There is no fear that any well-educated but unpropertied man will suffer injustice through being excluded from the polls. As it is to-day, all educated men who are not in active politics find the right to vote to be a hollow privilege to perform an empty ceremony; they learn that its value is nullified by the worthless men and frivolous women of the neighborhood, and by the sordid political organizations created by universal suffrage. No patriotic man desires the vote merely for his own gratification, or except for the general good; and how can it be for the public gain to let down the bars in his case, if a score of incapables thereby get through the fence and offset and defeat his vote twenty times over? It is probable that fifty undesirables will be excluded from the polls by a property qualification for every man of worth kept away because of his poverty; and the latter will be consoled and recompensed by seeing his class at last obtain an influence and a hearing. And, after all, the value to the state of the political judgment and opinion of such few electors as are able to pass an educational examination, and yet are not possessed of the equivalent of a reasonable property qualification, cannot be very great; probably all put together it is less than nothing. A man with all the advantage of a good education who is unable in this country to save enough money to put him on the roll of the thrifty, is presumably incompetent to advise the commonwealth; and it is perhaps one of the advantages of a property qualification that it saves the state from the ill counsel of his class.
The complete failure of mere school and college education to fit man for civic duties is recognized by the heads of our educational system, as well as by business men. In an address delivered at New Haven September 28, 1919, President Hadley of Yale University laid proper emphasis on this point, and on the risks attending undisciplined democracy. He said in substance that there is danger that our free institutions may break down for want of capacity in the voters, and admitted that the schools and colleges had proved incapable of creating a competent electorate. The “vision” which Hadley found lacking in the voters of today as contrasted with the Fathers, is the insight into life which a man may get in caring for property or in successfully fending for himself and family.
Besides the men of books without practical vision or judgment there is another type whose hands should be kept off the wheels of government; namely, those who have sufficient education and fluency of speech to give them sway over the foolish and dissatisfied masses, but who are themselves weak in principle and devoid of knowledge of political economy. As long as such a one enjoys a fortune he is comparatively safe; but let him be penniless and he is apt to become a dangerous agitator. The state is safest without such men in any part of its organization. A purely educational qualification system would give high place to the featherhead revolutionary agitators of Russia and France, Nihilists, Anarchists, Bolsheviki, Terrorists, political scoundrels and madmen. It must be steadily borne in mind that our civilization is founded on private property, and that the rights of private property cannot be safely disregarded by the makers of the modern democratic state but must be always held paramount if our fundamental institutions are to endure.
The qualification age of voters should be advanced from twenty one to twenty five years. The age of twenty one has by common consent of most civilized people been selected as that at which the tutelage of a youth shall cease, and he shall become a free man with the right to regulate his own life and dispose of his own property. In point of fact this theory substantially accords with the truth in the majority of cases; the average boy ends his schooling at about seventeen years of age, and after four years spent at college or in learning the rudiments of some business, trade or calling his period of training for manhood is usually ended. And so, on the theory that suffrage is a natural right of a man it might well be said that the vote should be given on attaining manhood; but starting with the correct theory that suffrage is a function of government, for which the school of life is a preparation, it is clear that a proper additional period must be granted for that preparation. Ordinarily, the four years from the age of twenty-one to that of twenty-five, represent the period of the youth’s first experience in making his own living, in managing his own property, in planning and selecting his own career and associates, in making and executing his own decisions, and generally in the actual exercise of free and uncontrolled manhood. There can be no doubt that these four years thus spent have a great effect on a young man’s character; and that ordinarily he who was but a youth at twenty-one is found at twenty-five to be a man, with a stock of manly ideas and experience all acquired in the last four years. Four years apprenticeship to actual life is none too long a preparation for political duties, and the necessity of this requirement will no doubt be acknowledged by most young men over twenty-five years of age. In the case of those who have inherited property, it is plain that a four years’ acquaintance with its management, and of actual contact with the taxing power, will give to their votes a weight and value which are usually quite lacking to those of the ordinary youth of twenty-one years.
CHAPTER XXVIII
WOMAN SUFFRAGE IN THEORY
Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection, but I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. (I Timothy, ii; 13, 14.)
There be those to whom the words of the great apostle to the Gentiles speak with power and authority; who believe that Holy Writ will be read and heard with reverent faith long after the claptrap of to-day has been replaced by a later folly and is utterly forgotten; and there be those also who disdain St. Paul as one far inferior in deep sagacity to themselves. The precept of the ancient text will no doubt be valued by each reader as belikes him. The beauty of the landscape is in the eye of the human spectator; there is reason to believe that neither the grazing donkey nor any of his fellow quadrupeds has yet felt its fascination.
Woman suffrage has been steadily gaining ground in the United States for the last ten years, and the leading politicians have recently taken it up. It is a corollary and a sequence of manhood suffrage, its most fatal and noxious derivative. It is distinctly Bolshevik in its tendencies; it represents an absolute negation of the rights of property and the claims of capacity in government, and it threatens the severest blow which democracy has ever yet sustained. It implies the past failure of democracy as a governing power and is destined if accepted, to confirm and complete that failure in the future. Its adoption by a number of states of the Union is a disgrace and a dishonour, because it implies that the men of the nation are unfit to govern it. The implication is necessary and conclusive, but the charge does not rest on mere implication; the suffragettes have repeatedly made it on the platform and in their literature. Yes, to such depth of shame after three generations of its odious operations, has manhood suffrage brought our people, that our women are able openly to accuse our men of incapacity to govern the country. And by adopting woman suffrage in sixteen states the men have admitted the charge; for if they were competent to govern, if they were even as competent as the women, there was no excuse for calling in the latter to interfere. They have been called in, and the male electorate thereby stands a self-confessed failure. And yet the charge of incapacity made against our men is false; they are competent to manage the state and to manage it well, but the politicians who have been permitted to grasp the helm of state are not competent; and so after one hundred and forty years of independence and male government we are told by a parcel of fools and fanatics that the manhood of the country is not and never has been fit and able to conduct its affairs. Disguise it as you will, that is what woman suffrage means. It is not merely an open affront to American manhood, but it is also an aspersion at once upon its training and its intelligence; for it is a declaration that after over a century of actual participation in business, in war, in politics and in government, our men are so incapable, that their women who have none of this experience, are more competent than they to counsel and direct in all these important matters. In vain will the nincompoops and sentimentalists who gave us women suffrage attempt to avoid this plain conclusion by references to a few superior and exceptional women, such as their favorite wonder, Mme. Curie. The invitation to vote was not confined to the exceptional; we have called in the whole adult female population, black and white, from the most intelligent and refined lady in the land down to the vilest negress from the slums. The obvious effect was and is to offset every man’s vote by a woman’s vote; and thus practically to disfranchise the men of the country. The votes of the banker, the lawyer, the physician, the business man, the farmer, the manufacturer, the architect, each of whom has spent most of his days in learning lessons in the actual struggles of life, are to be negatived by the votes of their wives and daughters, who have passed their existence in sheltered homes, and who are so ignorant of the business of life and politics, that they do not even know its terms or its language. In every family, in every occupation, in every quality and grade of life, the same absurd and degrading performance is to be repeated year by year, as long as men will subject themselves to the futile humiliation of appearing at the polls. All the way up and down the scale our women are notoriously inferior to our men in business and political knowledge and judgment; and all the way down and all the way up, all the votes of such of the wise and experienced males as may hereafter trouble themselves to vote are to be negatived and nullified by those of the ignorant and inexperienced females. To say that no such result is intended is to say that the promoters of woman suffrage acted without reason or logic, which is probably true. They did not realize the meaning or effect of a great deal of what they said and proposed; but yet, whether or not they are capable of understanding it, woman suffrage must, if it does anything, modify or lessen man’s authority. Some of the suffragette leaders saw this, and the literature of the movement is well peppered with sharp aspersions on the capacity of men to rule the country. Indeed, if male government was satisfactory, why was a change proposed? The entire argument of the movement was that masculine rule is not satisfactory, and that therefore it was proposed to supersede and supplant it by a mixed government of men and women, now and forever. This change in management is inexcusable, unless it is intended to produce practical results in legislation and administration; and each of these practical results cannot be or mean less than an overruling of the male power by the female power, and a public and formal assertion of superior female capacity in government.
To say that none of this is to happen, that after all this hullabaloo about woman’s wrongs and rights, the women are going to vote in obedience to the directions or wishes of the men of their respective families, and that man’s government control and management will therefore remain unaffected by the triumph of their cause, is to make the whole movement futile and ridiculous. Not only that; but such a nullification of the women’s vote would add to the mischief of the affront already put upon the men by putting a separate affront upon the women. Far better for them to stay at home, and make no pretence of political action, than to go out to the polls, and pretend to do the part of freewomen, while really acting the part of puppets. If therefore a practise of proxy voting is to be the real effect of woman suffrage, and there is good reason to suspect that it is so in many instances, let it be done openly and straightforwardly. There is already too much fraud and humbug in politics; let the law be amended so that for instance, when a manufacturer with a wife and four other women in his family puts in six votes for a protective tariff it can be done openly; let him cast the six votes himself, without resorting to the troublesome expedient of having these five women, much against their will, trained and required to take a mean part in a sham transaction; first carefully instructed to vote the straight ticket and then taken to the polls and compelled to go through the tiresome form required by the man-made election law. Indeed, if men were permitted to vote by proxy for their women, the probability is that female attendance at the polls would before long become unfashionable and shrink almost to nothing. If, however, the female voters, inspired by the suffragette dreams, change their natures so far as to want to use their new powers in complete independence of the men, then will be seen the interesting picture of our women, publicly exercising their ignorance, and in defiance of all claims of loyalty and gratitude, trampling under foot family ties, assuming hostile attitudes towards the men, and negativing the votes of fathers, brothers and husbands whose bread they eat, who protect and care for them and whose business and political experience and wisdom is ten times their own. Imagine the theory of woman suffrage plainly and fully in effect, and see what it would mean. Picture, if you will, the assembled men of a hamlet or village voting “yea” on any proposition; say to build a school house or a sewer; to pass an ordinance, to favor war or peace, or to select a public official; and imagine the women in like separate assembly overruling the word of their men and voting “nay.” Would not this be to affront and dishonour the men of the community; and is there any doubt as to which body would be in the right in whatever decision had been made? Yet that or nothing, is the effect of this measure. Of the woman who favors woman suffrage it can therefore be said that she wishes to see the dearest opinions of her experienced father, her brother and her husband overruled not only by herself but by every gossiping wench in the neighborhood. Truly a noble movement! For the men who have acceded to it the most charitable excuse is indifference. The long continued operation of rotten politics has eaten into the civic fibre of our manhood; we have for generations seen elections turned into farces, public offices bargained and sold, and a vulgar oligarchy of rogues native and imported ruling this land, till our best men have almost ceased to care who votes or who is elected. If the male “suffragist” doubts this to be his real mental attitude, let him imagine the women of his family overruling him in a business transaction, or one of personal friendship, or any other matter in which he is really concerned, and wherein he is better informed than they; and he will realize, that his willingness to submit to having the exercise of his citizenship nullified at the polls, by the vote of an uninstructed woman is due to his contempt for politics, his indifference to political results, and his realization that the suffrage has been already degraded so that it is practically worthless.