To claim that we have not broken our pledge that there shall be no discrimination in the tolls and conditions when we thus favor our own coastwise trade, as against that of Canada, Mexico, and Colombia,—each with an Atlantic and a Pacific coast,—simply does not rise to the dignity of a quibble. Already by misrepresentation of the sense of fair-dealing which pervades American commercial life, incalculable injury has been done to our standing abroad—an injury which cannot be measured in money. After all our honorable diplomacy—the return of the Boxer indemnity, the open door policy in the Far East, and the strict observance of our promise to withdraw from Cuba, which foreign sneerers at America said we never would observe, “and never meant to observe”—it is shameful to have to drop to a lower plane of national conduct.
As if our cup of humiliation were not already full, it is argued that we are at liberty to refuse to submit the question of the breach of the Panama Treaty to the Hague Tribunal, if Great Britain should make the appeal. “Nicht zwei dumme streiche für eins” (Not two stupid strokes for one), says Lessing’s character in “Minna von Barnhelm.” Unless we desire to become the welsher of the nations, it is time that the good faith of the people should find an adequate expression in the good faith of the Government. All the money saved (to whom?) in tolls in a hundred years by the exemption could not compensate for the loss in money—not to reckon honor—which will result from the loss of credit and of great commercial opportunities all over the world. A strange way, indeed, to promote American commerce!
But there remains for us another chance—or will, if Great Britain shall a little longer pursue her friendly and forbearing course of waiting for our public opinion to assert itself. The coastwise exemption should be repealed. And, our obligations aside, why should we enter upon a policy of subsidizing our ships just at the time when apparently we are giving up the policy of subsidizing our manufactures? Are we never to get away from the inequality of privilege, that has already corrupted the sources of government by the “vicious circle,” creating and feeding by legislation agencies whose natural interest it thus becomes to destroy the principle of equality? Why subsidize ships any more than subsidize railways, or newspapers, or authorship? But if we must subsidize our ships, let it be done outright, in bills for that purpose, and not through the violation of the plain words of a solemn treaty.
Not only should the exemption be repealed, but, if we are to recover the ground that has been lost, it should be done in the first week of the December session of Congress. We feel sure that President Taft, whose misgivings tinctured his message of assent, now that the Canal bill has provided for a modus operandi, would not interpose his veto to the sober second thought of Congress. If the repeal is not accomplished, and if we refuse the appeal to The Hague, the great cause of Arbitration—the substitute for war—will be set back for unreckonable years. And it is the championship of Arbitration, together with his far-sighted and consistent defense and extension of the Merit System, which will give the President his highest claim to the respect of posterity. The object of the latter is to keep politicians from gambling with the resources of office; the object of the former is to prevent governments from gambling with the lives of men.
Should the repeal not be promptly made, it will become the duty of the people to organize to bring it about. We much mistake the temper of the country if within another six months its servants do not remove this blot in the national escutcheon.
WANTED: STRAIGHT THINKING ABOUT MILITANT SUFFRAGISTS
APROPOS OF THE RENEWAL OF VIOLENCE IN ENGLAND
ONE of the startling signs of the times is the recrudescence of violence among the militant suffragists in England. The physical attacks by women upon members of the government, including the hurling of a hatchet at the Prime Minister’s party; the attempt to set fire to a theater in which he was about to make an address, and other outrages, are in themselves a sufficiently deplorable symptom of lawless impulses, with which the government, as it was obliged, has dealt promptly and vigorously. As we have recognized in previous articles, this course of action has been disavowed in England by other prominent bodies of suffragists, who deserve honor for their refusal to be deflected from their “appeal to reason” to a policy which can only end in disaster. In this number of THE CENTURY we give place to an article by Mrs. Fawcett, President of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, of Great Britain, written at our request for a disavowal of this policy. If, besides the editorials in the New York “Evening Post,” there has been any similar official disavowal in America, it has escaped the attention of one careful reader of the daily news. Already many men in this country must be asking themselves whether it is wise to add to the electorate a body of voters who do not see the perilous influence of tolerating such actions—the influence not only upon women, but upon other impressionable classes having a real or fancied grievance.
And now comes another test of the wisdom and patriotism of these ladies. Before these lines shall be published, Mr. and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, two convicted lawbreakers of England, are to be honored by a reception by the National Woman Suffrage Association in New York, as Mrs. Pankhurst was received at Carnegie Hall after a similar conviction. We cannot conceal our sympathy with any person willing to suffer for opinion’s sake, but in these instances the punishment was inflicted not for opinion, but for deliberate violation of the elementary principles of civilized government—by the destruction of property (usually of unoffending persons) and the creation of public disorder. Of what use is it for conservative agencies to address themselves to the discouragement of lynching in the South, or in Pennsylvania, or of hired assassination in New York City, or the lawlessness of capital or of labor, or the lawlessness of brutal students, fashionable smugglers, bribed officials, or “fixed” juries, when the sentiment of so large and estimable a part of the community as the advocates of woman suffrage—teachers of the young—fail to see their responsibility toward their followers and the public? The defense that “no class has ever obtained its rights except by violence” is both false and insidious, and sets an example which will rise to plague the women themselves if they ever obtain a measure of responsible power. Deeper even than this vicious idea is the world-old delusion—which has its strongest exponent in politics—that the end justifies the means. The drift toward the employment of this standard is a hard blow to those who believe that women are to show us a more excellent way in government.
Admitting that this policy of terrorizing one’s opponents is valuable as advertising a movement, it seems never to have occurred to the advocates of woman suffrage that as effective a presentation of their cause could have been obtained without violence. Ruskin said that war would cease in Europe if on the declaration of hostilities Englishwomen would put on mourning. Ingenuity certainly could devise some form of réclame more worthy than the precipitation of delicately minded young women into the program of a New York vaudeville theater. Something must be allowed to the instinctive protest of human nature that everything shall not be thrown into the melting-pot of agitation.