The inalienable right to liberty in all mankind forbids the right of anarchy in any of mankind; and the question of woman suffrage, strange as it may appear, actually narrows itself down, as it seems to me, to the question whether we shall have democracy or anarchy. Democratic government is at an end when those who issue decrees are not identical with those who can enforce those decrees.
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 petition 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 assistance 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 circumstances have proved that they were sure of being heard, and, if the law were just, and for the general good, of assisting 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 pass, but in 1850 another bill, which she presented, asking for ten millions of acres, passed 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 passed both houses, and President Pierce vetoed it, because he believed the general Government had no constitutional 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 petition 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 Association 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 Constitutional Convention of New York State in 1894. After drawing, in fine and truthfully glowing words, a picture of woman's progress under the institutions 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 sex, 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 emancipated 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 constitute the only class of sane people excluded from the franchise, the only class 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 Constitution 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 constitution 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 noble 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 assurance 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 constitution, 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 classes 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 class 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.