¹ In England and Wales there are, in a population of 8,000,-
000 women between the ages of twenty and fifty, 3,000,000 un-
married women.                                                                          137
 

be thrown open to woman; she is to receive
everywhere the same wages as man; male and
female are to work side by side; and they are
indiscriminately to be put in command the one
over the other.  Furthermore, legal rights are
to be secured to the wife over her husband's
property and earnings.  The programme is,
in fact, to give to woman an economic inde-
pendence out of the earnings and taxes of
man.
    Nor does feminist ambition stop short here.
It demands that women shall be included in
every advisory committee, every governing
board, every jury, every judicial bench, every
electorate, every parliament, and every minis-
terial cabinet; further, that every masculine
foundation, university, school of learning,
academy, trade union, professional corpora-
tion and scientific society shall be converted
into an epicene institution--until we shall have
everywhere one vast cock-and-hen show.
    The proposal to bring man and woman
together everywhere into extremely intimate                             138
relationships raises very grave questions.  It
brings up, first, the question of sexual compli-
cations; secondly, the question as to whether
the tradition of modesty and reticence between
the sexes is to be definitely sacrificed; and,
most important of all, the question as to
whether epicene conditions would place ob-
stacles in the way of intellectual work.
    Of these issues the feminist puts the first two
quite out of account.  I have already else-
where said my say upon these matters.¹    With
regard to the third, the feminist either fails to
realise that purely intellectual intercourse--as
distinguished from an intercommunion of men-
tal images--with woman is to a large section
of men repugnant; or else, perceiving this,
she makes up her mind that, this notwithstand-
ing, she will get her way by denouncing the
man who does not welcome her as selfish; and
by insisting that under feminism (the quota-
tion is from Mill, the italics which question his
sincerity are mine) "the mass of mental facul-

   ¹ Vide Appendix, pp. 169-173.                                                     139
 

ties available for the higher service of man-
kind would be doubled."
    The matter cannot so lightly be disposed of.
It will be necessary for us to find out whether
really intimate association with woman on the
purely intellectual plane is realisable.  And if
it is, in fact, unrealisable, it will be necessary to
consider whether it is the exclusion of women
from masculine corporations; or the perpetual
attempt of women to force their way into these,
which would deserve to be characterised as
selfish.
    In connexion with the former of these issues,
we have to consider here not whether that form
of intellectual co-operation in which the man
plays the game, and the woman moves the
pawns under his orders, is possible.  That
form of co-operation is of course possible, and
it has, doubtless, certain utilities.
    Nor yet have we to consider whether quite
intimate and purely intellectual association on
an equal footing between a particular man and
a selected woman may or may not be possible.                        140
It will suffice to note that the feminist alleges
that this also is possible; but everybody knows
that the woman very often marries the man.
    What we have to ask is whether--even if
we leave out of regard the whole system of at-
tractions or, as the case may be, repulsions
which come into operation when the sexes are
thrown together--purely intellectual inter-
course between man and the typical unselected
woman is not barred by the intellectual im-
moralities and limitations which appear to be
secondary sexual characters of woman.
    With regard to this issue, there would seem
to be very little real difference of opinion
among men.  But there are great differences
in the matter of candour.  There are men who
speak out, and who enunciate like Nietzsche
that "man and woman are alien--never yet
has any one conceived how alien."
    There are men who, from motives of delicacy
or policy, do not speak out--averse to saying
anything that might be unflattering to woman.
    And there are men who are by their pro-                             141
fession of the feminist faith debarred from
speaking out, but who upon occasion give
themselves away.
    Of such is the man who in the House of
Commons champions the cause of woman's
suffrage, impassionately appealing to Justice;
and then betrays himself by announcing that
he would shake off from his feet the dust of its
purlieus if ever women were admitted as mem-
bers--i.e. if ever women were forced upon him
as close intellectual associates.
    Wherever we look we find aversion to com-
pulsory intellectual co-operation with woman.
We see it in the sullen attitude which the or-
dinary male student takes up towards the pres-
ence of women students in his classes.  We see
it in the fact that the older English universi-
ties, which have conceded everything else to
women, have made a strong stand against mak-
ing them actual members of the university;
for this would impose them on men as intellec-
tual associates.  Again we see the aversion in
the opposition to the admission of women to                            142
the bar.  But we need not look so far afield.
Practically every man feels that there is in
woman--patent, or hidden away--an element
of unreason which, when you come upon it,
summarily puts an end to purely intellectual
intercourse.  One may reflect, for example,
upon the way the woman's suffrage contro-
versy has been conducted.
    Proceeding now on the assumption that
these things are so, and that man feels that he
and woman belong to different intellectual
castes, we come now to the question as to
whether it is man who is selfish when he ex-
cludes women from his institutions, or woman
when she unceasingly importunes for admit-
tance.  And we may define as selfish all such
conduct as pursues the advantage of the agent
at the cost of the happiness and welfare of
the general body of mankind.
    We shall be in a better position to pronounce
judgment on this question of ethics when we
have considered the following series of analo-
gies:                                                                                        143
    When a group of earnest and devout be-
lievers meet together for special intercession
and worship, we do not tax them with selfish-
ness if they exclude unbelievers.
    Nor do we call people who are really de-
voted to music selfish if, coming together for
this, they make a special point of excluding
the unmusical.
    Nor again would the imputation of selfish-
ness lie against members of a club for black-
balling a candidate who would, they feel, be
uncongenial.
    Nor should we regard it as an act of selfish-
ness if the members of a family circle, or of
the same nation, or of any social circle, desired
to come together quite by themselves.
    Nor yet would the term selfish apply to an
East End music hall audience when they eject
any one who belongs to a different social class
to themselves and wears good clothes.
    And the like would hold true of servants re-
senting their employers intruding upon them
in their hours of leisure or entertainments.                                 144
    If we do not characterise such exclusions as
selfish, but rather respect and sympathise with
them, it is because we recognise that the whole
object and raison d' être of association would
in each case be nullified by the weak-minded
admission of the incompatible intruder.
    We recognise that if any charge of selfish-
ness would lie, it would lie against that in-
truder.
    Now if this holds in the case where the in-
terests of religious worship or music, or family,
national, or social life, or recreation and relax-
ation after labour are in question, it will hold
true even more emphatically where the inter-
ests of intellectual work are involved.
    But the feminist will want to argue.  She
will--taking it as always for granted that
woman has a right to all that men's hands or
brains have fashioned--argue that it is very
important for the intellectual development of
woman that she should have exactly the same
opportunities as man.  And she will, scouting [rejecting with contempt]
the idea of any differences between the intelli-                          145
gences of man and woman, discourse to you of
their intimate affinity.
    It will, perhaps, be well to clear up these
points.
    The importance of the higher development
of woman is unquestionable.
    But after all it is the intellect of man which
really comes into account in connexion with
"the mass of mental faculties available for the
higher service of mankind."
    The maintenance of the conditions which
allow of man's doing his best intellectual work
is therefore an interest which is superior to
that of the intellectual development of woman.
And woman might quite properly be referred
for her intellectual development to instruc-
tional institutions which should be special to
herself.
    Coming to the question of the intimate re-
semblances between the masculine and the
feminine intelligence, no man would be ven-
turesome enough to dispute these, but he may                          146
be pardoned if he thinks--one would hope in
no spirit of exaltation--also of the differences.
    We have an instructive analogy in connexion
with the learned societies.
    It is uncontrovertible that every candidate
for election into such a society will have, and
will feel that he has, affinities with the members
of that association.  And he is invited to set
these forth in his application.  But there may
also be differences of which he is not sensible.
On that question the electors are the judges;
and they are the final court of appeal.
    There would seem to be here a moral which
the feminist would do well to lay to heart.
    There is also another lesson which she might
very profitably consider.  A quite small dif-
ference will often constitute as effective a bar
to a useful and congenial co-operation as a
more fundamental difference.
    In the case of a body of intellectual workers
one might at first sight suppose that so small
a distinction as that of belonging to a different                           147
nationality--sex, of course, is an infinitely pro-
founder difference--would not be a bar to un-
restricted intellectual co-operation.
    But in point of fact it is in every country,
in every learned society, a uniform rule that
when foreign scientists or scholars are admitted
they are placed not on the ordinary list of
working members, but on a special list.
    One discerns that there is justification for
this in the fact that a foreigner would in cer-
tain eventualities be an incompatible person.
    One may think of the eventuality of the
learned society deciding to recognise a national
service, or to take part in a national movement.
And one is not sure that a foreigner might not
be an incompatible person in the eventuality
of a scientist or scholar belonging to a national-
ity with which the foreigner's country was at
feud being brought forward for election.
And he would, of course, be an impossible
person in a society if he were, in a spirit of
chauvinism, to press for a larger representa-
tion of his own fellow-countrymen.                                          148
    Now this is precisely the kind of way man
feels about woman.  He recognises that she is
by virtue of her sex for certain purposes an in-
compatible person; and that, quite apart from
this, her secondary sexual characters might in
certain eventualities make her an impossible
person.
    We may note, before passing on, that these
considerations would seem to prescribe that
woman should be admitted to masculine insti-
tutions only when real humanitarian grounds
demand it; that she should--following here the
analogy of what is done in the learned societies
with respect to foreigners--be invited to co-
operate with men only when she is quite spe-
cially eminent, or beyond all question useful
for the particular purpose in hand; and lastly,
that when co-opted into any masculine institu-
tion woman should always be placed upon a
special list, to show that it was proposed to con-
fine her co-operation within certain specified
limits.
    From these general questions, which affect                           149
only the woman with intellectual aspirations,
we pass to consider what would be the effect
of feminism upon the rank and file of women
if it made of these co-partners with man in
work.  They would suffer not only because
woman's physiological disabilities and the re-
strictions which arise out of her sex place
her at a great disadvantage when she has to
enter into competition with man, but also be-
cause under feminism man would be less and
less disposed to take off woman's shoulders a
part of her burden.
    And there can be no dispute that the most
valuable financial asset of the ordinary woman
is the possibility that a man may be willing--
and may, if only woman is disposed to fulfil her
part of the bargain, be not only willing but
anxious--to support her and to secure for her,
if he can, a measure of that freedom which
comes from the possession of money.
    In view of this every one who has a real fel-
low-feeling for woman, and who is concerned
for her material welfare, as a father is con-                               150
cerned for his daughter's, will above every-
thing else desire to nurture and encourage in
man the sentiment of chivalry, and in woman
that disposition of mind that makes chivalry
possible.
    And the woman workers who have to fight
the battle of life for themselves would indi-
rectly profit from this fostering of chivalry;
for those women who are supported by men do
not compete in the limited labour market which
is open to the woman worker.
    From every point of view, therefore, except
perhaps that of the exceptional woman who
would be able to hold her own against mas-
culine competition--and men always issue in-
formal letters of naturalisation to such an ex-
ceptional woman--the woman suffrage which
leads up to feminism would be a social disaster.                       151
 
 

                        PART III

IS THERE, IF THE SUFFRAGE IS BARRED, ANY
     PALLIATIVE OF CORRECTIVE FOR THE
                DISCONTENTS OF WOMAN?
 

                                      I

PALLIATIVES OR CORRECTIVES FOR THE
               DISCONTENTS OF WOMAN

What are the Suffragist's Grievances?--Economic and
         Physiological Difficulties of Woman--Intellectual
         Grievances of Suffragist and Corrective.

    Is there then, let us ask ourselves, if the suf-
frage with its programme of feminism is
barred as leading to social disaster, any pallia-
tive or corrective that can be applied to the
present discontents of woman?
    If such is to be found, it is to be found only
by placing clearly before us the suffragist's
grievances.
    These grievances are, first, the economic
difficulties of the woman who seeks to earn her
living by work other than unskilled manual
labour; secondly, the difficult physiological
conditions in which woman is placed by the                              155
excess of the female over the male population
and by her diminished chances of marriage ¹ ;
and thirdly, the tedium which obsesses the life
of the woman who is not forced, and cannot
force herself, to work.  On the top of these
grievances comes the fact that the suffragist
conceives herself to be harshly and unfairly
treated by man.  This last is the fire which
sets a light to all the inflammable material.
    It would be quite out of question to discuss
here the economic and physiological difficulties
of woman.  Only this may be said: it is impos-
sible, in view of the procession of starved and
frustrated lives which is continuously filing
past, to close one's eyes to the urgency of this
woman's problem.
    After all, the primary object of all civilisa-
tion is to provide for every member of the
community food and shelter and fulfilment of
natural cravings.  And when, in what passes
as a civilised community, a whole class is called
upon to go without any one of these our hu-

   ¹ Vide footnote, p. 138.
 

man requirements, it is little wonder that it
should break out.
    But when a way of escape stands open revolt
is not morally justified.
    Thus, for example, a man who is born into,
but cannot support himself in, a superior class
of society is not, as long as he can find a liveli-
hood abroad in a humbler walk in life, entitled
to revolt.
    No more is the woman who is in economic or
physiological difficulties.  For, if only she has
the pluck to take it, a way of escape stands
open to her.
    She can emigrate; she can go out from the
social class in which she is not self-supporting
into a humbler social class in which she could
earn a living; and she can forsake conditions
in which she must remain a spinster for con-
ditions in which she may perhaps become a
mother.  Only in this way can the problem of
finding work, and relief of tedium, for the
woman who now goes idle be resolved.
    If women were to avail themselves of these                          157
ways of escape out of unphysiological condi-
tions, the woman agitator would probably find
it as difficult to keep alive a passionate agita-
tion for woman suffrage as the Irish Nation-
alist agitator to keep alive, after the settlement
of the land question and the grant of old age
pensions, a passionate agitation for a separate
Parliament for Ireland.
    For the happy wife and mother is never pas-
sionately concerned about the suffrage.  It is
always the woman who is galled either by phy-
siological hardships, or by the fact that she has
not the same amount of money as man, or by
the fact that man does not desire her as a co-
partner in work, and withholds the homage
which she thinks he ought to pay to her intel-
lect.
    For this class of grievances the present edu-
cation of woman is responsible.  The girl who is
growing up to woman's estate is never taught
where she stands relatively to man.  She
is not taught anything about woman's phys-
ical disabilities.  She is not told--she is left                              158
to discover it for herself when too late--that
child and husband are to woman physiological
requirements.  She is not taught the defects
and limitations of the feminine mind.  One
might almost think there were no such defects
and limitations; and that woman was not al-
ways overestimating her intellectual power.
And the ordinary girl is not made to realise
woman's intrinsically inferior money-earning
capacity.  She is not made to realise that the
woman who cannot work with her hands is
generally hard put to earn enough to keep her-
self alive in the incomplete condition of  a
spinster.
    As a result of such education, when, influ-
enced by the feminist movement, woman comes
to institute a comparison between herself and
man, she brings into that comparison all those
qualities in which she is substantially his equal,
and leaves out of account all those in which she
is his inferior.
    The failure to recognise that man is the mas-
ter, and why he is the master, lies at the root                            159
of the suffrage movement.  By disregarding
man's superior physical force, the power of
compulsion upon which all government is based
is disregarded.  By leaving out of account
those powers of the mind in which man is the
superior, woman falls into the error of thinking
that she can really compete with him, and that
she belongs to the self-same intellectual caste.
Finally, by putting out of sight man's superior
money-earning capacity, the power of the
purse is ignored.
    Uninstructed woman commits also another
fundamental error in her comparison.  Instead
of comparing together the average man and
the average woman, she sets herself to estab-
lish that there is no defect in woman which can-
not be discovered also in man; and that there
is no virtue or power in the ordinary man which
cannot be discovered also in woman.  Which
having been established to her satisfaction, she
is led inevitably to the conclusion that there is
nothing whatever to choose between the sexes.
And from this there is only a step to the posi-                           160
tion that human beings ought to be assigned,
without distinction of sex, to each and every
function which would come within the range
of their individual capacities, instead of being
assigned as they are at present: men to one
function, and women to another.
    Here again women ought to have been safe-
guarded by education.  She ought to have
been taught that even when an individual
woman comes up to the average of man this
does not abrogate the disqualification which
attaches to a difference of sex.  Nor yet--as
every one who recognises that we live in a
world which conducts itself by generalisations
will see--does it abrogate the disqualification
of belonging to an inferior intellectual caste.
    The present system of feminine education is
blameworthy not only in the respect that it
fails to draw attention to these disqualifications
and to teach woman where she stands; it is even
more blameworthy in that it fails to convey
to the girl who is growing up any conception
of that absolutely elementary form of morality                           161
which consists in distinguishing meum and
tuum [that which is mine and that which is yours].
    Instead of her educators encouraging every
girl to assert "rights" as against man, and put
forward claims, they ought to teach her with
respect to him those lessons of behaviour which
are driven home once for all into every boy at
a public school.
    Just as there you learn that you may not
make unwarranted demands upon your fel-
low, and just as in the larger world every na-
tion has got to learn that it cannot with im-
punity lay claim to the possessions of its neigh-
bours, so woman will have to learn that when
things are not offered to her, and she has not
the power to take them by force, she has got
to make the best of things as they are.
    One would wish for every girl who is grow-
ing up to womanhood that it might be brought
home to her by some refined and ethically-
minded member of her own sex how insuffer-
able a person woman becomes when, like a
spoilt child, she exploits the indulgence of                                 162
man; when she proclaims that it is his duty
to serve her and to share with her his power
and possessions; when she makes an outcry
when he refuses to part with what is his own;
and when she insists upon thrusting her society
upon men everywhere.
    And every girl ought to be warned that to
embark upon a policy of recrimination when
you do not get what you want, and to pro-
claim yourself a martyr when, having hit, you
are hit back, is the way to get yourself thor-
oughly disliked.
    Finally, every girl ought to be shown, in the
example of the militant suffragist, how revolt
and martyrdom, undertaken in order to possess
oneself of what belongs to others, effects the
complete disorganisation of moral character.
    No one would wish that in the education of
girls these quite unlovely things should be in-
sisted upon more than was absolutely neces-
sary.  But one would wish that the educators
of the rising generation of women should, bas-
ing themselves upon these foundations, point                            163
out to every girl how great is woman's debt to
civilisation; in other words, how much is under
civilisation done for woman by man.
    And one would wish that, in a world which is
rendered unwholesome by feminism, every
girl's eyes were opened to comprehend the
great outstanding fact of the world: the fact
that, turn where you will, you find individ-
ual man showering upon individual woman--
one man in tribute to her enchantment, an-
other out of a sense of gratitude, and another
just because she is something that is his--every
good thing which, suffrage or no suffrage, she
never could have procured for herself.                                      164
 
 

                          APPENDIX

    LETTER ON MILITANT HYSTERIA

Reprinted by permission from The Times  (London), March
                                           28, 1912.
 

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES

SIR,--For man the physiological psychology
of woman is full of difficulties.
    He is not a little mystified when he encoun-
ters in her periodically recurring phases of
hypersensitiveness, unreasonableness, and loss
of the sense of proportion.
    He is frankly perplexed when confronted
with a complete alteration of character in a
woman who is child-bearing.
    When he is a witness of the "tendency of
woman to morally warp when nervously ill,"
and of the terrible physical havoc which the
pangs of a disappointed love may work, he is
appalled.
    And it leaves on his mind an eerie feeling
when he sees serious and long-continued men-
tal disorders developing in connexion with the                           167
approaching extinction of a woman's repro-
ductive faculty.
    No man can close his eyes to these things;
but he does not feel at liberty to speak of
them.

For the woman that God gave him is not his to give away.    [From "The Female of the Species" by Rudyard Kipling]

    As for woman herself, she makes very light
of any of these mental upsettings.
    She perhaps smiles a little at them. . . . ¹
    None the less, these upsettings of her men-
tal equilibrium are the things that a woman
has most cause to fear; and no doctor can ever
lose sight of the fact that the mind of woman
is always threatened with danger from the
reverberations of her physiological emer-
gencies.
    It is with such thoughts that the doctor lets
his eyes rest upon the militant suffragist.  He
cannot shut them to the fact that there is

   ¹ In the interests of those who feel that female dignity is
compromised by it, I have here omitted a woman's flippant
overestimate of the number of women in London society who
suffer from nervous disorders at the climacteric [i.e. menopause].          168
 

mixed up with the woman's movement much
mental disorder; and he cannot conceal from
himself the physiological emergencies which lie
behind.
    The recruiting field for the militant suf-
fragists is the million of our excess female
population--that million which had better long
ago have gone out to mate with its comple-
ment of men beyond the sea.
    Among them there are the following dif-
ferent types of women:--(a)  First--let us
put them first--come a class of women who
hold, with minds otherwise unwarped, that
they may, whenever it is to their advantage,
lawfully resort to physical violence.
    The programme, as distinguished from the
methods, of these women is not very different
from that of the ordinary suffragist woman.
    (b)  There file past next a class of women
who have all their life-long been strangers to
joy, women in whom instincts long suppressed
have in the end broken into flame.  These are
the sexually embittered women in whom every-                        169
thing has turned into gall and bitterness of
heart, and hatred of men.
    Their legislative programme is license for
themselves, or else restrictions for man.
    (c)  Next there file past the incomplete.
One side of their nature has undergone atro-
phy, with the result that they have lost touch
with their living fellow men and women.
    Their programme is to convert the whole
world into an epicene institution--an epicene
institution in which man and woman shall
everywhere work side by side at the selfsame
tasks and for the selfsame pay.
    These wishes can never by any possibility be
realised.  Even in animals--I say even, be-
cause in these at least one of the sexes has
periods of complete quiscence--male and fe-
male cannot be safely worked side by side, ex-
cept when they are incomplete.
    While in the human species safety can be
obtained, it can be obtained only at the price
of continual constraint.                                                             170
    And even then woman, though she protests
that she does not require it, and that she does
not receive it, practically always does receive
differential treatment at the hands of man.
    It would be well, I often think, that every
woman should be clearly told--and the woman
of the world will immediately understand--
that when man sets his face against the pro-
posal to bring in an epicene world, he does so
because he can do his best work only in sur-
roundings where he is perfectly free from sug-
gestion and from restraint, and from the onus
which all differential treatment imposes.
    And I may add in connexion with my own
profession that when a medical man asks that
he should not be the yoke-fellow of a medical
woman he does so also because he would wish
to keep up as between men and women--even
when they are doctors--some of the modesties
and reticences upon which our civilisation has
been built up.
    Now the medical woman is of course never                         171
on the side of modesty,¹ or in favour of any
reticences.  Her desire for knowledge does
not allow of these.
    (d)  Inextricably mixed up with the types
which we have been discussing is the type of
woman whom Dr. Leonard Williams's recent
letter brought so distinctly before our eyes--
the woman who is poisoned by her misplaced
self-esteem; and who flies out at every man
who does not pay homage to her intellect.
    She is the woman who is affronted when a
man avers that for him the glory of woman lies
in her power of attraction, in her capacity for
motherhood, and in unswerving allegiance to
the ethics which are special to her sex.
    I have heard such an intellectually embit-
tered woman say, though she had been self-
denyingly taken to wife, that "never in the
whole course of her life had a man ever as much
as done her a kindness."

   ¹ To those who have out of inadvertence and as laymen and
women misunderstood, it may be explained that the issue here
discussed is the second in order of the three which are set out
on p. 139  (supra ).                                                                      172
 

    The programme of this type of woman is,
as a preliminary, to compel man to admit her
claim to be his intellectual equal; and, that
done, to compel him to divide up everything
with her to the last farthing, and so make her
also his financial equal.
    And her journals exhibit to us the kind of
parliamentary representative she desiderates.
He humbly, hat in hand, asks for his orders
from a knot of washerwomen standing arms
a-kimbo.²
    (e)  Following in the wake of these em-
bittered human beings come troops of girls
just grown up.
    All these will assure you, these young girls
--and what is seething in their minds is stir-
ring also in the minds in the girls in the col-
leges and schools which are staffed by un-
married suffragists--that woman has suffered
all manner of indignity and injustice at the
hands of man.

    ² I give, in response to a request, the reference: Votes for
Women, March 18, 1910, p. 381.                                                     173
 

    And these young girls have been told about
the intellectual, and moral, and financial value
of woman--such tales as it never entered into
the heart of man to conceive.
    The programme of these young women is to
be married upon their own terms.  Man shall
--so runs their scheme--work for their sup-
port--to that end giving up his freedom, and
putting himself under orders, for many hours
of the day; but they themselves must not be
asked to give up any of their liberty to him,
or to subordinate themselves to his interests,
or to obey him in anything.
    To obey a man would be to commit the
unpardonable sin.
    It is not necessary, in connexion with a
movement which proceeds on the lines set out
above, any further to labour the point that
there is in it an element of mental disorder.
It is plain that it is there.
    There is also a quite fatuous element in the
programmes of the militant suffragist.  We
have this element, for instance, in the doctrine                           174
that, notwithstanding the fact that the con-
ditions of the labour market deny it to her,
woman ought to receive the same wage as a
man for the same work.
    This doctrine is fatuous, because it leaves
out of sight that, even if woman succeeds in
doing the same work as man, he has behind him
a much larger reserve of physical strength.
As soon as a time of strain comes, areserve of
strength and freedom from periodic indisposi-
tion is worth paying extra for.
    Fatuous also is the dogma that woman
ought to have the same pay for the same work
--fatuous because it leaves out of sight that
woman's commercial value in many of the best
fields of work is subject to a very heavy dis-
count by reason of the fact that she cannot,
like a male employee, work cheek by jowl with
a male employer; nor work among men as a
man with his fellow employees.
    So much for the woman suffragist's protest
that she can conceive of no reason for a dif-
ferential rate of pay for man.                                                    175
    Quite as fatuous are the marriage projects of
the militant suffragist.  Every woman of the
world could tell her--whispering it into her
private ear--that if a sufficient number of men
should come to the conclusion that it was not
worth their while to marry except on the terms
of fair give-and-take, the suffragist woman's
demands would have to come down.
    It is not at all certain that the institution of
matrimony--which, after all, is the great in-
strument in the levelling up of the financial
situation of woman--can endure apart from
some willing subordination on the part of the
wife.
    It will have been observed that there is in
these programmes, in addition to the element
of mental disorder and to the element of the
fatuous, which have been animadverted upon,
also a very ugly element of dishonesty.  In
reality the very kernel of the militant suffrage
movement is the element of immorality.
    There is here not only immorality in the                                 176
ends which are in view, but also in the methods
adopted for the attainment of those ends.
    We may restrict ourselves to indicating
wherein lies the immorality of the methods.
    There is no one who does not discern that
woman in her relations to physical force stands
in quite a different position to man.
    Out of that different relation there must of
necessity shape itself a special code of ethics
for woman.  And to violate that code must be
for woman immorality.
    So far as I have seen, no one in this con-
troversy has laid his finger upon the essential
point in the relations of woman to physical
violence.
    It has been stated--and in the main quite
truly stated--that woman in the mass cannot,
like man, back up her vote by bringing physi-
cal force into play.
    But the woman suffragist here counters by
insisting that she as an individual may have
more physical force than an individual man.                              177
    And it is quite certain--and it did not need
suffragist raids and window-breaking riots to
demonstrate it--that woman in the mass can
bring a certain amount of physical force to
bear.
    The true inwardness of the relation in which
woman stands to physical force lies not in the
question of her having it at command, but in
the fact that she cannot put it forth without
placing herself within the jurisdiction of an
ethical law.
    The law against which she offends when she
resorts to physical violence is not an ordinance
of man; it is not written in the statutes of any
State; it has not been enunciated by any hu-
man law-giver.  It belongs to those unwritten,
and unassailable, and irreversible command-
ments of religion, [Greek ¹ ],
which we suddenly and mysteriously become
aware of when we see them violated.
    The law which the militant suffragist has
violated is among the ordinances of that code
which forbade us even to think of employing                            178

    [ ¹ From Antigone by Sophocles; "the unwritten
and unassailable statutes given to us by the gods. "
Sir Almroth had it in the original Greek with Greek fonts.]
 

our native Indian troops against the Boers;
which brands it as an ignominy when a man
leaves his fellow in the lurch and saves his
own life; and which makes it an outrage for a
man to do violence to a woman.
    To violate any ordinance of that code is
more dishonourable than to transgress every
statutory law.
    We see acknowledgment of it in the fact
that even the uneducated man in the street
resents it as an outrage to civilisation when he
sees a man strike a blow at a woman.
    But to the man who is committing the out-
rage it is a thing simply unaccountable that
any one should fly out at him.
    In just such a case is the militant suffragist.
She cannot understand why any one should
think civilisation is outraged when she scuffles
in the street mud with a policeman.
    If she asks for an explanation, it perhaps
behoves a man to supply it.
    Up to the present in the whole civilised world
there has ruled a truce of God as between man                        179
and woman.  That truce is based upon the
solemn covenant that within the frontiers of
civilisation (outside them of course the rule
lapses) the weapon of physical force may not
be applied by man against woman; nor by
woman against man.
    Under this covenant, the reign of force
which prevails in the world without comes to
an end when a man enters his household.
    Under this covenant that half of the human
race which most needs protection is raised up
above the waves of violence.
    Within the terms of this compact everything
that woman has received from man, and every-
thing man receives from woman, is given as a
free gift.
    Again, under this covenant a full half of the
programme of Christianity has been realised;
and a foundation has been laid upon which it
may be possible to build higher; and perhaps
finally in the ideal future to achieve the aboli-
tion of physical violence and war.
    And it is this solemn covenant, the covenant                         180
so faithfully kept by man, which has been
violated by the militant suffragist in the in-
terest of her morbid, stupid, ugly, and dis-
honest programmes.
    Is it wonder if men feel that they have had
enough of the militant suffragist, and that the
State would be well rid of her if she were
crushed under the soldiers' shields like the
traitor woman at the Tarpeian rock [in ancient Rome where traitors were killed] ?
    We may turn now to that section of woman
suffragists--one is almost inclined to doubt
whether it any longer exists--which is opposed
to all violent measures, though it numbers in
its ranks women who are stung to the quick
by the thought that man, who will concede the
vote to the lowest and most degraded of his
own sex, withholds it from "even the noblest
woman in England."
    When that excited and somewhat pathetic
appeal is addressed to us, we have only to con-
sider what a vote really gives.
    The parliamentary vote is an instrument--
and a quite astonishly disappointing instru-                               181
ment it is--for obtaining legislation; that is,
for directing that the agents of the State shall
in certain defined circumstances bring into ap-
plication the weapon of physical compulsion.
    Further, the vote is an instrument by which
we give to this or that group of statesmen an-
thority to supervise and keep in motion the
whole machinery of compulsion.
    To take examples.  A vote cast in favour
of a Bill for the prohibition of alcohol--if we
could find opportunity for giving a vote on
such a question--would be a formal expression
of our desire to apply, through the agency of
the paid servants of the State, that same physi-
cal compulsion which Mrs. Carrie Nation put
into application in her "bar-smashing" cru-
sades.
    And a vote which puts a Government into
office in a country where murder is punishable
by death is a vote which, by agency of the
hangman, puts the noose round the neck of
every convicted murderer.
    So that the difference between voting and                            182
direct resort to force is simply the difference
between exerting physical violence in person,
and exerting it through the intermediary of
an agent of the State.
    The thing, therefore, that is withheld from
"the noblest woman in England," while it is
conceded to the man who is lacking in nobility
of character, is in the end only an instrument
by which she might bring into application
physical force.
    When one realises that that same noblest
woman of England would shrink from any
personal exercise of violence, one would have
thought that it would have come home to her
that it is not precisely her job to commission
a man forcibly to shut up a public-house, or
to hang a murderer.
    One cannot help asking oneself whether, if
she understood what a vote really means, the
noblest woman in England would still go on
complaining of the bitter insult which is done
to her in withholding the vote.
    But the opportunist--the practical politi-                             183
cian, as he calls himself--will perhaps here in-
tervene, holding some such language as this:
--"Granting all you say, granting, for the sake
of argument, that the principle of giving votes
to woman is unsound, and that evil must ulti-
mately come of it, how can you get over the
fact that no very conspicuous harm has re-
sulted from woman suffrage in the countries
which have adopted it?  And can any firm
reasons be rendered for the belief that the giv-
ing of votes to women in England would be
any whit more harmful than in the Colo-
nies?"
    A very few words will supply the answer.
    The evils of woman suffrage lie, first, in the
fact that to give the vote to women is to give
it to voters who as a class are quite incom-
petent to adjudicate upon political issues;
secondly, in the fact that women are a class of
voters who cannot effectively back up their
votes by force; and, thirdly, in the fact that
it may seriously embroil man and woman.
    The first two aspects of the question have                            184
already in this controversy been adequately
dealt with.  There remains the last issue.
    From the point of view of this issue the con-
ditions which we have to deal with in this coun-
try are the absolute antithesis of those ruling
in any of the countries and States which have
adopted woman suffrage.
    When woman suffrage was adopted in these
countries it was adopted in some for one
reason, in others for another.  In some it was
adopted because it appealed to the doctrinaire [theoretical]
politician as the proper logical outcome of a
democratic and Socialistic policy.  In others
it was adopted because opportunist politicians
saw in it an instrument by which they might
gain electioneering advantages.  So much was
this the case that it sometimes happened that
the woman's vote was sprung upon a com-
munity which was quite unprepared and in-
different to it.
    The cause of woman suffrage was thus in
the countries of which we speak neither in its
inception nor in its realisation a question of                               185
revolt of woman against the oppression of
man.  It had, and has, no relation to the pro-
grammes of the militant suffragists as set out
at the outset of this letter.
    By virtue of this, all the evils which spring
from the embroiling of man and woman have
in the countries in question been conspicuously
absent.
    Instead of seeing himself confronted by a
section of embittered and hostile women voters
which might at any time outvote him and help
to turn an election, man there sees his women
folk voting practically everywhere in accord-
ance with his directions, and lending him a
hand to outvote his political opponent.
    Whether or no such voting is for the good
of the common weal is beside our present ques-
tion.  But it is clearly an arrangement which
leads to amity and peace between a man and
his womenkind, and through these to good-will
towards all women.
    In England everything is different.
    If woman suffrage comes in here, it will                                186
have come as a surrender to a very violent
feminist agitation--an agitation which we have
traced back to our excess female population
and the associated abnormal physiological con-
ditions.
    If ever Parliament concedes the vote to
woman in England, it will be accepted by the
militant suffragist, not as an eirenicon, but as a
victory which she will value only for the better
carrying on of her fight à outrance [to the bitter end] against the
oppression and injustice of man.
    A conciliation with hysterical revolt is
neither an act of peace; nor will it bring
peace.
    Nor would the conferring of the vote upon
women carry with it any advantages from the
point of view of finding a way out of the ma-
terial entanglements in which woman is en-
meshed, and thus ending the war between man
and woman.
    One has only to ask oneself whether or not
it would help the legislator in remodelling the
divorce or the bastardy laws if he had con-                              187
joined with him an unmarried militant suf-
fragist as assessor.
    Peace will come again.  It will come when
woman ceases to believe and to teach all man-
ner of evil of man despitefully.  It will come
when she ceases to impute to him as a crime her
own natural disabilities, when she ceases to
resent the fact that man cannot and does not
wish to work side by side with her.  And peace
will return when every woman for whom there
is no room in England seeks "rest" beyond the
sea, "each one in the house of her husband," and
when the woman who remains in England
comes to recognise that she can, without sacri-
fice of dignity, give a willing subordination to
the husband or father, who, when all is said
and done, earns and lays up money for her.
                                        A. E. WRIGHT.
March 27, 1912.                                                                          188
 

Prepared by Thomas Pollock aka Spartacus,
Editor of 

Slight formatting changes were made to accommodate the new medium of the web, e.g.,
page numbers now appear on the margin of the last line of the page as opposed to
underneath to avoid breaks in the text.