New York Letter

George Soule

Now that the New York legislature has decided to submit the question of woman suffrage to popular vote, we are being bored and sometimes horrified by the revelations of a battle which most of us get into the habit of thinking was fought and won long ago. That is the trouble with many radicals. The investigation of new causes comes to mean with them merely a process of personal salvation. A belief attained is taken as a matter of course, as if there were nothing more to be done about it. Even to mention it seems in bad taste—there are so many more important things, so many more ecstatic attitudes. And then the world rumbles along to it like some prehistoric monster, and we are caught unaware in the midst of quarreling which seems to us beside the point. Have we not discarded fighting machinery? Have we not thrown our siege guns on the scrap heap? How rude of the unintelligent to disturb us! We are like the pacificists who thought that war could be abolished by the mere act of willing. We forget that mankind never wills all at once. We forget that it is sometimes necessary to sacrifice our energy in the battle for a distressingly old cause. Or else we never see the necessity, and damn the naive volunteers with a supercilious smile of superior enlightenment while we cuddle ourselves in the cotton wool of private emotions. We offer them a new word as a reagent for all their difficulties.

Who, for instance, could have imagined that The New York Times, mental yokel though it is, could come out with a two-column editorial article against suffrage on the ground that women are not fitted to vote because they do not share men’s economic burdens? It must have been six months ago at least that The Times published a census report on its back page showing that 30.6 per cent of all the females in New York over ten years of age are engaged in gainful occupations. You would think census statistics would be just the thing to attract the eye of that editorial writer. But here the editorial is, like an unbelievable fossil come to life. If it represented merely a Tory minority we could afford to laugh and wait for its partisans to die. It represents, however, the astute judgment of The Times as to what several hundred thousand people in New York city really think. The big newspaper cannot afford to try leading public opinion. It must agree with as many people of buying capacity as possible. And here we are again, face to face with a blind, stupid majority.

One begins to speculate on what possibility there is for a democracy except running about in circles. Everything is apparently arranged so that the majority can enforce its immediate will, and its immediate will is always several generations behind the wisdom of its best citizens. An enthroned tyrant can be dynamited, but a hydra-headed tyrant in the election booth must be educated. What a wearisome, unromantic task that is! Many a man who would exultingly give his life in the adventure of assassination retires to his study before the labor of training a mob. He has neither the strength of imagination nor the strength of heart necessary to fight his way inch by inch. Here is a real sacrifice to be made for the future. Here is a chance for modern heroes with stuff in them. Here is an opportunity to substitute soul-testing labor for amateur theatricals. To leaven stupidity, to work with raw and shouting enthusiasts, to be humble enough to accept each partial victory, each compromise, and still to fight for the next one—this is the challenge of faith which proves to us there is still iron in mankind. There is satisfaction in the thought that victories have not become easier. Many a Launcelot would go insane in the trenches.

Everyone is looking for the supremacy of his own pet reform or reaction as a result of the war, and it is banal to indulge in prophecies. Yet it seems to me there will be a great gain in our understanding if we approach the monster with humility. It has, to be sure, shown us the brutality lurking in modern civilization. We can easily use it as a text for denouncing politics, commercialism, militarism, and all the other abstractions which represent to us the sum of present human failings. Yet why not go a little farther, and blame as well an intellectualism which slides about on the surface of things, a species of reform and enthusiasm which does not bite into the substance of humanity? Do not our philosophies now appear as futile as the pedantic dreaming of mediaeval schoolmen and alchemists? Does not our separation of the ideal from the material now seem as vicious as Christian asceticism? What business have we to toy with perfectionist theories when to do so we must ignore what is to-day and what will be to-morrow in the blood and brain of nearly all human beings? We must make human breeding the test of effort. We must admit that the will is powerless without the hands. We must create our social tools to accomplish our social ends. We must forget the false distinctions between emotion and intellect, and use both for their common purpose. Let us not repudiate machinery because it has not yet been consciously directed to an end that is worth gaining. Modern civilization has spent its force developing in opposite directions—toward the brute and toward the god—and now we are amazed at the contradiction. Our task is to make a synthesis and arrive at man. It will be a task to engage the highest qualities of the poet and the scientist—this job of putting man’s will in control of his overgrown body. And it will be more fascinating than any other work man has ever set himself.