There is a thing which is often called progress, but which only occurs in dull and stale conditions; it is indeed, not progress, but a sort of galloping plagiarism. To carry the same fashion further and further is not a mark of energy, but a mark of fatigue. One can fancy that in the fantastic decline of some Chinese civilization one might find things automatically increasing, simply because everybody had forgotten what the things were meant for. Hats might be bigger than umbrellas, because every one had forgotten to wear them. Walking sticks might be taller than lances, because nobody ever thought of taking them out on a walk. The human mind never goes so fast as that except when it has got into a groove.

The converse is also true. All really honest and courageous thought has a tendency to look like truism. For strong thought about a thing is always thought about its original nature; while weak thought is always thought about its most recent developments. The really bold thinker is never afraid of platitude; because platitudes are the great primeval foundations. The bold thinker is not afraid to say of the hat that it is a covering for the head; when he has said that he knows that he has his hat and his head in the right place. The strong thinker does not shrink from saying that the walking stick is a stick with which one goes walking; then he knows that he has got hold of the right end of the stick. All civilizations show some tendency towards that weak-minded sort of progress which is mere accumulation. Some time ago a well-dressed English gentleman wore two or three waist-coats. It would be easy to be purely progressive about him, to make him wear more and more waistcoats

of different colors until he died. Some time ago a Japanese nobleman wore two swords; it would be easy to be progressive and suggest nine swords or twenty-three swords. But

the strong thinker does not go forward with the flood, but back to the fountain. If once we think about what a sword is and what it symbolizes, we shall see that a man ought to have one sword because he has one right hand. And if we meditate deeply upon what a waistcoat is, it will become apparent to us, after a brief effort of philology, that a man ought not to have more than one waistcoat unless he has more than one waist. All tame and trivial thought is concerned with following a fashion onward to its logical extremity. All clear and courageous thought is concerned with following it back to its logical root. A man may make hats larger and larger and be only as mad as a hatter. But if he can quite perfectly explain what a hat is he must have the great sanity of Aristotle.

Now, in that quarrel about the function of the two sexes which has lately disturbed a section of our wealthier classes, nothing seems to me more marked than this habit of pursuing a thing to its conclusion when we have not tracked it to its origin. Many of the women who wish for votes urge their case entirely as a development from what exists. They argue from precedent, that most poisonous and senseless of all the products of our Protestant Constitution. Precedent is the opposite of doctrine. These ladies, who believe themselves revolutionary, are really moving along that line of least resistance which is the essence of the evil sort of conservatism. They say, "Men have votes; why shouldn't women have votes?" I have

met many able and admirable ladies who were full of reasons why women should have votes. But when I asked them why men should have votes they did not know.

I shall pursue here the opposite course. I shall try to start with a truth, even if it is a truism. I shall try to state the substance of suffrage, instead of pulling it out into long strings like liquorice or treacle till it reaches the end of the world. If the question stands whether a Woman should have a vote, I beg leave to begin by asking what a vote is, and even (so far as the subject can be safely approached) what a woman is. But the nature of a vote is the vital ang really interesting thing.

I trust that the reader will remember that I am, for the moment, the professor of platitudes. As the man seeking to preserve sanity among hatters would begin by reminding them that hats have to cover heads, so I begin all statements about the vote at the humblest and most evident end. Two things are quite clear about the vote. First that it is entirely concerned with government. that is with coercion. Second, it is entirely concerned with democratic government; that is, with government by chorus, government by public quarrel and public unanimity. First, to desire a vote means to desire the power of coercing others; the power of using a policeman. Second, it means that this power should be given not to princes or officials, but to a human mass, a throng of citizens. If any person does not mean by voting coercion by the will of the masses, then that person does not know what the word means. He (or rather she) is simply stunned with one monosyllable that she does not understand. If a woman wants democracy or mob law, or even riot, I think she should be listened to most seriously and respectfully. But if she only wants the

vote, it is a proof that she ought not to have it. She should be refused just as a would-be nun should be refused who has no vocation except a wish to wear the costume.

Now this is exactly where my personal lament begins. I weep for the collapse and complete surrender of woman. People tell me that this modern movement is a revolt against man by woman. It seems to me to be the utter submission of woman to man upon every point upon which they ever disagreed. That woman should ask for a vote is not feminism; it is masculinism in its last and most insolent triumph. The whole point of view which is peculiar to man is here riding so ruthlessly and contemptuously over the whole point of view that is peculiar to woman that I cannot but regret it, though it is the triumph of my own sex. After all, I am a human being as well as a male, and my pleas ure in knowing that masculine prejudices are at last prevailing is poisoned with the thought that after all women do exist, and that their present humiliation cannot be good for the common stock.

The facts themselves, of course, are clear enough. Voting, as has been said, involves two primary principles; it involves the coercive idea, and it involves the collective idea. To push and kick men into their senses, and to push with a throng of arms, to kick with a crowd of legs, that is the quite just and rational meaning of voting; it has no other just or rational meaning. And certainly the privilege should be extended to everybody, certainly the arms and legs might be of any sex, if only this were quite certainly clear and proved-that the coercive and the collective ideas are the whole of human life. But the truth is that the coercive and collective ideas are not only a mere half of human life, but have been from the beginning

a mere half of the human species. From the dawn of the world there has been another point of view, the feminine point of view, which was against mere force, but even more against mere argument. This strong feminine position has kept the race healthy for hundreds of centuries. It has never really been weakened until now.

Every good man is half an anarchist. That is, that with half his mind he feels it is a cruel and clumsy business to be always catching his fellows in the man-traps of merely human bylaws, and torturing them with ropes and rods and long terms of living burial. Coercion is necessary, no doubt; but it should be conducted in the presence of some permanent protest on behalf of a humane anarchy. That protest has always been provided by the other half of life called Society; by the enormous success with which women have managed their social empire. They have done it not without cruelty, but quite without coercion. They have made the cold shoulder as unmistakable as the branded shoulder; they have found it quite easy to lock the offenders out, without finding it necessary to lock them in. Not only is one half of the good man an anarchist, but the anarchist is his better half; the anarchist is his wife. It is the woman who stands for ever for the futility of mere rules. Women could justly contrast Society's swiftness with the law's delay. It takes such a long time to condemn a manand such a short time to snub him. Tact is only a name for anarchy when it works well. But this free and persuasive method, for which women have stood from the beginning, has much stronger examples than any mere diplomacies of social life.

The two or three most Important things in the world have always been managed without law or government; because they have been managed by

women. Can anyone tell me two things more vital to the race than these; what man shall marry what woman, and what shall be the first things taught to their first child? Yet no one has ever been so mad as to suggest that either of these godlike and gigantic tasks should be conducted by law. They are matters of emotional management; of persuasion and dissuasion; of discouraging a guest or encouraging a governess. This is the first great argument for the old female point of view, and we could never deny that it had force. The old-fashioned woman really said this: "What can be the use of all your politics and policemen? The moment you come to a really vital question you dare not use them. For a foolish marriage, or a bad education, for a broken heart or a spoilt child, for the things that really matter, your courts of justice can do nothing at all. When one live woman is being neglected by a man, or one live child by a mother, we can do more by our meanest feminine dodges than you can do by the whole ap. paratus of the British Constitution. A snub from a duchess or a slanging from a fishwife is more likely to put things right than all the votes in the world." That has always been the woman's great case against mere legalist machinery. It is only one half of the truth; but I am sorry to see the women abandon it.

But voting not only stands for the coercive idea of government, but also for the collective idea of democracy. And a surrender to collective deniocracy is even more of a feminine collapse than a surrender to regimentation and legalism. Woman would be more herself if she refused to touch coercion altogether. That she may be the priestess of society it is necessary that her hands should be as bloodless as a priest's. I think Queen Victoria would have been more powerful still

if she had never had to sign a death warrant. But although I disagree with votes for women, I do not necessarily disagree with thrones for women or imperial crowns for women. There is a much stronger case for making Miss Pankhurst a despot than for making her a voter. Among other reasons, there is the fact that she is a despot. Moderns complain of a personal voice in the Papacy; but it is odd to notice that every one of the highly modern and slightly hysterical moral and religious movements of today is run with the most irresponsible despotism: General Booth's despotism in the Salvation Army; Mrs. Eddy's despotism in Christian Science; and the Pankhurst despotism amongst the Suffragettes. But I do not so mu complain of this. It was always plain to me that there are two principles in life, the harmony of which is happiness: the horizontal principle called equality and the vertical principle called authority. For we require authority even to impose equality. The first is life considered as a perpetual playground, where the children are under one law and should share and share alike. The second is life considered as the perpetual repetition of the relation of mother and child. I would be much more willing to give women authority than to give them equality. I can imagine that a queen might really be the mother of her people without ceasing to be the mother of her babies. She must be a despotic queen, of course; there must be no nonsense about constitutions. For despotism is, in its nature, a domestic thing; an autocracy is run like રી household; that is, it is run without rules.

But voting is government conducted entirely by this other element in man; this sense of fraternity and similarity. Voting is gregarious government. The only reality behind voting is that in

LIVING AGE. VOL. XLIV. 2314

stinct of men to get together and argue; unless they can fulfil this they are unhappy. In our somewhat morbid age, when representative government has become only an unwieldy oligarchy, and when decent pleasures have stagnated into poison, there is said to be some kind of quarrel between the Parish Council and the Public House. But in a plain and happy society the Public House is the Parish Council. The townsmen argue in the tavern about the politics of the town, invoking abstract principles which cannot be proved, and rules of debate which do not in the least matter; their wives teach the children to say their prayers and wish politics at the bottom of the sea. That is the happiest condition of humanity. But in any

case this is the basis of voting: the elders of the tribe talking under the tree: the men of the village shouting at each other at the "Blue Pig"; the great and mysterious mob, singing, fighting and judging in the market place. This is democracy; all voting is only the shadow of this; and if you do not like this you will not like its shadow.

Nothing is more unfair in the current attacks on Christianity than the way in which men specially accuse the Church of things that are far more manifest in the world. Thus people will talk of torture as a disgrace to the Church, whereas it is simply one of the few real disgraces of European civilization, from the Roman Empire to Francis Bacon or Governor Eyre. But of all the instances there is none more unjust than the ordinary charge against religion of being a mere ritual or routine. So, indeed, it sometimes is; but never so much as all other human institutions, especially modern institutions. Talk of clerical government becoming stiff and unmeaning! What, in heaven's name, has become of representative government by this

time? Talk of a praying machine; what could one say of the voting machine? I doubt if the dullest peasant or the most reckless brigand ever made the sign of the cross on his body with such a deathlike indifference as many a modern citizen makes the sign of the cross on his ballot papers.

So long as the vote is thus a meaningless and useless thing it is natural that women should want it. I do not say this as a traditional sneer at their unreason; on the contrary, I think their feeling is quite reasonable. If the vote means nothing it must be a mere badge; and if it is a badge it is a badge of superiority. It is exactly because most female suffragists think that it is a mere formality that they object to the public insult of being kept out of that formality. It is only when we ask ourselves what the vote ultimately means when it means anything, what democracy is when it is direct, that we discover why the folk of all ages, male and female alike, have felt that this function is rather male than female.

Women might like an unreal democracy; and they may possibly be called upon to comply with the forms of one. But they dislike a real democracy; and it is well that they do. For real democracy has its peculiar perils and exaggerations, against which woman has wisely pitted herself from the first. She hates that vagueness in democracy which tends to forget the fact of the family in the theory of the State. She dislikes the democratic tendency to discuss abstractions; or, as she sees it, the tendency to arouse discussions that have no end. To her the Good Citizen of the Revolution is best defined as the man who begins to ask unanswerable questions when it is time to go to bed. Now there is a truth and a corrective value in this attitude; the Good Citizen may really

become an uncommonly bad husband. Most men with anything manly about them can remember arguments started some weeks ago which might be going on now but for the interruption of the ladies. It is sufficient here to maintain that woman, as compared at least with man, dislikes this atmosphere of government by deafening and protracted debate; dislikes it and also distrusts it, not by any means without reason. If anyone thinks this too sweeping, it is easy to make an imaginative test. Think of any street in London at a late hour of the evening, and ask yourself in how many of the houses it is likely that the men are yawning and wondering when ou earth the women will have done talking.

Thus we see that on both pointsthe coercive or legal conception, and the collective or democratic conception -a great part of the power and importance of woman from the first has been concerned with balancing, criticising and opposing them. It is the female, as symbol of the family in which there are no laws and no votes, who has been the permanent drag. both on the fantasies of democracy and the pedantries of law. But what shall we do if women cease to make game of us?

The immediate effect of the female suffrage movement will be to make politics much too important; to exaggerate them out of all proportion to the rest of life. For the female suffrage movement is simply the breakdown of the pride of woman; her surrender of that throne of satire, realism and detachment from which she has so long laughed at the solemnities and moderated the manias of the mere politician. Woman tempered the gravity of politics as she tempers the gravity of golf. She reminds us that it is only about things that are slightly unreal that a man can be as solemn as