WOMEN AND POLITICS.
WE learn from the Pall Mall Gazette of Monday, that Mr. W. T. Stead "has made a munificent offer to Newnham College. He proposes to give a scholarship of £100 per annum for the next three years, the object of the scholarship being "to promote an interest in present-day history and politics among women, as a counterpoise to the somewhat exclusive attention to the history of the past which the ancient Universities tend to encourage;" and the competitors for this prize, we learn, are probably to be occupied in preparing an essay "on the progress of the world during the past year." There will be plenty of them, we have no doubt. The progress of the world during the past year, or any other period, is exactly the kind of subject on which young people are ready to form an opinion ; and to earn £300 by expressing their view, instead of grinding away at dictionary and grammar, will indeed be a prospect quickening lively gratitude to the author of this scheme. Nevertheless, it is one that will, we should think, fill many warm friends of the education of women with dismay ; and for our own part, we should have deprecated it with equal urgency, whether we considered its influence on women, on politics, or on general education. The girls who strive for this .:t300 will be clever and energetic ; and they will spend the most valuable time of their life chiefly in reading newspapers, or books that help one to understand newspapers. The newspaper world is engrossing, the day is limited, study is not recreation, and the spectacle of the present is always a formidable rival to the study of the past. To set up an artificial stimulus for this preference in the intellectual world, to give the noisy appeals of the passing hour any help in catching the attention of the young, and to make the three priceless years at a University the opportunity for giving such a bias, seems to us almost on a par with a scheme for getting young people to drink wine or read novels ; and that Newnham should lend itself to such a scheme is a deplorable abdication of duty on the part of an institution taking a prominent position in the movement for female education.
There is, no doubt, a great deal of valuable information to be got out of our best newspapers, using the last epithet in a very broad sense. But there will be a great deal less, if the people who write newspapers have spent their youth in • reading them. And the future of those young people is an even larger subject of concern than the influence of the small proportion who will succeed in getting anybody to read their articles. Any interest, we gladly allow, is better than none. But there will always be enough political interest in the world, and we cannot say the same of any other interest. If we want to keep a plot of fertile soil for any kind of knowledge that demands study, let us beware how we sow that seed there. The actual increase in the number of female politicians is a fact on which those may be agreed who can find very little else to agree about in politics or elsewhere ; and from Mr. Stead's point of view, he is probably right in wishing to in- crease it. It will, we believe, largely reinforce the side that he has espoused, and we incline to think that his object in making it may be a desire to demonstrate (against the ordinary notion) that the principles of democracy have nothing to fear from female influence. Those who feel any hesitation in swelling the triumph of democracy, would do well to consider whether he is not here on safe ground. That women are naturally Con- servative, does not appear to us by any means an un- questionable inference even from women's influence in the past,—the history of the French Revolution, for instance, would seem to tell the other way. No doubt there is some reason for the ordinary belief. When Goethe put into the mouth of a woman the sentence, " Nach Freiheit strebt der Mann, die Frau nach Sate," he presented a view that both falls in with much experience, and suffers very little distortion in being shortly expressed as a belief that women are Conservatives. Sitte, however we translate it —" order," we suppose, would be the best rendering here— is not a quality that flourishes in the air of revolution ; and Freedom, though in some sense the desire of everybody, is not the characteristic desire of one who feels strongly, what almost every woman has felt at some time, the desire to merge her own life in that of another person. But oppo- sites are neighbours, and the most natural movement in the human mind is that of inversion. By the very fact that women know this impulse, they know its dangers. They are made aware by painful experience that subjection needs always in the ruler some spark of the divine, and that the allegiance which can be safely given in its entirety only to God, is often a cruel weight to lay on erring man. The experience of the wife teaches her that power may find its victim in its agent ; the experience of the mother shows her another possible victim. To protect the weak is not to emancipate the weak from wise control ; but in the blind workings of mistaken activity, the one action constantly passes into the other; and they whose sympathies tend in- variably to the weaker side, can certainly not be reckoned as friends of order. These are not arguments against a scheme for training up a set of female journalists, or against any one who agrees with its author ; on the con- trary, they show, as far as they go, that his offer is a wise one from his point of view. But surely they should give pause to all who think, as many do, besides those who would call themselves Conservatives, that what politics needs at this moment is a larger infusion of virile in- fluence,—an influence that women, indeed, are better fitted to appreciate than men are, but that they can only appre- ciate so far as they distrust what is most characteristic of themselves.
We look on the present duty resting upon everybody, men and women alike, who can exert any sort of influence, to occupy themselves with politics, as a necessity no less deplorable than it is unquestionable. When an influential party is urging on a change that is vast and irrevocable, it behoves all who think it also disastrous to exert themselves in every possible way to help their country to avoid it, one of those ways being the endeavour to rouse political interest where it does not already exist. But we lament such a necessity, and especially we lament it in the case of women. It seems to us almost like the necessary setting aside of all peaceful occupations in the case of an invasion ; an event hardly more exceptional than the present state of things. Women have their own special qualifications for approaching the life of their country. We look on Miss Kate Norgate's "Angevin Kings," for instance, as a brilliant example of the way in which an interest in personal life may light up the study of the past, and make us feel, after reading a book, almost as if we had visited a gallery. We contemplate the possibility that such a power as hers, or anything like it should be pressed into the service of politics, as we should have con- templated the possibility of Reynolds having to earn his bread as a sign-painter, or Beethoven as the leader of a band. This would be much the smallest evil of such a scheme as Mr. Stead's ; but we cite it here, because we believe that most people would accept this result as the possible price of such a stimulus to journalism as this, and that it is one which all without exception would deplore.
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