Part 16

These are some of the simple hints that might be given, in answer to inquiring friends. I can remember when they would have saved me some anguish of spirit; and they may be of some use to others now. I write, then, not to induce any one to talk for the sake of talking,—Heaven forbid!—but that those who are longing to say something should not fancy the obstacles insurmountable, when they are really slight.

PRINCIPLES OF GOVERNMENT.

“That liberty, or freedom, consists in having an actual share in the appointment of those who frame the laws, and who are to be the guardians of every man’s life, property, and peace; for the all of one man is as dear to him as the all of another, and the poor man has an equal right, but more need, to have representatives in the legislature than the rich one. That they who have no voice nor vote in the electing of representatives do not enjoy liberty, but are absolutely enslaved to those who have votes, and to their representatives; for to be enslaved is to have governors whom other men have set over us, and be subject to laws made by the representatives of others, without having had representatives of our own to give consent in our behalf.”—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, _in Sparks’s Franklin_, ii. 372.

LXXII. WE THE PEOPLE.

I remember, that, when I went to school, I used to look with wonder on the title of a newspaper of those days which was often in the hands of one of the older scholars. I remember nothing else about the newspaper, or about the boy, except that the title of the sheet he used to unfold was “We the People;” and that he derived from it his school nickname, by a characteristic boyish parody, and was usually mentioned as “Us the Folks.”

Probably all that was taught in that school, in regard to American history, was not of so much value as the permanent fixing of this phrase in our memories. It seemed very natural, in later years, to come upon my old friend “Us the Folks,” reproduced in almost every charter of our national government, as thus:—

“WE THE PEOPLE of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”—_United States Constitution, Preamble._

“WE THE PEOPLE of Maine do agree,” etc.—_Constitution of Maine._

“All government of right originates from THE PEOPLE, is founded in their consent, and instituted for the general good.”—_Constitution of New Hampshire._

“The body politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals; it is a social compact, by which THE WHOLE PEOPLE covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good.”—_Constitution of Massachusetts._

“WE THE PEOPLE of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations ... do ordain and establish this constitution of government.”—_Constitution of Rhode Island._

“THE PEOPLE of Connecticut do, in order more effectually to define, secure, and perpetuate the liberties, rights, and privileges which they have derived from their ancestors, hereby ordain and establish the following constitution and form of civil government.”—_Constitution of Connecticut._

And so on through the constitutions of almost every State in the Union. Our government is, as Lincoln said, “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” There is no escaping it. To question this is to deny the foundations of the American government. Granted that those who framed these provisions may not have understood the full extent of the principles they announced. No matter: they gave us those principles; and, having them, we must apply them.

Now, women may be voters or not, citizens or not; but that they are a part of the people, no one has denied in Christendom—however it may be in Japan, where, as Mrs. Leonowens tells us, the census of population takes in only men, and the women and children are left to be inferred. “WE THE PEOPLE,” then, includes women. Be the superstructure what it may, the foundation of the government clearly provides a place for them: it is impossible to state the national theory in such a way that it shall not include them. It is impossible to deny the natural right of women to vote, except on grounds which exclude all natural right. Dr. Bushnell, in annihilating, as he thinks, the claims of women to the ballot, annihilates the rights of the community as a whole, male or female. He may not be consistent enough to allow this, but Mr. Wasson is. That keen destructive strikes at the foundation of the building, and aims to demolish “We the people” altogether.

The fundamental charters are on our side. There are certain statute limitations which may prove greater or less. But these are temporary and trivial things, always to be interpreted, often to be modified, by reference to the principles of the Constitution. For instance, when a constitutional convention is to be held, or new conditions of suffrage to be created, the whole people should vote upon the matter, including those not hitherto enfranchised. This is the view insisted on, a few years since, by that eminent jurist, William Beach Lawrence. He maintained, in a letter to Charles Sumner and in opposition to his own party, that if the question of “negro suffrage” in the Southern States of the Union were put to vote, the colored people themselves had a natural right to vote on the question. The same is true of women. It should never be forgotten by advocates of woman suffrage, that, the deeper their reasonings go, the stronger foundation they find; and that we have always a solid fulcrum for our lever in that phrase of our charters, “We the people.”

LXXIII. THE USE OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.

When young people begin to study geometry, they expect to begin with hard reasoning on the very first page. To their surprise, they find that the first few pages are not occupied by reasoning, but by a few simple, easy, and rather commonplace sentences, called “axioms,” which are really a set of pegs on which all the reasoning is hung. Pupils are not expected to go back in every demonstration, and prove the axioms. If Almira Jones happens to be doing a problem at the blackboard on examination-day, at the high school, and remarks in the course of her demonstration that “things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another,” and if a sharp questioner jumps up, and says, “How do you know it?” she simply lays down her bit of chalk, and says fearlessly, “That is an axiom,” and the teacher sustains her. Some things must be taken for granted.

The same service rendered by axioms in the geometry is supplied, in regard to government, by the simple principles of the Declaration of Independence. Right or wrong, they are taken for granted. Inasmuch as all the legislation of the country is supposed to be based in them,—they stating the theory of our government, while the Constitution itself only puts into organic shape the application,—we must all begin with them. It is a great convenience, and saves great trouble in all reforms. To the Abolitionists, for instance, what an inestimable labor-saving machine was the Declaration of Independence! Let them have that, and they asked no more. Even the brilliant lawyer Rufus Choate, when confronted with its plain provisions, could only sneer at them as “glittering generalities,” which was equivalent to throwing down his brief, and throwing up his case. It was an admission, that, if you were so foolish as to insist on applying the first principles of the government, it was all over with him.

Now, the whole doctrine of woman suffrage follows so directly from these same political axioms, that they are especially convenient for women to have in the house. When the Declaration of Independence enumerates as among “self-evident” truths the fact of governments “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” then that point may be considered as settled. In this school-examination of maturer life, in this grown-up geometry-class, the student is not to be called upon by the committee to prove that. She may rightfully lay down her demonstrating chalk, and say, “That is an axiom. You admit that yourselves.”

It is a great convenience. We cannot always be going back, like a Hindoo history, to the foundations of the world. Some things may be taken for granted. How this simple axiom sweeps away, for instance, the cobweb speculations as to whether voting is a natural right, or a privilege delegated by society! No matter which. Take it which way you please. That is an abstract question; but the practical question is a very simple one. “Governments owe their just powers to the consent of the governed.” Either that axiom is false, or, whenever women as a class refuse their consent to the present exclusively masculine government, it can no longer claim just powers. The remedy then may be rightly demanded, which the Declaration of Independence goes on to state: “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

This is the use of the Declaration of Independence. Women, as a class, may not be quite ready to use it. It is the business of this book to help make them ready. But, so far as they are ready, these plain provisions are the axioms of their political faith. If the axioms mean any thing for men, they mean something for women. If men deride the axioms, it is a concession, like that of Rufus Choate, that these fundamental principles are very much in their way. But, so long as the sentences stand in that document, they can be made useful. If men try to get away from the arguments of women by saying, “But suppose we have nothing in our theory of government which requires us to grant your demand?” then women can answer, as the straightforward Traddles answered Uriah Heep, “But you have, you know: therefore, if you please, we won’t suppose any such thing.”

LXXIV. THE TRADITIONS OF THE FATHERS.

It is fortunate for reformers that our fathers were clear-headed men. If they did not foresee all the applications of their own principles,—and who does?—they at least stated those principles very distinctly. This is a great convenience to us who preach, in season and out of season, on the texts they gave. Thus we are constantly told, “You are mistaken in thinking that the fathers of the Republic, when they proclaimed ‘taxation without representation,’ referred to individual rights. They were speaking only of national rights. They fought for national independence, not for personal rights at all.”

It is in order to refute this sort of reasoning that women very often need to read American history afresh. They will soon be satisfied that such reasoning may be met with a plain, distinct denial. It is contrary to the facts. The plain truth is, that our fathers not only did not make national independence their exclusive aim, but they did not make it an aim at all until the war had actually begun. “I verily believe,” wrote the brave Dr. Warren, “that the night preceding the barbarous outrages committed by the soldiery at Lexington, Concord, etc., there were not fifty people in the whole colony that ever expected any blood would be shed in the contest between us and Great Britain.”

What was it, then, that had kept the colonists in a turmoil for years? Let us see.

On Monday, the 6th of March, 1775, the “freeholders and other inhabitants of Boston” met in town-meeting at Faneuil Hall, Samuel Adams being moderator. The committee appointed, the year before, to appoint an orator “to perpetuate the memory of the horrid massacre perpetrated on the evening of the 5th of March, 1770, by a party of soldiers,” reported that they had selected Joseph Warren, Esq. The meeting confirmed this, and adjourned to meet at the Old South at half-past eleven, Faneuil Hall being too small. At the appointed hour, the church was crowded. The pulpit was draped in black. Forty British officers, in uniform, sat in the front pews or on the gallery-stairs. So great was the crowd, that Warren, in his orator’s robe, entered the pulpit by a ladder through the window. He stood there before the representatives of royalty, and in defiance of the “Regulating Act,” one of whose objects was to suppress meetings for any such purpose. What doctrines did he stand there to proclaim?

Richard Frothingham in his admirable “Life of Warren”[14] states the following as the fundamental proposition of this celebrated address:—

Footnote 14:

p. 430.

“That personal freedom is the right of every man, and that property, or an exclusive right to dispose of what he has honestly acquired by his own labor, necessarily arises therefrom, are truths which common-sense has placed beyond the reach of contradiction; and no man or body of men can, without being guilty of flagrant injustice, claim a right to dispose of the persons or acquisitions of any other man, or body of men, unless it can be proved that such a right had arisen from some compact between the parties in which it has been explicitly and freely granted.”

“The orator then traced,” says Frothingham, “the rise and progress of the aggressions on the natural right of the colonists to enjoy personal freedom and representative government.” Not a word in behalf of national independence: on the contrary, he said, “An independence on Great Britain is not our aim. No: our wish is that Britain and the colonies may, like the oak and ivy, grow and increase together.” What he protested against was the taking of individual property without granting the owner a voice in it, personally or through some authorized representative. And—observe!—this authorization must not be a merely negative or vaguely understood thing: it must be attested by “some compact between the parties in which it has been explicitly and freely granted.” Any thing short of this was “a wicked policy,” under whose influence the American had begun to behold the Briton as a ruffian, ready “first to take his property, and next, what is dearer to every virtuous man, the liberty of his country.” The loss of the country’s liberty was thus staked as a result, a deduction, a corollary; the original offence lay in the violation of the natural right of each to control his own personal freedom and personal property, or else, if these must be subordinated to the public good, to have at least a voice in the matter. This, and nothing else than this, was the principle of those who fought the Revolution, according to the statement of their first eminent martyr.

And it was for announcing these great doctrines, and for sealing them, three months later, with his blood, that it was said of him, on the fifth of March following, “We will erect a monument to thee in each of our grateful hearts, and to the latest ages will teach our tender infants to lisp the name of Warren with veneration and applause.” That the opinions he expressed were the opinions current among the people, is proved by the general use of the cry “ Liberty and Property” among all classes, at the time of the Stamp Act; a cry which puzzles the young student, until he sees that the Revolution really began with personal rights, and only slowly reached the demand for national independence. “Liberty and Property” was just as distinctly the claim of Joseph Warren as it is the claim of those women who now refuse to pay taxes because they believe in the principles of the American Revolution.

LXXV. SOME OLD-FASHIONED PRINCIPLES.

There has been an effort, lately, to show that when our fathers said, “Taxation without representation is tyranny,” they referred not to personal liberties, but to the freedom of a state from foreign power. It is fortunate that this criticism has been made, for it has led to a more careful examination of passages; and this has made it clear, beyond dispute, that the Revolutionary patriots carried their statements more into detail than is generally supposed, and affirmed their principles for individuals, not merely for the state as a whole.

In that celebrated pamphlet by James Otis, for instance, published as early as 1764, “The Rights of the Colonies Vindicated,” he thus clearly lays down the rights of the individual as to taxation:—

“The very act of taxing, exercised over those who are not represented, appears to me to be depriving them of one of their most essential rights as freemen; and, if continued, seems to be, in effect, an entire disfranchisement of every civil right. For what one civil right is worth a rush, after a man’s property is subject to be taken from him at pleasure, without his consent? If a man is not his own assessor, in person or by deputy, his liberty is gone, or he is entirely at the mercy of others.”[15]

Footnote 15:

Otis: Rights of the Colonies, p. 58.

This fine statement has already done duty for liberty, in another contest; for it was quoted by Mr. Sumner in his speech of March 7, 1866, with this commentary:—

“Stronger words for universal suffrage could not be employed. His argument is, that, if men are taxed without being represented, they are deprived of essential rights; and the continuance of this deprivation despoils them of every civil right, thus making the latter depend upon the right of suffrage, which by a neologism of our day is known as a political right instead of a civil right. Then, to give point to this argument, the patriot insists that in determining taxation, ‘every man must be his own assessor, in person or by deputy,’ without which his liberty is entirely at the mercy of others. Here, again, in a different form, is the original thunderbolt, ‘Taxation without representation is tyranny;’ and the claim is made not merely for communities, but for ‘every man.’”

In a similar way wrote Benjamin Franklin, some six years after, in that remarkable sheet found among his papers, and called “Declaration of those Rights of the Commonalty of Great Britain, without which they cannot be free.” The leading propositions were these three:—

“That every man of the commonalty (excepting infants, insane persons, and criminals) is of common right and by the laws of God a freeman, and entitled to the free enjoyment of liberty. That liberty, or freedom, consists in having an actual share in the appointment of those who frame the laws, and who are to be the guardians of every man’s life, property, and peace; for the all of one man is as dear to him as the all of another; and the poor man has an equal right, but more need, to have representatives in the legislature than the rich one. That they who have no voice nor vote in the electing of representatives do not enjoy liberty, but are absolutely enslaved to those who have votes, and to their representatives; for to be enslaved is to have governors whom other men have set over us, and be subject to laws made by the representatives of others, without having had representatives of our own to give consent in our behalf.”[16]

Footnote 16:

Sparks’s Franklin, ii. 372.

In quoting these words of Dr. Franklin, his latest biographer feels moved to add, “These principles, so familiar to us now and so obviously just, were startling and incredible novelties in 1770, abhorrent to nearly all Englishmen, and to great numbers of Americans.” Their fair application is still abhorrent to a great many; or else, not willing quite to deny the theory, they limit the application by some such device as “virtual representation.” Here, again, James Otis is ready for them; and Charles Sumner is ready to quote Otis, as thus:—

“No such phrase as virtual representation was ever known in law or constitution. It is altogether a subtlety and illusion, wholly unfounded and absurd. We must not be cheated by any such phantom, or any other fiction of law or politics, or any monkish trick of deceit or blasphemy.”

These are the sharp words used by the patriot Otis, speaking of those who were trying to convince American citizens that they were virtually represented in Parliament. Sumner applied the same principle to the freedmen: it is now applied to women. “Taxation without representation is tyranny.” “Virtual representation is altogether a subtlety and illusion, wholly unfounded and absurd.” No ingenuity, no evasion, can give any escape from these plain principles. Either you must revoke the maxims of the American Revolution, or you must enfranchise woman. Stuart Mill well says in his autobiography, “The interest of woman is included in that of man exactly as much (and no more) as that of subjects in that of kings.”

LXXVI. FOUNDED ON A ROCK.

Gov. Long’s letter on woman suffrage is of peculiar value, as recalling us to the simple principles of “right,” on which alone the agitation can be solidly founded. The ground once taken by many, that women as women would be sure to act on a far higher political plane than men as men, is now urged less than formerly: the very mistakes and excesses of the agitation itself have partially disproved it. No cause can safely sustain itself on the hypothesis that all its advocates are saints and sages; but a cause that is based on a principle rests on a rock.

If there is any one who is recognized as a fair exponent of our national principles, it is our martyr-president Abraham Lincoln; whom Lowell calls, in his noble Commemoration Ode at Cambridge,—

“New birth of our new soil, the first American.”

What President Lincoln’s political principle was, we know. On his journey to Washington for his first inauguration, he said, “I have never had a feeling that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” To find out what was his view of those sentiments, we must go back several years earlier, and consider that remarkable letter of his to the Boston Republicans who had invited him to join them in celebrating Jefferson’s birthday, in April, 1859. It was well called by Charles Sumner “a gem in political literature;” and it seems to me almost as admirable, in its way, as the Gettysburg address.

“The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society. And yet they are denied and evaded with no small show of success. One dashingly calls them ‘glittering generalities.’ Another bluntly styles them ‘self-evident lies.’ And others insidiously argue that they apply only to ‘superior races.’”

“These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect,—the subverting the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned heads plotting against the people. They are the vanguard, the sappers and miners of returning despotism. We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us.”

“All honor to Jefferson!—the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document _an abstract truth applicable to all men and all times_, and so to embalm it there that to-day and in all coming days it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”