Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/870

850 may ordinarily be held a fair equivalent for the earning of an income by the husband."

As to political rights or privileges, he holds that those of women are not to be regarded as identical with those of men. With men, the possession of the suffrage involves the obligation to become military defenders of the nation. Women have not the same liabilities; hence, if they are granted identical privileges, their position is not one of equality but of superiority to men. The question of equal political rights for women can not be entertained, he argues, until we reach a state of permanent peace. In criticism of this view, it may be maintained, we think, in accordance with a logic which Mr. Spencer has himself recognized in treating of the property rights of women, that the question is not so much one of identity of function and obligation as of just equivalence. Even in case of war, it may not unjustly be held that the services of women, in the hospital and in the home, as tax-payers and wage-earners, as mothers and educators of the country's defenders, constitute a fair equivalent to the services of men in the field, and entitle women to equal political consideration, all other conditions being identical. Moreover, large classes of men are legally exempt from military service, by age, occupation, or physical disqualification, but such persons are not therefore disfranchised. Evidently, therefore, suffrage is not conditioned, de facto, upon military service or ability therefor. Nor, happily, are the problems of government mainly those growing out of physical conflicts between nations. The arguments against enfranchising women in the later chapter on The Constitution of the State, based on their constitutional differences from men—their comparative impulsiveness, emotional susceptibility, and relative inability to recognize the force of abstract and remote considerations, bearing upon the public welfare—appear to us to have much greater weight than the by no means novel argument based on the incapacity of women for military service. They will doubtless seem to many minds at present conclusive. Mr. Spencer, it should be said, expressly disclaims the application of this argument as an objection to local or municipal suffrage for women.

In discussing the rights of children, the reciprocal duties of parent and child are clearly outlined, and the necessity of giving the child a gradually increasing freedom of action to fit him for the independent or selfdirected activities of his adult life is strongly affirmed.

With a notable series of chapters on the nature, constitution and duties of the State, Mr. Spencer concludes the present volume. In many respects these chapters constitute the most suggestive and valuable part of this discussion. Nowhere else have the nature and duties of citizenship, and the proper limitations of state-control over the individual, been so clearly and tersely set forth. With admirable brevity and lucidity, Mr. Spencer first shows the fallacy of the eighteenth-century doctrine of political rights, a doctrine which still finds intelligent supporters, especially in democratic and republican communities like our own. The only rights, truly so called, which man possesses, he affirms, are the personal rights to life, freedom, security, etc. Political privileges are instrumental, in greater or less measure, depending on the state of culture and civilization, in maintaining these rights; and they can only be claimed in virtue of their efficiency in securing this end. "The giving of a vote," e. g, "considered in itself, in no way furthers the voter's life, as does the exercise of those various liberties we properly call rights. All we can say is that the possession of the franchise by each citizen gives the citizens in general the power of checking trespasses upon their rights; powers which they may or may not use to good purpose"(page 111).

Attention is called to the fact that in France the bureaucratic despotism is as great under the republic as it was under the empire; and that in America universal suffrage does not prevent corruptions of municipal government, the surrender of power to wire-pullers and bosses, the coercion of the citizens by laws dictating what they shall not drink, and the taxation of the many for the benefit of the few by a "protective" tariff. "The so-called political rights may be used for the maintenance of liberties, they may fail to be so used, and may even be used for the establishment of tyrannies." In considering The Nature of the State,