But in this corner called England, at this end of the century, there has
happened a strange and startling thing. Openly and to all appearance,
this ancestral conflict has silently and abruptly ended; one of the two
sexes has suddenly surrendered to the other. By the beginning of the
twentieth century, within the last few years, the woman has in public
surrendered to the man. She has seriously and officially owned that the
man has been right all along; that the public house (or Parliament) is
really more important than the private house; that politics are not
(as woman had always maintained) an excuse for pots of beer, but are
a sacred solemnity to which new female worshipers may kneel; that the
talkative patriots in the tavern are not only admirable but enviable;
that talk is not a waste of time, and therefore (as a consequence,
surely) that taverns are not a waste of money. All we men had grown used
to our wives and mothers, and grandmothers, and great aunts all
pouring a chorus of contempt upon our hobbies of sport, drink and party
politics. And now comes Miss Pankhurst with tears in her eyes, owning
that all the women were wrong and all the men were right; humbly
imploring to be admitted into so much as an outer court, from which she
may catch a glimpse of those masculine merits which her erring sisters
had so thoughtlessly scorned.
Now this development naturally perturbs and even paralyzes us. Males,
like females, in the course of that old fight between the public and
private house, had indulged in overstatement and extravagance, feeling
that they must keep up their end of the see-saw. We told our wives that
Parliament had sat late on most essential business; but it never crossed
our minds that our wives would believe it. We said that everyone must
have a vote in the country; similarly our wives said that no one must
have a pipe in the drawing room. In both cases the idea was the same.
“It does not matter much, but if you let those things slide there
is chaos.” We said that Lord Huggins or Mr. Buggins was absolutely
necessary to the country. We knew quite well that nothing is necessary
to the country except that the men should be men and the women women.
We knew this; we thought the women knew it even more clearly; and we
thought the women would say it. Suddenly, without warning, the women
have begun to say all the nonsense that we ourselves hardly believed
when we said it. The solemnity of politics; the necessity of votes;
the necessity of Huggins; the necessity of Buggins; all these flow in a
pellucid stream from the lips of all the suffragette speakers. I suppose
in every fight, however old, one has a vague aspiration to conquer; but
we never wanted to conquer women so completely as this. We only expected
that they might leave us a little more margin for our nonsense; we never
expected that they would accept it seriously as sense. Therefore I am
all at sea about the existing situation; I scarcely know whether to be
relieved or enraged by this substitution of the feeble platform lecture
for the forcible curtain-lecture. I am lost without the trenchant and
candid Mrs. Caudle. I really do not know what to do with the prostrate
and penitent Miss Pankhurst. This surrender of the modern woman has taken
us all so much by surprise that it is desirable to pause a moment, and
collect our wits about what she is really saying.
As I have already remarked, there is one very simple answer to all this;
these are not the modern women, but about one in two thousand of the
modern women. This fact is important to a democrat; but it is of very
little importance to the typically modern mind. Both the characteristic
modern parties believed in a government by the few; the only difference
is whether it is the Conservative few or Progressive few. It might
be put, somewhat coarsely perhaps, by saying that one believes in any
minority that is rich and the other in any minority that is mad. But in
this state of things the democratic argument obviously falls out for the
moment; and we are bound to take the prominent minority, merely
because it is prominent. Let us eliminate altogether from our minds the
thousands of women who detest this cause, and the millions of women who
have hardly heard of it. Let us concede that the English people itself
is not and will not be for a very long time within the sphere of
practical politics. Let us confine ourselves to saying that these
particular women want a vote and to asking themselves what a vote is. If
we ask these ladies ourselves what a vote is, we shall get a very
vague reply. It is the only question, as a rule, for which they are not
prepared. For the truth is that they go mainly by precedent; by the mere
fact that men have votes already. So far from being a mutinous movement,
it is really a very Conservative one; it is in the narrowest rut of
the British Constitution. Let us take a little wider and freer sweep of
thought and ask ourselves what is the ultimate point and meaning of this
odd business called voting.
*****