The comfortable citizen possessing a vote won for him in a previous
generation, who is so often profoundly disturbed by the cry of "Votes
for Women," seldom connects the present attempt to extend the franchise
with those former efforts, as the results of which he himself became a
member of the enfranchised class. Still less does the average voter
reflect that in order to make self-government a great instrument in the
hands of those who crave social justice, it must ever be built up anew
in relation to changing experiences, and that unless this readjustment
constantly takes place self-government itself is placed in jeopardy.
Yet the adherents of representative government, with its foundations
laid in diversified human experiences, must concede that the value of
such government bears a definite relation to the area of its base and
that the history of its development is merely a record of new human
interests which have become the subjects of governmental action, and
the incorporation into the government itself of those classes who
represented the new interests.
As the governing classes have been increased by the enfranchisement of
one body of men after another, the art of government has been enriched
in human interests, and at the same time as government has become thus
humanized by new interests it has inevitably become further
democratized through the accession of new classes. The two propositions
are complementary. For centuries the middle classes in every country in
Europe struggled to wrest governmental power from the nobles because
they insisted that government must consider the problems of a rising
commerce; on the other hand, the merchants claimed direct
representation because government had already begun to concern itself
with commercial affairs. When the working men of the nineteenth
century, the Chartists in England and the "men of '48" in Germany
vigorously demanded the franchise, national parliaments had already
begun to regulate the condition of mines and the labor of little
children. The working men insisted that they themselves could best
represent their own interests, but at the same time their very entrance
into government increased the volume and pressure of those interests.
Much of the new demand for political enfranchisement arises from a
desire to remedy the unsatisfactory and degrading social conditions
which are responsible for so much wrongdoing and wretchedness. The fate
of all the unfortunate, the suffering, the criminal, is daily forced
upon public attention in painful and intimate ways. But because of the
tendency to nationalize all industrial and commercial questions, to
make the state responsible for the care of the helpless, to safeguard
by law the food we eat and the liquid we drink, to subordinate the
claim of the individual family to the health and well-being of the
community, contemporary women who are without the franchise are much
more outside the real life of the world than any set of disenfranchised
men could possibly have been in all history, unless it were the men
slaves of ancient Greece, because never before has so large an area of
life found civic expression, never has Hegel's definition of the state
been so accurate, that it is the "realization of the moral ideal."
Certain it is that the phenomenal entrance of women into governmental
responsibility in the dawn of the twentieth century is coincident with
the consideration by governmental bodies of the basic human interests
with which women have been traditionally concerned. A most advanced
German statesman recently declared in the Reichstag that it was a
reproach to the Imperial Government itself that out of two million
children born annually in Germany, 400,000 died during the first twelve
months of their existence. He proceeded to catalog various reforms
which might remedy this, such as better housing, the increase of park
areas, the erection of municipal hospitals, the provision for an
adequate milk supply, and many another, but he did not make the very
obvious suggestion that women might be of service in a situation
involving the care of children less than a year old.
Nevertheless, in spite of this lack of perception, women all over the
world are claiming and receiving a place in representative government
because they insist that they will not cease to perform their
traditional duties, simply because these duties have been taken over by
existing governments.
The contemporaneous "Votes for Women" movement is often amorphous and
sporadic, but always spontaneous. It not only appears simultaneously in
various countries, but manifests itself in widely separated groups in
the same country; in every city it embraces the "smart set" and the
hard-driven working women; sometimes it is sectarian and dogmatic, at
others philosophic and grandiloquent, but it is always vital and
constantly becoming more widespread.
In certain aspects it differs from former efforts to extend the
franchise. We recall that the final entrance of the middle class into
government was characterized by two dramatic revolutions, one in
America and one in France, neither of them without bloodshed, and that
although the final efforts of the working men were more peaceful, even
in restrained England the Chartists burned hayricks and destroyed town
property. This world-wide entrance into government on the part of women
is happily a bloodless one. Although some glass has been broken in
England it is noteworthy that the movement as a whole has been without
even a semblance of violence. The creed of the movement, however, is
similar to that promulgated by the doctrinaires of the eighteenth
century: that if increasing the size of the governing body
automatically increases the variety and significance of government,
then only when all the people become the governing class can the
collective resources and organizations of the community be consistently
utilized for the common weal.