worst of the white man's relationship to his wife, and failed utterly, as in the nature of the case we must have done, to give him the best of the white man's relation to his wife.
When in India, as Mrs. Garrett Fawcett has so finely shown, we introduce the technicalities of the English law of marriage to bind an unwilling wife to her husband, we give the Hindoo the slavery of the Anglo-Saxon wife, but we do not give him that spirit of Anglo-Saxon marriage and home-life which has made that slavery often scarcely felt, and never an unmixed evil. If, to-day, in the Hawaiian Islands or in Cuba we fail to recognize the native women, who still hold something of the primitive prestige of womanhood, fail to recognize them as entitled to a translation, under new laws and conditions, of the old dignity of position, we shall not only do them an injustice, but we shall forcibly give the Hawaiian and Cuban men lessons in the wrong side and not the right side of our domestic relations. Above all, if in the Philippines we abruptly and with force of arms establish the authority of the husband over the wife, by recognizing men only as property-owners, as signers of treaties, as industrial rulers and as domestic law-givers, we shall introduce every outrage and injustice of women's subjection to men, without giving these people one iota of the sense of family responsibility, of protection of and respect for woman, and of deep and self-sacrificing devotion to childhood's needs, which mark the Anglo-Saxon man.
In a word, if we introduce one particle of our belated and illogical political and legal subjection of women to men into any savage or half-civilized community, we shall spoil the domestic virtues that community already possesses, and we shall not (because we can not so abruptly and violently) inoculate them with the virtues of civilized domestic life. Nature will not be cheated. We can not escape, nor can we roughly and swiftly help others to escape, the discipline of ages of natural growth.
This all means that we need another Commission to go to all the lands in which our flag now claims a new power of oversight and control—a Commission other than that so recently sent to the Philippines—to see what may be done to bring order to that distracted group of islands. We need a Commission which shall study domestic rather than political conditions, and which shall look for the undercurrents of social growth rather than the more showy political movements. We should have on that Commission two archæologists, a man and a woman, and I can name them—Otis T. Mason and Alice C. Fletcher....
An earnest discussion followed this paper, in which Mrs. Clara Bewick Colby (D. C.), Mrs. Helen Philleo Jenkins (Mich.), Henry B. Blackwell (Mass.), Miss Octavia W. Bates (Mich.), Miss Martha Scott Anderson (Minn.), and Miss Anthony took part:
Mrs. Jenkins: ....Whatever power in government may be given to the men of our new possessions in selecting their rulers, let the same privilege be accorded the women. It may be said that the women are ignorant, and need yet to be held in subjection—that they are unfit to have a voice in the new order of things. Let us not be deceived. Probably the women are no more ignorant and stupid than the masses of men in these newly acquired regions—excepting always the few men whom circumstances have developed. The ignorant mother can guide her child quite as safely as its ignorant father. Men and women in all nations and tribes are pretty nearly on a level as to common sense and forethought for the future good of the family. Indeed, the interests of the home, protection of the children, and the morals and behavior of the community make the standard of even unlettered women one notch higher than that of their ignorant husbands. Let us of this nation hesitate before we establish a sex supremacy that it may take long centuries to overcome....
Thousands of dollars are expended on a military commission; it is sent to investigate the commercial possibilities, the financial opportunities, in remote lands; but the army, the commerce, the finance are not all there is of a nation. There are more vital interests—there is something which lies at the very base of the nation, without which it could not exist—the homes, the women and the children. It is the social conditions that need special consideration in our country's dealings with these new lands.
Miss Bates: ....In the presence of the events which have transpired during the past year, and in all the discussions pertaining to the new peoples who have suddenly become our protégés, seldom if ever does one hear a word about the women, who, all will admit, are a most important factor in the civilization—or the lack of it—which we have taken under our control.
We women are here at this time to do our best to awaken the public conscience to a realizing sense of the state of affairs. We are the result of what the religion, the education of the nineteenth century and the liberty which it has granted to women have made us. We are ready and willing and competent to befriend our less favored sisters beyond the seas, and to extend to them the benefits we enjoy, so far as they are able to receive them; but—the tragedy of it—in a certain sense we are utterly helpless to reach them and to give them what they, unconsciously to themselves, so grievously need. There is no place for the thought of the women of this land in the plans of the nation for the study of these questions.
No matter how much our speaker may think and write and publish on this subject—aye, and women like her—no matter how wise the conclusions they reach, is it at all likely that their voices will be listened to in the din and blare and clash of warring political parties, or respected in legislative halls? Or is it probable that the advocates of territorial expansion will pause a moment to ponder on the woman side of that question? We, to-day, are discussing this subject without even the shadow of a hope of putting our convictions into practice. Is it any wonder that women at large are dead to the importance of this matter?...
I am in favor of pushing the question to the utmost—not that I have any hope that such a Commission will be appointed, but because it furnishes a most valuable argument for extending the suffrage to women: first, in order that, by its possession, they may have an uncontested, legally-defined right of serving on such commissions; and, second, because of the opportunity it offers for proving to the world the necessity of commissions like this for settling questions and conditions of which women form a central and integral part. Of course if we possessed the suffrage, we should have no necessity for a discussion like the present. Everything we are saying would seem like truisms then, instead of being contested point by point, as it is to-day....
Mr. Blackwell: ....In those islands are peoples ranging from absolute savagery to mediæval civilization, from fighters with blow-guns and bows and arrows to fighters with Mauser rifles and modern artillery. Laws and institutions suited to the needs of one tribe are unsuited to those of another. Side by side are Catholicism, Mohammedanism and heathenism. Their amusements vary from cannibalism to cock-fighting. Their social status ranges from barbarous promiscuity to Moslem polygamy and thence to Hindoo monogamy. But everywhere exist masculine domination and feminine subjection, under varied forms of political despotism, tempered with Protestant liberalism in the case of Hawaii. To establish over all these diverse social conditions the rigid principles of the English common law, which prevail largely in our jurisprudence, will perpetuate and intensify the tyranny of husband over wife, of father over offspring.
We see the consequences already in the British West Indies, where negro women generally prefer to live outside of legal marriage because as wives they find themselves subjected to practical serfdom. In Jamaica 75 per cent. of the births are illegitimate for this reason. When I visited Haiti, I was told to my great surprise that the homes and small farms were usually owned by the women. Expressing my admiration of this chivalrous recognition of women's right to the homestead, I was informed that there was no such sentiment. It was solely because the men were so lazy and unreliable that the perpetuity of the race was endangered. The fathers of the children were here to-day and away to-morrow. They spent their time in loafing, drinking, gambling and plotting "revolutions." The women, anchored by the love for their children, lived in the little huts on their small plantations, raising yams and bananas, and if the men became too drunken and abusive the women ordered them to leave. Among those people, in a tropical climate, with land to squat upon, most of the work is done by the women. Let no one imagine that the so-called "matriarchate" of early ages was an ideal condition of society. It was based primarily upon the industrial and moral irresponsibility of men.
In our new possessions, side by side with these primitive conditions, we have great bodies of Chinese and Hindoo coolies, who represent ancient and fossilized types of civilized society, patient, economical, industrious, monogamous and exclusive