Suffrage and eligibility are not natural, indefeasible rights, but franchises or trusts conferred by civil society; and it is for civil society to determine in its wisdom whom it will or will not enfranchise; on whom it will or will not confer the trust. Both are social or political rights, derived from political society, and subject to its will, which may extend or abridge them as it judges best for the common good. Ask you who constitute political society? They, be they more or fewer, who, by the actual constitution of the state, are the sovereign people. These, and these alone, have the right to determine who may or may not vote or be voted for. In the United States, the sovereign people has hitherto been, save in a few localities, adult males of the white race, and these have the right to say whether they will or will not extend suffrage to the black and colored races, and to women and children.
Women, then, have not, for men have not, any natural right to admission into the ranks of the sovereign people. This disposes of the question of right, and shows that no injustice or wrong is done to women by their exclusion, and that no violence is done to the equal rights on which the American republic is founded. It may or it may not be wise and expedient to admit women into political, as they are now admitted into civil, society; but they cannot claim admission as a right. They can claim it only on the ground of expediency, or that it is necessary for the common good. For our part, we have all our life listened to the arguments and declamations of the woman's rights party on the subject; have read Mary Wollstonecraft, heard Fanny Wright, and looked into The Revolution, conducted by some of our old friends and acquaintances, and of whom we think better than many of their countrymen do; but we remain decidedly of the opinion that harm instead of good, to both men and women, would result from the admission. We say not this because we think lightly of the intellectual or moral capacity of women. We ask not if women are equal, inferior, or superior to men; for the two sexes are different, and between things different in kind there is no relation of equality or of inequality. Of course, we hold that the woman was made for the man, not the man for the woman, and that the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church, not the wife of the husband; but it suffices here to say that we do not object to the political enfranchisement of women on the ground of their feebleness, either of intellect or of body, or of any real incompetency to vote or to hold office. We are Catholics, and the church has always held in high honor chaste, modest, and worthy women as matrons, widows, or virgins. Her calendar has a full proportion of female saints, whose names she proposes to the honor and veneration of all the faithful. She bids the wife obey her husband in the Lord; but asserts her moral independence of him, leaves her conscience free, and holds her accountable for her own deeds.
Women have shown great executive or administrative ability. Few men have shown more ability on a throne than Isabella, the Catholic, of Spain; or, in the affairs of government, though otherwise faulty enough, than Elizabeth of England, and Catharine II. of Russia. The present queen of the British Isles has had a most successful reign; but she owes it less to her own abilities than to the wise counsels of her husbands Prince Albert, and her domestic virtues as a wife and a mother, by which she has won the affections of the English people. Others have shown rare administrative capacity in governing religious houses, often no less difficult than to govern a kingdom or an empire. Women have a keener insight into the characters of men than have men themselves, and the success of female sovereigns has, in great measure, been due to their ability to discover and call around them the best men in the state, and to put them in the places they are best fitted for.
What women would be as legislators remains to be seen; they have had little experience in that line; but it would go hard, but they would prove themselves not much inferior to the average of the men we send to our State legislatures or to our national Congress.
Women have also distinguished themselves in the arts as painters and sculptors, though none of them have ever risen to the front rank. St. Catharine of Egypt cultivated philosophy with success. Several holy women have shown great proficiency in mystic theology, and have written works of great value. In lighter literature, especially in the present age, women have taken a leading part. They almost monopolize the modern novel or romance, and give to contemporary popular literature its tone and character; yet it must be conceded that no woman has written a first-class romance. The influence of her writings, speaking generally, has not tended to purify or exalt the age, but rather to enfeeble and abase it. The tendency is to substitute sentiment for thought, morbid passion for strength, and to produce a weak and unhealthy moral tone. For ourselves, we own, though there are some women whose works we read, and even re-read with pleasure, we do not, in general, admire the popular female literature of the day; and we do not think that literature is that in which woman is best fitted to excel, or through which she exerts her most purifying and elevating influences. Her writings do not do much to awaken in man's heart the long dormant chivalric love so rife in the romantic ages, or to render the age healthy, natural, and manly. We say awaken; for chivalry, in its true and disinterested sense, is not dead in the coldest man's heart; it only sleepeth. It is woman's own fault, more than man's, that it sleeps, and wakes not to life and energy.
Nor do we object to the political enfranchisement of women in the special interest of the male sex. Men and women have no separate interests. What elevates the one elevates the other; what degrades the one degrades the other. Men cannot depress women, place them in a false position, make them toys or drudges, without doing an equal injury to themselves; and one ground of our dislike to the so-called woman's rights movement is, that it proceeds on the supposition that there is no inter-dependence between men and women, and seeks to render them mutually independent of each other, with entirely distinct and separate interests. There is a truth in the old Greek fable, related by Plato in the Banquet, that Jupiter united originally both sexes in one and the same person, and afterward separated them, and that now they are but two halves of one whole. "God made man after his own image and likeness; male and female made he them." Each, in this world, is the complement of the other, and the more closely identified are their interests, the better is it for both. We, in opposing the political enfranchisement of women, seek the interest of men no more than we do the interest of women themselves.
Women, no doubt, undergo many wrongs, and are obliged to suffer many hardships, but seldom they alone. It is a world of trial, a world in which there are wrongs of all sorts, and sufferings of all kinds. We have lost paradise, and cannot regain it in this world. We must go through the valley of the shadow of death before re-entering it. You cannot make earth heaven, and there is no use in trying; and least of all can you do it by political means. It is hard for the poor wife to have to maintain a lazy, idle, drunken vagabond of a husband, and three or four children into the bargain; it is hard for the wife delicately reared, accomplished, fitted to adorn the most intellectual, graceful, and polished society, accustomed to every luxury that wealth can procure, to find herself a widow reduced to poverty, and a family of young children to support, and unable to obtain any employment for which she is fitted as the means of supporting them. But men suffer too. It is no less hard for the poor, industrious, hardworking man to find what he earns wasted by an idle, extravagant, incompetent, and heedless wife, who prefers gadding and gossiping to taking care of her household. And how much easier is it for the man who is reduced from affluence to poverty, a widower with three or four motherless children to provide for? The reduction from affluence to poverty is sometimes the fault of the wife as well as of the husband. It is usually their joint fault. Women have wrongs, so have men; but a woman has as much power to make a man miserable as a man has to make a woman miserable; and she tyrannizes over him as often as he does over her. If he has more power of attack, nature has given her more power of defence. Her tongue is as formidable a weapon as his fists, and she knows well how, by her seeming meekness, gentleness, and apparent martyrdom, to work on his feelings, to enlist the sympathy of the neighborhood on her side and against him. Women are neither so wronged nor so helpless as The Revolution pretends. Men can be brutal, and women can tease and provoke.
But let the evils be as great as they may, and women as greatly wronged as is pretended, what can female suffrage and eligibility do by way of relieving them? All modern methods of reform are very much like dram-drinking. The dram needs to be constantly increased in frequency and quantity, while the prostration grows greater and greater, till the drinker gets the delirium tremens, becomes comatose, and dies. The extension of suffrage in modern times has cured or lessened no social or moral evil; and under it, as under any other political system, the rich grow richer and the poor poorer. Double the dram, enfranchise the women, give them the political right to vote and be voted for; what single moral or social evil will it prevent or cure? Will it make the drunken husband temperate, the lazy and idle industrious and diligent? Will it prevent the ups and downs of life, the fall from affluence to poverty, keep death out of the house, and prevent widowhood and orphanage? These things are beyond the reach of politics. You cannot legislate men or women into virtue, into sobriety, industry, providence. The doubled dram would only introduce a double poison into the system, a new element of discord into the family, and through the family into society, and hasten the moment of dissolution. When a false principle of reform is adopted, the evil sought to be cured is only aggravated. The reformers started wrong. They would reform the church by placing her under human control. Their successors have in each generation found they did not go far enough, and have, each in its turn, struggled to push it farther and farther, till they find themselves without any church life, without faith, without religion, and beginning to doubt if there be even a God. So, in politics, we have pushed the false principle that all individual, domestic, and social evils are due to bad government, and are to be cured by political reforms and changes, till we have nearly reformed away all government, at least, in theory; have well-nigh abolished the family, which is the social unit; and find that the evils we sought to cure, and the wrongs we sought to redress, continue undiminished. We cry out in our delirium for another and a larger dram. When you proceed on a true principle, the more logically and completely you carry it out the better; but when you start with a false principle, the more logical you are, and the farther you push it, the worse. Your consistency increases instead of diminishing the evils you would cure.