The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage | Page 6

enforcement of rights--our task is to examine the arguments which the suffragist brings forward in support of her claims.
First and chief among these is the argument that the _Principle of Justice_ prescribes that women should be enfranchised.
When we inquire what the suffragist understands under the Principle of Justice, one receives by way of answer only the _petitio principii [question begging]_ that Justice is a moral principle which includes woman suffrage among its implications.
In reality it is only very few who clearly apprehend the nature of Justice. For under this appellation two quite different principles are confounded.
The primary and correct signification of the term Justice will perhaps be best arrived at by pursuing the following train of considerations:--
When man, long impatient at arbitrary and quite incalculable autocratic judgments, proceeded to build up a legal system to take the place of these, he built it upon the following series of axioms:--(a) All actions of which the courts are to take cognisance shall be classified. (b) The legal consequences of each class of action shall be definitely fixed. (c) The courts shall adjudicate only on questions of fact, and on the issue as to how the particular deed which is the cause of action should be classified. And (d) such decisions shall carry with them in an automatic manner the appointed legal consequences.
For example, if a man be arraigned for the appropriation of another man's goods, it is an axiom that the court (when once the questions of fact have been disposed of) shall adjudicate only on the issue as to whether the particular appropriation of goods in dispute comes under the denomination of larceny, burglary, or other co-ordinate category; and that upon this the sentence shall go forth: directing that the legal consequences which are appointed to that particular class of action be enforced.
This is the system every one can see administered in every court of justice.
There is, however, over and above what has just been set out another essential element in Justice. It is an element which readily escapes the eye.
I have in view the fact that the classifications which are adopted and embodied in the law must not be arbitrary classifications. They must all be conformable to the principle of utility, and be directed to the advantage of society.
If, for instance, burglary is placed in a class apart from larceny, it is discriminated from it because this distinction is demanded by considerations of public advantage. But considerations of utility would not countenance, and by consequence Justice would not accept, a classification of theft into theft committed by a poor man and theft committed by a rich man.
The conception of Justice is thus everywhere interfused with considerations of utility and expediency.
It will have become plain that if we have in view the justice which is administered in the courts--we may here term it _Juridical Justice--then the question as to whether it is just_ to refuse the suffrage to woman will be determined by considering whether the classification of men as voters and of women as non-voters is in the public interest. Put otherwise, the question whether it would be just that woman should have a vote would require the answer "Yes" or "No," according as the question whether it would be expedient or inexpedient that woman should vote required the answer "Yes" or "No." But it would be for the electorate, not for the woman suffragist, to decide that question.
There is, as already indicated, another principle which passes under the name of Justice. I have in view the principle that in the distribution of wealth or political power, or any other privileges which it is in the power of the State to bestow, every man should share equally with every other man, and every woman equally with every man, and that in countries where Europeans and natives live side by side, these latter should share all privileges equally with the white--the goal of endeavour being that all distinctions depending upon natural endowment, sex, and race should be effaced.
We may call this principle the _Principle of Egalitarian Equity_--first, because it aims at establishing a quite artificial equality; secondly, because it makes appeal to our ethical instincts, and claims on that ground to override the distinctions of which formal law takes account.
But let us reflect that we have here a principle which properly understood, embraces in its purview all mankind, and not mankind only but also the lower animals. That is to say, we have here a principle, which consistently followed out, would make of every man and woman _in primis [at first]_ a socialist; then a woman suffragist; then a philo-native, negrophil, and an advocate of the political rights of natives and negroes; and then, by logical compulsion ant anti-vivisectionist, who accounts it unjust to experiment on an animal; a vegetarian, who