Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution. A. V. Dicey
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Bentham and his disciples.81 The declining influence of the utilitarian school appears therefore to give new strength to this doctrine. People forget that the dogma of natural rights was confuted not only by Benthamites but by powerful thinkers of the eighteenth and of the nineteenth century who had no sympathy with utilitarianism.
CRITICISM OF EACH OF THE FOUR NEW CONSTITUTIONAL IDEAS 82
Woman Suffrage
The claim for women of the right to vote for members of Parliament, or, as now urged, to be placed in a position of absolute political equality with men, is no new demand. It was made in England before the end of the eighteenth century,83 but no systematic, or at any rate noticeable, movement to obtain for Englishwomen the right to vote for members of Parliament can be carried back much earlier than 1866-67, when it was supported in the House of Commons by J. S. Mill.
Let my readers consider for a moment first the causes which have added strength to a movement which is 1866 attracted comparatively little public attention, and next the main lines of argument or of feeling which really tell on the one hand with the advocates and on the other with the opponents of the claim to votes for women.84
The Causes
These may be thus summarised. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century the number in the United Kingdom of self-supporting
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and also of unmarried women has greatly increased; and this class has by success in literature, as well as in other fields, acquired year by year greater influence. In the United Kingdom there exists among the actual population an excess of women over men, and this excess is increased by the emigration of Englishmen to our colonies and elsewhere. The low rate of payment received by women as compared with men, for services of any kind in which men and women enter into competition, has excited much notice. The spreading belief, or, as it used to be considered, the delusion, that wages can be raised by legislation, has naturally suggested the inference that want of a parliamentary vote inflicts severe pecuniary loss upon women. The extension of the power of the state and the enormous outgrowth of social legislation results in the daily enactment of laws which affect the very matters in which every woman has a personal interest. In an era of peace and of social reform the electors themselves constantly claim the sympathy and the active co-operation of women on behalf of causes which are treated, at any rate by partisans, as raising grave moral or religious controversy. Hence the agitation in favour of Woman Suffrage often commends itself to ministers of religion and notably to the English clergy, who believe, whether rightly or not, that the political power of women would practically add to the authority in the political world of the Church of England. These circumstances, and others which may be suggested by the memory or the ingenuity of my readers, are enough to explain the prominence and weight acquired for the movement in favour of giving the parliamentary franchise to women.
The Main Lines of Argument
These may be brought under two heads; they are most clearly and briefly exhibited if under each head is stated the argument of the Suffragist and the answer or reasoning in reply of the Anti-Suffragist.
First Argument
Every citizen, or, as the point is generally put, every person who pays taxes under the law of the United Kingdom, is entitled as a matter of right to a vote for a member of Parliament. Hence the obvious conclusion that as every Englishwoman pays taxes under the
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law of the United Kingdom, every Englishwoman is at any rate prima facie entitled to a vote.
Answer
This line of reasoning proves too much. It inevitably leads to the conclusion that any form of popular government ought to be based on the existence of strictly universal suffrage. An extreme suffragette will say that this result is not a reductio ad absurdum. But there are thousands of sensible Englishmen and Englishwomen who, while they doubt the advisability of introducing into England even manhood suffrage, refuse to admit the cogency of reasoning which leads to the result that every Englishman and Englishwoman of full age must have a right to vote for a member of Parliament. But the full strength of an anti-suffragist’s reply cannot be shown by any man who does not go a little further into the nature of things. A fair-minded man prepared to do this will, in the first place, admit that many democratic formulas, e.g. the dictum that “liability to taxation involves the right to representation,” do verbally cover a woman’s claim to a parliamentary vote. His true answer is that many so-called democratic principles, as also many so-called conservative principles, are in reality not principles at all but war-cries, or shibboleths which may contain a good deal of temporary or relative truth but are mixed up with a vast amount of error. The idea, he will ultimately say, that the possession of a vote is a personal right is a delusion. It is in truth the obligation to discharge a public duty, and whether this miscalled right should be conferred upon or withheld from Englishwomen can be decided only by determining whether their possession of the parliamentary vote will conduce to the welfare of England.
Second Argument
The difference of sex presents no apparent or necessary reason for denying to Englishwomen the same political rights as are conferred upon Englishmen. It is found by experience, as suffragists will add, that some women have in many ways even greater capacity for the exercise of government than have some men. This argument may best be put in its full strength if it be placed, as it often is, in the form of a question: Was it reasonable that Florence Nightingale should not
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have possessed the right to vote for a member of Parliament when even in her day her footman or her coachman, if he had happened to be a ten-pound householder, or a forty-shilling freeholder, might have exercised a right denied to a lady who, as appears from her biography, possessed many statesmanlike qualities, who did in fact in some lines of action exert more political power than most M.P.s, and who always exercised power disinterestedly, and generally exercised it with admitted benefit to the country? There is not the remotest doubt that the argument involved in this inquiry (in whatever form it is stated) seems to many women, to a great number of parliamentary electors, and also to a considerable number of M.P.s, to afford an unanswerable and conclusive reason in favour of giving parliamentary votes to women.
Answer
The claim of parliamentary votes for women as now put forward in England is in reality a claim for the absolute political equality of the two sexes. Whether its advocates are conscious of the fact or not, it is a demand on behalf of women for seats in Parliament and in the Cabinet. It means that Englishwomen should share the jury box and should sit on the judicial bench. It treats as insignificant for most purposes that difference of sex which, after all, disguise the matter as you will, is one of the most fundamental and far-reaching differences which can distinguish one body of human beings from another. It is idle to repeat again and again reasoning which, for the last thirty years and more, has been pressed upon the attention of every English reader and elector. One thing is certain: the real strength (and it is great) of the whole conservative argument against the demand of votes for women lies in the fact that this line of reasoning, on the face thereof, conforms to the nature of things. The anti-suffragists can re-echo the words of Burke whilst adapting them to a controversy unknown to him and practically unknown to his age:
The principles that guide us, in public and in private, as they are not of our devising, but moulded into the nature and the essence of things, will endure with the sun and moon—long, very long after whig and tory, Stuart and Brunswick [suffragist, suffragette, and anti-suffragist], and all such miserable
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bubbles and playthings of the hour, are vanished from existence and from memory.85
Proportional Representation 86
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