themselves.

Immeasurably the larger number are in a

solvent position only because men have placed

them there.  All large fortunes and practically

all the incomes which are furnished by invest-

ments are derived from man.                                                   46

Nay; but the very revenues which the

Woman Suffrage Societies devote to man's

vilification are to a preponderating extent de-

rived from funds which he earned and gave

over to woman.

In connexion with the financial position of

woman as here stated, it will be well to consider

first the rich woman's claim to the vote.

We may seek light on the logical and moral

aspects of this claim by considering here two

parallel cases.

The position which is occupied by the peer

under the English Constitution furnishes a

very interesting parallel to the position of the

woman who is here in question.

Time out of mind the Commons have viewed

with the utmost jealousy any effort of the

House of Lords to obtain co-partnership with

them in the control of the finances of the State;

and, in pursuance of that traditional policy,

the peers have recently, after appeal to the

country, been shorn of the last vestige of

financial control.  Now we may perhaps see,                            47

in this jealousy of a House of Lords, which

represents inherited wealth, displayed by a

House of Commons representing voters elect-

ing on a financial qualification, an unconscious

groping after the moral principle that those

citizens who are solvent by their own efforts,

and only these, should control the finances of

the State.

And if this analogy finds acceptance, it

would not--even if there were nothing else

than this against such proposals--be logically

possible, after ousting the peers who are large

tax-payers from all control over the finances

of the State, to create a new class of voters out

of the female representatives of unearned

wealth.

The second parallel case which we have to

consider presents a much simpler analogy.

Consideration will show that the position oc-

cupied in the State by the woman who has

inherited money is analogous to that occupied

in a firm by a sleeping partner who stands in

the shoes of a deceased working partner, and                          48

who has only a small amount of capital in the

business.  Now, if such a partner were to

claim any financial control, and were to make

trouble about paying his pro rata establish-

ment charges, he would be very sharply called

to order.  And he would never dream of ap-

pealing to Justice by breaking windows, go-

ing to gaol, and undertaking a hunger strike.

Coming back from the particular to the

general, and from the logical to the moral

aspect of woman's claim to control the finances

of the State on the ground that she is a tax-

payer, it will suffice to point out that this claim

is on a par with the claim to increased political

power and completer control over the finances

of the State which is put forward by a class of

male voters who are already paying much less

than their pro rata share of the upkeep of the

State.

In each case it is a question of trying to get

control of other people's money.  And in the

case of woman it is of "trying on" in connexion

with her public partnership with man that prin-                          49

ciple of domestic partnership, "All yours is

mine, and all mine's my own."

Next to the plea of justice, the plea which is

advanced most insistently by the woman who

is contending for a vote is the plea of liberty.

We have here, again, a word which is a val-

uable asset to woman suffrage both in the re-

spect that it brings moral pressure to bear, and

in the respect that it is a word of ambiguous

meaning.

In accordance with this we have John Stuart

Mill making propaganda for woman suffrage

in a tractate entitled the Subjection of

Women; we have a Woman's Freedom League

--"freedom" being a question-begging syn-

onym for "parliamentary franchise"--and

everywhere in the literature of woman's suf-

frage we have talk of woman's "emancipa-

tion"; and we have women characterised as

serfs, or slaves--the terms serfs and slaves

supplying, of course, effective rhetorical syn-

onyms for non-voters.

When we have succeeded in getting through                         50

these thick husks of untruth we find that the

idea of liberty which floats before the eyes of

woman is, not at all a question of freedom from

unequitable legal restraints, but essentially a

question of getting more of the personal lib-

erty (or command of other people's services),

which the possession of money confers and

more freedom from sexual restraints.

The suffragist agitator makes profit out

of this ambiguity.  In addressing the woman

worker who does not, at the rate which her

labour commands on the market, earn enough

to give her any reasonable measure of financial

freedom, the agitator will assure her that the

suffrage would bring her more money, describ-

ing the woman suffrage cause to her as the

cause of liberty.  By juggling in this way with

the two meanings of "liberty" she will draw

her into her toils.

The vote, however, would not raise wages

of the woman worker and bring to her the

financial, nor yet the physiological freedom

she is seeking.                                                                         51

The tactics of the suffragist agitator are the

same when she is dealing with a woman who is

living at the charges of a husband or relative,

and who recoils against the idea that she lies

under a moral obligation to make to the man

who works for her support some return of

gratitude.  The suffragist agitator will point

out to her that such an obligation is slavery,

and that the woman's suffrage cause is the

cause of freedom.

And so we find the women who want to have

everything for nothing, and the wives who do

not see that they are beholden to man for any-

thing, and those who consider that they have

not made a sufficiently good bargain for them-

selves--in short, all the ungrateful women--

flock to the banner of Women's Freedom--

the banner of financial freedom for woman at

the expense of financial servitude for man.

The grateful woman will practically always

be an anti-suffragist.

It will be well, before passing on to another                          52

class of arguments, to summarise what has

been said in the three foregoing sections.

We have recognised that woman has not

been defrauded of elementary natural rights;

that Justice, as distinguished from egalitarian

equity, does not prescribe that she should be

admitted to the suffrage; and that her status

is not, as is dishonestly alleged, a status of

serfdom or slavery.

With this the whole case for recrimina-

tion against man, and a fortiori [for greater reason] the case for

[a] resort to violence, collapses.

And if it does collapse, this is one of those

things that carries consequences.  It would

beseem man to bethink himself that to give in

to an unjustified and doubtfully honest claim

is to minister to the demoralisation of the

claimant.                                                                                  53

II

ARGUMENTS FROM INTELLECTUAL GRIEV-

ANCES OF WOMAN

Complaint of Want of Chivalry--Complaint of "Insults"

--Complaint  of  "Illogicalities"--Complaint  of

"Prejudices"--The Familiar Suffragist Grievance

of the Drunkard Voter and the Woman of Property

Who is a Non-Voter--The Grievance of Woman be-

ing Required to Obey Man-Made Laws.

WE pass from the argument from elemen-

tary natural rights to a different class of argu-

ments--intellectual grievances.  The suffra-

gist tells us that it is unchivalrous to oppose

woman's suffrage; that it is insulting to tell

woman that she is unfit to exercise the franchise; s

that it is "illogical" to make in her case

an exception to a general rule; that it is mere

"prejudice" to withhold the vote from her;

that it is indignity that the virtuous and highly

intelligent woman has no vote, while the                                   54

drunkard has; and that the woman of property

has no vote, while her male underlings have;

and, lastly, that it is an affront that a woman

should be required to obey "man-made"

laws.

We may take these in their order.

Let us consider chivalry, first, from the

standpoint of the woman suffragist.  Her no-

tion of chivalry is that man should accept

every disadvantageous offer which may be

made to him by woman.

That, of course, is to make chivalry the prin-

ciple of egalitarian equity limited in its appli-

cation to the case between man and woman.

It follows that she who holds that the suf-

frage ought, in obedience to that principle of

justice, to be granted to her by man, might

quite logically hold that everything else in

man's gift ought also to be conceded.

But to do the woman suffragist justice, she

does not press the argument from chivalry.

Inasmuch as life has brought home to her that

the ordinary man has quite other conceptions                           55

of that virtue, she declares that "she has no

use for it."

Let us now turn to the anti-suffragist view.

The anti-suffragist (man or woman) holds that

chivalry is a principle which enters into every

reputable relation between the sexes, and that

of all the civilising agencies at work in the

world it is the most important.

But I think I hear the reader interpose,

"What, then, is chivalry if it is not a question

of serving woman without reward?"

A moment's thought will make the matter

clear.

When a man makes this compact with a

woman, "I will do you reverence, and protect

you, and yield you service; and you, for your

part, will hold fast to an ideal of gentleness, of

personal refinement, of modesty, of joyous

maternity, and to who shall say what other

graces and virtues that endear woman to

man," that is chivalry.

It is not a question of a purely one-sided                              56

bargain, as in the suffragist conception.  Nor

yet is it a bargain about purely material things.

It is a bargain in which man gives both

material things, and also things which pertain

perhaps somewhat to the spirit; and in which

woman gives back of these last.

But none the less it is of the nature of a con-

tract.  There is in it the inexorable do ut des;

facio ut facias [give me this, and I will give you that; do this for me, and I will do that for you].

And the contract is infringed when woman

breaks out into violence, when she jettisons

her personal refinement, when she is ungrate-

ful, and, possibly, when she places a quite ex-

travagantly high estimate upon her intellectual

powers.

We now turn from these almost too intimate

questions of personal morality to discuss the

other grievances which were enumerated above.

With regard to the suffragist's complaint

that it is "insulting" for woman to be told that

she is as a class unfit to exercise the suffrage,

it is relevant to point out that one is not in-                                57

sulted by being told about oneself, or one's

class, untruths, but only at being told about

oneself, or one's class, truths which one dis-

likes.  And it is, of course, an offence against

ethics to try to dispose of an unpalatable gen-

eralisation by characterising it as "insulting."

But nothing that man could do would be

likely to prevent the suffragist resorting to

this aggravated form of intellectual immor-

ality.

We may now turn to the complaint that it

is "illogical" to withhold the vote from women.

This is the kind of complaint which brings

out in relief the logical endowment and legis-

lative sagacity of the suffragist.

With regard to her logical endowment it

will suffice to indicate that the suffragist

would appear to regard the promulgation of a

rule which is to hold without exception as an

essentially logical act; and the admission of

any class exception to a rule of general ap-

plication as an illogicality.  It would on this

principle be "illogical" to except, under con-                             58

scription, the female population from military

service.

With regard to the suffragist's legislative

sagacity we may note that she asks that we

should put back the clock, and return to the

days when any arbitrary principle might be

adduced as a ground for legislation.  It is as

if Bentham had never taught:--

"What is it to offer a good reason with re-

spect to a law?  It is to allege the good or

evil which the law tends to produce; so much

good, so many arguments in its favour; so

much evil, so many arguments against it.

"What is it to offer a false reason?  It is

the alleging for, or against a law, something

else than its good or evil effects."

Next, we may take up the question as to

whether an unwelcome generalisation may

legitimately be got out of the way by char-

acterising it as a prejudice.  This is a funda-

mentally important question not only in con-

nexion with such an issue as woman suffrage,

but in connexion with all search for truth in                               59

those regions where crucial scientific experi-

ments cannot be instituted.

In the whole of this region of thought we

have to guide ourselves by generalisations.

Now every generalisation is in a sense a pre-

judgment.  We make inferences from cases

or individuals that have already presented

themselves to such cases or individuals of the

same class as may afterwards present them-

selves.  And if our generalisation happens to

be an unfavourable one, we shall of necessity

have prejudged the case against those who are

exceptions to their class.

Thus, for example, the proposition that

woman is incapable of usefully exercising the

parliamentary franchise prejudges the case

against a certain number of capable women.

It would none the less be absolutely anarch-

ical to propose to abandon the system of

guiding ourselves by prejudgments; and un-

favourable prejudgments or prejudices are

logically as well justified, and are obviously                               60

as indispensable to us as favourable prejudg-

ments.

The suffragist who proposes to dispose of

generalisations which are unfavourable to

woman as prejudices ought therefore to be told

to stand down.

It has probably never suggested itself

to her that, if there were a mind which was not

stored with both favourable prejudgments

and prejudices, it would be a mind which

had learned absolutely nothing from experi-

ence.

But I hear the reader interpose, "Is there

not a grave danger that generalisations may

be erroneous?"

And I can hear the woman suffragist inter-

ject, "Is there not a grave danger that unflat-

tering generalisations about woman may be

erroneous?"

The answer to the general question is that

there is of course always the risk that our gen-

eralisations may be erroneous.  But when a                              61

generalisation finds wide acceptance among

the thoughtful, we have come as close to truth

as it is possible for humanity to come.

To the question put by the suffragist the

reply is that experience with regard to the

capacity of woman has been accumulating in

all climes, and through all times; and that the

belief of men in the inherent inferiority of

women in the matter of intellectual morality,

and in the power of adjudication, has never

varied.

I pass now to the two most familiar griev-

ances of the suffragist; the grievance that the

virtuous and intelligent woman has no vote,

while the male drunkard has; and the griev-

ance that the woman of property has no vote,

while her male underlings have.

All that is worth while saying on these points

is that the suffragist is here manufacturing

grievances for herself, first, by reasoning from

the false premiss that every legal distinction

which happens to press hardly upon a few in-

dividuals ought for that to be abrogated; and,                           62

secondly, by steady leaving out of sight that

logical inconsistencies can, for the more part,

be got rid of only at the price of bringing others

into being.

The man who looks forward to the intel-

lectual development of woman must be

brought near to despair when he perceives that

practically every woman suffragist sees in

every hard case arising in connexion with a

legal distinction affecting woman, an insult

and example of the iniquity of man-made

laws, or a logical inconsistency which could

with a very little good-will be removed.

We have come now to the last item on our

list, to the grievance that woman has to submit

herself to "man-made laws."

This is a grievance which well rewards study.

It is worth study from the suffragist point of

view, because it is the one great injury under

which all others are subsumed.  And it is

worth studying from the anti-suffragist point

of view, because it shows how little the suf-

fragist understands of the terms she employs;                           63

and how unreal are the wrongs which she re-

sents.

Quite marvelously has the woman suffra-

gist in this connexion misapprehended; or

would she have us say misrepresented?

The woman suffragist misapprehends--it

will be better to assume that she "misappre-

hends"--when she suggests that we, the male

electors, have framed the laws.

In reality the law which we live under--and

the law in those States which have adopted

either the English, or the Roman law--

descends from the past.  It has been evolved

precedent, by precedent, by the decisions of

generation upon generation of judges, and it

has for centuries been purged by amending

statutes.  Moreover we, the present male elec-

tors--the electors who are savagely attacked

by the suffragist for our asserted iniquities in

connexion with the laws which regulate sexual

relations--have never in our capacity as elec-

tors had any power to alter an old, or to sug-

gest a new law; except only in so far as by                               64

voting Conservative or Liberal we may indi-

rectly have remotely influenced the general

trend of legislation.

"Well but"--the suffragist will here rejoin

--"is it not at any rate true that in the draft-

ing of statutes and the framing of judicial

decisions man has always nefariously discrim-

inated against woman?"

The question really supplies its own answer.

It will be obvious to every one who considers

that the drafting of statutes and the formula-

ting of legal decisions is almost as impersonal a

procedure as that of drawing up the rules to

govern a game; and it offers hardly more op-

portunity for discriminating between man and

woman.

There are, however, three questions in con-

nexion with which the law can and does make

a distinction between man and woman.

The first is that of sexual relations: rape,

divorce, bastardy, and the age of consent.  In

connexion with rape, it has never been alleged

that the law is not sufficiently severe.  It is, or                           65

has been, under colonial conditions, severe up

to the point of ferocity.  In the matter of

divorce the law of a minority of man-governed

States differentiates in favour of man.  It

does so influenced by tradition, by what are

held to be the natural equities, and by the fact

that a man is required to support his wife's

progeny.  The law of bastardy [illegitimate childbirth] is what it is

because of the dangers of blackmail.  The law

which fixes the age of consent discriminates

against man, laying him open to a criminal

charge in situations where woman--and it is

not certain that she is not a more frequent of-

fender--escapes scot-free.

The second point in which the law differ-

entiates is in the matter of exacting personal

service for the State.  If it had not been that

man is more prone to discriminate in favour of

woman than against her, every military State,

when exacting personal military service from

men, would have demanded from women some

such equivalent personal service as would be

represented by a similar period of work in an                           66

army clothing establishment, or ordnance fac-

tory, or army laundry; or would at any rate

have levied upon woman a ransom in lieu of

such service.

The third point in which the law dis-

tinguishes between man and woman is with ref-

erence to the suffrage.  The object of this

book is to show that this is equitable and in the

interests of both.

The suffragist further misapprehends when

she regards it as an indignity to obey laws

which she has not herself framed, or specifically

sanctioned.  (The whole male electorate, be

it remarked, would here lie under the same

dignity as woman.)

But in reality, whether it is a question of the

rules of a game, or of the reciprocal rights and

duties of members of a community, it is, and

ought to be, to every reasonable human being

not a grievance, but a matter of felicitation,

that an expert or a body of experts should have

evolved a set of rules under which order and

harmony are achieved.  Only vanity and folly                            67

would counsel amateurs to try to draw up rules

or laws for themselves.

Again, the woman suffragist takes it as a

matter of course that she would herself be

able to construct a system of workable laws.

In point of fact, the framing of a really useful

law is a question of divining something which

will apply to an infinite number of different

cases and individuals.  It is an intellectual

feat on a par with the framing of a great

generalisation.  And would woman--that be-

ing of such short sight, whose mind is always

so taken up with whatever instances lie near-

est to her--be capable of framing anything

that could pass muster as a great generalisa-

ition?

Lastly, the suffragist fails to see that the

function of framing the laws is not an essential

function of citizenship.

The essential functions of citizenship are the

shaping of public policy, and the control of

the administrative Acts of Government.

Such directive control is in a state of political                        68

freedom exercised through two quite different

agencies.

It is exercised--and it is of the very essence

of political freedom that this should be the

normal method of control--in the first place,

through expressed public opinion.  By this

are continuously regulated not only momen-

tous matters of State, such as declarations of

war and the introduction of constitutional

changes, but also smaller and more individual

matters, such as the commutation of a capital

sentence, or the forcible feeding of militant suf-

fragists.

In the background, behind the moral com-

pulsion of expressed public opinion, there is,

in the case of a Parliamentary State, also an-

other instrument of control.  I have in view

that periodical settlement of the contested

rulership of the State by the force of a majority

of electors which is denoted a general elec-

tion.

The control exercised by the suffrages of

the electors in a general election is in certain                             69

important respects less effective than that ex-

ercised by the everyday public expression of

opinion.  It falls short in the respect that its

verdicts are, except only in connexion with the

issue as to whether the Government is to be

retained in office or dismissed, ambiguous ver-

dicts; further, in the respect that it comes into

application either before governmental pro-

posals have taken definite shape, or only after

the expiration of a term of years, when the

events are already passing out of memory.

If we now consider the question of woman's

franchise from the wider point of view here

opened up, it will be clear that, so far as con-

cerns the control which is exercised through

public opinion on the Government, the intelli-

gent woman, and especially the intelligent

woman who has made herself an expert on any

matter, is already in possession of that which is

a greater power than the franchise.  She has

the power which attaches to all intelligent opin-

ion promulgated in a free State.  Moreover,

wherever the special interest of women are in-                         70

volved, any woman may count on being lis-

tened to if she is voicing the opinions of any

considerable section of her sex.

In reality, therefore, woman is disfran-

chised only so far as relates to the confirmation

of a Government in office, or its dismissal by

the ultima ratio [ultimate reason] of an electoral contest.  And

when we reflect that woman does not come into

consideration as a compelling force, and that

an electoral contest partakes of the nature of

a civil war, it becomes clear that to give her the

parliamentary vote would be to reduce all those

trials of strength which take the form of elec-

toral contests to the level of a farce.

With this I have, I will not say completed

the tale of the suffragist's grievances--that

would be impossible--but I have at any rate

dealt with those which she has most acrimoni-

ously insisted upon.                                                                 71

III

ARGUMENTS WHICH TAKE THE FORM OF

"COUNSELS OF PERFECTION" AD-

DRESSED TO MAN

Argument that Woman Requires a Vote for her Protec-

tion--Argument that Woman ought to be Invested

with the Responsibilities of Voting in Order that

She May Attain Her Full Intellectual Stature.

THERE, however, remains still a further class

of arguments.  I have in view here arguments

which have nothing to do with elementary

natural rights, nor yet with wounded amour

propre.  They concern ethics, and sympathy,

and charitable feelings.

The suffragist here gives to man "counsels

of perfection."

It will be enough to consider here two of

these:--the first, the argument that woman,

being the weaker vessel, needs, more than man,

the suffrage for her protection; the second,                             72

that woman, being less than man in relation

to public life, ought to be given the vote for

instructional purposes.

The first of these appeals will, for instance,

take the following form:--"Consider the poor

sweated East End woman worker.  She

knows best where the shoe pinches. You men

can't know.  Give her a vote; and you shall see

that she will very soon better her condition."

When I hear that argument I consider:--

We will suppose that woman was ill.  Should

we go to her and say: "You know best, know

better than any man, what is wrong with you.

Here are all the medicines and remedies.

Make your own selection, for that will assur-

edly provide what will be the most likely to

help."

If this would be both futile and inhuman,

much more would it be so to seek out this

woman who is sick in fortune and say to her,

"Go and vote for the parliamentary candidate

who will be likely to influence the trend of

legislation in a direction which will help."                                   73

What would really help the sweated woman

labourer would, of course, be to have the best

intellect brought to bear, not specially upon

the problem of indigent woman, but upon the

whole social problem.

But the aspect of the question which is, from

our present point of view, the fundamentally

important one is the following: Granting that

the extension of the suffrage to woman would

enable her, as the suffragist contends, to bring

pressure upon her parliamentary representa-

tive, man, while anxious to do his very best

for woman, might very reasonably refuse to

go about it in this particular way.

If a man has a wife whom he desires to treat

indulgently, he does not necessarily open a

joint account with her at his bankers.

If he wants to contribute to a charity he

does not give to the managers of that charity

a power of attorney over his property.

And if he is a philanthropical director of a

great business he does not, when a pathetic

case of poverty among his staff is brought                                74

to his notice, imperil the fortunes of his under-

taking by giving to his workmen shares and a

vote in the management.

Moreover, he would perhaps regard it as a

little suspect if a group of those who were

claiming this as a right came and told him that

"it was very selfish of him" not to grant their

request.

Precious above rubies to the suffragist and

every other woman who wants to apply the

screw to man is that word selfish.  It furnishes

her with the petitio principii that man is under

an ethical obligation to give anything she

chooses to ask.

We come next--and this is the last of all

the arguments we have to consider--to the

argument that the suffrage ought to be given

to woman for instructional purposes.

Now it would be futile to attempt to deny

that we have ready to hand in the politics of the

British Empire--that Empire which is swept

along in "the too vast orb of her fate"--an ideal

political training-ground in which we might                                75

put woman to school.  The woman voter would

there be able to make any experiment she

liked.

But one wonders why it has not been pro-

posed to carry woman's instruction further,

and for instructional purposes to make of a

woman let us say a judge, or an ambassador,

or a Prime Minister.

There would--if only it were legitimate to

sacrifice vital national interests--be not a

little to say in favour of such a course.  One

might at any rate hope by these means once

for all to bring home to man the limitations

of woman.                                                                              76

PART II

ARGUMENTS AGAINST THE CONCESSION OF THE

PARLIAMENTARY SUFFRAGE TO WOMAN

I

WOMAN'S DISABILITY IN THE MATTER OF

PHYSICAL FORCE

International Position of State would be Imperilled by

Woman's Suffrage--Internal Equilibrium of State

would be Imperilled.

THE woman suffrage movement has now

gone too far to be disposed of by the over-

throw of its arguments, and by a mere indica-

tion of those which could be advanced on the

other side.  The situation demands the bring-

ing forward of the case against woman's suf-

frage; and it must be the full and quite unex-

purgated case.

I shall endeavour to do this in the fewest pos-

sible words, and to be more especially brief

where I have to pass again over ground which

I have previously traversed in dealing with the

arguments of the suffragists.

I may begin with what is fundamental.                                  79

It is an axiom that we should in legislating

guide ourselves directly by considerations of

utility and expediency.  For abstract princi-

ples--I have in view here rights, justice, egali-

tarian equity, equality, liberty, chivalry, logi-

cality, and such like--are not all of them

guides to utility; and each of these is, as we

have seen, open to all manner of private mis-

interpretation.

Applying the above axiom to the issue be-

fore us, it is clear that we ought to confine

ourselves here to the discussion of the ques-

tion as to whether the State would, or would

not, suffer from the admission of women to

the electorate.

We can arrive at a judgment upon this by

considering, on the one hand, the class-char-

acters of women so far as these may be rele-

vant to the question of the suffrage; and, on

the other hand, the legislative programmes

put forward by the female legislative re-

former and the feminist.

In connexion with the class-characters of                             80

woman, it will be well, before attempting to

indicate them, to interpolate here the general

consideration that the practical statesman,

who has to deal with things as they are, is not

required to decide whether the characters of

women which will here be considered are, as

the physiologist (who knows that the sexual

products influence every tissue of the body)

cannot doubt, "secondary sexual characters";

or, as the suffragist contends, "acquired char-

acters."  It will be plain that whether defects

are "secondary sexual characters" (and there-

fore as irremediable as "racial characters"); or

whether they are "acquired characters" (and

as such theoretically remediable) they are

relevant to the question of the concession of

the suffrage just so long as they continue to

be exhibited.1

1 This is a question on which Mill (vide Subjection of Women ,

last third of Chapter I) has endeavoured to confuse the issues

for his reader, first, by representing that by no possibility can

man know anything of the "nature," i.e. , of the "secondary

sexual characters" of woman; and, secondly, by distracting at-

tention from the fact that "acquired characters" may produce

unfitness for the suffrage.                                                            81

The primordial argument against giving

woman the vote is that that vote would not

represent physical force.

Now it is by physical force alone and by

prestige--which represents physical force in

the background--that a nation protects itself

against foreign interference, upholds its rule

over subject populations, and enforces its own

laws.  And nothing could in the end more cer-

tainly lead to war and revolt than the decline

of the military spirit and loss of prestige which

would inevitably follow if man admitted

woman into political co-partnership.

While it is arguable that such a partnership

with woman in government as obtains in Aus-

tralia and New Zealand is sufficiently unreal

to be endurable, there cannot be two opinions

on the question that a virile and imperial race

will not brook any attempt at forcible control

by women.

Again, no military foreign nation or native

race would ever believe in the stamina and                               82

firmness of purpose of any nation that submit-

ted even to the semblance of such control.

The internal equilibrium of the State also

would be endangered by the admission to the

register of millions of electors whose vote would

not be endorsed by the authority of physical

force.

Regarded  from this point of view a

Woman's Suffrage measure stands on an ab-

solutely different basis to any other extension

of the suffrage.  An extension which takes in

more men--whatever else it may do--makes

for stability in the respect that it makes the

decrees of the legislature more irresistible.

An extension which takes in any women

undermines the physical sanction of the

laws.

We can see indications of the evil that would

follow such an event in the profound dissatis-

faction which is felt when--in violation of the

democratic principle that every man shall

count for one, and no man for more than one                           83

--the political wishes of the large constituen-

cies which return relatively few members to

Parliament, are overborne by those of con-

stituencies which, with a smaller aggregate

population, return more members.

And we see what such evil finally culminates

in when the over-representation of one part of

a country and the corresponding under-rep-

resentation of other portions has led a large

section of the people to pledge themselves to

disregard the eventual ordinances of Parlia-

ment.

If ever the question as to whether the will

of Ulster or that of the Nationalists is to pre-

vail is brought to the arbitrament of physical

force, it will be due to the inequalities of parlia-

mentary representation as between England

and Ireland, and as between the Unionist and

Nationalist population of Ulster.

The general lesson that all governmental

action ought to be backed by force, is fur-

ther brought home to the conscience when we

take note of the fact that every one feels that                            84

public morality is affronted when senile, in-

firm, and bedridden men are brought to the

poll to turn the scale in hotly contested elec-

tions.

For electoral decisions are felt to have moral

prestige only when the electoral figures quan-

titatively represent the physical forces which

are engaged on either side.  And where vital

interests are involved, no class of men can be

expected to accept any decision other than one

which rests upon the ultima ratio.

Now all the evils which are the outcome of

disparities between the parliamentary power

and the organised physical force of contend-

ing parties would "grow" a hundredfold if

women were admitted to the suffrage.

There would after that be no electoral or

parliamentary decision which would not be

open to challenge on the ground that it was

impossible to tell whether the party which

came out the winner had a majority which

could enforce its will, or only a majority ob-

tained by the inclusion of women.  And no                               85

measure of redistribution could ever set that

right.

There may find place here also the considera-

tion that the voting of women would be an un-

settling element in the government of the

State, forasmuch as they would, by reason of a

general lack of interest in public affairs, only

very; seldom come to the poll: would, in fact,

come to the poll in full strength only when

some special appeal had come home to their

emotions.

Now an electorate which includes a very

large proportion of quite uninterested voters

would be in the same case as a legislature

which included a very large proportion of

members who made a practice of staying away.

It would be in the same case, because the ab-

sentees, who would not have acquired the train-

ing which comes from consecutive attention

to public affairs, might at any moment step

in and upset the stability of State by voting

for some quite unconsidered measure.

Coming back in conclusion to our main is-                           86

sue, I would re-emphasise an aspect of the

question upon which I have already elsewhere

insisted.1   I have in view the fact that woman

does, and should, stand to physical violence in

a fundamentally different relation to man.

Nothing can alter the fact that, the very mo-

ment woman resorts to violence, she places

herself within the jurisdiction of an ethical

law, which is as old as civilisation, and which

was framed in its interests.

1 Vide Appendix, pp. 176-179.                                                    87

II

WOMAN'S DISABILITY IN THE MATTER OF

INTELLECT

Characteristics of the Feminine Mind--Suffragist Il-

lusions with Regard to the Equality of Man and

Woman as Workers--Prospect for the Intellectual

Future of Woman--Has Woman Advanced?

THE woman voter would be pernicious to

the State not only because she could not back

her vote by physical force, but also by reason

of her intellectual defects.

Woman's mind attends in appraising a state-

ment primarily to the mental images which it

evokes, and only secondarily--and sometimes

not at all--to what is predicated in the state-

ment.  It is over-influenced by individual in-

stances; arrives at conclusions on incomplete

evidence; has a very imperfect sense of pro-

portion; accepts the congenial as true, and re-

jects the uncongenial as false; takes the imagi-                          88

nary which is desired for reality, and treats the

undesired reality which is out of sight as non-

existent---building up for itself in this way,

when biased by predilections and aversions, a

very unreal picture of the external world.

The explanation of this is to be found in all

the physiological attachments of woman's

mind: 1 in the fact that mental images are in

her over-intimately linked up with emotional

reflex responses; that yielding to such reflex

responses gives gratification; that intellec-

tual analysis and suspense of judgment involve

an inhibition of reflex responses which is felt as

neural distress; that precipitate judgment

brings relief from this physiological strain;

and that woman looks upon her mind not as an

implement for the pursuit of truth, but as an

instrument for providing her with creature

comforts in the form of agreeable mental im-

ages.

In order to satisfy the physical yearning

1 Certain of these have already been referred to in the letter

printed in the Appendix ( vide p.167 infra ).                                                   89

for such comforts, a considerable section

of intelligent and virtuous women insist

on picturing to themselves that the reign of

physical force is over, or as good as over; that

distinctions based upon physical and intellec-

tual force may be reckoned as non-existent;

that male supremacy as resting upon these is a

thing of the past; and that Justice means

Egalitarian  Equity--means  equating the

weaklings with the strong and the incapable

with the capable.

All this because these particular ideas are

congenial to the woman of refinement, and be-

cause it is to her, when she is a suffragist, un-

congenial that there should exist another prin-

ciple of justice which demands from the phys-

ically and intellectually capable that they shall

retain the reins of government in their own

hands; and specially uncongenial that in all

man-governed States the ideas of justice of

the more forceful should have worked out so

much to the advantage of women, that a

large majority of these are indifferent or ac-                             90

tively hostile to the Woman's Suffrage Move-

ment.

In further illustration of what has been said

above, it may be pointed out that woman, even

intelligent woman, nurses all sorts of miscon-

ceptions about herself.  She, for instance, is

constantly picturing to herself that she can

as a worker lay claim to the same all-round

efficiency as a man--forgetting that woman

is notoriously unadapted to tasks in which se-

vere physical hardships have to be con-

fronted; and that hardly any one would, if

other alternative offered, employ a woman

in any work which imposed upon her a com-

bined physical and mental strain, or in any

work where emergencies might have to be

faced.

In like manner the suffragist is fond of

picturing to herself that woman is for all

ordinary purposes the intellectual equal, and

that the intelligent woman is the superior of

the ordinary man.

These results are arrived at by fixing the at-                          91

tention upon the fact that an ordinary man

and an ordinary woman are, from the point of

view of memory and apprehension, very much

on a level; and that a highly intelligent woman

has a quicker memory and a more rapid power

of apprehension than the ordinary man; and

further, by leaving out of regard that it is not

so much a quick memory or a rapid power of

apprehension which is required for effective

intellectual work, as originality, or at any rate

independence of thought, a faculty of fel-

icitious generalisations and diacritical judg-

ment, long-sustained intellectual effort, an un-

selective mirroring of the world in the mind,

and that relative immunity to fallacy which

goes together with a stable and comparatively

unresponsive nervous system.

When we consider that the intellect of the

quite ungifted man works with this last-

mentioned physiological advantage, we can

see that the male intellect must be, and--

pace [with the permission of] the woman suffragist---it in point of fact

is, within its range, a better instrument for                                 92

dealing with the practical affairs of life than

that of the intelligent woman.

How far off we are in the case of woman

from an unselective mirroring of the world in

the mind is shown by the fact that large and

important factors of life may be represented

in woman's mind by lacunæ [gaps] of which she is

totally unconscious.

Thus, for instance, that not very unusual

type of spinster who is in a condition of re-

tarded development (and you will find this

kind of woman even on County Council's), is

completely unconscious of the sexual element

in herself and in human nature generally.

Nay, though one went from the dead, he could

not bring it home to her that unsatisfied sex-

uality is an intellectual disability.

Sufficient illustration will now have been

given of woman's incapacity to take a com-

plete or objective view of any matter in which

she has a personal, or any kind of emotional

interest; and this would now be the place to

discuss those other aspects of her mind which                          93

are relevant to her claim to the suffrage.  I

refer to her logical endowment and her political

sagacity.

All that I might have been required to say

here on these issues has, however, already been

said by me in dealing with the arguments of

the suffragist.  I have there carefully writ-

ten it in between the lines.

One thing only remains over.--We must,

before we pass on, consider whether woman

has really, as she tells us, given earnest for the

future weeding out of these her secondary sex-

ual characters, by making quite phenomenal

advances within the lifetime of the present gen-

eration; and, above all, whether there is any

basis for woman's confident assurance that,

when for a few generations she shall have en-

joyed educational advantages, she will at any

rate pull up level with man.

The vision of the future may first engage

our attention; for only this roseate prospect

makes of any man a feminist.

Now the basis that all this hope rests upon                           94

is the belief that it is a law of heredity that ac-

quired characteristics are handed down; and,

let it be observed, that whereas this theory

found, not many decades ago, under the in-

fluence of Darwin, thousands of adherents

among scientific men, it finds to-day only here

and there an adherent.

But let that pass, for we have to consider

here, not only whether acquired characteristics

are handed down, but further whether, "if we

held that doctrine true," it would furnish scien-

tific basis for the belief that educational ad-

vantages carried on from generation to gen-

eration would level up woman's intellect to

man's; and whether, as the suffragist also be-

lieves, the narrow education of past genera-

tions of women can be held responsible for their

present intellectual shortcomings.

A moment's consideration will show--for

we may here fix our eyes only on the future---

that woman could not hope to advance rela-

tively to man except upon the condition that

the acquired characteristics of woman, instead                         95

of being handed down equally to her male and

female descendants, were accumulated upon

her daughters.

Now if that be a law of heredity, it is a law

which is as yet unheard of outside the sphere

of the woman suffrage societies.  Moreover,

one is accustomed to hear women, when they

are not arguing on the suffrage, allege that

clever mothers make clever sons.

It must, as it will have come home to us, be

clear to every thoughtful mind that woman's

belief that she will, through education and the

cumulation of its effects upon her through

generations, become a more glorious being,

rests, not upon any rational basis, but only on

the physiological fact that what is congenial

to woman impresses itself upon her as true.

All that sober science in the form of history

and physiology would seem to entitle us to

hope from the future of woman is that she will

develop pari passu [step by step] with man; and that educa-

tion will teach her not to retard him overmuch

by her lagging in the rear.                                                         96

In view of this larger issue, the question as

to whether woman has, in any real sense of the

word, been making progress in the course of

the present generation, loses much of interest.

If to move about more freely, to read more

freely, to speak out her mind more freely, and

to have emancipated herself from traditionary

beliefs--and, I would add, traditionary ethics

--is to have advanced, woman has indubitably

advanced.

But the educated native too has advanced

in all these respects; and he also tells us that

he is pulling up level with the white man.

Let us at any rate, when the suffragist

is congratulating herself on her own progress,

meditate also upon that dictum of Nietzsche,

"Progress is writ large on all woman's ban-

ners and bannerets; but one can actually see

her going back."                                                                      97

III

WOMAN'S DISABILITY IN THE MATTER OF

PUBLIC MORALITY

Standards by which Morality can be Appraised--Con-

flict  between  Different Moralities--The Correct

Standard of Morality--Moral Psychology of Men

and Woman--Difference between Man and Woman

in Matters of Public Morality.

YET a third point has to come into considera-

tion in connexion with the woman voter.  This

is, that she would be pernicious to the State

also by virtue of her defective moral equip-

ment.

Let me make clear what is the nature of the

defect of morality which is here imputed to

woman.

Conduct may be appraised by very differ-

ent standards.

We may appraise it by reference to a trans-

cendental religious ideal which demands that                            98

the physical shall be subordinated to the spirit-

ual, and that the fetters of self should be flung

aside.

Or again, we may bring into application

purely mundane utilitarian standards, and

may account conduct as immoral or moral ac-

cording as it seeks only the happiness of the

agent, or the happiness of the narrow circle

of humanity which includes along with him

also his relatives and intimate friends, or again,

the welfare of the wider circle which includes

all those with whom he may have come into con-

tact, or whom he may affect through his work;

or again, the welfare of the whole body-politic

of which we are members; or lastly, that of the

general body of mankind.

Now it might be contended that all these dif-

ferent moralities are in their essence one and

the same; and that one cannot comply with the

requirements of any one of these systems of

morality without fulfilling in a measure the re-

quirements of all the other moralities.

It might, for example, be urged that if a                                99

man strive after the achievement of a trans-

cendental ideal in which self shall be annulled,

he will pro tanto [to such extent] be bringing welfare to his do-

mestic circle; or again, that it would be im-

possible to promote domestic welfare without,

through this, promoting the welfare of the

nation, and through that the general welfare

of the world.

In like manner it might be argued that all

work done for abstract principles of morality

like liberty and justice, for the advancement

of knowledge, and for whatever else goes to

the building up of a higher civilisation, will,

by promoting the welfare of the general body

of mankind, redound to the advantage of each

several nation, and ultimately to the advantage

of each domestic circle.

But all this would be true only in a very

superficial and strictly qualified sense.  In re-

ality, just as there is eternal conflict between

egoism and altruism, so there is conflict be-

tween the different moralities.

To take examples, the attempt to actualise                           100

the transcendental religious ideal may, when

pursued with ardour, very easily conflict with

the morality which makes domestic felicity its

end.  And again--as we see in the anti-mili-

tarist movement in France, in the history of

the early Christian Church, in the case of the

Quakers and in the teachings of Tolstoy--it

may quite well set itself in conflict with na-

tional ideals, and dictate a line of conduct

which is, from the point of view of the State,

immoral.

We need no further witness of the divorce

between idealistic and national morality than

that which is supplied in the memorable utter-

ance of Bishop Magee, "No state which was

conducted on truly Christian principles could

hold together for a week."

And domestic morality will constantly come

into conflict with public morality.

To do everything in one's power to advance

one's relatives and friends irrespectively of all

considerations of merit would, no doubt, be

quite sound domestic morality; it could, how-                           101

ever, not always be reconciled with public

morality.  In the same way, to take one's

country's part in all eventualities would be

patriotic, but it might quite well conflict with

the higher interests of humanity.

Now, the point towards which we have been

winning our way is that each man's moral sta-

tion and degree will be determined by the elec-

tion which he makes where egoism and altru-

ism, and where a narrower and a wider code

of morality, conflict.

That the moral law forbids yielding to the

promptings of egoism or to those of the nar-

rower moralities when this involves a violation

of the precepts of the wider morality is axio-

matic.  Criminal and anti-social actions are

not excused by the fact that motives which im-

pelled their commission were not purely ego-

istic.

But the ethical law demands more than ab-

stention from definitely anti-social actions.

It demands from every individual that he

shall recognise the precepts of public mor-                               102

ality as of superior obligation to those of ego-

ism and domestic morality.

By the fact that her public men recognised

this ethical law Rome won for herself in the

ancient world spectacular grandeur.  By an

unexampled national obedience to it glory has

in our time accrued to Japan.  And, in truth,

there is not anywhere any honour or renown

but such as comes from casting away the bonds

of self and of the narrower moralities to

carry out the behests of the wider morality.

Even in the strongholds of transcendental

religion where it was axiomatic that mor-

ality began and was summed up in personal

morality, it is gradually coming to be rec-

ognised that, where we have two competing

moralities, it is always the wider morality

which has the prior claim upon our allegiance.

Kingsley's protest against the morality of

"saving one's dirty soul" marked a step in ad-

vance.  And we find full recognition of the

superior claim of the larger morality in that

other virile dictum of Bishop Magee, "I would                          103

rather have England free, than England

sober."  That is, "I would maintain the con-

ditions which make for the highest civilisation

even at the price of a certain number of lapses

in personal and domestic morality."

What is here new, let it be noted, is only

the acknowledgment by those whose official

allegiance is to a transcendental ideal of per-

sonal morality that they are called upon to

obey a higher allegiance.  For there has al-

ways existed, in the doctrine that guilty man

could not be pardoned and taken back into

favour until the claims of eternal justice had

been satisfied, theoretical recognition of the

principle that one must conform to the pre-

cepts of abstract morality before one may

ethically indulge oneself in the lower moral-

ities of philanthropy and personal benevo-

lence.

The view point from which I would pro-

pose to survey the morality of woman has now

been reached.  It has, however, still to be

pointed out that we may appropriately, in com-                        104

paring the morals of man and woman, confine

our survey to a comparatively narrow field.

That is to say, we may here rule out all that

relates to purely personal and domestic mor-

ality--for this is not relevant to the suffrage.

And we may also rule out all that relates to

offences against the police laws--such as public

drunkenness and offences against the criminal

law--for these would come into consideration

only in connexion with an absolutely inappre-

ciable fraction of voters.

It will be well to begin by signalising certain

points in the moral psychology of man.

When morality takes up its abode in a

man who belongs to the intellectual caste it

will show itself in his becoming mindful of his

public obligations.  He will consider the qual-

ity of his work as affecting the interest of those

who have to place dependence upon it; be-

haviour to those who are casually brought into

relations with him; the discharge of his in-

debtedness to the community; and the proper

conduct of public affairs.                                                          105

In particular, it will be to him a matter of

concern that the law shall be established upon

classifications which are just (in the sense of

being conformable to public advantage); and

that the laws shall everywhere be justly, that

is to say rigorously and impartially, adminis-

tered.

If we now turn to the man in the street we

shall not find him especially sensible to the

appeals of morality.  But when the special

call comes it will generally be possible to trust

him: as an elector, to vote uninfluenced by con-

siderations of private advantage; and, when

called to serve on a jury, to apply legal class-

ifications without distinction of person.

Furthermore, in all times of crisis he may be

counted upon to apply the principles of com-

munal morality which have been handed down

in the race.

The Titanic disaster, for example, showed

in a conspicuous manner that the ordinary man

will, "letting his own life go," obey the com-

munal law which lays it upon him, when in-                               106

volved in a catastrophe, to save first the wo-

men and children.

Lastly, we come to the man who is intoler-

ant of all the ordinary restraints of personal

and domestic morality.  Even in him the seeds

of communal morality will often be found

deeply implanted.

Time and again a regiment of scallawags,

who have let all other morality go hang, have,

when the proper chord has been made to vi-

brate in them, heard the call of communal

morality, and done deeds which make the ears

of whosoever heareth of them to tingle.

We come into an entirely different land

when we come to the morality of woman.  It

is personal and domestic, not public, morality

which is instinctive in her.

In other words, when egoism gives

ground to altruism, that altruism is exercised

towards those who are linked up to her by a

bond of sexual affection, or a community in

blood, or failing this, by a relation of personal

friendship, or by some other personal relation.                          107

And even when altruism has had her perfect

work, woman feels no interest in, and no re-

sponsibility towards, any abstract moral ideal.

And though the suffragist may protest, in-

stancing in disproof of this her own burning

enthusiasm for justice, we, for our part, may

legitimately ask whether evidence of a moral

enthusiasm for justice would be furnished by

a desire to render to others their due, or by

vehement insistence upon one's own rights,

and systematic attempts to extort, under the

cover of the word "justice," advantages for

oneself.

But it will be well to dwell a little longer

on, and to bring out more clearly, the point

that woman's moral ideals are personal and

domestic, as distinguished from impersonal

and public.

Let us note in this connexion that it would

be difficult to conceive of a woman who had

become deaf to the appeal of personal and do-

mestic morality making it a matter of amour

propre to respond to a call of public morality;                          108

and difficult to conceive of a woman recover-

ing lost self-respect by fulfilling such an obli-

gation.

But one knows that woman will rise and re-

spond to the call of any strong human or trans-

cendental personal affection.

Again, it is only a very exceptional woman

who would, when put to her election between

the claims of a narrow and domestic and a

wider or public morality, subordinate the

former to the latter.

In ordinary life, at any rate, one finds her

following in such a case the suggestions of

domestic--I had almost called it animal--mor-

ality.

It would be difficult to find any one who

would trust a woman to be just to the rights

of others in the case where the material in-

terests of her children, or of a devoted hus-

band, were involved.  And even to consider

the question of being in such a case intellec-

tually just to any one who came into competi-

tion with personal belongings like husband and                         109

child would, of course, lie quite beyond the

moral horizon of ordinary woman.

It is not only the fact that the ideals of

abstract justice and truth would inevitably

be brushed aside by woman in the interests of

those she loves which comes into consideration

here; it is also the fact that woman is almost

without a moral sense in the matter of execut-

ing a public trust such as voting or attaching

herself to a political association with a view

to influencing votes.

There is between man and woman here a

characteristic difference.

While it is, of course, not a secret to any-

body that the baser sort of man can at any

time be diverted from the path of public mor-

ality by a monetary bribe or other personal

advantage, he will not, at any rate, set at

naught all public morality by doing so for a

peppercorn.  He will, for instance, not join,

for the sake of a daughter, a political move-

ment in which he has no belief; nor vote for this

or that candidate just to please a son; or cen-                           110

sure a member of Parliament who has in vot-

ing on female suffrage failed to consider the

predilections of his wife.

But woman, whether she be politically en-

franchised as in Australasia, or unenfran-

chised as at home; whether she be immoral in

the sense of being purely egoistic, or moral in

the sense of being altruistic, very rarely makes

any secret or any shame of doing these things.

In this matter one would not be very far

from the truth if one alleged that there are no

good women, but only women who have lived

under the influence of good men.

Even more serious than this postponement

of public to private morality is the fact that

even reputedly ethical women will, in the in-

terests of what they take to be idealistic causes,

violate laws which are universally accepted as

being of moral obligation.

I here pass over the recent epidemic of polit-

ical crime among women to advert to the want

of conscience which permits, in connexion with

professedly idealistic causes, not only misrepre-                       111

sentations, but the making of deliberately false

statements on matters of public concern.

It is, for example, an illustration of the pro-

foundly different moral atmospheres in which

men and women live that when a public woman

recently made, for what was to her an idealistic

purpose, a deliberately false statement of fact

in The Times, she quite naïvely confessed to

it, seeing nothing whatever amiss in her ac-

tion.

And it did not appear that any other woman

suffragist could discern any kind of immoral-

ity in it.  The worst thing they could find to

say was that it perhaps was a little gauche

to confess to making a deliberately false state-

ment on a public question when it was for the

moment particularly desirable that woman

should show up to best advantage before the

eyes of man.

We may now for a moment put aside the

question of woman's public morality and con-

sider a question which is inextricably mixed up                         112

with the question of the admission of woman

to the suffrage.  This is the mental attitude

and the programme of the female legislative

reformer.                                                                                 113

IV

MENTAL OUTLOOK AND PROGRAMME OF

THE FEMALE LEGISLATIVE REFORMER

THE suffragist woman, when she is the kind

of woman who piques herself upon her ethical

impulses, will, even when she is intellectually

very poorly equipped, and there is no imprint

of altruism upon her life, assure you that noth-

ing except the moral influence of woman, ex-

erted through the legislation, which her prac-

tical mind would be capable of initiating, will

ever avail to abate existing social evils, and to

effect the moral redemption of the world.

It will not be amiss first to try to introduce

a little clearness and order into our ideas upon

those formidably difficult problems which the

female legislative reformer desires to attack,

and then to consider how a rational reforming

mind would go to work in the matter of pro-

posing legislation for these.                                                      114

First would come those evils which result

from individuals seeking advantage to them-

selves by the direct infliction of injury upon

others.  Violations of the criminal law and the

various forms of sweating and fleecing one's

fellow-men come under this category.

Then would come the evils which arise out of

purveying physiological and psychological re-

freshments and excitements, which are, ac-

cording as they are indulged in temperately or

intemperately, grateful and innocuous, or

sources of disaster and ruin.  The evils which

are associated with the drink traffic and the

betting industry are typical examples.

Finally, there would come into consideration

the evils of death or physical suffering deliber-

ately inflicted by man upon man with a view to

preventing worse evils.  The evil of war would

come under this category.  In this same cate-

gory might also come the much lesser evil of

punitive measures inflicted upon criminals.

And with this might be coupled the evil of                                 115

killing and inflicting physical suffering upon

animals for the advantage of man.

We may now consider how the rational legis-

lative reformer would in each case go to

work.

He would not start with the assumption that

it must be possible by some alteration of the

law to abolish or conspicuously reduce any of

the afore-mentioned evils; nor yet with the as-

sumption that, if a particular alteration of the

law would avail to bring about this result, that

alteration ought necessarily to be made.  He

would recognise that many things which are

theoretically desirable are unattainable; and

that many legislative measures which could

perfectly well be enforced would be barred by

the fact that they would entail deplorable un-

intended consequences.

The rational legislator whom we have here

in view would accordingly always take expert

advice as to whether the desired object could

be achieved by legal compulsion; and as to                              116

whether a projected law which satisfied the

condition of being workable would give a bal-

ance of advantages over disadvantages.

In connexion with a proposal for the pre-

vention of sweating he would, for instance,

take expert advice as to whether its provisions

could be enforced; and whether, if enforce-

able, they would impose added hardships on

any class of employees or penalties on any in-

nocent class of employers.

In like manner in connexion with a pro-

posed modification in criminal procedure, the

rational reformer would defer to the expert

on the question as to whether such modification

would secure greater certainty of punishment

for the guilty without increasing the risk of

convicting the innocent.

In connexion with the second category of

evils--the category under which would come

those of drinking and betting--the rational

legislative reformer would recognise the com-

plete impracticability of abolishing by legis-                              117

lative prohibition physiological indulgences

and the evils which sometimes attend upon

them.

He would consider instead whether these at-

tendant evils could be reduced by making the

regulating laws more stringent; and whether

more stringent restrictions--in addition to

the fact that they would filch from the all too

small stock of human happiness--would not,

by paving the way for further invasions of per-

sonal liberty, cripple the free development of

the community.

On the former question, which only experts

could properly answer, the reasonable reformer

would defer to their advice.  The answer to

the last question he would think out for him-

self.

In connexion with the evils which are de-

liberately inflicted by man with a view to reap-

ing either personal profit, or profit for the na-

tion, or profit for humanity, the reasonable

reformer would begin by making clear to

himself that the world we live in is not such                               118

a world as idealism might conjure up, but a

world of violence, in which life must be taken

and physical suffering be inflicted.

And he would recognise that the vital

material interests of the nation can be pro-

tected only by armed force; that civilisation

can be safeguarded only by punishing viola-

tions of the criminal law; and that the taking

of animal life and the infliction of a certain

amount of physical suffering upon animals is

essential to human well-being, comfort, and

recreation; and essential also to the achieve-

ment of the knowledge which is required to

combat disease.

And the reasonable reformer will, in con-

formity with this, direct his efforts, not to the

total abolition of war, but to the prevention of

such wars as are not waged for really vital

material interests, and to the abatement of the

ferocities of warfare.

In the case of punishment for criminals he

would similarly devote his efforts not to the

abrogation of punishments, but to the relin-                              119

quishment of any that are not reformatory, or

really deterrent.

In like manner the reasonable reformer

would not seek to prohibit the slaughtering of

animals for food, or the killing off of animal

pests, or the trapping, shooting, or hunting of

animals for sport or profit, nor yet would he

seek to prevent their utilisation of animals for

the acquirement of knowledge.

He would direct his efforts to reducing the

pain which is inflicted, and to preserving every-

where measure and scale--not sentimentally

forbidding in connexion with one form of

utilisation of animals what is freely allowed

in connexion with another--but differentia-

ting, if differentiating at all in favour of per-

mitting the infliction of proportionately greater

suffering in the case where national and hu-

manitarian interests, than in the case where

mere recreation and luxury and personal

profit, are at stake.

Having recognised what reason would pre-

scribe to the legislative reformer, we have next                         120

to inquire how far the man voter conforms to

these prescriptions of reason, and how far the

woman reformer would do so if she became

a voter.

Let it be noted that the man in the street

makes no question about falling in with the

fact that he is born into a world of violence,

and he acquiesces in the principle that the

State, and, failing the State, the individual,

may employ force and take life in defence

of vital material interests.  And he frankly

falls in with it being a matter of daily

routine to kill and inflict suffering upon ani-

mals for human profit or advantage.

Even if these principles are not formulated

by the man in the street in quite such plain

terms, he not only carries them out in practice,

but he conducts all his thinking upon these pre-

suppositions.

He, for instance, would fall in with the prop-

osition that morality does not require from

man that he should give up taking life

or inflicting physical suffering.  And he would                            121

not cavil with the statement that man should

put reasonable limits to the amount of suffer-

ing he inflicts, and confine this within as nar-

row a range as possible--always requiring for

the death or suffering inflicted some tangible

advantage.

Moreover, if the question should be raised

as to whether such advantage will result, the

ordinary man will as a rule, where the matter

lies beyond his personal ken, take expert opin-

ion before intervening.

He will, for instance, be prepared to be so

guided in connexion with such questions as

whether disease could, if more knowledge were

available, be to a large extent prevented and

cured; as to how far animal experiments would

contribute to the acquirement of that knowl-

edge; and as to how far the physical suffer-

ing which might be involved in these experi-

ments can be minimised or abolished.

But not every man is prepared to fall in

with this programme of inflicting physical suf-

fering for the relief of physical suffering.                                    122

There is also a type of spiritually-minded man

who in this world of violence sets his face un-

compromisingly against the taking of any

life and the infliction of any physical suffer-

ing--refusing to make himself a partaker of

evil.

An idealist of this type will, like Tolstoy,

be an anti-militarist.  He will advocate a gen-

eral gaol delivery for criminals.  He will be a

vegetarian.  He will not allow an animal's

life to be taken in his house, though the mice

scamper over his floors.  And he will, consist-

ently with his conviction that it is immoral to

resort to force, refuse to take any part in legis-

lation or government.

This attitude, which is that commended by

the Hindoo and the Buddhist religions, is, of

course, a quite unpractical attitude towards

life.  It is, in fact, a self-destructive attitude,

unless a man's fellow-citizens are prepared by

forcible means to secure to him the enjoyment

of the work of his hands or of his inherited

property, or unless those who refuse to desist                           123

from the exercise of force are prepared to un-

take the support of idealists.

We have not only these two classes of men--

the ordinary man who has no compunction in

resorting to force when the requirements of life

demand it, and the idealist who refuses to have

any lot or part in violence; there is also a hy-

brid.  This male hybrid will descant on the

general iniquity of violence, and then not only

connive at those forms of violence which min-

ister to his personal comforts, but also make

a virtue of trying to abate by legal violence

some particular form of physical suffering

which happens to offend in a quite special man-

ner his individual sensibility.

There is absolutely nothing to be said about

this kind of reforming crank, except only that

anything which may be said in relation to the

female legislative reformer may be appositely

said of him; and perhaps also this, that the

ordinary man holds him both in intellectual

and in moral contempt, and is resolved not to                           124

allow him to do any really serious injury to

the community.

To become formidable this quasi-male per-

son must, as he recognises, ally himself with

the female legislative reformer.

Passing on to deal with her, it imports us first

to realise that while the male voter has--ex-

cept where important constitutional issues

were in question--been accustomed to leave

actual legislation to the expert, the female re-

former gives notice beforehand that she will,

as soon as ever she gets the suffrage, insist

on pressing forward by her vote her reform-

ing schemes.

What would result from the ordinary voter

legislating on matters which require expert

knowledge will be plain to every one who will

consider the evolution of law.

There stand over against each other here, as

an example and a warning, the Roman Law,

which was the creation of legal experts: the

prætor and the jurisconsult; and the legal                                  125

system of the Greeks, which was the creation

of a popular assembly--and it was a popu-

lar assembly which was quite ideally intelli-

gent.

Upon the Roman Law has been built the law

of the greater part of the civilised world.  The

Greek is a by-word for inconsequence.

How can one, then, without cold shudders

think of that legal system which the female

amateur legal reformer would bring to the

birth?

Let us consider her qualifications.  Let us

first take cognisance of the fact that the re-

forming woman will neither stand to the prin-

ciple that man may, where this gives a balance

of advantage, inflict on his fellow-man, and a

fortiori upon animals, death and physical suf-

fering; nor yet will she stand to the principle

that it is ethically unlawful to do deeds of vio-

lence.

She spends her life halting between these

two opinions, eternally shilly-shallying.

She will, for instance, begin by announcing                           126

that it can never be lawful to do evil that good

may come; and that killing and inflicting suf-

fering is an evil.  (In reality the precept of

not doing evil that good may come has rela-

tion only to breaking for idealistic purposes

moral laws of higher obligation.)  She will

then go back upon that and concede that war

may sometimes be lawful, and that the punish-

ment of criminals is not an evil.  But if her

emotions are touched by the forcible feeding

of a criminal militant suffragist, she will again

go back upon that and declare that the appli-

cation of force is an intolerable evil.

Or, again, she will concede that the slaugh-

tering of animals for food is not an evil, but

that what is really unforgivable is the infliction

of physical suffering on animals.  And all the

time for her, as well as for man, calves and

lambs are being emasculated to make her meat

succulent; wild animals are painfully done to

death to provide her table with delicacies;

birds with young in the nest are shot so that

she may parade in their plumage; or fur-bear-                           127

ing animals are for her comfort and adorn-

ment massacred and tortured in traps.

When a man crank who is co-responsible

for these things begins to talk idealistic re-

forms, the ordinary decent man refuses to

have anything more to say to him.

But when a woman crank holds this lan-

guage, the man merely shrugs his shoulders.

"It is," he tells himself, "after all, the woman

whom God gave him."

It must be confessed that the problem as to

how man with a dual nature may best accom-

modate himself to a world of violence pre-

sents a very difficult problem.

It would obviously be no solution to follow

out everywhere a programme of violence.

Not even the predatory animals do that.

Tigers do not savage their cubs; hawks do not

pluck hawks' eyes; and dogs do not fight

bitches.

Nor would, as has been shown, the solution

of the problem be arrived at by everywhere

surrendering--if we had been given the grace                            128

to do this--to the compunctious visitings of

nature.

What is required is to find the proper com-

promise.  As to what that would be there is,

as between the ordinary man and woman on

the one side, and the male crank and the

battalions of sentimental women on the other,

a conflict which is, to all intents and purposes,

a sex war.

The compromise which ordinary human na-

ture had fixed upon--and it is one which, min-

istering as it does to the survival of the race,

has been adopted through the whole range of

nature--is that of making within the world in

which violence rules a series of enclaves in

which the application of violence is progres-

sively restricted and limited.

Outside the outermost of the series of ring

fences thus constituted would be the realm of

uncompromising violence such as exists when

human life is endangered by wild animals, or

murderous criminals, or savages.  Just within

this outermost fence would be civilised war--                            129

for in civilised war non-combatants and prison-

ers and wounded are excluded from the appli-

cation of violence.  In like manner we bring

humanity in general within a more sheltered

enclosure than animals--pet animals within a

more sheltered enclosure than other animals.

Again, we bring those who belong to the white

race within a narrower protecting circle than

mankind in general, and those of our own na-

tion within a still narrower one.

Following out the same principle, we in-

clude women and children within a narrower

shelter fence than our adult fellow-male; and

we use the weapon of force more reluctantly

when we are dealing with our relatives and

friends than when we are dealing with those

who are not personally known to us; and

finally, we lay it aside more completely when

we are dealing with the women of our house-

holds than when we are dealing with the

males.

The cause of civilisation and of the amenities,

and the welfare of the nation, of the family,                               130

and of woman, are all intimately bound up with

a faithful adherence to this compromise.

But this policy imposes upon those whom

it shelters from violence corresponding obliga-

tions.

In war non-combatants--not to speak of the

wounded on the battlefield--must desist from

hostile action on the pain of being shot down

like wild beasts.  And though an individual

non-combatant might think it a patriotic action

for him to take part in war, the thoughtful

man would recognise that such action was a

violation of a well-understood covenant made

in the interest of civilisation, and that to break

through this covenant was to abrogate a hu-

manitarian arrangement by which the general

body of non-combatants immensely benefits.

Exactly the same principle finds, as already

pointed out, application when a woman em-

ploys direct violence, or aspires to exercise by

voting indirect violence.

One always wonders if the suffragist appre-

ciates all that woman stands to lose and all                               131

that she imperils by resort to physical force.

One ought not to have to tell her that, if she

had to fight for her position, her status would

be that which is assigned to her among the

Kaffirs--not that which civilised man concedes

to her.

From considering the compromise by which

man adapts his dual nature to violence in the

world, we turn to that which the female legis-

lative reformer would seek to impose by the

aid of her vote.

Her proposal, as the reader will have dis-

cerned, would be that all those evils which make

appeal to the feminine emotions should be

legally prohibited, and that all those which fail

to make this appeal shall be tolerated.

In the former class would be included those

which come directly under woman's ken, or

have been brought vividly before the eyes of

her imagination by emotional description.

And the specially intolerable evils will be those

which, owing to the fact that they fall upon

woman or her immediate belongings, induce                             132

in the female legislative reformer pangs of

sympathetic discomfort.

In the class of evils which the suffragist is

content to tolerate, or say nothing about, would

be those which are incapable of evoking in her

such sympathetic pangs, and she concerns her-

self very little with those evils which do not

furnish her with a text for recriminations

against man.

Conspicuous in this programme is the ab-

sence of any sense of proportion.  One would

have imagined that it would have been plain

to everybody that the evils which individual

women suffer at the hands of man are very far

from being the most serious ills of humanity.

One would have imagined that the suffering

inflicted by disease and by bad social condi-

tions--suffering which falls upon man and

woman alike--deserved a first place in the

thoughts of every reformer.  And one might

have expected it to be common knowledge that

the wrongs individual men inflict upon women

have a full counterpart in the wrongs which                               133

individual women inflict upon men.  It may

quite well be that there are mists which here

"blot and fill the perspective" of the female

legislative reformer.  But to look only upon

one's own things, and not also upon the things

of others, is not for that morally innocent.

There is further to be noted in connexion

with the female legislative reformer that she

has never been able to see why she should be

required to put her aspirations into practical

shape, or to consider ways and means, or to

submit the practicability of her schemes to ex-

pert opinion.  One also recognises that from

a purely human point of view such tactics are

judicious.  For if the schemes of the fe-

male legislative reformer were once to be re-

viewed from the point of view of their prac-

ticability, her utility as a legislator would come

into question, and the suffragist could no

longer give out that there has been committed

to her from on High a mission to draw water

for man-kind out of the wells of salvation.

Lastly, we have to reflect in connection with                         134

the female legislative reformer that to go about

proposing to reform the laws means to aban-

don that special field of usefulness which lies

open to woman in alleviating misery and re-

dressing those hard cases which will, under all

laws and regulations of human manufacture

and under all social dispositions, inevitably

occur.  Now when a woman leaves a social

task which is commensurate with her abilities,

and which asks from her personal effort and

self-sacrifice, for a task which is quite beyond

her abilities, but which, she thinks, will bring

her personal kudos, shall we impute it to her

for righteousness?                                                                    135

V

ULTERIOR ENDS WHICH THE WOMAN'S SUF-

FRAGE MOVEMENT HAS IN VIEW

WE have now sufficiently considered the

suffragist's humanitarian schemes, and we

may lead up to the consideration of her further

projects by contrasting woman's suffrage as it

presents itself under colonial conditions--i.e.

woman's suffrage without the female legisla-

tive reformer and the feminist--with the

woman suffrage which is being agitated for in

England--i.e. woman suffrage with the fe-

male legislative reformer and the feminist.

In the colonies and undeveloped countries

generally where women are in a minority, and

where owing to the fact that practically all

have an opportunity of marrying, there are not

for woman any difficult economic and physio-

logical conditions, there is no woman's ques-                            136

tion; and by consequence no female legislative

reformer or feminist.  The woman voter fol-

lows, as the opportunist politicians who en-

franchised her intended, the lead of her men-

folk--serving only a pawn in the game of pol-

itics.  Under such conditions woman's suf-

frage leaves things as they are, except only

that it undermines the logical foundations of

the law, and still further debases the standard

of public efficiency and public morality.

In countries, such as England, where an ex-

cess female population 1 has made economic

difficulties for woman, and where the severe

sexual restrictions, which here obtains, have

bred in her sex-hostility, the suffrage move-

ment has as its avowed ulterior object the abro-

gation of all distinctions which depend upon

sex; and the achievement of the economic inde-

pendence of woman.

To secure this economic independence every

post, occupation, and Government service is to

1 In England and Wales there are, in a population of 8,000,-

000 women between the ages of twenty and fifty, 3,000,000 un-

married women.                                                                          137

be thrown open to woman; she is to receive

everywhere the same wages as man; male and

female are to work side by side; and they are

indiscriminately to be put in command the one

over the other.  Furthermore, legal rights are

to be secured to the wife over her husband's

property and earnings.  The programme is,

in fact, to give to woman an economic inde-

pendence out of the earnings and taxes of

man.

Nor does feminist ambition stop short here.

It demands that women shall be included in

every advisory committee, every governing

board, every jury, every judicial bench, every

electorate, every parliament, and every minis-

terial cabinet; further, that every masculine

foundation, university, school of learning,

academy, trade union, professional corpora-

tion and scientific society shall be converted

into an epicene institution--until we shall have

everywhere one vast cock-and-hen show.

The proposal to bring man and woman

together everywhere into extremely intimate                             138

relationships raises very grave questions.  It

brings up, first, the question of sexual compli-

cations; secondly, the question as to whether

the tradition of modesty and reticence between

the sexes is to be definitely sacrificed; and,

most important of all, the question as to

whether epicene conditions would place ob-

stacles in the way of intellectual work.

Of these issues the feminist puts the first two

quite out of account.  I have already else-

where said my say upon these matters.1    With

regard to the third, the feminist either fails to

realise that purely intellectual intercourse--as

distinguished from an intercommunion of men-

tal images--with woman is to a large section

of men repugnant; or else, perceiving this,

she makes up her mind that, this notwithstand-

ing, she will get her way by denouncing the

man who does not welcome her as selfish; and

by insisting that under feminism (the quota-

tion is from Mill, the italics which question his

sincerity are mine) "the mass of mental facul-

1 Vide Appendix, pp. 169-173.                                                     139

ties available for the higher service of man-

kind would be doubled."

The matter cannot so lightly be disposed of.

It will be necessary for us to find out whether

really intimate association with woman on the

purely intellectual plane is realisable.  And if

it is, in fact, unrealisable, it will be necessary to

consider whether it is the exclusion of women

from masculine corporations; or the perpetual

attempt of women to force their way into these,

which would deserve to be characterised as

selfish.

In connexion with the former of these issues,

we have to consider here not whether that form

of intellectual co-operation in which the man

plays the game, and the woman moves the

pawns under his orders, is possible.  That

form of co-operation is of course possible, and

it has, doubtless, certain utilities.

Nor yet have we to consider whether quite

intimate and purely intellectual association on

an equal footing between a particular man and

a selected woman may or may not be possible.                        140

It will suffice to note that the feminist alleges

that this also is possible; but everybody knows

that the woman very often marries the man.

What we have to ask is whether--even if

we leave out of regard the whole system of at-

tractions or, as the case may be, repulsions

which come into operation when the sexes are

thrown together--purely intellectual inter-

course between man and the typical unselected

woman is not barred by the intellectual im-

moralities and limitations which appear to be

secondary sexual characters of woman.

With regard to this issue, there would seem

to be very little real difference of opinion

among men.  But there are great differences

in the matter of candour.  There are men who

speak out, and who enunciate like Nietzsche

that "man and woman are alien--never yet

has any one conceived how alien."

There are men who, from motives of delicacy

or policy, do not speak out--averse to saying

anything that might be unflattering to woman.

And there are men who are by their pro-                             141

fession of the feminist faith debarred from

speaking out, but who upon occasion give

themselves away.

Of such is the man who in the House of

Commons champions the cause of woman's

suffrage, impassionately appealing to Justice;

and then betrays himself by announcing that

he would shake off from his feet the dust of its

purlieus if ever women were admitted as mem-

bers--i.e. if ever women were forced upon him

as close intellectual associates.

Wherever we look we find aversion to com-

pulsory intellectual co-operation with woman.

We see it in the sullen attitude which the or-

dinary male student takes up towards the pres-

ence of women students in his classes.  We see

it in the fact that the older English universi-

ties, which have conceded everything else to

women, have made a strong stand against mak-

ing them actual members of the university;

for this would impose them on men as intellec-

tual associates.  Again we see the aversion in

the opposition to the admission of women to                            142

the bar.  But we need not look so far afield.

Practically every man feels that there is in

woman--patent, or hidden away--an element

of unreason which, when you come upon it,

summarily puts an end to purely intellectual

intercourse.  One may reflect, for example,

upon the way the woman's suffrage contro-

versy has been conducted.

Proceeding now on the assumption that

these things are so, and that man feels that he

and woman belong to different intellectual

castes, we come now to the question as to

whether it is man who is selfish when he ex-

cludes women from his institutions, or woman

when she unceasingly importunes for admit-

tance.  And we may define as selfish all such

conduct as pursues the advantage of the agent

at the cost of the happiness and welfare of

the general body of mankind.

We shall be in a better position to pronounce

judgment on this question of ethics when we

have considered the following series of analo-

gies:                                                                                        143

When a group of earnest and devout be-

lievers meet together for special intercession

and worship, we do not tax them with selfish-

ness if they exclude unbelievers.

Nor do we call people who are really de-

voted to music selfish if, coming together for

this, they make a special point of excluding

the unmusical.

Nor again would the imputation of selfish-

ness lie against members of a club for black-

balling a candidate who would, they feel, be

uncongenial.

Nor should we regard it as an act of selfish-

ness if the members of a family circle, or of

the same nation, or of any social circle, desired

to come together quite by themselves.

Nor yet would the term selfish apply to an

East End music hall audience when they eject

any one who belongs to a different social class

to themselves and wears good clothes.

And the like would hold true of servants re-

senting their employers intruding upon them

in their hours of leisure or entertainments.                                 144

If we do not characterise such exclusions as

selfish, but rather respect and sympathise with

them, it is because we recognise that the whole

object and raison d' être of association would

in each case be nullified by the weak-minded

admission of the incompatible intruder.

We recognise that if any charge of selfish-

ness would lie, it would lie against that in-

truder.

Now if this holds in the case where the in-

terests of religious worship or music, or family,

national, or social life, or recreation and relax-

ation after labour are in question, it will hold

true even more emphatically where the inter-

ests of intellectual work are involved.

But the feminist will want to argue.  She

will--taking it as always for granted that

woman has a right to all that men's hands or

brains have fashioned--argue that it is very

important for the intellectual development of

woman that she should have exactly the same

opportunities as man.  And she will, scouting [rejecting with contempt]

the idea of any differences between the intelli-                          145

gences of man and woman, discourse to you of

their intimate affinity.

It will, perhaps, be well to clear up these

points.

The importance of the higher development

of woman is unquestionable.

But after all it is the intellect of man which

really comes into account in connexion with

"the mass of mental faculties available for the

higher service of mankind."

The maintenance of the conditions which

allow of man's doing his best intellectual work

is therefore an interest which is superior to

that of the intellectual development of woman.

And woman might quite properly be referred

for her intellectual development to instruc-

tional institutions which should be special to

herself.

Coming to the question of the intimate re-

semblances between the masculine and the

feminine intelligence, no man would be ven-

turesome enough to dispute these, but he may                          146

be pardoned if he thinks--one would hope in

no spirit of exaltation--also of the differences.

We have an instructive analogy in connexion

with the learned societies.

It is uncontrovertible that every candidate

for election into such a society will have, and

will feel that he has, affinities with the members

of that association.  And he is invited to set

these forth in his application.  But there may

also be differences of which he is not sensible.

On that question the electors are the judges;

and they are the final court of appeal.

There would seem to be here a moral which

the feminist would do well to lay to heart.

There is also another lesson which she might

very profitably consider.  A quite small dif-

ference will often constitute as effective a bar

to a useful and congenial co-operation as a

more fundamental difference.

In the case of a body of intellectual workers

one might at first sight suppose that so small

a distinction as that of belonging to a different                           147

nationality--sex, of course, is an infinitely pro-

founder difference--would not be a bar to un-

restricted intellectual co-operation.

But in point of fact it is in every country,

in every learned society, a uniform rule that

when foreign scientists or scholars are admitted

they are placed not on the ordinary list of

working members, but on a special list.

One discerns that there is justification for

this in the fact that a foreigner would in cer-

tain eventualities be an incompatible person.

One may think of the eventuality of the

learned society deciding to recognise a national

service, or to take part in a national movement.

And one is not sure that a foreigner might not

be an incompatible person in the eventuality

of a scientist or scholar belonging to a national-

ity with which the foreigner's country was at

feud being brought forward for election.

And he would, of course, be an impossible

person in a society if he were, in a spirit of

chauvinism, to press for a larger representa-

tion of his own fellow-countrymen.                                          148

Now this is precisely the kind of way man

feels about woman.  He recognises that she is

by virtue of her sex for certain purposes an in-

compatible person; and that, quite apart from

this, her secondary sexual characters might in

certain eventualities make her an impossible

person.

We may note, before passing on, that these

considerations would seem to prescribe that

woman should be admitted to masculine insti-

tutions only when real humanitarian grounds

demand it; that she should--following here the

analogy of what is done in the learned societies

with respect to foreigners--be invited to co-

operate with men only when she is quite spe-

cially eminent, or beyond all question useful

for the particular purpose in hand; and lastly,

that when co-opted into any masculine institu-

tion woman should always be placed upon a

special list, to show that it was proposed to con-

fine her co-operation within certain specified

limits.

From these general questions, which affect                           149

only the woman with intellectual aspirations,

we pass to consider what would be the effect

of feminism upon the rank and file of women

if it made of these co-partners with man in

work.  They would suffer not only because

woman's physiological disabilities and the re-

strictions which arise out of her sex place

her at a great disadvantage when she has to

enter into competition with man, but also be-

cause under feminism man would be less and

less disposed to take off woman's shoulders a

part of her burden.

And there can be no dispute that the most

valuable financial asset of the ordinary woman

is the possibility that a man may be willing--

and may, if only woman is disposed to fulfil her

part of the bargain, be not only willing but

anxious--to support her and to secure for her,

if he can, a measure of that freedom which

comes from the possession of money.

In view of this every one who has a real fel-

low-feeling for woman, and who is concerned

for her material welfare, as a father is con-                               150

cerned for his daughter's, will above every-

thing else desire to nurture and encourage in

man the sentiment of chivalry, and in woman

that disposition of mind that makes chivalry

possible.

And the woman workers who have to fight

the battle of life for themselves would indi-

rectly profit from this fostering of chivalry;

for those women who are supported by men do

not compete in the limited labour market which

is open to the woman worker.

From every point of view, therefore, except

perhaps that of the exceptional woman who

would be able to hold her own against mas-

culine competition--and men always issue in-

formal letters of naturalisation to such an ex-

ceptional woman--the woman suffrage which

leads up to feminism would be a social disaster.                       151

PART III

IS THERE, IF THE SUFFRAGE IS BARRED, ANY

PALLIATIVE OF CORRECTIVE FOR THE

DISCONTENTS OF WOMAN?

I

PALLIATIVES OR CORRECTIVES FOR THE

DISCONTENTS OF WOMAN

What are the Suffragist's Grievances?--Economic and

Physiological Difficulties of Woman--Intellectual

Grievances of Suffragist and Corrective.

Is there then, let us ask ourselves, if the suf-

frage with its programme of feminism is

barred as leading to social disaster, any pallia-

tive or corrective that can be applied to the

present discontents of woman?

If such is to be found, it is to be found only

by placing clearly before us the suffragist's

grievances.

These grievances are, first, the economic

difficulties of the woman who seeks to earn her

living by work other than unskilled manual

labour; secondly, the difficult physiological

conditions in which woman is placed by the                              155

excess of the female over the male population

and by her diminished chances of marriage 1 ;

and thirdly, the tedium which obsesses the life

of the woman who is not forced, and cannot

force herself, to work.  On the top of these

grievances comes the fact that the suffragist

conceives herself to be harshly and unfairly

treated by man.  This last is the fire which

sets a light to all the inflammable material.

It would be quite out of question to discuss

here the economic and physiological difficulties

of woman.  Only this may be said: it is impos-

sible, in view of the procession of starved and

frustrated lives which is continuously filing

past, to close one's eyes to the urgency of this

woman's problem.

After all, the primary object of all civilisa-

tion is to provide for every member of the

community food and shelter and fulfilment of

natural cravings.  And when, in what passes

as a civilised community, a whole class is called

upon to go without any one of these our hu-

1 Vide footnote, p. 138.

man requirements, it is little wonder that it

should break out.

But when a way of escape stands open revolt

is not morally justified.

Thus, for example, a man who is born into,

but cannot support himself in, a superior class

of society is not, as long as he can find a liveli-

hood abroad in a humbler walk in life, entitled

to revolt.

No more is the woman who is in economic or

physiological difficulties.  For, if only she has

the pluck to take it, a way of escape stands

open to her.

She can emigrate; she can go out from the

social class in which she is not self-supporting

into a humbler social class in which she could

earn a living; and she can forsake conditions

in which she must remain a spinster for con-

ditions in which she may perhaps become a

mother.  Only in this way can the problem of

finding work, and relief of tedium, for the

woman who now goes idle be resolved.

If women were to avail themselves of these                          157

ways of escape out of unphysiological condi-

tions, the woman agitator would probably find

it as difficult to keep alive a passionate agita-

tion for woman suffrage as the Irish Nation-

alist agitator to keep alive, after the settlement

of the land question and the grant of old age

pensions, a passionate agitation for a separate

Parliament for Ireland.

For the happy wife and mother is never pas-

sionately concerned about the suffrage.  It is

always the woman who is galled either by phy-

siological hardships, or by the fact that she has

not the same amount of money as man, or by

the fact that man does not desire her as a co-

partner in work, and withholds the homage

which she thinks he ought to pay to her intel-

lect.

For this class of grievances the present edu-

cation of woman is responsible.  The girl who is

growing up to woman's estate is never taught

where she stands relatively to man.  She

is not taught anything about woman's phys-

ical disabilities.  She is not told--she is left                              158

to discover it for herself when too late--that

child and husband are to woman physiological

requirements.  She is not taught the defects

and limitations of the feminine mind.  One

might almost think there were no such defects

and limitations; and that woman was not al-

ways overestimating her intellectual power.

And the ordinary girl is not made to realise

woman's intrinsically inferior money-earning

capacity.  She is not made to realise that the

woman who cannot work with her hands is

generally hard put to earn enough to keep her-

self alive in the incomplete condition of  a

spinster.

As a result of such education, when, influ-

enced by the feminist movement, woman comes

to institute a comparison between herself and

man, she brings into that comparison all those

qualities in which she is substantially his equal,

and leaves out of account all those in which she

is his inferior.

The failure to recognise that man is the mas-

ter, and why he is the master, lies at the root                            159

of the suffrage movement.  By disregarding

man's superior physical force, the power of

compulsion upon which all government is based

is disregarded.  By leaving out of account

those powers of the mind in which man is the

superior, woman falls into the error of thinking

that she can really compete with him, and that

she belongs to the self-same intellectual caste.

Finally, by putting out of sight man's superior

money-earning capacity, the power of the

purse is ignored.

Uninstructed woman commits also another

fundamental error in her comparison.  Instead

of comparing together the average man and

the average woman, she sets herself to estab-

lish that there is no defect in woman which can-

not be discovered also in man; and that there

is no virtue or power in the ordinary man which

cannot be discovered also in woman.  Which

having been established to her satisfaction, she

is led inevitably to the conclusion that there is

nothing whatever to choose between the sexes.

And from this there is only a step to the posi-                           160

tion that human beings ought to be assigned,

without distinction of sex, to each and every

function which would come within the range

of their individual capacities, instead of being

assigned as they are at present: men to one

function, and women to another.

Here again women ought to have been safe-

guarded by education.  She ought to have

been taught that even when an individual

woman comes up to the average of man this

does not abrogate the disqualification which

attaches to a difference of sex.  Nor yet--as

every one who recognises that we live in a

world which conducts itself by generalisations

will see--does it abrogate the disqualification

of belonging to an inferior intellectual caste.

The present system of feminine education is

blameworthy not only in the respect that it

fails to draw attention to these disqualifications

and to teach woman where she stands; it is even

more blameworthy in that it fails to convey

to the girl who is growing up any conception

of that absolutely elementary form of morality                           161

which consists in distinguishing meum and

tuum [that which is mine and that which is yours].

Instead of her educators encouraging every

girl to assert "rights" as against man, and put

forward claims, they ought to teach her with

respect to him those lessons of behaviour which

are driven home once for all into every boy at

a public school.

Just as there you learn that you may not

make unwarranted demands upon your fel-

low, and just as in the larger world every na-

tion has got to learn that it cannot with im-

punity lay claim to the possessions of its neigh-

bours, so woman will have to learn that when

things are not offered to her, and she has not

the power to take them by force, she has got

to make the best of things as they are.

One would wish for every girl who is grow-

ing up to womanhood that it might be brought

home to her by some refined and ethically-

minded member of her own sex how insuffer-

able a person woman becomes when, like a

spoilt child, she exploits the indulgence of                                 162

man; when she proclaims that it is his duty

to serve her and to share with her his power

and possessions; when she makes an outcry

when he refuses to part with what is his own;

and when she insists upon thrusting her society

upon men everywhere.

And every girl ought to be warned that to

embark upon a policy of recrimination when

you do not get what you want, and to pro-

claim yourself a martyr when, having hit, you

are hit back, is the way to get yourself thor-

oughly disliked.

Finally, every girl ought to be shown, in the

example of the militant suffragist, how revolt

and martyrdom, undertaken in order to possess

oneself of what belongs to others, effects the

complete disorganisation of moral character.

No one would wish that in the education of

girls these quite unlovely things should be in-

sisted upon more than was absolutely neces-

sary.  But one would wish that the educators

of the rising generation of women should, bas-

ing themselves upon these foundations, point                            163

out to every girl how great is woman's debt to

civilisation; in other words, how much is under

civilisation done for woman by man.

And one would wish that, in a world which is

rendered unwholesome by feminism, every

girl's eyes were opened to comprehend the

great outstanding fact of the world: the fact

that, turn where you will, you find individ-

ual man showering upon individual woman--

one man in tribute to her enchantment, an-

other out of a sense of gratitude, and another

just because she is something that is his--every

good thing which, suffrage or no suffrage, she

never could have procured for herself.                                      164

APPENDIX

LETTER ON MILITANT HYSTERIA

Reprinted by permission from The Times  (London), March

28, 1912.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES

SIR,--For man the physiological psychology

of woman is full of difficulties.

He is not a little mystified when he encoun-

ters in her periodically recurring phases of

hypersensitiveness, unreasonableness, and loss

of the sense of proportion.

He is frankly perplexed when confronted

with a complete alteration of character in a

woman who is child-bearing.

When he is a witness of the "tendency of

woman to morally warp when nervously ill,"

and of the terrible physical havoc which the

pangs of a disappointed love may work, he is

appalled.

And it leaves on his mind an eerie feeling

when he sees serious and long-continued men-

tal disorders developing in connexion with the                           167

approaching extinction of a woman's repro-

ductive faculty.

No man can close his eyes to these things;

but he does not feel at liberty to speak of

them.

For the woman that God gave him is not his to give away.    [From "The Female of the Species" by Rudyard Kipling]

As for woman herself, she makes very light

of any of these mental upsettings.

She perhaps smiles a little at them. . . . 1

None the less, these upsettings of her men-

tal equilibrium are the things that a woman

has most cause to fear; and no doctor can ever

lose sight of the fact that the mind of woman

is always threatened with danger from the

reverberations of her physiological emer-

gencies.

It is with such thoughts that the doctor lets

his eyes rest upon the militant suffragist.  He

cannot shut them to the fact that there is

1 In the interests of those who feel that female dignity is

compromised by it, I have here omitted a woman's flippant

overestimate of the number of women in London society who

suffer from nervous disorders at the climacteric [i.e. menopause].          168

mixed up with the woman's movement much

mental disorder; and he cannot conceal from

himself the physiological emergencies which lie

behind.

The recruiting field for the militant suf-

fragists is the million of our excess female

population--that million which had better long

ago have gone out to mate with its comple-

ment of men beyond the sea.

Among them there are the following dif-

ferent types of women:--(a)  First--let us

put them first--come a class of women who

hold, with minds otherwise unwarped, that

they may, whenever it is to their advantage,

lawfully resort to physical violence.

The programme, as distinguished from the

methods, of these women is not very different

from that of the ordinary suffragist woman.

(b)  There file past next a class of women

who have all their life-long been strangers to

joy, women in whom instincts long suppressed

have in the end broken into flame.  These are

the sexually embittered women in whom every-                        169

thing has turned into gall and bitterness of

heart, and hatred of men.

Their legislative programme is license for

themselves, or else restrictions for man.

(c)  Next there file past the incomplete.

One side of their nature has undergone atro-

phy, with the result that they have lost touch

with their living fellow men and women.

Their programme is to convert the whole

world into an epicene institution--an epicene

institution in which man and woman shall

everywhere work side by side at the selfsame

tasks and for the selfsame pay.

These wishes can never by any possibility be

realised.  Even in animals--I say even, be-

cause in these at least one of the sexes has

periods of complete quiscence--male and fe-

male cannot be safely worked side by side, ex-

cept when they are incomplete.

While in the human species safety can be

obtained, it can be obtained only at the price

of continual constraint.                                                             170

And even then woman, though she protests

that she does not require it, and that she does

not receive it, practically always does receive

differential treatment at the hands of man.

It would be well, I often think, that every

woman should be clearly told--and the woman

of the world will immediately understand--

that when man sets his face against the pro-

posal to bring in an epicene world, he does so

because he can do his best work only in sur-

roundings where he is perfectly free from sug-

gestion and from restraint, and from the onus

which all differential treatment imposes.

And I may add in connexion with my own

profession that when a medical man asks that

he should not be the yoke-fellow of a medical

woman he does so also because he would wish

to keep up as between men and women--even

when they are doctors--some of the modesties

and reticences upon which our civilisation has

been built up.

Now the medical woman is of course never                         171

on the side of modesty,1 or in favour of any

reticences.  Her desire for knowledge does

not allow of these.

(d)  Inextricably mixed up with the types

which we have been discussing is the type of

woman whom Dr. Leonard Williams's recent

letter brought so distinctly before our eyes--

the woman who is poisoned by her misplaced

self-esteem; and who flies out at every man

who does not pay homage to her intellect.

She is the woman who is affronted when a

man avers that for him the glory of woman lies

in her power of attraction, in her capacity for

motherhood, and in unswerving allegiance to

the ethics which are special to her sex.

I have heard such an intellectually embit-

tered woman say, though she had been self-

denyingly taken to wife, that "never in the

whole course of her life had a man ever as much

as done her a kindness."

1 To those who have out of inadvertence and as laymen and

women misunderstood, it may be explained that the issue here

discussed is the second in order of the three which are set out

on p. 139  (supra ).                                                                      172

The programme of this type of woman is,

as a preliminary, to compel man to admit her

claim to be his intellectual equal; and, that

done, to compel him to divide up everything

with her to the last farthing, and so make her

also his financial equal.

And her journals exhibit to us the kind of

parliamentary representative she desiderates.

He humbly, hat in hand, asks for his orders

from a knot of washerwomen standing arms

a-kimbo.2

(e)  Following in the wake of these em-

bittered human beings come troops of girls

just grown up.

All these will assure you, these young girls

--and what is seething in their minds is stir-

ring also in the minds in the girls in the col-

leges and schools which are staffed by un-

married suffragists--that woman has suffered

all manner of indignity and injustice at the

hands of man.

2 I give, in response to a request, the reference: Votes for

Women, March 18, 1910, p. 381.                                                     173

And these young girls have been told about

the intellectual, and moral, and financial value

of woman--such tales as it never entered into

the heart of man to conceive.

The programme of these young women is to

be married upon their own terms.  Man shall

--so runs their scheme--work for their sup-

port--to that end giving up his freedom, and

putting himself under orders, for many hours

of the day; but they themselves must not be

asked to give up any of their liberty to him,

or to subordinate themselves to his interests,

or to obey him in anything.

To obey a man would be to commit the

unpardonable sin.

It is not necessary, in connexion with a

movement which proceeds on the lines set out

above, any further to labour the point that

there is in it an element of mental disorder.

It is plain that it is there.

There is also a quite fatuous element in the

programmes of the militant suffragist.  We

have this element, for instance, in the doctrine                           174

that, notwithstanding the fact that the con-

ditions of the labour market deny it to her,

woman ought to receive the same wage as a

man for the same work.

This doctrine is fatuous, because it leaves

out of sight that, even if woman succeeds in

doing the same work as man, he has behind him

a much larger reserve of physical strength.

As soon as a time of strain comes, areserve of

strength and freedom from periodic indisposi-

tion is worth paying extra for.

Fatuous also is the dogma that woman

ought to have the same pay for the same work

--fatuous because it leaves out of sight that

woman's commercial value in many of the best

fields of work is subject to a very heavy dis-

count by reason of the fact that she cannot,

like a male employee, work cheek by jowl with

a male employer; nor work among men as a

man with his fellow employees.

So much for the woman suffragist's protest

that she can conceive of no reason for a dif-

ferential rate of pay for man.                                                    175

Quite as fatuous are the marriage projects of

the militant suffragist.  Every woman of the

world could tell her--whispering it into her

private ear--that if a sufficient number of men

should come to the conclusion that it was not

worth their while to marry except on the terms

of fair give-and-take, the suffragist woman's

demands would have to come down.

It is not at all certain that the institution of

matrimony--which, after all, is the great in-

strument in the levelling up of the financial

situation of woman--can endure apart from

some willing subordination on the part of the

wife.

It will have been observed that there is in

these programmes, in addition to the element

of mental disorder and to the element of the

fatuous, which have been animadverted upon,

also a very ugly element of dishonesty.  In

reality the very kernel of the militant suffrage

movement is the element of immorality.

There is here not only immorality in the                                 176

ends which are in view, but also in the methods

adopted for the attainment of those ends.

We may restrict ourselves to indicating

wherein lies the immorality of the methods.

There is no one who does not discern that

woman in her relations to physical force stands

in quite a different position to man.

Out of that different relation there must of

necessity shape itself a special code of ethics

for woman.  And to violate that code must be

for woman immorality.

So far as I have seen, no one in this con-

troversy has laid his finger upon the essential

point in the relations of woman to physical

violence.

It has been stated--and in the main quite

truly stated--that woman in the mass cannot,

like man, back up her vote by bringing physi-

cal force into play.

But the woman suffragist here counters by

insisting that she as an individual may have

more physical force than an individual man.                              177

And it is quite certain--and it did not need

suffragist raids and window-breaking riots to

demonstrate it--that woman in the mass can

bring a certain amount of physical force to

bear.

The true inwardness of the relation in which

woman stands to physical force lies not in the

question of her having it at command, but in

the fact that she cannot put it forth without

placing herself within the jurisdiction of an

ethical law.

The law against which she offends when she

resorts to physical violence is not an ordinance

of man; it is not written in the statutes of any

State; it has not been enunciated by any hu-

man law-giver.  It belongs to those unwritten,

and unassailable, and irreversible command-

ments of religion, [Greek 1 ],

which we suddenly and mysteriously become

aware of when we see them violated.

The law which the militant suffragist has

violated is among the ordinances of that code

which forbade us even to think of employing                            178

[ 1 From Antigone by Sophocles; "the unwritten

and unassailable statutes given to us by the gods. "

Sir Almroth had it in the original Greek with Greek fonts.]

our native Indian troops against the Boers;

which brands it as an ignominy when a man

leaves his fellow in the lurch and saves his

own life; and which makes it an outrage for a

man to do violence to a woman.

To violate any ordinance of that code is

more dishonourable than to transgress every

statutory law.

We see acknowledgment of it in the fact

that even the uneducated man in the street

resents it as an outrage to civilisation when he

sees a man strike a blow at a woman.

But to the man who is committing the out-

rage it is a thing simply unaccountable that

any one should fly out at him.

In just such a case is the militant suffragist.

She cannot understand why any one should

think civilisation is outraged when she scuffles

in the street mud with a policeman.

If she asks for an explanation, it perhaps

behoves a man to supply it.

Up to the present in the whole civilised world

there has ruled a truce of God as between man                        179

and woman.  That truce is based upon the

solemn covenant that within the frontiers of

civilisation (outside them of course the rule

lapses) the weapon of physical force may not

be applied by man against woman; nor by

woman against man.

Under this covenant, the reign of force

which prevails in the world without comes to

an end when a man enters his household.

Under this covenant that half of the human

race which most needs protection is raised up

above the waves of violence.

Within the terms of this compact everything

that woman has received from man, and every-

thing man receives from woman, is given as a

free gift.

Again, under this covenant a full half of the

programme of Christianity has been realised;

and a foundation has been laid upon which it

may be possible to build higher; and perhaps

finally in the ideal future to achieve the aboli-

tion of physical violence and war.

And it is this solemn covenant, the covenant                         180

so faithfully kept by man, which has been

violated by the militant suffragist in the in-

terest of her morbid, stupid, ugly, and dis-

honest programmes.

Is it wonder if men feel that they have had

enough of the militant suffragist, and that the

State would be well rid of her if she were

crushed under the soldiers' shields like the

traitor woman at the Tarpeian rock [in ancient Rome where traitors were killed] ?

We may turn now to that section of woman

suffragists--one is almost inclined to doubt

whether it any longer exists--which is opposed

to all violent measures, though it numbers in

its ranks women who are stung to the quick

by the thought that man, who will concede the

vote to the lowest and most degraded of his

own sex, withholds it from "even the noblest

woman in England."

When that excited and somewhat pathetic

appeal is addressed to us, we have only to con-

sider what a vote really gives.

The parliamentary vote is an instrument--

and a quite astonishly disappointing instru-                               181

ment it is--for obtaining legislation; that is,

for directing that the agents of the State shall

in certain defined circumstances bring into ap-

plication the weapon of physical compulsion.

Further, the vote is an instrument by which

we give to this or that group of statesmen an-

thority to supervise and keep in motion the

whole machinery of compulsion.

To take examples.  A vote cast in favour

of a Bill for the prohibition of alcohol--if we

could find opportunity for giving a vote on

such a question--would be a formal expression

of our desire to apply, through the agency of

the paid servants of the State, that same physi-

cal compulsion which Mrs. Carrie Nation put

into application in her "bar-smashing" cru-

sades.

And a vote which puts a Government into

office in a country where murder is punishable

by death is a vote which, by agency of the

hangman, puts the noose round the neck of

every convicted murderer.

So that the difference between voting and                            182

direct resort to force is simply the difference

between exerting physical violence in person,

and exerting it through the intermediary of

an agent of the State.

The thing, therefore, that is withheld from

"the noblest woman in England," while it is

conceded to the man who is lacking in nobility

of character, is in the end only an instrument

by which she might bring into application

physical force.

When one realises that that same noblest

woman of England would shrink from any

personal exercise of violence, one would have

thought that it would have come home to her

that it is not precisely her job to commission

a man forcibly to shut up a public-house, or

to hang a murderer.

One cannot help asking oneself whether, if

she understood what a vote really means, the

noblest woman in England would still go on

complaining of the bitter insult which is done

to her in withholding the vote.

But the opportunist--the practical politi-                             183

cian, as he calls himself--will perhaps here in-

tervene, holding some such language as this:

--"Granting all you say, granting, for the sake

of argument, that the principle of giving votes

to woman is unsound, and that evil must ulti-

mately come of it, how can you get over the

fact that no very conspicuous harm has re-

sulted from woman suffrage in the countries

which have adopted it?  And can any firm

reasons be rendered for the belief that the giv-

ing of votes to women in England would be

any whit more harmful than in the Colo-

nies?"

A very few words will supply the answer.

The evils of woman suffrage lie, first, in the

fact that to give the vote to women is to give

it to voters who as a class are quite incom-

petent to adjudicate upon political issues;

secondly, in the fact that women are a class of

voters who cannot effectively back up their

votes by force; and, thirdly, in the fact that

it may seriously embroil man and woman.

The first two aspects of the question have                            184

already in this controversy been adequately

dealt with.  There remains the last issue.

From the point of view of this issue the con-

ditions which we have to deal with in this coun-

try are the absolute antithesis of those ruling

in any of the countries and States which have

adopted woman suffrage.

When woman suffrage was adopted in these

countries it was adopted in some for one

reason, in others for another.  In some it was

adopted because it appealed to the doctrinaire [theoretical]

politician as the proper logical outcome of a

democratic and Socialistic policy.  In others

it was adopted because opportunist politicians

saw in it an instrument by which they might

gain electioneering advantages.  So much was

this the case that it sometimes happened that

the woman's vote was sprung upon a com-

munity which was quite unprepared and in-

different to it.

The cause of woman suffrage was thus in

the countries of which we speak neither in its

inception nor in its realisation a question of                               185

revolt of woman against the oppression of

man.  It had, and has, no relation to the pro-

grammes of the militant suffragists as set out

at the outset of this letter.

By virtue of this, all the evils which spring

from the embroiling of man and woman have

in the countries in question been conspicuously

absent.

Instead of seeing himself confronted by a

section of embittered and hostile women voters

which might at any time outvote him and help

to turn an election, man there sees his women

folk voting practically everywhere in accord-

ance with his directions, and lending him a

hand to outvote his political opponent.

Whether or no such voting is for the good

of the common weal is beside our present ques-

tion.  But it is clearly an arrangement which

leads to amity and peace between a man and

his womenkind, and through these to good-will

towards all women.

In England everything is different.

If woman suffrage comes in here, it will                                186

have come as a surrender to a very violent

feminist agitation--an agitation which we have

traced back to our excess female population

and the associated abnormal physiological con-

ditions.

If ever Parliament concedes the vote to

woman in England, it will be accepted by the

militant suffragist, not as an eirenicon, but as a

victory which she will value only for the better

carrying on of her fight à outrance [to the bitter end] against the

oppression and injustice of man.

A conciliation with hysterical revolt is

neither an act of peace; nor will it bring

peace.

Nor would the conferring of the vote upon

women carry with it any advantages from the

point of view of finding a way out of the ma-

terial entanglements in which woman is en-

meshed, and thus ending the war between man

and woman.

One has only to ask oneself whether or not

it would help the legislator in remodelling the

divorce or the bastardy laws if he had con-                              187

joined with him an unmarried militant suf-

fragist as assessor.

Peace will come again.  It will come when

woman ceases to believe and to teach all man-

ner of evil of man despitefully.  It will come

when she ceases to impute to him as a crime her

own natural disabilities, when she ceases to

resent the fact that man cannot and does not

wish to work side by side with her.  And peace

will return when every woman for whom there

is no room in England seeks "rest" beyond the

sea, "each one in the house of her husband," and

when the woman who remains in England

comes to recognise that she can, without sacri-

fice of dignity, give a willing subordination to

the husband or father, who, when all is said

and done, earns and lays up money for her.

A. E. WRIGHT.

March 27, 1912.                                                                          188

Prepared by Thomas Pollock aka Spartacus,

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Table of Contents

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage, by Almroth Wright

CONTENTS

PREFACE

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