Letters to a friend on votes for women/Summary of argument

by Albert Venn Dicey

LETTER V

Summary of argument

My dear C,

My reasoning throughout the whole of these letters has almost of necessity involved a certain amount of repetition. The pains with which I have elaborated particular points may have obscured the general drift of my argument. Allow me, then, in this last letter, to come back to the question whence we started: Will England derive benefit from the introduction of woman suffrage? When the matter has been calmly examined, without declamation or rhetoric, the answer comes out clearly enough. That this is so will be apparent if I broadly summarize the whole case, as it stands before my mind, against granting Parliamentary votes to English women.

There exist, on the one hand, some plausible or even strong arguments for conceding to women a share in sovereign power. The force, however, of these reasons lies mainly in their correspondence with much of the prevalent sentiment of the day. When examined, they turn out too weak to prove the necessity or the expediency of exposing an ancient commonwealth to the risks of a dangerous experiment, which can hardly, indeed, be complimented with the name of an experiment, since, when once tried, it cannot be given up.

The claim to Parliamentary votes, as a matter of abstract right, is part of an obsolete political creed which did not command the assent of the teacher whose 'Subjection of Women' supplies the argumentative foundation of the claim to woman suffrage. This demand, again, is treated by suffragists as a deduction from the principles of popular government; but these so-called principles, when rationally examined, turn out to be mere watchwords or shibboleths which, if treated as the premises of serious political argument, must, from their vagueness and inaccuracy, lead to absurd conclusions. The desired innovation or revolution is, we are further told, needed to deliver English women from, or guard them against, grievous wrongs. But we now know from happy experience that such wrongs may be, as they in fact have been, removed or averted by a Parliament consisting solely of men, and in the election whereof no woman had a part.

To give votes to women is, we are assured, nothing but the final step in that path of democratic progress which, during the last eighty years, has led the men and women of England towards freedom and happiness. 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. But the dogma that an individual, whether man or woman, has a right to determine matters which mainly concern such individual, goes hardly a step towards showing that, from a woman's right to govern herself, you may legitimately infer that she has a right to govern others. The claim to civil rights or private rights never has been, and never can be, placed on the same footing as the claim to political rights, or, in other words, duties.^[1]

Women's votes, we are told, will raise women's wages; but, in the sense in which every overworked woman will understand this assertion, it is false. The current rate of wages cannot be fixed by law. In the only sense in which the assertion may be true, it supplies, as I have pointed out, the strongest of arguments against the extension of electoral rights to a body of persons tempted to use their votes as the means of wringing higher wages from the State.

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. Capacity for passionate emotion is unfavourable to the calmness of judgment which anticipates the risks and forbids the cruelty and the wastefulness of war.

The reasons, on the other hand, against trying a hazardous constitutional experiment on an ancient commonwealth are of immense weight.

Woman suffrage means adult suffrage; and adult suffrage means the transfer of the right to govern the United Kingdom from some 7,000,000 of men to some 20,000,000 or, it may be, 24,000,000 of men and women, whereof women will be the majority.

That the women to be admitted to the Parliamentary franchise will often be excellent persons, highly endowed with the virtues of fortitude, personal unselfishness, and self-sacrifice, we are convinced; but the conviction that English women will exhibit in the highest degree the virtues of women is not the contradiction, but the complement of the belief, entertained by nearly every man, that women of pre-eminent goodness are often lacking in the virtues, such as active courage, firmness of judgment, self-control, steadiness of conduct, and, above all, a certain sense of justice maintained even in the heat of party conflict, which are often to be found in Englishmen, even of an ordinary type. Whoever asks for the vindication of this belief should study the deeds and the words of the fighting suffragists. He should note at the same time that the female leaders in the battle for women's rights have for the most part never unreservedly condemned the lawless follies and the hysterical insolence of their followers. These leaders have thus condoned courses of action which, if pursued by every body of persons who deemed that they suffered real grievances, would reduce the United Kingdom to an anarchy deeper than that which destroyed Poland.

Of the features which discredit the agitation whose war-cry is 'Votes for women!' I have of set purpose said little. The antics of the fighting suffragists hardly deserve serious notice. The misapprehension both of history and of law which suggests the delusion that English women have been robbed of a suffrage which they never possessed, has, we trust, been finally disposed of by the impressive judgment delivered by the Lord Chancellor in the House of Lords. The silly and mendacious insinuation^[2] that over 140 women have been sent to prison only for asking for votes is, in itself, hardly more deserving of confutation than would be the statement that a convicted burglar had got five years' penal servitude 'only because he called on a householder late at night, and entered by the back rather than by the front door of the house.'

The pregnant principle or fact that government itself depends at bottom upon force, tells all but fatally against the establishment of woman suffrage in a country, at any rate, such as England, where it would ultimately give predominant power to women. Nothing, I may add, is more noteworthy or characteristic than the incapacity of suffragists to recognize this unwelcome truth. Their political blindness is shown by the failure to perceive that for women to rely on physical force for the attainment of political authority calls into play the instrument, and creates the condition of opinion, which, should women obtain votes, might deprive them of any real share in sovereignty. The folly displayed by a class which, knowing itself to be deficient in paramount physical strength, relies upon lawless violence for the attainment of its ends, excites derision. But it reminds a thoughtful observer of the anarchy or tyranny which would be possible under any constitution that dissevered legal right from physical power, and left open the chance that a Government supported by a majority of the electorate, consisting mainly of women, should come into conflict with the vast majority of the male electors who commanded the sympathy of, or (as in Switzerland) had come to coincide with, the national army.

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.

This, then, is the case against woman suffrage. To fair-minded men who have throughout life been zealous to extend the civil rights of English women, it may well seem decisive. They will refuse to sanction a policy which, if it offers some dubious benefits to women, threatens irreparable damage, and great and immediate peril to England.

Will the kind of argument, you ask, which I have laid before you in these letters, pressed as it has been, and is, in every shape and from all sides upon public attention, arrest a dangerous revolution?

No one knows. It will certainly not commend itself to enthusiasts who believe that they are resisting laws unjust to women, when in reality they are attacking, not human law, but the very nature of things. One circumstance fills me with hope. 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. They have, I trust, averted the risk, against which we must still be on our guard, that the admission of women to the Parliamentary franchise should be the result of party intrigue. Their duty, and I am certain their wish, is to continue with vigour the good work they have begun. 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. It has produced all the definite improvements—and they are many—in the condition of English women which have been effected during the last fifty years. 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. Our neighbours are military States, each of which maintains armies larger than we can retain within the bounds of the United Kingdom. These States are armed nations; some of them are governed on military principles. One and all, however, whether they have done much or little for the promotion of popular freedom, the Continental States recognize, with one insignificant exception, the principle that none can have a share in sovereignty who cannot defend the land for which he may be required at any moment to die.

Contrast the position of Great Britain. 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. In Ireland we have resistance to the law which Ministers refuse to put down, and which may any day be transformed into organized sedition. The spirit of nationality is moving in Egypt. From India we hear of widespread conspiracy which might some day make armed revolt a possibility. Meanwhile grave questions are pending in Eastern Europe, whence an armed conflict may arise from which our honour and our interests may make it impossible for us to hold aloof. The very vastness of our Empire, and the envy with which it is regarded by other nations, provoke and expose us to attack. The necessary intricacy and entanglement of our foreign and colonial policy make it more than ever needful that the country should be guided by the cool head, the clear aim, and the tenacious purpose, which are to be found only in the strongest and most sagacious of men.

We inherit institutions built up by generations of statesmen, and well worth defence. Our constitution, resting as it does on the unquestionable supremacy of the civil power and the universal rule of equal law, is, with all its defects, the strongest, the freest, the most pacific, we may venture to say the most humane, form of government which has ever existed in any great State or Empire. It maintains an unvaried peace in every country subject to the British flag; it has secured for the self-governing colonies of Great Britain independence as regards their local affairs, combined with exemption from the necessity of defending themselves against foreign aggression either by the sacrifices of war or by the intolerable burden of an armed peace. At this moment Englishmen are engaged in the earnest endeavour to prove that popular government in Great Britain is compatible with the maintenance of Imperial power and Imperial peace. What may be the issue of this effort to combine honest democracy with sane Imperialism no prophet is daring enough to foretell. Yet upon its success may well depend the fate of popular government throughout the civilized world.

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. Of these the best are ignorant of statesmanship; the least trustworthy are fanatics who, in their passionate desire to obtain a share in the sovereignty which determines the policy of the British Empire (including the fate of millions of inhabitants of dependent countries), have conclusively shown that they have not yet mastered the most elementary principles of self-government or of loyal obedience to the laws of their native land. To these demands English electors will, I trust, be deaf. An appeal is made to their common sense and common prudence; they must for once trust themselves rather than their leaders. The most honourable of Parliamentary statesmen, when once engrossed in the game of party warfare, are apt to forget the very elements of statesmanship. They count votes gained or lost in or out of Parliament, and they lose the capacity for understanding the voice of the nation. May that voice be clear and unmistakable. It was well said a little while ago by a great soldier: 'We are not here only, nor even chiefly, for the purposes of the moment. 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. Is not this, indeed, my lords, the greater part of our duty? Unless we occupy ourselves most earnestly and under a sense of personal trusteeship with the means by which the safety and greatness of our country, continued from age to age, may be maintained in time to come, we cannot justify our existence even against the subversive force challenging this House to-day, and we shall not escape the heavy judgment of history. We are links in a living chain, pledged to transmit intact to posterity the glorious heritage we have received from those who have gone before us.'^[3]

These are the words of Lord Roberts. They were addressed to the House of Lords. They refer immediately to the imperative need of providing at all costs for the defence of the country. But their wisdom and their patriotism give them a wide application. They admirably describe the grave responsibility which falls upon every elector when urged to revolutionize the constitution of the United Kingdom. Whoever takes them to heart will refuse his sanction to an experiment which might well bring destruction on his country.

1. It is worth noting that no man was less inclined than Mill to entrust the government of India to the British democracy. He deplored the transference of the administration of Indian affairs from the East India Company to Parliament. The good government of India depended, in his opinion, upon a much more profound study of the conditions of Indian government than British politicians had shown any willingness to undertake. There is no reason to suppose that even Mill expected such profound study to be promoted by giving to English women a share in sovereign power.
2. 'Is it possible that in free England over 140 women have been sent to prison for only asking for votes for women?' ('Case for Women's Suffrage,' p. 140). The answer, of course, is that it is not possible, and never has happened. Every woman imprisoned was convicted of some distinct breach of the law, such, for example, as resisting and obstructing the police in the execution of their duty, or conduct likely to provoke a breach of the peace.
3. See speech in the House of Lords, reported in the Times, November 24, 1908, p. 6.