The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

The drunken loafer who has not earned a living for years is consulted by the Constitution on questions like the training and upbringing of children, the national settlement of religion in Wales and elsewhere, and as to the best method of dealing with the licensing problem. But the wife whose industry keeps him and his household from beggary, who pays the rent and taxes which constitute him a voter, who is therefore really responsible for his qualification to vote, is not taken into account in the slightest degree. I came in contact not long ago with a great girls' school in the south of England. It was founded by women, and it is administered by women. It is one of the most marvelous organizations in the whole country, and yet, when we had, in the year 1906, to give a national verdict on the question of education, the man who split the firewood in that school was asked for his opinion about it, while those ladies were deemed to be absolutely unfit to pass any judgment on it at all. That is a preposterous and barbarous anachronism, and so long as it lasts our democracy is one-sided and incomplete. But it will not last long. No franchise bill can ever again be brought forward in this country without raising the whole problem of whether you are going to exclude more than half the citizens of the land. Women have entered pretty nearly every sphere of commerce and industry and professional activity and public employment; and there never was a time when the nation stood more in need of the special experience, instincts, and sympathy of womanhood in the management of its affairs. When women get the vote the horizon of the home will be both brightened and expanded, and their influence on moral and social and educational questions, especially on the temperance question, and possibly on the peace of nations, will be constant and humanizing.

Those are a few of the reasons why I favor woman suffrage. But because I favor it I do not therefore hold myself bound to either speak or vote for any and every suffrage bill that may be introduced into Parliament. I voted against the so-called Conciliation Bill which proposed to give the vote to every woman of property if she chose to take the trouble to get it, and at the same time enfranchise only about one-tenth or one-fifteenth of the working women of the country. That was simply a roundabout way of doubling the plural voters and no democrat could possibly support it, so long as there remained a single alternative. The solution that most appeals to me is the one embodied in the Dickinson Bill, that is to say, a measure conferring the vote on women householders and on the wives of married electors; and I believe that it is in that form that woman suffrage will eventually come in this country. How soon it will come depends very largely on how soon the militants come to their senses.

I say, unhesitatingly, that the main obstacle to women getting the vote is militancy and nothing else. Its practitioners really seem to think that they can terrorize and pinprick Parliament into giving it to them; and until they learn something of the people they are dealing with, their whole agitation, so far as the House of Commons is concerned, is simply and utterly damned. It is perfectly astonishing to recall with what diabolical ingenuity they have contrived to infuriate all their opponents, to alienate all their sympathizers, and to stir up against themselves every prejudice in the average man's breast. A few years ago they found three-fourths of the Liberal M.P.'s on their side. They at once proceeded to cudgel their brains as to how they could possibly drive them into the enemy's camp. They rightly decided that this could not be done more effectually than by insulting and assaulting the Prime Minister, the chief of the Party, and a leader for whom all his colleagues and followers feel an unbounded admiration, regard, and affection. When they had thus successfully estranged the majority of Liberals they began to study the political situation a little more closely. They saw that the Irish Nationalists were very powerful factors in the Ministerial Coalition. The next problem, therefore, was how to destroy the last chance that the Irish Nationalists would support their cause. They achieved this triumphantly first by making trouble in Belfast where the only Nationalist member is or was a strong Suffragist, and secondly by going to Dublin when all Nationalist Ireland had assembled to welcome Mr. Asquith, throwing a hatchet at Mr. Redmond, and trying to burn down a theater. That finished Ireland, but still they were dissatisfied. There was a dangerous movement of sympathy with their agitation in Wales, and they felt that at any cost it had to be checked. They not only checked, but demolished, it with the greatest ease by breaking in upon the proceedings at an Eisteddfod. Now the Eisteddfod is not only the great national festival of Welsh poetry and music and eloquence, it is also an oasis of peace amid the sharp contentions of Welsh life. To bring into it any note of politics or sectarianism or public controversy, even when these things are rousing the most passionate emotions outside, seems to a Welshman like the desecration of an altar. That is just what the militants did, and Welsh interest in their cause fell dead on the spot. But even then they were not happy. They were still encumbered by the good-will of perhaps a hundred Tory M.P.'s. But they proved entirely equal to the task of antagonizing them. They began smashing windows, burning country mansions, firing race-stands, damaging golf-greens, striking as hard as they could at the Tory idol of Property. There is really nothing more left for them to do; they have alienated every friend they ever had; their work is complete beyond their wildest hopes.