Woman and the Republic: A Survey of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the United States and a Discussion of the Claims and Arguments of Its Foremost Advocates — John Shaqi
Woman and the Republic: A Survey of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the United States and a Discussion of the Claims and Arguments of Its Foremost AdvocatesJohnson, Helen Kendrick
History
Woman and the Republic: A Survey of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the United States and a Discussion of the Claims and Arguments of Its Foremost Advocates
Johnson, Helen Kendrick
Women -- Legal status, laws, etc. -- United States; Women -- Suffrage -- United States
This fact and argument show how little arbitration has to do with the
practical decision concerning suffrage. Suffrage writers and speakers harp
upon the thought that arbitration will take the place of force. That
method of settling disputes cannot come too quickly, but it has not come
yet. It has no real bearing on the organization of the state as resting
upon the civil and military service of its citizens. England consented to
arbitrate with the powerful United States, but refused to arbitrate with
defenceless Nicaragua in a far less important matter. Congress has
seriously considered exterminating the remnant of the beautiful herd of
seals that once played in our Northern Pacific waters, because British
subjects have continued, in violation of the Arbitration treaty, to kill
the animals with cruelty. Behind arbitration, as behind all law and order,
military power must always stand and must sometimes be used. One more
proof that the vote is not the real power, but only its insignia, lies in
the fact that legislation has not been able to put an end to strikes and
riots. Laws that forbid them are passed with all due form; but when they
come, as come they do, the reading of the riot act is suspended and the
regiments are ordered to Chicago, or Buffalo, or Brooklyn, or Homestead,
or Cripple Creek, or Cleveland, or the Indian country. The force of those
bodies was not "brutal," it was physical power obeying mental; and unless
mental power can command physical, there is no way in which mental power
can enforce its decrees in government. There are now facing us tremendous
moral issues, which presage tremendous struggles; and a very notable
example of the dangers that would attend woman suffrage is suggested by
them. If women had the power to create a numerical majority when there was
a majority of the law's natural and only defenders against them, they
might soon precipitate a crisis that would lead to bloodshed, which they
would be powerless either to prevent or to allay. Would the majority of
men submit to the minority of men associated with non-combatants? American
history furnishes no reason for supposing that they would. The Dorr War in
Rhode Island is a case in point, in local matters. I am neither an
alarmist nor a believer in war as a panacea; but if we discuss this
subject at all, we must discuss it with facts and not fancies in our
minds.
Dr. Jacobi again says, in her book: "It may be said, for it has been said,
that the objection to seeing a vote of seven hundred men overcome by a
coalition of three hundred men with eight hundred women, lies in the fact
that the defeated minority knows, if it had a free hand and was allowed to
use fisticuffs, it could pound into a jelly a majority composed so largely
of women. It would feel, therefore, sullen, restive, and justly indignant,
that it should be prohibited from using this power and obliged to submit
to a merely nominal force and supremacy."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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