Εικόνες σελίδας
PDF
Ηλεκτρ. έκδοση

the official distance: but these men, if they carry mails, usually have complaints made against them, at least on the British side, by the post-office officials. Their times of arrival are compared with those of a ship nearly matched in speed, etc. Then, again, builders do not care to see a man in charge of a fast ship which lags behind one built in a rival yard. A man who cuts corners and runs full speed in fog, is a man who advertises both his line and the yard which made his ship. There is no suspicion of graft here, but simply of satisfaction, official and personal, if the man in command is making smart passages, and of dissatisfaction if he is not.

In my paper I charged that masters and officers of liners were underpaid. Will any of the critics who denied my charge mention a single instance of any transatlantic liner captain receiving a salary of $5000 a year? Transatlantic liners are nearly three times larger than the liners of fifteen years ago, and they carry twice the amount of mail and twice the number of passengers, and yet the salaries of masters, instead of increasing, have decreased proportionately. Possibly the commodores in the best German and English liners may occasionally reach $4000. The great majority of masters range between $2000 and $3000 — this according to seniority. Most masters on liners carrying over 3000 souls do not reach even $2000 a year. The pay of the chief officers of the biggest liners afloat never exceeds and seldom reaches $1400 per annum. The seventh officer receives for his expensive training and his diplomas, the princely sum of $35 a month, while his initial expense on

costly uniforms will be about $150. This deduction leaves him a balance of $270 for his first year's services.

It is not a fair reply to these charges, that the laws of supply and demand regulate salaries. Those who engage in a career on the sea, start in their profession as mere boys, and the artificial barriers which separate the seaman from the landsman effectually prevent the great majority of seamen from getting preferment ashore. A wage that would keep body and soul together and afford a little margin for the decencies of life would seem to be good policy, but it is one which is not embraced by any line afloat.

One important point in my article seems to have been neglected by all my critics. The matter of habitual speed in foggy weather met with no denial. Perhaps the Republic incident is too recent. Perhaps also the charge proves itself, for ships come and go with clock-like regularity, fog or no fog.

I have tried to answer my critics with candor, but I have not felt at liberty to mention names. The reasons why are obvious. I know my facts, and I believe they cannot be impugned. In closing, I should like to state once more that my charges are not directed against any particular company, ship, or master. I should like again to emphasize the fact that many masters carry out the letter of the law and of the company's regulations, but these men do not always get the credit which is their due. The supposed 'crack' skipper has better fortune!

Respectfully yours,

CHARLES TERRY DELANEY.

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY

SEPTEMBER, 1910

THE LADIES' BATTLE

BY MOLLY ELLIOT SEAWELL

I

ONE fact concerning the womansuffrage movement is plain to all who have watched that movement: that is, the superficial and inadequate manner in which the matter has been discussed on both sides. The suffragists, in their spoken and published utterances, reveal that, while they propose a stupendous governmental change, they have little knowledge of the fundamentals of government, the evolution of representation, the history of politics, or the genesis, scope, and meaning of suffrage. In their treatment of the subject, they hopelessly confuse political, philanthropic, socialistic, and economic questions; nor do they seem able to discriminate between objects of national and those of state or municipal regulation. They have shown no grasp of the principles of government; few suffragists, perhaps, could explain, offhand, why the House of Representatives has a Committee on Foreign Affairs, and the Senate has a Committee on Foreign Relations. Yet such things are among the alphabet of representative government, and to attempt enormous governmental changes without knowing this alphabet is like trying to work the integral and differential calculus

VOL. 106-NO. 3

without knowing the ground-rules of arithmetic.

The objectors to woman suffrage have not always given logical or practical reasons against it. They feel an instinctive dislike to the overturning of the social order which woman suffrage would work, but they have reasoned little more than a person reasons who runs indoors from a hailstorm. The inconveniences of remaining exposed to a hailstorm are so plain that few persons work the matter out logically; they act on instinct, which, unlike reason, makes no mistakes. Still, if an effort were made forcibly to expose persons to hailstorms, a dozen conclusive reasons might be found why they should go indoors. Mr. William Dean Howells says that he has heard many appeals against woman suffrage, but that he has never heard any reasons against it; yet there are compelling reasons against it. They have not been much in evidence, because the debate has been chiefly in the hands of women whose knowledge of governmental principles is meagre.

Both sides-whether for or against - have assumed that the revolution would be over when a woman could walk up to the polling-booth and deposit a ballot in the box. It is at this

point, however, that the revolution would begin. It is true that limited suffrage prevails in twenty-two states, and full suffrage in four, - Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah,—and still there is no general revolution. But it must be remembered that in the states where there is limited suffrage, women have shown a general indifference to exercising suffrage, while the experiment in the four crude and sparsely settled states in which there is full suffrage affords no adequate test for full suffrage in great centres of civilization, and in vast and crowded communities, with immense and diversified interests. Wyoming is a state of cowboys and cattle-ranges. Idaho is dominated to a great degree by the Mormon Church, which has ever been the good friend of woman suffrage, and the most powerful advocate it has yet had. In Utah, the women-voters, under the lead of Mormonism, have voted steadily in favor of polygamists and law-breakers, who have been sent to Congress, in defiance of the law, by the votes of women. In Colorado, the most civilized of all the suffrage states, the suffrage experiment has not been entirely successful, as will be shown further on. The near view of suffrage does not seem to help it. During the last fourteen years, California, South Dakota, Washington, and Oregon have all defeated suffrage amendments to their constitutions.

II

There are two basic principles opposed to woman suffrage. A basic principle works with the merciless mechanism of a natural law, like gravitation, and is indeed a natural law. It may be violated for a time, just as a stick may be thrust in the cogs of a machine, but the machine will not work until the stick is removed, and is sure to be damaged by the performance. True, it is not only

the suffragists who have defied a basic principle: it is within the memory of living men that the government of the United States, through some of its ablest and most experienced legislators, violated every principle of constitutional government, of common sense as well as common justice, by placing the ballot in the hands of recently emancipated slaves who could neither read nor write, and were without property.

By the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, in five states of the Union, all power and property were handed over to the combined vice and illiteracy of those states. By the Fifteenth Amendment, a coach and horses were driven through the Constitution of the United States by an attempt to compel the granting of the same civil rights to the recently emancipated slaves only a few generations removed from cannibalism, as to the highest type of the Caucasian race with a thousand years of civilization behind it. If civilization could be destroyed by legislative enactment, it would have been destroyed in the five Southern states which were thus delivered over to anarchy. But civilization cannot be destroyed by legislative enactment. It may be grievously injured, and frightful disorders and lasting wrong may follow; but the basic and natural law will always, in such dreadful events, rise above the statute law and civilization will maintain itself at all costs.

The reason against the enfranchisement of women bears no relation whatever to the reason for the practical disfranchisement of the Negro which now prevails throughout the Southern states. It may rather be compared to the disfranchisement of all the citizens of that district which has the highest percentage of literacy of any district in the country, and the highest percentage of individual wealth, and in which

the government disburses three hundred and seventy-two millions of dollars a year in wages. This is the District of Columbia, containing a population of 343,005 souls. No citizen of the District has a vote. The experiment of The experiment of giving these citizens votes had been fully tried, when, less than forty years ago, two of the greatest jurists of the age, the late Senator Thurman of Ohio, and former Senator Edmunds of Vermont, carried through, without division of party, a scheme of disfranchising every citizen in the most intelligent municipality in the country. Two reasons were given for this. One was to prevent the Negroes from voting, and the other was the belief that it was better there should be no political representatives at the seat of Federal government except Federal representatives.

In this case, as from the beginning of representative government, the ballot was recognized, not as a right, but as a privilege, which could be withheld from intelligent qualified persons, as well as from the unqualified. As Senator Elihu Root, one of the greatest living jurists, has tersely put it, "But if there is any one thing settled, it is that voting is not a natural right, but simply a means of government.'

[ocr errors]

III

The two basic reasons against woman suffrage are as follows:

First, no electorate has ever existed, or ever can exist, which cannot execute its own laws.

Second, no voter has ever claimed, or ever can claim, maintenance from another voter.

In the suffrage states these basic laws are for the moment nullified.

Concerning the first of these propositions, a voter must have two qualifications. First, he must, except in occasional individual instances, be

physically able to make his way to the polls, against opposition if necessary; and, second, he must be able to carry out by force the effect of his ballot. Law consists of a series of Thou-shaltnots, but government does not result until an armed man stands ready to execute the law. Force converts law into government. In civilized countries there are three methods of converting law into government - fine or compensation, imprisonment, and death. For all of these, physical force is necessary. To create an electorate unable to use physical force, is not, as the suffragists seem to think, merely doubling the present electorate. It means pulling out the underpinning, which is force, from every form of government the world has yet known.

Besides the two essential qualifications of a voter, there are many other desirable ones. Education is desirable, but not essential. The possession of education and intelligence does not enable women to force their way to the polls or to execute laws created under female suffrage. The spectacle of one half the electorate unable to execute a single law it has made, or even to deposit its ballots without the assistance of the other half, is a proposition so fantastic that it is difficult to attack it seriously.

The trouble would begin with the mere attempt of women to deposit their ballots. A dozen ruffians at a single polling-place could prevent a hundred women from depositing a single ballot. There can be no doubt that this means would be used by the rougher elements, and that the polls would become scenes of preordained disorder and riot. In addition to this rowdyism, respectable women would have to face the class that is not respectable, a thing appalling to modest women. The respectable women might invoke the law, but they could not enforce it. They

would be dependent upon that moiety of men who might be willing to assist them. The constabulary has always proved totally inadequate to maintain order at the polls when there was a determined effort at disorder; and there is in the American nation a fixed hostility to the employment of troops at polling-places. It is a fact, probably unknown to the suffragists, that every administration which has ever passed a force bill, or even made a serious endeavor to do so, has lost the House of Representatives at the next election. This has given rise to the axiom that an electorate which cannot protect itself is not worth protecting, and the country is better off without it than with it. This principle has worked unerringly since the foundation of the Republic, and is in itself the natural protection of the ballot.

Supposing the ballots of women, however, to have been deposited by the indulgence of men, women will surely be called upon to legislate for men upon subjects of which no woman has ever had, or ever can have, any practical experience. True, men now legislate for women. But there is no trade, profession, or handicraft, of which women have a monopoly, and in which no man has any experience. It has often been pointed out that women could not, with justice, ask to legislate upon matters of war and peace, as no woman can do military duty; but this point may be extended much further. No woman can have any practical knowledge of shipping and navigation, of the work of trainmen on railways, of mining, or of many other subjects of the highest importance. Their legislation, therefore, would not probably be intelligent, and the laws they devised for the benefit of sailors, trainmen, miners, etc., might be highly objectionable to the very persons they sought to benefit. If obedience should be re

fused to these laws, who is to enforce them? The men? Is it likely they will? And if the effort should be made, what stupendous disorders would occur! The entire execution of the law would be in the hands of men, backed up by an irresponsible electorate which could not lift a finger to apprehend or punish a criminal.

Great questions would arise concerning national defense and internal protection. The votes of women, not one of whom would be called upon to share the hardships of a military life, might decree that a hundred thousand soldiers would be sufficient in a case where the men from whom these soldiers would be recruited would say that two hundred thousand were needed. By providing only half that number, those men might be sent to their destruction. Would they go? And if they refused, who is to make them go? Where would be the justice in allowing women a voice, and an utterly irresponsible ballot, on this subject? In municipal affairs, the men might decide that a city needed for its protection a police force of fifteen hundred men; the women, not one of whom would be called upon to risk her life as a policeman risks his, might conclude that a thousand men would be enough, and those thousand men would have to face odds with which it would require fifteen hundred men to deal; and awful disasters might result. But suppose the police refuse to meet these odds. Again, who is to make them do it? A considerable proportion of men are unable to do military or constabulary duty. To add to this irresponsible percentage among men the whole feminine electorate, would be to reduce the responsible electorate to a minimum.

In a recent magazine article, Mrs. Clarence Mackey, a leading suffragist, advances with much gravity the proposition that influence such as women now possess, without responsibility, is a

« ΠροηγούμενηΣυνέχεια »