regiments of “Guards” which are the boast of the English army, and are
believed by their officers to be the finest troops in the world. They
have deteriorated in size since the Crimean war; but I believe that the
men of one regiment still average six feet two inches in height; and I
am sure that nobody ever saw them in line, without noticing the contrast
between these magnificent men and the comparatively puny officers who
command them. These officers are from the highest social rank in
England, the governing classes; and, if it were the whole object of this
military organization to give a visible proof of the utter absurdity of
the Saturday Review’s theory, it could not be better done. There is no
country in Europe, I suppose, where the hereditary aristocracy is
physically equal to that of England, or where the intellectual class has
so good a physique. But set either the House of Lords or the Saturday
Review contributors upon a hand-to-hand fight against an equal number of
“navvies” or “costermongers,” and the patricians would have about as
much chance as a crew of Vassar girls in a boat-race with Yale or
Harvard. Take the men of England alone, and it is hardly too much to say
that physical force, instead of being the basis of political power in
any class, is apt to be found in inverse ratio to it. In case of
revolution, the strength of the governing class in any country is not in
its physical, but in its mental power. Rank and money, and the power to
influence and organize and command, are merely different modifications
of mental training, brought to bear by somebody.
In our country, without class distinctions, the same truth can be easily
shown. Physical power lies mainly in the hands of the masses: wherever a
class or profession possesses more than its numerical share of power, it
has usually less than its proportion of physical vigor. This is easily
shown from the vast body of evidence collected during our civil war. In
the volume containing the medical statistics of the Provost Marshal
General’s Bureau, we have the tabulated reports of about 600,000 persons
subject to draft, and of about 500,000 recruits, substitutes, and
drafted men; showing the precise physical condition of more than a
million men.
It appears, that, out of the whole number examined, rather more than 257
in each 1,000 were found unfit for military service. It is curious to
see how generally the physical power among these men is in inverse ratio
to the social and political prominence of the class they represent. Out
of 1,000 unskilled laborers, for instance, only 348 are physically
disqualified; among tanners, only 216; among iron-workers, 189. On the
other hand, among lawyers, 544 out of 1,000 are disqualified; among
journalists, 740; among clergymen, 954. Grave divines are horrified at
the thought of admitting women to vote, when they cannot fight; though
not one of twenty of their own number is fit for military duty, if he
volunteered. Of the editors who denounce woman suffrage, only about one
in four could himself carry a musket; while, of the lawyers who fill
Congress, the majority could not be defenders of their country, but
could only be defended. If we were to distribute political power with
reference to the “physical basis” which the Saturday Review talks about,
it would be a wholly new distribution, and would put things more
hopelessly upside down than did the worst phase of the French Commune.
If, then, a political theory so utterly breaks down when applied to men,
why should we insist on resuscitating it in order to apply it to women?
The truth is, that, as civilization advances, the world is governed more
and more unequivocally by brains; and whether those brains are deposited
in a strong body or a weak one becomes a matter of less and less
importance. But it is only in the very first stage of barbarism that
mere physical strength makes mastery; and the long head has controlled
the long arm since the beginning of recorded time.
And it must be remembered that even these statistics very imperfectly
represent the case. They do not apply to the whole male sex, but
actually to the picked portion only, to the men presumed to be of
military age, excluding the very old and the very young. Were these
included, the proportion unfit for military duty would of course be far
greater. Moreover, it takes no account of courage or cowardice,
patriotism or zeal. How much all these considerations tell upon the
actual proportion, may be seen from the fact, that in the town where I
am writing, for instance, out of some twelve thousand inhabitants and
about three thousand voters, there are only some three hundred who
actually served in the civil war,—a number too small to exert a
perceptible influence on any local election. When we see the community
yielding up its voting power into the hands of those who have actually
done military service, it will be time enough to exclude women for not
doing such service. If the alleged physical basis operates as an
exclusion of all non-combatants, it should surely give a monopoly to the
actual combatants.
XCVI.
THE VOTES OF NON-COMBATANTS.
The tendency of modern society is not to concentrate power in the hands
of the few, but to give a greater and greater share to the many. Read
Froissart’s Chronicles, and Scott’s novels of chivalry, and you will see
how thoroughly the difference between patrician and plebeian was then a
difference of physical strength. The knight, being better nourished and
better trained, was apt to be the bodily superior of the peasant, to
begin with; and this strength was re-enforced by armor, weapons, horse,
castle, and all the resources of feudal warfare. With this greater
strength went naturally the assumption of greater political power. To
the heroes of “Ivanhoe,” or “The Fair Maid of Perth,” it would have
seemed as absurd that yeomen and lackeys should have any share in the
government, as it would seem to the members in an American legislature
that women should have any such share. In a contest of mailed knights,
any number of unarmed men were but so many women. As Sir Philip Sidney
said, “The wolf asketh not how many the sheep may be.”
But time and advancing civilization have tended steadily in one
direction. “He giveth power to the weak, and to them who have no might
He increaseth strength.” Every step in the extension of political rights
has consisted in opening them to a class hitherto humbler. From kings to
nobles, from nobles to burghers, from burghers to yeomen; in short, from
strong to weak, from high to low, from rich to poor. All this is but the
unconscious following-out of one sure principle,—that legislation is
mainly for the protection of the weak against the strong, and that for
this purpose the weak must be directly represented. The strong are
already protected by their strength: it is the weak who need all the
vantage-ground that votes and legislatures can give them. The feudal
chiefs were stronger without laws than with them. “Take care of
yourselves in Sutherland,” was the anxious message of the old
Highlander: “the law has come as far as Tain.” It was the peaceful
citizen who needed the guaranty of law against brute force.
But can laws be executed without brute force? Not without a certain
amount of it, but that amount under civilization grows less and less.
Just in proportion as the masses are enfranchised, statutes execute
themselves without crossing bayonets. “In a republic,” said De
Tocqueville, “if laws are not always respectable, they are always
respected.” If every step in freedom has brought about a more peaceable
state of society, why should that process stop at this precise point?
Besides, there is no possibility in nature of a political division in
which all the men shall be on one side and all the women on the other.
The mutual influence of the sexes forbids it. The very persons who hint
at such a fear refute themselves at other times, by arguing that “women
will always be sufficiently represented by men,” or that “every woman
will vote as her husband thinks, and it will merely double the numbers.”
As a matter of fact, the law will prevail in all English-speaking
nations: a few men fighting for it will be stronger than many fighting
against it; and, if those few have both the law and the women on their
side, there will be no trouble.
The truth is, that, in this age, _cedant arma togæ_: it is the civilian
who rules on the throne or behind it, and who makes the fighting-men his
mere agents. Yonder policeman at the corner looks big and formidable: he
protects the women, and overawes the boys. But away in some corner of
the City Hall, there is some quiet man, out of uniform, perhaps a
consumptive or a dyspeptic or a cripple, who can overawe the burliest
policeman by his authority as city marshal or as mayor. So an army is
but a larger police; and its official head is that plain man at the
White House, who makes or unmakes, not merely brevet-brigadiers, but
major-generals in command,—who can by the stroke of the pen convert the
most powerful man of the army into the most powerless. Take away the
occupant of the position, and put in a woman, and will she become
impotent because her name is Elizabeth or Maria Theresa? It is brains
that more and more govern the world; and whether those brains be on the
throne, or at the ballot-box, they will soon make the owner’s sex a
subordinate affair. If woman is also strong in the affections, so much
the better. “Win the hearts of your subjects,” said Lord Burleigh to
Queen Elizabeth, “and you will have their hands and purses.”
War is the last appeal, and happily in these days the rarest appeal, of
statesmanship. In the multifarious other duties that make up
statesmanship, we cannot spare the brains, the self-devotion, and the
enthusiasm, of woman. One of the most important treaties of modern
history, the peace of Cambray, in 1529, was negotiated, after previous
attempts had failed, by two women,—Margaret, aunt of Charles V., and
Louisa, mother of Francis I. Voltaire said that Christina of Sweden was
the only sovereign of her time who maintained the dignity of the throne
against Mazarin and Richelieu. Frederick the Great said that the Seven
Years’ War was waged against three women,—Elizabeth of Russia, Maria
Theresa, and Mme. Pompadour. There is nothing impotent in the
statesmanship of women when they are admitted to exercise it: they are
only powerless for good when they are obliged to obtain by wheedling and
flattery a sway that should be recognized, responsible, and limited.
XCVII.
“MANNERS REPEAL LAWS.”
There is in Boswell’s Life of Johnson a correspondence which is well
worth reading by both advocates and opponents of woman suffrage.
Boswell, who was of an old Scotch family, had a difference of opinion
with his father about an entailed estate which had descended to them.
Boswell wished the title so adjusted as to cut off all possibility of
female heirship. His father, on the other hand, wished to recognize such
a contingency. Boswell wrote to Johnson in 1776 for advice, urging a
series of objections, physiological and moral, to the inheritance of a
family estate by a woman; though, as he magnanimously admits, “they
should be treated with great affection and tenderness, and always
participate of the prosperity of the family.”
Dr. Johnson, for a wonder, took the other side, defended female
heirship, and finally summed up thus: “It cannot but occur that women
have natural and equitable claims as well as men, and these claims are
not to be capriciously or lightly superseded or infringed. When fiefs
inspired military service, it is easily discerned why females could not
inherit them; but the reason is at an end. _As manners make laws, so
manners likewise repeal them._”
This admirable statement should be carefully pondered by those who hold
that suffrage should be only co-extensive with military duty. The
position that woman cannot properly vote because she cannot fight for
her vote efficiently, is precisely like the position of feudalism and of
Boswell, that she could not properly hold real estate because she could
not fight for it. Each position may have had some plausibility in its
day, but the same current of events has made each obsolete. Those who in
1881 believe in giving woman the ballot argue precisely as Dr. Johnson
did in 1776. Times have changed, manners have softened, education has
advanced, public opinion now acts more forcibly; and the reference to
physical force, though still implied, is implied more and more remotely.
The political event of the age, the overthrow of American slavery, would
not have been accomplished without the “secular arm” of Grant and
Sherman, let us agree; but neither would it have been accomplished
without the moral power of Garrison the non-resistant, and Harriet
Beecher Stowe the woman. When the work is done, it is unfair to
disfranchise any of the participants. Dr. Johnson was right: “When fiefs
[or votes] implied military service, it is easily discerned why women
should not inherit [or possess] them; but the reason is at an end. As
manners make laws, so manners likewise repeal them.”
Under the feudal system it would have been absurd that women should hold
real estate, for the next armed warrior could dispossess her. By Gail
Hamilton’s reasoning, it is equally absurd now: “One man is stronger
than one woman, and ten men are stronger than ten women; and the
nineteen millions of men in this country will subdue, capture, and
execute or expel the nineteen millions of women just as soon as they set
about it.” Very well: why, then, do not all the landless men in a town
unite, and take away the landed property of all the women? Simply
because we now live in civilized society and under a reign of law;
because those men’s respect for law is greater than their appetite for
property; or, if you prefer, because even those landless men know that
their own interest lies, in the long-run, on the side of law. It will be
precisely the same with voting. When any community is civilized up to
the point of enfranchising women, it will be civilized up to the point
of sustaining their vote, as it now sustains their property-rights, by
the whole material force of the community. When the thing is once
established, it will no more occur to anybody that a woman’s vote is
powerless because she cannot fight, than it now occurs to anybody that
her title to real estate is invalidated by the same circumstance.
Woman is in the world; she cannot be got rid of: she must be a serf or
an equal; there is no middle ground. We have outgrown the theory of
serfdom in a thousand ways, and may as well abandon the whole. Women
have now a place in society: their influence will be exerted, at any
rate, in war and in peace, legally or illegally; and it had better be
exerted in direct, legitimate, and responsible methods, than in ways
that are dark, and by tricks that have not even the merit of being
plain.
XCVIII.
KILKENNY ARGUMENTS.
It always helps a good cause when its opponents are in the position of
the famous Kilkenny cats, and mutually eat each other up. In the
anti-slavery movement, it was justly urged that the slaves might
possibly be (as slaveholders alleged) a race of petted children, whose
hearts could not possibly be alienated from their masters; or they might
be (as was also alleged by slaveholders) a race of fiends, whom a
whisper could madden: but they could not well be both. Every claim that
the negro was happy was stultified by that other claim, that the South
was dwelling on a barrel of gunpowder, and that the mildest anti-slavery
tract meant fire and explosion. The twin arguments saved abolitionists a
great deal of trouble. Either by itself would have required an answer;
but the two answered each other,—devoured each other, in fact, like the
Kilkenny cats.
So, whenever the advocates of woman suffrage are assailed on the ground
that women are too superstitious, and will, if enfranchised, be governed
by religion and the Church alone, there is always sure to come in some
obliging advocate with his “Besides, the tendency of the movement is to
utter lawlessness, to the destruction of religion, the marriage-vows,
the home”—and all the rest of it. The boy in the story is hardly more
selfcontradictory, when, in answer to his friend’s appeal for his
jack-knife, he replies, “I haven’t any. Besides, I want to use it.”
Here, for instance, is Mr. Nathan N. Withington of Newbury, Mass., who
in an address on woman suffrage, while waiving many arguments against
it, plants himself strongly on the ground that it must be fatal to the
family. “No one whose opinion is worth reckoning, with whom I have
talked on the matter, ever denied entirely that the logical result of
the movement was what is called free love.” My inference would be, in
passing, that my old neighbor Mr. Withington must confine himself to a
very narrow circle, in the way of conversation; or, that he must find
nobody’s opinion “worth reckoning” if it differs from his own. Certainly
I have talked with hardly an advocate of woman suffrage in New England
who would not deny entirely—and with a good deal of emphasis—any such
assumptions as he here makes. But let that go: the subject has already
been discussed far more than its intrinsic importance required; and
convention after convention has taken unnecessary pains to refute a
charge more baseless than the slaveholders’ fears of insurrection. What
I wish to point out is, that such charges have, in one way, great value:
they precisely neutralize and utterly annihilate the equally baseless
terror of “Too superstitious.”
If it is true, as is sometimes alleged, that women are constitutionally
under the dominion of religion and the Church, then it is pretty sure,
that, under these auspices, the moral restraints of the community, as
marriage and the home, will be maintained. If it is true on the other
hand, as Mr. Withington honestly thinks, that the tendency of woman
suffrage is to create a deluge that shall sweep away the home, then it
is certain that all vestiges of churchly superstition will be swamped in
the process. The logical outcome of the movement may be, if you please,
to establish the Spanish Inquisition or to bring back the horrors of the
French Revolution, but it seems clear that it cannot simultaneously
bring both. The advocates of both theories are equally sincere,
doubtless, in their predictions of alarm; but one set of alarmists or
the other set of alarmists must be wofully disappointed when the time
comes. And, if either, why not both?
The simple fact is, that whosoever draws upon his imagination, for
possible disasters from any particular measure, has a great fund at his
disposal, whether he looks right or left. He has always this advantage
over the practical reformer, that whereas the claims of the reformer
are, or should be, definite, coherent, practical, the opponent can, if
he wishes, have the whole cloudy domain of possibility to draw upon: he
can marshal an army in the atmosphere, while the practical reformer must
stay on earth. It is a comfort when two of these nebulous armies of
imaginary obstacles fight in the air, as in the present case, like the
shadowy hosts in Kaulbach’s great cartoon; and so destroy one another,
bringing back clear sky.
Woman needs the ballot for self-respect and self-protection, and to do
her share for the education and moral safety of the children she bears.
This is enough to begin with. In seeking after this we have firm
foothold. The old Eastern fable describes a certain man as finding a
horse-shoe. His neighbor soon begins to weep and wail, because, as he
justly points out, the man who has found a horse-shoe may some day find
a horse, and may shoe him; and the neighbor’s child may some day go so
near the horse’s heels as to be kicked, and die; and then the two
families may quarrel and fight, and several valuable lives be lost
through that finding of a horse-shoe. The gradual advancement of women
must meet many fancies as far-fetched as this, and must see them
presented as arguments; and we must be very grateful if they prove
Kilkenny arguments, and destroy one another.
XCIX.
WOMEN AND PRIESTS.
The chief reason given by the Italian radicals for not supporting woman
suffrage was the alleged readiness of women to accept the control of the
priests. The same objection has, before now, been heard in other
countries,—in France, England, and America. John Bright, especially,
made it the ground of his opposition to a movement in which several
members of his family have been much engaged. The same point of view was
presented, in this country, several years ago, by Mr. Abbot of the
Index. But to how much, after all, does this objection amount?
No one doubts that the religious sentiment seems stronger in women than
in men; but it must be remembered that this sentiment has been
laboriously encouraged by men, while the field of action allowed to
women has been sedulously circumscribed, and her intellectual education
every way restricted. It is no wonder if, under these circumstances, she
has gone where she has been welcomed, and not where she has been
snubbed. Priests were glad to hail her as a saint, while legislators and
professors joined in repelling her as a student or a reformer. What
wonder that she turned from the study or the law-making of the world to
its religion? But in all this, whose was the fault,—hers, or those who
took charge of her? If she did not trust the clergy, who alone
befriended her, whom should she trust?
But observe that the clergy of all ages, in concentrating the strength
of woman on her religious nature, have summoned up a power that they
could not control. When they had once lost the confidence of those ruled
by this mighty religious sentiment, it was turned against them. In the
Greek and Roman worship, women were the most faithful to the altars of
the gods; yet, when Christianity arose, the foremost martyrs were women.
In the Middle Ages women were the best Catholics, but they were
afterwards the best Huguenots. It was a woman, not a man, who threw her
stool at the offending minister’s head in a Scotch kirk; it was a woman
who made the best Quaker martyr on Boston Common. And, from vixenish
Jenny Geddes to high-minded Mary Dyer, the whole range of womanly
temperament responds as well to the appeal of religious freedom as of
religious slavery. It is religion that woman needs, men say; but they
omit to see that the strength of her religious sentiment is seen when
she resists her clerical advisers as well as when she adores them or
pets them. Frances Wright and Lucretia Mott are facts to be considered,
quite as much as the matrons and maids who work ecclesiastical slippers,
and hold fancy fairs to send their favorite clergymen to Europe.
At any rate, if the clergy still retain too much of their control, the
evil is not to be corrected by leaving the whole matter in their hands.
The argument itself must be turned the other way. Women need the mental
training of science to balance the over-sympathy of religion; they need
to participate in statesmanship to develop the practical side of their
lives. We are outgrowing the sarcasm of the Frenchman who said that in
America there were but two amusements,—politics for the men, and
religion for the women. When both women and men learn to mingle the two
more equally, both politics and religion will become something more than
an amusement.
C.
THE ROMAN CATHOLIC BUGBEAR.
“Those who wish the Roman Catholic Church to subvert our school
system, control legislation, and become a mighty political force,
cannot do better than labor day and night for woman suffrage. This,
it is true, is opposed to every principle and tradition of that
great church, which nevertheless would reap from it immense
benefits. The priests have little influence over a considerable part
of their male flock; but their power is great over the women, who
would repair to the polls at the word of command, with edifying
docility and zeal.”—FRANCIS PARKMAN _on “The Woman Question” in
North American Review_, September, 1879.