| The chief interest of the May anniversaries is undoubtedly in those of the various societies of reform. A few years since it was the annual meeting of the Antislavery Society which was the most conspicuous, and apparently not the least efficient. The meetings were a constant and overwhelming appeal to the moral sentiment; and although the strict Abolitionists who rejected the Constitution as tainted with slavery did not vote, they furnished conclusive reasons for the voting of others. One lesson may be drawn from the history of those old anniversaries for the readers of to-day who were then too young to be interested, and it is this: that the utmost ridicule and falsification in the newspaper reports of those meetings were as effective in resistance to the movement as a dried leaf in damming Niagara. And a similar improvement may be made for the older brethren who used to sneer and swear at the fanatics and tomfools, as they were called, of those old meetings, and it is this: that the movements which now seem to them as crude and impracticable as the anti-slavery reform may have the same reason and vitality, and may be tending to as great a result. The "Reform League" anniversary meeting was devoted to a discursive debate upon the state of the nation. Mr. Phillips reviewed the situation as one in which the growing contest between labor and capital is the most significant fact, and asserted that the Ku-Klux terror is naked war, and requires to be dealt with as General Butler dealt with Mumford. Mr. Phillips thinks that a little hanging of the conspicuous leaders would be a wholesome severity. A few summary executions would show the Ku-Klux assassins that the people of the country are in earnest in requiring peace. Is it, however, the lesson of history that discontent and disorder are best repressed by drumhead court-martials? It may be war in the Southern States, but neither President Grant nor General Butler, if he were President, as Mr. Phillips perhaps wishes he might be, could do acts of war without authority of Congress. Does Mr. Phillips really wish that the President of the United States would or could summarily hang murderers at his pleasure? Or is it the fact that under an absolute dictatorship only bad men are punished, and that liberty flourishes? Mr. Phillips in another speech eloquently vindicated agitation as the saving power in modern society, declaring it to be instinctive in the Saxon heart. But if the chief magistrate were to take "lives of the topmost line" at his discretion, he would make short work of agitators. This was precisely the object of the legislation proposed by Mr. Douglas at the time of the John Brown raid. But those who were the heads and hearts of what Mr. Douglas’s bill defined as conspiracy were, at that time, not the Ku-Klux assassins—they were the anti-slavery orators. Good citizens might consent to the dictatorship of General Grant, but how about a joint dictatorship of Mr. Tweed and the Mobile Register? The anniversary of the American Woman Suffrage Association was interesting not only in itself, but because of the definitive declaration that the question of the extension of political power to women has nothing whatever in common with what is called free love or any other project. The assertion which is sometimes made that the political power of women would destroy the marriage relation is as wise as that made fifty years ago, that the higher education of women would inevitably produce domestic unhappiness. The Association unwisely as it seems to us, approved the attempt to obtain the suffrage for women under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution. We object to it upon the same ground that we should object to the attempt to cover the voting of minors by the same amendments, and that is, that it was clearly not the intention of the amendment to confer any such power. It is never desirable to attempt a great and radical political change by a merely ingenious construction of law. Such changes, to be really valuable, must be intrenched in general conviction. It is a hard truth for all who wish reforms, but it is none the less a truth, that there is no shortcut to great social and political results. Artificial heat my bake green fruit, but it will not ripen it. Mr. Gerrit Smith used to hold that the Constitution was really an antislavery instrument; and if the general sentiment had agreed with him, it would practically have become so. But, as it was, it would have been difficult for him to refuse to return a fugitive upon the ground that under the Constitution he was a free man. So with the amendments in question, if the general opposition to the voting of women had disappeared, they might vote under a construction of those amendments, or of any other. But if that were the situation, there would be no difficulty in obtaining the Sixteenth Amendment. Meanwhile, that there is no pretense that the present amendments meant to convey the power claimed is reason enough for seeking that power only by moulding public opinion to favor the Sixteenth Amendment. The interest in the question must not be measured by the greater or less throng at the anniversary meetings. That is a point usually decided by the expectation of entertainment from the speakers. It is a cause which, from its nature, moves silently and privately, but very surely. | |
