I have found it a real privilege to be here to-night and to listen to
the addresses which you have heard. Though you may not all of you
believe it, I would a great deal rather hear somebody else speak than
speak myself; but I should feel that I was omitting a duty if I did not
address you to-night and say some of the things that have been in my
thought as I realized the approach of this evening and the duty that
would fall upon me.
The astonishing thing about the movement which you represent is, not
that it has grown so slowly, but that it has grown so rapidly. No doubt
for those who have been a long time in the struggle, like your honored
president, it seems a long and arduous path that has been trodden, but
when you think of the cumulating force of this movement in recent
decades, you must agree with me that it is one of the most astonishing
tides in modern history. Two generations ago, no doubt Madam President
will agree with me in saying, it was a handful of women who were
fighting this cause. Now it is a great multitude of women who are
fighting it.
And there are some interesting historical connections which I would like
to attempt to point out to you. One of the most striking facts about the
history of the United States is that at the outset it was a lawyers'
history. Almost all of the questions to which America addressed itself,
say a hundred years ago, were legal questions, were questions of
method, not questions of what you were going to do with your Government,
but questions of how you were going to constitute your Government,--how
you were going to balance the powers of the States and the Federal
Government, how you were going to balance the claims of property against
the processes of liberty, how you were going to make your governments up
so as to balance the parts against each other so that the legislature
would check the executive, and the executive the legislature, and the
courts both of them put together. The whole conception of government
when the United States became a Nation was a mechanical conception of
government, and the mechanical conception of government which underlay
it was the Newtonian theory of the universe. If you pick up the
Federalist, some parts of it read like a treatise on astronomy instead
of a treatise on government. They speak of the centrifugal and the
centripetal forces, and locate the President somewhere in a rotating
system. The whole thing is a calculation of power and an adjustment of
parts. There was a time when nobody but a lawyer could know enough to
run the Government of the United States, and a distinguished English
publicist once remarked, speaking of the complexity of the American
Government, that it was no proof of the excellence of the American
Constitution that it had been successfully operated, because the
Americans could run any constitution. But there have been a great many
technical difficulties in running it.
And then something happened. A great question arose in this country
which, though complicated with legal elements, was at bottom a human
question, and nothing but a question of humanity. That was the slavery
question. And is it not significant that it was then, and then for the
first time, that women became prominent in politics in America? Not many
women; those prominent in that day were so few that you can name them
over in a brief catalogue, but, nevertheless, they then began to play a
part in writing, not only, but in public speech, which was a very novel
part for women to play in America. After the Civil War had settled some
of what seemed to be the most difficult legal questions of our system,
the life of the Nation began not only to unfold, but to accumulate. Life
in the United States was a comparatively simple matter at the time of
the Civil War. There was none of that underground struggle which is now
so manifest to those who look only a little way beneath the surface.
Stories such as Dr. Davis has told to-night were uncommon in those
simpler days. The pressure of low wages, the agony of obscure and
unremunerated toil, did not exist in America in anything like the same
proportions that they exist now. And as our life has unfolded and
accumulated, as the contacts of it have become hot, as the populations
have assembled in the cities, and the cool spaces of the country have
been supplanted by the feverish urban areas, the whole nature of our
political questions has been altered. They have ceased to be legal
questions. They have more and more become social questions, questions
with regard to the relations of human beings to one another,--not merely
their legal relations, but their moral and spiritual relations to one
another. This has been most characteristic of American life in the last
few decades, and as these questions have assumed greater and greater
prominence, the movement which this association represents has gathered
cumulative force. So that, if anybody asks himself, "What does this
gathering force mean," if he knows anything about the history of the
country, he knows that it means something that has not only come to
stay, but has come with conquering power.
I get a little impatient sometimes about the discussion of the channels
and methods by which it is to prevail. It is going to prevail, and that
is a very superficial and ignorant view of it which attributes it to
mere social unrest. It is not merely because the women are discontented.
It is because the women have seen visions of duty, and that is something
which we not only cannot resist, but, if we be true Americans, we do not
wish to resist. America took its origin in visions of the human spirit,
in aspirations for the deepest sort of liberty of the mind and of the
heart, and as visions of that sort come up to the sight of those who are
spiritually minded in America, America comes more and more into her
birthright and into the perfection of her development.
So that what we have to realize in dealing with forces of this sort is
that we are dealing with the substance of life itself. I have felt as I
sat here to-night the wholesome contagion of the occasion. Almost every
other time that I ever visited Atlantic City, I came to fight somebody.
I hardly know how to conduct myself when I have not come to fight
against anybody, but with somebody. I have come to suggest, among other
things, that when the forces of nature are steadily working and the tide
is rising to meet the moon, you need not be afraid that it will not come
to its flood. We feel the tide; we rejoice in the strength of it; and we
shall not quarrel in the long run as to the method of it. Because, when
you are working with masses of men and organized bodies of opinion, you
have got to carry the organized body along. The whole art and practice
of government consists not in moving individuals, but in moving masses.
It is all very well to run ahead and beckon, but, after all, you have
got to wait for the body to follow. I have not come to ask you to be
patient, because you have been, but I have come to congratulate you that
there was a force behind you that will beyond any peradventure be
triumphant, and for which you can afford a little while to wait.