WOMEN UNDER AN AGNOSTIC REGIME.
THE women who think themselves "emancipated," or who desire to be so, will not thank Mr. Frederic Harrison for his speech of Saturday night in commemoration of Auguste Comte. It contained little not recognised as part of the social teaching of his sect ; but Mr. Harrison has the power of giving sharp edges to old thoughts, and his words bite. The ladies who like not law will think themselves wounded in the house of their friends. Influenced by a mis- reading of the signs of the times, on which we have said a word below, many of them have grown accustomed to decry Christianity, to which alone they owe their present position of freedom, as hostile to their claims, and to look for aid in their purposes only to those who are not chained to an ancient superstition and do not reverence that fetish, a written record of God's dealings with man. Mr. Harrison, however, is as emancipated from superstition as themselves, and has, if possible, less reverence for the ancient record. He has substituted for a personal God the idea of Humanity at large, for the opinion of Christ the opinion of Comte, and for Christian law his own deductions from the history of mankind. Yet he is as opposed to the view of the "
emancipated" ladies as any Catholic priest. With a severity which in the priest would be denounced as insolence, he tells the women who seek for masculine careers not to be " abortive Men. ; " that they are intended " by body, mind, feeling, and character, to play a different part ; " that their true sphere of action is the home ; that they cannot be rivals of men in the same lines without the destruction of all that is highest in them ; and that " the cry in the present day for the emancipation of women, for complete freedom for every adult individual, male or female, for the abolition of all restraints preventing any adult living his or her own life at his or her private will,—such anarchic cries involve the destruction of every social institution, and of every virtue. The State, the Church, the nation, industry, social organisa- tion, and law all rest upon fixed rules, which are a standing contradiction of this claim of universal personal liberty from restraint: Society implies the control of individual license, and the claim is one for absolute individual license. Women must choose either to be women or abortive men. When men and women start as competitors in the same fierce race, as rivals and opponents instead of companions and helpmates, with the same habits, the same ambitions, the same engross- ing toil, and the same public lives, women will have disappeared. Society will then consist of individuals dis- tinguished physiologically, as horses and dogs are, into male and female specimens ; `family' will mean groups of those who chose to live in common, and home' will mean places where the groups collect for shelter." These sentences are the very embodiment in their eloquent lucidity of the old teaching, and will seem to hundreds of women of the new opinions at once foolish and insulting. They will declare Mr. Harrison as " Oriental" as Moses, and as belated as St. Paul, and pro- bably ask indignantly how he would like, instead of being a most popular lecturer on religion and society and the future of man, to be a mother and a nurse. Yet in all their indigna- tion there must be something of dismay, for if Mr. Harrison, as the last product of completely emancipated yet civilised and systematic culture and thought, can be thus hostile to their claims, what have they to expect from average men of the old opinions, who are still the vast majority, and who, as they well know, give to those claims nothing but that form of courteous hearing which is compatible with blank denial and complete prejudgment ?
It is a moment for many women, of whom a section, how- ever perverse, are heartily in earnest, and entirely disin- terested, almost for despair; and we would seize it to ask them gravely why they expected anything else. Mr. Har- rison, of course, only gives to the long-known and formulated ideas of his sect a certain terse vigour of expression ; but if all the disbelievers of our day, the men who have substituted science for religion as the ultimate guide to action, were as frank of utterance as he is, one-half of them at least would express
upon his subject precisely the same ideas. They might, and pro- bably would, express diverse views as to the best way of enabling women to " complete their destiny " and fulfil their allotted functions in life, but they would almost all describe that destiny in the same terms, and limit those functions in pre- cisely the same degree. Life would be as " dull " for women under an agnostic regime as under the " dying" clerical sway, which perhaps is not moribund at all. Of all the odd fancies which have within the past thirty years seized upon enthu- siastic and aspiring women, we know of none so odd and so melancholy as their idea that, if only they could be rid of Christianity and its prejudices, they. would in some more or less complete degree be set free of " bondage." That—unless, indeed, by " bondage " some of them mean, what we do not attribute to them, bondage to the moral law—is the exact reverse of the truth. The moment Christianity dis- appears, the law of strength revives, and under that law women can have no hope, except that their slavery may be mild and pleasant. In the absence of religion, instinct rules ; and the instinct of man is, that women were meant to be, and shall be, his agreeable aids in contending with the miseries. real and apprehended, of human life ; and for that end he will make laws which may be wise or foolish, humane or cruel, the laws of Europe or the laws of Asia, but will in any case, and under all circumstances, be laws entirely inconsistent with the feminine claim to complete emancipation. The entire history of mankind ptoves that, even the history of Rome; where the patrician lady possessed most of the legal rights which the •" emancipated " claim, and was still in some essen- tial respects a slave, besides being so detested and dreaded that the severest laws failed to compel wealthy men to enter into regular marriage bonds. The emancipated ladies will tell us that. old examples do not matter, for that human reason has advanced, and that under a regime of scientific thought, women will be recognised as men's equals, or at least as being entitled to independence ; but where is their proof of that P The governing idea of modern scientific men is not the inde- pendence of men at all, or women either, but their strict sub- jection to an elaborate system of rules which may be described in various ways, but is, however described, in reality the Penal Code of Intelligent Experience. Scientific rulers*will regulate all men in all the affairs of life, and women more especially, because they are weaker to resist, most women dreading above all things singularity, and because on them depends in such large measure the future of the race. The men of science are not merely mathematicians ; they are all physiologists at heart, all influenced, though in different degrees, by the doctrine of heredity, all believers with a kind of fanati- cism in education—though they see in their own nurseries that no system of training leaves two children alike and in all those capacities they will be as completely opposed to the " emancipation " of the partners and mothers of the human 'race as ever the Puritans or Catholic doctors were. They will want to compel women to fulfil an ideal, and that implies legislation, formal or social, of the most drastic kind. The first thing they will think of is human progress, and the last thing human freedom, whether the subject be feminine or, male. Just look for one moment at Mr. Harrison's speech. He, an entirely emancipated person, thinking first and always of the welfare of humanity, proposes first of all what we, still slaves of the old superstition, should oppose as a monstrous invasion of woman's natural right to freedom. He would refuse her the right if she pleases to labour in association ; would debar women, he says, from factory labour, either by law, for he is not entering into detail, or by the stronger com- pulsion of opinion. His object, of course, is to make women healthier, happier, and more competent to their highest function, which is to be the rulers of the family ; and for aught we know, or for the purpose of this argument care, he may be entirely wise. Certainly he has on his side the unbroken opinion of the whole body of successful mankind, who, the very moment they cease to be pressed by physical necessity, withdraw their women from every kind of gainful labour, make, indeed, of abstinence from such labour the severest of caste rules. Even the audacity of Lady — would not enable her to do housemaid's work for pay. That process is universal from Yokohama to Southampton, and is probably, therefore, wise ; but to enforce it by law or opinion under all circumstances, against the woman's own opinion, is none the less monstrous oppression. The individual woman has a right to work if she pleases, and no one can righteously deprive her of the right. The scientific rulers of the future, we may depend on it, will pay no attention to that argument, or to any other which is at variance with Intelligent Experience as to the general well-being of the race. They may declare men and women equal, but they will no more give them equality of careers than they will set entomologists to report on the reve- lations of the spectrum. They may abolish marriage, but they will regulate the relations of the sexes by laws far sterner than any now in force, abolishing choice in favour of scientific suitability, with a view to a noble race. f They talk already of prohibiting marriage to the descendants of lunatics —e.g., the whole Royal family—drunkards, criminals, and persons afflicted with diseases like scrofula and epilepsy.) They may alleviate maternity by providing for and educating children, but they will punish severely mismanagement in the nursery, or any deviation from such method of early training as Intelligent Experience may suggest. They may declare all functions open to women, but they will make exceptions on hygienic grounds, on moral grounds, on economic grounds, and on the grounds embodied in their view of general improve- ment, which will leave women nothing to do for maintenance except please men, precisely the duty to which the "emanci- pated " declare that they are at present so oppressively confined. And lastly, they will declare that for this or that physiological reason, the comparative quantity of grey matter in the skull or what not, women are not entitled, when opposed to men, to express opinions, still less to adhere to them. We do not find that the scientific tend to believe in universal suffrage at all, and most assuredly they will not give it to voters who of all others will be least governed by precise thought, and most by instinct and emotion. Like all who think themselves in possession of absolute truth, they will go forward on the path of their ideas as unflinchingly as Catholic Inquisitors or Puritan Generals ; and as the tyranny of culture, like every other tyranny, will fall heaviest on the weakest, it is women's freedom which will be most completely crushed. It is Christianity which, by recognising that every woman is a responsible being, and therefore a being with rights, and not a mere rivet in an improveable machine, has made women free, subject only, like men, to irreversible moral laws, as they are subject, like men, to irreversible physical laws; and in quitting its fold, from whatever motive, women are quitting shelter, and entering on a region where in the end Mr. Harrison will prevail, and women, in the name of the Future of Humanity, will be legislated out of the right to sew.
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