I think I cannot give a fitter close to this chapter than by quoting Newman's suggestions as to measures of urgent importance with regard to our Indian Empire, which were made a little over forty years ago.
"The establishment of an Imperial Court in India to judge all causes…. The mark of a 'tyrant' (according to the Old Greeks) was his defence by a foreign body-guard: we bear that mark of illegitimate sway at present.
"To make India loyal, to save the yearly sacrifice of health or life to 10,000 young men, now the miserable victims of our army system, is so urgent an interest, that I put this topic foremost. Too much importance can hardly be given to it. Each soldier is said to cost us £100; hence the pecuniary expense also is vast. But until we restrain ourselves from aggression, all attempts permanently to improve our millions at home must be fruitless…. Our task is to rear India into political manhood, train it to English institutions, and rejoice when it can govern itself without our aid."
CHAPTER XVII
VOTES FOR WOMEN
There is always a large percentage of people who range themselves on the side of the majority in regard to any question of the day. They range themselves there not because of any principle involved, but simply and solely because they consider this mode of action expedient. And they feel far safer, far happier, taking the flabby, muscleless arm of Expediency than in venturing into unknown difficulties behind the uncompromisingly stiff figure of Principle. But there are others-thank God for them!—who hate the shifty, cunning eye of Expediency far too much to have anything to do with him. These others would far rather be in the minority in championing some good cause than with the "expedient" majority.
These others are the pioneers of civilization. Sometimes—to-day we have many cases in point as regards the social crusade of brave women against taxation without representation—they are martyrs as well as pioneers. But the splendid spirit of knight-errantry, which shone so vividly with the fire of enthusiasm in medieval days, is still abroad in our midst to-day. A few militant personalities fight for a great cause, a great principle— the raising of a better moral tone amongst us, the betterment of the lives of their fellows. Newman was one of these. His sword was always in the thickest of the fight when it was a fight against some social injustice to his fellow citizens. Forty years ago and more he spoke out in championship of woman's rights. So long ago as 1867 he led the movement which tilted at social wrongs, social injustices dealt out to the sex. It is a movement which has taken, as I said, more than half a century to make its way to the position it holds to-day. It has been opposed bitterly almost every inch of the way by men who love expediency, and turn their backs on the principle of the thing; which is fair play for women. Nevertheless, England is a country which prides herself on her keen sense of justice and freedom.
If Newman had done nothing else, his work for this movement would be unforgettable; his words were so outspoken, his way of dealing with the subject so broad-minded. In one of his articles he urged the following on his fellow men:—"Readers of History, and Lawyers, are aware that women's wrongs are an ancient and terribly persistent fact…. Why has our law been so unjust to women?—Because women never had a voice in the making of it, and men as a class have not realized the oppression of women as a class" (the italics are my own). "Men have deep in their hearts the idea that women ought to be their legal inferiors; that neither the persons of women nor their property ought to remain their own; that marriage is not a free union on equal terms; and that the law ought to favour the stronger sex against the weaker. It is remarkable that our law is more unjust to women than that of the great historically despotic nations, and in some important respects less favourable than that of the Turks. All these things point out that equality of the sexes in respect to the Parliamentary Franchise is essential to justice. The conscience of men is opening to the truth…." "Readers of newspapers cannot be ignorant of the miseries endured by wives from brutal husbands. In ordinary decorous families, sons at lavish expense are trained to self-support. The daughters in one class have nothing spent on their education; in another, are educated as elegant ornaments of a drawing-room, where they live in luxury for a parent's delight; yet when he dies, and their youth is spent, they are often turned adrift into comparative poverty, incompetent for self-help. When complaint is made of this, the ascendant sex graciously tells them, 'they ought to marry,' and this in a country where women are counted by the hundred thousand more numerous than men; where also men do not universally accept the state of marriage. Meanwhile, the law is made as if to dissuade the woman from such a remedy. If she dare to adopt it, it instantly strips her of all her property, great or little; [Footnote: Since then some amendment of the wrong has been done by the "Married Women's Property Act.">[ and if she earn anything, authorizes her husband to seize it by force. In the Marriage Service, the husband, as if in mockery, says, 'With all my worldly goods I thee endow': while the law allows him to gamble away her whole fortune the day after the marriage, or to live in riotous indulgence on her money, and give to her the barest necessaries of life…. He may maliciously refuse her the sight of her own children…. And if to gain one sight of them she return to his house for two days, the law holds her to have 'condoned' all his offences however flagrant."
Mr. Haweis many years ago said a very significant thing. He said that the best—if the rarest—men had always a good share of the woman nature in themselves. Francis Newman was one of these men. He understood the woman's point of view without any telling. He knew instinctively, intuitively, the mental cramp, the moral inability to rise to her full stature, which is induced by man's perpetual effort to fit her into a measured mould prepared by himself. He knew that if "a man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" what a hell faced the woman who could not even reach forward to fulfil all the many aims which she was conscious were stirring within her, longing for attainment. He had seen women, his countrywomen, shake the bars behind which they faced their world for the very passion of revolt against these man-set limits, which kept them in on every side. He knew that, of all hard fates, perhaps few are more bitter than to feel the power and ability within you to do some work as well as another does it, and yet to have no freedom to use that power. To be forced, by man-made laws, to wrap up your talent in the napkin of legal red-tapeism, when everything within you, perhaps, urges you to turn it to good account.
Let us look for one moment at some of the legal disabilities of women to- day. Perhaps some of us are hardly aware to what an almost incredible distance they reach.