None the less, human nature being what it is, militancy was inevitable, and the wise will look at the situation, not as it was, or might be, but as it is. We must consider what effect that situation is having on the national character. Every little outrage committed on men by women is met by a little outrage committed on women by men; and each time one of these mutual outrages takes place, tens of thousands of minds in this country are blunted in that most sensitive quality, gentleness. It is idle to pretend that women have not stood, and do not still stand, to men as the chief reason for being gentle; that men have not, and do not still stand to women, in the same capacity. By every little mutual outrage, then, the beneficence of sex is being weakened, its maleficence awakened throughout the land. And the harm which is thus being done is so impalpable, so subtle, as to be beyond the power of most to notice at all, and surely beyond the power of statesmen to assess. That is the mischief. The scent is stealing away out of the flower of our urbanity. It will be long before the gardeners discover how odourless and arid that flower has become.
For it is not so much the action of the militant women themselves, nor that of those who are suppressing them, which is doing this subtle harm. It is the effect of this scrimmage on the spectators; the coarsening, and hardening, and general embitterment; the secret glorification of the worst side of the sex instinct; the constant exaltation of the rule of force; the rapid growth of a rankling sense of injustice amongst tens of thousands of women. To say that hundreds of thousands of women are opposed, or indifferent, to the full emancipation of their sex is not, in truth, to say very much. No civilizing movement was ever brought to fruition save in the face of the indifference or opposition of the majority. What proportion of agricultural labourers were actively concerned to win for themselves the vote? How small a fraction of the people actively demanded free education! But when these privileges were won, what number of those for whom they were won would have been willing to resign them? If women were fully emancipated to-morrow, many would certainly resent what they would deem a blow at the influence and power already wielded by them in virtue of their sex. But in two years’ time how many would be willing to surrender their freedom? As certainly, not ten in a hundred! To compare the disapproval of women raised against their wills to a state of emancipation in which they can remain inactive if they like with the bitter resentment spreading like slow poison in the veins of those who fruitlessly demand emancipation is to compare the energy of vanishing winter snow with that of the spring sun which melts it.
In an age when spirituality has ever a more desperate struggle to maintain hold at all against the inroads of materialism, any increase of bitterness in the national life, any loss of gentleness, aspiration, and mutual trust between the sexes, however silent, secret, and unmeasurable, is, surely, a serious thing. Justice, neglected, works her own insidious revenge. Every month, every year, the germs of bitterness and brutality will be spreading. If any think that this people has gentleness to spare, and can afford to tamper with the health of its spirit, they are mistaken. If any think that repression can put an end to this aspiration—again they are mistaken. The idea of the full emancipation of women is so rooted that nothing can now uproot it.
But, apart from the political impasse, there are those who, satisfied that women have not the political aptitude of men, are chiefly opposed to the granting of the vote for fear that it will come to mean the return of women to Parliament. Now, if their conviction regarding the inferiority of women’s political capacity be sound—as I for one, speaking generally, am inclined to believe—there is no danger of women being returned to Parliament save in such small numbers as to make no matter. If it be unsound—if the political capacity of woman be equal to man’s—it is time Parliament were reinforced by women’s presence. New waters soon find their level. Nor are such as distrust the political capacities of women qualified to prophesy a flood. To debar women for fear of their competition is a policy of little spirit, and not one that the men of this country will consciously adopt, unless we have indeed lost the fire of our fathers. There are many, too, who believe that the granting of the vote to women will increase the emotional element in an electorate whose emotional side they already distrust, and thereby endanger our relations with foreign Powers. But it has yet to be proved that women are, in a wide sense of the word, more emotional than men; and, even conceding that they are, why forget that they will bring to the consideration of international matters the solid reinforcement of two qualities—the first, a practical domestic sense lacking to men, and likely to foster national reluctance to plunge into wild-cat wars, the second, a greater faculty for self-sacrifice, tending to fortify national determination to persist in a war once undertaken. It is well known that during the American Civil War the women of the Southern States displayed a spirit of resistance even more heroic than that of their men folk. But, in any case, to retain women in their present state of social and political inferiority for reasons which are so debatable savours, surely, somewhat of the sultanic. We have, in fact, yet to imbibe the spirit of Mill’s wisest saying: “Amongst all the lessons which men require for carrying on the struggle against the evident imperfections of their lot on earth, there is no lesson which they more need than not to add to the evils which Nature inflicts, by their jealous and prejudiced restrictions on one another.”
In fine, out of the practical perplexities brooding over this whole matter there is no way save by resort to the first principles of gentility. It has been uncontrovertibly established that there is in this country a great and ever-increasing body of women suffering from a bitter sense of injustice. What course then, compatible with true gentility, is left open to us men? Our whole social life is in essence but a long, slow, striving for the victory of justice over force; and this demand of our women for full emancipation is but a sign of that striving. Are we not bound in honour to admit this simple fact? Shall we not at last give fulfilment to this idea—with the due caution that should mark all political experiment? Has not, in truth, the time come for us to say: From this resistance to the claims of Equity; from this bitter and ungracious conflict with those weaker than ourselves; from this slow poisoning of the well-springs of our national courtesy, and kindliness, and sense of fair play: “Gentles, let us rest!”
II
Appeal to the Press
(A Letter to the Daily News, 1911.)
I write as a supporter of woman’s suffrage, but not of militant suffragism. Whenever I have remonstrated with a militant Suffragist I have received this answer:
“We could not keep the movement before the eyes of the public without militant tactics, because the papers, with two or three exceptions, would not report peaceful work. For this reason we adopted our methods, and the event has justified us. We have advanced the cause—simply by forcing it on people’s attention in the only way open to us—more in the last three years than those who pursued peaceful methods had done in the last forty.”