It will be better to adopt in this chapter the same process that
appeared a piece of mental justice in the last. My general opinions on
the feminine question are such as many suffragists would warmly approve;
and it would be easy to state them without any open reference to the
current controversy. But just as it seemed more decent to say first
that I was not in favor of Imperialism even in its practical and popular
sense, so it seems more decent to say the same of Female Suffrage, in
its practical and popular sense. In other words, it is only fair to
state, however hurriedly, the superficial objection to the Suffragettes
before we go on to the really subtle questions behind the Suffrage.
Well, to get this honest but unpleasant business over, the objection
to the Suffragettes is not that they are Militant Suffragettes. On the
contrary, it is that they are not militant enough. A revolution is a
military thing; it has all the military virtues; one of which is that
it comes to an end. Two parties fight with deadly weapons, but under
certain rules of arbitrary honor; the party that wins becomes the
government and proceeds to govern. The aim of civil war, like the aim of
all war, is peace. Now the Suffragettes cannot raise civil war in
this soldierly and decisive sense; first, because they are women; and,
secondly, because they are very few women. But they can raise something
else; which is altogether another pair of shoes. They do not create
revolution; what they do create is anarchy; and the difference between
these is not a question of violence, but a question of fruitfulness and
finality. Revolution of its nature produces government; anarchy only
produces more anarchy. Men may have what opinions they please about
the beheading of King Charles or King Louis, but they cannot deny that
Bradshaw and Cromwell ruled, that Carnot and Napoleon governed. Someone
conquered; something occurred. You can only knock off the King’s
head once. But you can knock off the King’s hat any number of times.
Destruction is finite, obstruction is infinite: so long as rebellion
takes the form of mere disorder (instead of an attempt to enforce a new
order) there is no logical end to it; it can feed on itself and renew
itself forever. If Napoleon had not wanted to be a Consul, but only
wanted to be a nuisance, he could, possibly, have prevented any
government arising successfully out of the Revolution. But such a
proceeding would not have deserved the dignified name of rebellion.
It is exactly this unmilitant quality in the Suffragettes that makes
their superficial problem. The problem is that their action has none of
the advantages of ultimate violence; it does not afford a test. War is
a dreadful thing; but it does prove two points sharply and
unanswerably--numbers, and an unnatural valor. One does discover the two
urgent matters; how many rebels there are alive, and how many are
ready to be dead. But a tiny minority, even an interested minority, may
maintain mere disorder forever. There is also, of course, in the case of
these women, the further falsity that is introduced by their sex. It is
false to state the matter as a mere brutal question of strength. If his
muscles give a man a vote, then his horse ought to have two votes and
his elephant five votes. The truth is more subtle than that; it is that
bodily outbreak is a man’s instinctive weapon, like the hoofs to the
horse or the tusks to the elephant. All riot is a threat of war; but the
woman is brandishing a weapon she can never use. There are many weapons
that she could and does use. If (for example) all the women nagged for
a vote they would get it in a month. But there again, one must remember,
it would be necessary to get all the women to nag. And that brings us to
the end of the political surface of the matter. The working objection
to the Suffragette philosophy is simply that overmastering millions of
women do not agree with it. I am aware that some maintain that women
ought to have votes whether the majority wants them or not; but this is
surely a strange and childish case of setting up formal democracy to the
destruction of actual democracy. What should the mass of women decide
if they do not decide their general place in the State? These people
practically say that females may vote about everything except about
Female Suffrage.
But having again cleared my conscience of my merely political and
possibly unpopular opinion, I will again cast back and try to treat the
matter in a slower and more sympathetic style; attempt to trace the real
roots of woman’s position in the western state, and the causes of our
existing traditions or perhaps prejudices upon the point. And for this
purpose it is again necessary to travel far from the modern topic, the
mere Suffragette of today, and to go back to subjects which, though much
more old, are, I think, considerably more fresh.
*****