Chapter X: Part 10

The scientists take for granted that the education of the schools creates intelligence; very often it does no such thing. It creates a superficial appearance of knowledge, indeed; but knowledge is like food, unless it be thoroughly assimilated when absorbed, and thoroughly digested, it can give no nourishment; it lies useless, a heavy and unleavened mass. It is the fashion in these times to despise husbandmen and husbandry, but it is much to be questioned if the city cad, with his smattering of education, his dabbling in politics, his crude, conceited opinions upon matters on which he is absolutely ignorant, be not a far more ignorant, as he is undoubtedly a far more useless, person than the peasant, who may never have opened a book or heard of arithmetic, but thoroughly understands the soil he works on, the signs of the weather, the rearing of plants and of animals, and the fruits of the earth which he cultivates. The man of genius may be many-sided; nature has given him the power to be so; but the mass of men do not and cannot obtain this Protean power; to do one thing well is the utmost that the vast majority can well hope to do; many never do so much, nor a quarter so much. To this vast majority science would say: you may be as indifferent weavers, ploughmen, carpenters, shopmen, what you will, but you must know where the spermatic nerves are situated in the ichneumon, and you must describe the difference between microzoaires and miraphytes, and you must understand the solidification of nitric acid. Nor is the temper which science and its teachers seem likely thus to give the human race, one of fair promise. How much have not the men of science added to the popular dread of cholera, which in its manifestation of cowardice and selfishness has so grossly disgraced the Continent of Europe of late years? Their real or imaginary creation, the microbe, has invested cholera with a fanciful horror so new and hideous in the popular mind, that popular terror of it grows ungovernable, and will, in great likelihood, revolt beyond all restraint, municipal or imperial, whenever the disease shall again revisit Europe with violence. Again, how many nervous illnesses, how many imaginary diseases, have sprung into existence since science, popularised, attracted the attention of mankind to the mechanism of its own construction? It is a familiar truth that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and of no knowledge is it truer than of physiological knowledge. It has been said, that every one at forty should be a fool or a physician, and so far as knowing what to eat, drink and avoid, every one should be so; but, unhappily, those who become the latter, _i.e._, those who become capable of controlling their own constitutional ailments and weaknesses, are apt to contract in their study of themselves an overweening tendency to think about themselves. The generalisation of physiology amongst the masses means the generalisation of this form of egotism. A child who was told and shown something of anatomy, said, naively: ‘Oh, dear me! now that I know how I am made, I shall be always thinking that I am coming to pieces.’ In a less innocent way the effect of the popularisation of physiology is the same on the multitude as on this child: it increases valetudinarianism, nervousness and the diseases which spring from morbid fears and morbid desires. Those nervous illnesses which are the peculiar privilege of modern times, are largely due to the exaggerated attention to themselves which science has taught to humankind. The Greek and the Latin said: ‘Let us eat and drink and enjoy, for to-morrow we die.’ Modern science says: ‘Let us concentrate our whole mind on ourselves and our body, although our mind like our body is only a conglomeration of gases which will go out in the dark.’ The classic injunction and conclusion are the more healthy and the more logical, and produced a race of men more manly, more vigorous and more consistent with themselves.

To return to the assertions contained in this address which we now consider: in the address it is stated as a fact which all must rejoice over, that in Boston one shoe factory, by its machines, does the work of 30,000 shoemakers in Paris, who have still to go through the weary drudgery of hand-labour. Now, why is the ‘drudgery’ of sewing a shoe in any way more ‘weary’ than the drudgery of oiling, feeding and attending to a machine? Machine-work is, on the contrary, of all work the most mechanical, the most absolute drudgery. There is no kind of proof that, because the work of 30,000 shoemakers is done by a machine, mankind at large is any the happier for this. We know that all machine-made work is inferior to hand-work; inferior in durability, in excellence of quality, and in its inevitable lack of that kind of individuality and originality which handwork takes from the fingers which form it. In the _Seven Lamps of Architecture_, there is an admirable exposition of this immeasurable difference in quality which characterises hand-labour and machine-made work; of the stone cut by steam and the stone cut by hand. Let us only consider what ruin to the arts of India has been brought about by the introduction of machinery. The exquisite beauty of Oriental work is due to the individuality which is put into it; the worker, sitting beneath his grove of date-trees, puts original feeling, individual character, into each line graven on the metal, each thread woven in the woof, each turn given to the ivory. Machines destroy all this. They make machines of the men who tend them, and give a soulless and hateful monotony to everything which they produce.

Despite the vaunt of Playfair, the cobbler who sits on the village green, doing sound, if simple work, honestly, giving a personality to the shoe he labours on, and knowing on what foot it will be worn and whither it will go, is a man, and maybe in his own humble way a good artist; but the attendant who feeds the shoe-machine with oil, or takes from it its thousands of machine-cut leathers, is no better than a machine himself; so far from being ‘set free,’ he is in servitude. The cobbler on the village green knows far more of freedom than he.

This curious statement that hand-work, with its scope for originality and individual interest is slavery, whilst the work of factories, mechanical, monotonous and done in ugly chambers and unwholesome air, is liberty, is surely the oddest delusion with which the fanatical and biased mind of science ever delighted itself. Who can compare the freedom of the native child in a village of Benares, shaping an ebony or cocoanut toy under the palm-fronds of his home, with the green paroquets swinging, and the monkeys chattering in the sun-lit bamboos above his head, with the servitude of the poor little sickly and weary Hindoos, thronging in patient flocks the noisome factory-chambers of Bombay?

The President of the British Association seems to expect that all men whom machines ‘set free’ from the drudgery of their daily calling, will, all at once, do something infinitely better than they did before they were free. But this seems to me a very rash conclusion. If the 30,000 shoemakers are all ‘set free’ in Paris, by the introduction of the Boston machine, is it so certain that their freedom will produce anything better than a good pair of shoes? What greater freedom is there in attending to the machine if they select to do that, or in entering into another trade?—one thing or the other no doubt they must do, if they want to earn their bread? What have they gained by being ‘set free, and passed from one kind of occupation to another?’ I fail to see what they have gained. Have the public gained? It is open to doubt. Where will be the gain to their contemporaries, or to themselves, if these 30,000 shoemakers ‘set free’ become telegraph clerks or book-keepers? Something they must become, unless they are to live as paupers or mendicants. Where is their freedom? ‘Set free’ is a seductive and resonant expression, but analysed it simply means nothing in this instance. And, before quitting this subject, let me also remark that if Playfair knew as much about shoes as he does about science, he would know that a machine to make shoes is a most unwholesome invention, because every shoe or boot which is not made _expressly_ for the foot which is to wear it, is an ill-made shoe, and will cause suffering and deformity to the unwise wearer. The vast mass of the population of every ‘civilised’ nation has deformed feet, because they buy and wear ready-made shoes, thrusting their extremities into houses of leather never designed for them. Machines which make shoes by the thousand can only increase this evil. As it is, we never see by any chance any one walk well, unless it be some one whose shoes are made with great care and skill, adjusted to his feet alone, or peasants who have never shod their feet at all and step out, with the bare sole set firmly and lightly on their mother earth. Science can, no doubt, turn out millions of cheap shoes, all exactly alike, but Nature will not consent to adopt such monotony of contour in the feet which will wear them.

The President of the British Association speaks of science always as of a Demeter, with blessings in her hands, creating the fulness of the fields and the joys of mankind. He forgets that the curse of Demeter brought barrenness: and if we resist the charm of his eloquence and look more closely at the tissue of it, we shall not be so content to accept his declarations. What does the expression mean, ‘to benefit mankind?’ I conclude that it must mean to increase its happiness and its health; all the wisdom of the ages will avail it nothing if it pule in discontent and fret in nervous sickness. Now, does science increase the sum of human happiness? It is very doubtful.

Let us take the electric telegraph as an instance of the benevolence of science. Can it be said to make men happier? I think not. Politicians and diplomatists agree that the hasty judgments and conflicting orders which it favours and renders possible, double the chances of internecine quarrels, and stimulate to irritation and haste, which banish statesmanship. In business the same defects are due to it, and many a rash speculation or unconsidered reply, an acceptance or refusal, forced on men without there being time for any mature consideration, have led to disastrous engagements and as disastrous failures. Even in private life its conveniences may have a certain value, but the many troubles and excitements brought by it are incalculable. Niobe hearing of the death of her children by a printed line on a yellow sheet of paper, has her grief robbed of all dignity and privacy, and intensified by a shock which deals her its fatal blow without any preparation of the mind to receive it. The telegraph, bridging space, may be, and is, no doubt, a wonderful invention, but that it has contributed to the happiness or wisdom of humanity is not so certain. Men cannot do without it now, no doubt; neither can they do without alcohol. The telegraph, like nearly all the inventions of the modern age, tends to shorten time but to harass it, to make it possible to do much more in an hour, a day, a year, than was done of old, but to make it impossible to do any of this without agitation, brain-pressure and hurry. It has impaired language and manners, it has vulgarised death, and it has increased the great evils of immature choice and hasty action; these drawbacks weighed against its uses must at the time prevent us from regarding its invention as an unmixed blessing. Of the telephone may be said as much, and more.[L]

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Footnote L:

Science having shouted many hallelujahs over the telephone, now
discovers that it is a terrible disseminator of disease!

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Playfair, proceeding in his enumeration of the benefits which science confers on man, turns to that most familiar matter, air, and that equally familiar element, water. He speaks with pride of all which science has discovered concerning their component parts, and their uses and effects upon the world. His pride, no doubt, may be justified in much, but he passes over one great fact in connection with air and water, _i.e._, that both have been polluted through the inventions of science in a degree which may well be held to outweigh the value of the discoveries of science.

Were we to awake an Athenian of the time of Phidias from his mausoleum, and take him with eyes to see and ears to hear and nostrils to smell, into Blackpool or Belfast, even into Zurich or Munich, he would ask us, in stupefaction, under what curse of the gods had the earth fallen that mankind should dwell in such hideous clamour, such sooty darkness, such foul stenches, such defiled and imprisoned air. He would survey the begrimed toilers of the mills and looms, the pallid women, the stunted offspring, the long lines of hideous houses, the soil ankle-deep with cinder-dust, the skies a pall of lurid smoke, the country scorched and blackened and accursed; he would survey all this, I say, asking by what malediction of heaven and what madness of mankind the sweetest and chief joys of Nature had been ruined and forgotten thus? He would behold the dwarfed trees dying under the fume of poisonous gases, the clear river changed to a slimy, crawling, stinking, putrid flood of filth; the buoyant air, once sweet as the scent of cowslips or clover-grass, made by the greed of man into a sickly, noxious, loathsome thing, loaded with the stench of chemicals and the vapours of engine-belched steam. He would stand amidst this hell of discordant sounds, between these walls of blackened brick, under this sky of heavy-hanging soot; and he would remember the world as it was; and if at his ears any prated of science, he would smile in their faces, and say,—‘If these be the fruits of science let me rather dwell with the forest beast and the untaught barbarian.’

Yes; no doubt science can study air in her spectrum, and analyse water in her retorts; she can tell why the green tree dies in the evil gas, and the rose will not bloom where the blast-furnace roars: she can tell you the why and the wherefore, and can give you a learned treatise on the calcined dust which chokes up your lungs; but she cannot make the green tree and the wild rose live in the hell she has created for men, and she cannot make the skies she has blackened lighter, nor the rivers she has poisoned run clean. Even we who dwell where the air is pure, and the southern sun lights the smiling waves and the vine-clad hills, even we cannot tell how beautiful was the earth in the days of the Greek anthologists; when the silvery blue of wood-smoke alone rose from the hearth fires; when the flame of the vegetable oils alone illumined the fragrant night; when the white sails alone skimmed the violet seas; when the hand alone threw the shuttle and wove the web; and when the vast virgin forests filled the unpolluted air with their odorous breath. Even we cannot tell what the radiance of the atmosphere, of the horizons, of the sunrise and sunset, were when the world was young. Our loss is terrible and hopeless, like the loss of all youth. It may be useless to lament it, but in God’s name let us not be such purblind fools that we call our loss our gain.

Repose, leisure, silence, peace and sleep are all menaced and scattered by the inventions of the last and present century. They are the greatest though the simplest blessings that mankind has ever had; their banishment may be welcomed by men greedy only of gold; but, meantime, the mad-houses are crowded, spinal and cerebral diseases are in alarming increase, heart-disease in divers shapes is general, where it once was rare, and all the various forms of bodily and mental paralysis multiply and crown the triumphs of the age.

Let us turn for a moment to the consideration of politics and of war as these are affected by the influence of science. Playfair speaks much of the superior wisdom, the superior education, the superior devotion to science, of Germany, as contrasted with those of any other nation; he lauds to the skies her enormous grants to laboratories and professors of physiology and chemistry and ‘original research’ (called by the vulgar, vivisection); but the only result of all this expenditure and instruction is a military despotism so colossal that, whilst it overawes and paralyses both German liberty and European peace, it yet may fall over from its own weight any day, like the giant of clay which it resembles. Are we not then justified in objecting to accept, whilst the chief issue of German culture is Militarism and anti-Semitism, such praises of Germany, and refusing to render such homage to her? ‘By your fruits ye shall be judged,’ is a just saying: and the fruits of Germany, in the concert of Europe and the sum of political life, are dissension, apprehension, absolutism, and the sacrifice of all other nations to the pressure of the military Juggernaut which rolls before her; whilst in her own national life the outcome of the sanguinary lessons given by the government is little better than the barbarism of the middle ages without its redeeming law of chivalry. The incessant and senseless duels which maim and disfigure German youth remain a disgrace to civilisation, and a duellist may fire three times at an adversary who _never returns the fire_ and, killing him at the last, will only be punished by a slight imprisonment, whilst he will be admired and deified by his comrades.[M] Such barbarous brutality, such insensibility to generous feeling, such universal resort to the arbitration of every trifling dispute by the pistol or the sabre, is the chief characteristic of the nation in which science rules supreme! Conscription, that curse of nations, is forced on all weaklier powers by the enormous armed forces of Germany; art suffers, trades suffer, families suffer; and we are called on by a ‘scientific’ mind to admire as a model the nation which is the cause of this suffering, as we are bidden to admire as models also her mutilated and bandaged students, and her blue-spectacled and blear-eyed school children!

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Footnote M:

See _Times_ of September 19, 1885: account of duel in Munich.

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Again Playfair traces the defeat of France in 1870 to the inferiority of her university teaching, and gives the opinion of the Institut de France as his authority. It seems a singularly illogical and unphilosophical decision for such an august body to have given forth publicly. The causes of the defeat of France stretch farther back and have deeper roots than can be accounted for by the omission of the state to create more professors and laboratories. The whole teachings of history show that all states, after reaching their perihelion, gradually decline and sink into an inferior place amongst the nations. The day of France, as of England, is already past its noon. Neither will ever be what they have been. Neither will ever again give law to Europe as they gave it once. But so many causes, some near, some remote, have all contributed to bring about a decline which is as inevitable to nations as to individuals, that it is surely most unphilosophic to contend that such decay could have been averted by the creation of some hundred or thousand more professors of natural or other science. It may be excusable for such a professor to consider such professorships the one universal panacea for all ills; but it is not an opinion in which those who know France best and most intimately would be inclined to coincide. They would conclude that, on the contrary, she has too many professors already; that the grace, and wit, and courtesy, and wisdom and chivalry have gone out of her since she was ruled from the desks of the school-master, the physiologist and the notary, and that the whole system of French colleges is calculated to emasculate and injure the character of the schoolboy before he goes up for his baccalaureate.

The German invasion of France was supported by all which science could do, yet most military judges are agreed that unless the carelessness of her foe had afforded her a fortnight’s preparation, Germany would have been hopelessly beaten on her own territory; whilst, look at the campaign how we may, it cannot stand a moment’s comparison with the Eastern marches of Alexander, or the conquests of Roman generals. With none of the resources of modern warfare, these great conquerors carried fire and sword through the whole of the regions known to them, from the sands of Africa to the ice-plains of the Baltic. What is there in modern war, which can compare with the campaigns of Hannibal, the amazing victories of Julius Cæsar, the deeds of the young Pompeiins, the story of every Legion? In the English endeavour to rescue Gordon, with every aid which modern science can invent, and assisted by every facility which modern modes of transit lend to the transport of multitudes, an army was despatched from Great Britain with orders to reach a city on the Nile. The errand was too difficult to be accomplished; the generals returned with their mission unfulfilled; the country received them with honour. This is the height to which the assistance of modern science has brought the would-be Cæsars of the age.

What child’s play would this expedition to Khartoum have seemed to Scipio Africanus or to Lucius Sylla! Yet all the ‘resources of science’ did not save the modern expedition from failure, and, in the face of Europe and Asia, it retreated in ignominy before the barbaric and untrained followers of a half-mad prophet, after an enormous expenditure of stores and treasure, and a perfectly useless waste of human life!

War has been almost incessant since the empire of science, but it has been characterised neither by magnanimity nor true triumph. Europe, armed to the teeth, is like a muzzled pack of blood-hounds; every nation lives in terror of the others; to such a pass has scientific warfare brought the world. The multiplication of engines of destruction is one of the chief occupations and boasts of a scientific age, and it can claim a melancholy pre-eminence in the discovery of the means to inflict the most agonising of all wounds through the medium of conical bullets and shells of nitro-glycerine. To have added unspeakable horror to death, and to have placed the power of secret and wholesale assassination in the hands of ignorant and envious men, is one of the chief benefits which this Egeria has brought to her eager pupil. And when her worshippers laud her to the skies, as does the president of the Aberdeen meeting, their silence on this side of her teaching is at once significant and ominous.

Playfair is obviously afraid that the Humanities will always obtain, in England at least, a larger place in public teaching and in public subsidies than pure science will be able to do. I wish his fear may be justified. My own fears are on the other side. Science offers prizes to the prurient curiosities and the nascent cruelties of youth with which literature can never compete. To study all the mysteries of sex in anatomy, and to indulge the power of a Nero in little when watching the agonies of a scientifically-tortured or poisoned dog, are enjoyments appealing to instincts in the frame of the school-boy, with which not even the most indecent passage in his Greek or Latin authors can ever pretend to measure attraction. The professors of science need have no fear as to the potency of the charm which their curriculum will exercise over the juvenile mind. Teaching which offers at once the penetration into corporeal secrets and the power of torture over animals, possesses a fascination for the minds of youth which it will never lose, because its appeals are addressed to those coarsest and crudest impulses which are strongest of all in the child and in the adolescent.

What science is preparing for the future of man, in thus putting the scalpel and the injecting-needle into the hands of children, is a darker and wider question. One thing is certain, that in the future, as in the streets and temples of Ancient Rome, there will be no altar to Pity.

The acknowledged doctrine of the professors of ‘research,’ that all knowledge is valuable because it is, or appears to be, knowledge, and that all ways and methods of obtaining it are justified and sanctified, bears so curious a likeness to the self-worship of the Papal dominion and of the Spanish Inquisition, that we see, with a sense of despair, how bigotry and despotism in some form or another are fated to reappear so long as human life shall last.

It is significant of the political immorality and readiness to tyrannise over others in the pursuit of their aims, which characterise the scientific classes, that they are willing to admire and support any government, however despotic, which is willing in return to endow their scholarships and erect their laboratories. They are inclined to surrender all political liberty, if by so doing they can obtain a ruler who will build them a number of new colleges, with every new instrument ready to their hands for animal torture and physiological or chemical experiment.

A Lorenzo di Medici, devoted exclusively to the sciences instead of to the arts, would be their ideal sovereign. Public liberties might perish under him as they should; he would give science her free scope, her desired endowments, her million living victims; he would be even too enlightened to refuse her human subjects for the physiological laboratory.

This curious willingness of the pursuers of science to join hands with tyranny, so long as tyranny helps themselves, is the darkest menace of the world’s future. In time to come it may assume dimensions and aspects which are undreamed of now. The demand of biologists and chemists to be provided for out of the funds of the state, is a demand which has never been made by literature or art, and would not be tolerated from them. The exorbitant sums insisted on for the establishment of laboratories and professorships, rob science of that character of disinterested devotion which alone would make it worthy of esteem. ‘Give me a thousand or fifteen hundred a year,’ says the physiologist to the state; ‘give me money-grants also for experiments which I may spend at my good option and for which I need return no account, and leave me to cut up dogs and cats and horses at leisure. In return I will give you some new facts about internal hydrocephalus or the length of time a new poison takes to kill a guinea-pig.’ The agreement may, or may not, be worth the state’s entering into with the physiologist, but in any case the physiologist cannot deny that he makes a good income out of his science, and cannot pretend to any disinterested or philanthropic selection of it. The moment that any man accepts a salary for intellectual work, he must submit to resign all claim to purely intellectual devotion to it. The claims of scientists to be paid and provided for out of national funds has many equivocal aspects, and will have many unwholesome results; whilst the rapacity and insistence with which they are put forward are as unbecoming as they are undisguised. The high priests of modern science are not likely to shed tears like the Greek philosopher Isocrates because they are compelled to take money. On the contrary, they clamour loudly for their maintenance by their nation, with a cupidity which has happily never disgraced either literature or art.

As modern socialism aspires to make the world into one vast allotment-ground, with every man’s half-acre meted out to him on which to build his hut and hive his store, so science would change the world into one vast class-room and laboratory, wherein all humanity (paying very large fees) should sit at the feet of its professors, whom it would clothe with purple and fine linen, and whom it would never presume to oppose or to contradict.

The world will gain nothing by delivering itself, as it is gradually doing, from the bondage of the various churches and their priesthoods, if in their stead it puts its neck under the yoke of a despotism, more intellectual perhaps, but as bigoted, as arrogant, and as cruel. That this danger lies before it from its submission to the demands of science, no dispassionate student of humanity can doubt.

FEMALE SUFFRAGE

It is a singular fact that England, which has been always esteemed the safest and slowest of all factors in European politics, should be now seriously meditating on such a revolutionary course of action as the political emancipation of women. It is a sign, and a very ominous sign, of the restlessness and feverishness which have come upon this century in its last twenty years of life, and from which England is suffering no less than other nations, is perhaps even suffering more than they, since when aged people take the diseases natural to youth it fares ill with them, more ill than with the young. There are many evidences that before very long, whichever political party may be in office, female suffrage will be awarded at Westminster, and if it be so, it is scarcely to be doubted that the French Chambers and the Representative Houses at Washington will be loth to lag behind and resist such a precedent. The influence on the world will scarcely be other than most injurious to its prosperity and most degrading to its wisdom.

It is true that the wholesale exercise of electoral rights by millions of uneducated and unwashed men is a spectacle so absurd that a little more or a little less absurdity may be held not to matter very greatly. The intellectual world in political matters has voluntarily abdicated already and given its sceptre to the mob. ‘Think you,’ said Publius Scipio to the raging populace, ‘then, I shall fear those free whom I sent in chains to the slave market?’ But the modern politician, of whatever nation he be (with the solitary exception of Bismarck), does fear the slaves whose chains he has struck off before they know how to use their liberty, and has in him neither the candour nor the courage of Scipio.

Rationally, logically, political power ought to be alloted in proportion to the stake which each voter possesses in the country. But this sound principle has been totally disregarded in the present political systems of both Europe and America. Vapourings anent the inherent ‘rights of man’ have been allowed to oust out common-sense and logical action, and he whose contributions to the financial and intellectual power of his nation are of the largest and noblest order has no more electoral voice in the direction of the nation than the drunken navvy or the howling unit of the street-mob. This is esteemed liberty, and commends itself to the populace, because it levels, or seems to level, intellect and wealth with poverty and ignorance. It is probable that America will, in years to come, be the first to change this, the doctrine of democracy, as there are signs that the United States will probably grow less and less democratic with every century, and its large land-owners will create an aristocracy which will not be tolerant of the dominion of the mob. But meantime Europe is swaying between absolutism and anarchy, with that tendency of the pendulum to swing wildly from one extreme to the other which has been always seen in the whole history of the world; and one of the most curious facts of the epoch is that both democracy and conservatism are inclined to support and promote female suffrage, alleging each of them totally different motives for their conduct, and totally different reasons for the opinions which they advance in its favour.

The motives of the Tory leaders are as unlike those of Mrs Fawcett, Mrs Garratt, and the rest of the female agitators as stone is unlike water, as water is unlike fire. The conservative gentlemen wish to admit women into political life because they consider that women are always religious, stationary, and wedded to ancient and stable ways; the female agitators, on the contrary, clamour to have themselves and their sex admitted within the political arena because they believe that women will be foremost in all emancipation, innovation, and social democratic works. It is an odd contradiction, and displays perhaps more than anything else the utter confusion and the entire recklessness and abandonment of principle characteristic of all political parties in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It is very possible that as the English labourer obtained his vote through the confusion and jealousies of party against the sane, the serene, and the unbiased judgment of patriots, so woman in England, and if in England, ultimately in America, will obtain hers. Opportunist policies have always their sure issue in sensational and hurried legislation; and in Europe at the present hour, in England and France most especially, an opportunist policy is the only policy pursued.

What is there to be said in favour of female suffrage? It may be treated as an open subject, since both Reactionists and Socialists can advance for it claims and arguments of the most totally opposite nature. Perhaps it may be said that there is some truth in both sides of these arguments and entire truth in neither. It is probable that female politicians would be many of them more reactionary than the Reactionists, and many of them would be more socialistic than the Socialists. The golden mean is not in favour with women or with mobs.

In England, both the Conservative and Radical intentions are at present limited to giving the suffrage to such women alone as are possessed of real property. But it is certain that this limitation could not be preserved; for the women without property would clamour to be admitted, and would succeed by their clamour as the men without property have done. No doubt, to see a woman of superior mind and character, capable of possessing and administering a great estate, left without electoral voice, whilst her carter, her porter, or the most illiterate labourer on her estate possesses and can exercise it, is on the face of it absurd. But it is not more absurd than that her brother should have his single vote outnumbered and neutralised by the votes of the men-servants, scullions and serving-boys who take his wage and fill his servants’ hall and kitchen. It would be more honest to say that the whole existing system of electoral power all over the world is absurd; and will remain so, because in no nation is there the courage, perhaps in no nation is there the intellectual power, capable of putting forward and sustaining the logical doctrine of the _just supremacy of the fittest_: a doctrine which it is surely more vitally necessary to insist on in a republic than in a monarchy. It is because the fittest have not had the courage to resist the pressure of those who are intellectually their inferiors, and whose only strength lies in numbers, that democracy has been enabled to become the power that it has. Theoretically, a republic is founded on the doctrine of the supremacy of the fittest; but who can say that since the days of Perikles any republic has carried out this doctrine practically? The lawyer or the chemist who neglects his business to push himself to the front in political life in France is certainly not the most admirable product of the French intellect; nor can it be said by any impartial student that every President of the United States has been the highest type of humanity that the United States can produce.

Alexander Dumas _fils_, the most accomplished, but the most rabid of the advocates of female suffrage, resumes what seems to him the absurdity of the whole system in a sentence. ‘Mme. de Sévigné ne peut pas voter; M. Paul son jardinier peut voter.’ He does not seem to see that there is as great an absurdity in the fact that were Mme. de Sévigné, Monsieur de Sévigné, and were she living now, all her wit and wisdom would fail to confer on her more voting power than would be possessed by ‘Paul son jardinier.’

With all deference to him, I do not think that Mme. de Sévigné would have cared a straw to rival Paul, the gardener, in going to the electoral urn. Mme. de Sévigné, like every woman of wit and mind, had means of exercising her influence so incomparably superior to the paltry one of recording a vote in a herd that she would, I am sure, have had the most profound contempt for the latter. Indeed, her contempt would have probably extended to the whole electoral system and ‘government by representation.’ Women of wit and genius must always be indifferent to the opportunity of going up to the ballot booth in company with their own footman and coachman. To those who have a sense of humour the position is not one of dignity. Hypatia, when she feels herself the equal of Julian, will not readily admit that Dadus, however affranchised, is her equal.

Absurdities are not cured by adding greater absurdities to them; discrepancies are not remedied by greater discrepancies being united to them. Whether women voted or not would not change by a hair’s breadth the existing, and to many thinkers the deplorable fact, that under the present electoral system throughout the world, the sage has no more electoral power than the dunce, that Plato’s voice counts for no more than a fool’s. The admission of women could do nothing to remedy this evil. It would only bring into the science of politics what it has too much of already—inferior intelligence and hysterical action. No: reply both the French essayist and the conservative advocates of female suffrage. Not so; because we should only admit women qualified to use it by the possession of property. But it would be impossible to sustain this limitation in the teeth of all the levelling tendencies of modern legislation; it would speedily be declared unjust, intolerable, aristocratic, iniquitous, and it would soon become impossible to deny to Demos’s wife or mistress, mother or sister, what you award to Demos himself. If women be admitted at all to the exercise of the franchise they must be admitted wholesale down to the lowest dregs of humanity as men are now admitted. The apple-woman will naturally argue that she has as much right to it as the heiress; how can you say she has not when you have given the apple-man as much electoral voice as the scholar? It is idle to talk of awarding the female suffrage on any basis of property when property has been deliberately rejected as a basis for male suffrage.

The project often insisted on by the advocates of the system, to give votes only to unmarried women, may be dismissed without discussion, as it would be found to be wholly untenable. It would give votes to the old maids of Cranford village, and the enriched _cocottes_ of great cities, and would deny them to a Mme. Roland or a Mme. de Staël, to Lady Burdett Coutts or to Mme. Adam. The impossibility of any such limitation being sustained if female suffrage be ever granted, renders it unnecessary to dwell longer on its self-evident defects.

Again, are women prepared to purchase electoral rights by their willingness to fulfil military obligations? If not, how can they expect political privileges unless they are prepared to renounce for them the peculiar privileges which have been awarded to them in view of the physical weakness of their sex? Dumas does, indeed, distinctly refuse to let them be soldiers, on the plea that they are better occupied in child-bearing, but in the same moment he asserts that they ought to be judges and civil servants. It is difficult to see why to postpone an assault to a beleaguered city because _Mme. la Générale est accouchée_ would be more absurd than to adjourn the hearing of a pressing lawsuit because _Mme. la Jugesse_ would be _sur la paille_. The much graver and truer objection lies less in the physical than in the mental and moral inferiority of women. I use moral in its broadest sense. Women on an average have little sense of justice, and hardly any sense whatever of awarding to others a freedom for which they do not care themselves. The course of all modern legislation is its tendency to make by-laws, fretting and vexatious laws trenching unjustifiably on the personal liberty of the individual. If women were admitted to political power these laws would be multiplied indefinitely and incessantly. The _infiniment petit_ would be the dominate factor in politics. Such meddling legislation as the Sunday Closing Act in England, and the Maine Liquor Laws and Carolina Permissive Bill in the United States would be the joy and aim of the mass of female voters. Women cannot understand that you can make no nation virtuous by act of parliament; they would construct their acts of parliament on purpose to make people virtuous whether they chose or not, and would not see that this would be a form of tyranny as bad as any other. A few years ago a State in America (I think it was Maine or Massachusetts) decreed that because a few Pomeranian dogs were given to biting people, all Pomeranian dogs within the State, ill and well, young and old, should on a certain date be killed; and they were killed, two thousand odd in number. Now, this is precisely the kind of legislation which women would establish in their moments of panic; the disregard of individual rights, the injustice to innocent animals and their owners, the invasion of private property under the doctrinaire’s plea of the general good, would all commend themselves to women in their hysterical hours, for women are more tyrannical and more self-absorbed than men.

Renan in his ‘Marc-Aurèle’ observes that the decline of the Roman Empire was hastened, and even, in much, primarily brought about by the elements of feebleness, introduced into it by the Christian sects’ admission of women into the active and religious life of men. The woman-worship springing from the adoration of the virgin-mother was at the root of the emasculation and indifference to political and martial duties, which it brought into the lives of men who ceased to be either bold soldiers or devoted citizens.

I do not think the moral and mental qualities of the average woman so inferior to those of the average man as is conventionally supposed. The average man is not an intellectual nor a noble being; neither is the average woman. But there are certain solid qualities in the male creature which are lacking from the female; such qualities as patience and calmness in judgment, which are of infinite value, and in which the female character is almost invariably deficient; a lack in her which makes the prophecy of Dumas, that she will one day fill judicial and forensic duties, a most alarming prospect, as alarming as the prediction of Goldwin Smith that the negro population will eventually outnumber and extinguish the Aryan race in the United States.

There are men with women’s minds, women with men’s minds; masculine genius may exist in a female farm; feminine inconsistency in a male farm; but these are exceptions to the rule, and such exceptions are exceedingly rare.

The Conservative or patrician party in England advocates the admission of women into politics for much the same motives as influenced the early Christians; they believe that her influence will be universally exercised to preserve the moral excellences of the body politic, the sanctity of the home, the supremacy of religion, the cautiousness of timid and wary legislators. The class of which the Conservatives are always thinking as the recipients of female suffrage would possibly in the main part do so. They would be persons of property and education, and as such might be trusted to do nothing rash. But they would be closely wedded to their prejudices. They would be narrow in all their views. Their church would hold a large place in their affections, and their legislation would be of the character which they now give to their county society. Moreover, as I have said, the suffrage once given to women, it could not be restricted to persons of property. The female factory hand in her garret would assert that she has as much right to and need of a voice as the female landowner, and in face of the fact that the male factory hand and the male landowner have been placed on the same footing in political equality, the country would be unable to refute the argument.

The most intelligent and most eloquent of all the advocates of female suffrage is, as I have said, undoubtedly Dumas _fils_. No man can argue a case more persuasively; nor is any man more completely wedded to one side of an argument than he. Yet even he, her special pleader, in his famous _Appel aux Femmes_, admits that she would bring to science the scorn of reason, and the indifference to suffering which she has shown in so many centuries in the hallucinations and martyrdoms of religion; that she would throw herself into it with _audace et frénésie_; that she would hold all torture of no account if it solved an enigma, and would give herself to the beasts of the field, ‘not to prove that Jesus lived, but to know if Darwin was right;’ and he passes on to the triumphant prediction that in sixty years’ time the world will see the offspring of men and female monkeys, of women and apes; though wherein this prospect for the future is glorious it were hard to say.

Stripped of that exaggeration which characterises all the arguments of a writer famous for anomaly, antithesis and audacity, his prediction that his favourite client Woman will bring into her pursuit of the mysteries of science, the same sort of _folie furieuse_, which Blandina and Agatha, and all the feminine devotees of the early years of Christianity brought into religion, is a prophecy undoubtedly correct. She will bring the same into politics, into legislation, if she ever obtain a preponderant power in them.

The most dangerous tendency in English political life is at this moment the tendency to legislate _per saltum_: female legislation would invariably be conducted _per saltum_. The grasshopper-bounds of Mr Gladstone would be outdone by the kangaroo-leaps of the female legislator when she moved at all. A ‘masterly inactivity’ would not be understood by her; nor the profound good sense contained in the advice which is variously attributed to Talleyrand, Melbourne and Palmerston, ‘When in doubt do nothing.’ There is the most mischievous desire in modern politicians to pull everything about, merely to look as if they were great reformers; to strew the ashes of the old order around them long ere they have even settled the foundations of the new; they do not consider the inevitable imperfection which must characterise all human institutions; they do not remember that if the system, whether political or social, works reasonably well, it should be supported, even if it be not symmetrically perfect in theory. These faults are characteristic of modern politicians, because modern politicians are for the most part no longer men trained from their youth in the philosophy of government, but opportunists who view politics as a field of self-advancement. Women will bring into politics these same faults greatly exaggerated and not balanced by that rough and ready common sense which characterises most men who are not specialists or visionaries. Whether the female legislator would imprison all people who do not go to church, or would imprison all people who do not attend scientific lectures, the despotism would be equal; and it is certain that she would desire to imprison either one class or the other.

Some writer has said, ‘I can as little understand why any one should fast in Lent, as I can understand why others should object to their fasting if it please them.’ But this would never be the attitude of the female politician in regard to either the fasting or the feasting of others. Sir Henry Thomson, in his admirable treatise on gastronomy, remarks on the unwisdom of those who, because a certain food is palatable and nutritious to themselves, recommend it to every one they know, making no account of the difference in constitution and digestion of different persons. There exists a similar difference in mind and character, for which women would never make any allowance when forcing on the world in general their political or social nostrums. As we again and again see the woman expecting from her son the purity of manners of a maiden, and making no account, because she ignores them entirely, of the imperious necessities of sex, so we should see her in matters of national or universal import similarly disregarding or ignoring all facts of which she chose to take no note. She would increase and intensify the present despotisms and weaknesses of political life, and she would put nothing in their place, for she would have lost her own originality and charm. Science, indeed, presumes that in educating her it would strengthen her reasoning powers and widen her mind into the acceptance of true liberty. But what proof is there that science would do anything of that sort? It has never yet showed any true liberality itself. Nothing can exceed the arrogance and the despotism of its own demands and pretensions, the immensity of its self-admiration, the tyrannical character of its exactions.

Dumas observes that happy women will not care for the suffrage because they are happy; he might have added, that brilliant women will not, because they have means of influencing men to any side and to any extent they choose without it. Who, then, will care to exercise it? All the unhappy women, all the fretful _déclassées_, all the thousands or tens of thousands of spinsters who know as much or as little of human nature as they do of political economy. What will such as these bring into political life? They can bring nothing except their own crotches, their own weakness, their own hysterical agitations. Happy women are fond of men, but unhappy women hate them. The legislation voted for by unhappy women would be as much against men, and all true liberty, as Dumas himself is against them and it. Men at present legislate for women with remarkable fairness; but women would never legislate for men with anything approaching fairness, and as the numerical preponderance of votes would soon be on the female side, if female electors were once accepted, the prospect is alarming to all lovers of true freedom.

The woman is the enemy of freedom. Give her power and she is at once despotic, whether she be called Elizabeth Tudor or Theroigne de Mirecourt, whether she be a beneficent or a malevolent ruler, whether she be a sovereign or a revolutionist. The enormous pretensions to the monopoly of a man’s life which women put forward in marriage, are born of the desire to tyrannise. The rage and amazement displayed by the woman when a man, whether her lover or her husband, is inconstant to her, comes from that tenacity over the man as a property which wholly blinds her to her own faults or lack of charm and power to keep him. A very clever woman never blames a man for inconstancy to her: she may perhaps blame herself. Women as a rule attach far too great a value to themselves; the woman imagines herself necessary to the man because the man is necessary to her. Hence that eternal antagonism of the woman against the man which is one of the saddest things in human nature. Every writer like Dumas, who does his best to increase this antagonism, commits a great crime. The happiness of the human race lies in the good-will existing between men and women. This good-will cannot exist so long as women have the inflated idea of their own value which they now possess largely in Europe and still more largely in America. A virtuous woman may be above rubies, has said Solomon, but this depends very much on the quality of the virtue; and the idea prevailing among women that they are valuable, admirable and almost divine, merely because they are women, is one of the most mischievous fallacies born of human vanity, and accepted without analysis.