The Subjection of Women
in one of them, only within the last few years) been at length
abolished, and that of the female sex has been gradually changed into
a milder form of dependence. But this dependence, as it exists at
present, is not an original institution, taking a fresh start from
considerations of justice and social expediency--it is the primitive
state of slavery lasting on, through successive mitigations and
modifications occasioned by the same causes which have softened the
general manners, and brought all human relations more under the
control of justice and the influence of humanity. It has not lost the
taint of its brutal origin. No presumption in its favour, therefore,
can be drawn from the fact of its existence. The only such
presumption which it could be supposed to have, must be grounded on
its having lasted till now, when so many other things which came down
from the same odious source have been done away with. And this,
indeed, is what makes it strange to ordinary ears, to hear it
asserted that the inequality of rights between men and women has no
other source than the law of the strongest.
That this statement should have the effect of a paradox, is in some
respects creditable to the progress of civilization, and the
improvement of the moral sentiments of mankind. We now live--that is
to say, one or two of the most advanced nations of the world now
live--in a state in which the law of the strongest seems to be
entirely abandoned as the regulating principle of the world's
affairs: nobody professes it, and, as regards most of the relations
between human beings, nobody is permitted to practise it. When any
one succeeds in doing so, it is under cover of some pretext which
gives him the semblance of having some general social interest on his
side. This being the ostensible state of things, people flatter
themselves that the rule of mere force is ended; that the law of the
strongest cannot be the reason of existence of anything which has
remained in full operation down to the present time. However any of
our present institutions may have begun, it can only, they think,
have been preserved to this period of advanced civilization by a
well-grounded feeling of its adaptation to human nature, and
conduciveness to the general good. They do not understand the great
vitality and durability of institutions which place right on the side
of might; how intensely they are clung to; how the good as well as
the bad propensities and sentiments of those who have power in their
hands, become identified with retaining it; how slowly these bad
institutions give way, one at a time, the weakest first, beginning
with those which are least interwoven with the daily habits of life;
and how very rarely those who have obtained legal power because they
first had physical, have ever lost their hold of it until the
physical power had passed over to the other side. Such shifting of
the physical force not having taken place in the case of women; this
fact, combined with all the peculiar and characteristic features of
the particular case, made it certain from the first that this branch
of the system of right founded on might, though softened in its most
atrocious features at an earlier period than several of the others,
would be the very last to disappear. It was inevitable that this one
case of a social relation grounded on force, would survive through
generations of institutions grounded on equal justice, an almost
solitary exception to the general character of their laws and
customs; but which, so long as it does not proclaim its own origin,
and as discussion has not brought out its true character, is not felt
to jar with modern civilization, any more than domestic slavery among
the Greeks jarred with their notion of themselves as a free people.
The truth is, that people of the present and the last two or three
generations have lost all practical sense of the primitive condition
of humanity; and only the few who have studied history accurately, or
have much frequented the parts of the world occupied by the living
representatives of ages long past, are able to form any mental
picture of what society then was. People are not aware how entirely,
in former ages, the law of superior strength was the rule of life;
how publicly and openly it was avowed, I do not say cynically or
shamelessly--for these words imply a feeling that there was something
in it to be ashamed of, and no such notion could find a place in the
faculties of any person in those ages, except a philosopher or a
saint. History gives a cruel experience of human nature, in shewing
how exactly the regard due to the life, possessions, and entire
earthly happiness of any class of persons, was measured by what they
had the power of enforcing; how all who made any resistance to
authorities that had arms in their hands, however dreadful might be
the provocation, had not only the law of force but all other laws,
and all the notions of social obligation against them; and in the
eyes of those whom they resisted, were not only guilty of crime, but
of the worst of all crimes, deserving the most cruel chastisement
which human beings could inflict. The first small vestige of a
feeling of obligation in a superior to acknowledge any right in
inferiors, began when he had been induced, for convenience, to make
some promise to them. Though these promises, even when sanctioned by
the most solemn oaths, were for many ages revoked or violated on the
most trifling provocation or temptation, it is probable that this,
except by persons of still worse than the average morality, was
seldom done without some twinges of conscience. The ancient
republics, being mostly grounded from the first upon some kind of
mutual compact, or at any rate formed by an union of persons not very
unequal in strength, afforded, in consequence, the first instance of
a portion of human relations fenced round, and placed under the
dominion of another law than that of force. And though the original
law of force remained in full operation between them and their
slaves, and also (except so far as limited by express compact)
between a commonwealth and its subjects, or other independent
commonwealths; the banishment of that primitive law even from so
narrow a field, commenced the regeneration of human nature, by giving
birth to sentiments of which experience soon demonstrated the immense
value even for material interests, and which thenceforward only
required to be enlarged, not created. Though slaves were no part of
the commonwealth, it was in the free states that slaves were first
felt to have rights as human beings. The Stoics were, I believe, the
first (except so far as the Jewish law constitutes an exception) who
taught as a part of morality that men were bound by moral obligations
to their slaves. No one, after Christianity became ascendant, could
ever again have been a stranger to this belief, in theory; nor, after
the rise of the Catholic Church, was it ever without persons to stand
up for it. Yet to enforce it was the most arduous task which
Christianity ever had to perform. For more than a thousand years the
Church kept up the contest, with hardly any perceptible success. It
was not for want of power over men's minds. Its power was prodigious.
It could make kings and nobles resign their most valued possessions
to enrich the Church. It could make thousands, in the prime of life
and the height of worldly advantages, shut themselves up in convents
to work out their salvation by poverty, fasting, and prayer. It could
send hundreds of thousands across land and sea, Europe and Asia, to
give their lives for the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre. It could
make kings relinquish wives who were the object of their passionate
attachment, because the Church declared that they were within the
seventh (by our calculation the fourteenth) degree of relationship.
All this it did; but it could not make men fight less with one
another, nor tyrannize less cruelly over the serfs, and when they
were able, over burgesses. It could not make them renounce either of
the applications of force; force militant, or force triumphant. This
they could never be induced to do until they were themselves in their
turn compelled by superior force. Only by the growing power of kings
was an end put to fighting except between kings, or competitors for
kingship; only by the growth of a wealthy and warlike bourgeoisie in
the fortified towns, and of a plebeian infantry which proved more
powerful in the field than the undisciplined chivalry, was the
insolent tyranny of the nobles over the bourgeoisie and peasantry
brought within some bounds. It was persisted in not only until, but
long after, the oppressed had obtained a power enabling them often to
take conspicuous vengeance; and on the Continent much of it continued
to the time of the French Revolution, though in England the earlier
and better organization of the democratic classes put an end to it
sooner, by establishing equal laws and free national institutions.
If people are mostly so little aware how completely, during the
greater part of the duration of our species, the law of force was the
avowed rule of general conduct, any other being only a special and
exceptional consequence of peculiar ties--and from how very recent a
date it is that the affairs of society in general have been even
pretended to be regulated according to any moral law; as little do
people remember or consider, how institutions and customs which never
had any ground but the law of force, last on into ages and states of
general opinion which never would have permitted their first
establishment. Less than forty years ago, Englishmen might still by
law hold human beings in bondage as saleable property: within the
present century they might kidnap them and carry them off, and work
them literally to death. This absolutely extreme case of the law of
force, condemned by those who can tolerate almost every other form of
arbitrary power, and which, of all others, presents features the most
revolting to the feelings of all who look at it from an impartial
position, was the law of civilized and Christian England within the
memory of persons now living: and in one half of Anglo-Saxon America
three or four years ago, not only did slavery exist, but the slave
trade, and the breeding of slaves expressly for it, was a general
practice between slave states. Yet not only was there a greater
strength of sentiment against it, but, in England at least, a less
amount either of feeling or of interest in favour of it, than of any
other of the customary abuses of force: for its motive was the love
of gain, unmixed and undisguised; and those who profited by it were a
very small numerical fraction of the country, while the natural
feeling of all who were not personally interested in it, was
unmitigated abhorrence. So extreme an instance makes it almost
superfluous to refer to any other: but consider the long duration of
absolute monarchy. In England at present it is the almost universal
conviction that military despotism is a case of the law of force,
having no other origin or justification. Yet in all the great nations
of Europe except England it either still exists, or has only just
ceased to exist, and has even now a strong party favourable to it in
all ranks of the people, especially among persons of station and
consequence. Such is the power of an established system, even when
far from universal; when not only in almost every period of history
there have been great and well-known examples of the contrary system,
but these have almost invariably been afforded by the most
illustrious and most prosperous communities. In this case, too, the
possessor of the undue power, the person directly interested in it,