The Unfinished Programme of Democracy

by Richard Roberts

It is not for a moment argued that the establishment of the economic independence of woman is a cure for all the ills that afflict the family. But this is fundamental; and we shall simply be beating the air so long as we do not accept this principle. For it is the only method which holds a promise of restoring the life of the home. At the same time, it is no less necessary that the woman being by reason of her motherhood economically independent should not be regarded as the economic handmaid of the state. If the endowment of motherhood is only a provision for increasing the economic and military human material of the community, then we are better without it. For the poison which vitiates our life will return to it at its most delicate and sensitive point. To regard the marriage relation simply as the means of supplying a constant stream of military and economic units for the state is to deny the spiritual nature of man at its very source, and to reimpose on ourselves the deadly incubus of materialism. This is the danger which the Eugenics movement threatens us with. To introduce the principle of selective breeding into human relations may result in a community of persons, healthy, vigorous and efficient for economic and military purposes; but we are learning how little physical heredity has to do with the ultimate purpose of life. In so far as Eugenics will lead to greater precautions against the propagation of diseased and mentally and physically degenerate persons, and quickens a greater vigilance and a more insistent demand for sound minds and sound bodies in those about to give themselves in marriage, it brings a necessary and valuable reinforcement to the influences that make for human welfare. But when it goes beyond this point, it becomes a danger to the spiritual conception of life and society. What we must insist upon is that marriage shall be a partnership, deliberately entered into by two equal persons, economically independent of each other, attracted to each other by that physical and temperamental affinity which we call love; and that we shall import into the relationship no extraneous notions of state-service or of race-preservation which may interfere with the freedom and spontaneity of the relation thus established. The bearing of children may be a service to the nation; but no child is well-born who is not born simply of the joyful mutual selfgiving of man and woman.

Yet it may be held that the partnership is an affair so momentous that none should be permitted to enter it so precipitately as the marriage laws of the United States allow. Some degree of deliberation should be insisted upon before legal recognition of the union is granted. The demand for greater facilities for divorce is probably not unconnected with the extreme facility with which persons can enter upon the marriage relationship.

But the establishment of right relations between the sexes must begin before the period when men and women have reached the condition of personal independence. It should be plain that the sense of sex-difference which emerges in adolescence should not be allowed to develop in the unregulated and capricious manner in which our false modesty compels it to develop to-day. The processes of initiation into the mysteries of sex should begin sufficiently early to avert so far as possible the danger of its being discoloured and perverted by the undue obtrusion of its sense-accompaniments. There is no real reason why the frank comradeship of boys and girls should not be maintained through adolescence into youth, but the criminal negligence which we have shown concerning the means by which sex-knowledge is communicated to growing children has succeeded in creating a gulf between men and women which persists more or less permanently and constitutes the most obstinate difficulty in the way of perfect freedom of fellowship between men and women. It is no exaggeration to say that the attitude of most men to women is poisoned—perhaps beyond perfect recovery at any time—by the conditions under which as boys they received their first intimations of the nature of the sex-relation. A good deal has already been done to pave the way of change in this matter; and an increasing number of parents are assuming the responsibility of communicating this knowledge to their children. But there is still unfortunately a great mass of unhealthy prudery to be overcome before rational dealing with this problem becomes anything like universal.

The problem of the fellowship of men and women, however, extends beyond the institution of marriage. Now that the enfranchisement of women is opening up the question of their availability and qualification for national legislatures, we are confronted with a very large possibility of change in the tone and temper of government. Much nonsense is talked about the psychological differences between men and women; and of this nonsense, the emptiest is that which assumes that women are dominated by sentiment and emotion, while men are guided by reason. An unprejudiced observer, watching deliberative gatherings of men over any space of time would certainly arrive at the conclusion that the occasions on which they acted upon purely rational grounds were rare and exceptional; and it has been the experience of the present writer that in deliberative groups of men and women the women are on the whole more likely to display a dispassionate rationality in arriving at their judgments than the men. It is a region in which broad generalisations are bound to be unsound; and the progress of the higher education of women is undoubtedly obliterating any patent difference of mental operation between men and women. At the same time, there are certain differences which are embedded in the physical structure of sex and which may be therefore permanent; but so far from disqualifying women from a share in government, those very differences entitle them to it. Quite apart from the fact that the problems of food and clothing in their incidence on the home are of peculiar importance to women, and that the woman’s point of view should always be represented in discussion of the large-scale problems of production and distribution, the mind of woman brings a check and balance to the operations of the male mind which they very acutely need. There can, for instance, be no question that the male mind tends to an inordinate faith in force and coercive processes; and while it would hardly be correct to say that the female mind possesses an antithetic bias of a reasoned kind, it does normally display a certain hesitancy to apply the closure of compulsion which the too ready real-politik of a purely male assembly is prone to adopt when it sets out to translate its emotions into enactments. The truth of the matter, in fine, is this—that because humanity is bi-sexual, its affairs cannot be reasonably and fruitfully determined save through the common counsels of men and women. We have already made a beginning in the admission of women to the councils of the community. A woman has sat in the Congress of the United States; women have long been at home in British municipal bodies, and their right to a place in Parliament has been acknowledged. It is only a matter of time when the logic of the enfranchisement of women will reach its inevitable conclusion in their admission to all public deliberative bodies on equal terms with men. They have a contribution to bring to the corporate direction of affairs without which the nations can no longer do; and the fact that as a class they may take some time to become habituated to the mechanics of legislation is an argument for hastening their complete admission to it.

There were those who in the “militant” stage of the “Votes for Women” campaign foretold that the economic class-war would presently be superseded or complicated by a sex-war; and some women there were whose utterances undoubtedly pointed in that direction. For the time, however, this danger has dropped over the horizon. The war has evoked a community of suffering in which men and women alike have shared too deeply, and in which their mutual need has been too overwhelming to make the notion of a sex-war even thinkable to-day. But we should be rejoicing prematurely if we supposed that all possible sources of sex-antagonism have disappeared. The political enfranchisement of women certainly removes one source; but the new industrial complications caused by the entry of women into occupations which have hitherto been a male monopoly, and in which their employment has been fully justified by the character of their workmanship may, when the transition to peaceful life is being made, breed grievances and troubles in which the line of cleavage will be determined by the sex-factor. But if we assume the establishment of the “national minimum,” applicable to men and women alike, and therefore securing the economic independence of women, we shall have robbed this prospective danger of much of its substance. For the rest, there seems to be no reason why women should not be freely permitted to engage in occupations for which they are competent, on equal terms with men; and the comradeship of men and women in the control and the operation of industrial processes would do much to fix the now dominant sex-interest in its proper place in life. The primacy of the sex-interest in determining the relations of men and women works definitely toward the retention of women in a subordinate, parasitic and exploited position, and while this lasts, we shall still have with us the seeds of sex-antagonism. All this does not overlook the fact that there are kinds of work for which women are physically unsuited, and that there are times in the life of the married woman when she should be exempted from all manual work save of the lightest sort. But these problems are in essence present even in the working conditions of men. All men are not suited for all classes of work; and there are few men whose work is not occasionally interrupted by sickness. What is needed in the case of women is simply a further application of those principles of selection and accommodation which already operate in every industry. Unless some such position as this is frankly accepted, we may be presently confronted with a new militancy and a new sabotage at the hands of women who have tasted the experience of economic independence and are unwilling to surrender it to a convention of inequality which they claim their own war-time performance has permanently discredited.

IV

Difficult as the realisation of a perfect fellowship between men and women may be, it presents a problem comparatively easy of solution by the side of that entailed in the division of a community by a colour-line. In itself the colour-line is not insuperable; its difficulty lies in its symbolical character as representing a difference and an inferiority of tradition and history. The chief difficulty in the United States arises out of the memory of the former slavery of the negro population; and the consequent persistence of a prejudice against according equal treatment to a class regarded as, if not sub-human, at least permanently inferior in capacity. It is useless to press the assumption that a necessary physical aversion must always separate the white from the black, in the face of the existence of a vast number of palpably cross-bred persons in the community. This does not, of course, mean that mixed marriages should be encouraged or regarded as normal. The problems raised by miscegenation are much too difficult to permit us to remove the colour-line by the off-hand method of race-fusion. The fusion of two races separated from one another not only by the memory of two centuries of slavery but by unnumbered centuries of widely different culture, would probably create more problems than it solved. The colour-line would be superseded by a multiplicity of shade-lines; and confusion would be worse confounded. It is probable that the level of the more advanced race would be depressed more than that of the more backward race would be raised. Houston Chamberlain is probably right (in spite of his capacity for being so frequently and so colossally wrong) in holding that the finest racial types are produced by the fusion of two peoples not too widely separated in physical and historical character, followed by close inbreeding. The gulf between black and white in America and South Africa is far too deep, as yet at least, to make the removal of the colour-line by fusion a subject of hopeful discussion.

But equally the solution is not to be found in segregation—certainly so far as these two countries are concerned. The admixture of the black and the white elements in the population has gone much too far to make segregation a practical proposition. It would, moreover, have the distinct disadvantage of stereotyping two different types of cultural development within the same commonwealth and of consequently endangering its unity by setting up the possibility of rivalry and antagonism. In any two-race community the ideal must be to secure so far as may be possible a substantial identity of outlook and culture; and this is to be done not by segregation, but by contact.

But it is just this “contact” that is denied to the negro race both in America and South Africa. The races are really segregated as effectually as though they lived in separate reservations; they live in quite different cultural “climates.” The negro though no longer a chattel-slave yet constitutes a servile class; the duties assigned to him in the community are essentially of a menial kind. It is characteristic of his position in America that the higher ranks of military command are closed to him; and while a woman has made her way to Congress, there is as yet no negro congressman; the idea is still barely thinkable. Yet no community has thrived permanently which permitted a helot class to exist within itself; and the position of the negro—now that education is quickening his mind to the sense of class-disinheritance and race-consciousness—may become a grave menace to the inner harmony of the Republic.

The logic of Lincoln’s proclamation has yet to be worked out in the minds of white Americans. To abolish slavery is not indeed to make a black man white; nor does it at once equip him for the responsibilities of freedom. But it does confer citizenship upon him; and the gift of citizenship should be validated by two things; first, by a frank and generous recognition of equality of standing, and second, by a thorough-going policy of education. Perhaps the former was more than could be justly expected. Just as the slave was ill-equipped for freedom, so the white man could hardly rise at once to the plane of regarding the negro as his free and equal brother. But it is a fair criticism of the public treatment of the negro that he has not been supplied with the opportunity of rising to his white brother’s plane of culture. There have been voluntary philanthropic efforts in this direction, but this work should not have been left to the precarious chances of charity. Just because negro emancipation was a public act, the full cultural education of the negro was a public responsibility.