Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/59

 of things could ever arise, although, in a state of war, men show themselves by no means incapable of exterminating the enemy's women.

If we find some of the women's champions a little hazy on this matter, their confusion is as nothing, however, to the muddle-headedness of some of the reactionaries. I have heard one and the same champion of anti-suffragism (calling himself a Churchman, too) speak of the dominance of physical force as a "regrettable fact," do lip-service to the gospel of Jesus, and add that he feared the world was not ready for it yet and probably never would be, and follow this up by the much more fervent and heartfelt declaration that it was "only just and right that men, who alone can enforce the law, should make the law." Now, if it is right and just that physical force should rule, undirected by moral force, it is not a regrettable fact, and we need not seek to alter it. But this is not what anyone really means. Everyone admits that laws should be based upon justice and equity, and that they have no stability if this moral sanction is entirely lacking. Anti-suffragists say that suffragists deny the dominance, sometimes even the very existence of physical force. This is not so. We think, on the contrary, that it is too dominant and that man is sufficiently reasonable to see this, when, as is now happening all over the world, women show that they are not consenting parties to such domination. Mr. Norman Angell has pointed out that the modern pacifist does not deny that nations can wage wars;