Education, using the word in its restricted scholastic sense, is always
productive of restlessness and discontent, unless education, in its
practical relations to life, furnishes an outlet and safety valve for
the whetted and strengthened faculties. Mere mental gymnastics are
unsatisfactory after the first flush of pleasurable excitement produced
in the mind newly awakened to its own capabilities.
There seems to be something within us which demands that our knowledge
be in some way applied, and that the logic of thought find fruition in
the logic of events. The moment the laborers of the country found time
and opportunity to whet their minds, they also developed a vast and
persistent unrest--a dissatisfaction with the order of things which gave
to them the tools with which to carve a fuller, broader life, but had
not yet furnished them the material upon which they might work.
Their plane of thought was raised, their outlook was expanded, their
possibilities multiplied; but the materials to work with remained the
same. Their status and condition clashed with their new hopes and needs.
This state of things produced what we call "labor troubles," with all
their complications. Capital and labor had no contest until labor became
(to a degree) educated.
If--"in those good old days"--labor was not satisfied, it did not
know how to make the fact very clearly understood. Capital smiled and
patronized labor, and labor smiled and said it was quite content to work
for so kind a master. It was safer to do that way--in those good old
days. Then, too, so long as labor's wits had not been sharpened, so long
as the laborer had not learned the relative values of things, perhaps he
was content. Certainly he was far more so than he is to-day.
It is well that, in his present state of angry unrest, he feels that he
has but to organize and elect his own representatives to help enact just
and repeal unjust laws as they bear upon his own immediate needs. But
for this outlet to his feelings, and this hope for his own future, the
labor troubles would be troubles indeed, and every additional book read
by labor, every new schoolhouse built for labor, would but add flame to
fire. But education brings with it--when taken into practical life--a
certain sense of the responsibilities of life and of the relations of
things.
The laborer begins to argue, "Am not I partly responsible for my own
condition? Is not my salvation in my own hands and in the hands of my
fellows? We are units in our own government. We are in the majority
numerically, and we are, therefore, at least partially responsible for
not only what we do, but for that which is done to us."
It is this feeling that sobers and steadies while it inspires the
so-called working classes to-day.
If, with their present enlightenment, ambitions, and needs, laboring
men felt themselves wholly irresponsible for the present or future
legislation, riots and lawlessness would be the inevitable result. A
sense of responsibility alone makes educational development safe either
in individuals or in classes.
Witness the truth of this in the lives of the "gilded youths" of all
countries whose sharpened wits are not steadied by, or applied in, any
useful occupation. The results are disastrous to themselves and to those
who fall under their sway or influence.
Broadened ambitions, sharpened mental capacities, developed
intellectuality, demand corresponding outlets and responsibilities.
Lacking these, education is but an added danger. Especially is this true
in a Republic where the theory of legal and political equality is held.
At the present time there are but two wholly irresponsible classes in
our republic--Indians and women.
I place the Indians first because it has recently been decided in South
Dakota that if an Indian (male) will "accept land in severalty,"
he thereby becomes a sovereign, and is henceforth presumed to have
sufficient interest in the welfare of his government and the stability
of affairs in general to entitle him to be looked upon as a desirable
citizen, capable of legislating and desiring to legislate wisely for the
public weal.
Since the government has not yet come to believe that any amount of land
in severalty entitles women to so much confidence, and since the lack
of responsibility develops in woman, as in man, a reckless and wanton
spirit, we have the spectacle of this irresponsible element taking
property laws into its own hands, and proudly destroying in public the
belongings of other people where those belongings chanced to be in
the form of beverages which these women disapproved of as articles of
merchandise and use. And we have seen, farther, the grave spectacle
of courts of law which will not or dare not enforce the law for their
punishment.
The due recognition of property rights is one of the earliest
developments of personal, legal, and political responsibility. The negro
notoriously disregarded these when his own human rights and individual
responsibility were unrecognized. His desires were likely to be the
measure of your loss.
He is not the light-fingered being that he was. Mine and thine have a
new meaning for him since--for the first time in his life--"thine" has
any meaning to his one-time master.
He is also beginning to look to his ballot for his safety and to himself
to work out his future status, whereas one day his legs were his
sole dependence when trickery or blandishment failed him. Woman
still depends--where she wishes to compass an end--upon blandishment,
deception, or a type of force which she believes will not or cannot be
resented in the way it would unquestionably be resented if offered by
men. A body of respectable men in a quiet community do not calmly walk
into another man's business house, and without process of law
destroy his property. Their sense of personal and legal and political
responsibility is a most effective police force; and no matter how rabid
a prohibitionist John Smith is, he does not collect a band of otherwise
respectable men about him and proceed to destroy--with praise and prayer
as an accompaniment--the belongings of his neighbor.
No; he goes to a legal infant and a political nonexistent, and gets
her to do it if it is to be done. He knows that to her the limit of
responsibility is the verge of her desires on this question. He knows
that she recognizes no right of property in a beverage she does not
approve and a traffic she hopes to destroy. He knows that her sense
of helplessness within the law--where she has no voice--gives her that
reckless spirit of the political non-existent of all classes, which
finds its revenge in lawlessness so long as it may not hope to have a
voice in lawfulness. While woman was uneducated and wholly a dependent,
there was little danger from her. She had too much at stake, in a purely
physical sense. Then, too, she had not reasoned out the logical sequence
between the pretension that a Republic of political equals before the
law exists, while in fact one-half of that Republic has no political
status whatever and no voice in the laws they obey. Uneducated and
wholly dependent as woman was, this was safe enough. Educated, and to a
degree financially independent, as she now is, she is a menace to social
order so long as she stands without legal responsibility or political
outlet for the expression of her opinions and desires in matters of
government.
So long as her only means of expression on the subject of the liquor
traffic is a hatchet and prayer, she will use both, and we will have
the shocking spectacle, witnessed a little over a year ago, of a court
refusing to even fine those who committed as clear and wanton an outrage
on property rights as often finds record.
The steadying sense of personal and mental responsibility can develop
only under the exercise of such responsibility. Man passed through
the stage of regulative and prohibitive thought, and learned the true
significance and value of Liberty only by its possession. By being
responsible he learned the folly and danger of undue restrictive
legislation, and the utter futility of the attempt to legislate taste,
moral sense and lofty ideals (i. e. his personal taste and ideals) into
his neighbors.
He also learned the futility and danger of lawless raids upon those who
were not of his way of thinking as to what they should eat or drink, or
wherewithal they should be clothed. Woman will have to learn the same
important lesson in the same way. She will abuse the personal rights and
liberties of others who disagree with her (now that she is educated
and has the power) unless she is steadied, given legal and political
responsibility, and held to the same account for her acts as are her
brothers. Being helpless within the law--having no means of expression
nor of making her will and opinions felt, having no voice in municipal
or governmental management--she has begun to find lawless outlet for
her newly acquired talents and intellectual activity. She is playing
the part of border "regulator" and lobbyist--two very dangerous and
degrading rôles in any case but doubly so in the hands of an educated
but unrepresented class.
It has been argued, by men who are otherwise favorable to woman
suffrage, that to grant the ballot to woman would be to yield up, upon
the altar of fanaticism and narrow personal desires, much of the liberty
for which man has fought and struggled. They argue that women do not
stop to consider whether they have the right to interfere with what
others do, but that they only ask whether they like the thing done.
The argument goes further and asserts that women only want the ballot
that they may restrict the liberty of other people, pass prohibitory,
sumptuary, and religious laws; and that the ballot in the hands of
woman means a return to a union of church and state, and the meddlesome,
personal legislation of the type known to us as Blue Laws.
It is no doubt true that there are many half-developed thinkers among
women who demand the ballot, who desire political power for these petty
reasons. It is also undoubtedly true that many of these would travel the
same road trod by their fathers before them, and learn political wisdom
slowly and only after a struggle with their own narrow ideas of liberty,
which means their own liberty to restrict and regulate the liberty of
other people.
It may be readily admitted, I say, that woman will make some of the same
mistakes, political, religious, and sociological, that have been made by
men in the reach after a better way. But what has taught thoughtful men
wisdom? What has broadened the conception of political liberty? What
taught men the danger and folly of religious and restrictive (sumptuary)
legislation? What but experience and responsibility?
Nothing so steadies the hasty and narrow judgment as power, coupled with
the recognition that responsibility for the use of that power is sure to
be demanded.
Many a man will advise, as secret lobbyist, what he would not do in open
legislature. Many a man in private life asserts that "If I were judge
or president," or what not, so and so should not be done. When the power
and responsibility once rests upon him, his outlook is broadened, and he
recognizes that he would endanger a far more sacred principle were he to
adhere to his plan.
This holds true with woman. With her newly acquired intellectual and
financial power she is seeking an outlet for her capacities. She sees
certain municipal and governmental ills. Having no direct power of
expression, no legal, political status in a country which claims to have
no political classes, she does what all disqualified, irresponsible,
dissatisfied classes of men have done before her when deprived of equal
opportunity with their fellows; she seeks by subterfuge (indirection)
or lawlessness to compass that which she may not attempt lawfully and
which, had she the steadying influence and discipline of responsibility
and power, she would not do.
Inexperience, coupled with irresponsibility and a lax sense of the
rights of others, always did and always will produce tyrants.
Unite this naturally produced and inevitable social and political
condition and outlook with the developed mental capacities and
consequent restless, undirected, and unabsorbed ambition of the women of
to-day, and we have a dangerous lobby--working in secret by indirection
and without open responsibility for their words, deed, or influence--to
handle in our Republic.