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

ELBERT HUBBARD

There was a time in England when all the laws were made and executed by the King.

Later he appointed certain favorites who acted for him, and these were paid honors and emoluments accordingly.

Still later, all soldiers were allowed to express their political preferences. And that is where we got the idea about not allowing folks to vote who could not fight.

It was once the law in England that no Catholic should be allowed to vote.

It was also once the law in England that no Jew could hold real estate, could vote at elections, could hold a public office, or serve on a jury.

Full rights of citizenship were not given to the Jews in Great Britain until the year 1858. Deists, Theists, Quakers, and "Dissenters" were not allowed to testify in courts, and their right to vote was challenged in England up to 1885.

For centuries, Jews occupied the position of minors, mental defectives, or men with criminal records.

Women now in England occupy the same position politically that the Jews did a hundred years ago.

Until very recent times all lawmakers disputed the fact that women have rights. Women have privileges and duties—mostly duties.

All the laws are made by men, and for the most part the rights only of male citizens are considered. If the rights of women or children are taken into consideration, it is only from a secondary point of view, or because the attention of lawmakers is especially called to the natural rights of women, children, and dumb animals.

Provisions, however, have always been made in England as well as all other civilized countries for punishing Catholics, Jews, Quakers, and women.

In old New England there was once a pleasing invention called a "ducking stool," that was for "women only." For the most part, the punishment for these individuals who were not citizens was very much more severe than it was for the people who made and devised the punishment for them.

Women are admitted into the full rights of citizenship in New Zealand and Australia, and in several States in the United States.

There will surely come a time when we will look back and regard the withholding of full political rights from women in the same way that we now look back and regard the disfranchisement of Jews and Catholics.

There is no argument that can possibly be presented against the right of women to express their political preferences which does not in equal degree apply to the right of male citizens to express theirs.

Every possible logical argument has been put forward and answered.

The protest in England by certain women who are working for equal suffrage has taken what is called a militant form.

These women, in many instances, have been guilty of violence.

The particular women who have been foremost in this matter of violence are not criminals in any sense of the word. They are not plotting and planning the overthrow of the government. They are not guilty of treason; and certainly they are not guilty of disorder along any other line than that springing out of their disapproval of the failure of the government to grant the right of political representation to women.

"Taxation without representation" was the shibboleth of the men who founded the government of the United States of America.

This shibboleth, or slogan, came to them from across the sea and was first uttered in England before the days of Magna Charta.

That every adult individual, man or woman, possessed of normal mentality, should be thoroughly interested in the government, and should have the right of expressing his or her political preferences, is beyond dispute, especially under any government that affects to derive its powers from the governed.

The right to govern is conferred by the governed, and this is now admitted even in the so-called monarchies. And the governed are not exclusively males; the governed are men and women, for women are responsible before the law.

So thoroughly are these facts fixed in the minds of a great many men and women everywhere that a few men are possessed by the righteousness of the cause to a degree that they are willing not only to live for it and fight for it, suffer for it, but also to die for it.

Some of these women in London, who have been throwing stones into windows, thus destroying property, have signified as great a willingness to injure themselves as they have to injure the property of their fellow citizens, provided by so doing they can bring to the attention of the men in charge of the government the absolute necessity of recognizing the political rights of women.

If certain people in the past had not been willing to stake their all on individual rights, there would to-day be no liberty for any one.