When the eloquent colored abolitionist, Charles Remond, once said upon the
platform that George Washington, having been a slaveholder, was a villain,
Wendell Phillips remonstrated by saying, "Charles, the epithet is not
felicitous." Reformers are apt to be pelted with epithets quite as
ill-chosen. How often has the charge figured in history, that they were
"actuated by love of notoriety"! The early Christians, it was generally
believed, took a positive pleasure in being thrown to the lions, under the
influence of this motive; and at a later period there was a firm conviction
that the Huguenots consented readily to being broken on the wheel, or sawed
in pieces between two boards, and felt amply rewarded by the pleasure of
being talked about. During the whole anti-slavery movement, while the
abolitionists were mobbed, fined, and imprisoned,--while they were tabooed
by good society, depleted of their money, kept out of employment, by the
mere fact of their abolitionism,--there never was a moment when their
motive was not considered by many persons to be the love of notoriety. Why
should the advocates of woman suffrage expect any different treatment now?
It is not necessary, in order to dispose of this charge, to claim that all
reformers are heroes or saints. Even in the infancy of any reform, it takes
along with it some poor material; and unpleasant traits are often developed
by the incidents of the contest. Doubtless many reformers attain to a
certain enjoyment of a fight, at last: it is one of the dangerous
tendencies which those committed to this vocation must resist. But, so far
as my observation goes, those who engage in reform for the sake of
notoriety generally hurt the reform so much that they render it their chief
service when they leave it; and this happy desertion usually comes pretty
early in their career. The besetting sin of reformers is not, so far as I
can judge, the love of notoriety, but the fate of power and of flattery
within their own small circle,--a temptation quite different from the
other, both in its origin and its results.
Notoriety comes so soon to a reformer that its charms, whatever they may
be, soon pall upon the palate, just as they do in case of a popular poet or
orator, who is so used to seeing himself in print that he hardly notices
it. I suppose there is no young person so modest that he does not, on first
seeing his name in a newspaper, cut out the passage with a certain tender
solicitude, and perhaps purchase a few extra copies of the fortunate
journal. But when the same person has been battered by a score or two of
years in successive unpopular reforms, I suppose that he not only would
leave the paper uncut or unpurchased, but would hardly take the pains even
to correct a misstatement, were it asserted that he had inherited a fortune
or murdered his grandmother. The moral is that the love of notoriety is
soon amply filled, in a reformer's experience, and that he will not, as a
rule, sacrifice home and comfort, money and friends, without some stronger
inducement. This is certainly true of most of the men who have interested
themselves in this particular movement, the "weak-minded men," as the
reporters, with witty antithesis, still describe them; and it must be much
the same with the "strong-minded women" who share their base career.
And it is to be remembered, above all, that, considered as an engine for
obtaining notoriety, the woman-suffrage agitation is a great waste of
energy. The same net result could have been won with far less expenditure
in other ways. There is not a woman connected with it who could not have
achieved far more real publicity as a manager of charity fairs or as a
sensation letter-writer. She could have done this, too, with far less
trouble, without the loss of a single genteel friend, without forfeiting a
single social attention, without having a single ill-natured thing said
about her--except perhaps that she bored people, a charge to which the
highest and lowest forms of prominence are equally open. Nay, she might
have done even more than this, if notoriety was her sole aim: for she might
have become a "variety" minstrel or a female pedestrian; she might have
written a scandalous novel; she might have got somebody to aim at her that
harmless pistol, which has helped the fame of so many a wandering actress,
while its bullet somehow never hits anything but the wall. All this she
might have done, and obtained a notoriety beyond doubt. Instead of this,
she has preferred to prowl about, picking up a precarious publicity by
giving lectures to willing lyceums, writing books for eager publishers,
organizing schools, setting up hospitals, and achieving for her sex
something like equal rights before the law. Either she has shown herself,
as a seeker after notoriety, to be a most foolish or ill-judging person,--
or else, as was said of Washington's being a villain, "the epithet is not
felicitous."