Naturally the improvement in the position of women in the new age will not arrive at a bound, nor will their rights in relation to marriage be unaccompanied by other rights at present withheld, and perhaps not always unreasonably withheld. On the contrary, the recognition of one set of rights will facilitate and accelerate the recognition of the other. It is generally agreed that the tendency of the sexes is to become less divergent, intellectually and morally, for reasons connected with what Spencer calls “the less early arrest of individual evolution, and the result everywhere seen throughout the organic world, of a self-preserving power inversely proportionate to the race-preserving power.”[4]
As it will have been realised, long before the advent of the next century, that the surest way to improved capacity is to be found in increased responsibility, women will not, a hundred years hence, be allowed or compelled to shirk their political obligations. We may see with half an eye that every year women are becoming more capable, and also more desirous of aiding the counsels of the public: and in some of our Colonies, as well as in some States of the American Union, they are already voting, and voting (as it turns out) with the most wonderful intelligence and usefulness. The influence of the female vote in, for example, New Zealand has been for some time perceptible in the legislation of that highly-enlightened colony: and I never heard anyone object to the results of this influence except persons whose conduct, or the conduct which they approved in their associates, was likely to be inconvenienced by them. It is no doubt true that women are a great deal more fond of demanding that the law should do work which it would be better to leave to natural developments of public character than could be wished: but then so are men, and it is an unquestionable thing that the misdeeds which men more readily condone than women are much more likely to be bad for public morality than those which women condone more freely than men. There is no particular reason for thinking at the present time (though there was ample reason for thinking a few decades ago) that women will be more prone to legislate unnecessarily, and therefore mischievously, than men: and we are in any case bound to pass through a good many years of parliament-worship before we awaken to the fact that the law cannot do everything, and that any reform which is accomplished by the spontaneous influence of public opinion is always a great deal more complete, a great deal more conducive to public self-respect, and a great deal better adjusted to the special requirements of every individual circumstance that it touches, than one which is laboriously and mechanically embodied in statutes which cannot but be imperfect, cannot possibly fail to act oppressively and unjustly in one place or another, and frequently prove to be unworkable from beginning to end.
[1] Ante, [Chapter II]. [↑]
[2] Against some methods of securing this object no doubt the unintelligent sentimentality of the present time would rebel; but if any inconsistency be detected in my suggestion that the next century, which is expected to be even milder than this, will accept them, it only needs to be replied that the gentleness of our descendants will be a reasonable and ordered gentleness, not a mere effect of morbid sentimentality. They will not hesitate before an apparent and temporary cruelty which is capable of preventing much greater suffering in a much greater number of persons. The crime of permitting children to be born with brains abnormally predisposed to evil of any sort will more greatly revolt an intelligent age than any conceivable measure adopted for its prevention. [↑]
[3] It may, perhaps, be thought that the disuse of trial by jury would be liable to perpetuate a somewhat glaring abuse of our present jurisprudence—the disproportionately severe repression of offences against property as compared with the disproportionately light repression of offences against the person. But the mere fact that the “unlearned” bench is conspicuously inept in this particular is no reason for thinking that “learned” courts would be so: and meantime, as judges, like other men, are children of their epoch, we may suppose that the increased mildness of the new age will be reflected here as elsewhere, and that extenuating circumstances will be allowed more weight in determining a sentence for larceny, and less weight in determining a sentence for assault. [↑]
[4] Study of Sociology, Chapter XV. [↑]