LE SUFFRAGE

Not wishing to overload this long essay with too many parentheses, apart
from its thesis of progress and precedent, I append here three notes on
points of detail that may possibly be misunderstood.

The first refers to the female controversy. It may seem to many that I
dismiss too curtly the contention that all women should have votes,
even if most women do not desire them. It is constantly said in this
connection that males have received the vote (the agricultural laborers
for instance) when only a minority of them were in favor of it. Mr.
Galsworthy, one of the few fine fighting intellects of our time, has
talked this language in the "Nation." Now, broadly, I have only to
answer here, as everywhere in this book, that history is not a toboggan
slide, but a road to be reconsidered and even retraced. If we really
forced General Elections upon free laborers who definitely disliked
General Elections, then it was a thoroughly undemocratic thing to do;
if we are democrats we ought to undo it. We want the will of the people,
not the votes of the people; and to give a man a vote against his will
is to make voting more valuable than the democracy it declares.

But this analogy is false, for a plain and particular reason. Many
voteless women regard a vote as unwomanly. Nobody says that most
voteless men regarded a vote as unmanly. Nobody says that any voteless
men regarded it as unmanly. Not in the stillest hamlet or the most
stagnant fen could you find a yokel or a tramp who thought he lost his
sexual dignity by being part of a political mob. If he did not care
about a vote it was solely because he did not know about a vote; he did
not understand the word any better than Bimetallism. His opposition, if
it existed, was merely negative. His indifference to a vote was really
indifference.

But the female sentiment against the franchise, whatever its size, is
positive. It is not negative; it is by no means indifferent. Such
women as are opposed to the change regard it (rightly or wrongly) as
unfeminine. That is, as insulting certain affirmative traditions to
which they are attached. You may think such a view prejudiced; but
I violently deny that any democrat has a right to override such
prejudices, if they are popular and positive. Thus he would not have
a right to make millions of Moslems vote with a cross if they had a
prejudice in favor of voting with a crescent. Unless this is admitted,
democracy is a farce we