Now there is an element of truth in Paine's charge, but there is distortion also. To say that Burke had no thought for the oppressed and the miserable is a wanton slander, disproved by abundant passages in the veryReflectionsand by his whole career. "If it should come to the last extremity," he had once avowed in Parliament, with no fear of contradiction, "and to a contest of blood, God forbid! God forbid!—my part is taken; I would take my fate with the poor, and low, and feeble." But it is the fact nevertheless, construe it how one will, that in the ordinary course of things Burke's ideas of government were moulded and his sentiment towards life was colored by the vivid industry of his imagination, and that he thought the world at large controlled by the same power. I doubt if analysis can reach a deeper distinction between the whole class of minds to which Burke belongs, and that to which Paine belongs, than is afforded by this difference in the range and texture of the imagination.
And in this Burke had with him the instinct of his people, while in a way transcending it; for a good deal of what we regard as the British character depends on just the excess of imagination over a rather dull sensibility and sluggish intelligence. This, if we look into it, is what Bagehot signalized as the saving dulness of England, and what Walpole meant by attributing to "the good sense [note the contrast ofsenseandsensibility] of the English that they have not painted better." It was this same quality that inspired Burke's great comparison of the French excitability with the British stolidity: "Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the fieldring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field." In its higher working, when sensibility and intelligence are also magnified, the imagination, no doubt, is the source of the loftier English poetry and eloquence, but in the lower range, which we are now considering, it is rather a slow, yet powerful and endearing, visualization of what is known and familiar; it is the beginning of distrust for innovation and of that prejudice for existing circumstances and actual relations which Burke exalted as the mother of content. And with content it produces a kind of egotistic satisfaction in the pomps and privileges which pass before the eye, giving to the humble a participation in things wherein they have no material share. In the baser nature this evokes a trait which we condemn as snobbishness; in the higher it results in a fine magnanimity: "He feels no ennobling principle in his own heart, who wishes to level all the artificial institutions which have been adopted for giving a body to opinion and permanence to fugitive esteem. It is a sour, malignant, envious disposition, without taste for the reality, or for any image or representation of virtue, that sees with joy the unmerited fall of what had long flourished in splendor and in honor." Thus, too, the imagination is an accomplice of time, as well as of the law of subordination; indeed, its deepest and noblest function lies in its power of carrying what was once seen and known as a living portion and factor of the present, and there is no surer test of the quality of a man's mind than the degree in which he feels the long-remembered past as one of the vital and immediate laws of his being. So it is that the imagination is the chief creator and sustainer of the great memorial institutions of society, such as the Crown and the Church and the other pageantries of state, which are the very embodiment of prescription, as it were the soul of traditiontaking form and awful authority among the living. How deeply Burke felt this prescriptive right of the imagination, no one need be told; nor is it necessary to quote in full the familiar passages in which he likens the British monarchy, with its bulwark of nobility, to "the proud keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers," or calls on the Church to "exalt her mitred front in courts and parliaments." There is the true Burke; he knew, as Paine knew, that the support of these institutions was in their symbolic sway over the imaginations of men, and that, with this defence undermined, they would crumble away beneath the aggressive passions of the present, or would remain as mere bloodless vanities. He thought that the real value of life was in its meaning to the imagination, and he was not ashamed to avow that the fall and tragedy of kings, because they bore in their person the destiny of ancient institutions, stirred him more profoundly than the sufferings of ordinary men.
It is perfectly easy for a keen and narrow intelligence to ridicule Burke's trust in the imagination, but as a matter of fact there is nothing more practical than a clear recognition of its vast domain in human affairs—it was Napoleon Bonaparte who said that "imagination rules the world." Burke is not dead; his pages are an inexhaustible storehouse of inspiration and wisdom. But it is true nevertheless, that his ideas never quite freed themselves from their matrix, and that in his arguments the essential is involved in the contingent. Though he saw clearly enough the imperfections of the actual union of a prescriptive and a natural aristocracy, he was not able, with all his insight, to conceive the existence of the latter alone and by virtue of its own rights. He cried out that the age of chivalry was gone; he saw that the age of prescription, however it might be propped up for a time, was also doomed, not only in France but in his England as well, and with that away there was nothing for his imaginationbut an utter blank. As a consequence the problem of government for us to-day in its fundamental aspects is really closer to the exposition of the Greek philosopher two thousand years ago, than to that of the modern English statesman. We have the naked question to answer: How shall a society, newly shaking itself free from a disguised plutocratic régime, be guided to suffer the persuasion of a natural aristocracy which has none of the insignia of an old prescription to impose its authority? Shall the true justice prevail, which by a right discrimination would confer power and influence in accordance with inner distinction; or shall that so-called justice prevail—for no man acknowledges open injustice—which recommends itself as equality of opportunity, but in practice, by confusing the distinctions of age, sex, and character, comes at last to the brutal doctrine that might makes right, whether that might be the material strength of money or the jealous tyranny of numbers?
Leaders there will be, as there always have been. Leaders there are now, of each class, and we know their names. We still call the baser sort a demagogue, and his definition is still what it was among those who invented the term: "a flatterer of the people." Or, if that description seems too vague, you will recognize him as one who unites in himself enormous physical and mental activity, yet who employs his extraordinary talents in no serious way for the comfort and sustenance of the higher life of the imagination, but for running about restlessly and filling the public mind with stentorian alarms. He is one who proclaims ostentatiously that the first aim of government "must always be the possession by the average citizen of the right kind of character," and then, in his own person, gives an example of identifying character with passion by betraying a friend and malignantly misinterpreting his words, as soon as that friend may be decried for balking the popular will—and balking the path of the decrier's ambition. He is one who hasbeen honored as the leader of a great political party, and then, as soon as he is dethroned from its leadership, denounces that same party as the tool of privilege and the source of corruption. He is one who in proclaiming the principles of his new party, has constantly on his lips the magical word "justice," which he defines by the specious phrase "equality of opportunity," yet in the end identifies justice with the removal of all checks from government so that the desire of the majority may be immediately carried out, whether right or wrong. For "it is impossible to invent constitutional devices which will prevent the popular will from being effective for wrong without also preventing it from being effective for right. The only safe course to follow in this great American democracy is to provide for making the popular judgment really effective."
To this end our exemplary demagogue would take away every obstacle between the opinion of the moment and the enactment of that opinion into law. Hence the initiative and referendum.
Above the legislators is the Constitution, devised in order that legislation upon any particular question may be made to conform essentially with what has been laid down on deliberation as the wisest general course of government. It is a check upon hasty action, and implies a certain distrust of the popular judgment at any moment when passion or delusion may be at play. Therefore our demagogue will denounce reverence for the Constitution as a fetich. Blithely ignoring the fact that Constitution-making and remaking is one of the pastimes of some States, and that even the Federal Constitution can be amended with none too great difficulty when the opinion of the people is really formed (as in the recent case of the election of senators), he will earnestly call upon the Constitutional Convention of Ohio "to provide in this Constitution means which will enable the people readily to amend it if at any point it works injustice"; and then, asif that provision were not sufficient to relax its mortmain, he will virtually abrogate its function of imposing any check whatsoever by adding "means which will permit the people themselves by popular vote, after due deliberation and discussion, but finally and without appeal, to settle what the proper construction of any constitutional point is"; and this construction is to be made, not legally, that is by an attempt to get at the actual meaning of the language used, but in accordance with the current notion of what is right.
But the full venom of his attack will be directed against the courts, because in them is impersonated the final sovereignty of unimpassioned judgment over the fluctuations of sentiment, and with it the last check upon the operations of the demagogue. The interpretation of the law in accordance with the conditions of life is to rest with the people. If necessary they are to have the power of recalling the judge who is recalcitrant to their views, and at the least they are to have opportunity to reverse any decision of the courts which seems to them wrong. In this way he thinks to ensure "an independent judiciary"! To enforce the need of the recall he accuses the courts of "refusing to permit the people of the States to exercise their right as a free people." Thereupon he cites what he calls a "typical" case in New York, in which the judges declared a workingmen's compensation act unconstitutional. "In other words, they insisted that the Constitution hadpermanentlycursed our people with impotence to right wrong and hadperpetuateda cruel iniquity." This tirade, followed by the most inflammatory appeals to the emotions, was uttered in 1912; at the very time when he was inveighing against the courts for perpetuating iniquity, the machinery was in train for amending the Constitution, and in less than two years that permanent curse was removed by the passage of a constitutional law in full favor of the workingman. Such is the despotism of facts. And ever through these vituperative charges runsthe high note of flattery: "If the American people are not fit for popular government, and if they should of right be the servants and not the masters of the men whom they themselves put in office!"
The demagogue paints himself. In a word you may know him by this single trait: he is one who, in the pursuit of the so-called rights of humanity, has a supreme contempt for those
Unconcerning things, matters of fact;
Unconcerning things, matters of fact;
one who, by means of an hypnotic loquaciousness, is constantly persuading the people that they have only to follow their first impulsive emotions to be right and safe, and that as a consequence every institution should be swept away which in their wiser, calmer moments they have created as a bulwark against their own more variable nature. To complete the picture we need to contrast with it Burke's portrait of the men of light and leading, with his sober statement of the law of liberty: "Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters." Or we may go further back and look upon Plato's portrait of the guides who have earned the right to persuade others to temperance by the diligent exercise of that virtue in their own lives.
But the most notable example of demagoguery to-day is not a man, though he be clothed with thunder, but aninstitution. There are newspapers and magazines, reaching millions of readers, which have reduced the art to a perfect system. Their method is as simple as it is effective: always appeal to the emotion of the hour, and present it in terms which will justify its excess. Thus, in times when there is no wave of international envy disturbing the popular mind, our journal will print edifying editorials on brotherly love, and laud the people as the great source of peace among nations. But let some racial dispute arise, as in the months preceding our Spanish war or the Italian raid on Africa, and this same journal will day after day use its editorial columns to inflame national hatred—and increase its circulation. On days when no sensational event has occurred, it will indulge in the prettiest sentimental sermons on the home and on family felicities. Nothing so moral; it will even plead in lacrimose type against the evil of allowing babies to lie in perambulators with their eyes exposed to the sun. But let the popular mind be excited by some crime of lust, and the same journal will forget the sweet obligations of home and wife—
That silly old morality,That, as these links were knit, our love should be—
That silly old morality,That, as these links were knit, our love should be—
and will deck out the loathsome debauchery of a murderer and his trull as the spiritual history of two young souls finding themselves in the pure air of passion; or some sordid liaison will be virtually lifted above marriage by the terms "affinity" or "heart-wife." And always, meanwhile, the people are to be soothed out of a sense of responsibility for errors and corruption by the skilfully maintained suggestion of a little group of men entirely removed from the feelings and motives of ordinary humanity, sitting somewhere in secret conclave, plotting, plotting, to pervert the government. Our public crimes are never our own, but are the result of conspiracy.
These are the agencies that, in varying forms, have beenat work in many ages. Only now we have formulated them into a noble maxim, which you will hear daily resounding in the pulpit and the press and in the street: "The cure of democracy is more democracy." It is a lie, and we know it is a lie. We know that this cry of the demagogue has invariably in the past led to anarchy and to despotism; and we know that to-day, were these forces unopposed, as happily they are not unopposed, the same result would occur—
Our liberty reversed and charters gone,And we made servants to Opinion.
Our liberty reversed and charters gone,And we made servants to Opinion.
The remedy for the evils of license is not in the elimination of popular restraint, but precisely in bringing the people to respect and follow their right leaders. The cure of democracy is notmoredemocracy, butbetterdemocracy.
Nor is such a cure dependent primarily on the appearance, in a community, of men capable of the light: for these the world always has, and these we too have in abundance; it depends rather on so relating these select natures to the community that they shall be also men of leading. The danger is lest, in a State which bestows influence and honors on its demagogues, the citizens of more refined intelligence, those true philosophers who have discourse of reason, and have won the difficult citadel of their own souls, should withdraw from public affairs and retire into that citadel, as it were into an ivory tower. The harm wrought by such a condition is twofold: it deprives the better minds of the larger sustenance of popular sympathy, producing among them a kind of intellectualpréciositéand a languid interest in art as a refuge from life instead of an integral part of life; and, on the other hand, it tends to leave the mass of society a prey to the brutalized emotions of indiscriminate pleasure-seeking. In such a State distinction becomes the sorry badge of isolation. The need is to provide for a natural aristocracy.
Now it must be clearly understood that in advocating such a measure, at least under the conditions that actually prevail to-day, there is involved no futile intention of abrogating democracy, in so far as democracy means government by and of the people. A natural aristocracy does not demand the restoration of inherited privilege or a relapse into the crude dominion of money; it is not synonymous with oligarchy or plutocracy. It calls rather for some machinery or some social consciousness which shall ensure the selection from among the community at large of the truly "best," and the bestowal on them of "power"; it is the true consummation of democracy. And, again, it must be said emphatically that this is not an academic question, dealing with unreal distinctions. No one supposes that the "best" are a sharply defined class, moving about among their fellows with a visible halo above them, and a smile of beatific superiority on their faces. Society is not made of such classifications, and governments have always been of a more or less mixed character. A natural aristocracy signifies rather a tendency than a conclusion; and in such a sense it was taken, no doubt, by my sociological friend of radical ideas who pronounced it the great practical problem of the day.
The first requisite for solving this problem is that those who are designed by nature, so to speak, to form an aristocracy should come to an understanding of their own belief. There is a question to be faced boldly: What is the true aim of society? Does justice consist primarily in leveling the distribution of powers and benefits, or in proportioning them to the scale of character and intelligence? Is the main purpose of the machinery of government to raise the material welfare of the masses, or to create advantages for the upward striving of the exceptional? Is the state of humanity to be estimated by numbers, or is it a true saying of the old stoic poet:humanum paucis vivit genus? Shall our interest in mankind begin at the bottom and progress upward, or begin at the topand progress downward? To those who feel that the time has come for a reversion from certain present tendencies, the answer to this question cannot be doubtful. Before anything else is done we must purge our minds of the current cant of humanitarianism. This does not mean that we are to deny the individual appeals of pity, and introduce a wolfish egotism into human relations. On the contrary it is just the preaching of false humanitarian doctrines that practically results in weakening the response to rightful obligations and "turning men's duties into doubts," and thus throws the prizes of life to the hard grasping materialist and the coarse talker. In the end the happiness of the people also, in the wider sense, depends on the common recognition of the law of just subordination. But, whatever the ultimate effect of this sort may be, the need now is to counterbalance the excess of emotional humanitarianism, with an injection of the truth—even the contemptuous truth. Let us, in the name of a long-suffering God, put some bounds to the flood of talk about the wages of the bricklayer and the trainman, and talk a little more about the income of the artist and teacher and public censor who have taste and strength of character to remain in opposition to the tide. Let us have less cant about the great educative value of the theatre for the people and less humbug about the virtues of the nauseous problem play, and more consideration of what is clean and nourishing food for the larger minds. Let us forget for a while our absorbing desire to fit the schools to train boys for the shop and the counting-room, and concern ourselves more effectively with the dwindling of those disciplinary studies which lift men out of the crowd. Let us, in fine, not number ourselves among the traitors to their class whoinvidiæ metu non audeant dicere.
One hears a vast deal these days about class consciousness, and it is undoubtedly a potent social instrument. Why should there not be an outspoken class consciousness among those who are in the advance of civilization as wellas among those who are in the rear? Such a compact of mutual sympathy and encouragement would draw the man of enlightenment out of his sterile seclusion, and make him efficient; it would strengthen the sense of obligation among those who hesitate to take sides, and would turn many despondent votaries of fatalism and many amateur dabblers in reform to a realization of the deeper needs of the day. Nor is this an appeal to idle sentiment. Much is said about the power of the masses and the irresistible spread of revolutionary ideas from the lower ranks upward. The facts of history point in quite the other direction. It was not the plebs who destroyed the Roman republic, but the corrupt factions of the Senate, and the treachery of such patricians as Catiline and Julius Cæsar. In like manner the French Revolution would never have had a beginning but for the teaching of the philosophers and the prevalence of equalitarian fallacies among the privileged classes themselves. The Vicomtesse de Noailles spoke from knowledge when she said: "La philosophie n'avait pas d'apôtres plus bienveillants que les grands seigneurs. L'horreur des abus, le mépris des distinctions héréditaires, tous ces sentiments dont les classes inférieures se sont emparées dans leur intérêt, ont dû leur premier éclat à l'enthousiasme des grands." And so to-day the real strength of socialistic doctrines is not in the discontent of the workingmen, but in the faint-hearted submission of those who by the natural division of society belong to the class that has everything to lose by revolution, and in the sentimental adherence of dilettante reformers. The real danger is after all not so much from the self-exposed demagogues as from the ignorant tamperers with explosive material. It is not so much from the loathsome machinations of the yellow press, dangerous as they are, as from the journals that are supposed to stand for higher things, yet in their interest in some particular reform, support whole-heartedly candidates who flirt with schemes subversive of property and constitutionalchecks; in their zeal for the brotherhood of man, deal loosely with facts; and in their clamor for some specious extension of the franchise, neglect the finer claims of justice. These men and these journals, betrayers of the trust, are the real menace. Without their aid and abetment there may be rumblings of discontent, wholesome enough as warnings against a selfish stagnation, but there can be no concerted drive of society towards radical revolution. For radical forces are by their nature incapable of any persistent harmony of action, and have only the semblance of cohesion from a constraining fear or hatred. The dynamic source of revolution must be in the perversion of those at the top, and anarchy comes with their defalcation. Against such perils when they show themselves, the proper safeguard is the arousing of a counter class consciousness.
It is a sound theorem of President Lowell's that popular government "may be said to consist of the control of political affairs by public opinion." Now there is to-day a vast organization for manipulating public opinion in favor of the workingman, and for deluding it in the interest of those who grow fat by pandering in the name of emancipation to the baser emotions of mankind; but of organization among those who suffer from the vulgarizing trend of democracy there is little or none. As a consequence we see the conditions of life growing year by year harder for those whose labor is not concerned immediately with the direction of material forces or with the supply of sensational pleasure; they are ground, so to speak, between the upper and the nether millstone. Perhaps organization is not the word to describe accurately what is desired among those who are fast becoming the silent members of society, for it implies a sharper discrimination into grades of taste and character than exists in nature; but there is nothing chimerical in looking for a certain conscious solidarity at the core of the aristocratical class (using "aristocratical" always in the Platonic sense),with a looser cohesion at the edges. Let that class become frankly convinced that the true aim of a State is, as in the magnificent theory of Aristotle, to make possible the high friendship of those who have raised themselves to a vision of the Supreme Good, let them adopt means to confirm one another in that faith, and their influence will spread outward through society, and leaven the whole range of public opinion.
The instrument by which this control of public opinion is effected is primarily the imagination; and here we meet with a real difficulty. It was the advantage of such a union of aristocracy and inherited oligarchy as Burke advocated that it gave something visible and definite for the imagination to work upon, whereas the democratic aristocracy of character must always be comparatively vague. But we are not left wholly without the means of giving to the imagination a certain sureness of range, while remaining within the forms of popular government. The opportunity is in the hands of our higher institutions of learning, and it is towards recalling these to their duty that the first efforts of reform should be directed. It is not my intention here to enter into the precise nature of this reform, for the subject is so large as to demand a separate essay. In brief, the need is to restore to their predominance in the curriculum those studies that train the imagination, not, be it said, the imagination in its purely æsthetic function, though that aspect of it also has been sadly neglected, but the imagination in its power of grasping in a single firm vision, so to speak, the long course of human history, and of distinguishing what is essential therein from what is ephemeral. The enormous preponderance of studies that deal with the immediate questions of economics and government, inevitably results in isolating the student from the great inheritance of the past; the frequent habit of dragging him through the slums of sociology, instead of making him at home in the society of the noble dead, debauches his mind with aflabby, or inflames it with a fanatic, humanitarianism. He comes out of college, if he has learnt anything, anouveau intellectuel, bearing the same relation to the man of genuine education as thenouveau richeto the man of inherited manners; he is narrow and unbalanced, a prey to the prevailing passion of the hour, with no feeling for the majestic claims of that within us which is unchanged from the beginning. In place of this excessive contemporaneity we shall give a larger share of time and honor to the hoarded lessons of antiquity. There is truth in the Hobbian maxim that "imagination and memory are but one thing"; by their union in education alone shall a man acquire the uninvidious equivalent in character of those broadening influences which came to the oligarch through prescription—he is moulded indeed into the true aristocrat. And with the assertion of what may be called an inner prescription he will find among those over whom he is set as leader and guide a measure of respect which springs from something in the human breast more stable and honorable and more conformable to reason than the mere stolidity of an unreflecting prejudice. For, when everything is said, there could be no civilized society were it not that deep in our hearts, beneath all the turbulences of greed and vanity, abides the instinct of obedience to what is noble and of good repute. It awaits only the clear call from above.
Recent ideas of social justice have been marked by a vast extension of the category of human rights. While these new rights are most various they may all be covered by the general principle that wages may be of right more than what the wage taker earns for his employer, and that in all exchanges of any sort between the poor and the rich the poor has the right to take more than he gives. To follow the applications of this new doctrine of rights would be instructive. We should find that an employer is financially responsible for accidents occurring through an employee's recklessness. If my gardener gets drunk and drowns himself in the cistern, I must pay roundly to his estate. Nor have I the satisfaction, if it be such, of regarding this contribution as a compulsory beneficence. It is my gardener's right. The odd part is that if I, being a professor, get drunk and drown myself in the campus fountain, the corporation is in no way bound to assuage my widow's financial need. If the corporation should, by way of embalming my memory, grant her a pension, it would be a case not of her rights but of their charity. This perfectly possible instance reveals an odd reversal of all earlier doctrines of rights. It used to be supposed that rights increased with capacity. Now the more incapable a person may be, the more completely the state invests him with rights. Ability and power must be carefully hemmed in with duties. Weakness on the contrary is freed from duties and must be privileged.
Into what moral gulf we are thus cheerfully staggering it would be a high public service to inquire. But my theme is not so ambitious. I wish merely to suggest in a particular instance the somewhat woeful reaction of thisnew doctrine of rights upon a certain class of the weak—to wit, ill balanced and discontented women. I have witnessed many cases of personal unhappiness among women, some of domestic shipwreck, owing to a wife's moral confusion, some of women hounded by unreasonable discontent into public careers for which they have no capacity, and perhaps the most pitiful cases of all, women pursued by an aimless restiveness which finds no stated expression, but colors atrociously their every act. Peace and clear thinking wither as those women pass. They are mostly victims of a false theory that a woman has the innate right to be amused, and that for such amusement she need not pay. It will be seen that I have described what foreign neurologists callla maladie Américaine. And as a matter of fact the fallacy that a right to be amused exists, is more prevalent in America than elsewhere. Let us admit that Mrs. Wharton's Undine Spragg is overdrawn, she still retains high symbolic value. As Americans we may doubt her in parts, but we cannot disown her as a whole. She is the bright archangel of the dogma that while a woman must be amused, she need not pay.
At the outset we must discriminate sharply the right to be amused, from the ordinary pursuit of pleasure. The most reckless or voluptuous programme of life assumes in contrast a certain dignity and morality, from the fact that the pleasure seeker is prepared to take all risks and pay all prices. That is the man's code the world over, and in most countries it has imposed itself upon the community generally. It is a poor code enough as compared with self control and social service, but at least it has glimmerings of generosity and justice. The strong at all times have managed to live pretty satisfactorily by it. The weak have not suffered unduly under the rule of he who breaks must pay. Quite apart from the Epicurean programme, all sensible people work on a theory of reciprocity in service and in pleasure. I can't expectnice people to seek me unless I now and then seek them. If I am habitually silent or merely garrulous, I have no claim upon the good talker; he will properly flee my approach. So for the person who is not amusing there can be no right to be amused, and if he succeeds nevertheless in extorting amusement from the world, it is at somebody else's expense, and at the cost of his own soul.
What I frequently see in the faces of women, and especially in the faces of young girls of the wealthy classes, is as distressing to me as mysterious. It has been my rare good fortune to live among serene and companionable women, women whose graciousness has been rooted in character. Accordingly I am mystified by the hungry defiant faces I see about me wherever women congregate. They seem to be playing a part, to be desperately seeking something which they are getting in insufficient measure. They have the air of being ready to resent a slight while stubbornly maintaining a right. They are too intent. There is no ease in them and no fragrance. Now if these observations were of recent date or suddenly made, it would be prudent to set them down to the score of middle age and a growing disinclination from general society. It would be pleasant to believe that I am merely become old fashioned, mistaking Paris modes for inner characteristics, and particular cosmetic arts which the young girls of my youth happened not to employ, for a sign of degeneracy. Whereas, it may still be a true heart, the beating of which one observes too plainly at opera or dance, and rouge tinges nothing but the skin. So I would fain believe that the readiness with which our women assume the stigmata of the Paris half-world, is without significance. "The Ladies! God bless them!" it would be pleasant to end this ungracious discourse with the familiar toast. But the toast itself no longer is pledged with the old unction, and the modern woman is too intelligent to be satisfied with stale and perfunctory oblations. She knows that not all is well with her, and welcomes the probe. Thesatirists of our womenkind would starve but for women readers. I who am no satirist, but a simple observer of life, shall have my best reading from women, or shall go unread.
That defiant hungry look on our young girls' faces, so different from the shyness and wistfulness one generally notes in Europe, what is its ground? A complete answer would mean the writing of a considerable chapter of our history. One would trace the course of happy laborious partnerships in pioneer times, to the establishment of wealth, and the institution of a peculiar American cult of womanhood. This cult found expression in eloquent cant phrases. "Every American woman is a queen in her own household" was a favorite article of the liturgy. More economically expressive was the phrase "able to support a wife," a wife obviously being regarded as a luxury of the more expensive order. Along with the cult went a resolute practice of keeping all business or political cares from the women of the family. Such reticence as to the real issues of living, such exclusion from the usual means of education, was the lot of the American woman from early in the last century. She was, in another favorite liturgical phrase, exclusively, "The ornament of the home." Naturally her education was to consist wholly of accomplishments. Money poured into her hands and out. Whence it came, and the difficulty of getting it, were scrupulously concealed from her. To be a good provider was the cardinal masculine merit. For the husband the money grubbing realities; for the wife the decorative appearances. Very soon it became a tacit convention that, already separated in all ordinary business relations, husband and wife should be separated also in their pleasures. He was too dull or too tired for society, but from his fireside or club chair took a remotely conjugal satisfaction in the report of her brilliancy and social successes: for after all he was subsidizing her career. To be the husband of a very successful woman was likebeing the background angel for a theatrical star. It implied association and interest, but nothing like intimacy. Being reduced to a scintillant parasitic role, the American woman, to do her justice, played it pretty well. The literature and general discussions of the sixties and seventies abound in her laudation, while the American man is either charitably ignored or briefly commended for his self effacing virtues and unlimited generosity as a provider. It was in this black walnut era, which corresponds exactly with the high point of the cult of the American woman, that she became a familiar apparition in the hotels of Europe. Ostensibly she was cultivating some accomplishment, or, less specifically, her soul. In response to an abnormal social position she developed peculiar capacities. She devoured wholesale miscellaneous ill assorted information, and gave it back with interest. She acquired a brittle fluent manner of talk, but her idea of conversation was to be vivacious and assertive and above all merely to keep things going. She created a social atmosphere in which no thoughtful, unaggressive person could live. The American husband withdrew more securely into his social nonentity, while his place was taken by nondescript foreigners or by light footed and joyous young native male beings who also had the gift of keeping things up. These radiant young males for the most part flourished only for a space. In turn they became occulted husbands and tolerated good providers.
The women were less fortunate. To be an American woman was an inexorable career that once undertaken could not be abandoned. A few escaped by marrying into the simple human conditions prevailing among the European aristocracy, some American queens were dethroned through failure of the exchequer, a few succumbed to an increasing group of children; these were the fortunate exceptions. Most of them continued the hopeless task of building up a satisfactory life without includingthe ordinary responsibilities and loyalties. Naturally the cardinal maxim of a life largely empty of real interests and devoted to self exploitation along social lines, was the right to be amused. That is what, by and large, the good looking American woman is taught to regard as her most peculiar and precious right. That is the meaning of the hungry and defiant faces of our young girls. They are the last logical stage in the American notion of womanhood. They are anxiously asserting a right which the world by no means always allows—the right to be amused.
Let me restore a perhaps tottering reputation for humor by admitting that the picture just sketched is somewhat overdrawn. There was sometimes a certain unity in grotesquely sundered families. The organizing and management of a household in days before the apartment hotel, the telephone, and the department store, involved an irreducible minimum of steadying duties. The cult of the American woman often produced a sense ofnoblesse oblige, not very logical but efficacious. The queen could in the better sense do no wrong. Then there were always happy backwaters of society where the family was still an alliance, and mutual understanding was the rule. What justifies me in blackening the picture, is the fact that the dogma of the right to be amused is as strong as ever, and more disastrous in its results. Few duties and educational offsets help the modern girl to see life clearly and see it whole. Increasingly detached from all imposed responsibilities, she is more in danger of regarding the world as her playground and other men and women as her toys. The inevitable weakness of her position is that she has little to give. Her beauty and the charm of her sex, a certain restless vivacity, are often her sole current coin. It is a currency subject to rapid depreciation. After girlhood she frequently is not amusing, has nothing to give for the amusement become necessary to her. Establishing no stable and self respecting relations, she flies about in search of new excitements. Isms and ologiesclaim her passing fealty. Messiahs alternate with neurologists. To the problems of life she brings the mind of a spoiled child. If she marries well, she may at least conduct satisfactorily an expensive will-o'-the-wisp existence. For amusement by this sort is very exactly graded by its expensiveness. Large motor cars or yachts, opera boxes, public dining and dancing—these are the surest evidence that one's right to be amused is duly conceded by one's husband and by the world. Whatever satisfactions the married butterfly commands are largely denied to her unwedded sister. I know of no more pitiful spectacle than that of women in the forties still conducting with a child's mentality the occupations of girlhood. These constitute the supporting public for all the charlatanisms—social, political, and religious.
Of course I am aware that all babies are born with the right to be amused—a right which child specialists have valiantly but vainly striven to abridge. In the case of a male baby that right is pretty soon abridged by the rough and tumble and give and take of school and games. The sense that he must be amused is soon knocked out of a normal boy. In a young man whatever may survive of it yields to the somewhat grim business of earning a living. In a rich and unoccupied young man, the problem of amusement is very much that of the woman, with the marked difference, however, that only a very perverse young man imagines that amusement is due him, or can be had on other terms than his paying for it. In comparison with this wholesome process of gradual enlightenment, how little is done for the education of a girl! Compare with the unconditioned freedom of a well to do American maiden, that stern subjection to the complicated interest of a clan which is the lot of an English girl, or better, the rational preparation for marriage and motherhood which every well born French girl receives. To submit, to play a social part, to discount pleasure in favor of duty, this is the very air girls breathe in the oldercivilizations. A study or a mere observation of the women of Europe and America will leave no doubt as to where the balance of happiness lies. The boasted freedom of the American woman is often her sorrow, and her joy is escape from freedom into some kind of service.
This is a trite story. Robert Grant, Edith Wharton, Robert Herrick have expended the greatest artistry on the ungrateful theme of the egocentric American woman. More blatantly, David Graham Phillips, Upton Sinclair, and Owen Johnson have belabored the unfortunate creature. I venture to move matter so thoroughly familiar, only in the hope of setting it in something like historic perspective, and of pointing out remedial tendencies. And first of all, while this is primarily a woman's problem, it is emphatically of man's making. It would be a most curious and interesting historical study to ascertain just when and precisely how, the American notion of women as a luxury and ornament came into being. Until the quite recent revulsion against the theory, it passed for a beautiful expression of the innate chivalry of the American man. It is possible that it is indeed a product of that peculiar inept sentimentality—of that impotence in the field of the emotions—which frequently accompanies a life too narrowly devoted to business. In affairs involving the intelligence of the heart, there is notoriously no fool comparable with a certain type of millionaire. An unkinder view of this chivalric delusion of the American man as regards his womankind, is that it is not a delusion at all but a Machiavellian policy. He is overconcentrated in work, and socially inert. He bribes his women in order to be let alone. He dangles vanities before them in order to avoid a manly sharing of his life. The Undine Spraggs and her sisters in fiction are prone to take this view when they go to the rare pains of general reflection. Probably a mixture of the two motives would supply the real cause. Our forefathers did idolize their women, and doubtless wished to procure them happiness without first takingthe trouble to learn where a woman's happiness really lies. Our forefathers were also over busy men, and willing to pay handsomely for immunity from ungrateful social duties. They may have quite honestly desired to simplify what is a delicate and complicated personal adjustment, but in so doing they ignored that broad community of interest which is the vitalizing principle of any successful marriage. The present iconoclasm concerning our once idolized women will do very little good until it be clearly perceived that what is very much the misfortune of the American woman is also very much the fault of the American man. When he begins to realize that he is not merely a provider or patron, but in the fullest sense a partner, the old sentimentalisms will give way to reality and common sense.
Meanwhile much is happening to make our women more capable of genuine partnership. The projection of millions of women from sheltered homes into business has been a rude process and fraught with evils, but it has given to these women some vision of the world of affairs. Much of our recent humanitarian endeavor has been hysterical and half-baked, but it has also left a considerable residuum of genuine new experience and wisdom. Suffragist and socialist agitation has wavered between gushing sentimentalisms and benighted fanaticisms, but it has also been an educational process, revealing, to hundreds of thousands of women even if in a hectic light, the real figure of the world. A great deal that is still raw in these fermentations may eventuate in clearer ideas of social justice and personal wisdom. In a very true sense much of the revolt of women has been an unconscious protest against the theory of man as paymaster general. When men understand that women cannot live by frocks and functions alone, however generously provided, but want companionship, less will be heard about feminism and more about humanity.
Meanwhile it is the duty of parents to disabuse theirfemale offspring as to the existence of a right to be amused. To be amused is at best a privilege conditional upon one's desire to prove amusing to others. Amusement is necessary, but less necessary than it seems, and always has to be paid for fairly. It seems as if such ideas could be instilled into children, substituting a general morality and sense of fair play, for the old pseudo-chivalric notion of sex privilege. There was more to come of this argument when I was summoned to the telephone to command any one of a half a dozen little playmates to come and see my eight year old daughter. She is temporarily unoccupied and needs to be amused. When she is a little older she shall read this article.Fiat justitia!But stop! When I consider her with many women of my acquaintance, I am amazed that so much sweetness and efficiency have after all survived so much false doctrine and so many unfair kindnesses. The stock is good, if much of the thinking and training has been bad. Quite sincerely I toast the Ladies, if not with the old sentimental unction, at least with the profound conviction that they are worthy of more substantial guerdon than can ever be compacted from mere profits, dividends, and coupons. I will be more of a companion to her who has ever been that to me, and more of a comrade too for the little girl who wants to be amused.
That the results of applied woman suffrage may stand out the more clearly, it will be expedient to show, first, the results achieved in behalf of woman without its help. All are agreed that during the sixty-five years that have elapsed since the suffragists, led by Lucretia Mott, posted their "Declaration of Sentiments" at Seneca Falls, N. Y., in 1848, woman has gained certain rights and privileges. That Declaration contained a bitter indictment by woman of man who had "oppressed her on all sides." He had made her, if married, "in the eye of the law, civilly dead," having taken from her "all right in property, even to the wages she earns." He had made her "morally an irresponsible;" she could commit many crimes with impunity, "provided they be done in the presence of her husband, he becoming to all intents and purposes her master—the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty and to administer chastisement." He had so framed the laws of divorce as to what should be the proper causes, and, in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children should be given, "as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women—the law in all cases going upon the false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands."
The married woman having no rights, the single woman was "taxed to support a Government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it." Man had "monopolized nearly all the profitable employments;" and from those woman was permitted to follow, "she receives but a scanty remuneration." Man had closed to woman "all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most honorable to himself: as a teacher of theology, in medicine, or law, she is not known." Moreover,man had "denied to her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her." In the Church, too, she was subordinated, and apostolic authority was invoked "for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the Church." Men acted by a different code of morals from women, "by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in men." By such means, the indictment declared, man had discriminated against woman, endeavoring in every way he could to "destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her lead a dependent and abject life." And because of these things the drawers of the indictment demanded for women "immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States."
It was first of all as voters that the women should gain the rights denied them. Deprivation of the vote was the fundamental evil. The first item of their grievances named the ballot as their "inalienable right." It was primarily because this had been wrested away, the Declaration said, that man had been able to oppress woman on all sides.
But it needs only the restatement of the original suffragist grievances to show how completely woman has been emancipated since they were formulated, and chiefly without the vote. Nowhere in the United States is the married woman, in the eyes of the law, civilly dead. Nowhere is she bereft of the right in property and wages. In that year 1848 when the "Declaration of Sentiments" was drafted, New York State, still withholding the franchise from woman, expressly permitted married women to hold property for their sole and separate use. By a law of 1861, married women in New York received power to control property, including wages, and authority to will property was given them in 1867. By 1887 the propertyrights of married women in this State were more complete than those of their husbands, who could not convey real estate without their wives' consent. Woman now has a right of action for injuries to person or property, and she is liable for her own wrongful acts; that is, she is no longer "morally an irresponsible." Women are joint guardians with their husbands of their minor children, and, in case of divorce, the custody of the children is decreed reasonably to the innocent party without discrimination as to sex. The laws of divorce and separation, too, though differing widely in the several States, are impartial, applying equally to men and women. New York's women taxpayers have the right to vote on questions of local taxation in all towns and villages, and they are eligible to nearly all political offices, and to various positions of trust and responsibility. Moreover, all the professions are open to them.
In these respects, the case of New York is fairly typical of all the States in the Union, whether suffragist or non-suffragist. As for men's monopolizing "nearly all the profitable employments," the Federal census of 1900 showed that women were engaged in 295 out of the 303 masculine occupations. The original complaint that they were not admitted to men's pursuits on equal terms with men has changed to a demand for laws which shall discriminate in favor of women in industry because of their weaker physique. Only in Massachusetts, Indiana, and Nebraska, however, three male-suffrage States, have laws been passed prohibiting night work for women in factories and machine shops. The eight-hour law for women in California was enacted before they had the suffrage there, but it still exempts the great canning industry of that State from its operation, and it does not prohibit night work. The doubtful minimum wage act, and the maternity act for the protection of women were first copied from anti-feminist Europe by male-suffragist Massachusetts. Massachusetts, also, is generally creditedby child labor experts and by woman suffragists with having the best child labor law in the Union, applied in her great textile industries. It would seem, therefore, that the added complaint of the latter-day suffragists of lack of discrimination in favor of working women may be satisfied without resort by them to the ballot.
The facilities for acquiring a thorough education are now in no State denied to woman. In the argument of Mrs. A. J. George to the woman suffrage committee of the Federal Senate on April 19, 1913, this anti-suffragist authority noted the fact that there are "to-day more institutions which grant degrees to women in this country than there are institutions which grant degrees to men." The foundation of Vassar, of Wellesley, of Smith, of Mount Holyoke, was "in no way connected with the suffrage movement," while the opening of the Harvard examinations to women and the opening of the graduate departments of Yale University to women were due to the activities of men and women who were avowed anti-suffragists. In the universal granting of this great privilege to woman, therefore, the ballot was not used or needed.
The grievance that woman is subordinated in the Church was one that, by its nature, could not be settled by the suffrage, since in this country Church and State are irrevocably separate. As a matter of fact, however, woman has steadily gained rights and privileges in most denominations of the Protestant Church, including admission to the ministry and public participation in their affairs. For example, Dr. Anna Shaw, the President of the National Woman's Suffrage Association, is a clergywoman. As in religion, so in morals. The legal prohibitions of immorality are in most cases the same for both men and women; it is only outside the domain of legislation and within the sphere of social custom that divergencies appear, and here the discrimination is exercised notoriously by woman against her erring sisters.
Up to this point results achieved and practicable without the suffrage seem to argue strongly against a continuance of the propaganda to obtain the elective franchise for the redress of aggrieved womankind. Clothed with full rights in property and earnings, held morally accountable for her acts, made joint guardian with her husband over her children, welcomed to an equal competition with men in business, industry, and the professions, after ample opportunities given for acquiring a higher education and special training, to what further extent can the exercise of the voting power by woman improve her status? The grievances set forth in the "Declaration of Sentiments" of 1848 present the "whole case for woman as comprehensively as it ever has been stated since," according to an official statement of the National Woman Suffrage Association; the document's resolutions comprised "practically every demand that ever afterwards was made for women." The civil and legal rights besought therein have been so fully recognized that the anti-suffragists, numbering many public-spirited women who have battled zealously for these rights, now contend that womanhood suffrage is not needed.
Their suffragist opponents will not be gainsaid. While the condition of woman and her children has been mitigated, much remains to do, they say, and the more quickly by the ballot. For example, while eighteen States, comprising nearly one-half the population of the Union—41,231,000, to be exact—enjoy the benefit of joint guardianship laws, and in twenty-seven more States the surviving mother is made sole guardian of her children with the same powers exercised by the father in his lifetime, six States remain—Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, and Maryland, with a combined population of 9,104,000—in which the father has power to bequeath the guardianship to a stranger and away from the mother. To be sure, in this ninth of the population of the country the custom ignores the common law; husbands uniformlyleave the guardianship of children to their wives, and the mother shares authority over them with the father. But here is a field for corrective legal action. The question is whether, if women had the vote, this would be the swiftest and most direct means of bringing about the reform demanded. A suffragist writer has said: "It took the mothers of Massachusetts fifty-five years to get an equal guardianship law, but after the women obtained the ballot in Colorado the very next Legislature enacted one." She forgot that New York's joint guardianship law was passed a year before the Colorado statute. Mrs. George W. Townsend of Buffalo, who as head of the Woman's Educational and Industrial Union was active in urging the passage of the joint guardianship laws in both States, says of the one in New York:
Our Union was especially careful that the Suffrage Association should not know of the Union's effort until after the law was passed. I remember that a prominent suffragist called to see me as soon as she heard of it, and said, "How did you accomplish this great good, and not let us know?" And I answered, "Because we did not let you know." I think I was justified in saying that, because many men in both houses were so opposed to woman suffrage that they would not have voted for our bills. The guardianship bill was passed without a negative vote in either house.The work was done in a systematic manner. Circulars giving full information in regard to laws in other States, and as to what we desired to accomplish, and reasons therefor, were sent to every legislator. There was no lobbying, and, in fact, it was not necessary for me to go to Albany at all.
Our Union was especially careful that the Suffrage Association should not know of the Union's effort until after the law was passed. I remember that a prominent suffragist called to see me as soon as she heard of it, and said, "How did you accomplish this great good, and not let us know?" And I answered, "Because we did not let you know." I think I was justified in saying that, because many men in both houses were so opposed to woman suffrage that they would not have voted for our bills. The guardianship bill was passed without a negative vote in either house.
The work was done in a systematic manner. Circulars giving full information in regard to laws in other States, and as to what we desired to accomplish, and reasons therefor, were sent to every legislator. There was no lobbying, and, in fact, it was not necessary for me to go to Albany at all.
It should be noted in this connection that in Wyoming, while it is not among the "benighted" states that permit the father to will the guardianship of his children away from the mother, the women have had an equal voice in the State Government for more than half a century without making fathers and mothers joint guardians of their children. It is not clear, therefore, that joint guardianshiplaws have been passed the more quickly by reason of woman suffrage.
But other tests should be applied. The new complaints of woman that have arisen since the Declaration of 1848 deal largely with her condition in the industries which men have thrown open to her. Has the suffrage enabled her more quickly to ameliorate this condition? Around this point the strife rages between the "pros" and the "antis." Miss Minnie Bronson, who was employed from 1907 to 1909 by the Federal Bureau of Labor to investigate the conditions of labor of women and children, and who acted as the Special Agent of the Bureau to report on the strike of shirtwaist makers in 1910 has prepared a statement for the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women embodying a comparison of the laws for the protection of wage-earning women in the various States of the Union. Miss Bronson's contentions have been deemed of sufficient importance to merit a reply, with an introduction by Jane Addams, written by the two best qualified woman suffragist authorities on women in the industries, Miss Edith Abbott of Hull House, Chicago, and Professor Sophonisba P. Breckinridge of the University of Chicago. The allegations of Miss Bronson and the specific replies of her opponents thereto are marshaled below: