"The Saturday Review," in an article which denounces all equality in
marriage laws and all plans of woman suffrage, admits frankly the practical
obstacles in the way of the process of voting. "Possibly the presence of
women as voters would tend still further to promote order than has been
done by the ballot." It plants itself wholly on one objection, which goes
far deeper, thus:--
"If men choose to say that women are not their equals, women have
nothing to do but to give in. Physical force, the ultimate basis of
all society and all government, must be on the side of the men; and
those who have the key of the position will not consent permanently
to abandon it."
It is a great pleasure when an opponent of justice is willing to fall back
thus frankly upon the Rob Roy theory:--
"The good old rule
Sufficeth him, the simple plan
That they should take who have the power,
And they should keep who can."
It is easy, I think, to show that the theory is utterly false, and that the
basis of civilized society is not physical force, but, on the contrary,
brains.
In the city where the "Saturday Review" is published, there are three
regiments of "Guards" which are the boast of the English army, and are
believed by their officers to be the finest troops in the world. They have
deteriorated in size since the Crimean war; but I believe that the men of
one regiment still average six feet two inches in height; and I am sure
that nobody ever saw them in line without noticing the contrast between
these magnificent men and the comparatively puny officers who command them.
These officers are from the highest social rank in England, the governing
classes; and if it were the whole object of this military organization to
give a visible proof of the utter absurdity of the "Saturday Review's"
theory, it could not be better done. There is no country in Europe, I
suppose, where the hereditary aristocracy is physically equal to that of
England, or where the intellectual class has so good a physique. But set
either the House of Lords or the "Saturday Review" contributors upon a
hand-to-hand fight against an equal number of "navvies" or
"coster-mongers," and the patricians would have about as much chance as a
crew of Vassar girls in a boat-race with Yale or Harvard. Take the men of
England alone, and it is hardly too much to say that physical force,
instead of being the basis of political power in any class, is apt to be
found in inverse ratio to it. In case of revolution, the strength of the
governing class in any country is not in its physical, but in its mental
power. Rank and money, and the power to influence and organize and command,
are merely different modifications of mental training, brought to bear by
somebody.
In our country, without class distinctions, the same truth can be easily
shown. Physical power lies mainly in the hands of the masses: wherever a
class or profession possesses more than its numerical share of power, it
has usually less than its proportion of physical vigor. This is easily
shown from the vast body of evidence collected during our civil war. In the
volume containing the medical statistics of the Provost Marshal General's
Bureau, we have the tabulated reports of about 600,000 persons subject to
draft, and of about 500,000 recruits, substitutes, and drafted men; showing
the precise physical condition of more than a million men.
It appears that, out of the whole number examined, rather more than 257 in
each 1000 were found unfit for military service. It is curious to see how
generally the physical power among these men is in inverse ratio to the
social and political prominence of the class they represent. Out of 1000
unskilled laborers, for instance, only 348 are physically disqualified;
among tanners, only 216; among iron-workers, 189. On the other hand, among
lawyers, 544 out of 1000 are disqualified; among journalists, 740; among
clergymen, 954. Grave divines are horrified at the thought of admitting
women to vote, since they cannot fight; though not one in twenty of their
own number is fit for military duty, if he volunteered. Of the editors who
denounce woman suffrage, only about one in four could himself carry a
musket; while of the lawyers who fill Congress, the majority could not be
defenders of their country, but could only be defended. If we were to
distribute political power with reference to the "physical basis" which the
"Saturday Review" talks about, it would be a wholly new distribution, and
would put things more hopelessly upside down than did the worst phase of
the French Commune. If, then, a political theory so utterly breaks down
when applied to men, why should we insist on resuscitating it in order to
apply it to women? The truth is that as civilization advances the world is
governed more and more unequivocally by brains; and whether those brains
are deposited in a strong body or a weak one becomes a matter of less and
less importance. But it is only in the very first stage of barbarism that
mere physical strength makes mastery; and the long head has controlled the
long arm since the beginning of recorded time.
And it must be remembered that even these statistics very imperfectly
represent the case. They do not apply to the whole male sex, but actually
to the picked portion only, to the men presumed to be of military age,
excluding the very old and the very young. Were these included, the
proportion unfit for military duty would of course be far greater.
Moreover, it takes no account of courage or cowardice, patriotism or zeal.
How much all these considerations tell upon the actual proportion may be
seen from the fact that in the town where I am writing, for instance, out
of some twelve thousand inhabitants and about three thousand voters, there
are only some three hundred who actually served in the civil war,--a number
too small to exert a perceptible influence on any local election. When we
see the community yielding up its voting power into the hands of those who
have actually done military service, it will be time enough to exclude
women for not doing such service. If the alleged physical basis operates as
an exclusion of all non-combatants, it should surely give a monopoly to the
actual combatants.