Читать книгу Woman and the Republic - Helen Kendrick Johnson - Страница 8

The writers of the "History of Woman Suffrage" give the following account of the founding of their Association. In July, 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Martha O. Wright, and Ann McClintock issued an unsigned call for a convention, which was asked to consider the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman; and in preparation for the meeting, they wrote a "Declaration of Sentiments," which was adopted by the assembly. They say, in describing the writing of this declaration:—"The reports of Peace, Temperance, and Anti-Slavery conventions were examined, but all alike seemed too tame and pacific for the inauguration of a rebellion such as the world had never before seen. We knew women had wrongs, but how to state them was the difficulty, and this was increased from the fact that we ourselves were fortunately organized and conditioned. … After much delay, one of the circle took up the Declaration of 1776, and read it aloud with spirit and emphasis, and it was at once decided to adopt the historic document, with some slight changes. Knowing that women must have more to complain of than men under any circumstances possibly could, and seeing the Fathers had eighteen grievances, a protracted search was made through statute books, church usages, and the customs of society to find that exact number."

In such solemnly puerile fashion did they work out a travesty on one of the most august utterances ever penned. A young man who was present remarked: "Tour grievances must be grievous indeed when you are obliged to go to books in order to find them out." He might have added, "And they must be false indeed when you have to found most of your charges on dead- letter statutes and outgrown usages and customs."

The Preamble of their Declaration reads: "When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course."

The declaration is as follows: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are suffer able, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they were accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled. The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world." Then follows a categorical parody of the eighteen grievances, which will be duly considered in this and later chapters.

After thirty years of Suffrage effort, the leaders say that this instrument contained all that the most radical have ever claimed. The Fathers of the Revolution say in their Preamble: "When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation." The Mothers of the Woman's Rebellion say: "When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course." The strained and ridiculous attitude produced by ignoring the essential difference between a political movement and a sex movement is visible in every line, and yet that instinct which finds for a new cause its appropriate channel never carried more truly than in this presentment of the ultimate purpose of woman suffrage. The Fathers were met to dissolve the relations that bound their land politically to a foreign power, and to form a separate and equal nation. The Mothers were met to dissolve the relations that bound their sex politically to man, and to form a separate and equal sex organization. The Fathers proposed to free men, women, and children from the yoke of England. The Mothers proposed to free women and girls from the yoke of men. It is suggestive to consider the "slight changes," between the two Declarations.

The Fathers of the Revolution begin their protest by saying: "We hold these truths to be self-evident:—That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The Mothers of the Woman's Rebellion add nothing to the meaning, but detract greatly from the force of its expression, when in their parody they say: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men and women are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." These women of all in America were the first to belittle themselves by seeming to assume that in a revolutionary document that was promulgated to declare a determination to wrest from tyranny the liberty that was an inalienable right for all, they and their sex were excluded because the generic term "man" was employed in relation to another inalienable right, which was about to be set forth—that of revolution against intolerable tyranny. The Americans who framed that instrument would have been the last men in the world to assert that women were not the equals of men. They were not discussing abstract human or sex conditions. They met "to institute a new government." The Mothers of the Woman's Rebellion had an inalienable right to meet "to institute a new government," if they believed as sincerely as did the Fathers of the Revolution that "a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinced a design to reduce them under absolute despotism." Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were their natural and God-given rights. If they truly believed that these were trampled upon by government, they might be justified in revolting and attempting to form a new government. That they did not so believe, seems to be proved by their statement that "they knew that woman had wrongs, but how to state them was the difficulty, and this was increased from the fact that they themselves were fortunately organized and conditioned." The Declaration of Independence meant war against the ever-growing encroachment of despotism. The gauntlet was thrown down at the feet of a king by his subjects. The Declaration of Sentiments meant war against the whole social order as then constituted. The gauntlet was thrown down at the feet of man by those who declared him to be a determined foe.

They had not the remotest notion of "instituting a new government," far from it; they relied upon the old government to sustain them in making their attempted "rebellion" a revolution. Without the backing of the state's defence, they had no expectation or hope of enforcing any new enactment they might desire. They were gladly consenting to be governed, in order to prove that they withheld consent.

Should woman suffrage prevail, the foundation principles of democracy would have to be overthrown and "a new government instituted" in which the power should be delegated and not direct, if the nation thus formed was to "assume among the powers of the earth a separate and equal station." The leaders of the Suffrage movement well understood that they claimed no inalienable right to institute a new government, and this is again shown in another "slight change" made by them. The first count in the suffrage indictment against all men, but especially against those of the American Republic, reads as follows: "He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise." The Fathers made no claim or suggestion that the suffrage was an inalienable right, or a right at all. Not only is there nothing to intimate that voting was a natural right, but from that day to this it has been the theory and the practice of our Government to control the suffrage. The fact that "governments were instituted among men" for the purpose of securing inalienable rights, proves that in the opinion of the Declarers the method of instituting a government was not in itself inalienable. Governments to secure certain inalienable rights are instituted among men, wrote Jefferson, "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." This was not the first government founded upon "consent of the governed." The English government had been so founded, but our fathers now refused their consent. That particular government could no longer exist for them with their consent. In their judgment, it had become destructive of the proper ends of all government, and so they proclaimed that the inalienable right to liberty made it—to use the words of the Declaration—"the right, the duty, of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to institute a new government."

In the New York Constitutional Convention of 1867, Mr. George William Curtis defended the proposition so to amend the Constitution as to extend the suffrage to women. In the course of his eloquent remarks he said: "The Chairman of the Committee asked Miss Anthony whether, if suffrage was a natural right, it could be denied to children? Her answer seemed to me perfectly satisfactory. She said simply, 'All that we ask is an equal and not an arbitrary regulation. If you have the right, we have it.'" To me it seems to discredit the logical powers both of Miss Anthony and of Mr. Curtis that one should have made this reply and the other should have rested content with it. That was a pertinent question, and it was not answered at all. To say "if you have the right, we have it," is not to tell whether one thinks children should have it. As a matter of fact, an agitation of "the rights of minors" arose from the discussion of "natural right," and also an agitation for "minority representation" that is continued to this day. Mr. Curtis added: "The honorable Chairman would hardly deny that to regulate the exercise of a right according to obvious reason and experience is one thing, to deny it absolutely and forever is another." To regulate a law is to abolish it, either relatively or absolutely, for some, and to maintain it for others. When the State of New York says that no alien who has not been naturalized shall vote, that no boy under twenty-one shall vote, that no person resident in one town or ward shall vote in another, that no criminal or pauper shall vote—it acts on the natural principle of self-defence, which contravenes the dogma of a natural right of any one to the suffrage. On that principle it would be impossible for the Congress to impeach a President; to forbid, as it did, those who had been in rebellion from voting; or to deny the suffrage to a child or to any human being. Government itself becomes impossible. Judge Story, whom Suffrage writers claim as favorable to their cause on other grounds, says that the right of voting has always been treated as a granted and not a natural right, derived from and regulated by each country according to its ideas of government. Both Federal and State courts have decided again and again that there is no such thing as a natural right to suffrage.

The "consent of the governed" certainly meant something very different to our fathers, and to our statesmen, and to ourselves, from what it could mean to any other government on earth. Although the phrase itself may have been a euphemism which sprang from Jefferson's sympathy with the mighty rumblings of feeling that preceded the French Revolution, still, it was certainly meant that, so far as they could make it so, there should be vastly more consenting by popular vote than had been dreamed of in the mother country. But it did not mean that each and every individual in the state must consent to each and every law that governed him; for not only has no government ever been instituted which derived "just powers" in that way, but none ever will be, for there never can be such unanimity. It did not mean that every individual must consent to be governed somehow, by some scheme of government; for its laws were carefully framed so as to compel the external allegiance of those who never consent—the criminal and the anarchist. It did not mean even that consent, in the sense of agreement, was expected from a large body, or a small body, as the case might happen, of those who held views opposed to the policies that were controlling at any given time. It meant just what Jefferson meant in that other dictum of his: "The will of the majority is the natural law of every society, and the only sure guardian of the rights of man." Together they interpret each other, and are worthy of our Declaration and our Bill of Rights.

The inalienable right to liberty in all mankind forbids the right of anarchy in any of mankind; and the question of woman suffrage, strange as it may appear, actually narrows itself down, as it seems to me, to the question whether we shall have democracy or anarchy. Democratic government is at an end when those who issue decrees are not identical with those who can enforce those decrees.

But, after all, the claim to suffrage as a natural right has been practically abandoned by those who first made that claim. Their next proposition was, that it was a universal right, springing from the necessary conditions of organized society, and so should be granted to woman as a member of that society. They say in their Declaration: "He deprived her of the first right of a citizen—the elective franchise." Chief Justice Waite of the United States Supreme Court decided that citizenship carried with it no voting power or right. The same decision has been handed down by many courts in disposing of test cases.

It seems to me quite as evident that what is now called universal manhood suffrage does not rest upon any belief by the state that this is "the first right of a citizen," because no one doubts that if the time came when a majority deemed that the preservation of the state depended upon disfranchising a number of voters, they would be disfranchised although they remained citizens. The Suffrage leaders have, in theory at least, also abandoned the claim to suffrage on the ground of their universal right as citizens. A proof of this is seen in the fact that at various times they have suggested the extension of suffrage under qualification. Among the latest that I have noticed, is an address of Mrs. Stanton's to a Suffrage Convention, held in 1894, in which she proposed the following: "Resolved, that the women of New York petition the Legislature of the State to extend the suffrage to women on an educational qualification." She must therefore believe that the Legislature has the legal right to qualify it for men; and to withhold it from women is but an extension of the right to qualify suffrage, because it only says: "We do not consider woman citizens qualified to be voters." Writing a year ago, Mrs. Stanton said: "It is the duty of the educated women of this Republic to protest against the extension of the suffrage to another man until they themselves are enfranchised!" Thus it would appear that Mrs. Stanton does not believe in universal suffrage. A Suffrage speaker in New York not long ago said naively: "We [the women, when enfranchised] will vote to withhold the suffrage from the ignorant." She did not explain what would happen if the ignorant voted not to have the suffrage withheld; nor did she appear to realize that she was practically admitting that the present voters have the right to withhold the suffrage from those whom they consider unfitted for it.

But it is not true that American women did not, and do not, "consent to be governed." They have always consented loyally and joyfully. From the time of the Boston Tea Party down to the Civil War, and in such times of peace and prosperity as were indicated by the Columbian Exposition, when the Government formally asked the assistance of its woman citizens, they showed their consent by their deeds, and only the suffrage faction treated the invitation to share in the Exposition after the immemorial fashion of a discontented element. And the Suffragists themselves consent to be governed every time they accept the protection of the law or invoke it against a debtor; for they thereby acknowledge its proper application to themselves if the case were reversed.

The second count in the list of political grievances runs: "He has compelled her to submit to laws in the formation of which she had no voice." This was not true, for the women who wrote that sentence were free to use their voices in regard to every law they desired to affect, and circumstances have proved that they were sure of being heard, and, if the law were just, and for the general good, of assisting materially to establish it. At the very time when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott were writing that indictment against the United States Government, Dorothea Dix was presenting a memorial to the National Congress asking for an appropriation of five hundred thousand acres of the public lands to endow hospitals for the indigent insane. That bill failed to pass, but in 1850 another bill, which she presented, asking for ten millions of acres, passed the House and failed in the Senate merely for want of time to consider it. Four years later a bill making appropriations of the ten millions of acres to the separate States passed both houses, and President Pierce vetoed it, because he believed the general Government had no constitutional power to make such appropriations. She then went to the Legislatures of the States, with the result that is so well known. Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New York, Indiana, Illinois, Louisiana, and North Carolina founded lunatic asylums, and the work was begun which is culminating in the separation of the insane from the criminal, the women from the men, in every town and county of the land. The right of petition is not only as open to women as to men, but because of the non-partisan character of their claims and suggestions they find quicker hearing. Miss Louise Lee Schuyler has been more successful in securing the enactment of laws for which she presented the need than any one politician in the State of New York, before whose Legislature they have both pleaded—he with a vote which had to contend against other votes, she with a voice that spoke the united mind of a body of philanthropic women. There was no unjust law which the Suffrage Association could not have changed during these fifty years, had it cared to try, and indeed its members make the boast that many of the changes are their own. Change and improvement of laws was not their aim. It was a vote upon changing or not changing laws that they sought for. The difference is world-wide.

The third count in the indictment runs: "He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant men—both natives and foreigners." Dr. Jacobi represented the Suffrage cause before the Special Committee of the Constitutional Convention of New York State in 1894. After drawing, in fine and truthfully glowing words, a picture of woman's progress under the institutions and laws of the United States, she said: "For the first time, all political right, privilege and power reposes undisguisedly on the one brutal fact of sex, unsupported, untempered, unalloyed by any attribute of education, any justification of intelligence, any glamour of wealthy any prestige of birth, any insignia of actual power. … To-day, the immigrants pouring in through the open gates of our seaport towns, the Indian when settled in severalty, the negro hardly emancipated from the degradation of two hundred years of slavery—may all share in the sovereignty of the State. The white woman—the woman in whose veins runs the blood of those heroic colonists who founded our country, of those women who helped to sustain the courage of their husbands in the Revolutionary War; the woman who may have given the flower of her youth and health in the service of our Civil War—that woman is excluded. To-day women constitute the only class of sane people excluded from the franchise, the only class deprived of political representation, except the tribal Indians and the Chinese." To the same effect the editors of the "Suffrage History" say: "The superiority of man does not enter into the demand for suffrage; for in this country all men vote; and as the lower orders, of men are not superior to the higher orders of women, they must hold and exercise the right of self-government on some other ground than superiority to woman." Here it would seem that Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony had been thinking, but they never followed their own thought to its inevitable conclusion. Universal manhood suffrage does relieve the men of this country from the unjust aspersion the women of the Suffrage movement put upon them, that they excluded women on account of inferiority.

No native American, who by the very fact of that nativity is bound to support the Constitution of the United States, and no foreign-born citizen who has taken the oath of allegiance to it, has a right by his vote to do anything that will imperil or impede the carrying out of its principles and its commands. "The establishment of justice, the insurement of domestic tranquillity, provision for the common defence, security in the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity," cannot be perfected or maintained without the present exercise and the reserve power of manhood strength. This Government laid aside all "attribute of education, or glamour of wealth, or prestige of birth," and committed its life to the keeping of its defenders. In this land, the vote is the "insignia of actual power," but it is only the insignia; the power to defend themselves and those who make country and home worth defending, lies with the individual defenders. To attempt to put it into the hands of those who are not physically fitted to maintain the obligations that may result from any vote or any legislative act, is to render law a farce, and to betray the trust imposed upon them by the constitution they have sworn to uphold. Universal manhood suffrage is the crowning result in the long evolution of government. Our statesmen of the Revolutionary period did not contemplate it. But stability was the thing for which they sought—the thing for which all statesmen of all times have been searching. If a government is not stable, it is of little consequence that it is full of noble ideals; and the most far-reaching thought has now grasped the idea that manhood strength is the natural and only defence of the state. This is the underlying theory of our Government, the one solid rock on which it rests. "When any question of governmental policy comes up, we virtually decide it, sooner or later, by a manhood vote; and as the decision has a majority of the men of the country behind it, there is no power that can overthrow it. If we attempt to establish policies or execute laws to which a majority of the men are opposed, we throw away our one assurance of stability, and are in constant danger of revolution. Even in the comparatively brief history of our Republic, there are plentiful instances to show that a majority of men will not submit to a minority, no matter how many non-combatants are joined with that minority. To give women a position of apparent power, without its reality, would be to make our Government forever unstable.