Part 18

Much of the new demand for political enfranchisement arises from a desire to remedy the unsatisfactory and degrading social conditions which are responsible for so much wrongdoing and wretchedness. The fate of all the unfortunate, the suffering, the criminal, is daily forced upon public attention in painful and intimate ways. But because of the tendency to nationalize all industrial and commercial questions, to make the state responsible for the care of the helpless, to safeguard by law the food we eat and the liquid we drink, to subordinate the claim of the individual family to the health and well-being of the community, contemporary women who are without the franchise are much more outside the real life of the world than any set of disenfranchised men could possibly have been in all history, unless it were the men slaves of ancient Greece, because never before has so large an area of life found civic expression, never has Hegel's definition of the state been so accurate, that it is the "realization of the moral ideal." Certain it is that the phenomenal entrance of women into governmental responsibility in the dawn of the twentieth century is coincident with the consideration by governmental bodies of the basic human interests with which women have been traditionally concerned. A most advanced German statesman recently declared in the Reichstag that it was a reproach to the Imperial Government itself that out of two million children born annually in Germany, 400,000 died during the first twelve months of their existence. He proceeded to catalog various reforms which might remedy this, such as better housing, the increase of park areas, the erection of municipal hospitals, the provision for an adequate milk supply, and many another, but he did not make the very obvious suggestion that women might be of service in a situation involving the care of children less than a year old.

Nevertheless, in spite of this lack of perception, women all over the world are claiming and receiving a place in representative government because they insist that they will not cease to perform their traditional duties, simply because these duties have been taken over by existing governments.

The contemporaneous "Votes for Women" movement is often amorphous and sporadic, but always spontaneous. It not only appears simultaneously in various countries, but manifests itself in widely separated groups in the same country; in every city it embraces the "smart set" and the hard-driven working women; sometimes it is sectarian and dogmatic, at others philosophic and grandiloquent, but it is always vital and constantly becoming more widespread.

In certain aspects it differs from former efforts to extend the franchise. We recall that the final entrance of the middle class into government was characterized by two dramatic revolutions, one in America and one in France, neither of them without bloodshed, and that although the final efforts of the working men were more peaceful, even in restrained England the Chartists burned hayricks and destroyed town property. This world-wide entrance into government on the part of women is happily a bloodless one. Although some glass has been broken in England it is noteworthy that the movement as a whole has been without even a semblance of violence. The creed of the movement, however, is similar to that promulgated by the doctrinaires of the eighteenth century: that if increasing the size of the governing body automatically increases the variety and significance of government, then only when all the people become the governing class can the collective resources and organizations of the community be consistently utilized for the common weal.

DAVID LLOYD-GEORGE

I have long been a convinced advocate of woman suffrage and am now firmer than ever in supporting it. It seems to me a necessary and desirable consequence of the vast extension of the functions of Government which the past century and a half has witnessed. The state, nowadays, enters the homes of the people and insists on having a voice in questions that individual men and women, acting together, taking counsel together, used to settle for themselves in their own way. Education and the training and feeding of children, the housing and sanitation problems, provision against old age and sickness, the prevention of disease--all these are questions that formerly were dealt with, of course, in a very isolated and inadequate way, by cooperation and discussion between the heads of each household. What reason is there why the same cooperation should not continue now that these matters have been raised to the sphere of legislative enactments and official administration?

Laws to-day affect the interests of women just as deeply as they do the interests of men. Some laws--many laws--affect them more gravely and intimately; and I do not believe you can trust the welfare of a class or a sex entirely to another class or sex. It is not that their interests are not identical, but that their point of view is different. Take the housing problem. A working man leaves home in the morning within half an hour after he wakes. He is not there all day. He turns up in the evening and does not always remain there. If the house is a poor, uncomfortable, dismal one, he very often seeks consolation in the glare and warmth of the nearest public-house, but he takes very good care that the wife shall not do as he does. She has got to stay at home all day, however wretched her surroundings. Who can say that her experience, her point of view, is not much better worth consulting than her husband's on the housing problem? Up to the present the only and the whole share of women in the housing question has been suffering. Slums are often the punishment of the man. They are almost always the martyrdom of the woman. Give women the vote, give them an effective part in the framing and administration of the laws which touch not merely their own lives but the lives of their children, and they will soon, I believe, cleanse the land of these foul dens.

All sorts of women's interests were affected by the National Insurance Act, and all sorts of questions sprang up in connection with it on which women alone could speak with real authority. But, being voteless, there was no way in which their views could be authoritatively set forth. Four million women workers and seven million married women have come under the operation of the Act, yet not one of them was given the opportunity of making their opinions known and felt through a representative in the House of Commons. It was the experience of every friendly society official I consulted that had it not been for the women and their splendid self-sacrifice, the subscriptions of the men would have lapsed long ago. Yet these women who had thus kept the societies going were not considered worth consulting as to their status under the Act. The House of Commons itself insisted on there being at least one woman Commissioner. But if a woman is fit to be a Commissioner--a very heavy and difficult position involving enormous responsibilities and demanding great skill and judgment and experience--how can she be said to be unfit to have a vote?

What is the meaning of democracy? It is that the citizens who are expected to obey the law are those who make the law. But that is not true of Great Britain. At least half the adult citizens whose lives are deeply affected by every law that is carried on the statute-books have absolutely no voice in making that law. They have no more influence in the matter than the horses that drag their lords and masters to the polling-booth.

The drunken loafer who has not earned a living for years is consulted by the Constitution on questions like the training and upbringing of children, the national settlement of religion in Wales and elsewhere, and as to the best method of dealing with the licensing problem. But the wife whose industry keeps him and his household from beggary, who pays the rent and taxes which constitute him a voter, who is therefore really responsible for his qualification to vote, is not taken into account in the slightest degree. I came in contact not long ago with a great girls' school in the south of England. It was founded by women, and it is administered by women. It is one of the most marvelous organizations in the whole country, and yet, when we had, in the year 1906, to give a national verdict on the question of education, the man who split the firewood in that school was asked for his opinion about it, while those ladies were deemed to be absolutely unfit to pass any judgment on it at all. That is a preposterous and barbarous anachronism, and so long as it lasts our democracy is one-sided and incomplete. But it will not last long. No franchise bill can ever again be brought forward in this country without raising the whole problem of whether you are going to exclude more than half the citizens of the land. Women have entered pretty nearly every sphere of commerce and industry and professional activity and public employment; and there never was a time when the nation stood more in need of the special experience, instincts, and sympathy of womanhood in the management of its affairs. When women get the vote the horizon of the home will be both brightened and expanded, and their influence on moral and social and educational questions, especially on the temperance question, and possibly on the peace of nations, will be constant and humanizing.

Those are a few of the reasons why I favor woman suffrage. But because I favor it I do not therefore hold myself bound to either speak or vote for any and every suffrage bill that may be introduced into Parliament. I voted against the so-called Conciliation Bill which proposed to give the vote to every woman of property if she chose to take the trouble to get it, and at the same time enfranchise only about one-tenth or one-fifteenth of the working women of the country. That was simply a roundabout way of doubling the plural voters and no democrat could possibly support it, so long as there remained a single alternative. The solution that most appeals to me is the one embodied in the Dickinson Bill, that is to say, a measure conferring the vote on women householders and on the wives of married electors; and I believe that it is in that form that woman suffrage will eventually come in this country. How soon it will come depends very largely on how soon the militants come to their senses.

I say, unhesitatingly, that the main obstacle to women getting the vote is militancy and nothing else. Its practitioners really seem to think that they can terrorize and pinprick Parliament into giving it to them; and until they learn something of the people they are dealing with, their whole agitation, so far as the House of Commons is concerned, is simply and utterly damned. It is perfectly astonishing to recall with what diabolical ingenuity they have contrived to infuriate all their opponents, to alienate all their sympathizers, and to stir up against themselves every prejudice in the average man's breast. A few years ago they found three-fourths of the Liberal M.P.'s on their side. They at once proceeded to cudgel their brains as to how they could possibly drive them into the enemy's camp. They rightly decided that this could not be done more effectually than by insulting and assaulting the Prime Minister, the chief of the Party, and a leader for whom all his colleagues and followers feel an unbounded admiration, regard, and affection. When they had thus successfully estranged the majority of Liberals they began to study the political situation a little more closely. They saw that the Irish Nationalists were very powerful factors in the Ministerial Coalition. The next problem, therefore, was how to destroy the last chance that the Irish Nationalists would support their cause. They achieved this triumphantly first by making trouble in Belfast where the only Nationalist member is or was a strong Suffragist, and secondly by going to Dublin when all Nationalist Ireland had assembled to welcome Mr. Asquith, throwing a hatchet at Mr. Redmond, and trying to burn down a theater. That finished Ireland, but still they were dissatisfied. There was a dangerous movement of sympathy with their agitation in Wales, and they felt that at any cost it had to be checked. They not only checked, but demolished, it with the greatest ease by breaking in upon the proceedings at an Eisteddfod. Now the Eisteddfod is not only the great national festival of Welsh poetry and music and eloquence, it is also an oasis of peace amid the sharp contentions of Welsh life. To bring into it any note of politics or sectarianism or public controversy, even when these things are rousing the most passionate emotions outside, seems to a Welshman like the desecration of an altar. That is just what the militants did, and Welsh interest in their cause fell dead on the spot. But even then they were not happy. They were still encumbered by the good-will of perhaps a hundred Tory M.P.'s. But they proved entirely equal to the task of antagonizing them. They began smashing windows, burning country mansions, firing race-stands, damaging golf-greens, striking as hard as they could at the Tory idol of Property. There is really nothing more left for them to do; they have alienated every friend they ever had; their work is complete beyond their wildest hopes.

Well, one can not dignify such tactics and antics by the title of "political propaganda." The proper name for them is sheer organized lunacy. The militants have erected militancy into a principle. I am beginning to think that a good many of them are more concerned with the success of their method than with the success of their cause. They would rather not have the vote than fail to win it by the particular brand of agitation they have pinned their faith to. They don't really want the vote to be given them; they want to get it and to get it by force; and they are quite unable to see that the more force they use the stronger becomes the resolve both of Parliament and of the country to send them away empty-handed. If they had accepted Mr. Asquith's pledge of two years ago and thanked him for it and helped him redeem it, woman suffrage by now would be an accomplished fact. But they preferred their own ways, and what is the result? The result is that working for their cause in the House of Commons to-day is like swimming not merely against a tide but against a cataract. The real reason why the attempts to carry woman suffrage through the House of Commons during the past two years have failed is not merely the difficulty of trying to combine a non-party measure with the party system; it is, above all, the impossibility of using Parliament to pass a bill that the opinion of the country has been fomented to condemn. The fact that in both the principal parties there is a clean division of opinion on this issue and that no Government, or none that is at present conceivable, can bring forward a measure for the enfranchisement of women as a Government, is a great, but not necessarily an insuperable obstacle. The one barrier, there is no surmounting and no getting round, is the decided and increasing hostility of public sentiment; and for that the militants have only themselves to thank.

Personally I always try to remember, first, that militancy is the work of only a very small fraction of the women who want the vote and ought to have it, and, secondly, that there have been crazy men just as there are crazy women. Militancy has not affected my own individual attitude toward the main question and never will. But I recognize that it has killed the immediate Parliamentary prospects of any and every Suffrage Bill, and that so long as militancy continues the House of Commons will do nothing. Only a new movement altogether can now bring women to the goal of political emancipation; and it will have to be a sane, hard-headed, practical movement, as full of liveliness as you please, but absolutely divorced from stones and bombs and torches. When it arises the friends of the Women's cause will begin to take heart again.

ISRAEL ZANGWILL

THE AWKWARD AGE OF THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT

"And what did she get by it?" said my Uncle Toby. "What does any woman get by it?" said my father. "_Martyrdom_" replied the young Benedictine.

TRISTRAM SHANDY.

The present situation of woman suffrage in England recalls the old puzzle: What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable body? The irresistible force is the religious passion of myriads of women, the fury of self-sacrifice, the righteous zeal that shrinks not even from crime; the immovable body may be summed up as Mr. Asquith. Almost as gross an incarnation of Tory prejudice as Squire Western, who laid it down that women should come in with the first dish and go out with the first glass, Mr. Asquith is all that stands between the sex and the suffrage.

The answer to the old puzzle, I suppose, would be that though the immovable body does not move, yet the impact of the irresistible force generates heat, which, as we know from Tyndall, is a mode of motion. At any rate, heat is the only mode in which the progress of woman suffrage can be registered to-day. The movement has come to what Mr. Henry James might call "the awkward age": an age which has passed beyond argument without arriving at achievement; an age for which words are too small and blows too big. And because impatience has been the salvation of the movement, and because the suffragette will not believe that the fiery charger which has carried her so far can not really climb the last ridge of the mountain, but must be replaced by a mule--that miserable compromise between a steed and an anti-suffragist--the awkward age is also the dangerous age.

When the Cabinet of Clement's Inn, perceiving that if a woman suffrage Bill did not pass this session, the last chance--under the Parliament Act--was gone for this Parliament, resolved to rouse public opinion by breaking tradesmen's windows, it overlooked that the English are a nation of shopkeepers, and that the public opinion thus roused would be for the first time almost unreservedly on the side of the Government. And when the Cabinet of Downing Street, moved to responsive recklessness, raided the quarters of the Women's Social and Political Union and indicted the leaders for criminal conspiracy, it equally overlooked an essential factor of the situation. The Cabinet of the conspiracy was at least as much a restraint to suffragettes as an incentive. It held in order the more violent members, the souls naturally daring or maddened by forcible feeding. By its imposition of minor forms of lawlessness, it checked the suggestion of major forms. Crime was controlled by a curriculum and temper studied by a time-table. The interruptions at meetings were distributed among the supposed neuropaths like parts at a play, and we to the maenad who missed her cue. With the police, too, the suffragettes lived for the most part on terms of cordial cooperation, each side recognizing that the other must do its duty. When the suffragettes planned a raid upon Downing Street or the House of Commons, they gave notice of time and place, and were provided with a sufficient force of police to prevent it. Were the day inconvenient for the police, owing to the pressure of social engagements, another day was fixed, politics permitting. The _entente cordiale_ extended even in some instances to the jailers and the bench, and, as in those early days of the Quaker persecution of which Milton's friend, Ellwood, has left record, prisoners sometimes left their cells for a night to attend to imperative affairs, or good-naturedly shortened or canceled their sentences at the pressing solicitation of perturbed magistrates. Prison was purified by all these gentle presences, and women criminals profited by the removal of the abuses they challenged. Holloway became a home from home, in which beaming wardresses welcomed old offenders, and to which husbands conducted erring wives in taxicabs, much as Ellwood and his brethren marched of themselves from Newgate to Bridewell, explaining to the astonished citizens of London that their word was their keeper. A suffragette's word stood higher than consols, and the war-game was played cards on table. True, there were brutal interludes when Home Secretaries lost their heads, or hysterical magistrates their sense of justice, or when the chivalrous constabulary of Westminster was replaced by Whitechapel police, dense to the courtesies of the situation; but even these tragedies were transfused by its humors, by the subtle duel of woman's wit and man's lumbering legalism. The hunger-strike itself, with all its grim horrors and heroisms, was like the plot of a Gilbertian opera. It placed the Government on the horns of an Irish bull. Either the law must kill or torture prisoners condemned for mild offenses, or it must permit them to dictate their own terms of durance. The criminal code, whose dignity generations of male rebels could not impair, the whole array of warders, lawyers, judges, juries, and policemen, which all the scorn of a Tolstoy could not shrivel, shrank into a laughing-stock. And the comedy of the situation was complicated and enhanced by the fact that the Home Office, so far from being an Inquisition, was more or less tenanted by sympathizers with Female Suffrage, and that a Home Secretary who secretly admired the quixotry of the hunger-strikers was forced to feed them forcibly. He must either be denounced by the suffragettes as a Torquemada or by the public as an incapable. Bayard himself could not have coped with the position. There was no place like the Home Office, and its administrators, like the Governors of the Gold Coast, had to be relieved at frequent intervals. As for the police, their one aim in life became to avoid arresting suffragettes.

Such was the situation which the Governmental _coup_ transformed to tragedy unrelieved, giving us in the place of ordered lawlessness and responsible leadership a guerrilla warfare against society by irresponsive individuals, more or less unbalanced. That the heroic incendiary Mrs. Leigh, who deserved penal servitude and a statue, had been driven wild by forcible feeding was a fact that had given considerable uneasiness to headquarters, but she had been kept in comparative discipline. Now that discipline has been destroyed, it is possible that other free-lances will catch the contagion of crime; nay, there are signs that the leaders themselves are being infected through the difficulty of disavowing their martyrs. The wisest course for the Government would be to pardon Miss Pankhurst, of Paris, and officially invite her to resume control of her followers before they have quite controlled her.