Facts And Fictions Of Life Part 5

He laughed.

"Politics is no place for women. This they are doing is charity. That is all very well, but they got no business meddling with city government, and courts, and prisoners only _as_ charity."

"Yet you say that, for a hundred years, those who look after the criminal population, thought very little of helping the men who came out, much less did they think of beginning at the other end and trying to keep them from going in. Women have been allowed to devise public charities, even, for only a few years past. They had no experience in building manufactories and conducting coffee and lodging houses; they have but little money of their own to put into such things and yet they have bethought them to start, in embryo, right here where the returning convict lands, what appears to have vast possibilities as you say. Now if this effort for the prevention of crime and want were at the other end of the line in munic.i.p.al government, don't you think it might go even nearer the root of the matter and do more good?"

"How would you like to be a ward politician and a heeler?" he inquired, wiping a smile away and looking at my gloves.

"I should not like it at all."

"Well, now, look at that! Of course no lady would, so--"

"Do you think it possible that the world might get on fairly comfortably without having 'heelers' and 'ward politicians'--in the sense you mean--in munic.i.p.al or state government? And that it might be better without such crime producers?" I added, as he began to laugh.

"You women are always visionary. Never practical. You--"

"I thought you said that the one and only really practical measure yet taken to reduce the criminal population as it returns from the Islands was invented and is conducted by women and--"

"You can just make up your mind that in every family of six there'll be one hypocrite and one fool, either one of which is liable to be a criminal, too, and the State has got to take care of 'em somehow. But the prisons _are_ getting too full and the Almshouses and Insane Asylums _are_ growing very large. But there is the Two Brothers' Island. I've got to attend to my business now. Take the trip with me again some time."

But it seems to me, I shall not need to go again, and that no judge or legislator would need to take the journey more than once, unless, perchance, he took it in the person of either the hypocrite or the fool of his family; which, let us hope, no judge and no legislator is in a position to do.

AN IRRESPONSIBLE EDUCATED CLa.s.s

Education, using the word in its restricted scholastic sense, is always productive of restlessness and discontent, unless education, in its practical relations to life, furnishes an outlet and safety valve for the whetted and strengthened faculties. Mere mental gymnastics are unsatisfactory after the first flush of pleasurable excitement produced in the mind newly awakened to its own capabilities.

There seems to be something within us which demands that our knowledge be in some way applied, and that the logic of thought find fruition in the logic of events. The moment the laborers of the country found time and opportunity to whet their minds, they also developed a vast and persistent unrest--a dissatisfaction with the order of things which gave to them the tools with which to carve a fuller, broader life, but had not yet furnished them the material upon which they might work.

Their plane of thought was raised, their outlook was expanded, their possibilities multiplied; but the materials to work with remained the same. Their status and condition clashed with their new hopes and needs.

This state of things produced what we call "labor troubles," with all their complications. Capital and labor had no contest until labor became (to a degree) educated.

If--"in those good old days"--labor was not satisfied, it did not know how to make the fact very clearly understood. Capital smiled and patronized labor, and labor smiled and said it was quite content to work for so kind a master. It was safer to do that way--in those good old days. Then, too, so long as labor's wits had not been sharpened, so long as the laborer had not learned the relative values of things, perhaps he was content. Certainly he was far more so than he is to-day.

It is well that, in his present state of angry unrest, he feels that he has but to organize and elect his own representatives to help enact just and repeal unjust laws as they bear upon his own immediate needs. But for this outlet to his feelings, and this hope for his own future, the labor troubles would be troubles indeed, and every additional book read by labor, every new schoolhouse built for labor, would but add flame to fire. But education brings with it--when taken into practical life--a certain sense of the responsibilities of life and of the relations of things.

The laborer begins to argue, "Am not I partly responsible for my own condition? Is not my salvation in my own hands and in the hands of my fellows? We are units in our own government. We are in the majority numerically, and we are, therefore, at least partially responsible for not only what we do, but for that which is done to us."

It is this feeling that sobers and steadies while it inspires the so-called working cla.s.ses to-day.

If, with their present enlightenment, ambitions, and needs, laboring men felt themselves wholly irresponsible for the present or future legislation, riots and lawlessness would be the inevitable result. A sense of responsibility alone makes educational development safe either in individuals or in cla.s.ses.

Witness the truth of this in the lives of the "gilded youths" of all countries whose sharpened wits are not steadied by, or applied in, any useful occupation. The results are disastrous to themselves and to those who fall under their sway or influence.

Broadened ambitions, sharpened mental capacities, developed intellectuality, demand corresponding outlets and responsibilities.

Lacking these, education is but an added danger. Especially is this true in a Republic where the theory of legal and political equality is held.

At the present time there are but two wholly irresponsible cla.s.ses in our republic--Indians and women.

I place the Indians first because it has recently been decided in South Dakota that if an Indian (male) will "accept land in severalty,"

he thereby becomes a sovereign, and is henceforth presumed to have sufficient interest in the welfare of his government and the stability of affairs in general to ent.i.tle him to be looked upon as a desirable citizen, capable of legislating and desiring to legislate wisely for the public weal.

Since the government has not yet come to believe that any amount of land in severalty ent.i.tles women to so much confidence, and since the lack of responsibility develops in woman, as in man, a reckless and wanton spirit, we have the spectacle of this irresponsible element taking property laws into its own hands, and proudly destroying in public the belongings of other people where those belongings chanced to be in the form of beverages which these women disapproved of as articles of merchandise and use. And we have seen, farther, the grave spectacle of courts of law which will not or dare not enforce the law for their punishment.

The due recognition of property rights is one of the earliest developments of personal, legal, and political responsibility. The negro notoriously disregarded these when his own human rights and individual responsibility were unrecognized. His desires were likely to be the measure of your loss.

He is not the light-fingered being that he was. Mine and thine have a new meaning for him since--for the first time in his life--"thine" has any meaning to his one-time master.

He is also beginning to look to his ballot for his safety and to himself to work out his future status, whereas one day his legs were his sole dependence when trickery or blandishment failed him. Woman still depends--where she wishes to compa.s.s an end--upon blandishment, deception, or a type of force which she believes will not or cannot be resented in the way it would unquestionably be resented if offered by men. A body of respectable men in a quiet community do not calmly walk into another man's business house, and without process of law destroy his property. Their sense of personal and legal and political responsibility is a most effective police force; and no matter how rabid a prohibitionist John Smith is, he does not collect a band of otherwise respectable men about him and proceed to destroy--with praise and prayer as an accompaniment--the belongings of his neighbor.

No; he goes to a legal infant and a political nonexistent, and gets her to do it if it is to be done. He knows that to her the limit of responsibility is the verge of her desires on this question. He knows that she recognizes no right of property in a beverage she does not approve and a traffic she hopes to destroy. He knows that her sense of helplessness within the law--where she has no voice--gives her that reckless spirit of the political non-existent of all cla.s.ses, which finds its revenge in lawlessness so long as it may not hope to have a voice in lawfulness. While woman was uneducated and wholly a dependent, there was little danger from her. She had too much at stake, in a purely physical sense. Then, too, she had not reasoned out the logical sequence between the pretension that a Republic of political equals before the law exists, while in fact one-half of that Republic has no political status whatever and no voice in the laws they obey. Uneducated and wholly dependent as woman was, this was safe enough. Educated, and to a degree financially independent, as she now is, she is a menace to social order so long as she stands without legal responsibility or political outlet for the expression of her opinions and desires in matters of government.

So long as her only means of expression on the subject of the liquor traffic is a hatchet and prayer, she will use both, and we will have the shocking spectacle, witnessed a little over a year ago, of a court refusing to even fine those who committed as clear and wanton an outrage on property rights as often finds record.

The steadying sense of personal and mental responsibility can develop only under the exercise of such responsibility. Man pa.s.sed through the stage of regulative and prohibitive thought, and learned the true significance and value of Liberty only by its possession. By being responsible he learned the folly and danger of undue restrictive legislation, and the utter futility of the attempt to legislate taste, moral sense and lofty ideals (i. e. his personal taste and ideals) into his neighbors.

He also learned the futility and danger of lawless raids upon those who were not of his way of thinking as to what they should eat or drink, or wherewithal they should be clothed. Woman will have to learn the same important lesson in the same way. She will abuse the personal rights and liberties of others who disagree with her (now that she is educated and has the power) unless she is steadied, given legal and political responsibility, and held to the same account for her acts as are her brothers. Being helpless within the law--having no means of expression nor of making her will and opinions felt, having no voice in munic.i.p.al or governmental management--she has begun to find lawless outlet for her newly acquired talents and intellectual activity. She is playing the part of border "regulator" and lobbyist--two very dangerous and degrading roles in any case but doubly so in the hands of an educated but unrepresented cla.s.s.

It has been argued, by men who are otherwise favorable to woman suffrage, that to grant the ballot to woman would be to yield up, upon the altar of fanaticism and narrow personal desires, much of the liberty for which man has fought and struggled. They argue that women do not stop to consider whether they have the right to interfere with what others do, but that they only ask whether they like the thing done.

The argument goes further and a.s.serts that women only want the ballot that they may restrict the liberty of other people, pa.s.s prohibitory, sumptuary, and religious laws; and that the ballot in the hands of woman means a return to a union of church and state, and the meddlesome, personal legislation of the type known to us as Blue Laws.

It is no doubt true that there are many half-developed thinkers among women who demand the ballot, who desire political power for these petty reasons. It is also undoubtedly true that many of these would travel the same road trod by their fathers before them, and learn political wisdom slowly and only after a struggle with their own narrow ideas of liberty, which means their own liberty to restrict and regulate the liberty of other people.

It may be readily admitted, I say, that woman will make some of the same mistakes, political, religious, and sociological, that have been made by men in the reach after a better way. But what has taught thoughtful men wisdom? What has broadened the conception of political liberty? What taught men the danger and folly of religious and restrictive (sumptuary) legislation? What but experience and responsibility?

Nothing so steadies the hasty and narrow judgment as power, coupled with the recognition that responsibility for the use of that power is sure to be demanded.

Many a man will advise, as secret lobbyist, what he would not do in open legislature. Many a man in private life a.s.serts that "If I were judge or president," or what not, so and so should not be done. When the power and responsibility once rests upon him, his outlook is broadened, and he recognizes that he would endanger a far more sacred principle were he to adhere to his plan.

This holds true with woman. With her newly acquired intellectual and financial power she is seeking an outlet for her capacities. She sees certain munic.i.p.al and governmental ills. Having no direct power of expression, no legal, political status in a country which claims to have no political cla.s.ses, she does what all disqualified, irresponsible, dissatisfied cla.s.ses of men have done before her when deprived of equal opportunity with their fellows; she seeks by subterfuge (indirection) or lawlessness to compa.s.s that which she may not attempt lawfully and which, had she the steadying influence and discipline of responsibility and power, she would not do.

Inexperience, coupled with irresponsibility and a lax sense of the rights of others, always did and always will produce tyrants.

Unite this naturally produced and inevitable social and political condition and outlook with the developed mental capacities and consequent restless, undirected, and unabsorbed ambition of the women of to-day, and we have a dangerous lobby--working in secret by indirection and without open responsibility for their words, deed, or influence--to handle in our Republic.

s.e.x IN BRAIN

_Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in introducing the speaker said: "The first speaker of the evening is Helen Gardener, who is to give us an address on the Brain. You know the last stronghold of the enemy is scientific. Men have decided that we must not enter the colleges and study very hard; must not have the responsibility of government laid on our heads, because our brains weigh much less than the brains of men.

Dr. Hammond, of New York, has published several very elaborate articles in the Popular Science Monthly to prove this fact. But Helen Gardener has spent about fourteen months in investigation, and has conferred with twenty able specialists upon the subject, and will give us to-night the result of her investigation. She will show to us that it is impossible to prove any of the positions that Dr. Hammond has maintained._"

Read before the International Council of Women in Was.h.i.+ngton, 1888.

Ladies and Gentlemen:--The political conditions of woman are very greatly influenced to-day by what is taught to her and about her by those two conservative moulders of public opinion--clergymen and physicians. Our law-makers have long since ceased to merely sneer at the simple claim of human rights by one-half of humanity, and for refuge they have flown to priest and pract.i.tioner, who do not fail them in this their hour of great tribulation. It is true that men, most of whom never enter a church, have grown somewhat ashamed to press the theological arguments against the equality of the s.e.xes, and to these the medical argument has become an ever-present help in their time of trouble.