It is a singular fact that England, which has been always esteemed the
safest and slowest of all factors in European politics, should be now
seriously meditating on such a revolutionary course of action as the
political emancipation of women. It is a sign, and a very ominous sign,
of the restlessness and feverishness which have come upon this century
in its last twenty years of life, and from which England is suffering no
less than other nations, is perhaps even suffering more than they, since
when aged people take the diseases natural to youth it fares ill with
them, more ill than with the young. There are many evidences that before
very long, whichever political party may be in office, female suffrage
will be awarded at Westminster, and if it be so, it is scarcely to be
doubted that the French Chambers and the Representative Houses at
Washington will be loth to lag behind and resist such a precedent. The
influence on the world will scarcely be other than most injurious to its
prosperity and most degrading to its wisdom.
It is true that the wholesale exercise of electoral rights by millions
of uneducated and unwashed men is a spectacle so absurd that a little
more or a little less absurdity may be held not to matter very greatly.
The intellectual world in political matters has voluntarily abdicated
already and given its sceptre to the mob. ‘Think you,’ said Publius
Scipio to the raging populace, ‘then, I shall fear those free whom I
sent in chains to the slave market?’ But the modern politician, of
whatever nation he be (with the solitary exception of Bismarck), does
fear the slaves whose chains he has struck off before they know how to
use their liberty, and has in him neither the candour nor the courage of
Scipio.
Rationally, logically, political power ought to be alloted in proportion
to the stake which each voter possesses in the country. But this sound
principle has been totally disregarded in the present political systems
of both Europe and America. Vapourings anent the inherent ‘rights of
man’ have been allowed to oust out common-sense and logical action, and
he whose contributions to the financial and intellectual power of his
nation are of the largest and noblest order has no more electoral voice
in the direction of the nation than the drunken navvy or the howling
unit of the street-mob. This is esteemed liberty, and commends itself to
the populace, because it levels, or seems to level, intellect and wealth
with poverty and ignorance. It is probable that America will, in years
to come, be the first to change this, the doctrine of democracy, as
there are signs that the United States will probably grow less and less
democratic with every century, and its large land-owners will create an
aristocracy which will not be tolerant of the dominion of the mob. But
meantime Europe is swaying between absolutism and anarchy, with that
tendency of the pendulum to swing wildly from one extreme to the other
which has been always seen in the whole history of the world; and one of
the most curious facts of the epoch is that both democracy and
conservatism are inclined to support and promote female suffrage,
alleging each of them totally different motives for their conduct, and
totally different reasons for the opinions which they advance in its
favour.
The motives of the Tory leaders are as unlike those of Mrs Fawcett, Mrs
Garratt, and the rest of the female agitators as stone is unlike water,
as water is unlike fire. The conservative gentlemen wish to admit women
into political life because they consider that women are always
religious, stationary, and wedded to ancient and stable ways; the female
agitators, on the contrary, clamour to have themselves and their sex
admitted within the political arena because they believe that women will
be foremost in all emancipation, innovation, and social democratic
works. It is an odd contradiction, and displays perhaps more than
anything else the utter confusion and the entire recklessness and
abandonment of principle characteristic of all political parties in the
latter half of the nineteenth century. It is very possible that as the
English labourer obtained his vote through the confusion and jealousies
of party against the sane, the serene, and the unbiased judgment of
patriots, so woman in England, and if in England, ultimately in America,
will obtain hers. Opportunist policies have always their sure issue in
sensational and hurried legislation; and in Europe at the present hour,
in England and France most especially, an opportunist policy is the only
policy pursued.
What is there to be said in favour of female suffrage? It may be treated
as an open subject, since both Reactionists and Socialists can advance
for it claims and arguments of the most totally opposite nature. Perhaps
it may be said that there is some truth in both sides of these arguments
and entire truth in neither. It is probable that female politicians
would be many of them more reactionary than the Reactionists, and many
of them would be more socialistic than the Socialists. The golden mean
is not in favour with women or with mobs.
In England, both the Conservative and Radical intentions are at present
limited to giving the suffrage to such women alone as are possessed of
real property. But it is certain that this limitation could not be
preserved; for the women without property would clamour to be admitted,
and would succeed by their clamour as the men without property have
done. No doubt, to see a woman of superior mind and character, capable
of possessing and administering a great estate, left without electoral
voice, whilst her carter, her porter, or the most illiterate labourer on
her estate possesses and can exercise it, is on the face of it absurd.
But it is not more absurd than that her brother should have his single
vote outnumbered and neutralised by the votes of the men-servants,
scullions and serving-boys who take his wage and fill his servants’ hall
and kitchen. It would be more honest to say that the whole existing
system of electoral power all over the world is absurd; and will remain
so, because in no nation is there the courage, perhaps in no nation is
there the intellectual power, capable of putting forward and sustaining
the logical doctrine of the _just supremacy of the fittest_: a doctrine
which it is surely more vitally necessary to insist on in a republic
than in a monarchy. It is because the fittest have not had the courage
to resist the pressure of those who are intellectually their inferiors,
and whose only strength lies in numbers, that democracy has been enabled
to become the power that it has. Theoretically, a republic is founded on
the doctrine of the supremacy of the fittest; but who can say that since
the days of Perikles any republic has carried out this doctrine
practically? The lawyer or the chemist who neglects his business to push
himself to the front in political life in France is certainly not the
most admirable product of the French intellect; nor can it be said by
any impartial student that every President of the United States has been
the highest type of humanity that the United States can produce.
Alexander Dumas _fils_, the most accomplished, but the most rabid of the
advocates of female suffrage, resumes what seems to him the absurdity of
the whole system in a sentence. ‘Mme. de Sévigné ne peut pas voter; M.
Paul son jardinier peut voter.’ He does not seem to see that there is as
great an absurdity in the fact that were Mme. de Sévigné, Monsieur de
Sévigné, and were she living now, all her wit and wisdom would fail to
confer on her more voting power than would be possessed by ‘Paul son
jardinier.’
With all deference to him, I do not think that Mme. de Sévigné would
have cared a straw to rival Paul, the gardener, in going to the
electoral urn. Mme. de Sévigné, like every woman of wit and mind, had
means of exercising her influence so incomparably superior to the paltry
one of recording a vote in a herd that she would, I am sure, have had
the most profound contempt for the latter. Indeed, her contempt would
have probably extended to the whole electoral system and ‘government by
representation.’ Women of wit and genius must always be indifferent to
the opportunity of going up to the ballot booth in company with their
own footman and coachman. To those who have a sense of humour the
position is not one of dignity. Hypatia, when she feels herself the
equal of Julian, will not readily admit that Dadus, however
affranchised, is her equal.
Absurdities are not cured by adding greater absurdities to them;
discrepancies are not remedied by greater discrepancies being united to
them. Whether women voted or not would not change by a hair’s breadth
the existing, and to many thinkers the deplorable fact, that under the
present electoral system throughout the world, the sage has no more
electoral power than the dunce, that Plato’s voice counts for no more
than a fool’s. The admission of women could do nothing to remedy this
evil. It would only bring into the science of politics what it has too
much of already—inferior intelligence and hysterical action. No: reply
both the French essayist and the conservative advocates of female
suffrage. Not so; because we should only admit women qualified to use it
by the possession of property. But it would be impossible to sustain
this limitation in the teeth of all the levelling tendencies of modern
legislation; it would speedily be declared unjust, intolerable,
aristocratic, iniquitous, and it would soon become impossible to deny to
Demos’s wife or mistress, mother or sister, what you award to Demos
himself. If women be admitted at all to the exercise of the franchise
they must be admitted wholesale down to the lowest dregs of humanity as
men are now admitted. The apple-woman will naturally argue that she has
as much right to it as the heiress; how can you say she has not when you
have given the apple-man as much electoral voice as the scholar? It is
idle to talk of awarding the female suffrage on any basis of property
when property has been deliberately rejected as a basis for male
suffrage.
The project often insisted on by the advocates of the system, to give
votes only to unmarried women, may be dismissed without discussion, as
it would be found to be wholly untenable. It would give votes to the old
maids of Cranford village, and the enriched _cocottes_ of great cities,
and would deny them to a Mme. Roland or a Mme. de Staël, to Lady Burdett
Coutts or to Mme. Adam. The impossibility of any such limitation being
sustained if female suffrage be ever granted, renders it unnecessary to
dwell longer on its self-evident defects.
Again, are women prepared to purchase electoral rights by their
willingness to fulfil military obligations? If not, how can they expect
political privileges unless they are prepared to renounce for them the
peculiar privileges which have been awarded to them in view of the
physical weakness of their sex? Dumas does, indeed, distinctly refuse to
let them be soldiers, on the plea that they are better occupied in
child-bearing, but in the same moment he asserts that they ought to be
judges and civil servants. It is difficult to see why to postpone an
assault to a beleaguered city because _Mme. la Générale est accouchée_
would be more absurd than to adjourn the hearing of a pressing lawsuit
because _Mme. la Jugesse_ would be _sur la paille_. The much graver and
truer objection lies less in the physical than in the mental and moral
inferiority of women. I use moral in its broadest sense. Women on an
average have little sense of justice, and hardly any sense whatever of
awarding to others a freedom for which they do not care themselves. The
course of all modern legislation is its tendency to make by-laws,
fretting and vexatious laws trenching unjustifiably on the personal
liberty of the individual. If women were admitted to political power
these laws would be multiplied indefinitely and incessantly. The
_infiniment petit_ would be the dominate factor in politics. Such
meddling legislation as the Sunday Closing Act in England, and the Maine
Liquor Laws and Carolina Permissive Bill in the United States would be
the joy and aim of the mass of female voters. Women cannot understand
that you can make no nation virtuous by act of parliament; they would
construct their acts of parliament on purpose to make people virtuous
whether they chose or not, and would not see that this would be a form
of tyranny as bad as any other. A few years ago a State in America (I
think it was Maine or Massachusetts) decreed that because a few
Pomeranian dogs were given to biting people, all Pomeranian dogs within
the State, ill and well, young and old, should on a certain date be
killed; and they were killed, two thousand odd in number. Now, this is
precisely the kind of legislation which women would establish in their
moments of panic; the disregard of individual rights, the injustice to
innocent animals and their owners, the invasion of private property
under the doctrinaire’s plea of the general good, would all commend
themselves to women in their hysterical hours, for women are more
tyrannical and more self-absorbed than men.
Renan in his ‘Marc-Aurèle’ observes that the decline of the Roman Empire
was hastened, and even, in much, primarily brought about by the elements
of feebleness, introduced into it by the Christian sects’ admission of
women into the active and religious life of men. The woman-worship
springing from the adoration of the virgin-mother was at the root of the
emasculation and indifference to political and martial duties, which it
brought into the lives of men who ceased to be either bold soldiers or
devoted citizens.
I do not think the moral and mental qualities of the average woman so
inferior to those of the average man as is conventionally supposed. The
average man is not an intellectual nor a noble being; neither is the
average woman. But there are certain solid qualities in the male
creature which are lacking from the female; such qualities as patience
and calmness in judgment, which are of infinite value, and in which the
female character is almost invariably deficient; a lack in her which
makes the prophecy of Dumas, that she will one day fill judicial and
forensic duties, a most alarming prospect, as alarming as the prediction
of Goldwin Smith that the negro population will eventually outnumber and
extinguish the Aryan race in the United States.
There are men with women’s minds, women with men’s minds; masculine
genius may exist in a female farm; feminine inconsistency in a male
farm; but these are exceptions to the rule, and such exceptions are
exceedingly rare.
The Conservative or patrician party in England advocates the admission
of women into politics for much the same motives as influenced the early
Christians; they believe that her influence will be universally
exercised to preserve the moral excellences of the body politic, the
sanctity of the home, the supremacy of religion, the cautiousness of
timid and wary legislators. The class of which the Conservatives are
always thinking as the recipients of female suffrage would possibly in
the main part do so. They would be persons of property and education,
and as such might be trusted to do nothing rash. But they would be
closely wedded to their prejudices. They would be narrow in all their
views. Their church would hold a large place in their affections, and
their legislation would be of the character which they now give to their
county society. Moreover, as I have said, the suffrage once given to
women, it could not be restricted to persons of property. The female
factory hand in her garret would assert that she has as much right to
and need of a voice as the female landowner, and in face of the fact
that the male factory hand and the male landowner have been placed on
the same footing in political equality, the country would be unable to
refute the argument.
The most intelligent and most eloquent of all the advocates of female
suffrage is, as I have said, undoubtedly Dumas _fils_. No man can argue
a case more persuasively; nor is any man more completely wedded to one
side of an argument than he. Yet even he, her special pleader, in his
famous _Appel aux Femmes_, admits that she would bring to science the
scorn of reason, and the indifference to suffering which she has shown
in so many centuries in the hallucinations and martyrdoms of religion;
that she would throw herself into it with _audace et frénésie_; that she
would hold all torture of no account if it solved an enigma, and would
give herself to the beasts of the field, ‘not to prove that Jesus lived,
but to know if Darwin was right;’ and he passes on to the triumphant
prediction that in sixty years’ time the world will see the offspring of
men and female monkeys, of women and apes; though wherein this prospect
for the future is glorious it were hard to say.
Stripped of that exaggeration which characterises all the arguments of a
writer famous for anomaly, antithesis and audacity, his prediction that
his favourite client Woman will bring into her pursuit of the mysteries
of science, the same sort of _folie furieuse_, which Blandina and
Agatha, and all the feminine devotees of the early years of Christianity
brought into religion, is a prophecy undoubtedly correct. She will bring
the same into politics, into legislation, if she ever obtain a
preponderant power in them.
The most dangerous tendency in English political life is at this moment
the tendency to legislate _per saltum_: female legislation would
invariably be conducted _per saltum_. The grasshopper-bounds of Mr
Gladstone would be outdone by the kangaroo-leaps of the female
legislator when she moved at all. A ‘masterly inactivity’ would not be
understood by her; nor the profound good sense contained in the advice
which is variously attributed to Talleyrand, Melbourne and Palmerston,
‘When in doubt do nothing.’ There is the most mischievous desire in
modern politicians to pull everything about, merely to look as if they
were great reformers; to strew the ashes of the old order around them
long ere they have even settled the foundations of the new; they do not
consider the inevitable imperfection which must characterise all human
institutions; they do not remember that if the system, whether political
or social, works reasonably well, it should be supported, even if it be
not symmetrically perfect in theory. These faults are characteristic of
modern politicians, because modern politicians are for the most part no
longer men trained from their youth in the philosophy of government, but
opportunists who view politics as a field of self-advancement. Women
will bring into politics these same faults greatly exaggerated and not
balanced by that rough and ready common sense which characterises most
men who are not specialists or visionaries. Whether the female
legislator would imprison all people who do not go to church, or would
imprison all people who do not attend scientific lectures, the despotism
would be equal; and it is certain that she would desire to imprison
either one class or the other.
Some writer has said, ‘I can as little understand why any one should
fast in Lent, as I can understand why others should object to their
fasting if it please them.’ But this would never be the attitude of the
female politician in regard to either the fasting or the feasting of
others. Sir Henry Thomson, in his admirable treatise on gastronomy,
remarks on the unwisdom of those who, because a certain food is
palatable and nutritious to themselves, recommend it to every one they
know, making no account of the difference in constitution and digestion
of different persons. There exists a similar difference in mind and
character, for which women would never make any allowance when forcing
on the world in general their political or social nostrums. As we again
and again see the woman expecting from her son the purity of manners of
a maiden, and making no account, because she ignores them entirely, of
the imperious necessities of sex, so we should see her in matters of
national or universal import similarly disregarding or ignoring all
facts of which she chose to take no note. She would increase and
intensify the present despotisms and weaknesses of political life, and
she would put nothing in their place, for she would have lost her own
originality and charm. Science, indeed, presumes that in educating her
it would strengthen her reasoning powers and widen her mind into the
acceptance of true liberty. But what proof is there that science would
do anything of that sort? It has never yet showed any true liberality
itself. Nothing can exceed the arrogance and the despotism of its own
demands and pretensions, the immensity of its self-admiration, the
tyrannical character of its exactions.
Dumas observes that happy women will not care for the suffrage because
they are happy; he might have added, that brilliant women will not,
because they have means of influencing men to any side and to any extent
they choose without it. Who, then, will care to exercise it? All the
unhappy women, all the fretful _déclassées_, all the thousands or tens
of thousands of spinsters who know as much or as little of human nature
as they do of political economy. What will such as these bring into
political life? They can bring nothing except their own crotches, their
own weakness, their own hysterical agitations. Happy women are fond of
men, but unhappy women hate them. The legislation voted for by unhappy
women would be as much against men, and all true liberty, as Dumas
himself is against them and it. Men at present legislate for women with
remarkable fairness; but women would never legislate for men with
anything approaching fairness, and as the numerical preponderance of
votes would soon be on the female side, if female electors were once
accepted, the prospect is alarming to all lovers of true freedom.
The woman is the enemy of freedom. Give her power and she is at once
despotic, whether she be called Elizabeth Tudor or Theroigne de
Mirecourt, whether she be a beneficent or a malevolent ruler, whether
she be a sovereign or a revolutionist. The enormous pretensions to the
monopoly of a man’s life which women put forward in marriage, are born
of the desire to tyrannise. The rage and amazement displayed by the
woman when a man, whether her lover or her husband, is inconstant to
her, comes from that tenacity over the man as a property which wholly
blinds her to her own faults or lack of charm and power to keep him. A
very clever woman never blames a man for inconstancy to her: she may
perhaps blame herself. Women as a rule attach far too great a value to
themselves; the woman imagines herself necessary to the man because the
man is necessary to her. Hence that eternal antagonism of the woman
against the man which is one of the saddest things in human nature.
Every writer like Dumas, who does his best to increase this antagonism,
commits a great crime. The happiness of the human race lies in the
good-will existing between men and women. This good-will cannot exist so
long as women have the inflated idea of their own value which they now
possess largely in Europe and still more largely in America. A virtuous
woman may be above rubies, has said Solomon, but this depends very much
on the quality of the virtue; and the idea prevailing among women that
they are valuable, admirable and almost divine, merely because they are
women, is one of the most mischievous fallacies born of human vanity,
and accepted without analysis.
It has been passed, like many another fallacy, from generation to
generation, and the enormous power of evil which lies in the female sex
has been underestimated or conventionally disregarded for the sake of a
poetic effect. The seducer is continually held up for condemnation, but
the temptress is seldom remembered. It is common to write of women as
the victims of men, and it is forgotten how many men are the victims in
their earliest youth of women. Even in marriage the woman, by her
infidelity, can inflict the most poignant, the most torturing dishonour
on the man; the man’s infidelity does not in the least touch the honour
of the woman. She can never be in doubt as to the fact of her children
being her own; but he may be perpetually tortured by such a doubt, nay,
may be compelled through lack of proof to give his name and shelter to
his offspring when he is morally convinced that they are not his. The
woman can bring shame into a great race as the man can never do, and
ofttimes brings it with impunity. In marriage, moreover, the influence
of the woman, whatever popular prejudices plead to the contrary, is
constantly belittling and injurious to the intelligence of the man. How
many great artists since the days of Andrea del Sarto have cursed the
woman who has made them barter their heritage of genius for the
‘pottage’ of worldly affluence? How much, how often, and how pitilessly
have the petty affairs, the personal greeds, the unsympathetic and
low-toned character of the woman he has unfortunately wedded, put lead
on the winged feet of the man of genius, and made him leave the Muses
for the god of barter beloved of the common people in the market-place?
Not infrequently what is called with pious praise a good woman,
blameless in her own conduct and devoted to what she conceives to be her
duties, has been more fatal to the originality, the integrity, and the
intellectual brilliancy of a man than the worst courtesan could have
been. The injury which women have done the minds of men may fairly be
set off against those social and physical injuries which men are said by
M. Dumas to inflict so ruthlessly on women.
If outside monogamous marriage the woman suffers from the man, within it
man suffers from the woman. It is doubtful if but for the obligation to
accept it, which is entailed by property, and the desire for legitimate
heirs, one man in a hundred of the richer classes would consent to
marry. Whenever Socialism succeeds in abolishing property, monogamy will
be destroyed with it perforce.
In the lower strata of society the conjugal association is made on more
equal terms: both work hard and both frequently come to blows. The poor
man loses less by marriage than the rich man, for he has his comforts,
his food and his clothes looked after gratis, but the poor woman gains
very little indeed by it; and if she got a hearing in the political
world, she would probably brawl against it, or, which is still more
likely, she would do worse and insist on marriage laws which should
restrict the personal freedom of the man as severely and as tyrannically
as the Sabbath observance laws do in Scotland, and as the Puritan
exactions did in the early years of American colonisation.
The net result of the entrance of the woman into the political arena can
never be for the happiness of humanity.
‘Prevant leur revanche de l’immobilité à laquelle on les a condamnées
elles vont courrir par n’importe quels chemins à côté de l’homme, devant
lui si elles peuvent, contre lui s’il le faut à la conquête d’un nouveau
monde. En matière de sensation la femme est l’extrême, l’excès, de
l’homme.’ Dumas recognises the inevitable hostility which will be
begotten between the sexes if they war in the same public arena; but he
passes over it.
If female suffrage become law anywhere, it must be given to all women
who have not rendered themselves ineligible for it by criminality. The
result will scarcely be other than the emasculation and the confusion of
the whole world of politics. The ideal woman is, we know, the type of
heroism, fortitude, wisdom, sweetness and light; but even the ideal
woman is not always distinguished by breadth of thought, and it is here
a question not of the ideal woman at all, but of the millions of
ordinary women who have as little of the sage in them as of the angel.
Very few women are capable of being the sympathetic mistress of a great
man, or the ennobling mother of a child of genius. Most women are the
drag on the wheel of the higher aspirations, to the nobler impulses, to
the more original and unconventional opinions, of the men whom they
influence. The prospect of their increased ascendency over national
movements is very ominous. Is the mass of male humanity ready to accept
it?
Women will not find happiness in hostility to men even if they obtain a
victory in it, which is very doubtful. Women of genius have never hated
men: they have perhaps liked them too well. To the woman of genius love
may not be the sole thing on earth, as it is to Gretchen; it is only one
amongst the many emotions, charms and delights of life; but she never
denies its attractions, its consolation, its supreme ecstasy, its
exquisite sympathies. Heloise and Aspasia can love better than Penelope.
Who, then, will become those enemies of men to whom Dumas looks for the
emancipation of the weaker sex? All the _délaissées_, all the
_déclassées_, all the discontented, jaded, unloved, embittered women in
the world, all those, and their number is legion, who have not genius or
loveliness, fortune or power, the wisdom to be mute or the sorcery to
charm; women restless, feverish, envious, irritable, embittered, whose
time hangs heavy on their hands and whose brains seethe under the froth
of ill-assorted and ill-assimilated knowledge.
‘Quarry the granite rock with razors,’ wrote John Newman, ‘or moor the
vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope, with such keen and
delicate instruments as human knowledge and human understanding, to
contend against these giants, the passions and the pride of man;’—or
against the difference and the influence of sex.
I know not why women should wish or clamour at once to resemble and to
quarrel with man. The attitude is an unnatural one; it is sterile, not
only physically but mentally. It is true that the prejudices and
conventionalities of society, and the fictions of monogamy have stranded
a vast number of women, undistinguished and unhappy, with no career and
no interests, who would imagine themselves disgraced if they enjoyed the
natural affections of life outside that pale of propriety which the
conventions of society have created. These are the women who would care
for political power and would be allowed to exercise it. What could the
world gain from such as these? What would it not lose of the small
modicum of freedom, of contentment, and of wisdom which it already
possesses?
To most women success is measured by the balance at the bank, by the
applause of the hour, and nothing is esteemed which has not received the
hall-mark of the world’s approval. There are exceptions, no doubt; but
they have been and are, I think, fewer than the advocates of female
suffrage would have us believe. Men too often are mere _moutons de
Panurge_, but women are so almost invariably. The Arab who weeps when a
female child is born to him is perhaps more correct in his measurement
of the sex than the American who is prepared to make her the spoiled and
wayward sovereign of his household.
I have previously used the words ‘mental and moral inferiority’; it is
perhaps necessary to explain them. By mental inferiority I do not mean
that the average women might not, if educated to it, learn as much
mathematics or as much metaphysics as the ordinary man. I do not deny
that Girton may produce senior wranglers or physiologists in time to
come; it may do so. But the female mind has a radical weakness which is
often also its peculiar charm; it is intensely subjective, it is only
reluctantly forced to be impersonal, and it has the strongest possible
tendency to tyranny, as I have said before. In public morality, also,
the female mind is unconsciously unscrupulous; it is seldom very frank
or honest, and it would burn down a temple to warm its own pannikin.
Women of perfect honesty of intentions and antecedents will adopt a
dishonest course, if they think it will serve an aim or a person they
care for, with a headlong and cynical completeness which leaves men far
behind it. In intrigue a man will often have scruples which the woman
brushes aside as carelessly as if they were cobwebs, if once her
passions or her jealousies are ardently involved. There is not much
veracity anywhere in human nature, but it may always be roughly
calculated that the man will be more truthful than the woman, in
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred; his judgments will be less coloured
by personal wishes and emotions, and his instincts towards justice will
be straighter and less mobile than hers. Were women admitted into public
life, bribery would become a still greater factor in that life than it
now is, which is needless. All the world over, what is wanted for the
health of the nations is the moral purification of politics, the
elimination of venal and personal views, the disinterested advocacy and
adoption of broad, just and magnanimous principles of action. Can it be
said that the entry of women into politics would have this effect? He
must be a sanguine man who can think that it would, and he must have but
little knowledge of women.
_On a les défauts de ses qualités._ This is one of the most profound
axioms ever evolved out of a study of human nature. And all which
constitutes the charm of women, mutability, caprice, impressionability,
power of headlong self-abandonment, mingled with intense subjectiveness
and self-engrossment, would all make of women an inferior but of a most
dangerous political force. Where Mr Gladstone has sent out troops and
recalled them a dozen times, she, with similar but still greater
oscillations of purpose, would send them out and recall them five
hundred times. The _Souvent femme varie_ of Francois the First is true
to all time. But in all her variations it is the Sejanus, the Orloff,
the Biron, the Bothwell of the moment, whom she would wade through seas
of blood to please. This makes at once her dangerousness and her charm.
As scientists look forward to the time when every man will be bald from
boyhood, thus having outgrown the last likeness to the beasts that
perish, so enthusiasts for female suffrage look forward to a time when
woman will have shed all her fair follies and rectified all her amusing
inconsistencies. What will she be like then? Very unlovely it may safely
be predicted, as unlovely as the men without hair; very mischievous for
evil, it may also be deemed certain.
A French physiologist, who lectured in Russia not very long ago, was
amazed at the howls of impatience and disdain which was aroused in the
female students amongst his audience in Moscow by his simple statement
that the claims of the arts must not be wholly lost sight of in the
demands and inquiries of science. They would not tolerate even the
mention of the arts; in their fanaticism they would only worship one
God. The youths were willing to award a place to art; the maidens would
hear of nothing but science. ‘_Une grande sécheresse de cœur domine la
femme qui se donne à la Science_;’ and with this dryness of the soul
comes an unmerciful and intolerant disposition to tyranny over the minds
of others.
It cannot be denied that the quality which in women bestows most
happiness on those around them, is that which is called in French and
has no exact descriptive word in English, _gaîte de cœur_. Not frivolous
unusefulness, or passion for diversion and excitement, but a sweet and
happy spirit, finding pleasure in small things and great, and shedding a
light like that of Moore’s wild freshness of morning on the beaten
tracks of life. Where will this pleasant gaiety and smiling radiance go
when, harassed, heated, and blown by the bitter winds of strife, the
woman seeks to outshriek the man on political platforms, or when with
blood-stained hands she bends over the torture-trough of the
physiological laboratory?
The humanities do not harden a woman: erudition may leave her loveliness
and grace of form and mind; though as proficient a Greek and Latin
scholar as any of the learned Italian women of the Renaissance, yet she
may be the joy of her home and the angel of the poor. A love of
learning, of art, of nature, keeps long young the heart in which it has
a place. But the noisy conflicts of the polling-booths and the pitiless
cruelties of the laboratories will not do so. There is in every woman,
even in the best woman, a sleeping potentiality for crime, a curious
possibility of fiendish evil. Even her maternal love is dangerously near
an insane ferocity, which at times breaks out in infanticide or
child-murder. Everything which tends to efface in her gentler and softer
instincts tends to make of her a worse curse to the world than any man
has ever been. If, indeed, in the centuries to come she should develop
into the foe of man, which Dumas _fils_ wishes her to become, it is by
no means improbable that men, in sheer self-defence, will be compelled
to turn on her and chain her down into the impotency of servitude once
more.
If she once leave the power which nature has given her over her lovers,
her friends, her sons, to become the opponent, the jealous rival and the
acrid enemy of men, then men, it may be with surety predicted, will not
long keep the gloves on as they fight with her, but with the brutality
which is natural to the male animal and which is only curbed, not
effaced, by the graceful hypocrisies of society and of courtship, will
with his closed fists send her down into that lower place of _la femelle
de l’homme_, from which it has been the effort and the boast of
Christianity and of civilisation to raise her. Woman can never truly
conquer man, except by those irresistible weapons which the Queen of the
Amazons leaned on in her strife with Alexander.
Man has, I repeat, been very fair in his dealings with women, as far as
legislation goes; he could easily have kept her from all time to the
harem, and it has been a proof of his fairness, if not of his wisdom,
that he has not done so. I have but little doubt but that, before long,
he will cede to her clamour, and let her seat herself beside him, or
opposite to him, on the benches of his representative houses. When he
does, he will, I think, regret the loss of the harem.
There is a lax and perilous inclination in the mass of mankind, in these
latter days of the century, to give anything which is much asked for.
‘To yield to clamour and to pallid fears,
What wisdom, temperance and truth deny;’
to let the reins go, and the steeds, which draw the chariot of national
fate, gallop headlong, whither they will, downhill if they choose. The
pessimism prevalent in the classes which think, lies at the root of
their indifference to change, and their apathy and indolence before
fresh demands. Men who do think at all, see how unsatisfactory all
things are, how unreal all religions, how fictitious the bond of
marriage, how mutable the laws of property, how appalling the future of
the world, when there will not be even standing-room upon it for all the
billions of peoples begotten. And they are, therefore, in that mood
which makes them willing to try any new thing, even as men at death’s
door languidly affirm their despairing readiness to try any nostrum or
panacea tendered to them.
Woman may, will, very possibly, snatch from the nerveless hand of the
sick man those legal and legislative rights which she covets. The
political movements of modern times have been always in the direction of
giving unlimited power to blind and unmeasured masses, whose use of that
which is thus rashly given them the boldest prophet dare not predict.
Such movement will probably give political power to women.
I confess that I, for one, dread the day which shall see this further
development of that crude and restless character of the nineteenth
century, which, with sublime self-contentment and self-conceit, it has
presumed to call Progress.