nged him. That is the only possible meaning of
democracy, which can give any meaning to the first two syllables
and also to the last two. In this sense each citizen has the high
responsibility of a rioter. Every statute is a declaration of war, to
be backed by arms. Every tribunal is a revolutionary tribunal. In a
republic all punishment is as sacred and solemn as lynching.

*****

IX. SINCERITY AND THE GALLOWS

When, therefore, it is said that the tradition against Female Suffrage
keeps women out of activity, social influence and citizenship, let us
a little more soberly and strictly ask ourselves what it actually does
keep her out of. It does definitely keep her out of the collective act
of coercion; the act of punishment by a mob. The human tradition does
say that, if twenty men hang a man from a tree or lamp-post, they
shall be twenty men and not women. Now I do not think any reasonable
Suffragist will deny that exclusion from this function, to say the least
of it, might be maintained to be a protection as well as a veto. No
candid person will wholly dismiss the proposition that the idea of
having a Lord Chancellor but not a Lady Chancellor may at least be
connected with the idea of having a headsman but not a headswoman, a
hangman but not a hangwoman. Nor will it be adequate to answer (as is
so often answered to this contention) that in modern civilization women
would not really be required to capture, to sentence, or to slay; that
all this is done indirectly, that specialists kill our criminals as they
kill our cattle. To urge this is not to urge the reality of the vote,
but to urge its unreality. Democracy was meant to be a more direct way
of ruling, not a more indirect way; and if we do not feel that we are
all jailers, so much the worse for us, and for the prisoners. If it is
really an unwomanly thing to lock up a robber or a tyrant, it ought to
be no softening of the situation that the woman does not feel as if she
were doing the thing that she certainly is doing. It is bad enough that
men can only associate on paper who could once associate in the street;
it is bad enough that men have made a vote very much of a fiction. It
is much worse that a great class should claim the vote be cause it is
a fiction, who would be sickened by it if it were a fact. If votes for
women do not mean mobs for women they do not mean what they were meant
to mean. A woman can make a cross on a paper as well as a man; a child