Albert Venn Dicey

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I have always admitted that woman suffrage will increase the chance of Parliament turning its attention towards the special wants of women, and thus opening to them some few careers from which they are excluded simply by law. ”

“ They dimly perceive that it is not always easy to decide which of two guilty parties is the wrong-doer and which is the victim. They catch in practice a glimpse of the consideration, which is often overlooked in theoretical discussions, that sexual errors, which may be covered by one and the same name, differ almost indefinitely in the degree of moral culpability attaching to those who have violated a social law which it is assuredly necessary to keep in force. ”

“ The lowness of a woman's wages is due in part to her weakness compared with the strength of men, in part to her necessary exclusion from all careers, such as employment in the army and navy, labour in the docks, and the like, for which she is physically unfitted, and in part it may be in England to the excess in the number of women over men, or to the fact that many women do not depend upon their wages for a livelihood. ”

“ There is no need to deny that the possession of votes would in some instances increase the moral authority of women; what I do deny is that the increase in their moral power would be anything like as great as suffragists expect. If on any point of ethics the vast majority of English women were agreed, their agreement would certainly tell on English opinion ”

“ It is constantly assumed that the votes of women would assuredly tell against everything which many—let me say which most—good women hold to be evils, more or less suppressible by law or by national policy. ”

“ As regards charity, women, he conceives, are in the present state of the world both unable to see and unwilling to admit the ultimate evil tendency of any form of charity or philanthropy which commends itself to their sympathetic feelings. ”

“ I observe, however, that as the controversy progresses suffragists grow less and less confident about the closeness of the connection between the possession of a vote and the rise in the rate of a woman's earnings. There is another sense in which a vote or political power may, I admit, have its pecuniary value. It may be used by women, and still more by a body of women, to wring money, or money's worth, from the State. ”

“ But everybody knows that in this matter, and in others respecting the relation of the sexes, the judgment and the conduct of even the best women is not always uniform. They occasionally, at least, condemn the seducer less severely than his victim. It is common knowledge that respectable women do not err on the side of leniency in judging the errors of their own sex. ”

“ Nor have I ever myself been able to find any sound reason in its favour. A friend, whose sound and impartial judgment we both respect, fully agrees with me. 'I can't,' he writes, 'feel at all sure that women's influence would make for peace. Where wars excite popular feeling it seems to me that women's influence tends to fan the flame. ”

“ Law, when unsupported by public opinion, may fail to punish notorious crimes. A duellist who has caused the death of his opponent has for centuries, according to the law of England, been deemed a murderer. ”

“ He believes that 'disinterestedness in the general conduct of life, the devotion of the energies to purposes which hold out no promise of private advantage to the family, is very seldom encouraged or supported by women's influence.' [1] He credits women with aversion to war and addiction to philanthropy, but to these excellent characteristics the influence of women more often than not, in his opinion, gives a direction which is as often mischievous as useful. In philanthropy, the two provinces chiefly cultivated by women are religious proselytism and charity. ”

“ The first is that the effort to put down by law breaches of the moral rules which ought to govern the relation between the sexes has been made again and again, and has—at any rate where man and woman alike were consenting parties—ended in failure, and frequently been the parent of evils more disastrous than the wrong-doing which it was meant to cure. ”

“ Surely it was not the women, as such, who wanted peace in the Southern States of America, or in France, or in Germany.' In 1870 a Marylander told me that Maryland would have stood out for peace had it not been for the young women of his State, who clamoured for secession and war. Women are more emotional than men, and liability to emotion is no guarantee against warlike passion. ”

“ The State has been built up by men; its welfare depends upon the encouragement of manly qualities. There are two ways in which the authority of women might work evil. It might lead statesmen or stateswomen to judge public conduct by the rules properly applicable to domestic life. ”

“ If, to take one example, the seducer of any girl found that, as a rule, his sin excluded him from marriage with any woman of character, the penalty would be sufficient to work a transformation in general opinion as to the heinousness of his offence. ”

“ But then proselytism at home is a name for the embittering religious animosities, whilst abroad it is usually a blind running at an object without either knowing or heeding the fatal mischiefs, even as regards the propagation of religion itself, which may be produced by the means employed. ”

“ Fifth Argument.—The acquisition of votes by women will, it is constantly asserted, work the moral and social regeneration of England. This belief on the part of suffragists is natural. There are virtues, such as modesty, ready sympathy with, and compassion for poverty and suffering, which, though possessed in some degree by most human beings, are deemed, whether rightly or not, to be specially feminine. ”

“ The inhabitants of New England would to-day refuse to bear, and would rightly refuse to bear, the stem laws of their Puritan forefathers. The second remark is that the belief in the cure of moral evils by the force of law arises from the constant confusion between the spheres, which often overlap, of morality and law. ”

“ The one is that the domestic virtues may obtain too much rather than too little influence in the transaction of public affairs. Our politicians have by the Old Age Pensions Act re-established a gigantic system of outdoor relief without waiting to hear the judgment of a Commission appointed to inquire into the working of the Poor Law. ”

“ The one—namely, the Fourth Argument—will be received with special favour by hardworked and often underpaid women of the labouring classes; the other—namely, the Fifth Argument—is certain to impress benevolent ladies engaged in good works, and inclined to advocate every measure which, on the face of it, tends towards the moral and religious amelioration of mankind. ”

“ Yet 'Trafalgar saved England.' It is possible, again, that women, rightly careful of private morality, might, as things now stand, not recognize fully the duty, to which men of irregular lives have sometimes subordinated all selfish objects, of placing the welfare of the State far above the personal interests of family life. ”

“ He draws a splendid picture of what women will become in some future age and in some undiscovered society which places them on a political equality with men; but he expresses a most unfavourable opinion of English women as he actually knew them in real life from, say, 1830 to 1873. ”

“ But a duellist who fought fairly might, till quite recent days, kill his man without the least fear of punishment. The high morality of Sir Walter Scott, the strictly religious education of Macaulay, left each of them ready to accept a challenge. ”