What's Wrong with the World
jailors and the torturers, were always regarded not merely with fear but
with contempt; while all kinds of careless smiters, bankrupt knights
and swashbucklers and outlaws, were regarded with indulgence or even
admiration. To kill a man lawlessly was pardoned. To kill a man lawfully
was unpardonable. The most bare-faced duelist might almost brandish his
weapon. But the executioner was always masked.
This is the first essential element in government, coercion; a necessary
but not a noble element. I may remark in passing that when people say
that government rests on force they give an admirable instance of the
foggy and muddled cynicism of modernity. Government does not rest on
force. Government is force; it rests on consent or a conception of
justice. A king or a community holding a certain thing to be abnormal,
evil, uses the general strength to crush it out; the strength is his
tool, but the belief is his only sanction. You might as well say that
glass is the real reason for telescopes. But arising from whatever
reason the act of government is coercive and is burdened with all the
coarse and painful qualities of coercion. And if anyone asks what is the
use of insisting on the ugliness of this task of state violence since
all mankind is condemned to employ it, I have a simple answer to that.
It would be useless to insist on it if all humanity were condemned to
it. But it is not irrelevant to insist on its ugliness so long as half
of humanity is kept out of it.
All government then is coercive; we happen to have created a government
which is not only coercive; but collective. There are only two kinds
of government, as I have already said, the despotic and the democratic.
Aristocracy is not a government, it is a riot; that most effective
kind of riot, a riot of the rich. The most intelligent apologists of
aristocracy, sophists like Burke and Nietzsche, have never claimed
for aristocracy any virtues but the virtues of a riot, the accidental
virtues, courage, variety and adventure. There is no case anywhere of
aristocracy having established a universal and applicable order, as
despots and democracies have often done; as the last Caesars created
the Roman law, as the last Jacobins created the Code Napoleon. With
the first of these elementary forms of government, that of the king or
chieftain, we are not in this matter of the sexes immediately concerned.
We shall return to it later when we remark how differently mankind
has dealt with female claims in the despotic as against the democratic
field. But for the moment the essential point is that in self-governing
countries this coercion of criminals is a collective coercion. The
abnormal person is theoretically thumped by a million fists and kicked
by a million feet. If a man is flogged we all flogged him; if a man
is hanged, we all hanged 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
could do it as well as a woman; and a chimpanzee after a few lessons
could do it as well as a child. But nobody ought to regard it merely
as making a cross on paper; everyone ought to regard it as what it
ultimately is, branding the fleur-de-lis, marking the broad arrow,
signing the death warrant. Both men and women ought to face more fully
the things they do or cause to be done; face them or leave off doing
them.
On that disastrous day when public executions were abolished, private
executions were renewed and ratified, perhaps forever. Things grossly
unsuited to the moral sentiment of a society cannot be safely done in
broad daylight; but I see no reason why we should not still be roasting
heretics alive, in a private room. It is very likely (to speak in the
manner foolishly called Irish) that if there were public executions
there would be no executions. The old open-air punishments, the pillory
and the gibbet, at least fixed responsibility upon the law; and in
actual practice they gave the mob an opportunity of throwing roses as
well as rotten eggs; of crying “Hosannah” as well as “Crucify.” But I
do not like the public executioner being turned into the private
executioner. I think it is a crooked oriental, sinister sort of
business, and smells of the harem and the divan rather than of the forum
and the market place. In modern times the official has lost all the
social honor and dignity of the common hangman. He is only the bearer of
the bowstring.
Here, however, I suggest a plea for a brutal publicity only in order
to emphasize the fact that it is this brutal publicity and nothing else
from which women have been excluded. I also say it to emphasize the
fact that the mere modern veiling of the brutality does not make
the situation different, unless we openly say that we are giving the
suffrage, not only because it is power but because it is not, or in
other words, that women are not so much to vote as to play voting. No
suffragist, I suppose, will take up that position; and a few suffragists
will wholly deny that this human necessity of pains and penalties is
an ugly, humiliating business, and that good motives as well as bad may
have helped to keep women out of it. More than once I have remarked in
these pages that female limitations may be the limits of a temple as
well as of a prison, the disabilities of a priest and not of a pariah. I
noted it, I think, in the case of the pontifical feminine dress. In the
same way it is not evidently irrational, if men decided that a woman,
like a priest, must not be a shedder of blood.
*****
X. THE HIGHER ANARCHY
But there is a further fact; forgotten also because we moderns forget
that there is a female point of view. The woman’s wisdom stands partly,
not only for a wholesome hesitation about punishment, but even for a
wholesome hesitation about absolute rules. There was something feminine
and perversely true in that phrase of Wilde’s, that people should not
be treated as the rule, but all of them as exceptions. Made by a man the
remark was a little effeminate; for Wilde did lack the masculine power
of dogma and of democratic cooperation. But if a woman had said it
it would have been simply true; a woman does treat each person as a
peculiar person. In other words, she stands for Anarchy; a very ancient
and arguable philosophy; not anarchy in the sense of having no customs
in one’s life (which is inconceivable), but anarchy in the sense of
having no rules for one’s mind. To her, almost certainly, are due all
those working traditions that cannot be found in books, especially those
of education; it was she who first gave a child a stuffed stocking
for being good or stood him in the corner for being naughty. This
unclassified knowledge is sometimes called rule of thumb and sometimes
motherwit. The last phrase suggests the whole truth, for none ever
called it fatherwit.
Now anarchy is only tact when it works badly. Tact is only anarchy
when it works well. And we ought to realize that in one half of
the world--the private house--it does work well. We modern men are
perpetually forgetting that the case for clear rules and crude penalties
is not self-evident, that there is a great deal to be said for the
benevolent lawlessness of the autocrat, especially on a small scale;
in short, that government is only one side of life. The other half is
called Society, in which women are admittedly dominant. And they have
always been ready to maintain that their kingdom is better governed than
ours, because (in the logical and legal sense) it is not governed at
all. “Whenever you have a real difficulty,” they say, “when a boy is
bumptious or an aunt is stingy, when a silly girl will marry somebody,
or a wicked man won’t marry somebody, all your lumbering Roman Law and
British Constitution come to a standstill. A snub from a duchess or a
slanging from a fish-wife are much more likely to put things straight.”
So, at least, rang the ancient female challenge down the ages until the
recent female capitulation. So streamed the red standard of the higher
anarchy until Miss Pankhurst hoisted the white flag.
It must be remembered that the modern world has done deep treason to the
eternal intellect by believing in the swing of the pendulum. A man
must be dead before he swings. It has substituted an idea of fatalistic
alternation for the mediaeval freedom of the soul seeking truth.
All modern thinkers are reactionaries; for their thought is always a
reaction from what went before. When you meet a modern man he is always
coming from a place, not going to it. Thus, mankind has in nearly all
places and periods seen that there is a soul and a body as plainly
as that there is a sun and moon. But because a narrow Protestant sect
called Materialists declared for a short time that there was no
soul, another narrow Protestant sect called Christian Science is
now maintaining that there is no body. Now just in the same way
the unreasonable neglect of government by the Manchester School has
produced, not a reasonable regard for government, but an unreasonable
neglect of everything else. So that to hear people talk to-day one would
fancy that every important human function must be organized and avenged
by law; that all education must be state education, and all employment
state employment; that everybody and everything must be brought to the
foot of the august and prehistoric gibbet. But a somewhat more liberal
and sympathetic examination of mankind will convince us that the cross