Here is the pivot round which the wrongs of women revolve—her lack of legal status, her voicelessness as regards the laws of her country, the country which is so openly irrational as to count her a "person" when it wants to get a tax out of her, but refuses to do so at any other time when she has something to ask of it in return!
Once the parliamentary vote is given to women, the same results would follow in England as have followed elsewhere. Wages and hours of labour are made just for women, as in many respects they have been now made for men. The laws of divorce are the same. Mothers are made joint guardians of their children with their fathers. The age of protection for girls is raised to 18. [Footnote: At the present moment, by the English law, a girl can contract a valid marriage at twelve years of age; a boy at fourteen. (See Legal Status of Women, by H. H. Schloesser.)] In New South Wales, after the women were given the vote, Dr. Mackellar brought in a bill to deal with the protection of illegitimate children, which has answered admirably; while in New Zealand and Australia the Wages Board, which the women's vote helped to pass, has raised in both countries the wages of women from 5s. to l6s. per week for the same amount of work done. And in other respects it has abolished sweating—that crucial question of crucial questions in England to-day.
There is another point, too, amongst many others, in which the vote helped the national life in Australia in the giving of old age pensions. Perhaps had women the vote here in England, the shameful system in which old men and women are separated in the last years of their life, as the workhouses ordain, would be altered. And this is a question which demands immediate attention—immediate attention; for more than £26,000,000 are paid by taxpayers each year to be spent in great part on our wretched system of poor laws.
Francis Newman was strongly against poor laws administered as they are in England to-day, as, indeed, is every thoughtful man. He was also strongly of opinion that there should be women on juries in some cases. And indeed it is a fact that women magistrates, as well as women jurors, are most certainly a sine quâ non in those cases where, at the present moment, owing to juries being composed of men only, common justice for the unrepresented Englishwoman in relation with the other sex is not, in a great proportion of cases, rendered her. But even were women made eligible for these offices, it would be no new thing, for in Mary Tudor's reign there were two women appointed justices of the peace; and, of course, always there has been a provision in law for "a jury of matrons" in certain cases.
Indeed, when one goes far enough back in research into most questions, the invariable lesson, is taught us, which we are always so reluctant, in our cocksureness of the "antiquity" of our present-day conditions of life, to learn, and we find that our arrangements very often are not "as it was in the beginning," but only mushroom growths of a decade or two. As Mrs. Wolstenholme Elmy very justly says in her recent pamphlet on "Woman's Franchise," women possessed voting rights from time immemorial, and the year 1832 was the year when they were dispossessed of many ancient rights by the Reform Act passed in that year.
As regards other disabilities of women, Francis Newman wrote very fully and very strongly upon them, and it is impossible to leave them unmentioned here. In 1869 he wrote: "There is one important matter which young men need specially to be taught, viz. that at no time of life is any man … exempt from the essential duty of curbing animal impulses…. Nothing so paralyzes his force of Will as to be told that some men have from God the gift of continence, and others have it not. This doctrine is disastrously prominent in the Anglican marriage service, and is borrowed from St. Paul. But that great and deep-hearted apostle was unmarried and without personal experience. He writes, not as one revealing supernatural communications, but as imparting his best wisdom…. A general and just inference is, that a firm self-restraint is necessary and salutary for every man."
It is impossible to write more strongly and clearly of the wickedness of women's ancestral personal rights being swept away than does Newman in articles published in the fourth volume of his Miscellanies. He does not disguise the shameful state of the law as it affects woman to-day, and as it is carried out by Government—that law which makes wrongdoing so easy and unpunishable for man, and so hard and unjust to woman. The unjustifiableness of certain laws was shown up with no uncertain pen by him. He was himself convinced of their iniquity; and once convinced, he stood forward as a modern John the Baptist, spared no one, and passionately accused his countrymen of the injustice, immorality, and cruelty of their making one law for men and another for women. He inveighed against the world's point of view of this subject: and this not once, nor twice, but constantly; and urged with all his might that these wrongs to his countrywomen should be righted. Nevertheless his articles, many of them, are forgotten. The dust of neglect is lying thick upon them on many an unused shelf to-day. His voice has long been silent; and no doubt it has been said of him (as it was by a Church dignitary of Father Dolling at his death): "We shan't be worried any more by him now about the righting of social abuses." Laws against which Newman declaimed are not altered yet, and we are a long way from those far-reaching reforms he advocated. But the words he wrote are not dead. They are in our midst to- day, and they stir depths to-day in the hearts of his countrymen in suggestions towards social reformation; towards the righting of wrongs just as glaring to-day as they were a century ago. Questions which can never be put superficially aside, by men who, like Newman, cannot endure to leave a social wrong unredressed, if they can by any searching find the remedy.
CHAPTER XVIII
FRANCIS NEWMAN AND HIS RELIGION
More than one person has said to me in connection with this memoir: "If the whole of Frank Newman's heterodox religious opinions be not given, the book will lose half its point."