Walter Lyon Blease

“ If there was only one woman in England who was capable of practising as a doctor, it was her right as an individual to be allowed to practise, and the incapacity of every other of her sex was no reason for depriving her of her opportunity of working out her own life. Every kind of school and college, every occupation and profession, should be thrown open, and women should be permitted, as men were permitted, each to find her own place, according to her own natural capacity. ”

“ The conflict between the disposing and the sympathetic minds, between the blind and largely unconscious egoism of a governing class and the interest of its depreciated subjects, has never been elsewhere so terribly illustrated. Prostitution has always been regarded by a male society either as a danger or as a convenience. By such women as have known of its existence it has been more justly considered as an example of heartless oppression and abuse. Only a minority of the women who engage in it are there out of their own choice. ”

“ But the movement which Mill thus brought to the surface of politics was essentially part of the great tide of individual emancipation which had been flowing since the French Revolution, and pioneers like Lydia Becker were already struggling with prejudice and prudery with some success. Women were beginning to refuse, as Catholics, Dissenters, and workmen had refused, to be treated in the State as a branded class. If the domination of one class of men over another class of men had led to abuse, did not the domination of one sex over another also lead to abuse? ”

“ They are entrapped in childhood, or in early youth, they are corrupted by bad housing and overcrowding, they are betrayed by seducers, or they are driven by starvation wages to earn their living on the streets. Their condition is the most wretched of any people in the world. No other trade is so dangerous to those who are employed in it, or so quickly uses up their lives. No other trade so swiftly devours in its workpeople those noble qualities of the mind which would enable them to support the heaviest physical burdens. ”

“ The supposed weaknesses are at best exaggerated by education, and it was not improbable that they had been created by it. When everything possible had been done by artificial means to strengthen their minds and bodies, we might be able to form some accurate judgment of what their powers were. In any case, we had no right to enforce a general mode of life upon all women, irrespective of their individual variations. We no longer branded men with class marks, and reserved special occupations and dignities for special groups. Why should we persist in maintaining the same system for women? ”

“ The generation in which he wrote based all its hopes upon politics. Political reform was everything. Once enfranchised, the population would be able to protect itself against aggression, and its distress would come automatically to an end. Carlyle saw, what the Whigs, the Radicals, and the Manchester men could not or would not see, that this negative operation of the vote, this power of defence against interference by others, was of little use for his immediate purpose, the economic reconstruction of society, and he declared in his haste that it was of no use. ”

“ Most barbarous of all the grievances of women were the legal and conventional rules which affected the moral relations of the sexes. In nothing had the egoism of men been so remarkably displayed as in the construction of these rules, and in the care with which they had concealed the consequences from women. The progress of the movement in favour of Woman Suffrage is precisely to be measured by the growth of women's knowledge of the facts of sex, and in particular of the meaning of prostitution. ”

“ But it is a passionate appeal, in the very spirit of Socialism, to the sense of brotherhood, to the feeling that every man has as much right as every other not to be left behind in the race of industrial competition, and that the State, the organization of Society for common purposes, should not be confined merely to negative functions, but should be made the active and positive instrument of the improvement of human life.
Carlyle presented a curious contrast of the aristocrat and the democrat. His feeling was all for the people. ”

“ Whilst our diplomatists, fleets, and armies have been put in motion at enormous cost, to carry our counsel, or, if needful, our arms, to the assistance of the people of these remote regions, it is an unquestionable fact, that the population of a great portion of our own Empire has, at the same time, presented a grosser spectacle of moral and physical debasement than is to be met with in the whole civilized world. ”

“ Mill's Subjection of Women, published in 1869, applied to the condition of women precisely those arguments which, in other works, he applied to that of men. The question must be studied with an open mind, and not subject to a priori assumptions. Why should it be presumed that dependence and feebleness of mind were natural to women? Why should it be presumed that it was natural that men should regulate even the private lives of women? Why should it be presumed that a woman was naturally incapable of managing her own affairs? ”

“ The social problem of the future, he said, would be "how to unite the greatest individual liberty of action with a common ownership of the new material of the globe, and an equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labour." [11] His most original contribution to politics was his appeal for absolute equality of freedom for men and women, which was the first effective attempt to remove the class brand from women, and to abolish the aristocracy of sex. ”

“ The deliberate stunting of the female mind in education, [20] the exclusion of women from the Universities and the professions, the gross inequalities sanctioned by the new Divorce Act, the barbarity which stripped the wife on marriage of all her property and even of the earnings of her own labour, and reduced her to absolute physical and mental dependence upon her husband, all this was the direct or indirect consequence of the political domination of the male sex. Those who disposed of women in the State, disposed of them also in the schools, in industry, and in the family. ”

“ It stimulated the demand for education, for better moral standards, for the franchise, for everything which would enable women to control their own lives and to take themselves out of the disposition of men. It was in fact the greatest single stimulus to that vast social movement for the emancipation of women which is to-day visible in every part of the world. No one can understand the modern demand for Woman Suffrage who does not realize that the driving force behind it is the increasing knowledge of prostitution which has sprung from Mrs. Butler's agitation. ”

“ In all directions women of the middle class were beginning to assert their right to develop their own faculties and to employ their own powers according to their own ideas of what was right and fitting, and not according to those of the dominant sex. ”

“ But the course of events had determined that the children's minds should appear less important to Parliament than their souls.
A logical Liberal, faced with the task of establishing a national system of education, could take only the course which was advocated by the Birmingham League. That was to make education free, compulsory, and secular. No one should pay for education except as a taxpayer, all should be compelled to send their children to school, and no form of religious opinion should be taught. ”

“ For the conception of society as a collection of competing individuals, protected in their competition by the State, he endeavoured to substitute a conception of society as a mass of mutually dependent individuals, united by "organic filaments," the weaker aided and protected by the State against the competition of the stronger, and the whole rising and falling, advancing and retreating together. ”

“ Decisions of the judges had tended to cripple labour organizations by declaring strikes to be intimidation, and peaceful picketing a nuisance, and by holding that workmen acting in combination might be guilty of the crime of conspiracy, even though they did nothing which would have been a crime in the case of a single person. One decision had declared that a Trade Union, being an association in restraint of trade, was illegal, and that an official who embezzled its funds could not be sued by the Society. ”

“ The Radicals were "ballot-boxing on the graves of heroic ancestors." The mass of the people were "the rotten multitudinous canaille," and manhood suffrage was as reasonable as "horsehood and doghood suffrage." ”

“ Through all the progressive period of human history, the condition of women has been approaching nearer to equality with men. This does not of itself prove that the assimilation must go on to complete equality, but it assuredly affords some presumption that such is the case. ”

“ This Liberal Government was the first English Government which ever set itself to legislate for Ireland according to Irish ideas, to recognize the essential differences between the two countries, to establish in Ireland what it would not maintain in England, and to destroy in Ireland those English institutions which had been erected by the egoism of its predecessors. ”

“ He thus hoped to produce, not definitely new ideas, but a condition of mind to which new ideas would not be repugnant. This method of undermining his adversary's position was his method in politics as in general philosophy.
Mill was the son of a Utilitarian, and was himself a disciple of Bentham. But he never accepted the Benthamite theory without qualification. He knew that men were actuated by other motives, good and bad, than self-interest. He did not believe that by setting all men free to pursue their own interest the majority would achieve happiness. ”

“ Nonconformists might object, as they had always objected, to paying for the propagation of obnoxious dogmas. Churchmen and Catholics might object, with equal reason, to paying for the propagation of opinions which were obnoxious because they contained no dogmas at all. ”

“ For the first time in history, a great State, instead of asserting its claims by force, had agreed to be bound by the decision of an impartial tribunal, and had paid damages for its wrong-doing as if it had been a private person in a court of law. The cause of international morality advances slowly, and reaction is frequent and universal. ”

“ Thousands of human beings of the subject class, originally guilty of nothing worse than poverty or a youthful lapse from principle, were placed by the State at the disposal of the governing class for the foulest purpose. It is a most vivid illustration of the rarity of complete Liberalism, that the Contagious Diseases Acts remained on the Statute Book for seventeen years, and that if they were in the first place smuggled through Parliament, they were afterwards defended by men of all parties alike. ”

“ The world could only be saved by the hero, and the best thing mankind could do was to entrust itself to the unfettered genius of its great men. All this, and much more wild abuse sprang from Carlyle's violent indignation against individualism. ”

“ These propositions, which had perhaps been true in a barbarous society, could only be proved in a state of civilization by reason and argument. Until women had had some opportunity of exerting their natural powers in a state of independence, it was absurd to argue that those natural powers were not equal to independence. ”

“ No man ever saw more clearly the miseries of poverty, or felt more acutely the degradation of worth by external circumstances. "Through every living soul the glory of a present God still beams." But he was convinced that misery could not be entrusted with the instruments of its own relief. ”

“ Frederic Harrison, "is, as Adam Smith says, 'as ignorant of the subject as of human nature.' Unionism, above all, aims at making regular, even, and safe the workman's life. No one who had not specially studied it would conceive the vast array of grievances against which Unionism and strikes are directed. If we looked only to that side of the question, we should come to fancy that from the whole field of labour there went up one universal protest against injustice. There is a 'miserable monotony' of wrong and suffering in it. ”

“ No one can calculate what struggles, which the cause of improvement has yet to undergo, might have been spared if the philosophers of the eighteenth century had done anything like justice to the past. ”