These heavy forces reach their most perfect expression in the absolutely masculine field of warfare. The absolute authority; the brainless, voiceless obedience; the relentless penalty. Here we have male coercion at its height; law and government wholly arbitrary. The result is as might be expected, a fine machine of destruction. But destruction is not a human process--merely a male process of eliminating the unfit.
The female process is to select the fit; her elimination is negative and painless.
Greater than either is the human process, to _develop fitness._ Men are at present far more human than women. Alone upon their self-seized thrones they have carried as best they might the burdens of the state; and the history of law and government shows them as changing slowly but irresistably in the direction of social improvement.
The ancient kings were the joyous apotheosis of masculinity. Power and Pride were theirs; Limitless Display; Boundless Self-indulgence;
Irresistable Authority. Slaves and courtiers bowed before them, subjects obeyed them, captive women filled their harems. But the day of the masculine monarchy is passing, and the day of the human democracy is coming in. In a Democracy Law and Government both change. Laws are no longer imposed on the people by one above them, but are evolved from the people themselves. How absurd that the people should not be educated in the laws they make; that the trailing remnants of blind submission should still becloud their minds and make them bow down patiently under the absurd pressure of outgrown tradition!
Democratic government is no longer an exercise of arbitrary authority from one above, but is an organization for public service of the people themselves--or will be when it is really attained.
In this change government ceases to be compulsion, and becomes agreement; law ceases to be authority and becomes co-ordination. When we learn the rules of whist or chess we do not obey them because we fear to be punished if we don't, but because we want to play the game. The rules of human conduct are for our own happiness and service--any child can see that. Every child will see it when laws are simplified, based on sociology, and taught in schools. A child of ten should be considered grossly uneducated who could not rewrite the main features of the laws of his country, state, and city; and those laws should be so simple in their principles that a child of ten could understand them.
Teacher: "What is a tax?"
Child: "A tax is the money we agree to pay to keep up our common advantages."
Teacher: "Why do we all pay taxes?"
Child: "Because the country belongs to all of us, and we must all pay our share to keep it up."
Teacher: "In what proportion do we pay taxes?"
Child: "In proportion to how much money we have." (_Sotto voce_: "Of course!")
Teacher: "What is it to evade taxes?"
Child: "It is treason." (_Sotto voce_: "And a dirty mean trick.")
In masculine administration of the laws we may follow the instinctive love of battle down through the custom of "trial by combat"--only recently outgrown, to our present method, where each contending party hires a champion to represent him, and these fight it out in a wordy war, with tricks and devices of complex ingenuity, enjoying this kind of struggle as they enjoy all other kinds.
It is the old masculine spirit of government as authority which is so slow in adapting itself to the democratic idea of government as service.
That it should be a representative government they grasp, but representative of what? of the common will, they say; the will of the majority;--never thinking that it is the common good, the common welfare, that government should represent.
It is the inextricable masculinity in our idea of government which so revolts at the idea of women as voters. "To govern:" that means to boss, to control, to have authority; and that only, to most minds. They cannot bear to think of the woman as having control over even their own affairs; to control is masculine, they assume. Seeing only self-interest as a natural impulse, and the ruling powers of the state as a sort of umpire, an authority to preserve the rules of the game while men fight it out forever; they see in a democracy merely a wider range of self interest, and a wider, freer field to fight in.
The law dictates the rules, the government enforces them, but the main business of life, hitherto, has been esteemed as one long fierce struggle; each man seeking for himself. To deliberately legislate for the service of all the people, to use the government as the main engine of that service, is a new process, wholly human, and difficult of development under an androcentric culture.
