33. A Glance Into the Future
THE PRESENT public prosperity of the
exsuffragettes is chiefly due to the fact that the old-time male
politicians, being naturally very stupid, mistake them for
spokesmen for the whole body of women, and so show them
politeness. But soon or late--and probably disconcertingly soon
--the great mass of sensible and agnostic women will turn upon
them and depose them, and thereafter the woman vote will be no
longer at the disposal of bogus Great Thinkers and messiahs. If
the suffragettes continue to fill the newspapers with nonsense,
once that change has been effected, it will be only as a minority
sect of tolerated idiots, like the Swedenborgians, Christian
Scientists, Seventh Day Adventists and other such fanatics of
today. This was the history of the extension of the suffrage in
all of the American states that made it before the national
enfranchisement of women and it will be repeated in the nation at
large, and in Great Britain and on the Continent. Women are not
taken in by quackery as readily as men are; the hardness of their
shell of logic makes it difficult to penetrate to their emotions.
For one woman who testifies publicly that she has been cured of
cancer by some swindling patent medicine, there are at least
twenty masculine witnesses. Even such frauds as the favourite
American elixir, Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, which are
ostensibly remedies for specifically feminine ills, anatomically
impossible in the male, are chiefly swallowed, so an intelligent
druggist tells me, by men.
My own belief, based on elaborate inquiries and long
meditation, is that the grant of the ballot to women marks the
concealed but none the less real beginning of an improvement in
our politics, and, in the end, in our whole theory of government.
As things stand, an intelligent grappling with some of the
capital problems of the commonwealth is almost impossible. A
politician normally prospers under democracy, not in proportion
as his principles are sound and his honour incorruptible, but in
proportion as he excels in the manufacture of sonorous phrases,
and the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defences
against them. Our politics thus degenerates into a mere pursuit
of hobgoblins; the male voter, a coward as well as an ass, is
forever taking fright at a new one and electing some mountebank
to lay it. For a hundred years past the people of the United
States, the most terrible existing democratic state, have
scarcely had a political campaign that was not based upon some
preposterous fear--first of slavery and then of the manumitted
slave, first of capitalism and then of communism, first of the
old and then of the novel. It is a peculiarity of women that they
are not easily set off by such alarms, that they do not fall
readily into such facile tumults and phobias. What starts a male
meeting to snuffling and trembling most violently is precisely
the thing that would cause a female meeting to sniff. What we
need, to ward off mobocracy and safeguard a civilized form of
government, is more of this sniffing. What we need--and in the
end it must come--is a sniff so powerful that it will call a halt
upon the navigation of the ship from the forecastle, and put a
competent staff on the bridge, and lay a course that is
describable in intelligible terms.
The officers nominated by the male electorate in
modern democracies before the extension of the suffrage were
usually chosen, not for their competence but for their mere
talent for idiocy; they reflected accurately the male weakness
for whatever is rhetorical and sentimental and feeble and untrue.
Consider, for example, what happened in a salient case. Every
four years the male voters of the United States chose from among
themselves one who was put forward as the man most fit, of all
resident men, to be the first citizen of the commonwealth. He was
chosen after interminable discussion; his qualifications were
thoroughly canvassed; very large powers and dignities were put
into his hands. Well, what did we commonly find when we examined
this gentleman? We found, not a profound thinker, not a leader of
sound opinion, not a man of notable sense, but merely a
wholesaler of notions so infantile that they must needs disgust a
sentient suckling --in brief, a spouting geyser of fallacies and
sentimentalities, a cataract of unsupported assumptions and
hollow moralizings, a tedious phrase-merchant and
plaliludinarian, a fellow whose noblest flights of thought were
flattered when they were called comprehensible-specifically, a
Wilson, a Taft, a Roosevelt, or a Harding. This was the male
champion. I do not venture upon the cruelty of comparing his
bombastic flummeries to the clear reasoning of a woman of like
fame and position; all I ask of you is that you weigh them, for
sense, for shrewdness, for intelligent grasp of obscure
relations, for intellectual honesty and courage, with the ideas
of the average midwife.
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"In Defense Of Women" by H. L. Mencken, 1922