The present public prosperity of the ex-suffragettes is chiefly due to
the fact that the old-time male politicians, being naturally very
stupid, mistake them for spokesmen for the whole body of women, and so
show them politeness. But soon or late—and probably disconcertingly
soon—the great mass of sensible and agnostic women will turn upon them
and depose them, and thereafter the woman vote will be no longer at the
disposal of bogus Great Thinkers and messiahs. If the suffragettes
continue to fill the newspapers with nonsense, once that change has
been effected, it will be only as a minority sect of tolerated idiots,
like the Swedenborgians, Christian Scientists, Seventh Day Adventists
and other such fanatics of today. This was the history of the extension
of the suffrage in all of the American states that made it before the
national enfranchisement of women and it will be repeated in the nation
at large, and in Great Britain and on the Continent. Women are not
taken in by quackery as readily as men are; the hardness of their shell
of logic makes it difficult to penetrate to their emotions. For one
woman who testifies publicly that she has been cured of cancer by some
swindling patent medicine, there are at least twenty masculine
witnesses. Even such frauds as the favourite American elixir, Lydia
Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, which are ostensibly remedies for
specifically feminine ills, anatomically impossible in the male, are
chiefly swallowed, so an intelligent druggist tells me, by men.
My own belief, based on elaborate inquiries and long meditation, is
that the grant of the ballot to women marks the concealed but none the
less real beginning of an improvement in our politics, and, in the end,
in our whole theory of government. As things stand, an intelligent
grappling with some of the capital problems of the commonwealth is
almost impossible. A politician normally prospers under democracy, not
in proportion as his principles are sound and his honour incorruptible,
but in proportion as she excels in the manufacture of sonorous phrases,
and the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defences against
them. Our politics thus degenerates into a mere pursuit of hobgoblins;
the male voter, a coward as well as an ass, is forever taking fright at
a new one and electing some mountebank to lay it. For a hundred years
past the people of the United States, the most terrible existing
democratic state, have scarcely had a political campaign that was not
based upon some preposterous fear—first of slavery and then of the
manumitted slave, first of capitalism and then of communism, first of
the old and then of the novel. It is a peculiarity of women that they
are not easily set off by such alarms, that they do not fall readily
into such facile tumults and phobias. What starts a male meeting to
snuffling and trembling most violently is precisely the thing that
would cause a female meeting to sniff. What we need, to ward off
mobocracy and safeguard a civilized form of government, is more of this
sniffing. What we need—and in the end it must come—is a sniff so
powerful that it will call a halt upon the navigation of the ship from
the forecastle, and put a competent staff on the bridge, and lay a
course that is describable in intelligible terms.
The officers nominated by the male electorate in modern democracies
before the extension of the suffrage were usually chosen, not for their
competence but for their mere talent for idiocy; they reflected
accurately the male weakness for whatever is rhetorical and sentimental
and feeble and untrue. Consider, for example, what happened in a
salient case. Every four years the male voters of the United States
chose from among themselves one who was put forward as the man most
fit, of all resident men, to be the first citizen of the commonwealth.
He was chosen after interminable discussion; his qualifications were
thoroughly canvassed; very large powers and dignities were put into his
hands. Well, what did we commonly find when we examined this gentleman?
We found, not a profound thinker, not a leader of sound opinion, not a
man of notable sense, but merely a wholesaler of notions so infantile
that they must needs disgust a sentient suckling—in brief, a spouting
geyser of fallacies and sentimentalities, a cataract of unsupported
assumptions and hollow moralizings, a tedious phrase-merchant and
platitudinarian, a fellow whose noblest flights of thought were
flattered when they were called comprehensible—specifically, a Wilson,
a Taft, a Roosevelt, or a Harding.
This was the male champion. I do not venture upon the cruelty of
comparing his bombastic flummeries to the clear reasoning of a woman of
like fame and position; all I ask of you is that you weigh them, for
sense, for shrewdness, for intelligent grasp of obscure relations, for
intellectual honesty and courage, with the ideas of the average
midwife.