The next pulpitless preacher, in the succession we are considering, appeared in this country in 1828. Her name was Frances Wright. She was a person of totally different mind and methods from Anne Hutchinson and Ann Lee. She was professedly an enemy of religion. Anne Hutchinson attacked church and state in the name of Christian human perfection. Ann Lee attacked church and state in the name of woman; she preached communism and separation of the sexes in the name of Christ; she taught the abolition of marriage. Frances Wright preached communism and sex license in the name of irreligion. In opening the columns of the "Free Inquirer" to discussion, in New York, in 1828, she said: "Religion is true—and in that case the conviction of its truth should dictate every human word and govern every sublunary action,—or it is a deception. If it is a deception, it is not useless only, it is mischievous; it is mischievous by its idle terrors; it is mischievous by its false morality; it is mischievous by its hypocrisy; by its fanaticism; by its dogmatism; by its threats; by its hopes; by its promises; and last, though not least, by its waste of public time and public money." While deciding that it was a deception, she revealed the evil results to which abandonment of all faith can lead a woman with a clever brain and a fearless tongue. She constantly denounced religion as the source of all injustice and bigotry and of the "enslavement of women."

The editors of the "Suffrage History" say: "As early as 1828 the standard of the Christian party in politics was openly unfurled. Frances Wright had long been aware of its insidious efforts, and its reliance upon women for its support. Ignorant, superstitious, devout, woman's general lack of education made her a fitting instrument for the work of thus undermining the republic. Having deprived her of her just rights, the country was now to find in woman its most dangerous foe. Frances Wright lectured that winter in the large cities of the western and middle States, striving to rouse the nation to the new danger which threatened it. The clergy at once, became her most bitter opponents. The cry of 'infidel' was started on every side, though her work was of vital importance to the country and undertaken from the purest philanthropy."

It was high time that a Christian and a non-Christian party in politics should unfurl a banner; for to the dauntless courage of the land from which she came—Scotland—she added the polished manner of the country from which came D'Arusmont, the husband from whom she was soon parted. To the zeal of the Covenanter, the moral blackness of the infidel, and the political creed of the Commune, she united the doctrine of Free Love. As she set these forth with blandishments of speech and manner, the country did indeed find in this woman a most dangerous foe. When "Fanny Wright societies" sprang up in New York and the West, horror might well be felt by lovers of the Republic.

Lucretia Mott was the next public preacher in this succession. Pure in personal character, lofty in spirit, winning in address, she took for her motto, "Truth for Authority, not Authority for Truth." As authority for that truth, she took Elias Hicks.

Dr. Jacobi, in "Common Sense," says: "The abolitionists were declared to have set aside the laws of God when they allowed women to speak in public: and, by a pastoral letter, the Congregational churches of Massachusetts were directed to defend themselves against heresy, by closing their doors to the innovators. The Methodists denounced the Garrisonian societies as no-government, no-Sabbath, no-church, no-Bible, no-marriage, women's rights societies." Not the Methodists alone, but the Congregationalists, the Presbyterians, the Episcopalians, the Baptists, the Unitarians, the Universalists, and the Quakers so denounced that faction of them in which culminated many of the doctrines of Anne Hutchinson, Ann Lee, Frances Wright, and Lucretia Mott.

In an appeal to the women of New York, in 1860, signed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lydia Mott, Ernestine Rose, Martha C. Wright, and Susan B. Anthony, we read: "The religion of our day teaches that, in the most sacred relations of the race, the woman must ever be subject to the man; that in the husband centres all power and learning; that the difference in position between husband and wife is as vast as that between Christ and the Church; and woman struggles to hold the noble impulses of her nature in abeyance to opinions uttered by a Jewish teacher, which, alas! the mass believe to be the will of God."

In 1895, among the names of those responsible for the Suffrage Woman's Bible, we find three to which the title "Rev." is prefixed. The opening commentary on the first verses of Genesis, where the creation of man is described, says: "Instead of three male personages, as generally represented, a Heavenly Father, Mother, and Son would seem more rational. The first step in the elevation of woman to her true position, as an equal factor in human progress, is the cultivation of the religious sentiment in regard to her dignity and equality, the recognition by the rising generation of an ideal Heavenly Mother, to whom their prayers should be addressed, as well as to a Father." Here is Ann Lee's doctrine revived with a mocking suggestion that savors more of Frances Wright than of its poor, half-crazed author. The soul-sufficiency of Ann Hutchinson, the spiritual anarchy of Lucretia Mott, the infidelity and the veiled coarseness of Frances Wright, have all found fit setting in this commentary on the Pentateuch. I know that Miss Anthony repudiates the Suffrage Woman's Bible in the name of the Association of which she is President. It certainly does not represent the faith or the culture or the doctrines of many who belong to that body; but she cannot really repudiate it for herself or for them. It was promised in the History of which she is co-editor, it was foreshadowed in her circular quoted above, as well as in innumerable speeches of hers in convention. Those Christian and philanthropic bodies that have attached themselves to the Suffrage movement have this book to account for and with. Whatever they may personally decide to think or say of it, it is the consummate blossom of the spirit of the Suffrage movement, and the names it bears upon its title-page represent the varied classes that have worked for the political enfranchisement of woman. By the world outside it will so be dealt with.

Few movements have been started, especially among women, that did not professedly stand upon high moral and religious ground. Fourierism was superhuman in its intention,—in this country, at least. Free-thinking hopes to deliver the soul from the bondage of superstition in all religion. Mormonism was founded as "the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- Day Saints." Communism at Oneida was professedly built upon the doctrine of human perfection in Christian love. The disaster to the soul is in proportion to the amount of perversion of a living faith. Every movement must be judged, not by what its advocates suppose themselves to believe, but by that which time proves they do believe.

But to return to the Suffrage charge. "American men may quiet their consciences with the delusion that no such injustice exists in this country as in Eastern nations. Though, with the general improvement in our institutions, woman's condition must inevitably have improved also, yet the same principle that degrades her in Turkey insults her here." American men may quiet their consciences, while striving to enlighten them further. The answer to Mohammedanism is Turkey. The answer to Christianity is America. Ceremonial uncleanness is absolutely unlike religious and social orderliness in the distribution of duties. How came there to be "general improvement in our institutions?" There has been no improvement in Turkey, in China, in India, or in Japan, except such as is creeping back from the Christendom of which these Suffragists speak with a sneer. Freedom and education have not been appreciably advanced by "woman's becoming a component part of the government" in any land. The lands where she has the most apparent governmental control are the ones that are least educated and least free among those of modern civilization.

The church is an ever-growing body, and its clergy hold widely differing beliefs. The Egyptian priesthood guarded the sacred mysteries and ruled the state. Through the utmost that natural religion can do for man, they had gleaned the secret of a Supreme Maker and Ruler of the universe. Moses, who was "learned in all their wisdom," led the first exiles across the sea to find "freedom to worship God," and, from that day to this, the ministers of religion have stood as public guard over the mysteries of faith and, in the beginnings of each civilization, have ruled the state. Whenever they have forgotten the lesson that Moses taught, the lesson that Paul more clearly taught, that to God alone is any soul responsible, they have proved stumbling-blocks to progress. It is true that religious bigots, as Suffrage writers say, have "defended capital punishment, intemperance, slavery, polygamy, and the subjection of woman." But capital punishment is defended by many besides bigots. Intemperance finds not only its strongest but its most effective foes in the Christian ministry and the Christian church. Slavery in our country rent in twain several great religious bodies. James G. Birney says that "probably nine-tenths of the Abolitionists were church-members." With polygamy came woman's subjection and woman suffrage into our free States. And the bigots outside the Christian ministry and church must share the same condemnation with any who, professing freedom, have yet forgotten the injunction of the Bible and the Christ.

"She would invade the pulpit." Invasion seems a strange word to use in regard to woman's entrance upon one of the highest of human duties. A pulpitless teacher she is and always has been. Missionary women have taught multitudes of beings. The Salvation lassie has no thought of invasion, or of self-exaltation, when she leads the service of a thousand souls; and I am not willing to believe that a single woman who has entered the regular ministry has any more. It is the spirit of Suffrage that looks upon woman's advance as an attack.

But times have changed, say Suffrage leaders. Mrs. Cornelia K. Hood, in her report of the King's County Suffrage work for 1895, says: "A circular letter was addressed to all the clergymen known to be friends, asking them that a sermon might be preached by them in favor of woman suffrage. This request met with a liberal response, and many able addresses were made on the Sunday morning set for that purpose." In her report of the Suffrage campaign in New York city in the winter of 1895-96, Dr. Jacobi says, speaking of the parlor meetings: "Several prominent clergymen joined us— Mr. Rainsford, the Rev. Arthur Brooks, Mr. Percy Grant, Mr. Eaton, Mr. Leighton Williams." In referring to the last regular meeting of the County Suffrage Association held that winter in Cooper Union, she says: "The meeting was addressed by Samuel Gompers, President of the Federation of Labor, by Dr. Peters, an Episcopal clergyman, by Father Ducey, the Catholic priest, Dr. Saunders, a Baptist minister, and Henry George, the advocate of single tax." In her address before the Constitutional Convention, she said: "The Church, which fifty years ago was a unit in denouncing the public work of woman—even for the slave—is now divided in its councils." The church never was a unit in denouncing the public work of woman, and much of her noblest public work has been done under its auspices. The behavior of Suffrage women in slavery times caused scandal to church and state. The right of private judgment, claimed always by Protestant Christianity, has divided the clergy on all questions; and "a clergyman, a priest, and a minister" were as free to believe, and to speak what they believed, on suffrage, as were Samuel Gompers, who lately offended the Labor organization by inviting two anarchists to address it, and Henry George, whose single-tax theories have lately turned law and order upside down in Delaware.

"Interpret the Bible anew from her own standpoint." The volume in which a beginning has been made in this work is a thick pamphlet bearing a motto from Cousin on one cover, and the picture of a piano as an advertisement on the other. It is with a profound sense of sadness and disgust that any woman who honors God and loves her own sex turns its pages. Behold the first dilemma in which the commentators find themselves involved. Mrs. Stanton opens the comments on the Creation as follows: "In the great work of the creation, the crowning glory was realized when man and woman were evolved on the sixth day, the masculine and feminine forces in the image of God, that must have existed eternally, in all forms of matter and mind.... How then is it possible to make woman an afterthought?... All those theories based on the assumption that man was prior in the creation, have no foundation in Scripture. As to woman's subjection, on which both the canon and civil law delight to dwell, it is important to note that equal dominion is given to woman over every living thing, but not a word is said giving man dominion over woman. No lesson of woman's subjection can be fairly drawn from the first chapter of the Old Testament."

In commenting on the second account of the Creation, Ellen Battelle Dietrick says: "It is now generally conceded that some one (nobody pretends to know who) at some time (nobody pretends to know exactly when) copied two creation myths on the same leather roll, one immediately following the other. Modern theologians have, for convenience sake, entitled these two fables, respectively, the Elohistic and the Jahoistic stories. They differ not only in the point I have mentioned above, but in the order of the 'creative acts,' in regard to the mutual attitude of man and woman, and in regard to human freedom from prohibitions imposed by deity. Now, it is manifest that both of these stories cannot be true; intelligent women who feel bound to give the preference to either, may decide according to their own judgment which is more worthy of an intelligent woman's acceptance. My own opinion is, that the second story was manipulated by some wily Jew, in an endeavor to give 'heavenly authority' for requiring a woman to obey the man she married." Lillie Devereux Blake takes still another horn of the dilemma. She says: "In the detailed description of creation we find a gradually ascending series. 'Creeping things,' 'great sea-monsters,' every bird of wing,' 'cattle and living things of the earth,' the 'fish of the sea and the birds of the heavens;' then man, and, last and crowning glory of the whole, woman. It cannot be maintained that woman was inferior to man, even if, as asserted in chapter ii., she was created after him, without at once admitting that man is inferior to the creeping things because created after them."

These commentators, on the whole, agree that the first account of creation does not teach woman's subjection to man; that, although "some wily Jew" inserted the second account in an endeavor to give "heavenly authority for requiring a woman to obey the man she married," he has been outwitted after all, for the ascending series of creation really teaches the same lesson as the first account, and from it woman's inferiority cannot be maintained. And yet it would seem that she must be an "afterthought" if she is to be superior.

Mrs. Stanton, in summing up the concensus of opinion on a matter which is not of the slightest importance to any of them, except that they feel an interest, for the cause of Suffrage, in endeavoring to release woman from the long bondage of superstition, says: "The first account dignifies woman as an important factor in the creation, equal in power and glory with man. The second makes her a mere afterthought. The world in good running order without her, the only reason for her advent being the solitude of man. There is something sublime in bringing order out of chaos; light out of darkness; giving each planet its place in the solar system; oceans and lands their limits,—wholly inconsistent with a petty surgical operation to find material for the mother of the race. It is in this allegory that all the enemies of woman rest their battering-rams, to prove her inferiority. Accepting the view that man was prior in the creation, some Scriptural writers say that, as the woman was of the man, therefore her position should be one of subjection. Grant it. Then, as the historical fact is reversed in our day, and the man is now of the woman, shall his place be one of subjection? The equal position declared in the first account must prove more satisfactory to both sexes; created alike in the image of God—the heavenly Mother and Father. Thus, the Old Testament,' in the beginning,' proclaims the simultaneous creation of man and woman, the eternity and equality of sex; and the New Testament echoes back through the centuries the individual sovereignty of woman growing out of this natural fact. Paul, in speaking of equality as the very soul and essence of Christianity, said, 'There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.' With this recognition of the feminine element in the Godhead in the Old Testament, and this declaration of the equality of the sexes in the New, we may well wonder at the contemptible status woman occupies in the Christian Church to-day."

So the woman who spurns the Bible as the book that is responsible for woman's degradation, who denies that it is the word of God, who pours out upon Paul the vials of her wrath, finds in them both her highest warrant for believing in the "equal position" of woman, "the perfect equality of the sexes." When the wrath of woman thus praises God, the one who believes that through woman's status in the Bible and in the Christian Church this perfect equality is being worked out day by day need not take up controversial cudgels. Ribaldry in woman seems more gross than in man, and this is woman's ribaldry. It is profane to speak of the "feminine element in the Godhead." God is a spirit. There is no more a feminine than a masculine element in the Godhead. Sex belongs to mortal life and its conditions. It begins and ends with this earth. Christ has told us so: There will be in another world "no marrying, nor giving in marriage, but we all shall be as the angels in heaven." The equality of which Paul spoke as "the very soul and essence of Christianity" is the equality of the essence and soul of male and female humanity, and the oneness of the believer's soul with that of the Christ in whom his soul believes. The soul of humanity, as well as its body, is bound by sex conditions as long as it draws the breath of this transitory life. Every thought and every act reveal the governing power of the sex mould in which its form is cast for this world's uses. The use of this world is to give preparation for another and a better one; final spiritual triumph is the end to be attained. Humanity is now in the image of God only in the essential sense in which the full corn in the ear may be said to be wrapped up in its kernel, and it can unfold only according to the laws of its being. The first account of Creation sets forth, with the beautiful imagery of the Orient, the general and ultimate truth. The second account, with the same grand simplicity, foreshadows the method and the long, slow process by which this ultimate end is to be attained.

In continuing their comments, the editors say: "In chapter v., verse 23, Adam proclaims the eternal oneness of the happy pair, 'This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh;' no hint of her subordination. How could men, admitting these words to be divine revelation, ever have preached the subjection of woman? Next comes the naming of the mother of the race. 'She shall be called woman,' in the ancient form of the word, 'womb-man.' She was man and more than man, because of her maternity. The assertion of the supremacy of the woman in the marriage relation is contained in chapter v., 24: 'Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and cleave unto his wife.' Nothing is said of the headship of man, but he is commanded to make her the head of the household, the home, a rule followed for centuries under the Matriarchate."

A rule that has been followed rudely through all centuries, and is followed to-day with far greater approach to perfect obedience. Maternity was to be God's method of working out the problem of changing the innocence of ignorant savagery to the holiness of enlightened civilization. To this end, the more delicate and complex organism of the womb-man must be cared for by the strength and steadiness that could find full play because that subtler task was not demanded of it.

In commenting on chapter iii., which contains the account of the Garden of Eden and the eating of the apple, they say: "As out of this allegory grow the doctrines of original sin, the fall of man and of woman the author of all our woes, and the curses on the serpent, the woman and the man, the Darwinian theory of the gradual growth of the race from a lower to a higher type of animal life is more hopeful and encouraging."

The Christian doctrine is more hopeful and encouraging still. It reveals the growth of the race from a low type of animal life to the perfect life of the soul.

We do not need to go back to the garden where our first parents dwelt, to look for the substantiation of the eternal truth of this whole wondrous story. Amid the landscape of the civilization of the noblest country that the world possesses, we have the drama repeated. In the work of Anne Hutchinson, Ann Lee, Frances Wright, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Stanton, Susan Anthony, Ellen Dietrick, Lillie Blake, and their fellow- commentators, we have re-enacted the Temptress and the Fall. Woman first aspired. She stretched forth her eager hand to seize the good, and in so doing snatched the evil that grew beside it. The woman in Eden had not learned what maternity taught her later—that she could point the path, but could not lead in entering it. Wherever woman has forgotten this hard- won but glorious lesson, she has been the most dangerous of guides. The conscience, that intellect of the soul, woke first in woman. By her obedience to its voice, the faith that worketh by love had its perfected work, and the promise that was given to her was fulfilled in the birth of Christ. A Creation story without a gospel is chaos without gravitation, primal darkness without the sun. Forward to divinity in human form woman was able, through obedience, to point mankind. Backward to divinity in human form she points again, until humanity itself shall become divine. If she loses the final vision, or substitutes her own, she can neither point nor guide. No wonder woman has been a mystery to the church. No wonder a witch was not allowed to live, while a wizard might; she was more dangerous. No wonder Paul was perplexed by the woman question. No wonder monks fled to the desert. Christ has spoken the final words of woman, "Thy faith hath saved thee." From the anguish of His cross he said: "Woman, behold thy son!" "Behold thy mother," and the beloved disciple "took her to his own home from that hour."

In the Suffrage appeal of 1860, the writers said: "The difference between husband and wife is as vast as the difference between Christ and his Church." Christ himself says that the difference between him and his Church is that of degree, not of kind, and that the resemblance is that of essential oneness. He says: "I am the vine, ye are the branches." Could union be more completely pictured? The fruit-bearing branch cannot say to the strength-giving vine, "I have no need of thee." The vine cannot say, "I have no need of thee." Man in his imperious folly has pictured the relationship as that of oak and vine which have no organic union; but, despite imperiousness and folly, both men and women, through mutual obedience to God, have thus far worked out, and are still working out, the nobler destiny for both.

In summing up their opinion of the Pentateuch, the editors of the Suffrage Woman's Bible say: "This utter contempt for all the decencies of life, and all the natural personal rights of women, as set forth in these pages, should destroy, in the minds of women at least, all authority to superhuman origin, and stamp the Pentateuch at least as emanating from the most obscene minds of a barbarous age." So low can woman fall in ignorance and shameless audacity when the faith that works by love is lost. As the spirit of the Commandments comes to prevail, the decencies of life and the natural personal rights of woman become more secure. Here again Christ has spoken the ultimate word. He says: "Ye have heard by them of old time' Thou shalt not commit adultery,' but I say unto you whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart." This is the standard of chastity to which mankind must come. When the Hebrew mother in living faith cast the bread of her own life's being upon the Nile, she was to find it after many days in the great law-giver of her people. The Commandments received through him were the foreshadowing of those greater oracles in which Christ summed up the whole duty of man. The individual liberty which Moses was the first to proclaim to a whole people, in the Pentateuch, Christ, his anti-type, proclaimed to a whole world, and on his proclamation rests to-day the freedom of woman and of the American Republic. The Bread of Life, again cast on the troubled waters of this world, by woman's faith, through Mary the Virgin Mother, is returning after many days.

Strange that we should forever turn back, as if the application of any essential truth were finished. The child walks by faith. The childhood of the world walked by faith, and left in the Bible the evidence of things that are not seen but are eternal. The Suffrage movement has a quarrel with the Bible because the Creator is there represented, for the reverence of the race, under the guise of a Heavenly Father, and not a Heavenly Mother, or rather, not as a human pair, equal in dignity and power. If the first impulsion of love toward God had come into this world through the mind of man, he would have represented the divine love that his soul conceived under the guise of that being on earth whom he most loved. But love was born with the "disabilities" of woman; it was evolved through motherhood; and the same impulse that gave it, exalted, not itself, but what it loved and trusted. "I have gotten a man from the Lord" said the first recorded mother, who had learned to know the Lord through motherhood; and the boy she bore was taught to look up with confidence to the strength and protection of his father. She told him that the pity of his father, which made him bring food and raiment, and which guarded his home, was an image of the feeling that was felt for him by the divine being. Could man have learned the lesson first, we can see that the story would have been different, because man has named every beautiful and gracious thing for woman. Virtue, temperance, truth, purity, love, faith, hope, liberty, grace, beauty, charity, the inspirers of art and science, of music and literature, of justice and of religion, all are feminine. When man says: "Our Father which art in heaven," he prays as his mother taught him. Through the self-abnegation that was unconscious of its sacrifice, woman was to be the instrument for bringing human life up, on, to the God who, being spirit, could act upon a clay-bound mind only through the highest human thing that love could know. Men, as well as women, have misunderstood and misinterpreted this. The love that "is not puffed up," "doth not behave itself unseemly," cannot proclaim its own virtue—to arrogate it is to lose it. But the secret of the Lord has been with those who feared Him, and it has led the world aright in spite of blunder and of sin.

If man, in his ignorant conceit, has fancied that this was the subjection of woman, it has been a part of his mother's lesson to correct that impression. If woman, in her folly, has allowed herself to make the same mistake, that, too, is working out its cure through the love that so arranged human nature that "a man should leave father and mother and cleave unto his wife, and they twain should be one flesh," and that "her desire should be to her husband" in those matters wherein the mutual interest required that he should bear sway. If there is a minister of religion who holds to the perverted notion that, because woman ate the original apple in disobedience to God's command, she was the bringer of original sin into the world, and for that was and is punished by arbitrary subjection to the authority of man, that minister does not deserve the support of women. The fact that he would have few listeners, and fewer followers, if women were not the bringers and the maintainers of religious faith is sufficient proof against such an exposition of scripture. As a matter of fact, while the dogmatism of belief, like the dogmatism of unbelief, has made assertions that have dishonored both divine and human nature, the practical working of formulated faiths of all names has been to approach the standard laid down in the Old and the New Testament. The model of being set by Christ is that of a little child. "Except ye become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven." The natural characteristics of the child are faith, and hope, and love—the virtues that abide. When the virile apostle to the Gentiles "put away childish things," he kept these childlike qualities. If woman first attains them in perfection, she is superior; if man, he is superior. In the race toward the final goal, to be equal in accomplishment it is needful to be equal in obedience. The keynote of Paul's preaching was obedience—the obedience of all human beings to God in Christ, the obedience of all men and women to lawful civil authority for the sake of Christ and the promotion of his kingdom,—the obedience of men to one another in the churchly offices, for the sake of that "decency" that he loved and enjoined—the obedience of the equal wife to the husband who was the external representative of family life.

With Eastern nations the veil was the sign of retirement, of domestic life, and it was assumed by wives when they were in the street or in a public assembly. In heathen and barbarous countries it was also deemed a sign of woman's subjection and inferiority. The Hebrews were the first people to attain any truly spiritual conceptions, and they began to have a commensurately higher idea of the possibilities of woman's nature and work. When Christian women, in their new-found freedom, would have thrown aside the veil, just as Christian men, in their new-found reverence for God, would have repudiated the heathen wife, Paul said to them both that Christian liberty was individual,—it changed the character, not the sex relations. In arranging for church discipline, he advised that men should uncover the head, and women should wear the veil. But he said, in reference to that veil, that "woman should have power on her head, because of the angels." The angels are spoken of in the New Testament as veiling their faces in the very presence of the Creator. In that truer symbolism of Christianity, man was to uncover his head in token of reverence to God and acceptance of the responsibility of the guardianship of the earth. Woman was to cover her head in token of her acceptance of man's guardianship and of her dominion over his heart, to which she had revealed God's will.

Paul adds: "For as the woman is of the man, so is the man also of the woman; but all things are of God." This relation was one of the mysteries that Paul said he did not comprehend, nor could he, till the lessons he taught should work out their results, and might serve as commentary.

Life itself, as well as all that life could come to mean, depended upon woman's consenting. The word "obey" in some marriage services seems, like what it really is, a survival. Obedience has brought its reward, and the consent of the heart is more than the consent of the lips. But if there is no consent of the heart to wifehood and motherhood, in time there will be no chivalry, no progress, no final emancipation for the race. Consenting is also commanding, and woman loses her life in order to find it in the fulfillment of her wish. It was consent to her own teaching. The chivalrous and tender-hearted Paul, who spoke of women with reverent affection, who adopted as his own the mother of Rufus, was repeating the lesson of every Jewish mother from Sarah to Deborah, and from Deborah to the women who were last at Christ's cross and first beside his tomb. Deborah, who was the judge, prophetess and poet, but first of all "a mother in Israel," under whom her degenerate people had peace for forty years, rebuked Barak and said, to their humiliation: "This day shall the Lord deliver Israel by the hand of a woman." From this teaching Paul uttered his rebuke to the wayward church at Corinth: "It is a shame for a man to cover his head, inasmuch as he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of the man." And he added, in speaking of the wearing of the veil, "For this cause ought the woman to have power" "because of the angels." In the Epistle to the Ephesians Paul admonishes the Church to be "imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love, even as Christ also loved you, and gave himself for you, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour." Again, he says: "Therefore, as the Church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything." And as if to make doubly certain that no one should think that such submission implied bondage or inequality, he adds "Husbands, love your wives even as Christ also loved the Church and gave himself for it." Again, he says: "So ought men to love their wives, as their own bodies.... Even as the Lord the Church," adding with almost strained Oriental vehemence, "for we are members of his body, of his flesh and of his bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they twain shall be one flesh."

The comment most readily suggested is, that through this teaching the use of the veil has now no such significance. The uncovering of the head is a token of respect, largely to woman. The retention of the bonnet is not dreamed of in connection with woman's relation to man, nor does it suggest woman's power in the moral world. The obedience through which love "constrained" a mind that had been bred to forms, was free. If anybody now holds that woman was intended to glorify God indirectly, through man, or to serve God by serving man, he makes an assumption long discredited, and not in accord with the spirit of Christ and of Paul. Man is as much the glory of woman as woman is the glory of man, and they reveal equally the glory of God.

In speaking of the proprieties of life, Paul said: "Does not nature herself teach you?" "If a man have long hair, it is a shame to him." "If a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her." The badge of womanhood is a glory, and the "short-haired women and long-haired men" of the early Suffrage movement transformed the symbols of dignity and honor into those of contempt and disgrace.

Canon law grew up during the Middle Ages, when came the great

"Death-grapple in the darkness, 'twixt old systems and the Word."

The wondrous church that rose on the ruins of Roman militarism, and overthrew Norman feudalism, gave evidence, in its code, of the bitterness of the conflict and the rudeness of the time. The legal fiction that, in acknowledging the oneness of husband and wife, yet made the husband that one, was a perversion of Scripture.

It has been publicly said by Suffragists from the first, that the tenets of the Church of Rome, in which Canon law had its origin, were inimical to woman suffrage; and they have further said that those who canonize women and worship the Virgin Mother, should naturally have been friendly to the Suffrage idea. I suppose no one will deny that the spirit of the Roman body is that of a state church. I have no more to say in criticism of it as a Christian denomination than I have of others; but that organization which has held temporal and spiritual power to be co-ordinate and interdependent in government, presents a political phase that has direct bearing on my theme, and I make my few comments as a historian. The Church that inculcates Mariolatry would have far more ignorant women to add to our body of voters than any other. It has done less for woman's education and general advancement than any other, but its claims are not therefore modest. The school elections in Staten Island last year gave an object- lesson in regard to its intention to use the suffrage. In Connecticut, the school election presented another evidence of the intense interest felt by the Catholic clergy in public-school matters. In California, in the late canvass for woman suffrage, that Church assisted largely in carrying on the work to secure the amendment. While many of its individual members are among the noblest friends that civil and religious freedom have in our country, this church, by its traditions, and by its latest pronunciamentos, shows itself as a force that, for its own selfish reasons, may be reckoned on the side of woman suffrage in its conflict with woman's progress.



CHAPTER X.

WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND SEX.

The ninth count of the Suffrage Declaration says: "He has created a false sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude woman from society, are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in men." And the list of grievances is summed up as follows: "Because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States."

The writers do not say whether the code of morals referred to is a code of law or an unwritten code of public sentiment. If they mean the former, their statement is not true; for whatever laws affect moral delinquencies visit their penalties equally upon men and women. If they mean public sentiment alone, the answer is, that both men and women are responsible for its creation. It is folly to deny that there is, in the nature of things, more excuse for men than for women. A mother realizes that her son has a natural temptation of which her daughter knows nothing. But this fact, while it accounts in part for the different standard, by no means exonerates man. One of the strangest anomalies of human experience exists in connection with this matter. Man reposes his deepest faith in the existence of goodness at its vital point, in the virtue of woman; and yet when he tramples upon that virtue he screens himself behind the excuse that her nature is as vulnerable as his own, while his temptation is greater. The main reason, as it seems to me, why women often appear more cruel to their fallen sisters than do men, lies in the fact that pure women abhor this vice as they abhor no other. Besides bestowing upon woman a loftier moral sense, her Creator has hedged about her virtue with a feeling of physical repulsion that is distinct from the moral question involved. The social life of the world is to a large extent in woman's hands. When she says to men "You cannot bring your impurity into my home," "You must be the ones to guard our sons and daughters," the reform will be begun in earnest. Woman's faith, and her abstract way of looking at moral questions, prevent her from fastening her thought, as men naturally do, on any special culprit, in her severe but vague sense of wrong in this matter. The Suffragists have taken fewer steps in the direction of removing the social plague-spot than in the direction of bringing about a system of easier divorce—a thing that strikes a blow directly against, instead of for, the virtue of their sex. Social opinion is causing a change in some of the laws concerning social vice. Nearly every State legislature has raised the age of consent. So far as Suffrage associations have assisted in this, it proves their ability and their good will; but much more is due to our educated physicians and philanthropists.

It seems at first thought as if there were no direct connection between voting and social questions of sex; but I am following the lead of my Suffrage texts. Others who attempt the discussion are led to the same themes. Dr. Jacobi, in her book, says: "The problem is, to show why, in a representative system based on the double principle that all the intelligence in the state shall be enlisted for its welfare, and all the weakness in the state represented for its own defence, women, being often intelligent, and often weak, and always persons in the community, should not also be represented." In replying to the anti-suffrage arguments of Prof. Goldwin Smith, she says: "Do sex relations depend upon acts of Parliament or constitutional amendments? Can women marry a ballot, or embrace the franchise, otherwise than by a questionable figure of speech? Must adultery and infanticide necessarily be favored by the decisions of female jurors? Is divorce legislation, as arranged by the exclusive wisdom of men, now so satisfactory that women—who must perforce be involved in every case—should always modestly refrain from attempting amendment? This entire class of considerations, however irrelevant to the issue, may be grouped together and considered together, because, to a large class of minds—the rudest, quite as much as those of Mr. Smith's cultivation—they are the considerations that do come to the front whenever equal rights are suggested." She adds that the reason they come to the front is, "that men, accustomed to think of men as possessing sex attributes and other things besides, are accustomed to think of women as having sex and nothing else."

Is there a ruder mind anywhere than one that could not only think but write a sentiment so revolting and so false? And yet the statement admits that, whatever the reason, the sex issue does underlie the whole Suffrage question.

In their "History," the leaders not only set forth all the specific charges in their Declaration of Sentiments, but of this "rebellion such as the world has never seen" they say: "Men saw that with political equality for woman, she could no longer be kept in social subjection. The fear of a social revolution thus complicated the discussion."

In the Introduction to the Suffrage Woman's Bible, the commentators say: "How can woman's position be changed from that of a subordinate to an equal, without opposition?—without the broadest discussion of all the questions involved in her present degradation? For so far-reaching and momentous a reform as her complete independence, an entire revolution in all existing institutions is inevitable."

Dr. Jacobi says: "To-day, when all men rule, and diffused self-government has abolished the old divisions between the governing classes and the governed, only one class remains over whom all men can exercise sovereignty—namely, the women. Hence a shuddering dread runs through society at the proposal to also abolish this last refuge of facile domination."

Here, then, all these Suffragists present a problem far more momentous than appears when it is proposed "to show why, in a representative system based on the double principle that all the intelligence in the state shall be enlisted for its welfare, and all the weakness in the state represented for its defence, women, being often intelligent, and often weak, and always persons, should not also be represented." It is the sex battle that has been waged from the beginning. In the Suffrage Woman's Bible Mrs. Stanton says: "The correction of this [the misinterpretation of the Bible as concerns woman] will restore her, and deprive her enemy, man, of a reason for his oppression and a weapon of attack." Disguise it as they may, to themselves and to others, the Suffrage idea is compelled to claim that man is woman's enemy, that the ballot is the engine of his power, and that therefore she must vote. The reason that "these considerations come to the front whenever equal rights is mentioned" is because the women of that movement brought them there, and keep them there, and because no one can seriously consider the matter without seeing that they belong there.

In discussing them, Dr. Jacobi says: "What is imagined, claimed, and very seriously demanded, is, that women be recognized as human beings, with a range of faculties and activities co-extensive with that of men, whatever may be the difference in the powers within that range."

In another place she admits that "women are really recognized as individuals, the same as men," and the fact that they are so recognized is made the basis of an argument for their voting. Suppose men demanded that they be given a "range of faculties and activities co-extensive with that of women, whatever may be the difference in the powers within that range," if they demanded it "seriously" they would probably become laughing- stocks.

She says: "The sex relations of women as lovers, as wives, as mothers, as daughters, remain untouched, certainly unimpaired, by the demand to extend beyond these. What is impaired is not the sex relation, nor sex condition, but the social disabilities, the personal and social subordination, the condition of political non-existence, which have been foisted upon that sex condition."

The repeated demand to "extend beyond" the sex relations of either sex is a demand to touch those relations, and whether it is a demand to impair them depends upon the question whether it is true that disabilities and subordination have been foisted upon the sex conditions. In olden times they were. Men were subject to social disabilities, personal and social subordination, and political non-existence. It followed that women were also in the same subjection. As men threw off the yoke, the sex relations began to assume their natural position. Man was the protector, woman the protected. In the natural relations, the protector is at the service of the protected, and that is the state of things to-day. In order to be preserved in bodily, mental, and spiritual freedom, woman must yield with grace to the hand that serves her. In order to protect, man must see to it that this freedom he has won is kept sacred and inviolable. He cannot be at once a tyrant and a guard. This freedom removes from woman all disabilities save those of sex. The question then is, can all the intelligence and all the weakness of women be represented for their own welfare and their own defence, by the same methods as those by which men attain that end, and yet leave these fundamental sex relations untouched and unimpaired?

The Suffrage leaders did not expect or intend to leave them untouched, or unimpaired, if complete change was impairment. In the "History" they say: "It is often asked if political equality—would not arouse antagonism between the sexes? If it could be proved that men and women had been harmonious in all ages and countries, and that women were happy and satisfied in their slavery, we might hesitate in proposing any change whatever; but the apathy, the helpless, hopeless resignation of a subject class, cannot be called happiness. A woman growing up under American ideas of liberty in government and religion cannot brook any disability based on sex alone, without a deep feeling of antagonism with the power that creates it."

Dr. Jacobi says: "Manhood Suffrage in America may seem to result, historically, from the general average equality of social conditions among the inhabitants of the Thirteen States. But it may also be deduced as a philosophical necessity from the Idea of Individualism, which became the core of the Federal Union. This idea, at first suggested only for men, has, little by little, spread to women also."

Individualism, in the sense of personal moral responsibility, became the core, first of the Hebrew Theocracy, and last of the American National life. But that republicanism which has come to rest on sex distinction is the combined result of Individualism and Authority. Suffrage discussion for years has turned upon the idea of Individualism versus Authority.

In a government like ours, where all the intelligence and all the weakness are represented for their own welfare and defence, authority must to a certain extent hold a stern hand over individualism, because freedom for all means license for not a single one, be it man or woman. Mrs. Fanny Ames says: "Any argument [against Suffrage] worth anything at all, comes down to this—an argument against American democracy—and must rest there." Many arguments have been adduced against Woman Suffrage that were also arguments against democracy; because there are always people, and wise people too, who fear the test of the ultimate experiment. To this fear the Suffragists catered when, in contradiction to their own dictum of universal suffrage, they asked Congress for a sixteenth amendment that should require an educational qualification for all, both men and women. But, guided by the statesmanship that seeks to form a true and enduring democracy, this Republic has come to the sex basis.

Dr. Jacobi says: "The complex contradictions in the present distributions of sovereign power are further intensified by the vulgarization of the general ideal. It is one thing to say, 'Some men shall rule,' quite another to declare, 'All men shall rule,' and that in virtue of the most primitive and rudimentary attribute they possess,—that, namely, of sex. If the original contempt for masses of men has ever diminished, and the conception of mankind been ennobled, it is because, upon the primitive animal foundation, human imagination has built a fair structure of mental and moral attribute and possibility, and habitually deals with that. This indeed is no new thing to do; for it was to this moral man that Pericles addressed his funeral oration, and of whom Lincoln thought in his speech at Gettysburg. Of this moral man, women—the sex hitherto so despised—are now recognized to constitute an integral part. It is useless, therefore, to attempt to throw them out by an appeal to the primitive conditions of a physical force to which no one appeals for any other purpose."

The immortal orator at Gettysburg was commander-in-chief of an army and navy whose physical power was then in the very act of saving the nation and redeeming it from the sin of slavery. The soldier-statesman of Greece, in his funeral oration, was addressing an army. The fair structure of mental and moral attribute and possibility has not been built by human imagination. The conception of the moral man that has ennobled mankind is older than any man who has embodied it. It is as old as mankind itself, upon whose primitive animal foundation God implanted side by side the conception of the moral man, woman—and of the governing man, man.

That no inequality should be possible when this idea should really rest upon the most primitive, rudimentary and yet continuing and controlling attribute, instead of upon complex contradictions in regard to the distribution of sovereign human power, God, speaking through the ideal which the moral man had grasped, said: "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they twain shall be one flesh."

Man is not the hereditary sovereign in a republic. He is an actual, present, continuing sovereign, and he is that only so long as he obeys the law of his being and constitutes himself, by reason of his manhood strength, the defence of the republic's laws for all. In woman suffrage democracy has met a most dangerous foe. It has been asked "If it would be best for man to make over half his sovereignty to woman?" I cannot imagine how he could do this, whatever might be his wish. Sovereignty in a republic is only divisible among those who are equals as to sovereign power; and any effort to divide with those who lack the essential attribute must result in despotism or anarchy. Men are as subject to the restrictions and requirements of sex as are women, and when they try an experiment contrary to those conditions, the end must be destruction of government itself.

Prof. Goldwin Smith says: "One of the features of a revolutionary era is the prevalence of a feeble facility of abdication. The holders of power, however natural and legitimate it may be, are too ready to resign it on the first demand.... The nerves of authority are shaken by the failure of conviction."

This is true, and it is what makes the present situation portentous. From the very tenderheartedness of the men of our time comes the danger to the women of this nation. So far from desiring to hold the slightest restriction over the women of the Republic, they may rush into an attempt at abdication of a sovereignty that did not originate in their will but in their environment, in order to prove the sincerity of their desire that woman should not even appear to be compelled to obey.

This movement is a feature of the revolutionary era that seems suddenly to have extended to the men with whose theories it belongs. Not at once, nor everywhere equally, but finally and completely would this change come. Man, as well as woman, must "consent to be governed" by the laws of being. If man really could "share his sovereignty," there might be some show of reason in the Suffrage claim that he should do so. But unless he can abdicate the very essentials of his sex condition, he cannot abdicate his sovereignty. His laws are dead letters whenever more men than those who passed them and approve them choose that they shall be dead. He would have no material outside the men in this country, with which to execute the wishes of the woman voters whom it is proposed to introduce to make laws which they know they cannot themselves enforce.

And this leads us right round again to consider the "disabilities foisted upon sex conditions." The first thing demanded of a voter is that, in the ordinary state of things, he should be able to vote. A body of citizens is asking that a sex be admitted to franchise when it is known to all that a large part of that sex would at every election find it physically impossible, or improper, to go to the polls. Suffragists say: "No women need vote who do not wish to; but they have no right to hinder us." Is this the Individualism of Democracy? It is the Individualism of Anarchy. It is not the rule of the majority. It is class rule with a vengeance; and as for "consenting to be governed," there never was a man or a government that so coolly assumed to govern without their consent such a body, as do the Suffragists. The disabilities "foisted upon sex" would be felt first of all by the wives and mothers who are most interested in the laws.

The next duty of citizenship is jury service. The leaders said: "We demand, in criminal cases, that most sacred of all rights, trial by jury of our own peers." In regard to jury duty Suffragists are not agreed; which fact alone shows that that service would be felt to be an impairment of sex conditions. So impossible has jury duty been found, even in small communities, that in Wyoming the jury service of women ceased with the first judge who admitted them to serve at all; and in Colorado but one or two women have ever served. The judges there do not allow them to be called. It was found to be expensive, and not promotive of the ends of justice. Whether this is held to be man's cruel withholding of woman's rights or not, it shows that either the sex condition or the co- extensiveness of woman's work with man's must be impaired. Dr. Jacobi says in regard to jury service: "The numerous cases for exemption now admitted for men would be certainly paralleled for women, but they would not always be identical. Men are now more often excused for business; women would be excused on the plea of ill-health. Of course the special plea of family cares with young children would rule out thousands of women during a number of years of their lives."

Who would establish the "special plea" for so large a proportion of the voting population? No law of justice on which a solid government can rest could do it; and that it would be asked, and needed, shows that sex conditions would interfere with voting conditions. A criminal case often lasts weeks, even months, during which time the jury are kept together and alone, locked up at night, and walked out by day. This second duty cannot be, and is not, performed; not because many women would not make good jurors, not because they should not try delicate cases, and might not serve well at certain times, and in special ways, but because jury duty, like military service, cannot take account of sex conditions when they are the rule and not the exception.

Office-holding is the next necessary concomitant of the ballot. Of course it can be said at once: "Why, multitudes of men never hold office, why should women?" It may be answered that multitudes of men do hold office, that no American would think of extending the ballot without expecting that, as an accompaniment, the duty, or the privilege, of office-holding should follow.

Not only is it true that if more than half the population were added to the voting list multitudes among them would attempt to rush into office, but it was mainly for office that a majority of those who have been pressing the demand cared for the vote. The authors of the "History" say: "As to offices, it is not be supposed that the class of men now elected will resign to women their chances, and, if they should to any extent, the necessary number of women to fill the offices would make no apparent change in our social circles. If, for example, the Senate of the United States should be entirely composed of women, but two in each State would be withdrawn from the pursuit of domestic happiness."

How could "the class of men now elected" help resigning, if women enough chose to put up a woman and give her a majority of votes,—provided, as Suffragists say, that the vote secures the office and retains it by a mere mandate? But it is not one office, or set of offices, which we have to consider. It is the entrance upon political life, permanently, of a large body of women. What that means to the social life that "would not miss them," we well know. There could be no domestic ties; no hindering child. The time would be short before this unnatural position would breed a race of Aspasias—without the intellect that ruled "the ruler of the land, when Athens was the land of fame."

The "History" says: "An honest fear is sometimes expressed 'that women would degrade politics, and politics would degrade women,'" and the writers answer: "As the influence of woman has been uniformly elevating in new civilizations, in missionary work in heathen lands, in schools, colleges, literature, and general society, it is fair to suppose that politics would prove no exception." We do not need to depend upon forecast or inference. The influence of women upon politics, and the influence of politics upon women, have already been degrading. This is true of political intrigue in the old world, and of the "Female Lobby" in Washington. It is astonishing to what an extent it is true in our new country, with our fresh and sweet traditions.

In 1851, Mrs. Stanton, writing to a convention at Akron, Ohio, said: "The great work before us is the education of those just coming on the stage of action. Begin with the girls of to-day, and in twenty years we can revolutionize this nation. Teach the girl to go alone by night and day, if need be, on the lonely highway, or through the busy streets of the crowded metropolis. Better for her to suffer occasional insults, or die outright, than live the life of a coward, or never move without a protector.... Teach her that it is no part of life to cater to the prejudices of those around her. Make her independent of public sentiment, by showing her how worthless and rotten a thing it is.... Think you, women thus educated would long remain the weak, dependent beings we now find them? They would soon settle for themselves this whole question of Woman's Rights."

Fifty years of such teaching has had its effect. The fine bloom has too often been brushed from our girls' delicacy of thought. They can strut through the street in the daytime wearing a shirt-front, a cravat, a choker, a vest, and a man's hat, and carrying a cane. A few can flaunt themselves in bloomers and knickerbockers, and ride astride a bicycle. They ape men in everything except courtesy to women. But the result is not what was expected. These customs have introduced the chaperone, and have put an end to simple freedom between boys and girls. The Puritan maiden in her modesty could let John Alden speak for himself, because the John who could summon courage to speak of love to such a girl would not dare to breathe impurity. When the young woman requires a social spy, the young man is apt to forget that her innocent dignity is her own best guardian. With the passing of the "lady," American women may fail to remember that a gentlewoman need pretend to no aristocracy but that of the noblesse oblige of her own femininity. In the paragraph quoted above, women are spoken of as those who are "uniformly elevating" and as "weak and dependent" to a contemptuous degree. They cannot be both at once, and it seems to me that in fact they are neither. Woman is not an angel nor a demon, not a conqueror nor a slave. But the seed from which any of these conflicting natures may develop lies in more fertile soil, within her impassioned and impressible soil, than in man's. The Suffrage movement will leave her much better or worse than it found her. The phrase "the new woman," with the instinctive explanation that she "is as refined, or as good a wife, mother, sister, daughter, housekeeper," as the old, is ominous.

Suffrage writers seem to hold two views in regard to sex. One is, that it is so pervasive that it cannot be affected by any line of conduct. The other is, that, so far as mind is concerned, it is purely a fanciful barrier, and the less there appears of external distinction the better will this be realized. The Suffrage "History" says: "Sex pervades all matter. Whatever it is, it requires no special watchfulness on our part to see that it is maintained." At the same time the dictum "There is no sex in mind," has been a Suffrage war-cry. It seems to me that both views are unscientific and dangerous to social morals. Sex integrity is pervasive of the whole nature only when men and women are true to the ideal of the essential distinctions in each. The true environment of woman is womanliness; not to fit her nature to the utmost that womanliness can mean to the world, is to fail of womanly attainment. But making herself a distorted woman cannot make her even an imperfect man. The mere act of going to the polls is not unwomanly; it might be as proper as going to the post-office; but attempting to encroach upon duty that is laid upon man in her behalf is neither womanly nor manly.

In demanding equality, Suffragists assume that there is not and has not been equality. In asserting that "there is no sex in mind," they really have had to maintain that there is one sex in mind, and that the masculine, to which woman must conform. If man wanted clinching arguments to prove his superiority, could he find another to match this one which suffrage has furnished him? The quaint wit of the Yankee put it neatly when he gave the toast, "Woman—once our superior, now our equal!" Man has said: "The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world." He has also said, with Martin: "Whatever may be the customs and laws of a country, the women of it decide the morals." The civilization of no nation has risen higher than the carrying out of the religious ideals of its best womanhood. If man has the outward framing of church and state, woman has the framing of the character of man. There is no schism in the body of human duties as the Lord established them. The issues have become more distinctly and openly moral issues; and in so far as woman can make it consist with that inner life of the home and the child, which alone can make the family and fix the state on any sure foundation, she is welcomed by man to meet the common foe. Such new avenues to wealth and distinction as she can enter with womanly dignity and grace will open to her as fast as man can make them places where she can walk with security and comfort to herself and advantage to them both. And they will open no faster.

The woman Suffragist has had to wage as bitter a warfare against physical science as against religion. Eliza Burt Gamble, in her volume which discusses "The Evolution of Woman," takes up the cudgels against both the Bible and man's scientific classification of woman, or rather his failure to classify her properly at all. She says: "When we bear in mind the past experience of the human race, it is not perhaps surprising that, during an era of physical force and the predominance of the animal instincts in man, the doctrine of male superiority should have become firmly grounded. But with the dawn of scientific investigation it might have been hoped that the prejudices resulting from a lower condition of human society would disappear. When, however, we turn to the most advanced scientific writers of the present century, we find that the prejudices which throughout thousands of years have been gathering strength are by no means eradicated. Mr. Darwin, whenever he had occasion to touch on the mental capacities of women, or, more particularly, the relative capacities of the sexes, manifested the same spirit which characterizes an earlier age."

Herbert Spencer, in his essay on "Justice," says that he once favored woman suffrage "from the point of view of a general principle of individual rights." Later he finds that this cannot be maintained, because he "discovers mental and emotional differences between the sexes which disqualify women from the burden of government and the exercise of its functions." He also considers it absurd for women to claim the vote and military exemption in the name of equality.

Science has told us of the active, as well as the passive, part that the mother plays in the growth of the embryo, and at the same time has told us that the sex of that embryo is determined by the nourishing power of the mother. The commonplace statistics of the census come in with their verifying word, and we find that in rude times and hard conditions more boys are born. Gentle conditions and abundance are favorable to the birth of girls. Here is the same story we have learned so often. Man the protector, woman the protected. Woman the inspiring force, man the organizing and physical power.

So the Bible, Science, and Republican government, according to Suffragist and Anti-suffragist, have planted themselves squarely on the sex issue. It is solid standing-ground, and neither apparent irrelevancy nor real antagonism will dislodge the argument.

Dr. Jacobi, in her address before the Constitutional Convention, said: "Still, all women do not demand the suffrage. We are sometimes told that the thousands of women who do want the suffrage must wait until those who are now indifferent, or even hostile, can be converted from their position. Gentlemen, we declare that theory is preposterous. It is true that the exercise of an independent sovereignty necessitates the demonstration of a very considerable amount of independence. A rebel state that cannot break its own blockade may not call upon a foreign power to move from its neutrality to do so. But the demand for equal suffrage is in nowise analogous to a claim for independent sovereignty. It is rather analogous to the claim to the protection of existing laws, which any group of people, or even a single person, may make."

Under a democratic government a claim for equal suffrage is a claim to share the independent sovereignty that protects, and therefore it cannot be analogous to a claim for protection, individual or otherwise, under that sovereignty. Does Dr. Jacobi mean that in asking for suffrage she does not ask to be as much an independent sovereign as any masculine voter of them all? The comparison of woman's claims to suffrage to the protection afforded by existing laws, suggests a narrowing of the demand to fit the requirements of an apparently hopeless struggle for a majority vote of women.

The Government is spoken of by Suffragists as if it were something exterior to and apart from the individual voters—a code of laws that had been set going and would run of itself, the laws being changed by more or fewer votes, but the power to execute being automatic and continuous. As this is the opposite of the actual situation, these rebels will have to "break their own blockade" like any others.

The "pacific blocade" that is enforced by the Quaker guns of this movement has its peaceful war-cries. One of the most exultant is an allusion to the expression "We the people" in the preamble of our national Constitution, with the question whether "people" does not include women. A reading of the entire preamble shows that, of the six achievements there specified as the purpose of the Constitution, every one is a thing that only men can do—with the possible exception of the fifth, which proposes rather vaguely to "promote the general welfare."

As to the thousands of women who want the vote, there are some figures as to the majority that "are indifferent or even hostile." I see by the pamphlet published by the New York State Suffrage Association, that they have but 1,600 paying members, which is not one in a thousand of the women in the State over twenty years of age. As Mrs. Winslow Crannell has made a careful computation from figures published in the "Woman's Journal," edited by Henry B. Blackwell and his daughter Alice Stone Blackwell, I quote her results: In Maine there are but 12 Suffragists to every 100,000 of the people; in New Hampshire, but 5 to every 100,000; in Massachusetts, but 51 to every 100,000; in Connecticut, but 23 to every 100,000. Pennsylvania has but 14 in 100,000; Kentucky has 32 to 100,000; Michigan, but 6 to 100,000; Illinois has 13 to 100,000; Ohio has 11 to 100,000; Iowa has 6 to 100,000; Virginia, but 1 to 100,000; New Jersey, 8 to 100,000; Arkansas, 3 to 100,000; South Carolina, 3 to 100,000. California has 33 in every 100,000, and Maryland has 6 in 100,000. If the suffrage is claimed for tax-paying women, it can be shown that there are, in New York State, for instance, at least 1,500,000 women who do not pay taxes. But, as a matter of fact, the tax-paying women of this State were among the first signers of Anti-suffrage petitions.



CHAPTER XI.

WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND THE HOME.

The tenth count in the Suffrage Declaration is: "He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to her God."

In the "History of Woman Suffrage," the editors say: "Quite as many false ideas prevail as to woman's true position in the home as elsewhere. Womanhood is the great fact of her life; wifehood and motherhood are but incidental relations."

The first legislation demanded by the Suffragists was that which called for a change of the marriage laws, so as to admit of divorce, first for drunkenness, and later for several other causes. In discussing the matter in convention, Mrs. Stanton presented resolutions that declared, among other things, "That any constitution, compact, or covenant between human beings that failed to produce or promote human happiness, could not, in the nature of things, be of any force or authority; and it would be not only a right, but a duty, to abolish it. That though marriage be in itself divinely founded, and is fortified as an institution by innumerable analogies in the whole kingdom of universal nature, still a true marriage is only known by its results; and like the fountain, if pure, will reveal only pure manifestations. That observation and experience daily show how incompetent are men, as individuals, or as governments, to select partners in business, teachers for their children, ministers of their religion, or makers, adjudicators or administrators of their laws; and as the same weakness and blindness must attend in the selection of matrimonial partners, the dictates of humanity and common-sense alike show that the latter and most important contract should no more be perpetual than either or all of the former."

In supporting these resolutions, Mrs. Stanton said, "I place man above all governments, ecclesiastical and civil—all constitutions and laws." "In the settlement of any question, we must simply consider the highest good of the individual." Antoinette Brown Blackwell followed Mrs. Stanton with a series of resolutions in which she opposed her, and defended the sanctity of marriage. Wendell Phillips moved that neither series of resolutions be entered on the journal. Mr. Garrison said they did not come together to settle the question of marriage, but he should be sorry to rule out Mrs. Stanton's resolutions and speeches. Miss Anthony said: "I hope Mr. Phillips will withdraw his motion.... I totally dissent from the idea that this question does not belong on this platform. Marriage has ever been a one-sided matter. By it, man gains all, woman loses all. Tyrant law and lust reign supreme with him; meek submission and ready obedience alone befit her.... By law, public sentiment, and religion, from the time of Moses down to the present day, woman has never been thought of other than as a piece of property, to be disposed of at the will and pleasure of man.... She must accept marriage as man proffers it, or not at all."

The resolutions were carried and recorded, and are published to this day, with added testimony to the same effect from a hundred Suffrage sources. We turn back to trace one of the lines through which this teaching has come down. The Suffrage leaders mention as special inspirers of their movement besides Ernestine Rose (who seconded Mrs. Stanton's resolutions) and Frances Wright, Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft. In the writings of those women we find the same sentiments set forth with delicacy or vulgarity, according to the nature of the writer. Margaret Fuller, in her Dial essay, published in 1843, "The Great Lawsuit—Man Versus Woman, Woman Versus Man," says: "It is the fault of marriage, and of the present relation between the sexes, that the woman belongs to the man, instead of forming a whole with him. It is a vulgar error to suppose that love—a love—is to woman her whole existence. She is also born for Truth and Love in their universal energy. Would she but assume her inheritance, Mary would not be the only virgin mother." Mary Wollstonecraft believed that marriage consisted solely of mutual affection, and that there should be no outward promise or tie to bind. If love were to die, the heart should seek other affinity. The licentious words of Frances Wright need not be repeated. With Mephistophelian promptings, Ernestine Rose stood forever a-tip-toe, whispering in the ear of the purer American feeling that would often have faltered. At the time of the passing of Mrs. Stanton's resolutions she said: "But what is marriage? A human institution, called out by the needs of the social, affectional human nature for human purposes.... If it is demonstrated that the real objects are frustrated, I ask, in the name of individual happiness and social morality and well-being, why should such a marriage be binding for life?... I ask that personal cruelty to the wife may be made a State's-prison offence, for which divorce shall be granted. Wilful desertion for one year should be a sufficient cause for divorce.... Habitual intemperance, or any other vice which makes the husband or wife intolerable and abhorrent to the other, ought to be sufficient cause for divorce." Essentially the same idea was repeated by Dr. Hulda Gunn in a recent Suffrage meeting.

In asking for laws that carried out these claims, or some of them, Mrs. Stanton said, in addressing the New York Legislature in 1854: "If you take the highest view of marriage as a Divine relation, which love alone can constitute and sanctify, then of course human legislation can only recognize it.... But if you regard marriage as a civil contract, then let it be subject to the same laws that control all other contracts. Do not make it a kind of half-human, half-divine institution, which you may build up but cannot regulate."

These doctrines—from those of Frances Wright to those of Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony—were put forth in the name of social purity and true marriage. A great body of Suffragists never have accepted them. They were repugnant, in this form, to a majority who were demanding "equal rights." In January, 1871, Mr. Hooker (husband of Isabella Beecher Hooker), said in the New York Evening Post: "The persons who advocate easy divorce would advocate it just as strongly if there was no Suffrage movement. The two have no necessary connection. Indeed, one of the strongest arguments in favor of Woman Suffrage is, that the marriage relation will be safer with women to vote and legislate upon it than where the voting and legislation are left wholly to men. Women will always be wives and mothers, above all things else. This law of nature cannot be changed, and I know of nobody who desires to change it." As he had just been referring to "persons who advocated easy divorce," and who originated the Suffrage movement, his statement that he knew of nobody who desired to change marriage seems funny.

It was one of the matters remarked upon with satisfaction by Suffrage leaders during our Constitutional Convention Suffrage campaign, that such a large number of speakers advocated Suffrage because of its advantage to the home. Mrs. Cora Seabury said: "Where woman is, homes naturally exist, and not without her. The 'divine veracity in nature,' which in her case has survived the chaos of ages and the varying civilization of six thousand years, is not now to be disproved by an incident comparatively so trivial as that of taking the ballot." Dr. Jacobi puts the idea in this way: "Mr. Goldwin Smith declares that woman suffrage aims at such a 'sexual revolution' as must cause the 'dissolution of the family.' The Suffrage claim does not aim at this; it seeks only to formulate, recognize, and define the revolution already effected, yet which leaves the family intact. The Patria Potestas is gone. A man has lost, first, the right to kill his own son, then the right to order the marriage of his daughter, then the right to absorb the property of his wife. Nevertheless, he survives, and the family, shorn of its portentous rights, bids fair in America to remain the happiest of all conceivable natural institutions; more profound than society, so immeasurably deeper than politics that the fortunate wife, daughter, or sister is puzzled when the two are mentioned in the same breath."

All these writers agree in demanding the ballot in order to make some essential change in woman's condition. Some of them hold that this change cannot be made unless the relations of wife and mother can be set aside when the individual considers them detrimental; others hold that it can be made and leave the relations intact; and one believes that this change is already so far made, while the relations are still intact, that nothing need be feared from further change. It reduces itself to matter of opinion and prophecy on the part of those who agree with the early leaders that essential change is needed, but do not agree with them as to the steps necessary. The appeal must be to facts.

The originators of the movement ought to know what the movement meant. The marriage laws were the first attacked, and are still being hammered at in favor of divorce, although legislation has outrun their demand in changing the outgrown laws in regard to property and contracts. Mr. Hooker said: "The persons who advocate easy divorce would advocate it just as strongly if there was no Suffrage movement." How can that be, when the women who inspired the Suffrage movement, and who began it and still carry it on, proclaimed this as a necessary part? But, this question aside, it may be said that the marriage relation has been the most unsafe in the hands of the women whose idea of equality either repudiates it outright or inveighs against its present status. From the revolutionary and infidel portion of France, from which it sprang, to the recently dead Oneida Community, who but women who imbibed the doctrine that marriage was bondage, have sustained the various forms of license which called itself freedom? Transcendentalism and Libertinism worked together, and both found women who could be fitted to the task of destroying the home.

Mrs. Seabury avers that where woman is, homes will naturally exist. Homes have not existed "naturally." There was a long, long time in human history when not a dream of a home existed. From lawless individualism to tribal life, from tribe to clan, from the clan, at last, through mighty struggles, the family was evolved—the final grouping of the race—the social unit. That point was not reached until man the savage, man the rover, had consented to be bound, and bound for life, to one woman. It has been one object of Christian civilization to hold man to this saving compact. First to hold his spirit by affection for wife and child, and next to hold his material interests for the sake of society. The work has so well progressed that to-day the man's family is dearer to him than his own life. He will live for them, and fight for them; and the women who proclaim that man is woman's enemy, are the assassins of their own peace and of the growing peace of home.

A proof that "women will not always be wives and mothers above all things else," is to be found in the story of the women who have engaged in intrigue from the days of ancient Egypt. A woman State senator-elect says: "I am a Mormon, and believe in polygamy." The organizations that are first to proclaim the so-called freedom of woman from the marriage bond, are the same that would repudiate all government, human and divine.

But man has no more set the bounds of woman's life than woman has set those of man's. It is false to say that man has "usurped the prerogative of Jehovah," in assigning her a sphere of action. He has assigned neither her sphere nor his own. Their spheres have been worked out from the conditions that made them male and female. The ideal that faith could picture was presented in the Old Testament, and when Christ said, "For the hardness of your hearts Moses commanded to write a bill of divorcement, but in the beginning it was not so," he spoke the ultimate word. Save for adultery, the family was not to be broken, and the laws of modern life, which grow freer in every other respect, are approaching nearer to this model as society progresses, and most rapidly so in the most progressive states.

There is a fine bit of unconscious humor in Miss Anthony's remark that "Woman must accept marriage as man proffers it, or not at all." Man is at present blinded by the belief that he must proffer marriage as woman will accept it, or not at all. Society has lodged with her what Mrs. Stanton calls "only the veto power." Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton apparently wish the women to do the proffering, the accepting, and the rejecting. With so insignificant a part assigned him, it would seem a pity that there should be a sort of necessity for man to play in the marriage role at all. When Suffrage leaders have so arranged matters that the bride retains her maiden name, she can spend her summers in Europe and her winters in Florida, while her husband works all the year round in New York to support her, without her being subjected to the mortification of seeming to desert the man whose name she bears.