Part 20

But the extremists would not have it. Each played to the lead of the other. Whilst Wendell Phillips was preaching the equality of races, death to the slaveholders and the brotherhood of man at the North, William Lowndes Yancey was exclaiming that cotton was king at the South, and, to establish these false propositions, millions of good Americans proceeded to cut one another’s throats.

There were agitators and agitators in those days as there are in these. The agitator, like the poor, we have always with us. It used to be said even at the North that Wendell Phillips was just a clever comedian. William Lowndes Yancey was scarcely that. He was a serious, sincere, untraveled provincial, possessing unusual gifts of oratory. He had the misfortune to kill a friend in a duel when a young man, and the tragedy shadowed his life. He clung to his plantation and rarely went away from home. When sent to Europe by the South as its Ambassador in 1861, he discovered the futility of his scheme of a Southern confederacy, and, seeing the cornerstone of the philosophy on which he had constructed his pretty fabric, overthrown, he came home despairing, to die of a broken heart.

The moral alike for governments and men is: Keep the middle of the road.

III

Which brings us to Feminism. I will not write Woman Suffrage, for that is an accomplished fact—for good or evil we shall presently be better able to determine.

Life is an adventure and all of us adventurers—saving that the word presses somewhat harder upon the woman than the man—most things do in fact, whereby she is given greater endurance—leaving to men the duty of caring for the women; and, if need be, looking death squarely and defiantly in the face.

The world often puts the artificial before the actual; but under the dispensation of the Christian civilization—derived from the Hebraic—the family requiring a head, headship is assigned to the male. This male is commonly not much to speak of for beauty of form or decency of behavior. He is made purposely tough for work and fight. He gets toughened by outer contact. But back of all are the women, the children and the home.

I have been fighting the woman’s battle for equality in the things that count, all my life. I would despise myself if I had not been. In contesting precipitate universal suffrage for women, I conceived that I was still fighting the woman’s battle.

We can escape none of Nature’s laws. But we need not handicap ourselves with artificial laws. At best, life is an experiment, Death the final adventure. Feminism seems to me its next of kin; still we may not call the woman who assails the soap boxes—even those that antic about the White House gates—by the opprobrious terms of adventuress. Where such a one is not a lunatic she is a nuisance. There are women and women.

We may leave out of account the shady ladies of history. Neither Aspasia nor Lucrezia Borgia nor the Marquise de Brinvilliers could with accuracy be called an adventuress. The term is of later date. Its origin and growth have arisen out of the complexities of modern society.

In fiction Milady and Madame Marneffe come in for first honors—in each the leopard crossed on the serpent and united under a petticoat, beautiful and wicked—but since the Balzac and Dumas days the story-tellers and stage-mongers have made exceeding free with the type, and we have between Herman Merivale’s Stephanie de Mohrivart and Victorien Sardou’s Zica a very theater—or shall we say a charnel house—of the woman with the past; usually portrayed as the victim of circumstance; unprincipled through cruel experience; insensible through lack of conscience; sexless in soul, but a siren in seductive arts; cold as ice; hard as iron; implacable as the grave, pursuing her ends with force of will, intellectual audacity and elegance of manner, yet, beneath this brilliant depravity, capable of self-pity, yielding anon in moments of depression to a sudden gleam of human tenderness and a certain regret for the innocence she has lost.

Such a one is sometimes, though seldom, met in real life. But many pretenders may be encountered at Monte Carlo and other European resorts. They range from the Parisian cocotte, signalized by her chic apparel, to the fashionable divorcée who in trying her luck at the tables keeps a sharp lookout for the elderly gent with the wad, often fooled by the enterprising sport who has been there before.

These are out and out professional adventuresses. There are other adventuresses, however, than those of the story and the stage, the casino and the cabaret. The woman with the past becomes the girl with the future.

Curiously enough this latter is mainly, almost exclusively, recruited from our countrywomen, who to an abnormal passion for foreign titles join surpassing ignorance of foreign society. Thus she is ready to the hand of the Continental fortune seeker masquerading as a nobleman—occasionally but not often the black sheep of some noble family—carrying not a bona fide but a courtesy title—the count and the no-account, the lord and the Lord knows who! The Yankee girl with a dot had become before the world war a regular quarry for impecunious aristocrats and clever crooks, the matrimonial results tragic in their frequency and squalor.

Another curious circumstance is the readiness with which the American newspaper tumbles to these frauds. The yellow press especially luxuriates in them; woodcuts the callow bedizened bride, the jaded game-worn groom; dilates upon the big money interchanged; glows over the tin-plate stars and imaginary garters and pinchbeck crowns; and keeping the pictorial paraphernalia in cold but not forgotten storage waits for the inevitable scandal, and then, with lavish exaggeration, works the old story over again.

These newspapers ring all the sensational changes. Now it is the wondrous beauty with the cool million, who, having married some illegitimate of a minor royal house, will probably be the next Queen of Rigmarolia, and now—ever increasing the dose—it is the ten-million-dollar widow who is going to marry the King of Pontarabia’s brother, and may thus aspire to be one day Empress of Sahara.

Old European travelers can recall many funny and sometimes melancholy incidents—episodes—histories—of which they have witnessed the beginning and the end, carrying the self-same dénouement and lesson.

As there are women and women there are many kinds of adventuresses; not all of them wicked and detestable. But, good or bad, the lot of the adventuress is at best a hard lot. Be she a girl with a future or a woman with a past she is still a woman, and the world can never be too kind to its women—the child bearers, the home makers, the moral light of the universe as they meet the purpose of God and Nature and seek not to thwart it by unsexing themselves in order that they may keep step with man in ways of self-indulgent dalliance. The adventuress of fiction always comes to grief. But the adventuress in real life—the prudent adventuress who draws the line at adultery—the would-be leader of society without the wealth—the would-be political leader without the masculine fiber—is sure of disappointment in the end.

Take the agitation over Suffragism. What is it that the woman suffragette expects to get? No one of them can, or does, clearly tell us.

It is feminism, rather than suffragism, which is dangerous. Now that they have it, my fear is that the leaders will not stop with the ballot for women. They are too fond of the spotlight. It has become a necessity for them. If all women should fall in with them there would be nothing of womanhood left, and the world bereft of its women will become a masculine harlotocracy.

Let me repeat that I have been fighting woman’s battles in one way and another all my life. I am not opposed to Votes for Women. But I would discriminate and educate, and even at that rate I would limit the franchise to actual taxpayers, and, outside of these, confine it to charities, corrections and schools, keeping woman away from the dirt of politics. I do not believe the ballot will benefit woman and cannot help thinking that in seeking unlimited and precipitate suffrage the women who favor it are off their reckoning! I doubt the performances got up to exploit it, though somehow, when the hikers started from New York to Albany, and afterward from New York to Washington, the inspiring thought of Bertha von Hillern came back to me.

I am sure the reader never heard of her. As it makes a pretty story let me tell it. Many years ago—don’t ask me how many—there was a young woman, Bertha von Hillern by name, a poor art student seeking money enough to take her abroad, who engaged with the management of a hall in Louisville to walk one hundred miles around a fixed track in twenty-four consecutive hours. She did it. Her share of the gate money, I was told, amounted to three thousand dollars.

I shall never forget the closing scenes of the wondrous test of courage and endurance. She was a pretty, fair-haired thing, a trifle undersized, but shapely and sinewy. The vast crowd that without much diminution, though with intermittent changes, had watched her from start to finish, began to grow tense with the approach to the end, and the last hour the enthusiasm was overwhelming. Wave upon wave of cheering followed every footstep of the plucky girl, rising to a storm of exultation as the final lap was reached.

More dead than alive, but game to the core, the little heroine was carried off the field, a winner, every heart throbbing with human sympathy, every eye wet with proud and happy tears. It is not possible adequately to describe all that happened. One must have been there and seen it fully to comprehend the glory of it.

Touching the recent Albany and Washington hikes and hikers let me say at once that I cannot approve the cause of Votes for women as I had approved the cause of Bertha von Hillern. Where she showed heroic, most of the suffragettes appear to me grotesque. Where her aim was rational, their aim has been visionary. To me the younger of them seem as children who need to be spanked and kissed. There has been indeed about the whole Suffrage business something pitiful and comic.

Often I have felt like swearing “You idiots!” and then like crying “Poor dears!” But I have kept on with them, and had I been in Albany or Washington I would have caught Rosalie Jones in my arms, and before she could say “Jack Robinson” have exclaimed: “You ridiculous child, go and get a bath and put on some pretty clothes and come and join us at dinner in the State Banquet Hall, duly made and provided for you and the rest of you delightful sillies.”

Chapter the Ninth

Dr. Norvin Green—Joseph Pulitzer—Chester A. Arthur—General Grant—The Case of Fitz-John Porter