Page:The Pacific Monthly vol. 14.djvu/300



Russia is learning that the strength of a nation is not in powder and battleships, but in the willing patriotism of a people. Willing patriotism and tyranny cannot exist together.

The people of Russia are learning that after all has been said about vested rights, inherited rights, the will of God and the rights of the intelligent few, the real truth is that the laws and policies of a country must be for the mass of the people. It is the many v/ho make every country. It is the toil of the many which supports the privileged few everywhere. The laws of nature are for the many. Only the laws of man create privileges for the few.

Some day the vast masses which make up the armies and navies which go out to be killed, as well as the armies and navies which create all wealth, will realize where justice lies and will meet all argument about governing classes and vested rights with no more respectful argument than, "Pish! A nation is its people, not its overlords, and for the good of the people all things must bend or break."

Still the wonder is of the stupidity of the people. And the marvel is that Nero, Louis, Charles and Nicholas have found armies of loyal peasants willing to die for them, to forge their own chains the stronger.

Truly of any existing order of things, man makes a fetich. He dreads change, yet only by change has he ceased to be a besotted slave. The most patient animal is not the ox nor the ass. It is man.

We are a highly moral nation. Well, at least, highly respectable! We are a Christian nation in everything but practice. We are a great commercial success, and commerce is too sacred a thing to be mussed up with practical Christianity. Forty or fifty years ago we bawled and wept over the heathen, sitting in darkness, who excluded us from China and Japan. We knocked down these barriers with guns, in the case of China, and with treaties and entreaties, in the case of Japan. Yet, it has never occurred to us that we could not insult and exclude with impunity Chinese citizens. But when Chinese guilds threaten to boycott American products, then the American Christian for the first time sees that his conduct has not only been un-Christian, but ignorant, coarse and vulgar—and also unprofitable. And what shall it profit a man to lose his soul, unless he gain the whole world for a market.

Friday, June 30, I had the honor to address the National Woman's Suffrage Association, and among other things said in substance that missionary work of this righteous cause should be done among women, and especially to promote the economic freedom of woman; that woman suffrage would not come till women themselves demanded it, and women would not demand it while they were in a state of mental and physical servitude to husbands, brothers, fathers; that economic independence would make for mental independence and self-assertion.

The Rev. Anna Shaw, a most eloquent and able woman, commenting on this, said that it was useless to wait until all women wanted the suffrage, because all women never would, just as all men do not now want it; and cited, as example, that the Democratic party gave the suffrage to the laboring man, though all laboring men did not ask it, and the Republican party gave it to negroes, though they did not ask it. But it seems to me that history shows that no government has ever cared for abstract justice. No government