Albert Venn Dicey

“ Few, indeed, have been in England the reformers of any kind who could seriously believe in the absolute right of every person to a vote. Faith in this dogma would at this moment dictate the duty of providing at once for British India a Parliament elected by adult suffrage. The whole of the creed which leads to this reductio ad absurdum has, indeed, been formally repudiated by the ablest thinker who has advocated the rights of women to an equal share with men in the government of Great Britain. ”

“ It is in reality not a right at all; it is rather a power or function given to a citizen for the benefit not primarily of himself, but of the public. This is assuredly the doctrine of English law, no less than of common sense. It affords the sole, but also the ample, justification for the punishment of both the giving and the receiving of bribes at a Parliamentary election. It justifies the deprivation of whole classes—such, for example, as the Irish forty-shilling freeholders—of their votes, and this, too, without giving them any pecuniary or other compensation. ”

“ The petulance of lawlessness can boast of no beneficial achievement whatever. It has for the first time given to political agitation, as conducted by some of the women of England, the character of disloyalty and, to speak plainly, of absurdity.
Our final appeal is, and must be, to the electors. Let every elector remember for once the main duty which, independent of party connection, lies upon him. He is bound, on the subject of woman suffrage, to vote with a sole eye to the permanent interest of the United Kingdom and of the British Empire. England is surrounded by perils. ”

“ Third Argument.—Again, it is urged that the concession of Parliamentary suffrage to women is merely the final step in that extension of their liberties and rights which in England, above all other countries, has been the glory of the nineteenth century, and remains by far the most certain sign of human progress. This emancipation of women, as it is called, has been full of blessing to the world. ”

“ My conviction as to the true nature of a Parliamentary vote led inevitably to the conclusion that the expediency, or what in such a matter is the same thing, the justice, of giving Parliamentary votes to English women depends on the answer to the inquiry, not whether a large number of English women, or English women generally, wish for votes, but whether the establishment of woman suffrage will be a benefit to England? ”

“ It is, lastly, with confidence asserted that woman suffrage will make for the suppression of private vice at home and the maintenance of public peace abroad. This idea has for many noble and public-spirited women an immense fascination, but it is grounded in the main on error. Enthusiasm for a legislative crusade against immorality rests on that eternal confusion between the sphere of law and the sphere of ethics, which, as all experience shows, is invariably productive of immense evil. For the belief that women will always be in favour of peace there exists no solid foundation whatever. ”

“ Why in the name of common sense should a vote confer upon a woman a benefit which it has not conferred upon a man? In any case it argues recklessness, not to say unscrupulosity, to tell working women, ignorant both of politics and economics, that Parliamentary votes will raise their wages. The relation, indeed, between votes and earnings has for the last few months been actively discussed in the newspapers. ”

“ It is at least arguable that the establishment of household suffrage has lowered the legislative capacity of the House of Commons. Bold, indeed, would be the paradox-monger who maintained that in no State belonging to the American Commonwealth has the introduction of universal suffrage lowered the moral or intellectual character of the Legislature. We must always, therefore, in legislation which affects the constitution of Parliament, weigh against one another the different qualities of representativeness and effectiveness. ”

“ We are the trustees for the future of the Empire. Upon what is done or neglected in Parliament beforehand must depend sooner or later the fate of England and of the British dominions throughout the world. We are bound in this House to look beyond the bawling and the brawling of the day, and to uphold Imperial policy above the clamour of selfish or short-sighted interests. ”

“ What can be more apparently reasonable than the expectation that when women are given a new share in the government of the nation the private virtues belonging more peculiarly to women may become blended with the public virtues which specially distinguish men, and thus produce in the public life of England such a combination of justice and compassion, of mercy and of truthfulness, as the world has never before witnessed? ”

“ It was a great relief, at any rate to myself, to discover that I could reconcile my enthusiasm for everything which promotes the personal freedom and the education of women with the strenuous denial to them of any share in sovereign power. ”

“ My wish is to do the fullest justice to by far the strongest practical reason producible in favour of woman suffrage. It indubitably contains an amount of truth which ought never to be overlooked. Under a representative government any considerable body of persons who are not represented in Parliament is exposed, at best, to neglect. In a country such as England, the views of the unrepresented are overlooked far less through the selfishness than through the stupidity or preoccupation of the voters and their representatives. ”

“ A Ministry in want of support may bid high for the votes of women. But such traffic in votes is nothing better than sheer bribery, and, in the eyes of honest men and of honest women, bribery is none the more respectable because it is the corruption, not of an individual, but of a class, or because the bribe comes neither out of the pocket of a member of Parliament, nor out of the funds of a party, but out of the public revenue. The possibility that newly enfranchised women may be specially open to such corruption affords, if true, a cogent argument against woman suffrage. ”

“ Nor must it for a moment be forgotten that the vast majority of the 10,000,000 or more women who under a system of adult suffrage would be admitted to the electorate have never sanctioned the demand for participation in sovereign power; whilst the protest by a large and increasing body of women against the so-called concession to English women of rights which thousands of them regard as the unjust imposition of an unbearable burden becomes every day more and more audible, and must be heard with the most profound respect. ”

“ I neither assert nor hold that political Unionism is logically inconsistent with the belief that English women ought to receive Parliamentary votes. I merely insist upon the simple fact that the grounds on which most Unionists rest their moral right to maintain the Union against the wishes of the majority of the people of Ireland are opposed to some of the reasons and much of the sentiment which tell in favour of the movement for woman suffrage. ”

“ Prove that an Englishwoman has, speaking generally, a rightful claim to the exercise of her natural talents and powers, or even to the education which makes that exercise possible, yet you have not advanced a step towards showing that an English woman has a right to take part by her vote in the government of the 300,000,000 of men and women who are natives of British India.
The more the difference between civil and political rights is considered, the more instructive it becomes. The deprivation of civil rights may amount to slavery. ”

“ The forgetfulness of this distinction has, as the history of every age bears witness, given birth on the one hand to the Pharisaism which teaches that the fulfilment of the law is the same thing as the performance of every moral and religious duty, and, on the other hand, to the sentimentality which teaches, and never taught with greater audacity and with worse effects than to-day, that a man's acts, however lawless, may receive pardon or eulogy if only they can by any possibility be attributed to an innocent—e.g., a religious or a political—motive. ”

“ It is the calm but vigorous action of women who protest against a policy which they hold to be injurious to the nation as a whole, and especially to women themselves. They have already achieved much. They have aroused the attention of the country. They have made it absolutely impossible that a measure far more revolutionary than the introduction of manhood suffrage should pass through Parliament, whilst exciting less attention than a Bill allowing the consolidation or union of two or three great railway companies. ”

“ This circumstance told in several respects upon the way in which I gradually came to look upon the movement in favour of woman suffrage.
My Unionism impressed upon me, as did also my keen sympathy with the Northern States of America in their opposition to secession, the thought that Conservatism may in some instances be an effort to enforce the supremacy of common justice, and to maintain the unity of a great nation. It made me feel that the mere desire of a class, however large, for political power or for national independence affords no conclusive reason why the wish should be granted. ”

“ In the attempt to solve it an elector will receive little aid from his leaders. The hesitation of the Government and the ambiguous silence of the Opposition are of bad omen; they suggest transactions and intrigues; they foretell that a fundamental change in the constitution of England, to which the world presents no real parallel, may be carried through in obedience, not to the clearly expressed will of the nation, but to those calculations of election agents and wirepullers which guide the action even of honest statesmen who have too fully imbibed the spirit of Parliamentary partisanship. ”

“ Fourth Argument.—The possession of votes, it is asserted, will increase the earnings of women. This prophecy is of itself enough to enlist every underpaid and underfed seamstress or maid-of-all-work in the ranks of the fighting suffragists. The plain answer to it is that the prediction, if it means (as every working woman does understand it to mean) that a vote will in itself raise the market value of a woman's work, is false. The ordinary current price of labour depends on economical causes. ”

“ We condemn the law which hangs a murderer, we applaud the murderer who arrogates the name of an assassin. It is, let me lastly remark, certain that if in the England of to-day respectable women united in condemning severely what is generally termed 'immorality,' they could produce an effect greater by far than anything which could result from any sort of Parliament. ”

“ Grant—though the concession is an extravagant one—that the benefits derived from the development of popular government are not only, as they certainly are, great, but have also been unmixed with any evil, it is easy enough to show that they have been obtained, in Great Britain at least, by adherence to the fundamental canon of individualism, 'that over himself, his own body and mind, the individual is, or ought to be, sovereign'—that is, by the extension of the civil rights of individuals, whether men or women. ”

“ In no part of public life is the predominance of a class in general more apparent than in the sphere of taxation. But no woman in modern England is taxed where a man is not taxed. In plain truth, the civil or strictly private rights of an unmarried woman, when not in some way connected with a public function, are, broadly speaking, the same as those of a man. The few exceptions to this rule—e.g., the refusal of degrees to women at Oxford and Cambridge—might be got rid of to-morrow by half the exertion used for obtaining votes for women. ”

“ It is public opinion, not law, which has to a great extent put down gambling; it is public opinion, not change in the law, which has led English gentlemen to adopt habits of habitual sobriety. It is to public opinion we must mainly trust for the diminution of that love of drink which is the curse of the English wage-earners. But women can, and do, influence public opinion as much as do men. ”

“ Civil rights ought, according to Mill, to be governed by his law of liberty. To political rights this law has hardly any application. No art of logic, even when aided by rhetoric, can convert a precept intended to determine the limits of an individual's freedom, in matters which primarily concern himself, into the dogma that a given individual, or a given class, has necessarily a right to the determination of matters which primarily concern the public or the State. A person's claim, in short, to govern himself is a totally different thing from his claim to govern others. ”

“ At this crisis we are asked to add to our existing dangers and to our heavy political labours a new and doubtful experiment in constitutional government. We are asked to weaken English democracy by far more than doubling the number of English electors; we are asked to place the government of England, nominally at least, in the hands of women. ”

“ To the contributions and the influence of women is, he conceives, due the continually increasing mass of unenlightened and short-sighted benevolence which, relieving people from the disagreeable consequences of their own acts, saps the foundations of self-respect, self-help, and self-control which are the essential conditions both of individual prosperity and of social virtue. Few, indeed, are the women who can appreciate the value of self-dependence ”

“ No soldier, and very few civilians, can assert with confidence that our present army is sufficient for our defence. It is uncertain, as we all now know, whether our navy can of itself guarantee the United Kingdom against invasion. On the Englishmen who, civilians though they remain, must, as high authorities tell us, receive military training, will depend the maintenance of England's independence, and the existence of the British Empire. ”

“ Difference of sex, just because it is a natural division, not depending upon external circumstances, such as the difference between rich and poor, landlords and tenants, traders and agriculturists, does not—at any rate in a civilized country like England—often give rise to an opposition of interests. This is the important truth contained in the paradox attributed to John Bright—that 'women are not a class.' Where will you find a body of Englishmen who have legislated of set purpose against the interest of their daughters and in favour of their sons? ”

“ This our political guides have done, if we judge them with the very utmost charity possible, out of compassion for the miseries of the poor, without thinking for a moment of the burden they might impose on ratepayers whose efforts just kept them out of pauperism. Such leaders will not become wiser or more prudent when they find that their seats depend on the approval of new constituents whose tender-heartedness forbids them to see the evil of any form of charity which, at whatever cost to the State, gives immediate relief to individual distress which excites their sympathies. ”

“ It is due to the practical acceptance in Great Britain of Mill's own law of liberty—namely, that 'the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection; that the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to others. ”

“ A petition signed by more than 250,000 women has already told for much. Let the numbers be doubled, and it takes no prophet to predict that the pledges and opinions of candidates for seats in Parliament will undergo a miraculous change. Women can do more than any men to check an agitation which may delay for years the removal, at the instance of moderate reformers, of really injurious restraints upon the free action of women. Moderate reform has everything in its favour. ”

“ The other reflection is that, even if education strengthens, as I believe fully it will, the intellectual powers of women, yet the fruits of education come to ripeness only after long years, and therefore that to thrust political power or—in theory at least—political supremacy upon a body of women who have not as yet acquired as a class the civic virtues which the experience and the labours of centuries have even now developed but imperfectly among ordinary men is, on the very face of the matter, an act of portentous recklessness. ”

“ In 1909 we know, what even down to 1882 might have been open to question, that from a Parliament of men elected by men women can obtain, because in fact they have obtained, relief from every proved wrong. Women, in short, in modem England, exert, through free discussion and the certainty with which it tells on public opinion, a legislative influence which indefinitely diminishes, if it does not absolutely annihilate, the force of the argument that the women of England need Parliamentary representation as a guarantee against probable oppression. ”