MY DEAR MRS. WARD,—
You are most kind! I have received no contribution to the Quebec Battlefields that has given me greater pleasure. I value it partly because it is yours and partly Vancouver’s. Every cent that filters through from B.C. and the Prairie Provinces is a joy to me. The Canadian National Problem, the Imperial Problem, is how to link B.C. and the Western Provinces more closely with the Maritime Eastern Provinces—how to improve the transportation service, East and West, and cause the great highroad of human traffic from Europe to Asia to go via Montreal and Vancouver—that is the problem, and that is why I rejoice over every Western Piccanin who subscribes his few cents to Quebec. A feeling for Quebec will remain engraven on his heart for all time.
...I do not think the character of the debt owing in £ s. d. by the British race to the Wolfe family has ever been put before the public. Wolfe’s father never could obtain the repayment from the British Government of £16,000 advanced by him during the Marlborough campaigns. The different Departments did the pass trick with him—the first rule of departmental administration—played battledore and shuttlecock with him until he desisted from pressing his claim for fear of being considered a Dun!
Then James Wolfe, our Quebec hero, never received the C. in C. allowance of £10 per day. His mother claimed £3,000 from the British Treasury as the amount owing to her son on September 13, 1759—but the poor hard-up departments played battledore and shuttlecock with her, and she, like her Wolfe relations, was too great a gentleman to press for payment. When, however, she found that James had left £10,000 to be distributed according to the instructions of his will, and that his assets only realized £8,000, the dear good lady did try and squeeze £2,000 out of the £19,000 owing by the Government to the family, in order that she might carry out her boy’s wishes—but it was a hopeless, useless effort, and the splendid dame heaped all the coals of fire she could on the heads of the stony-hearted, perhaps because stony-broke, British People, by leaving the whole of her fortune to the widows and orphans of the officers who fell under Wolfe’s command at Quebec. Now I maintain that the whole Empire has a moral responsibility in this matter, for have not the most energetic of the descendants of the British People of 1759 emigrated into Greater Britain? The story of how we recompensed Wolfe for giving us an immortal example and half a continent has not, so far as I know, been told.
Delighted to think you are going back to England a red-hot Canadian missionary. Send out all the young people whom you know and believe in, and who are receptive and sympathetic and appreciative, and have sufficient imagination not to be stupidly critical. Send them all over here. We shall be delighted to see them, although I fear they cannot all get Private Cars!
If Mrs. Ward did not, on her return to England, set up altogether as an amateur emigration agent, she yet paid her debt to Canada by the delightful enthusiasm for the young country with all its boundless possibilities, combined with a shrewd appreciation of its difficulties, which she threw into her novel, Canadian Born. Neither Canada nor Lord Grey had any reason to complain of the devotion, both of heart and of head, which she gave to the cause. To her American friends, on the other hand, her impassioned attack in Daphne, or Marriage à la Mode, on the divorce laws of the United States, came as something of a surprise, for they had not realized, while she was with them, how deep an impression these things had made on her, or how much her artistic imagination had been captured by their tragic or sordid possibilities. Daphne is, indeed, little but a powerful tract, written under great stress of feeling, but the Americans missed in it the happy touch that had created Lucy Foster, and regretted that Mrs. Ward should have felt bound to portray for their benefit so wholly disagreeable a young person as Daphne Floyd. Time has, however, brought its revenges in the strong movement that has now arisen in the United States for the unification of the widely-differing divorce laws of the various States under one Federal Law.
Yet there were deeper forces at work in the writing of Daphne than any which Mrs. Ward’s brief visit to America alone could have accounted for. The growing disturbance which the Suffrage question was making in the currents of English life had thrown Mrs. Ward’s thoughts into these channels for longer than her critics knew. Daphne was one result of this fermentation; another was what we should now call “direct action.” Within a month after her return from America Mrs. Ward wrote to Miss Arnold of Fox How (herself an undaunted Suffragist at the age of seventy-five): “You will see from the papers what it is that has been taking all my time—the foundation of an Anti-Suffrage League.”
CHAPTER XII
MRS. WARD AND THE SUFFRAGE QUESTION
MRS. WARD, as is well known, did not believe in Women’s Suffrage. She had heard the subject discussed from her earliest days at Oxford, ever since the time when the first Women’s Petition for the vote was brought to the House of Commons by Miss Garrett and Miss Emily Davies in 1866, and John Stuart Mill moved his amendment to the Reform Bill of 1867. But it did not greatly interest her. Her mind was set in other directions, responding to the intellectual stimulus of Oxford rather in the field of historical and religious inquiry and leading her on, as we have seen, to her memorable “revolt from awe” in the matter of the Interpretation of the Scriptures. Her group of friends at Oxford were hardly touched by the Suffrage agitation; the movement for the Higher Education of Women, in which Mrs. Ward bore so distinguished a part, was wholly unconnected with it. Indeed it was the very success of this movement that helped to convince Mrs. Ward that the right lines for women’s advance lay, not in the political agitation for the Suffrage, but in the broadening of education, so as to fit her sex for the many tasks which were opening out before it. But she had also an inborn dislike and distaste for the type of agitation which, even in those early days, the Suffragists carried on; for the “anti-Man” feeling that ran through it, and for the type of woman—the “New Woman” as she was called in the eighties—who gravitated towards its ranks. Her scholarly mind rejected many of the Suffragist arguments as shallow and unproven, especially those which concerned the economic condition of women, while the practical co-operation between men and women that she saw all round her, both in Oxford and afterwards in London, gave her the conviction that the remaining disabilities of women might and would be removed in due course by this road, rather than by a political turmoil which would only serve to embitter the relations between them. In her eyes women were neither better nor worse than men, but different; so different that neither they nor the State would really be served by this attempt to press them into a political machine which owed its development solely to the male sex. In later years she had many close friends in the Suffrage camp, nor did she ever lose those of her earlier days who were converted, but to the end there remained a profound antipathy between her and the “feminist” type of mind, with its crudities and extravagances—the type that was to manifest itself so disastrously in later years among the “Suffragettes.” It was not that she wished her sex to remain aloof from the toil and dust of the world, as her Positivist friends would have liked; rather she felt it to be the duty of all educated women to work themselves to the bone for the uplifting of women and children less fortunate than themselves, and so to repay their debt to the community; but clamour for their own “rights” was a different thing: ugly in itself, and likely to lead, in her opinion, to a sex-war of very dubious outcome.
The first time that Mrs. Ward was drawn into the battle of the Suffrage was on the occasion, early in 1889, of Lord Salisbury’s much-trumpeted conversion to it, when a Private Member’s Bill[30] of the usual limited type was before Parliament, and the Prime Minister’s attitude appeared to make it probable that the Bill might pass. Mrs. Creighton—then also opposed to the Suffrage, though on somewhat different grounds from Mrs. Ward’s—Mr. Frederic Harrison, Mr. Knowles, and Mrs. Ward united in organizing a movement of protest. It was decided at a meeting held at Mr. Harrison’s house in May that the signatures of women eminent in the world of education, literature and public service should be invited to a “Protest against the extension of the Parliamentary Franchise to Women,” which Mrs. Ward had drawn up (with some assistance from Mrs. Creighton), and which Mr. Knowles undertook to publish in the next month’s Nineteenth Century.