THE WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE DEMONSTRATION.
IF we were in favour of giving votes to women, we should be profoundly depressed by the attitude of the public in general towards the great suffrage demonstration of Saturday last. It is true that the procession was exceedingly well organised, and that there was an element of taste about it in strong contrast to the ordinary male demonstration. Again, the mottoes on the banners and the speeches at the Albert Hall were marked by moderation and by an evident desire to eliminate wild and irre- sponsible utterances. Those, however, clear-sighted enough to look behind the " roaring and the wreaths " must surely have noted the signal of failure flying high, not only in the mood of the crowd of men and women who viewed the procession, but still more in the mental attitude of public opinion throughout the country. The mood of " the man in the street" may be best described as that of politeness and incredulity. There is nothing more exasperating and more impenetralle than the wet-blanket of amused indifference —one might almost say mildly interested indifference—in which the ordinary British nature is apt to clothe itself when face to face with a passionate appeal which it does not mean to grant. All who have had great causes to preach and a difficult political position to carry know and dread the attitude of those who listen attentively and courteously to the best reasoned and the most taking presentment of a case, and then say without heat or annoyance, or even argument, that they are sorry, but as far as they can see " there is nothing in it." Against such a defence attack is, indeed, difficult. It is a bale of cotton a thousand yards thick which will stop any pro- jectile ever created. When to this vague, if resilient, impenetrability is joined an air of kindly, nay, patronising, courtesy to the pleaders of the cause, these can only feel that all hope must be abandoned. In a poem memorable for its inspired diagnosis of a certain aspect of the British mind Mr. Kipling bids us- . " Oh I beware my country when my country grows polite !" That is as true for home as for foreign affairs. But the country, as was shown in Saturday's demonstration, is growing terribly and ostentatiously polite about the suffrage. Had the crowd groaned and yelled, had excited gentle- men, " perspiring and profane," attempted to interrupt the speakers or to denounce their cause, there might have been some hope. Opposition of that kind is a sign that people are being moved by the arguments, and must roar back & protest for fear that they or their friends may be converted in their own despite. Those who on Saturday treated the cut husiastic presentment of the suffrage case with a gentle and frigid equanimity are in very little danger of con- version. The hoisting of the signal of public politeness is, iu a word, an omen which the suffragists, if they are pre- pared to face facts and not to be deluded by false shows, cannot ignore..
We pointed out on a previous occasion that the only real chance of the advocates of women's suffrage carrying their point lies in their being able to play off one political party against another. Let us restate what we said as to this danger. When Mr. Asquith's Reform Bill is introduced, there can be no sort of doubt that a provision giving the vote to all women will be included in its clauses. There can equally be no doubt that the House of Lords will refuse to add by a stroke of the pen four million new voters to the register. We do not disguise from ourselves, however, that the Unionist Party leaders in the House of Lords, dazzled by the prospect of an immediate triumph at the polls, may at the same time express their willingness to enfranchise such women as are already on the municipal register. In normal circumstances, if a suggestion of com- promise on these lines were to be made, the Liberal Party might be counted upon to reject it with scorn as grossly unfair. It may be, however, that the advocates of female suffrage will be strong enough to force the Liberals to accept the half-measure. The wirepullers might very well argue :—" Having gone so far, and having irritated and set against us that very large body of opinion in the country which is strongly- opposed to female suffrage, we cannot now add to this opposition the whole weight of the women's suffrage movement. They tell us that if we do not accept the Lords' compromise they will, instead of working for us, work against us at the polls, and they are clearly in the deadliest earnest. But in view of the unpopularity of our candidates just now for many other reasons, this would mean the extinction of Liberal hopes in hundreds of constitu- • eucies. It is true that the new women voters will almost all be against us, and thus will bring about our defeat; but, in the position into which we have got ourselves, that is in any ease inevitable at the next Election. What we must now think of, unfortunately, is not the next Election, but the Election after the next, and here the prospects seem good. The suffrage women, we may be sure, will at once begin an agitation for the extension of the suffrage ion equal terms,' and this movement must be opposed by the Unionists. The result will be that at the Election after next we shall have the suffragists heartily on our side. At the same time, those Liberals who were opposed to female suffrage altogether will be obliged by the force of circumstances to accept the demand for equality. As Liberals, they are certain to see that they cannot go on maintaining a state of things which so greatly handicaps their party and helps that of their opponents." In other words, we declared that the great danger of the situation was that the Conservative leaders in the House of Lords might snatch at an immediate party advantage, and that the Liberals, owing to their commitments to the suffragists, would not be in a position to meet this piece of tactic's by any effective counter-move.
Happily there are signs that this danger is passing away. A great many Conservatives who have long hankered after the modified female suffrage because it would give votes to people who would be sure to vote consistently Con- servative are beginning to realise that the triumph thus secured could only be short-lived, and that in the end it would be impossible to maintain a -form of female suffrage which would act only in favour of one party. They are coming to realise that the suffrage must be for all women or for none, or, at any rate, that if women are to have votes, the wives of householders must have them as well as their widows and maiden aunts. Thus on a nearer inspection the proposed piece of party tactics is losing its charm, and we have now little fear that the House of Lords will be willing to effect a comp-rOinise.nnder which the ParliamentarY shall be assimilated to the municipal register. That being so, we must look to the next General Election being fought on the question of " Votes for Women." After what has happened, the Prime Minister 'cannot possibly refuse the inclusion of female suffrage on the big scale in his Reform Bill, and having done that, Cannot quietly allow it to be eliminated by the Lords. In fact, he will have to go to the country on the Reform Bill, the essential part of which will be female suffrage. But that is a proposal so vast and so funda- mental that it will swallow up every other consideration at the polls. The next General Election, therefore, must be in fact a plebiscite on votes for women. That from many points of view this is much to be deprecated we fully admit. In the first place, the effect on the Free- trade cause—a cause which the Liberal Party leaders have so much on their lips, but apparently so little in their hearts—cannot but be very grave. Still worse, we shall see the country distracted by an outbreak of sex antagonism. We do not mean by this that the majority of women will be opposed to the majority of men. On the contrary, we are fully convinced that the vast majority of women do not desire the suffrage. There will, however, be a sufficient number of women excited by the proposal to produce an apparent sense of sex antagonism, and in the course of the contest bitter and foolish and untrue thing will be said that may not only deeply wound the feelings of women generally, but may also tend to produce what we must describe as a throw-back towards savagery in the attitude of men towards woman. Gradually society has been building up an artificial, but none the less most valuable and most humanising, series of social con- ventions in regard to women, conventions under which they are protected and respected without being humiliated, and under which their influence over men and their social environment have been very widely and beneficially extended. The sense of chivalry, as we must call it for want of a better word, has gradually spread from the educated classes into every rank of society, and the emanci- pation of women in the best sense is thus in process of being secured. A General Election fought on the question of the suffrage must, as we have said, tend in the opposite direction. The die, however, has been cast, and there is now little chance of escape from a conflict so un- desirable. It will be necessary for the country to give its answer to the question whether one sex, and that sex the male, is to continue to say the final word in politics, or whether that word is henceforth to be sought from the jarring and confused utterance of both sexes shouting together.
Before we leave the subject we desire to say how painful it is to us to have to use words which, though in essence they involve nothing whatever that is derogatory to women, yet at a moment of excitement are, we fear, sure to be taken by many women as indications that we do not set the true value upon their sex. They will sometimes, indeed, be taken to mean that we regard women as the inferiors of men, and as unworthy of being the servers and helpers of their country,—as capable, that is, of only a limited patriotism. In truth, nothing could be further from our thought. We are among those who hold that though women are so essentially different from men, they are in mind and character in no sense inferior. Our respect for women rests in no way upon the patronage accorded to weakness. We mean that we do not respect women as we respect children, because of their help- lessness. All human beings are, no doubt, in a certain sense weak and want help, but on the moral plane women are no weaker or more helpless than men. The supreme function performed by women for the State, the function of motherhood, is the greatest and most glorious that can be accomplished by a human being. A man may be proud of his power to defend and maintain his home either by arms or by the provision of the daily bread for those he loves, but that function cannot be performed unless there is a home to perform it for. And the woman alone can make and keep the home, for a home in the true sense means the place of children.
Wordsworth in a line of the profoundest beauty, majesty, and pathos—a line which strikes as deep as any in the whole range of even his verse--speaks of " the patriot mother's weight of anxious cares." For the present writer the patriot mother—and every mother in the care for her offspring, whether she knows it or not, is performing a patriotic duty—commands a reverence and respect deeper and more sacred than he could yield to any man alive. And this reverence and respect must be in a lesser degree extended to all women, for it is not only the woman who bears children who performs the functions of motherhood. A part of them are performed by every woman who nurses, who teaches, or who helps children in the thousand ways in which only a woman can help them,—help which the most children-loving of men know not how to give, help which children instinctively demand from a woman and as instinctively refrain from asking from a man. But the patriot mother will not be helped in the discharge of her " weight of anxious cares " by having placed upon her shoulders the duty which belongs to the male,—the duty of maintaining and protecting the political State. Let her be allowed to perform her own functions and to bear her own duties, and let her be protected, honoured, and respected in the discharge of those functions by the whole force of the State, and by the sense of that sacred obligation of man towards woman which is involved in motherhood. We shall be told, perhaps, that at present this obligation is too often grossly and patently neglected by men, and that for one man who does lip-service to the ideals of chivalry there are ten thousand who ignore them or do them violence. We agree that there is very much to be done before mankind will perfectly and worthily discharge its duty towards womankind, and therefore towards the State. But we contend that modern society is surely, if very slowly, working towards a better understanding of the true relations between man and woman. Assuredly this tendency will not be helped, but the reverse, by men transferring to women a part of their special functions and duties while woman must still bear alone, as Nature has decreed she must, " the patriot mother's weight of anxious cares."
Previous page
