essence of the Bill was that it tended to destroy the ascendancy of Protestantism as against Catholicism, and of Englishmen as against Irishmen. Gathorne Hardy put the Tory case on this point in one sentence. He said that he looked upon the Church "as a part of the Imperial Government."[[297]] Sergeant Dowse stated the Liberal case in reply. "The Irish people regarded that Church as a great wrong and a standing memorial of conquest.... Nobody ever said the measure would lead to social equality. But in future a Bishop or Dean would no longer be preferred over a Bishop or Dean of the Catholic or minister of the Presbyterian Church, and in that way, at least, an important removal of social distinctions would be effected." He reminded his hearers that on the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne orange flags were hoisted on the spires of State churches, and described them as "the badge of degradation to the vast majority of the Irish people. Protestant ascendancy did exist, as long as one Church was patronized and preferred above another Church either of the whole or a portion of the people."[[298]] The Bill was carried into law after a hard fight with the House of Lords. It did not entirely destroy the insolence of Irish Protestants or allay all the discontents of the peasantry. But it was an earnest of the disposition of an English Government to legislate for the Irish people as they would have legislated for themselves.
The sentimental grievance having been removed, the Liberals turned to the practical grievance. The Irish Land Act of 1870 provided that the tenant should receive compensation for his improvements, and unless the contrary were proved, it was to be presumed that all improvements were his, and not the landlord's. If a tenant were evicted, he was to be compensated for disturbance, unless the eviction were for non-payment of rent, and even then the court might hold that the exorbitant amount demanded, or other circumstances, entitled him to special compensation. No tenant who paid less than £50 a year could contract out of the Act. Two great principles were expressed in this measure. The first was that of the Church Act, the
Irish government of Ireland. The second was the new collectivism. The Act not only alleviated the great hardship of the Irish tenants, it was a direct interference by the State with the right of property and with freedom of contract. The absolute owner of land was no longer allowed to deal with it as he pleased without compensating those to whom he leased it, and a poor tenant was expressly prevented from agreeing to his own injury. Utilitarianism and laissez faire had ceased to dominate the Liberal mind, and liberty was deliberately restricted in one direction that it might expand more readily in another. Where one party was rich and the other poor, where one held land in his absolute disposition and the other could not live without it, freedom of bargaining meant the lessening of liberty. This principle, suggested in the Factory Acts, and first openly applied to the problem of Irish land, is now the distinctive character of Liberal domestic policy.
A phenomenon of this period as remarkable as the appearance of Socialistic ideas is the direction of the attention of Parliament to the affairs of women. One or two Acts had dealt with the condition of working women as with that of working children, and they had been excluded altogether from the brutalizing labour of mines. But the general status of the sex, as compared with that of men, had remained unaltered since the accession of George III. Beneath the surface of politics a substantial improvement had taken place. The first condition of emancipation was that women themselves should be enabled to demand it. The carefully fostered ignorance of the eighteenth century was now being gradually reduced by improvements in education. The vast majority of middle-class women still received a mental training which was infinitely inferior to that of men. But a few schools, of which those of Miss Buss in North London and Miss Dorothea Beale at Cheltenham were the most conspicuous, had begun to substitute a scientific training of the mind for the futile cultivation of graces and accomplishments. Bedford College and Queen's College in London provided
similar training for girls who had passed the school age, and in 1870 the first women's college at Cambridge was established by Anne Jemima Clough. A few books had been published by women, who claimed the same freedom of development for the individual woman as all Liberals required for the individual man. The public distinctions of women like George Eliot, the Brontës, Mary Somerville, Harriet Martineau, and Florence Nightingale had accustomed society to the idea of vigorous female independence. Elizabeth Blackwell and Elizabeth Garrett had already contrived to squeeze themselves, in the face of every kind of opposition, into the medical profession, and soon after the Liberal victory of 1868 Sophia Jex-Blake began that extraordinary struggle at Edinburgh which at last ended in the defeat of male jealousy and the admission of women to medical schools and medical degrees. In all directions women of the middle class were beginning to assert their right to develop their own faculties and to employ their own powers according to their own ideas of what was right and fitting, and not according to those of the dominant sex.
This movement among women was only part of the general movement towards individual freedom from external control which is described in these pages. The ruling sex was as little capable of understanding the part as the Tory of the French Revolution had been of understanding the whole. But the real Liberal had no difficulty in discovering and in comprehending the movement of women, and the most conspicuous Liberal thinker of the time attacked sexual Toryism as he attacked the Toryism of class or creed. Mill's Subjection of Women, published in 1869, applied to the condition of women precisely those arguments which, in other works, he applied to that of men. The question must be studied with an open mind, and not subject to a priori assumptions. Why should it be presumed that dependence and feebleness of mind were natural to women? Why should it be presumed that it was natural that men should regulate even the private lives of women? Why should it be presumed that a woman was naturally incapable of managing her own affairs?
These propositions, which had perhaps been true in a barbarous society, could only be proved in a state of civilization by reason and argument. Until women had had some opportunity of exerting their natural powers in a state of independence, it was absurd to argue that those natural powers were not equal to independence. An arbitrary standard, convenient to the interest of the dominant sex, had been erected for women, and they had been carefully trained up to it. Delicacy of mind and body, diffidence and self-effacement, superficial and unscientific learning had been required of them, and it was not surprising that they had very rarely attained to anything stronger. It was absurd to argue that women were naturally incapable of intellectual exertion, of professional skill, or of taking part in public affairs, when the whole scheme of their education had been contrived to make them so incapable. The supposed weaknesses are at best exaggerated by education, and it was not improbable that they had been created by it. When everything possible had been done by artificial means to strengthen their minds and bodies, we might be able to form some accurate judgment of what their powers were. In any case, we had no right to enforce a general mode of life upon all women, irrespective of their individual variations. We no longer branded men with class marks, and reserved special occupations and dignities for special groups. Why should we persist in maintaining the same system for women? If there was only one woman in England who was capable of practising as a doctor, it was her right as an individual to be allowed to practise, and the incapacity of every other of her sex was no reason for depriving her of her opportunity of working out her own life. Every kind of school and college, every occupation and profession, should be thrown open, and women should be permitted, as men were permitted, each to find her own place, according to her own natural capacity.
This was the ordinary argument of Liberalism, a plea for the substitution of individual opportunity for class regulation. Mill went farther, as every Liberal is bound to go, and claimed for women the same right to control their own government as that
which he claimed for men. During the debates on the Reform Bill of 1867 he actually moved an amendment providing for the enfranchisement of women on the same terms as men. The respect with which the House listened to his speech was accorded to the speaker rather than to his argument, and it is only in very recent years that the opposition to Woman Suffrage has ceased to be largely frivolous and even obscene. In Mill's day the force outside Parliament was very weak, and it was impossible that his proposals should succeed. Even among the middle and upper classes only one woman in ten received a scientific mental training, and many of the best educated were so far removed by circumstances from all personal hardships that their sense of the common grievance was slight. But the movement which Mill thus brought to the surface of politics was essentially part of the great tide of individual emancipation which had been flowing since the French Revolution, and pioneers like Lydia Becker were already struggling with prejudice and prudery with some success. Women were beginning to refuse, as Catholics, Dissenters, and workmen had refused, to be treated in the State as a branded class. If the domination of one class of men over another class of men had led to abuse, did not the domination of one sex over another also lead to abuse? The deliberate stunting of the female mind in education,[[299]] the exclusion of women from the Universities and the professions, the gross inequalities sanctioned by the new Divorce Act, the barbarity which stripped the wife on marriage of all her property and even of the earnings of her own labour, and reduced her to absolute physical and mental dependence upon her husband, all this was the direct or indirect consequence of the political domination of the male sex. Those who disposed of women in the State, disposed of them also in the schools, in industry, and in the family. With excess of logic, the early Woman Suffragists even opposed the restriction of women's labour by
Factory Acts as if every such interference had been inspired by male jealousy.