It is not only the fact that the ideals of abstract justice and truth would inevitably be brushed aside by woman in the interests of those she loves which comes into consideration here; it is also the fact that woman is almost without a moral sense in the matter of executing a public trust such as voting or attaching herself to a political association with a view to influencing votes.

There is between man and woman here a characteristic difference.

While it is, of course, not a secret to anybody that the baser sort of man can at any time be diverted from the path of public morality by a monetary bribe or other personal advantage, he will not, at any rate, set at naught all public morality by doing so for a peppercorn. He will, for instance, not join, for the sake of a daughter, a political movement in which he has no belief; nor vote for this or that candidate just to please a son; or censure a member of Parliament who has in voting on female suffrage failed to consider the predilections of his wife.

But woman, whether she be politically enfranchised as in Australasia, or unenfranchised as at home; whether she be immoral in the sense of being purely egoistic, or moral in the sense of being altruistic, very rarely makes any secret or any shame of doing these things.

In this matter one would not be very far from the truth if one alleged that there are no good women, but only women who have lived under the influence of good men.

Even more serious than this postponement of public to private morality is the fact that even reputedly ethical women will, in the interests of what they take to be idealistic causes, violate laws which are universally accepted as being of moral obligation.

I here pass over the recent epidemic of political crime among women to advert to the want of conscience which permits, in connexion with professedly idealistic causes, not only misrepresentations, but the making of deliberately false statements on matters of public concern.

It is, for example, an illustration of the profoundly different moral atmospheres in which men and women live that when a public woman recently made, for what was to her an idealistic purpose, a deliberately false statement of fact in The Times, she quite naively confessed to it, seeing nothing whatever amiss in her action.

And it did not appear that any other woman suffragist could discern any kind of immorality in it. The worst thing they could find to say was that it perhaps was a little gauche to confess to making a deliberately false statement on a public question when it was for the moment particularly desirable that woman should show up to best advantage before the eyes of man.

We may now for a moment put aside the question of woman's public morality and consider a question which is inextricably mixed up with the question of the admission of woman to the suffrage. This is the mental attitude and the programme of the female legislative reformer.

IV

MENTAL OUTLOOK AND PROGRAMME OF THE FEMALE LEGISLATIVE REFORMER

The suffragist woman, when she is the kind of woman who piques herself upon her ethical impulses, will, even when she is intellectually very poorly equipped, and there is no imprint of altruism upon her life, assure you that nothing except the moral influence of woman, exerted through the legislation, which her practical mind would be capable of initiating, will ever avail to abate existing social evils, and to effect the moral redemption of the world.

It will not be amiss first to try to introduce a little clearness and order into our ideas upon those formidably difficult problems which the female legislative reformer desires to attack, and then to consider how a rational reforming mind would go to work in the matter of proposing legislation for these.

First would come those evils which result from individuals seeking advantage to themselves by the direct infliction of injury upon others. Violations of the criminal law and the various forms of sweating and fleecing one's fellow-men come under this category.

Then would come the evils which arise out of purveying physiological and psychological refreshments and excitements, which are, according as they are indulged in temperately or intemperately, grateful and innocuous, or sources of disaster and ruin. The evils which are associated with the drink traffic and the betting industry are typical examples.

Finally, there would come into consideration the evils of death or physical suffering deliberately inflicted by man upon man with a view to preventing worse evils. The evil of war would come under this category. In this same category might also come the much lesser evil of punitive measures inflicted upon criminals. And with this might be coupled the evil of killing and inflicting physical suffering upon animals for the advantage of man.

We may now consider how the rational legislative reformer would in each case go to work.

He would not start with the assumption that it must be possible by some alteration of the law to abolish or conspicuously reduce any of the afore-mentioned evils; nor yet with the assumption that, if a particular alteration of the law would avail to bring about this result, that alteration ought necessarily to be made. He would recognise that many things which are theoretically desirable are unattainable; and that many legislative measures which could perfectly well be enforced would be barred by the fact that they would entail deplorable unintended consequences.

The rational legislator whom we have here in view would accordingly always take expert advice as to whether the desired object could be achieved by legal compulsion; and as to whether a projected law which satisfied the condition of being workable would give a balance of advantages over disadvantages.

In connexion with a proposal for the prevention of sweating he would, for instance, take expert advice as to whether its provisions could be enforced; and whether, if enforceable, they would impose added hardships on any class of employees or penalties on any innocent class of employers.

In like manner in connexion with a proposed modification in criminal procedure, the rational reformer would defer to the expert on the question as to whether such modification would secure greater certainty of punishment for the guilty without increasing the risk of convicting the innocent.

In connexion with the second category of evils—the category under which would come those of drinking and betting—the rational legislative reformer would recognise the complete impracticability of abolishing by legislative prohibition physiological indulgences and the evils which sometimes attend upon them.

He would consider instead whether these attendant evils could be reduced by making the regulating laws more stringent; and whether more stringent restrictions—in addition to the fact that they would filch from the all too small stock of human happiness—would not, by paving the way for further invasions of personal liberty, cripple the free development of the community.

On the former question, which only experts could properly answer, the reasonable reformer would defer to their advice. The answer to the last question he would think out for himself.

In connexion with the evils which are deliberately inflicted by man with a view to reaping either personal profit, or profit for the nation, or profit for humanity, the reasonable reformer would begin by making clear to himself that the world we live in is not such a world as idealism might conjure up, but a world of violence, in which life must be taken and physical suffering be inflicted.

And he would recognise that the vital material interests of the nation can be protected only by armed force; that civilisation can be safeguarded only by punishing violations of the criminal law; and that the taking of animal life and the infliction of a certain amount of physical suffering upon animals is essential to human well-being, comfort, and recreation; and essential also to the achievement of the knowledge which is required to combat disease.

And the reasonable reformer will, in conformity with this, direct his efforts, not to the total abolition of war, but to the prevention of such wars as are not waged for really vital material interests, and to the abatement of the ferocities of warfare.

In the case of punishment for criminals he would similarly devote his efforts not to the abrogation of punishments, but to the relinquishment of any that are not reformatory, or really deterrent.

In like manner the reasonable reformer would not seek to prohibit the slaughtering of animals for food, or the killing off of animal pests, or the trapping, shooting, or hunting of animals for sport or profit, nor yet would he seek to prevent their utilisation of animals for the acquirement of knowledge.

He would direct his efforts to reducing the pain which is inflicted, and to preserving everywhere measure and scale—not sentimentally forbidding in connexion with one form of utilisation of animals what is freely allowed in connexion with another—but differentiating, if differentiating at all in favour of permitting the infliction of proportionately greater suffering in the case where national and humanitarian interests, than in the case where mere recreation and luxury and personal profit, are at stake.

Having recognised what reason would prescribe to the legislative reformer, we have next to inquire how far the man voter conforms to these prescriptions of reason, and how far the woman reformer would do so if she became a voter.

Let it be noted that the man in the street makes no question about falling in with the fact that he is born into a world of violence, and he acquiesces in the principle that the State, and, failing the State, the individual, may employ force and take life in defence of vital material interests. And he frankly falls in with it being a matter of daily routine to kill and inflict suffering upon animals for human profit or advantage.

Even if these principles are not formulated by the man in the street in quite such plain terms, he not only carries them out in practice, but he conducts all his thinking upon these presuppositions.

He, for instance, would fall in with the proposition that morality does not require from man that he should give up taking life or inflicting physical suffering. And he would not cavil with the statement that man should put reasonable limits to the amount of suffering he inflicts, and confine this within as narrow a range as possible—always requiring for the death or suffering inflicted some tangible advantage.

Moreover, if the question should be raised as to whether such advantage will result, the ordinary man will as a rule, where the matter lies beyond his personal ken, take expert opinion before intervening.

He will, for instance, be prepared to be so guided in connexion with such questions as whether disease could, if more knowledge were available, be to a large extent prevented and cured; as to how far animal experiments would contribute to the acquirement of that knowledge; and as to how far the physical suffering which might be involved in these experiments can be minimised or abolished. But not every man is prepared to fall in with this programme of inflicting physical suffering for the relief of physical suffering. There is also a type of spiritually-minded man who in this world of violence sets his face uncompromisingly against the taking of any life and the infliction of any physical suffering—refusing to make himself a partaker of evil.

An idealist of this type will, like Tolstoy, be an anti-militarist. He will advocate a general gaol delivery for criminals. He will be a vegetarian. He will not allow an animal's life to be taken in his house, though the mice scamper over his floors. And he will, consistently with his conviction that it is immoral to resort to force, refuse to take any part in legislation or government.

This attitude, which is that commended by the Hindoo and the Buddhist religions, is, of course, a quite unpractical attitude towards life. It is, in fact, a self-destructive attitude, unless a man's fellow-citizens are prepared by forcible means to secure to him the enjoyment of the work of his hands or of his inherited property, or unless those who refuse to desist from the exercise of force are prepared to untake the support of idealists.

We have not only these two classes of men—the ordinary man who has no compunction in resorting to force when the requirements of life demand it, and the idealist who refuses to have any lot or part in violence; there is also a hybrid. This male hybrid will descant on the general iniquity of violence, and then not only connive at those forms of violence which minister to his personal comforts, but also make a virtue of trying to abate by legal violence some particular form of physical suffering which happens to offend in a quite special manner his individual sensibility.

There is absolutely nothing to be said about this kind of reforming crank, except only that anything which may be said in relation to the female legislative reformer may be appositely said of him; and perhaps also this, that the ordinary man holds him both in intellectual and in moral contempt, and is resolved not to allow him to do any really serious injury to the community.

To become formidable this quasi-male person must, as he recognises, ally himself with the female legislative reformer.

Passing on to deal with her, it imports us first to realise that while the male voter has—except where important constitutional issues were in question—been accustomed to leave actual legislation to the expert, the female reformer gives notice beforehand that she will, as soon as ever she gets the suffrage, insist on pressing forward by her vote her reforming schemes.

What would result from the ordinary voter legislating on matters which require expert knowledge will be plain to every one who will consider the evolution of law.

There stand over against each other here, as an example and a warning, the Roman Law, which was the creation of legal experts: the praetor and the jurisconsult; and the legal system of the Greeks, which was the creation of a popular assembly—and it was a popular assembly which was quite ideally intelligent.

Upon the Roman Law has been built the law of the greater part of the civilised world. The Greek is a by-word for inconsequence.

How can one, then, without cold shudders think of that legal system which the female amateur legal reformer would bring to the birth?

Let us consider her qualifications. Let us first take cognisance of the fact that the reforming woman will neither stand to the principle that man may, where this gives a balance of advantage, inflict on his fellow-man, and a fortiori upon animals, death and physical suffering; nor yet will she stand to the principle that it is ethically unlawful to do deeds of violence.

She spends her life halting between these two opinions, eternally shilly-shallying.

She will, for instance, begin by announcing that it can never be lawful to do evil that good may come; and that killing and inflicting suffering is an evil. (In reality the precept of not doing evil that good may come has relation only to breaking for idealistic purposes moral laws of higher obligation.) She will then go back upon that and concede that war may sometimes be lawful, and that the punishment of criminals is not an evil. But if her emotions are touched by the forcible feeding of a criminal militant suffragist, she will again go back upon that and declare that the application of force is an intolerable evil.

Or, again, she will concede that the slaughtering of animals for food is not an evil, but that what is really unforgivable is the infliction of physical suffering on animals. And all the time for her, as well as for man, calves and lambs are being emasculated to make her meat succulent; wild animals are painfully done to death to provide her table with delicacies; birds with young in the nest are shot so that she may parade in their plumage; or fur-bearing animals are for her comfort and adornment massacred and tortured in traps.

When a man crank who is co-responsible for these things begins to talk idealistic reforms, the ordinary decent man refuses to have anything more to say to him.

But when a woman crank holds this language, the man merely shrugs his shoulders. "It is," he tells himself, "after all, the woman whom God gave him."

It must be confessed that the problem as to how man with a dual nature may best accommodate himself to a world of violence presents a very difficult problem.

It would obviously be no solution to follow out everywhere a programme of violence. Not even the predatory animals do that. Tigers do not savage their cubs; hawks do not pluck hawks' eyes; and dogs do not fight bitches.

Nor would, as has been shown, the solution of the problem be arrived at by everywhere surrendering—if we had been given the grace to do this—to the compunctious visitings of nature.

What is required is to find the proper compromise. As to what that would be there is, as between the ordinary man and woman on the one side, and the male crank and the battalions of sentimental women on the other, a conflict which is, to all intents and purposes, a sex war.

The compromise which ordinary human nature had fixed upon—and it is one which, ministering as it does to the survival of the race, has been adopted through the whole range of nature—is that of making within the world in which violence rules a series of enclaves in which the application of violence is progressively restricted and limited.

Outside the outermost of the series of ring fences thus constituted would be the realm of uncompromising violence such as exists when human life is endangered by wild animals, or murderous criminals, or savages. Just within this outermost fence would be civilised war—for in civilised war non-combatants and prisoners and wounded are excluded from the application of violence. In like manner we bring humanity in general within a more sheltered enclosure than animals—pet animals within a more sheltered enclosure than other animals. Again, we bring those who belong to the white race within a narrower protecting circle than mankind in general, and those of our own nation within a still narrower one.

Following out the same principle, we include women and children within a narrower shelter fence than our adult fellow-male; and we use the weapon of force more reluctantly when we are dealing with our relatives and friends than when we are dealing with those who are not personally known to us; and finally, we lay it aside more completely when we are dealing with the women of our households than when we are dealing with the males.

The cause of civilisation and of the amenities, and the welfare of the nation, of the family, and of woman, are all intimately bound up with a faithful adherence to this compromise.

But this policy imposes upon those whom it shelters from violence corresponding obligations.

In war non-combatants—not to speak of the wounded on the battlefield—must desist from hostile action on the pain of being shot down like wild beasts. And though an individual non-combatant might think it a patriotic action for him to take part in war, the thoughtful man would recognise that such action was a violation of a well-understood covenant made in the interest of civilisation, and that to break through this covenant was to abrogate a humanitarian arrangement by which the general body of non-combatants immensely benefits.

Exactly the same principle finds, as already pointed out, application when a woman employs direct violence, or aspires to exercise by voting indirect violence.

One always wonders if the suffragist appreciates all that woman stands to lose and all that she imperils by resort to physical force. One ought not to have to tell her that, if she had to fight for her position, her status would be that which is assigned to her among the Kaffirs—not that which civilised man concedes to her.

>From considering the compromise by which man adapts his dual nature to violence in the world, we turn to that which the female legislative reformer would seek to impose by the aid of her vote.

Her proposal, as the reader will have discerned, would be that all those evils which make appeal to the feminine emotions should be legally prohibited, and that all those which fail to make this appeal shall be tolerated.

In the former class would be included those which come directly under woman's ken, or have been brought vividly before the eyes of her imagination by emotional description. And the specially intolerable evils will be those which, owing to the fact that they fall upon woman or her immediate belongings, induce in the female legislative reformer pangs of sympathetic discomfort.

In the class of evils which the suffragist is content to tolerate, or say nothing about, would be those which are incapable of evoking in her such sympathetic pangs, and she concerns herself very little with those evils which do not furnish her with a text for recriminations against man.

Conspicuous in this programme is the absence of any sense of proportion. One would have imagined that it would have been plain to everybody that the evils which individual women suffer at the hands of man are very far from being the most serious ills of humanity. One would have imagined that the suffering inflicted by disease and by bad social conditions—suffering which falls upon man and woman alike—deserved a first place in the thoughts of every reformer. And one might have expected it to be common knowledge that the wrongs individual men inflict upon women have a full counterpart in the wrongs which individual women inflict upon men. It may quite well be that there are mists which here "blot and fill the perspective" of the female legislative reformer. But to look only upon one's own things, and not also upon the things of others, is not for that morally innocent.

There is further to be noted in connexion with the female legislative reformer that she has never been able to see why she should be required to put her aspirations into practical shape, or to consider ways and means, or to submit the practicability of her schemes to expert opinion. One also recognises that from a purely human point of view such tactics are judicious. For if the schemes of the female legislative reformer were once to be reviewed from the point of view of their practicability, her utility as a legislator would come into question, and the suffragist could no longer give out that there has been committed to her from on High a mission to draw water for man-kind out of the wells of salvation.

Lastly, we have to reflect in connection with the female legislative reformer that to go about proposing to reform the laws means to abandon that special field of usefulness which lies open to woman in alleviating misery and redressing those hard cases which will, under all laws and regulations of human manufacture and under all social dispositions, inevitably occur. Now when a woman leaves a social task which is commensurate with her abilities, and which asks from her personal effort and self-sacrifice, for a task which is quite beyond her abilities, but which, she thinks, will bring her personal kudos, shall we impute it to her for righteousness?

V

ULTERIOR ENDS WHICH THE WOMAN'S SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT HAS IN VIEW

We have now sufficiently considered the suffragist's humanitarian schemes, and we may lead up to the consideration of her further projects by contrasting woman's suffrage as it presents itself under colonial conditions—i.e. woman's suffrage without the female legislative reformer and the feminist—with the woman suffrage which is being agitated for in England—i.e. woman suffrage with the female legislative reformer and the feminist.

In the colonies and undeveloped countries generally where women are in a minority, and where owing to the fact that practically all have an opportunity of marrying, there are not for woman any difficult economic and physiological conditions, there is no woman's question; and by consequence no female legislative reformer or feminist. The woman voter follows, as the opportunist politicians who enfranchised her intended, the lead of her men-folk—serving only a pawn in the game of politics. Under such conditions woman's suffrage kleaves things as they are, except only that it undermines the logical foundations of the law, and still further debases the standard of public efficiency and public morality.

In countries, such as England, where an excess female population [1] has made economic difficulties for woman, and where the severe sexual restrictions, which here obtains, have bred in her sex-hostility, the suffrage movement has as its avowed ulterior object the abrogation of all distinctions which depend upon sex; and the achievement of the economic independence of woman.

[1] In England and Wales there are, in a population of 8,000,000 women between the ages of twenty and fifty, 3,000,000 unmarried women.

To secure this economic independence every post, occupation, and Government service is to be thrown open to woman; she is to receive everywhere the same wages as man; male and female are to work side by side; and they are indiscriminately to be put in command the one over the other. Furthermore, legal rights are to be secured to the wife over her husband's property and earnings. The programme is, in fact, to give to woman an economic independence out of the earnings and taxes of man.

Nor does feminist ambition stop short here. It demands that women shall be included in every advisory committee, every governing board, every jury, every judicial bench, every electorate, every parliament, and every ministerial cabinet; further, that every masculine foundation, university, school of learning, academy, trade union, professional corporation and scientific society shall be converted into an epicene institution—until we shall have everywhere one vast cock-and-hen show.

The proposal to bring man and woman together everywhere into extremely intimate relationships raises very grave questions. It brings up, first, the question of sexual complications; secondly, the question as to whether the tradition of modesty and reticence between the sexes is to be definitely sacrificed; and, most important of all, the question as to whether epicene conditions would place obstacles in the way of intellectual work.

Of these issues the feminist puts the first two quite out of account. I have already elsewhere said my say upon these matters.[1] With regard to the third, the feminist either fails to realise that purely intellectual intercourse—as distinguished from an intercommunion of mental images—with woman is to a large section of men repugnant; or else, perceiving this, she makes up her mind that, this notwithstanding, she will get her way by denouncing the man who does not welcome her as selfish; and by insisting that under feminism (the quotation is from Mill, the italics which question his sincerity are mine) "the mass of mental faculties available for the higher service of mankind would be doubled."

[1] Vide Appendix, pp. 169-173.

The matter cannot so lightly be disposed of. It will be necessary for us to find out whether really intimate association with woman on the purely intellectual plane is realisable. And if it is, in fact, unrealisable, it will be necessary to consider whether it is the exclusion of women from masculine corporations; or the perpetual attempt of women to force their way into these, which would deserve to be characterised as selfish.

In connexion with the former of these issues, we have to consider here not whether that form of intellectual co-operation in which the man plays the game, and the woman moves the pawns under his orders, is possible. That form of co-operation is of course possible, and it has, doubtless, certain utilities.

Nor yet have we to consider whether quite intimate and purely intellectual association on an equal footing between a particular man and a selected woman may or may not be possible. It will suffice to note that the feminist alleges that this also is possible; but everybody knows that the woman very often marries the man.

What we have to ask is whether—even if we leave out of regard the whole system of attractions or, as the case may be, repulsions which come into operation when the sexes are thrown together—purely intellectual intercourse between man and the typical unselected woman is not barred by the intellectual immoralities and limitations which appear to be secondary sexual characters of woman.

With regard to this issue, there would seem to be very little real difference of opinion among men. But there are great differences in the matter of candour. There are men who speak out, and who enunciate like Nietzsche that "man and woman are alien—never yet has any one conceived how alien."

There are men who, from motives of delicacy or policy, do not speak out—averse to saying anything that might be unflattering to woman.

And there are men who are by their profession of the feminist faith debarred from speaking out, but who upon occasion give themselves away.

Of such is the man who in the House of Commons champions the cause of woman's suffrage, impassionately appealing to Justice; and then betrays himself by announcing that he would shake off from his feet the dust of its purlieus if ever women were admitted as members—i.e. if ever women were forced upon him as close intellectual associates.

Wherever we look we find aversion to compulsory intellectual co-operation with woman. We see it in the sullen attitude which the ordinary male student takes up towards the presence of women students in his classes. We see it in the fact that the older English universities, which have conceded everything else to women, have made a strong stand against making them actual members of the university; for this would impose them on men as intellectual associates. Again we see the aversion in the opposition to the admission of women to the bar. But we need not look so far afield. Practically every man feels that there is in woman—patent, or hidden away—an element of unreason which, when you come upon it, summarily puts an end to purely intellectual intercourse. One may reflect, for example, upon the way the woman's suffrage controversy has been conducted.

Proceeding now on the assumption that these things are so, and that man feels that he and woman belong to different intellectual castes, we come now to the question as to whether it is man who is selfish when he excludes women from his institutions, or woman when she unceasingly importunes for admittance. And we may define as selfish all such conduct as pursues the advantage of the agent at the cost of the happiness and welfare of the general body of mankind.

We shall be in a better position to pronounce judgment on this question of ethics when we have considered the following series of analogies:

When a group of earnest and devout believers meet together for special intercession and worship, we do not tax them with selfishness if they exclude unbelievers.

Nor do we call people who are really devoted to music selfish if, coming together for this, they make a special point of excluding the unmusical.

Nor again would the imputation of selfishness lie against members of a club for black-balling a candidate who would, they feel, be uncongenial.

Nor should we regard it as an act of selfishness if the members of a family circle, or of the same nation, or of any social circle, desired to come together quite by themselves.

Nor yet would the term selfish apply to an East End music hall audience when they eject any one who belongs to a different social class to themselves and wears good clothes.

And the like would hold true of servants resenting their employers intruding upon them in their hours of leisure or entertainments.

If we do not characterise such exclusions as selfish, but rather respect and sympathise with them, it is because we recognise that the whole object and raison d' etre of association would in each case be nullified by the weak-minded admission of the incompatible intruder.

We recognise that if any charge of selfishness would lie, it would lie against that intruder.

Now if this holds in the case where the interests of religious worship or music, or family, national, or social life, or recreation and relaxation after labour are in question, it will hold true even more emphatically where the interests of intellectual work are involved.

But the feminist will want to argue. She will—taking it as always for granted that woman has a right to all that men's hands or brains have fashioned—argue that it is very important for the intellectual development of woman that she should have exactly the same opportunities as man. And she will, scouting [rejecting with contempt] the idea of any differences between the intelligences of man and woman, discourse to you of their intimate affinity.

It will, perhaps, be well to clear up these points.

The importance of the higher development of woman is unquestionable.

But after all it is the intellect of man which really comes into account in connexion with "the mass of mental faculties available for the higher service of mankind."

The maintenance of the conditions which allow of man's doing his best intellectual work is therefore an interest which is superior to that of the intellectual development of woman. And woman might quite properly be referred for her intellectual development to instructional institutions which should be special to herself.

Coming to the question of the intimate resemblances between the masculine and the feminine intelligence, no man would be venturesome enough to dispute these, but he may be pardoned if he thinks—one would hope in no spirit of exaltation—also of the differences.

We have an instructive analogy in connexion with the learned societies.

It is uncontrovertible that every candidate for election into such a society will have, and will feel that he has, affinities with the members of that association. And he is invited to set these forth in his application. But there may also be differences of which he is not sensible. On that question the electors are the judges; and they are the final court of appeal.

There would seem to be here a moral which the feminist would do well to lay to heart.

There is also another lesson which she might very profitably consider. A quite small difference will often constitute as effective a bar to a useful and congenial co-operation as a more fundamental difference.

In the case of a body of intellectual workers one might at first sight suppose that so small a distinction as that of belonging to a different nationality—sex, of course, is an infinitely profounder difference—would not be a bar to unrestricted intellectual co-operation.

But in point of fact it is in every country, in every learned society, a uniform rule that when foreign scientists or scholars are admitted they are placed not on the ordinary list of working members, but on a special list.

One discerns that there is justification for this in the fact that a foreigner would in certain eventualities be an incompatible person.

One may think of the eventuality of the learned society deciding to recognise a national service, or to take part in a national movement. And one is not sure that a foreigner might not be an incompatible person in the eventuality of a scientist or scholar belonging to a nationality with which the foreigner's country was at feud being brought forward for election. And he would, of course, be an impossible person in a society if he were, in a spirit of chauvinism, to press for a larger representation of his own fellow-countrymen.

Now this is precisely the kind of way man feels about woman. He recognises that she is by virtue of her sex for certain purposes an incompatible person; and that, quite apart from this, her secondary sexual characters might in certain eventualities make her an impossible person.

We may note, before passing on, that these considerations would seem to prescribe that woman should be admitted to masculine institutions only when real humanitarian grounds demand it; that she should—following here the analogy of what is done in the learned societies with respect to foreigners—be invited to co-operate with men only when she is quite specially eminent, or beyond all question useful for the particular purpose in hand; and lastly, that when co-opted into any masculine institution woman should always be placed upon a special list, to show that it was proposed to confine her co-operation within certain specified limits.

>From these general questions, which affect only the woman with intellectual aspirations, we pass to consider what would be the effect of feminism upon the rank and file of women if it made of these co-partners with man in work. They would suffer not only because woman's physiological disabilities and the restrictions which arise out of her sex place her at a great disadvantage when she has to enter into competition with man, but also because under feminism man would be less and less disposed to take off woman's shoulders a part of her burden.

And there can be no dispute that the most valuable financial asset of the ordinary woman is the possibility that a man may be willing—and may, if only woman is disposed to fulfil her part of the bargain, be not only willing but anxious—to support her and to secure for her, if he can, a measure of that freedom which comes from the possession of money.

In view of this every one who has a real fellow-feeling for woman, and who is concerned for her material welfare, as a father is concerned for his daughter's, will above everything else desire to nurture and encourage in man the sentiment of chivalry, and in woman that disposition of mind that makes chivalry possible.

And the woman workers who have to fight the battle of life for themselves would indirectly profit from this fostering of chivalry; for those women who are supported by men do not compete in the limited labour market which is open to the woman worker.

>From every point of view, therefore, except perhaps that of the exceptional woman who would be able to hold her own against masculine competition—and men always issue informal letters of naturalisation to such an exceptional woman—the woman suffrage which leads up to feminism would be a social disaster.

PART III

IS THERE, IF THE SUFFRAGE IS BARRED, ANY PALLIATIVE OF CORRECTIVE FOR THE DISCONTENTS OF WOMAN?

I

PALLIATIVES OR CORRECTIVES FOR THE DISCONTENTS OF WOMAN

What are the Suffragist's Grievances?—Economic and Physiological Difficulties of Woman—Intellectual Grievances of Suffragist and Corrective.

Is there then, let us ask ourselves, if the suffrage with its programme of feminism is barred as leading to social disaster, any palliative or corrective that can be applied to the present discontents of woman?

If such is to be found, it is to be found only by placing clearly before us the suffragist's grievances.

These grievances are, first, the economic difficulties of the woman who seeks to earn her living by work other than unskilled manual labour; secondly, the difficult physiological conditions in which woman is placed by the excess of the female over the male population and by her diminished chances of marriage [1]; and thirdly, the tedium which obsesses the life of the woman who is not forced, and cannot force herself, to work. On the top of these grievances comes the fact that the suffragist conceives herself to be harshly and unfairly treated by man. This last is the fire which sets a light to all the inflammable material.

[1] Vide footnote, p. 138.

It would be quite out of question to discuss here the economic and physiological difficulties of woman. Only this may be said: it is impossible, in view of the procession of starved and frustrated lives which is continuously filing past, to close one's eyes to the urgency of this woman's problem.

After all, the primary object of all civilisation is to provide for every member of the community food and shelter and fulfilment of natural cravings. And when, in what passes as a civilised community, a whole class is called upon to go without any one of these our human requirements, it is little wonder that it should break out.

But when a way of escape stands open revolt is not morally justified.

Thus, for example, a man who is born into, but cannot support himself in, a superior class of society is not, as long as he can find a livelihood abroad in a humbler walk in life, entitled to revolt.

No more is the woman who is in economic or physiological difficulties. For, if only she has the pluck to take it, a way of escape stands open to her.

She can emigrate; she can go out from the social class in which she is not self-supporting into a humbler social class in which she could earn a living; and she can forsake conditions in which she must remain a spinster for conditions in which she may perhaps become a mother. Only in this way can the problem of finding work, and relief of tedium, for the woman who now goes idle be resolved.

If women were to avail themselves of these ways of escape out of unphysiological conditions, the woman agitator would probably find it as difficult to keep alive a passionate agitation for woman suffrage as the Irish Nationalist agitator to keep alive, after the settlement of the land question and the grant of old age pensions, a passionate agitation for a separate Parliament for Ireland.

For the happy wife and mother is never passionately concerned about the suffrage. It is always the woman who is galled either by physiological hardships, or by the fact that she has not the same amount of money as man, or by the fact that man does not desire her as a co-partner in work, and withholds the homage which she thinks he ought to pay to her intellect.

For this class of grievances the present education of woman is responsible. The girl who is growing up to woman's estate is never taught where she stands relatively to man. She is not taught anything about woman's physical disabilities. She is not told—she is left to discover it for herself when too late—that child and husband are to woman physiological requirements. She is not taught the defects and limitations of the feminine mind. One might almost think there were no such defects and limitations; and that woman was not always overestimating her intellectual power. And the ordinary girl is not made to realise woman's intrinsically inferior money-earning capacity. She is not made to realise that the woman who cannot work with her hands is generally hard put to earn enough to keep herself alive in the incomplete condition of a spinster.

As a result of such education, when, influenced by the feminist movement, woman comes to institute a comparison between herself and man, she brings into that comparison all those qualities in which she is substantially his equal, and leaves out of account all those in which she is his inferior.

The failure to recognise that man is the master, and why he is the master, lies at the root of the suffrage movement. By disregarding man's superior physical force, the power of compulsion upon which all government is based is disregarded. By leaving out of account those powers of the mind in which man is the superior, woman falls into the error of thinking that she can really compete with him, and that she belongs to the self-same intellectual caste. Finally, by putting out of sight man's superior money-earning capacity, the power of the purse is ignored.

Uninstructed woman commits also another fundamental error in her comparison. Instead of comparing together the average man and the average woman, she sets herself to establish that there is no defect in woman which cannot be discovered also in man; and that there is no virtue or power in the ordinary man which cannot be discovered also in woman. Which having been established to her satisfaction, she is led inevitably to the conclusion that there is nothing whatever to choose between the sexes. And from this there is only a step to the position that human beings ought to be assigned, without distinction of sex, to each and every function which would come within the range of their individual capacities, instead of being assigned as they are at present: men to one function, and women to another.

Here again women ought to have been safeguarded by education. She ought to have been taught that even when an individual woman comes up to the average of man this does not abrogate the disqualification which attaches to a difference of sex. Nor yet—as every one who recognises that we live in a world which conducts itself by generalisations will see—does it abrogate the disqualification of belonging to an inferior intellectual caste.

The present system of feminine education is blameworthy not only in the respect that it fails to draw attention to these disqualifications and to teach woman where she stands; it is even more blameworthy in that it fails to convey to the girl who is growing up any conception of that absolutely elementary form of morality which consists in distinguishing meum and tuum [that which is mine and that which is yours].

Instead of her educators encouraging every girl to assert "rights" as against man, and put forward claims, they ought to teach her with respect to him those lessons of behaviour which are driven home once for all into every boy at a public school.

Just as there you learn that you may not make unwarranted demands upon your fellow, and just as in the larger world every nation has got to learn that it cannot with impunity lay claim to the possessions of its neighbours, so woman will have to learn that when things are not offered to her, and she has not the power to take them by force, she has got to make the best of things as they are.

One would wish for every girl who is growing up to womanhood that it might be brought home to her by some refined and ethically-minded member of her own sex how insufferable a person woman becomes when, like a spoilt child, she exploits the indulgence of man; when she proclaims that it is his duty to serve her and to share with her his power and possessions; when she makes an outcry when he refuses to part with what is his own; and when she insists upon thrusting her society upon men everywhere.

And every girl ought to be warned that to embark upon a policy of recrimination when you do not get what you want, and to proclaim yourself a martyr when, having hit, you are hit back, is the way to get yourself thoroughly disliked.

Finally, every girl ought to be shown, in the example of the militant suffragist, how revolt and martyrdom, undertaken in order to possess oneself of what belongs to others, effects the complete disorganisation of moral character.

No one would wish that in the education of girls these quite unlovely things should be insisted upon more than was absolutely necessary. But one would wish that the educators of the rising generation of women should, basing themselves upon these foundations, point out to every girl how great is woman's debt to civilisation; in other words, how much is under civilisation done for woman by man.

And one would wish that, in a world which is rendered unwholesome by feminism, every girl's eyes were opened to comprehend the great outstanding fact of the world: the fact that, turn where you will, you find individual man showering upon individual woman—one man in tribute to her enchantment, another out of a sense of gratitude, and another just because she is something that is his—every good thing which, suffrage or no suffrage, she never could have procured for herself.

APPENDIX

LETTER ON MILITANT HYSTERIA

Reprinted by permission from The Times (London), March 28, 1912.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES

SIR,—For man the physiological psychology of woman is full of difficulties.

He is not a little mystified when he encounters in her periodically recurring phases of hypersensitiveness, unreasonableness, and loss of the sense of proportion.

He is frankly perplexed when confronted with a complete alteration of character in a woman who is child-bearing.

When he is a witness of the "tendency of woman to morally warp when nervously ill," and of the terrible physical havoc which the pangs of a disappointed love may work, he is appalled.

And it leaves on his mind an eerie feeling when he sees serious and long-continued mental disorders developing in connexion with the approaching extinction of a woman's reproductive faculty.

No man can close his eyes to these things; but he does not feel at liberty to speak of them.

"For the woman that God gave him is not his to give away."[1]

[1 From "The Female of the Species" by Rudyard Kipling]

As for woman herself, she makes very light of any of these mental upsettings.

She perhaps smiles a little at them. . . .[1]

[1] In the interests of those who feel that female dignity is compromised by it, I have here omitted a woman's flippant overestimate of the number of women in London society who suffer from nervous disorders at the climacteric [i.e. menopause].

None the less, these upsettings of her mental equilibrium are the things that a woman has most cause to fear; and no doctor can ever lose sight of the fact that the mind of woman is always threatened with danger from the reverberations of her physiological emergencies.

It is with such thoughts that the doctor lets his eyes rest upon the militant suffragist. He cannot shut them to the fact that there is mixed up with the woman's movement much mental disorder; and he cannot conceal from himself the physiological emergencies which lie behind.

The recruiting field for the militant suffragists is the million of our excess female population—that million which had better long ago have gone out to mate with its complement of men beyond the sea.

Among them there are the following different types of women:—

(a) First—let us put them first—come a class of women who hold, with minds otherwise unwarped, that they may, whenever it is to their advantage, lawfully resort to physical violence.

The programme, as distinguished from the methods, of these women is not very different from that of the ordinary suffragist woman.

(b) There file past next a class of women who have all their life-long been strangers to joy, women in whom instincts long suppressed have in the end broken into flame. These are the sexually embittered women in whom everything has turned into gall and bitterness of heart, and hatred of men.

Their legislative programme is license for themselves, or else restrictions for man.

(c) Next there file past the incomplete. One side of their nature has undergone atrophy, with the result that they have lost touch with their living fellow men and women.

Their programme is to convert the whole world into an epicene institution—-an epicene institution in which man and woman shall everywhere work side by side at the selfsame tasks and for the selfsame pay.

These wishes can never by any possibility be realised. Even in animals—I say even, because in these at least one of the sexes has periods of complete quiscence—male and female cannot be safely worked side by side, except when they are incomplete.

While in the human species safety can be obtained, it can be obtained only at the price of continual constraint.

And even then woman, though she protests that she does not require it, and that she does not receive it, practically always does receive differential treatment at the hands of man.

It would be well, I often think, that every woman should be clearly told—and the woman of the world will immediately understand—that when man sets his face against the proposal to bring in an epicene world, he does so because he can do his best work only in surroundings where he is perfectly free from suggestion and from restraint, and from the onus which all differential treatment imposes.

And I may add in connexion with my own profession that when a medical man asks that he should not be the yoke-fellow of a medical woman he does so also because he would wish to keep up as between men and women—even when they are doctors—some of the modesties and reticences upon which our civilisation has been built up.

Now the medical woman is of course never on the side of modesty,[1] or in favour of any reticences. Her desire for knowledge does not allow of these.

[1] To those who have out of inadvertence and as laymen and women misunderstood, it may be explained that the issue here discussed is the second in order of the three which are set out on p. 139 (supra).

(d) Inextricably mixed up with the types which we have been discussing is the type of woman whom Dr. Leonard Williams's recent letter brought so distinctly before our eyes—the woman who is poisoned by her misplaced self-esteem; and who flies out at every man who does not pay homage to her intellect.

She is the woman who is affronted when a man avers that for him the glory of woman lies in her power of attraction, in her capacity for motherhood, and in unswerving allegiance to the ethics which are special to her sex.

I have heard such an intellectually embittered woman say, though she had been self-denyingly taken to wife, that "never in the whole course of her life had a man ever as much as done her a kindness."

The programme of this type of woman is, as a preliminary, to compel man to admit her claim to be his intellectual equal; and, that done, to compel him to divide up everything with her to the last farthing, and so make her also his financial equal.

And her journals exhibit to us the kind of parliamentary representative she desiderates. He humbly, hat in hand, asks for his orders from a knot of washerwomen standing arms a-kimbo.[2]

[2] I give, in response to a request, the reference: Votes for Women, March 18, 1910, p. 381.

(e) Following in the wake of these embittered human beings come troops of girls just grown up.

All these will assure you, these young girls—and what is seething in their minds is stirring also in the minds in the girls in the colleges and schools which are staffed by unmarried suffragists—that woman has suffered all manner of indignity and injustice at the hands of man.



And these young girls have been told about the intellectual, and moral, and financial value of woman—such tales as it never entered into the heart of man to conceive.

The programme of these young women is to be married upon their own terms. Man shall—so runs their scheme—work for their support—to that end giving up his freedom, and putting himself under orders, for many hours of the day; but they themselves must not be asked to give up any of their liberty to him, or to subordinate themselves to his interests, or to obey him in anything.

To obey a man would be to commit the unpardonable sin.

It is not necessary, in connexion with a movement which proceeds on the lines set out above, any further to labour the point that there is in it an element of mental disorder. It is plain that it is there.

There is also a quite fatuous element in the programmes of the militant suffragist. We have this element, for instance, in the doctrine that, notwithstanding the fact that the conditions of the labour market deny it to her, woman ought to receive the same wage as a man for the same work.

This doctrine is fatuous, because it leaves out of sight that, even if woman succeeds in doing the same work as man, he has behind him a much larger reserve of physical strength. As soon as a time of strain comes, areserve of strength and freedom from periodic indisposition is worth paying extra for.

Fatuous also is the dogma that woman ought to have the same pay for the same work—fatuous because it leaves out of sight that woman's commercial value in many of the best fields of work is subject to a very heavy discount by reason of the fact that she cannot, like a male employee, work cheek by jowl with a male employer; nor work among men as a man with his fellow employees.

So much for the woman suffragist's protest that she can conceive of no reason for a differential rate of pay for man.

Quite as fatuous are the marriage projects of the militant suffragist. Every woman of the world could tell her—whispering it into her private ear—that if a sufficient number of men should come to the conclusion that it was not worth their while to marry except on the terms of fair give-and-take, the suffragist woman's demands would have to come down.

It is not at all certain that the institution of matrimony—which, after all, is the great instrument in the levelling up of the financial situation of woman—can endure apart from some willing subordination on the part of the wife.

It will have been observed that there is in these programmes, in addition to the element of mental disorder and to the element of the fatuous, which have been animadverted upon, also a very ugly element of dishonesty. In reality the very kernel of the militant suffrage movement is the element of immorality.

There is here not only immorality in the ends which are in view, but also in the methods adopted for the attainment of those ends.

We may restrict ourselves to indicating wherein lies the immorality of the methods.

There is no one who does not discern that woman in her relations to physical force stands in quite a different position to man.

Out of that different relation there must of necessity shape itself a special code of ethics for woman. And to violate that code must be for woman immorality.

So far as I have seen, no one in this controversy has laid his finger upon the essential point in the relations of woman to physical violence.

It has been stated—and in the main quite truly stated—that woman in the mass cannot, like man, back up her vote by bringing physical force into play.

But the woman suffragist here counters by insisting that she as an individual may have more physical force than an individual man.

And it is quite certain—and it did not need suffragist raids and window-breaking riots to demonstrate it—that woman in the mass can bring a certain amount of physical force to bear.

The true inwardness of the relation in which woman stands to physical force lies not in the question of her having it at command, but in the fact that she cannot put it forth without placing herself within the jurisdiction of an ethical law.

The law against which she offends when she resorts to physical violence is not an ordinance of man; it is not written in the statutes of any State; it has not been enunciated by any human law-giver. It belongs to those unwritten, and unassailable, and irreversible commandments of religion, [Greek 1], which we suddenly and mysteriously become aware of when we see them violated.

[1 From Antigone by Sophocles; "the unwritten and unassailable statutes given to us by the gods." Sir Almroth had it in the original Greek with Greek fonts.]

The law which the militant suffragist has violated is among the ordinances of that code which forbade us even to think of employing our native Indian troops against the Boers; which brands it as an ignominy when a man leaves his fellow in the lurch and saves his own life; and which makes it an outrage for a man to do violence to a woman.

To violate any ordinance of that code is more dishonourable than to transgress every statutory law.

We see acknowledgment of it in the fact that even the uneducated man in the street resents it as an outrage to civilisation when he sees a man strike a blow at a woman.

But to the man who is committing the outrage it is a thing simply unaccountable that any one should fly out at him.

In just such a case is the militant suffragist. She cannot understand why any one should think civilisation is outraged when she scuffles in the street mud with a policeman.

If she asks for an explanation, it perhaps behoves a man to supply it.

Up to the present in the whole civilised world there has ruled a truce of God as between man and woman. That truce is based upon the solemn covenant that within the frontiers of civilisation (outside them of course the rule lapses) the weapon of physical force may not be applied by man against woman; nor by woman against man.

Under this covenant, the reign of force which prevails in the world without comes to an end when a man enters his household.

Under this covenant that half of the human race which most needs protection is raised up above the waves of violence.

Within the terms of this compact everything that woman has received from man, and everything man receives from woman, is given as a free gift.

Again, under this covenant a full half of the programme of Christianity has been realised; and a foundation has been laid upon which it may be possible to build higher; and perhaps finally in the ideal future to achieve the abolition of physical violence and war.

And it is this solemn covenant, the covenant so faithfully kept by man, which has been violated by the militant suffragist in the interest of her morbid, stupid, ugly, and dishonest programmes.

Is it wonder if men feel that they have had enough of the militant suffragist, and that the State would be well rid of her if she were crushed under the soldiers' shields like the traitor woman at the Tarpeian rock [in ancient Rome where traitors were killed]?

We may turn now to that section of woman suffragists—one is almost inclined to doubt whether it any longer exists—which is opposed to all violent measures, though it numbers in its ranks women who are stung to the quick by the thought that man, who will concede the vote to the lowest and most degraded of his own sex, withholds it from "even the noblest woman in England."

When that excited and somewhat pathetic appeal is addressed to us, we have only to consider what a vote really gives.

The parliamentary vote is an instrument—and a quite astonishly disappointing instrument it is—for obtaining legislation; that is, for directing that the agents of the State shall in certain defined circumstances bring into application the weapon of physical compulsion.

Further, the vote is an instrument by which we give to this or that group of statesmen anthority to supervise and keep in motion the whole machinery of compulsion.

To take examples. A vote cast in favour of a Bill for the prohibition of alcohol—if we could find opportunity for giving a vote on such a question—would be a formal expression of our desire to apply, through the agency of the paid servants of the State, that same physical compulsion which Mrs. Carrie Nation put into application in her "bar-smashing" crusades.

And a vote which puts a Government into office in a country where murder is punishable by death is a vote which, by agency of the hangman, puts the noose round the neck of every convicted murderer.

So that the difference between voting and direct resort to force is simply the difference between exerting physical violence in person, and exerting it through the intermediary of an agent of the State.

The thing, therefore, that is withheld from "the noblest woman in England," while it is conceded to the man who is lacking in nobility of character, is in the end only an instrument by which she might bring into application physical force.

When one realises that that same noblest woman of England would shrink from any personal exercise of violence, one would have thought that it would have come home to her that it is not precisely her job to commission a man forcibly to shut up a public-house, or to hang a murderer.

One cannot help asking oneself whether, if she understood what a vote really means, the noblest woman in England would still go on complaining of the bitter insult which is done to her in withholding the vote.

But the opportunist—the practical politician, as he calls himself—will perhaps here intervene, holding some such language as this:—"Granting all you say, granting, for the sake of argument, that the principle of giving votes to woman is unsound, and that evil must ultimately come of it, how can you get over the fact that no very conspicuous harm has resulted from woman suffrage in the countries which have adopted it? And can any firm reasons be rendered for the belief that the giving of votes to women in England would be any whit more harmful than in the Colonies?"

A very few words will supply the answer.

The evils of woman suffrage lie, first, in the fact that to give the vote to women is to give it to voters who as a class are quite incompetent to adjudicate upon political issues; secondly, in the fact that women are a class of voters who cannot effectively back up their votes by force; and, thirdly, in the fact that it may seriously embroil man and woman.

The first two aspects of the question have already in this controversy been adequately dealt with. There remains the last issue.

>From the point of view of this issue the conditions which we have to deal with in this country are the absolute antithesis of those ruling in any of the countries and States which have adopted woman suffrage.

When woman suffrage was adopted in these countries it was adopted in some for one reason, in others for another. In some it was adopted because it appealed to the doctrinaire [theoretical] politician as the proper logical outcome of a democratic and Socialistic policy. In others it was adopted because opportunist politicians saw in it an instrument by which they might gain electioneering advantages. So much was this the case that it sometimes happened that the woman's vote was sprung upon a community which was quite unprepared and indifferent to it.

The cause of woman suffrage was thus in the countries of which we speak neither in its inception nor in its realisation a question of revolt of woman against the oppression of man. It had, and has, no relation to the programmes of the militant suffragists as set out at the outset of this letter.

By virtue of this, all the evils which spring from the embroiling of man and woman have in the countries in question been conspicuously absent.

Instead of seeing himself confronted by a section of embittered and hostile women voters which might at any time outvote him and help to turn an election, man there sees his women folk voting practically everywhere in accordance with his directions, and lending him a hand to outvote his political opponent.

Whether or no such voting is for the good of the common weal is beside our present question. But it is clearly an arrangement which leads to amity and peace between a man and his womenkind, and through these to good-will towards all women.

In England everything is different.

If woman suffrage comes in here, it will have come as a surrender to a very violent feminist agitation—an agitation which we have traced back to our excess female population and the associated abnormal physiological conditions.

If ever Parliament concedes the vote to woman in England, it will be accepted by the militant suffragist, not as an eirenicon, but as a victory which she will value only for the better carrying on of her fight a outrance [to the bitter end] against the oppression and injustice of man.

A conciliation with hysterical revolt is neither an act of peace; nor will it bring peace.

Nor would the conferring of the vote upon women carry with it any advantages from the point of view of finding a way out of the material entanglements in which woman is enmeshed, and thus ending the war between man and woman.

One has only to ask oneself whether or not it would help the legislator in remodelling the divorce or the bastardy laws if he had conjoined with him an unmarried militant suffragist as assessor.

Peace will come again. It will come when woman ceases to believe and to teach all manner of evil of man despitefully. It will come when she ceases to impute to him as a crime her own natural disabilities, when she ceases to resent the fact that man cannot and does not wish to work side by side with her. And peace will return when every woman for whom there is no room in England seeks "rest" beyond the sea, "each one in the house of her husband," and when the woman who remains in England comes to recognise that she can, without sacrifice of dignity, give a willing subordination to the husband or father, who, when all is said and done, earns and lays up money for her.

A. E. WRIGHT. March 27, 1912.

THE END