The liberties of women are necessarily abridged, in Mr. Parkman's view, by the dangers to which the unbridled passions of men give rise. He says, "A man in lonely places has nothing to lose but life and property, and he has nerve and muscle to defend them." In another place he speaks of the common theory that chastity is a virtue only in women, as one to which society holds to-day as firmly as it ever did. In both of these respects we think that a change may be not only looked for, but recognized, in the cruel manners of the world. Let us look at the first. The greatest danger of woman lies in the brutal sexuality of man. Her defense is supposed to lie in the chivalry of man. How shall she be assured, in trusting to the other sex the defense of her honor, that ferocious passion shall not get the better of chivalrous compassion?
Existing provisions fail to give to woman this promised protection. Violence may dog her harmless footsteps in her own garden, may cross the threshold of her home, and find her there, as elsewhere, defenseless. Restriction of the woman's movements does not, then, prove an availing defense. The restriction must be sought and enforced elsewhere. The man can be taught as effectually to subordinate this part of his nature to reason and conscience as any other. If, as is claimed, he is the stronger party, let him be trained to show his strength in self-restraint, since self-indulgence shows only his weakness.
But chivalry is not limited to the domain of men. Its heroic compassion is also at home in the hearts of women. The growing concern of the best women for the welfare of their sex has latterly led, in many countries, to studies and efforts which tend to its true protection. The labors of Mrs. Butler (of Liverpool) and her fellow workers, culminating in such events as the Congress of Public Morality, held in Geneva, in September, 1877, have associated many noble men and women in a crusade against the low standard of sexual morality, hitherto held to be binding upon the male sex. When such men as M. Pressens, of the French Parliament, and Mr. Sternfeld, of the English House of Commons, take part in the proceedings of such a Congress, we may perceive that a new theory and influence are already making themselves felt in the administration of public morals.
Touching the justice of the claim of women to the elective franchise, Mr. Parkman says that "government by doctrines of abstract right, of which the French Revolution set the example, and bore the fruits, involves enormous danger and injustice."
We answer that government which opposes abstract right is fraught with far greater danger and injustice. Granted that while the recognition of a principle of right may be immediate, its embodiment in practice will remain a matter of slow and difficult endeavor. When, nevertheless, the principle has attained recognition, the policy which looks away from it, and excuses the neglect of a sacred duty by the inconvenience of its fulfillment, is short-sighted in its wisdom and short-lived in its success. But a sentence a little further on puzzles us extremely. Mr. Parkman says: "It is in the concrete, and not in the abstract, that rights prevail in every sound and wholesome society." Is right in the concrete, then, opposed to right in the abstract, and, where rights are enforced in the concrete, are they necessarily violated or neglected in the abstract? The woman-suffragists ask that an abstract right should be embodied in a concrete form, and Mr. Parkman replies to this by postulating a contradiction between abstract right and its concrete expression, which is valuable if viewed as a <i>reductio ad absurdum</i>.
To what authority can the concrete institutions of government appeal, if not to the principles of abstract right? The work which the French Revolution and our own essayed to do was to rectify concrete abuses by a return to the principles of ideal justice. While neither of these great efforts can be said to have been entirely successful, the measure of success which they did achieve is the most important attainment of the century which came to an end three years ago.
Mr. Parkman, like others of his creed, attempts to aid his reasoning by an analogy borrowed from the vegetable kingdom. "The palm," he says, "will not grow in the soil and climate of the pine." This metaphor seems to us peculiarly unfortunate, since man and woman, his pine and palm, necessarily grow in the same soil and climate. The question is, whether the pine shall make up his mind to allow the palm as much of the common soil and climate as he finds necessary for his own well-being. Or, rather, we should say that man and woman correspond to the male and female palms, for which every circumstance, except that of sex, is identical.
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