MR. GOLDWIN SMITH ON FEMALE SUFFRAGE.
11111. GOLDWIN SMITH has fired a red-hot shot into Mr. Forsyth's Bill, and indeed into any Bill for establishing Female Suffrage. He was originally an advocate for the Revolu- tion, he certainly has no prejudices against change, and he has seen the Women's movement in America, where it has been far more successful than in this country, and yet he disapproves the proposal with a vehemence which once or twice carries him somewhat too far. He has evidently prepared his argument, which appears in Macmillan for June, with extraordinary care, he has abstained from any of his usual flights, and has sought to corrode rather than to break his opponents' argument, but still he once or twice makes assumptions that will be angrily denied by many who are quite on his side as to the general
issue. It is no argumeut against extending the suffrage to Englishwomen that Frenchwomen would restore the Bourbons, nor is it quite fair to assert that men will always legislate fairly on women's special questions. They do not do it about property. No doubt the House of Commons tried to make a fair law con- ferring the right of holding property upon women, but the House of Peers removed all its valuable clauses, and men did not care enough to compel the Peers to reconsider themselves. The whole body of English law upon intestacy is most unfair to women, more especially wives, who, as we, with the Prussian lawyers, maintain, are the husband's natural heirs during widowhood, and masculine senti- ment generally is unfair to them about money. They are expected to save, not spend, even when it was their own, and the father who spends £1,000 in settling his son in business often refuses the same sum to settle his daughter in marriage or a career. On property questions in general men are not strictly fair between the sexes, and Mr. Smith's story of the wife whose husband was her hired labourer is only intended to excite prejudice. Among the lower classes of the great cities the wife is very often indeed the husband's unhired labourer, not paid even in kindness, and nobody sees anything very monstrous in that, any more than in a rich woman keeping her own money and giving her husband only part. Nor does it matter much whether women, once electors, would be always conservative, or not. The right to the franchise implies the right to maintain the system of society one approves, and the labourers till better taught, may prove as Conservative as the women. Indeed, we are by no means sure that in England women would be Conservative in the English sense, and have always wondered why Tories, and especially aristocratic Tories, should so often be on their side. They seem to us to forget that voters are always zealous to remove their own pecuniary grievances, and that women might be persuaded to strike two blows which would annihilate the English aristocratic system. They would certainly alter the law of successions, and they would be far more likely than men to approve a law of compulsory equal division at death. One first care is for their daughters ; who would be protected by such a law most completely, and another for their children generally, who would thus be defended against all other relatives, and against the endowments which Scotchmen wisely call " mortifies- tions." Indeed, we venture to doubt whether " every woman is an aristocrat at heart" in the political sense, whether her jealousy of distinctions is not at least as strong as her wish to obtain them. Finally, we are not quite sure that we follow Mr. Smith in his view on female education. He may in his note about it mean only that women's brains must not be overpressed, but he may also mean that the woman's want of education corrects the over-education of the man, and keeps her children healthy, a formula in which we heartily disbelieve. The children of thoroughly educated parents are just as healthy as the children of the uneducated, and often more so, and an overtaxed brain transmits itself, as insanity also does, quite as readily through one sex as the other.
These, however, are comparatively trifles, and on the main issue Mr. Smith's argument will effect much good. It is not, of course, very novel, being the one on which we have ourselves, and of course many others, relied as the one unanswerable objection to female suffrage. The right to make laws and the power to enforce them must never be separated, or elective govern- ment will and must cease to exist, to be replaced by some form of government comparatively independent of opinion. It may be quite true that women, who are the majority, are, on most points, as divided in opinion as men, but there are questions on which they are not so divided, and sooner or later some one of these questions would come up. Whether it was the kingship, as Mr. G. Smith thinks might be the case, women sympathising more strongly than men with a personal ruler ; or the freedom of the Press, which most women at least hate, wanting journals always to agree with them ; or clericalism, or the relation of the sexes, or the liquor laws, it would come up, and would be settled according to the women's will. Then would the men submit ? In all human probability no, any more than on certain questions they submit to women's opinion now, and their very first revolt would either make Government ridiculous, too ridiculous to go on, or the women would be disfranchised summarily by being slapped away from the polls, till the law which entrusted them with the vote was repealed. In Eng- land there is scarcely a doubt the question brought up would be the Maine Law, which the whole body of lower-class women would welcome with delight ; it would be settled their way, and the settlement would be resisted by a force against which soldiers, who would ardently sympathise with the 'men, could not be employed. The fabric of government would in fact fall to pieces just as much as it would if we had female police qr female soldiery. Another and still stronger case is that of war. Women are much more ready for war than men, and much more excited about it, and men would not endure to pay all the taxes for a war ordered by representatives, for whom women alone, or women as owners of the casting-vote, were well known to have voted. " Some supporters of the movement flatter themselves that women would always vote for peace, and that Female Suffrage would con- sequently be a short method of ridding the world of war and standing armies. Such experience as we have hardly warrants this anticipation. Female Sovereigns, as a rule, have not been eminently pacific. It would be difficult to find four contemporary male rulers who made more wars than Catherine II. of Russia, Maria Theresa, Madame de Pompadour (who ruled France in the name of her lover), and the Termagant, as Carlyle calls her, of Spain. It is widely believed that the late Empress of the French, inspired by her-Jesuits, was a principal mover in the attack on Germany. Those who know the Southern States say that the women there are far more ready to renew the Civil War than the men. The most effective check on war is, to use the American phrase, that every one should do his own fighting. But this check cannot be applied to women, who will be comparatively irresponsible in voting for war. A woman, in fact, can never be a full citizen in countries where, as in Germany, it is part of a citizen's duty to bear arms." Moreover, and this is a new point which we have not seen before, but which is put by Mr. Goldwin Smith with great force, the mere consciousness that laws were passed by voters who could not, whatever their majority, enforce them, would, especially in a rough community like ours—and Londoners half-forget bow
rough the real majority of men are—weaken the respect for all law, and, as we may add, completely deprive it of a most valu- able power, which it certainly possesses in England, as it appears to have done in Rome,—that of creating a sort of conscience. Rough people would say of many laws, as they say even now of one or two laws, such as the law on betting, "These rules are merely grandmothers' fads,' " and if they knew that they were voted by grandmothers, they would disobey them, and bring in the end free government to the ground. Upon this point Mr. Goldwin Smith's remarks are as full of thought as of eloquence :-
" Elective government, with the liberty of opinion and the power of progress which are its concomitants, has been brought into existence by the most terrible throes of humanity. When perfected and firmly esta- blished, it will, as we hope, and have good grounds for believing, give to reason and justice an ascendancy which they have never had before in human affairs, and increase the happiness of all by making private interest subordinate to the public good. But its condition, if we look .at the world as a whole, is still exceedingly precarious. All the powers of class interest, of sybaritism, of superstition, are arrayed against it, and have vast forces at their command, including tho great standing armies of Europe, while they find accomplices in the lassitude, the alarm, the discouragement caused by the revolutionary storms which, unhappily, are almost inevitable attendants upon the birth of a new order of things. Its existence having been so far a straggle, and an assertion at the sword's point, of principles, just in themselves, but needing qualification to make them available as the foundations of a polity, it is full of defects, to remedy which, so as to make it the deli- berate expression of public reason, clear of sectional interest and passion, is now the great aim of political thought and effort. Those to whose hands it is committed at this crisis are trustees for posterity of a heritage bought by ages of effort and torrents of blood; and they are bound to allow neither their own ambition nor that of any one else, if they can help it, to imperil the safety of their trust. That women would be likely to vote for one set of aspirants to political effice rather than for the opposite set, would be a very bad reason for withholding from them the suffrage even for a day ; but that they would probably overturn the institutions on which the hopes of the world rests, is as good a reason as there can be for withholding any- thing from anybody. When free institutions are firmly established in Europe, the question of Female Suffrage may, perhaps, be raised with less peril, so far as political interests are concerned ; but to take a 'female vote on their fate at present, would be as suicidal as it would Eave been to take a female vote on the issue between Charles L and the Parliament in the middle of the Civil War."
This is true of all States, and for a reason Mr. Goldwin Smith does not give, that the prime difficulty of the elective system is to give it force enough. Even in England it would be most diffi- cult to secure obedience to a vote enforcing a conscription, while in every other free State, Assemblies tremble at certain forms of taxation which they know to be expedient. Neither the Spanish Cortes, nor the Italian Parliament, nor the French Assembly, has the power to pass precisely the tax-laws it would like, and this feebleness would be enormously increased by a doubt whether the member elected by ballot really represented the strength of the community. It would also be increased, fright- fully increased, by any tendency to vacillation, and that there would be such a tendency we cannot doubt, the new potentate being entirely inexperienced in legislation. " In the United States the grievance of which most is heard is the tyrannical stringency of the marriage tie, which, it is alleged, gives a man property in a woman, and unduly interferes with the freedom and genuineness of affection. Some of the language used is more startling than this, and if reproduced, might unfairly prejudice the case. But male legislatures in the United States have already carried the liberty of divorce so far, that the next step would be the total abolition of marriage and the destruction of the family. The women themselves have now, it is said, begun to draw back.
They have probably become aware that liberty of divorce must be reciprocal, that marriage is pre-eminently a restraint placed on the passions of the man in the interest of the woman ; that a woman loses her charms more easily than she loses her need of a protector, and that to the children divorce is moral and social ruin. Mr. Mill demands for the ' slave ' the privilege of changing her master ; be forgets that he would at the same time give the master the privilege of changing his slave." This, however, is again a question apart from the main one, which is the possible existence of a Government in which legal right and physical power were for ever divorced. Man is the stronger, when all is said.
Of course we have not pretended to argue, any more than Mr.
Smith, as if electoral power were to be confined to the spinsters and widows of the island who happen to own houses. That vote would be just as bad as the mass-vote ; for the women being one-sixth of the electors, would, merely to assert themselves, hold the balance of power ; but it is, and is acknowledged, a mere sham, unjust in principle and silly in policy. We are not going to let in Lola ItIontes and exclude Mrs. Fry, or to believe that the sex will be content with representation by widows and old-maids alone.
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