Part 21

It is easy, I think, to show that the theory is utterly false, and that the basis of civilized society is not physical force, but, on the contrary, brains.

In the city where the Saturday Review is published, there are three 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.