The Complete Essays of Charles Dudley Warner

by Charles Dudley Warner

We should hesitate to draw adverse conclusions in regard to a system yet so young that its results cannot be fairly estimated. Only after two or three generations can its effects upon the character of a great people be measured: Observations differ, and testimony is difficult to obtain. We think it safe to say that those states are most prosperous which have the best free schools. But if the philosopher inquires as to the general effect upon the national character in respect to the objections named, he must wait for a reply.

III. The pursuit of the chimera of social equality, from the belief that it should logically follow political equality; resulting in extravagance, misapplication of natural capacities, a notion that physical labor is dishonorable, or that the state should compel all to labor alike, and in efforts to remove inequalities of condition by legislation.

IV. The equality of the sexes. The stir in the middle of the eighteenth century gave a great impetus to the emancipation of woman; though, curiously enough, Rousseau, in unfolding his plan of education for Sophie, in Emile, inculcates an almost Oriental subjection of woman—her education simply that she may please man. The true enfranchisement of woman—that is, the recognition (by herself as well as by man) of her real place in the economy of the world, in the full development of her capacities—is the greatest gain to civilization since the Christian era. The movement has its excesses, and the gain has not been without loss. “When we turn to modern literature,” writes Mr. Money, “from the pages in which Fenelon speaks of the education of girls, who does not feel that the world has lost a sacred accent—that some ineffable essence has passed out from our hearts?”

How far the expectation has been realized that women, in fiction, for instance, would be more accurately described, better understood, and appear as nobler and lovelier beings when women wrote the novels, this is not the place to inquire. The movement has results which are unavoidable in a period of transition, and probably only temporary. The education of woman and the development of her powers hold the greatest promise for the regeneration of society. But this development, yet in its infancy, and pursued with much crudeness and misconception of the end, is not enough. Woman would not only be equal with man, but would be like him; that is, perform in society the functions he now performs. Here, again, the notion of equality is pushed towards uniformity. The reformers admit structural differences in the sexes, though these, they say, are greatly exaggerated by subjection; but the functional differences are mainly to be eliminated. Women ought to mingle in all the occupations of men, as if the physical differences did not exist. The movement goes to obliterate, as far as possible, the distinction between sexes. Nature is, no doubt, amused at this attempt. A recent writer—[“Biology and Woman's Rights,” Quarterly Journal of Science, November, 1878.]—, says: “The 'femme libre' [free woman] of the new social order may, indeed, escape the charge of neglecting her family and her household by contending that it is not her vocation to become a wife and a mother! Why, then, we ask, is she constituted a woman at all? Merely that she may become a sort of second-rate man?”

The truth is that this movement, based always upon a misconception of equality, so far as it would change the duties of the sexes, is a retrograde.—[“It has been frequently observed that among declining nations the social differences between the two sexes are first obliterated, and afterwards even the intellectual differences. The more masculine the women become, the more effeminate become the men. It is no good symptom when there are almost as many female writers and female rulers as there are male. Such was the case, for instance, in the Hellenistic kingdoms, and in the age of the Caesars. What today is called by many the emancipation of woman would ultimately end in the dissolution of the family, and, if carried out, render poor service to the majority of women. If man and woman were placed entirely on the same level, and if in the competition between the two sexes nothing but an actual superiority should decide, it is to be feared that woman would soon be relegated to a condition as hard as that in which she is found among all barbarous nations. It is precisely family life and higher civilization that have emancipated woman. Those theorizers who, led astray by the dark side of higher civilization, preach a community of goods, generally contemplate in their simultaneous recommendation of the emancipation of woman a more or less developed form of a community of wives. The grounds of the two institutions are very similar.” (Roscher's Political Economy, p. 250.) Note also that difference in costumes of the sexes is least apparent among lowly civilized peoples.]—One of the most striking features in our progress from barbarism to civilization is the proper adjustment of the work for men and women. One test of a civilization is the difference of this work. This is a question not merely of division of labor, but of differentiation with regard to sex. It not only takes into account structural differences and physiological disadvantages, but it recognizes the finer and higher use of woman in society.

The attainable, not to say the ideal, society requires an increase rather than a decrease of the differences between the sexes. The differences may be due to physical organization, but the structural divergence is but a faint type of deeper separation in mental and spiritual constitution. That which makes the charm and power of woman, that for which she is created, is as distinctly feminine as that which makes the charm and power of men is masculine. Progress requires constant differentiation, and the line of this is the development of each sex in its special functions, each being true to the highest ideal for itself, which is not that the woman should be a man, or the man a woman. The enjoyment of social life rests very largely upon the encounter and play of the subtle peculiarities which mark the two sexes; and society, in the limited sense of the word, not less than the whole structure of our civilization, requires the development of these peculiarities. It is in diversity, and not in an equality tending to uniformity, that we are to expect the best results from the race.

V. Equality of races; or rather a removal of the inequalities, social and political, arising in the contact of different races by intermarriage.

Perhaps equality is hardly the word to use here, since uniformity is the thing aimed at; but the root of the proposal is in the dogma we are considering. The tendency of the age is to uniformity. The facilities of travel and communication, the new inventions and the use of machinery in manufacturing, bring men into close and uniform relations, and induce the disappearance of national characteristics and of race peculiarities. Men, the world over, are getting to dress alike, eat alike, and disbelieve in the same things: It is the sentimental complaint of the traveler that his search for the picturesque is ever more difficult, that race distinctions and habits are in a way to be improved off the face of the earth, and that a most uninteresting monotony is supervening. The complaint is not wholly sentimental, and has a deeper philosophical reason than the mere pleasure in variety on this planet.

We find a striking illustration of the equalizing, not to say leveling, tendency of the age in an able paper by Canon George Rawlinson, of the University of Oxford, contributed recently to an American periodical of a high class and conservative character.—[“Duties of Higher towards Lower Races.” By George Rawlinson. Princeton Re-view. November, 1878. New York.]—This paper proposes, as a remedy for the social and political evils caused by the negro element in our population, the miscegenation of the white and black races, to the end that the black race may be wholly absorbed in the white—an absorption of four millions by thirty-six millions, which he thinks might reasonably be expected in about a century, when the lower type would disappear altogether.

Perhaps the pleasure of being absorbed is not equal to the pleasure of absorbing, and we cannot say how this proposal will commend itself to the victims of the euthanasia. The results of miscegenation on this continent—black with red, and white with black—the results morally, intellectually, and physically, are not such as to make it attractive to the American people.