But, after all, the claim to suffrage as a natural right has been practically abandoned by those who first made that claim. Their next proposition was, that it was a universal right, springing from the necessary conditions of organized society, and so should be granted to woman as a member of that society. They say in their Declaration: "He deprived her of the first right of a citizen--the elective franchise."
Chief Justice Waite of the United States Supreme Court decided that citizenship carried with it no voting power or right. The same decision has been handed down by many courts in disposing of test cases.
It seems to me quite as evident that what is now called universal manhood suffrage does not rest upon any belief by the state that this is "the first right of a citizen," because no one doubts that if the time came when a majority deemed that the preservation of the state depended upon disfranchising a number of voters, they would be disfranchised although they remained citizens. The Suffrage leaders have, in theory at least, also abandoned the claim to suffrage on the ground of their universal right as citizens. A proof of this is seen in the fact that at various times they have suggested the extension of suffrage under qualification.
Among the latest that I have noticed, is an address of Mrs. Stanton"s to a Suffrage Convention, held in 1894, in which she proposed the following: "Resolved, that the women of New York pet.i.tion the Legislature of the State to extend the suffrage to women on an educational qualification."
She must therefore believe that the Legislature has the _legal_ right to qualify it for men; and to withhold it from women is but an extension of the right to qualify suffrage, because it only says: "We do not consider woman citizens qualified to be voters." Writing a year ago, Mrs. Stanton said: "It is the duty of the educated women of this Republic to protest against the extension of the suffrage to another man until they themselves are enfranchised!" Thus it would appear that Mrs. Stanton does not believe in universal suffrage. A Suffrage speaker in New York not long ago said naively: "We [the women, when enfranchised] will vote to withhold the suffrage from the ignorant." She did not explain what would happen if the ignorant voted not to have the suffrage withheld; nor did she appear to realize that she was practically admitting that the present voters have the right to withhold the suffrage from those whom _they_ consider unfitted for it.
But it is not true that American women did not, and do not, "consent to be governed." They have always consented loyally and joyfully. From the time of the Boston Tea Party down to the Civil War, and in such times of peace and prosperity as were indicated by the Columbian Exposition, when the Government formally asked the a.s.sistance of its woman citizens, they showed their consent by their deeds, and only the suffrage faction treated the invitation to share in the Exposition after the immemorial fashion of a discontented element. And the Suffragists themselves consent to be governed every time they accept the protection of the law or invoke it against a debtor; for they thereby acknowledge its proper application to themselves if the case were reversed.
The second count in the list of political grievances runs: "He has compelled her to submit to laws in the formation of which she had no voice." This was not true, for the women who wrote that sentence were free to use their voices in regard to every law they desired to affect, and circ.u.mstances have proved that they were sure of being heard, and, if the law were just, and for the general good, of a.s.sisting materially to establish it. At the very time when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott were writing that indictment against the United States Government, Dorothea Dix was presenting a memorial to the National Congress asking for an appropriation of five hundred thousand acres of the public lands to endow hospitals for the indigent insane. That bill failed to pa.s.s, but in 1850 another bill, which she presented, asking for ten millions of acres, pa.s.sed the House and failed in the Senate merely for want of time to consider it. Four years later a bill making appropriations of the ten millions of acres to the separate States pa.s.sed both houses, and President Pierce vetoed it, because he believed the general Government had no const.i.tutional power to make such appropriations. She then went to the Legislatures of the States, with the result that is so well known. Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New York, Indiana, Illinois, Louisiana, and North Carolina founded lunatic asylums, and the work was begun which is culminating in the separation of the insane from the criminal, the women from the men, in every town and county of the land. The right of pet.i.tion is not only as open to women as to men, but because of the non-partisan character of their claims and suggestions they find quicker hearing. Miss Louise Lee Schuyler has been more successful in securing the enactment of laws for which she presented the need than any one politician in the State of New York, before whose Legislature they have both pleaded,--he with a vote which had to contend against other votes, she with a voice that spoke the united mind of a body of philanthropic women. There was no unjust law which the Suffrage a.s.sociation could not have changed during these fifty years, had it cared to try, and indeed its members make the boast that many of the changes are their own. Change and improvement of laws was not their aim. It was a vote upon changing or not changing laws that they sought for. The difference is world-wide.
The third count in the indictment runs: "He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant men--both natives and foreigners."
Dr. Jacobi represented the Suffrage cause before the Special Committee of the Const.i.tutional Convention of New York State in 1894. After drawing, in fine and truthfully glowing words, a picture of woman"s progress under the inst.i.tutions and laws of the United States, she said: "For the first time, all political right, privilege and power reposes undisguisedly on the one brutal fact of s.e.x, unsupported, untempered, unalloyed by any attribute of education, any justification of intelligence, any glamour of wealthy any prestige of birth, any insignia of actual power.... To-day, the immigrants pouring in through the open gates of our seaport towns, the Indian when settled in severalty, the negro hardly emanc.i.p.ated from the degradation of two hundred years of slavery,--may all share in the sovereignty of the State. The white woman,--the woman in whose veins runs the blood of those heroic colonists who founded our country, of those women who helped to sustain the courage of their husbands in the Revolutionary War; the woman who may have given the flower of her youth and health in the service of our Civil War--that woman is excluded. To-day women const.i.tute the only cla.s.s of sane people excluded from the franchise, the only cla.s.s deprived of political representation, except the tribal Indians and the Chinese."
To the same effect the editors of the "Suffrage History" say: "The superiority of man does not enter into the demand for suffrage; for in this country all men vote; and as the lower orders, of men are not superior to the higher orders of women, they must hold and exercise the right of self-government on some other ground than superiority to woman."
Here it would seem that Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony had been thinking, but they never followed their own thought to its inevitable conclusion.
Universal manhood suffrage does relieve the men of this country from the unjust aspersion the women of the Suffrage movement put upon them, that they excluded women on account of inferiority.
No native American, who by the very fact of that nativity is bound to support the Const.i.tution of the United States, and no foreign-born citizen who has taken the oath of allegiance to it, has a right by his vote to do anything that will imperil or impede the carrying out of its principles and its commands. "The establishment of justice, the insurement of domestic tranquillity, provision for the common defence, security in the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity," cannot be perfected or maintained without the present exercise and the reserve power of manhood strength. This Government laid aside all "attribute of education, or glamour of wealth, or prestige of birth," and committed its life to the keeping of its defenders. In this land, the vote is the "insignia of actual power," but it is only the insignia; the power to defend themselves and those who make country and home worth defending, lies with the individual defenders. To attempt to put it into the hands of those who are not physically fitted to maintain the obligations that may result from any vote or any legislative act, is to render law a farce, and to betray the trust imposed upon them by the const.i.tution they have sworn to uphold.
Universal manhood suffrage is the crowning result in the long evolution of government. Our statesmen of the Revolutionary period did not contemplate it. But stability was the thing for which they sought--the thing for which all statesmen of all times have been searching. If a government is not stable, it is of little consequence that it is full of n.o.ble ideals; and the most far-reaching thought has now grasped the idea that manhood strength is the natural and only defence of the state. This is the underlying theory of our Government, the one solid rock on which it rests.
"When any question of governmental policy comes up, we virtually decide it, sooner or later, by a manhood vote; and as the decision has a majority of the men of the country behind it, there is no power that can overthrow it. If we attempt to establish policies or execute laws to which a majority of the men are opposed, we throw away our one a.s.surance of stability, and are in constant danger of revolution. Even in the comparatively brief history of our Republic, there are plentiful instances to show that a majority of men will not submit to a minority, no matter how many non-combatants are joined with that minority. To give women a position of apparent power, without its reality, would be to make our Government forever unstable.
"This is placing the Christian and civilized Government that stands as an example of peaceful progress on a foundation of brute force," cries the Suffragist. The founders of the Woman Suffrage movement apparently did not take the least account of either the military or the judicial powers that are provided for in every State const.i.tution, as well as in the Nation"s.
They demanded "immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States," but said not a word about the duties, disabilities, and money loss involved in the possession of those rights and privileges. The Fathers of the Revolution closed their Declaration of Independence from the tyranny of England by pledging "their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor" to attain it. The Mothers of the Woman"s Rebellion closed their Declaration of Independence from the tyranny of man, and especially from the tyranny of the United States Government, with a pledge to distribute tracts and hold conventions, while they depended upon the courtesy of the tyrants to protect them in the peaceful execution of their design. Is it any wonder that the descendants of the old heroes who had fought their way to our liberties smiled when the by-laws of the would-be revolt were handed to them?
When the attention of the women was called to the fact that force was needed, and that women were exempt from military service and jury and police duty, they answered that "In an age when the wrongs of society are adjusted in the courts and at the ballot-box, material force yields to reason and majorities." So successful has our Government been in carrying out the benign purposes for which its heroes staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, that in ordinary times we see little of the strength that stands quietly but firmly behind every law"s enactment and every poll"s decision. The "strong arm" of the law would lose its power to compel obedience if behind the decree of judge, jury, and legislators there was not a sheriff or a body of militia ready to commit the unconsenting criminal to prison, or to take care of an unruly minority. At an election, the minority do not acquiesce in the decision of the majority because the outcome of the vote has convinced them that the majority were right, and they were wrong. They have not become suddenly converted to the views of the majority. That decision, as recorded by the ballot, shows that if the minority do not keep their opinion in abeyance, there are men enough on the other side to compel them. Civilization has advanced so far that, instead of blows there are arguments in court, instead of bullets there are ballots at the polls; but the blows and the bullets must always be ready, in case the arguments and the ballots are unheeded. The physical strength that was given to man to use, like every other gift, for the good of the race, he is so using when he holds it as a _dernier ressort_ for law and order.
Dr. Jacobi says, in her address, "capacity to bear arms, in fulfilment of military duty, is not, in the State of New York, reckoned among the necessary qualifications of voters." The statement is also made by other Suffragists that "numerous cla.s.ses of men who enjoy political rights are exempt from military duty,--all men over forty-five, all who suffer mental or physical disability, such as the loss of an eye or a forefinger; clergymen, physicians, Quakers, school-teachers, professors, and presidents of colleges, judges, legislators, congressmen, state-prison officials, and all county, State, and National officers; fathers, brothers, or sons having certain relatives dependent upon them for support, all of these summed up in every State would make millions who may be exempted, and therefore there is no force in the plea that if women vote they must fight." It is not true that any cla.s.s of voters is exempt.
The State, regulating that matter as it regulates the age and residence of voters, as long as it has more defenders than it needs for immediate use, makes demand upon the youngest or strongest, but if it needs them all, then all must serve. Again, all, whether young or old, perfect or imperfect, must be reckoned with as elements in making up the count.
Lawless men do not exempt themselves from riot and rebellion because they are lame or over forty-five. In the South, during the Rebellion, there were few indeed who did not serve in some capacity. If there were blind and aged men enough to make a real difference in majorities, Americans would quickly see the propriety of doing as some republics that have to stand with arms more "at attention" have done, and exclude them from the vote.
But, suppose all those mentioned were really exempt, how would that apply to women? If a like number were counted out, there would still be a goodly array, from the maiden of twenty-one to the matron of forty-five, from which to draw. Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony write: "Women have led armies in all ages, have held positions in the army and navy for years in disguise, have fought, bled, and died on the battlefield in our late war."
The isolated occasions on which they have done so are not such as to commend the practice, neither do the Suffragists propose seriously to commend it. Dr. Jacobi, in her address before the Committee of the Const.i.tutional Convention, says: "We do not admit that exemption from military duty is a concession of courtesy, for which women should be so grateful as to refrain from asking for anything else. The military functions performed by men, and so often perverted to most atrocious uses, have never been more than the equivalent for the function of child-bearing imposed by nature upon women. It is not a fanciful nor sentimental, it is an exact and just equivalent. The man who exposes his life in battle, can do no more than his mother did in the hour she bore him. And the functions of maternity persist, and will persist, to the end of time,--while the calls to arms are becoming so faint and rare that three times since the Revolutionary War, an entire generation of men has grown up without having heard them."
This question of military service is not a question of equivalent at all-- sentimental or otherwise; it is a question of the actual service, and as to the service to the state given by women in bearing sons, the men work not only to support those sons but to support also their mothers and sisters, and that far beyond the child-bearing age of the mother.
As to the rareness of the calls, I read of seven wars since the Revolution, and three insurrections, not counting the riots and strikes at Chicago, Homestead, Brooklyn, and in the mountains in the West. Dr. Jacobi said in an article in the "New York Sun," two years ago, "We do not vote for war." That appears like a quibble, for we vote for what brings, or may bring it; but neither is it exact in fact. Three times, at least, in our history men have deposited their ballots in the box, knowing that the result meant peace or war. These were at the second election of Madison in 1812, the election of Polk in 1844, and that most solemn of all the acts of our country-men, the second election of President Lincoln. There have been other elections in which war issues were linked with the decisions, but in a less direct way.
The same writer says also, "The will of the majority rules, for the time being, not, as has been crudely a.s.serted, because it possesses the power, by brute force, to compel the minority to obey its behests; but because, after ages of strife, it has been found more convenient, more equitable, more conducive to the welfare of the state, that the minority should submit, until, through argument and persuasion, they shall have been able to win over the majority. Now that this stage in the evolution of modern society has been reached, it has become possible for women to demand their share also in the expression of the public opinion that is to rule. They could not claim this while it was necessary to defend opinions by arms; but this is no longer either necessary or expected." How long is it since this comfortable state of things was evolved? Has England consented to it?
In view of Venezuela and the Monroe Doctrine it would be necessary to have her. Has Spain mentioned her resignation of a right to appeal to arms in case she was not pleased with the conduct of our Government in regard to Cuba? Does the Sultan know about it, so that in case we see a good fair fighting chance to help the Armenians he will understand that the ages of strife are over, and that persuasion has been found more equitable and convenient than a resort to arms? And the Czar, and the erratic German Emperor, are they in the evolutionary agreement? Force is just what men are able to make it. It is not brutish unless it is brutishly used. There is as much force in the world to-day as there ever has been, but it is better applied. It is the object of a Christian civilization to persuade more and more men to come to the defence of good against evil in forms of government. Despotism and absolutism are corrupt uses of force.
Republicanism and a const.i.tutional government are its n.o.bler uses. But the force is still behind them, or there would be no power to continue such liberal forms. During the first Republic, Marathon and Thermopylae saved the principle of Western democracy against Oriental despotism, Salamis and Plataea saved Greek letters and Greek art to the continents that were yet to be. Christianity changed the motive but not the method in evolution; and, finally in the last great Republic, the American Revolution proclaimed liberty of thought, the war of 1812 secured American independence, while, beside the wandering Antietam and on the field of Gettysburg "green regiments went to their graves like beds" that the Union might live, and that human slavery might die. Manhood force, led by intelligence and goodness, is the bulwark of that maternity that must persist if heroes are to be. Dr. Jacobi"s admission that women could not claim the vote while it was necessary to defend opinions by arms, is a vital one, for it contravenes her entire argument.
Another plea of the Suffrage leaders is that "men send subst.i.tutes, and so could women." The answer in regard to exempt cla.s.ses will apply here also, because in case of need both subst.i.tute and subst.i.tuter are obliged to serve. During our Civil War the fact that a man had sent a subst.i.tute did not prevent him from being called in the next draft. The state claims both men as its defenders. But whom do the women propose to subst.i.tute? Other women? No, they propose to subst.i.tute men! The Suffragists seriously suggest that half the population, exempted by nature from military duty, shall become organic members of a government whose reliance, embodied in every const.i.tution, is upon the ability and the willingness of its organic members to do military duty in defence of those const.i.tutions, and that this exempted half may have it as their sole office, in case of war, to vote when and where the lives, the fortunes, and the sacred honor of those other organic members shall be laid down or imperilled. Suffragists seem to forget, when they boast of Joan of Arc, that the army she led was masculine.
The English socialist, Mrs. Stanton Blatch, daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in her addresses in this country two years ago, said: "Woman is not protected through chivalry, but because the men know that to put women to the front is national suicide. Woman"s part in war is not to wail or weep, but to furnish the army for the future." Then there is to be an army for the future! Was there no "national suicide" when over three million men were "put to the front" in the Rebellion, and more than five hundred thousand, North and South, laid down their lives, so that through the veins of this generation runs none of the gallant blood they spilled?
Shall the fathers, and possible fathers, be the only ones to die, if the mothers and betrothed proclaim themselves no longer desirous of being protected by such high sacrifice? If women cease to "weep and wail," will men not cease to be willing to be "furnished by them to the army?"
"At any cost one good is cheap-- The soldiers die lest women weep; And this reward is great and high-- The women weep that soldiers die."
Women and soldiers cannot transpose their work. The duty of each to the Republic is equally "great and high;" but in order to be done it must be kept distinct as now.
But all this is subordinate to the real, vital question. In the pa.s.sages just quoted, the writers make an error that is made so persistently by all Suffragists whenever the argument of force is alluded to, that it seems necessary to repeat the explanation. They a.s.sume that this argument, briefly stated, is: The men do the fighting, therefore they ought to be rewarded with the ballot. That is _not_ the argument; it is no matter of reward. The argument, briefly stated, is this: Stability is one of the highest virtues that any government can possess, and perhaps the most necessary. It can have no stability if it issues decrees that it cannot enforce. The only way to avoid such decrees is, to make sure that behind every law and every policy adopted stands a power so great that no power in the land can overthrow it. The only such power possible consists of a majority of the men. Therefore, the only safe thing for the Government to do is, to carry out the ascertained will of a majority of the men. This does not always secure ideally good laws, but it does secure stability and avoids revolution. The majority may blunder; but they are the only power that can correct their own blunders.
But war does not call for the only form of public service. There are others provided for in the National and State const.i.tutions, which are constant and exacting. They are jury, police and militia duty. When a boy reaches twenty-one the law says to him, "You are my servant." If a fire breaks out, the foreman can legally lay his hand on the boy"s shoulder, and say, "Help to put out this conflagration." When the law is broken, the sheriff can say to him, "Help me make this arrest." When a turn of the judicial wheel brings out his name, he must serve the state on a jury; if a riot occurs, he can be called out to quell it; and if a war arises, he can be drafted to fight against the country"s enemies. There is not a single act of defence to which the voter was subjected by law when the Const.i.tution was framed, to which he is not subject now, and subject because he is a voter. The vote is not given to him as a reward for standing ready to give this service to the state; it is a recognition by the state that, as he must stand ready to defend it, he should a.s.sist in establishing the laws which it may call upon him to enforce. As he has a.s.sisted to frame them, he cannot refuse to defend them. Woman"s only relation to this defence is that of beneficiary, and therefore her relation to the laws with which that defence is a.s.sociated must be one of advice and not of control. Fortunately for her, advice may prove sometimes to be control of the most satisfactory kind, a kind that admits of mental power and does not exact physical.
The statement is further made by Suffragists that "though woman needs protection of one man against his whole s.e.x, in pioneer life, in threading her way through a lonely forest, on the highway, or in the streets of a metropolis on a dark night, she sometimes needs, too, the protection of all men against this one. But even if she could be sure, as she is not, of the ever-present, all-protecting power of one strong arm, that would be weak indeed compared with the subtle, all-pervading influence of just and equal laws for all women. Hence woman"s need of the ballot, that she may hold in her own right hand the weapon of self-protection and defence."
The possession of the ballot has not been able to secure for men "the subtle and all-pervading influence of just and equal laws," and despite his holding the ballot in his own hand, man has had to hold also a more apparent weapon if he visit a striker"s camp or meddle with an anarchist riot. Something more tangible than protective influence is needed to make the public streets of this city safe for women in broad daylight. Again, they say that "Wisdom would suggest division of labor in peace as well as in war." Wisdom would have no chance to make such a suggestion, if women attempted to do the same work as do men, in the same way. There is true division of labor now, in peace as well as in war.
Suffragists mention as a final indignity the extension of the suffrage to the negro. Their protest only serves to suggest another forcible ill.u.s.tration of the fact that law and the enforcement of law may be different things. The suffrage is not extended to the negro. The Congress of the United States voted that it should be so extended; and while the Government stood behind his vote with its military power, the negro voted.
But no one pretends that he has done so, to any practical extent, since that time. Unarmed, the negro finds that he cannot enforce his own vote against the will of white men armed to the teeth. The "all-pervading influence of just and equal laws" cannot enforce it for him. Would the women be any better off, if the men chose that they should not exercise the vote? Who would enforce it?
This fact and argument show how little arbitration has to do with the practical decision concerning suffrage. Suffrage writers and speakers harp upon the thought that arbitration will take the place of force. That method of settling disputes cannot come too quickly, but it has not come yet. It has no real bearing on the organization of the state as resting upon the civil and military service of its citizens. England consented to arbitrate with the powerful United States, but refused to arbitrate with defenceless Nicaragua in a far less important matter. Congress has seriously considered exterminating the remnant of the beautiful herd of seals that once played in our Northern Pacific waters, because British subjects have continued, in violation of the Arbitration treaty, to kill the animals with cruelty. Behind arbitration, as behind all law and order, military power must always stand and must sometimes be used. One more proof that the vote is not the real power, but only its insignia, lies in the fact that legislation has not been able to put an end to strikes and riots. Laws that forbid them are pa.s.sed with all due form; but when they come, as come they do, the reading of the riot act is suspended and the regiments are ordered to Chicago, or Buffalo, or Brooklyn, or Homestead, or Cripple Creek, or Cleveland, or the Indian country. The force of those bodies was not "brutal," it was physical power obeying mental; and unless mental power can command physical, there is no way in which mental power can enforce its decrees in government. There are now facing us tremendous moral issues, which presage tremendous struggles; and a very notable example of the dangers that would attend woman suffrage is suggested by them. If women had the power to create a numerical majority when there was a majority of the law"s natural and only defenders against them, they might soon precipitate a crisis that would lead to bloodshed, which they would be powerless either to prevent or to allay. Would the majority of men submit to the minority of men a.s.sociated with non-combatants? American history furnishes no reason for supposing that they would. The Dorr War in Rhode Island is a case in point, in local matters. I am neither an alarmist nor a believer in war as a panacea; but if we discuss this subject at all, we must discuss it with facts and not fancies in our minds.
Dr. Jacobi again says, in her book: "It may be said, for it has been said, that the objection to seeing a vote of seven hundred men overcome by a coalition of three hundred men with eight hundred women, lies in the fact that the defeated minority knows, if it had a free hand and was allowed to use fisticuffs, it could pound into a jelly a majority composed so largely of women. It would feel, therefore, sullen, restive, and justly indignant, that it should be prohibited from using this power and obliged to submit to a merely nominal force and supremacy."
The objection to seeing seven hundred men defeated by a coalition of three hundred men with eight hundred women, lies in the fact that the defeated minority knows that it has a free hand, and that nothing less than eight hundred men could prevent it from using its physical power, were it so inclined. Only a force and supremacy that was real, and not nominal, could make it to submit. The rhetorical trick of belittling the matter by speaking of it as "fisticuffs" will not pa.s.s in this discussion. When the South Carolina negroes on election day looked into the rifle-barrels of the Red-shirt clubs, it was no matter of fisticuffs. When every statesman in our country was eagerly seeking a peaceful solution of the Hayes-Tilden dispute, it was not fisticuffs that they feared. When the Dostie convention was broken up and its leaders murdered in New Orleans, it was not by means of fisticuffs. When the Chicago anarchists threw their bomb into the ranks of the policemen in Haymarket Square, they were not playing at fisticuffs. When the rail way strikers in Pittsburg stopped the trains, "killed" the locomotives, and burned the freight, there was no fisticuffs about it. And when a Southern minority refused to abide by the result of the election of 1860, and the Northern majority shouldered muskets and went down and compelled them to, not the most flippant writer would have thought of calling it fisticuffs. All these are simply readily recalled instances of the necessity for power in the enforcement of law.
She goes on to say: "But is it only in such a hypothetical case that a minority would know it could, if allowed to resort to physical force, shiver to fragments the majority? The burly brakemen in railroad strikes would, probably, in a fair hand-to-hand encounter, be much bested over all the stockholders of the road,--weakened, not only because they included women in their midst, but also by sedentary habits and predominately indoor occupations. Why do they not try this way of settling their difficulties? Why do not the cla.s.ses in England, who still remain entirely disfranchised, and with whom rests so much physical strength, drop their fists into the balance as Brennus did his sword, and cut short the futile, womanish discussion? The answer is ready in every one"s mouth. It is not that it cannot be done, but that, on the whole, people are all agreed that it is best it should not be done. It is not that physical force is respected less, but that mental force is respected more."
I reply that both these things have been attempted over and over again, and the agreement of all the wise and good people that it is best that it should not be done cannot prevent it. Behind the burly brakemen who have seized the train, and the stockholders to whom it lawfully belongs, there lies a power greater than all the brakemen and stockholders together. We call it the power of law. It is, in fact, the power of a sovereign people, who, having made that law, are able to enforce it against the breakers of it. It is necessary, in the discussion of this point, to have clearly in mind the difference between sovereign power and delegated power. When a member of a stock company attends the annual meeting and casts one vote for every share that he holds, he is exercising delegated power. The sovereign people, acting through their representatives in the legislature, have delegated to the company the power to regulate its affairs in this way, and guaranteed to each shareholder this privilege. Should a combination of some of the shareholders attempt to prevent one from exercising it, he would appeal to the court, and behind the court stands the power of the people, many times larger than any stock company that exists. On the other hand, when men go to the polls on election day, they exercise, not delegated, but sovereign, power. There is no greater power, above and beyond themselves, to regulate their actions. The enfranchised cla.s.ses in England do drop their fists into the balance, and, as a result, we have seen the extensions of suffrage that marked the years 1832 and 1848, and the reason some cla.s.ses are still unfranchised is, that the monarchy that wills their unfranchis.e.m.e.nt has, as yet, more power at command than those who would enfranchise them. Mental and moral force is more respected with every rolling year, because those who respect it have been able to obtain control of the physical power that can force its decrees upon those who do not respect it.
The third count in the indictment is: "Having deprived her of the first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides." As, in securing the exact number of grievances mentioned by the Fathers, the Mothers were compelled to string out their distresses somewhat, I will quote the next count in the indictment, and consider these two together. "After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single, and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognized her only when her property could be made profitable to it."
The many-sided oppression, and the deprivation as a married woman, belong in other chapters. The remaining portions of the two counts may be summed up under the familiar cry: "No taxation without representation." What did that just accusation mean when our fathers uttered it in regard to English tyranny? Did they mean that their property was taxed, and they had no redress? The phrase originated with Patrick Henry, who read to the Virginia House of Burgesses the decision gleaned from a study of "c.o.ke upon Lyttleton," that "Englishmen living in America had all the rights of Englishmen living in England, the chief of which was, that they could only be taxed by their own representatives," and on that was founded the resolution adopted by them that the colonies could not be lawfully taxed in a body in which they were not represented; for the colonies, as well as individuals, had no vote in Parliament. They meant that their property could not be so taxed, and they meant far more. The more that they meant was embodied by Jefferson in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, when he said: "Can any one reason be a.s.signed why a hundred and sixty thousand _electors_ in the island of Great Britain should give law to four million in the States of America?" John Hanc.o.c.k meant that and more when he said: "Burn Boston and make John Hanc.o.c.k a beggar, if the public good requires it." He was offering his taxed property to defend the liberties of the four millions against the hundred and sixty thousand electors. The refusal of the majority to be ruled longer by the minority was the main motive of determination not to submit. But at that time all voting was connected with a tax on property, and so was the suffrage established by these men. And under those property-tax laws women who held property could vote. It was when taxation ceased to go with representation, that the women ceased to vote. There is now no connection between taxation of property and representation. When people were allowed votes in proportion to the amount of property they held, and could vote in different counties and States, there was a connection, and that law gave the rich man more voting power than the poor man. But all aristocratic qualification was done away with, and the government came to rely solely on the strength of individual men for its defence, instead of upon men and women with money enough to raise soldiery. There is a money tax levied on the property of men and women alike; and in return for the payment of this tax the property of both men and women is made secure against unlawful injury. In order to make it secure, the state lays, upon men alone, a service tax, and with that tax goes representation, or the vote. This service tax does not fall upon woman, and it cannot be demanded of her; so it is not true that "Man has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it." He has, in return for the money tax, so guarded her property through the service tax on men that it is of profit to her, which without that guard it could not be.
The tax on property is collected from that of minors and unnaturalized citizens, resident or non-resident, and to all these cla.s.ses, as well as to non-voting women, is given the right of pet.i.tion and legal redress of whatever sort. The men do not have "equal rights" in regard to public control of their taxable property, if equal rights means that each man shall be able to say what shall be done to, or with, or about, the property on which he pays taxes. The penniless voter can have as much to say as to whether a railroad shall cross the lands of a millionaire as the millionaire himself. At every town election the minority are unheeded, so far as the vote goes, and women with property interests would be no better off if they secured votes in the only way they can be secured--one voice, one vote.
Lydia Maria Child said, in a letter reprinted in the Woman"s edition of "The Rochester Post-Express" in 1896: "I reduce the argument to very simple elements. I pay taxes for property of my own earning and saving, and I do not believe in taxation without representation. As for representation by proxy, that savors too much of the plantation system, however kind the master may be. I am a human being, and every human being has a right to a voice in the laws which claim authority to tax him, to imprison him, or to hang him."
Not only has every human being in the United States a right to a voice in the laws that claim authority to tax him, imprison him, or hang him, but he can exercise that right in all portions of the United States where the laws that claim this authority are able to enlist sufficient physical force to execute the authority claimed. Where they have not that power, neither the voter nor the non-voter has any redress against violence offered to property or limb or life. Gerrymanders and lynchings in many parts of our land prove the truth of this. The mastery of men who abide by and execute law is not a mastery over women for the sake of the spoils of taxation or the disposal of life, but the mastery over lawlessness everywhere in order that tax-payers of either s.e.x, native or alien, voters or non-voters, may be enabled to have that voice in the laws which, as human beings, is their right. As to the "vote by proxy," if Mrs. Child could not trust her husband, her son, her brother, or best friend to look after her interests, she certainly could not trust the carrying out of her wish, as expressed in her vote, to the men who cast in their ballots by her side.
In return for the taxes paid, women get just what men get, namely, roads, gas, water, schools, etc. The women who have refused to pay their taxes because they did not vote, have been treated with a leniency that proves the courtesy of the law-enforcers. They would have made short work with men who were non-voters, who had tried the same tactics. When a man"s vote is challenged and refused, he does not dream of saying: "I shall not pay my tax," and the a.s.sessor never inquires whether he votes or desires to vote. The men in the District of Columbia do not find their unfranchised condition a.s.suaged by the smallness of their account with the a.s.sessor.
Neither do they realize or believe that they are governed without their consent, or exempt from police or military duty. This is a striking proof that the vote is not a reward for service. They are male American citizens, over twenty-one years old, and they must contribute service simply and solely for that reason. This is the price they pay for established order.
For, after all, what is government, and what are taxation and representation? When and how did society consent to be governed? When did it agree to be taxed and to be represented? The awful story of history, from the slaying of Abel to the slaughter of half a million men in the War of Secession, is the answer. It never did agree, it has not yet agreed.
The struggle of civilization is the effort to make it agree. Implanted in the bosom of man by his Maker is the belief in his individual freedom, of worship as concerns that Maker, of protection as concerns man. Side by side with that, was implanted the principle of surrender of a part of that freedom for just cause. There came a time when men said: "Let us use arguments instead of force in these decisions," and some form of vote was inst.i.tuted. With this they fought and voted by turns, as they set up or knocked down emperors, kings, popes, and presidents. War has been changed by progress because man has changed; but main strength to drive home the truths gained on the moral battlefield is still the power behind the throne of the National conscience, even in this enlightened land.
Though the Mothers of the Rebellion did not ask, and apparently did not think of asking, to share the military duties incident to suffrage, we must discuss it, if we are to consider the subject thoroughly. To be a voting citizen, is to be a possible soldier citizen. There is no way of fulfilling the moral part of the duty, and leaving unfulfilled the physical, and it is cowardly to attempt it. So the question comes, could American women be soldiers? They could, for a few in disguise were in service during the War of Secession. t.i.tled women of Europe are honorary officers; but this playing soldier is a relic of Middle-Age chivalry.
Women can be seriously destructive; but no one will claim that organized military duty is really practicable for them. And the suffrage proposition does not look to anything of the kind. The Suffragists demand equal vote in sending their fathers, brothers, sons, husbands, and lovers to the military field of action, and propose to be absolutely exempt from equal share in the duty that that vote now lays upon male voters. Before the law there could be no distinction of duty on account of race, s.e.x, or previous condition of servitude. The "emanc.i.p.ated" woman would be emanc.i.p.ated into that which the Declaration of Independence expressly called for, "the right and privilege of the people to bear arms."
The const.i.tution of Utah says that the State militia is to consist of "able-bodied males," and I have not yet heard that the women who vote there have insisted that the word "male" be struck out of that clause of the Const.i.tution. By no means, every woman expects to be exempt. After women had succeeded in getting the framers of the const.i.tution of every State to strike out the word "male," from its voting qualification, they would expect them to insert the word "male" in mentioning the service qualification. O Equality, where is thine equal for granting privilege!
Such chivalry, it would seem, is an insult to the power and intelligence of the women of Utah, who celebrated their "enfranchis.e.m.e.nt" by a convention to favor the free coinage of silver, 16 to 1, and whose behavior on that occasion was, to say the least, boyish. The tax upon time and strength, and the money loss of citizen service, Suffrage leaders did not once allude to. They did not, and do not, propose to pay even a double money tax on account of expected exemption. Little as this would have availed to meet the actual situation, it would have shown their good will, and some comprehension of justice, while they talked of an absurd and intangible "right."
But, it might be said, "Utah did insert such a clause into her const.i.tution, and so could other States. It is, after all, common sense that rules, and men can legislate what they please." The law pa.s.sed by Utah, which provided that "male voters must be tax-payers, while female voters need not be," was decided to be unconst.i.tutional, and this one also may well be. At the end of Utah"s Const.i.tution, as of every other, and of every bill that is pa.s.sed, occurs or is understood something like this sentence from the United States Const.i.tution: "The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." Is it the "appropriate legislation" that gives to Congress, or to any other body, the power to enforce the article decided upon by a majority? We know that it is not. It is the men who can enforce it if it is disobeyed. Every day we see that some laws are "dead letters," not because the legislation appropriate to their enforcement was not perfect, but because they are not enforced. When Mr. Roosevelt became Chairman of the Police Commission there had been for some time a bill, duly legislated, for the enforcement of the Sunday closing of liquor saloons in New York city. But the saloons had not been closed. Mr. Roosevelt summoned the police, and proceeded to enforce the law. If they had refused, the militia stood behind them. Do you say, "Very well, if Miss Willard had been Chairman of the Commissioners she could have done the same." There would have been this great difference. Mr. Roosevelt himself was as much subject to serve at the call of the law, as were the policemen. He was not a dictator merely, he was part and parcel of the strength that he invoked. The reason for obedience rested on the same ground in each case--service in which each stood equal. It is a specious form of mistake to suppose that "men can legislate just what they wish to." They can legislate only what the majority decrees, and they can legislate effectively only what they have power to enforce. Had the saloon-keepers refused to obey Miss Willard, not she, but Mr. Roosevelt and other men would have had to enforce the law.
It is absurd in itself, and annoying to Suffrage advocates, to talk about military duty for woman. Her very nature forbids it. So it is, and so it does, and therefore it is equally absurd to talk about her attempting to a.s.sume duties whose very nature forbids their being done by her. Were voting only a matter of obtaining the _opinion_ of women on matters that concern the country, or concern them (and all matters that concern the country concern them), all precedent gathered from the treatment of American women by American men goes to prove that no urging would have been required to secure for them as large a measure of suffrage as was consistent with their duties and their desires.
In 1879 an earnest discussion on Woman Suffrage was held in the legislature of Ma.s.sachusetts. Four propositions were pending. The first was that a const.i.tutional amendment should be submitted to the people, which, if accepted, would decree to women full suffrage. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Lucy Stone and William Lloyd Garrison argued the case for the women. Col. Higginson said that if ability to fight were made the test of voting "a large proportion of men, especially of professional men, would be disfranchised. The report of the Surgeon-General of the United States showed that of the thousand clergymen who volunteered or were drafted during the war, 945 were declared to be unfit for service. Of the lawyers who volunteered or were drafted, 650 were rejected, and of the physicians, 745." He added, "You must go down to the mechanics and laborers before you can find a cla.s.s of men a majority of whom will fulfil this requirement.
Of the clergymen who preach that woman suffrage is wrong because women can do no military duty, only one twentieth would themselves be accepted for such service. There is but one cla.s.s of men better fitted than mechanics for military service, and that is the prize-fighting cla.s.s, and therefore the const.i.tuency which sent John Morrissey to Congress was the only const.i.tuency that ever carried out this idea to the end." Col. Higginson, who played a gallant part in the Civil War, should have remembered what poor fighting material the country found in such men as formed the const.i.tuency of John Morrissey. The regiment of Zouaves raised in New York City by Billy Wilson, the pugilist, was found to be so mischievous, as well as worthless, that it was shipped to the Dry Tortugas in order to rid the army of a pest. On the other hand, many of the most gallant as well as most orderly soldiers came from dry-goods stores and apothecary shops. The pugilists and roughs are the very ones that are good for nothing as soldiers; they belong to the cla.s.s that makes soldiery necessary.