DEMOCRACY AND REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT
“Did you, too, O friend, suppose Democracy was only for
elections, for politics, or for a party name? I say Democracy
is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower
and fruits in manners, in the highest forms of interaction
between men and their beliefs—in Religion, Literature, Colleges
and Schools—Democracy in all public and private life.”—WALT
WHITMAN, _Democratic Vistas_.
Reference has been made to the half-heartedness of the school of
physical force. While asserting loudly that physical force rules and
always will rule the world, these people become very indignant if they
are accused of immorality, or even of unmorality. Few have the moral
courage to declare themselves unmoral, and the physical force apologists
for the domination of man over woman always proceed to argue that this
domination is not merely a “regrettable fact,” but is all for the best.
They argue that men as well as women possess a moral nature (which is
undeniable), and that they will direct their physical force in accordance
with their moral nature, which is, in public affairs, superior to that
of women. I have already touched upon the lack of foundation for this
assertion of superiority. There is too little ascertained fact and
far too much speculation and assertion on this point. Mr. Frederic
Harrison (whose connection with Positivism has done little to modify his
profoundly unscientific temperament) has published some essays on the
women’s movement, in which he picks out certain ugly characteristics
common to humanity and attributes them to women only. He professes
such a respect for women, such admiration for their moral, spiritual
and even intellectual qualities, that one really wonders how it comes
that he thinks it necessary to scold them so much. He sees them acting
in politics with “that spite and untruthfulness which is too often the
failing of some good women,” showing “a rancour, an injustice towards
persons, a bitterness of temper, which cause them to fling away common
sense, fairness, truth and even decency.” Dear, dear! How bad these good
women are, and who would have supposed that this passage was written by
a philosopher who holds that women are, “as a sex,” morally superior to
men? One would have supposed that to have accused good women of lying,
spite, folly, injustice, rancour and indecency was not to leave much
over to hurl at the bad ones. But he proceeds to say that it is woman’s
very possession of higher qualities which makes her political judgments
“untrustworthy and unstable.” One seems to have heard something very
like this in the course of the Dreyfus case, when it became a reproach
to be “intellectual.” But if these are the characteristics of women,
according to Mr. Harrison, we may smile to see how he gives himself
away, unintentionally, when he comes to those of men. He has just been
alluding to the “fair, impartial temper” with which men “habitually weigh
all sides of a question,” and declaring that “all political questions
and all parliamentary elections really turn, or ought to turn, on nicely
balanced judgments”; yet when he comes to anticipate what would be the
effect of women’s enfranchisement upon the judicial mind, the fair
impartial temper of men, he declares that it would weaken men’s respect
for women’s opinion and even their respect for women: “_The women’s
vote would always be actually or possibly on the wrong side._” (Italics
mine.) The conversation of the wolf with the lamb in La Fontaine’s fable
is an admirable expression of this state of mind, but to call it “fair
and impartial” throws a queer light on Mr. Harrison’s own particular
quality of male mind. He alludes pathetically to the sufferings men have
endured at the hands of women when men have felt it their duty to oppose
something women desired. It is a pity when rancour and spite manifest
themselves, but have women never suffered at the hands of men? How about
the witch trials? Did men make the path of Joan of Arc, of Josephine
Butler, of Doctor Jex-Blake, even of Florence Nightingale a path of
roses? Are not suffragists even now having all sorts of preposterous
views and disastrous vices attributed to them? And is there one of us
that has not been pelted with mud and refuse from the hands of a man
(save the mark)? One murmurs “Marconi,” one glances at the Balkans, and
wonders if women could really improve on the language that has been used
by men of each other in political controversy.
We have had enough of this irrelevant talk about the inferiority of
women. Do we replace it by equally foolish assertions of the inferiority
of men? Not a bit of it. We base the women’s demand for a share in
government on precisely the same grounds as those on which men have based
their demands. The difficulties we all find in acting for others are,
broadly speaking, of two kinds. There is the difficulty of understanding
the lives of others as completely as we understand our own, and there
is the fact that our own affairs have a motive force which the affairs
of others have not. Only people desperately driven to excuse themselves
could pretend that men, any more than women, are unaffected by these
difficulties, and Professor Dicey, whose unsentimental mind revolts from
cant, has frankly admitted as much. “Under a representative government,”
he writes,[3] “any considerable body of persons who are not represented
in Parliament is exposed, at best, to neglect. In a country such as
England the views of the unrepresented are overlooked far less through
selfishness than through the stupidity or preoccupation of the voters
and their representatives.… Nor can any impartial critic maintain that,
even at the present day, the desires of women, about matters in which
they are vitally concerned, obtain from Parliament all the attention they
deserve.… Despotism is none the less trying because it may be dictated by
philanthropy, and the benevolence of workmen which protects women from
overwork is not quite above suspicion when it coincides with the desire
of artisans to protect themselves from female competition.” No suffragist
could put the argument better than this candid anti-suffragist.
How is it possible for a man to assert that he knows what a woman feels
and wants as well as she herself? He would have to be more than man!
Even women, who spend their lives in studying men, do not make the
claim that they can feel a man’s passions as he can; and, in another
mood, the man who claims to be the arbiter of a woman’s life will rail
at her incomprehensible and fickle nature. “But women have tongues and
know only too well how to use them! We may consult with women and be
advised by them,” say the reactionaries. “Yes. And also you may not,”
is the reply. Professor Dicey makes much of the distinction between
civil, as distinct from political, rights. He speaks of reconciling
his “enthusiasm for everything which promotes the personal freedom and
education of women with the strenuous denial to them of any share in
sovereign power.” But the male electorate is not all so enlightened as
Professor Dicey, and civil rights depend upon political rights. Men
less intelligent, less sympathetic than Professor Dicey are absorbed in
their own affairs, and women have had to fight and are still having to
fight for every miserable concession in personal freedom and education
(and in such fights Professor Dicey has often been on the women’s side),
and they have no security that they will be allowed to hold what they
have won. Successive Local Government Acts have shown plainly how men
will almost unconsciously sweep away the rights of women when their
minds are concentrated on some reform for which men care. The Married
Women’s Property and the Custody of Children Acts repealed cruel and
unjust disabilities which had been imposed by men upon women. Are we to
suppose that all injustices are of the past, and that from henceforth for
evermore men will feel like women?
Besides the difference in relative values which men and women place upon
things, and the vast gulf that there is between actually experiencing
and only listening to an experience, there is the fact that even when
people know what is right, they do not always do it without some external
pressure, whether of public opinion, legal rights or political power. In
truth, the reactionaries are too thin-skinned when they wail about the
sex-antagonism of women who frankly declare this weakness in men. If we
asserted it of men only they would have some right to complain. But we
do not. The very existence of customs and laws and governments proves
that men believe humanity needs these motives in addition to moral ones,
and, unless you are an anarchist, you must agree that they do. When
men get altogether away from women they forget women. It is natural.
Therefore women, who suffer from being forgotten when their lives are at
stake, require that men shall not in future be able to get altogether
away from them when they are employed in governing them, as they do
now in Parliament. Mr. Harrison gives us an interesting and touching
little bit of information when he says, “To speak the truth, I only know
one woman whom I would always trust to come to a right decision”; but
this fact has really no general interest or value, and even if women
did not, on the whole, represent the views of Mr. Harrison, this would
not prevent them from representing their own, which is what matters in
representative government. Mr. Harrison becomes appealing when he says,
“Now I say frankly that I do not trust the average woman to decide these
complex issues”; because that is just how _we_ feel! _We_ do not trust
the average man to decide these complex issues. A fellow feeling makes us
wondrous kind, and perhaps when Mr. Harrison has grasped this feeling of
ours, he will see that the proper thing is for neither man nor woman to
attempt to decide these complex issues alone.
We have only to consider the very different lives women lead, leaving out
of account the debatable differences in nature, to see how impossible
it is for a man to look on life with a woman’s eyes. To begin with, as
long as he insists on being absolute master, there is the unbridgeable
gulf between those who command and those who obey, and the tendency of
this “division of labour” (as the reactionaries humorously call it) to
result in making men conceive it is theirs to think and act and woman’s
to feel. “Men must work and women must weep” is perhaps the most fatuous
expression in all literature of this attitude. Men are rich and women
are poor. Men are employers and women are employed. Wage-earning men
think mainly of wages, women are more concerned with prices. Men enjoy
fighting for its own sake, women only suffer from fighting. Men’s part
in parentage involves only the satisfaction of passion and appetite;
women’s part may involve these, but it also involves much suffering and
long care. It follows from the apportionment of men’s and women’s work
and interests that in the main men will be more concerned for property
and women more concerned for the person, and our laws and administration
amply bear this out. It follows also that men will spend money upon the
things they care most about, and starve the things they care less about.
We see millions lavished on war and destruction, on monuments of stone
and iron, on pomp and circumstance: we see health wasted, human creatures
neglected, education slighted. The titles and the honours go to those who
make money and take life. “Things are in the saddle,” says Emerson, “and
ride mankind.”
Those who defend the male franchise declare confidently that in England
“the family is the unit,” and that the voter casts his vote after a
balanced judgment of the interests of the family as a whole. This is,
of course, entirely without foundation. The vote is _not_ given to the
family when the head of the family happens to be a woman; the vote is
_not_ refused to a man when he has no family; several votes are given to
one man, although legally he cannot have several families. So that, even
if, for the sake of argument, we allow that husband and wife are one, and
that one is the husband, we still have a very large number of votes which
represent men only, and those men bachelors. The evils of this in such a
country as England are patent; in such a country as South Africa they are
greater still. There the bachelor vote is unstable and indifferent to the
permanent interests of the people, for the adventurous bachelor comes for
what he can find, to make money, not a home; to take his pleasure where
he can find it, among the women of an alien race, and leave in his track
the degradation of sexual ethics, the embitterment of racial hatred, the
burden of a fatherless race of half-breeds. All these ills fall upon the
voteless women of South Africa, and are felt in their rebound by the
English women at home.
The possession, by the people, of the parliamentary vote does not make
a democracy. Many other things are necessary for that. But the vote
is a piece of the machinery of democracy without which it cannot work,
and it is lamentable to hear men who call themselves Liberals, and who
use all the old catchwords of the democratic party, refusing to apply
their Liberalism to women and bringing against the enfranchisement of
women all the ragged old arguments which used to be brought against
men’s enfranchisement and which are ragged from the shot wherewith the
old reformers riddled them. “Men know better than women what is good
for women!” Yes, and the slave-owner knew what was good for his slaves;
and the employer knew what was good for his employees; and the landlord
knew what was good for his tenants! But the slave and the employee and
the tenant did not think so then, and no one dares say so now. The
women’s day is coming too, and the people of the future will deride
those Liberals of the early twentieth century who talked of the Will of
the People and forgot the mothers; who boasted of their intention to
enfranchise every person “of full age and competent understanding” and
left out half the people; who declared that “citizenship” should be the
basis of voting rights and denied these rights to all women, thereby
admitting (what the women had been rebuked for asserting) that Britons,
when they happened to be female Britons, _were_ slaves. No external
defeats could have so sapped the prestige of the political Liberal party
as the fact that it failed altogether, as a party, to recognise the
force and the progressive idealism of the women’s movement. There is
now in England no movement that can compare in vigour, intelligence and
devotion with the women’s movement. When the Liberal party acknowledges
this and identifies itself with the movement, it will once more step into
the line of progress; until then it is true to say that the progressive
women and the Labour party which supports them are the only democrats.
Moreover, the penalty of supporting reaction in one direction is that
the logic of events drives men into the logic of thought. Many a Liberal
who hoped he could restrict his illiberalism to women, is finding
himself forced into general principles of reaction which will sooner or
later—horrible to contemplate!—overwhelm men too.
On the other hand, the effect upon women of the agitation for the vote
has been enlarging beyond even the most sanguine expectations. I myself
have seen women of the middle class, who began by desiring the vote from
a personal and quite legitimate sense of their own worth and claims,
led, from a sense of justice, to entertain the claims of other less
fortunate women, and by degrees find their desire redoubled on behalf of
these women, whose needs, experience and sympathy gradually demonstrated
as far exceeding their own. No less remarkable is the enlargement of
the lives of these less fortunate women, by the growth of sympathy and
understanding between the different classes and by the linking up of
public and private duties and aims. “Since she’s been a suffragist,” I
have heard a man say, “my wife has seemed to take more interest in the
home. It hasn’t taken her thoughts off; it has only made her think more.”
And I have heard a middle-aged woman use the pathetic phrase, “Since I
began to think,” meaning, “Since I joined the suffrage movement.”
Is it all unmixed good, then? Is the women’s movement singular in this,
that it is perfect? Will women make no mistakes? By no means. Who could
be so foolish as to think so? But by mistakes we learn. If you wish to
learn a new language you must blunder in it first. One of the reasons of
women’s slow development is that men are so afraid women will make fools
of themselves. We all have a divine right to make fools of ourselves,
because the force that created us decreed that only so could we learn,
and the convention by which a woman is never allowed to be a fool all to
herself, as an individual, but is made to sin for her whole sex, is an
anti-progressive convention which must go. A woman fires a building and
we are told “Woman” has disgraced herself, “She” is unfit for the vote.
But men sack empires and burn cities to the ground and no one says “Man”
has disgraced himself, “He” is unfit for the vote.
I think I hear the horror-stricken Anti declare, “A right to make a fool
of yourself? But it is _our_ Empire that you are asking for,—to play
with! Our Empire which we made ourselves and which is so complex, so
delicate, so nicely poised, that one push from a foolish woman’s little
finger will send it reeling to destruction.” The Anti wants to make
our flesh creep; but it refuses. We don’t for a moment admit that the
Empire, with its millions of men and women, belongs to men any more than
it belongs to women. We can’t believe, either, that the Empire is in so
shockingly delicate a condition as the Antis make out. The cry is for
safety. Only Death is safe.
“Permanence hangs by the grave;
Sits by the grave green-grassed,
On the roll of the heaved grave-mound.”
Life is never safe, yet the happy warrior prefers life. The Empire was
certainly not made by people who chattered of safety and permanence, nor
will it be kept by such people.
The direction in which reactionaries anticipate most trouble is one where
I believe it would be last to show itself. It is in foreign affairs, in
the relations with other countries, in the issues of peace and war that
they see most danger, if women shared responsibility with men. I do not
believe it, because for one thing these matters are exceedingly remote
from the electorate, and in the vague way in which popular sentiment
makes itself felt it is highly improbable that women’s sentiment would
on any particular issue differ from men’s. It is difficult to conceive
of Englishwomen loving Germans while Englishmen were burning to cut
their throats. What is possible is that women may gradually help men
to see what very bad business war is, simply because it is obviously
and always such bad business for women, and while undoubtedly some men
trade in war, no women do. The idea is freely expressed that men would
resent women having power to control the forces of the army and navy,
when women cannot themselves serve in the army and navy. It does not seem
clear why they should, for they do not seem to resent women helping to
control the police force, although women do not serve in the police. In
this latter case the matter comes much more closely home to everyday life
and yet we have no trouble. Sometimes the difficulty is put in another
way. We in England, it is asserted, may be willing that women should
share in the control of their own lives, but if we allow this, we shall
lose the respect of more “virile” countries. But the “feminisation” of
politics (to use their phrase) will not give the country one man less,
nor will it make one man weaker or less virile. If really the respect
of other countries depends upon the amount of our physical force, that
force will still be there, undiminished, and in course of time, as we
fervently believe, through better and humaner conditions, will be greatly
increased. We do not find the Scandinavian races nor our Australian
cousins to be particularly womanish, yet Norway and Australia have given
all their women the vote.
My theme hitherto has been that the domination of physical force has
been the cause of the subjection of women, and that it is contrary to
progress and civilisation that physical force should dominate moral
and intellectual force. But, of course, physical force has never been
entirely dominant, otherwise the mind of man never would have emerged
from the mind of the beast. All progress is due to the growth of mind
controlling physical forces, and the anti-suffragists who assert that
the vote has been and is merely the counter which represents the
physical force of the voters, and that no one would dream of obeying a
law if he once suspected that it were not made by those who possessed
the preponderance of physical force, are making an assertion which not
only reflects quite undeservedly on the intelligence of men, but which
is patently contrary to facts. Things may be bad; they might be much
better; but physical force, in this crude sense, never has entirely
ruled the world since prehistoric times. The idea at the back of the
anti-suffragist contention is, as far as one can make it out, that you
cannot compel a man to do a thing _against his will_, if he feels that
he has the strength to resist. We must admit that. But there are many
ways of moving the will besides the crude way of physical force; there
are various kinds of compulsion and various forms of resistance. The
Antis at one moment declare the intellectual superiority of men over
women, and the next moment involve themselves in a line of argument which
presupposes man’s entire deafness to reason. Man is, however, gradually
discovering that he may get more out of his fellow-man (and _à fortiori_
out of his fellow-woman) by agreement than by compulsion, and the
resistance offered by out-and-out striking is only an extreme case of
the moral law of diminishing returns upon increased compulsion. It has
been found that slave-labour is the least productive labour; it is slowly
getting to be believed that overwork means under-production. The degree
of physical force used by men against women has not been sufficient at
any period to destroy women, but it has crippled them; it has resulted in
not getting the best out of them. Though stupid men and blackguards have
not understood this, the better sort always have, and the great mass of
men have never even dreamed of applying their force to its utmost against
women. It is quite true that Government rests on physical force in the
sense that Governments dispose of physical force; but those who form
the Government are not chosen for their personal possession of physical
force, nor even with any thought that they represent the physical force
of the community. In a country with representative institutions the
Government is supposed to represent the _opinions_ and _interests_ (not
the physical force) of the majority of the electors. Before the modern
extensions of the franchise, the country was actually ruled by the votes
of men who were few relatively to the whole population, and, therefore,
by no means represented the physical force of the community, and before
the days of parliamentary government a small oligarchy or even an
autocracy ruled. Democratic government has, in fact, come to birth and
steadily grown with the steady decline of the rule of physical force.
And it will be seen that this must be so, when once we have grasped the
fact that the unmoral use of physical force may here and there profit an
individual but is always bad business for the community.
If we abandon the visions of the Antis, we shall see that, as a matter
of prosaic fact, the vote in England is given to a man not as a reward
of virtue (as the assertion, “woman has disgraced herself,” would seem
to imply), nor as a prize for intellectual ability (as those who speak
slightingly of women’s intellect would suggest), nor as the guerdon of
physical prowess (as the physical force party declare), nor does it
depend upon his being a husband and father. An Englishman who has, by
debauchery, ruined body, mind and spirit, and who has neither wife nor
child, may yet have the necessary qualifications to vote, for these are
a confused and illogical jumble of accretions, but, such as they are,
they depend on the possession of property. It is proposed by Liberals to
abolish these and to enfranchise a man in virtue of his manhood. Once you
see the immorality, the waste and the stupidity of the physical force
argument, there is no possible ground for refusing to enfranchise a woman
in virtue of her womanhood.