Is it all unmixed good, then? Is the women’s movement singular in this, that it is perfect? Will women make no mistakes? By no means. Who could be so foolish as to think so? But by mistakes we learn. If you wish to learn a new language you must blunder in it first. One of the reasons of women’s slow development is that men are so afraid women will make fools of themselves. We all have a divine right to make fools of ourselves, because the force that created us decreed that only so could we learn, and the convention by which a woman is never allowed to be a fool all to herself, as an individual, but is made to sin for her whole sex, is an anti-progressive convention which must go. A woman fires a building and we are told “Woman” has disgraced herself, “She” is unfit for the vote. But men sack empires and burn cities to the ground and no one says “Man” has disgraced himself, “He” is unfit for the vote.
I think I hear the horror-stricken Anti declare, “A right to make a fool of yourself? But it is our Empire that you are asking for,—to play with! Our Empire which we made ourselves and which is so complex, so delicate, so nicely poised, that one push from a foolish woman’s little finger will send it reeling to destruction.” The Anti wants to make our flesh creep; but it refuses. We don’t for a moment admit that the Empire, with its millions of men and women, belongs to men any more than it belongs to women. We can’t believe, either, that the Empire is in so shockingly delicate a condition as the Antis make out. The cry is for safety. Only Death is safe.
“Permanence hangs by the grave;
Sits by the grave green-grassed,
On the roll of the heaved grave-mound.”
Life is never safe, yet the happy warrior prefers life. The Empire was certainly not made by people who chattered of safety and permanence, nor will it be kept by such people.
The direction in which reactionaries anticipate most trouble is one where I believe it would be last to show itself. It is in foreign affairs, in the relations with other countries, in the issues of peace and war that they see most danger, if women shared responsibility with men. I do not believe it, because for one thing these matters are exceedingly remote from the electorate, and in the vague way in which popular sentiment makes itself felt it is highly improbable that women’s sentiment would on any particular issue differ from men’s. It is difficult to conceive of Englishwomen loving Germans while Englishmen were burning to cut their throats. What is possible is that women may gradually help men to see what very bad business war is, simply because it is obviously and always such bad business for women, and while undoubtedly some men trade in war, no women do. The idea is freely expressed that men would resent women having power to control the forces of the army and navy, when women cannot themselves serve in the army and navy. It does not seem clear why they should, for they do not seem to resent women helping to control the police force, although women do not serve in the police. In this latter case the matter comes much more closely home to everyday life and yet we have no trouble. Sometimes the difficulty is put in another way. We in England, it is asserted, may be willing that women should share in the control of their own lives, but if we allow this, we shall lose the respect of more “virile” countries. But the “feminisation” of politics (to use their phrase) will not give the country one man less, nor will it make one man weaker or less virile. If really the respect of other countries depends upon the amount of our physical force, that force will still be there, undiminished, and in course of time, as we fervently believe, through better and humaner conditions, will be greatly increased. We do not find the Scandinavian races nor our Australian cousins to be particularly womanish, yet Norway and Australia have given all their women the vote.
My theme hitherto has been that the domination of physical force has been the cause of the subjection of women, and that it is contrary to progress and civilisation that physical force should dominate moral and intellectual force. But, of course, physical force has never been entirely dominant, otherwise the mind of man never would have emerged from the mind of the beast. All progress is due to the growth of mind controlling physical forces, and the anti-suffragists who assert that the vote has been and is merely the counter which represents the physical force of the voters, and that no one would dream of obeying a law if he once suspected that it were not made by those who possessed the preponderance of physical force, are making an assertion which not only reflects quite undeservedly on the intelligence of men, but which is patently contrary to facts. Things may be bad; they might be much better; but physical force, in this crude sense, never has entirely ruled the world since prehistoric times. The idea at the back of the anti-suffragist contention is, as far as one can make it out, that you cannot compel a man to do a thing against his will, if he feels that he has the strength to resist. We must admit that. But there are many ways of moving the will besides the crude way of physical force; there are various kinds of compulsion and various forms of resistance. The Antis at one moment declare the intellectual superiority of men over women, and the next moment involve themselves in a line of argument which presupposes man’s entire deafness to reason. Man is, however, gradually discovering that he may get more out of his fellow-man (and à fortiori out of his fellow-woman) by agreement than by compulsion, and the resistance offered by out-and-out striking is only an extreme case of the moral law of diminishing returns upon increased compulsion. It has been found that slave-labour is the least productive labour; it is slowly getting to be believed that overwork means under-production. The degree of physical force used by men against women has not been sufficient at any period to destroy women, but it has crippled them; it has resulted in not getting the best out of them. Though stupid men and blackguards have not understood this, the better sort always have, and the great mass of men have never even dreamed of applying their force to its utmost against women. It is quite true that Government rests on physical force in the sense that Governments dispose of physical force; but those who form the Government are not chosen for their personal possession of physical force, nor even with any thought that they represent the physical force of the community. In a country with representative institutions the Government is supposed to represent the opinions and interests (not the physical force) of the majority of the electors. Before the modern extensions of the franchise, the country was actually ruled by the votes of men who were few relatively to the whole population, and, therefore, by no means represented the physical force of the community, and before the days of parliamentary government a small oligarchy or even an autocracy ruled. Democratic government has, in fact, come to birth and steadily grown with the steady decline of the rule of physical force. And it will be seen that this must be so, when once we have grasped the fact that the unmoral use of physical force may here and there profit an individual but is always bad business for the community.
If we abandon the visions of the Antis, we shall see that, as a matter of prosaic fact, the vote in England is given to a man not as a reward of virtue (as the assertion, “woman has disgraced herself,” would seem to imply), nor as a prize for intellectual ability (as those who speak slightingly of women’s intellect would suggest), nor as the guerdon of physical prowess (as the physical force party declare), nor does it depend upon his being a husband and father. An Englishman who has, by debauchery, ruined body, mind and spirit, and who has neither wife nor child, may yet have the necessary qualifications to vote, for these are a confused and illogical jumble of accretions, but, such as they are, they depend on the possession of property. It is proposed by Liberals to abolish these and to enfranchise a man in virtue of his manhood. Once you see the immorality, the waste and the stupidity of the physical force argument, there is no possible ground for refusing to enfranchise a woman in virtue of her womanhood.