Feminism - Women and Memory Forum

252 FEMINISM
has not yet been put to any serious test. The argumentation of
the woman suffragists is, rather, to slur over this point, and their
procedure, in the countries where all men have gradually been
conceded the right to vote, is to make a sudden jump off the end
of this induction to the ultimate limit that all human beings have
a right to vote, and then they use this as a principle for the
deduction that women, because they are human beings, have a
right to vote, although they do not apply it to children, who are
equally human beings. Thus an unauthorised inference is followed
by an inconsistent application, and they who commit these
two absurdities pride themselves on their logic
Again, a natural right has been defined to be " the right one
has to do what is to his advantage " ;
^* and if anything is certain,
it is certain that no one has a natural right (at least in the sense
of a moral right) to do what may tend, in its ultimate effect,
to be harmful to the community in which he lives and therefore
to himself or to his descendants. °** It is for this reason that, even if
we admit the existence of natural rights, the natural right of
women to the suffrage can still be proved only by the argument
of expediency. The term " natural right " is used, as we have
seen, more properly as any right a person may have in the state
of nature — a right " common to all animals " was the Roman
definition of it. °° In that state every one has the right, or liberty
(for right and liberty are closely allied), to do whatever he
pleases. But this is not a moral right. A moral right, or moral
liberty, is that of doing whatever one pleases that is not injurious
to any one. To this every one — man, woman, and child — has
a natural right, because no reason can be given why any one
should not have it; for all are equal in this respect. Now, on
entering a civil state some natural rights are given up, in exchange
for some new civil rights. Thus, for instance, the natural
right to avenge an injury is handed over to the state, in exchange
for the state's protection against injury, which now becomes
the citizen's right. Suffrage, in the form of taking part
in governing society, may then, if you will, be a natural right
in everybody; and yet it may not in everybody be a civil right,
being abandoned, or being such as ought to be abandoned, by
the weak in exchange for protection by the strong. The strong,
indeed, gave up some of their natural rights likewise, for the
B4 Dupont de Nemours, one of the early advocates of natural rights, in his Editorial
Discourse prefixed to Quesnay's Le Droit Natureh Daire's ed. of the Physiocrats, Part
I., p. 19. Quesnay's own definition was: " the right a man has to the things proT)er
for his enjoyment, ib., p, 41.
64a Cf. Burke: " Men [and women too] have no right to what is not reasonable,
or to what is not for their benefit," Works, iii. 313.
OB Institutes, I. ii., Digest, I. i. 3.
!