Apart from the fact that Edith Cavell was not a spy, and that her offence was one which has seldom in the world’s history been so cruelly punished, Governor Craig’s words deserve attention. He explicitly exempted a woman, because she was a woman, from the penalty which would have been incurred by a man. Incidentally he was compelled to commute the death-sentence of her confederate, as it was hardly possible to send the murderous wife to prison, and her murderous accomplice to the chair. That the execution of Mrs. Warren would have sent a “shiver” through North Carolina is doubtless true. The Governor had received countless letters and telegrams protesting against the infliction of the death-penalty on a woman.
One of the reasons which has been urged for the total abolition of this penalty is the reluctance of juries to convict women of crimes punishable by death. The number of wives who murder their husbands, and of girls who murder their lovers, is a menace to society. Our sympathetic tolerance of these crimes passionnés, the sensational scenes in court, and the prompt acquittals which follow, are a menace to law and justice. Better that their perpetrators should be sent to prison, and suffer a few years of corrective discipline, until soft-hearted sentimentalists circulate petitions, and secure their pardon and release.
The right to be judged as men are judged is perhaps the only form of equality which feminists fail to demand. Their attitude to their own errata is well expressed in the solemn warning addressed by Mr. Louis Untermeyer’s Eve to the Almighty,
“Pause, God, and ponder, ere Thou judgest me!”
The right to be punished is not, and has never been, a popular prerogative with either sex. There was, indeed, a London baker who was sentenced in the year 1816 to be whipped and imprisoned for vagabondage. He served his term; but, whether from clemency or from oversight, the whipping was never administered. When released, he promptly brought action against the prison authorities because he had not been whipped, “according to the statute,” and he won his case. Whether or not the whipping went with the verdict is not stated; but it was a curious joke to play with the grim realities of British law.
American women are no such sticklers for a code. They acquiesce in their frequent immunity from punishment, and are correspondingly, and very naturally, indignant when they find themselves no longer immune. There was a pathetic ring in the explanation offered some years ago by Mayor Harrison of Chicago, whose policemen were accused of brutality to female strikers and pickets. “When the women do anything in violation of the law,” said the Mayor to a delegation of citizens, “the police arrest them. And then, instead of going along quietly as men prisoners would, the women sit down on the sidewalks. What else can the policemen do but lift them up?”
If men “go along quietly,” it is because custom, not choice, has bowed their necks to the yoke of order and equity. They break the law without being prepared to defy it. The lawlessness of women may be due as much to their long exclusion from citizenship,
“Some reverence for the laws ourselves have made,”
as to the lenity shown them by men,—a lenity which they stand ever ready to abuse. We have only to imagine what would have happened to a group of men who had chosen to air a grievance by picketing the White House, the speed with which they would have been arrested, fined, dispersed, and forgotten, to realize the nature of the tolerance granted to women. For months these female pickets were unmolested. Money was subscribed to purchase for them umbrellas and overshoes. The President, whom they were affronting, sent them out coffee on cold mornings. It was only when their utterances became treasonable, when they undertook to assure our Russian visitors that Mr. Wilson and Mr. Root were deceiving Russia, and to entreat these puzzled foreigners to help them free our nation, that their sport was suppressed, and they became liable to arrest and imprisonment.
Much censure was passed upon the unreasonable violence of these women. The great body of American suffragists repudiated their action, and the anti-suffragists used them to point stern morals and adorn vivacious tales. But was it quite fair to permit them in the beginning a liberty which would not have been accorded to men, and which led inevitably to licence? Were they not treated as parents sometimes treat children, allowing them to use bad language because, “if you pay no attention to them, they will stop it of their own accord”; and then, when they do not stop it, punishing them for misbehaving before company? When a sympathetic gentleman wrote to a not very sympathetic paper to say that the second Liberty Loan would be more popular if Washington would “call off the dogs of war on women,” he turned a flashlight upon the fathomless gulf with which sentimentalism has divided the sexes. No one dreams of calling policemen and magistrates “dogs of war” because they arrest and punish men for disturbing the peace. If men claim the privileges of citizenship, they are permitted to suffer its penalties.