The Suffragist Peace How Women Shape The Politics of War Robert F Trager Full Chapter PDF

The Suffragist Peace: How Women
Shape the Politics of War Robert F.

Trager
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-suffragist-peace-how-women-shape-the-politics-o
f-war-robert-f-trager/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
The Politics Of Peace: A Global Cold War History 1st

Edition Edition Petra Goedde
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-politics-of-peace-a-global-
cold-war-history-1st-edition-edition-petra-goedde/
The Insiders' Game: How Elites Make War and Peace

Elizabeth N. Saunders
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-insiders-game-how-elites-make-
war-and-peace-elizabeth-n-saunders/
John F. Kennedy's 1957 Algeria Speech: The Politics of

Anticolonialism in the Cold War Era Gregory D. Cleva
https://ebookmass.com/product/john-f-kennedys-1957-algeria-
speech-the-politics-of-anticolonialism-in-the-cold-war-era-
gregory-d-cleva/
First Raise a Flag: How South Sudan Won the Longest War
But Lost the Peace Peter Martell
https://ebookmass.com/product/first-raise-a-flag-how-south-sudan-
won-the-longest-war-but-lost-the-peace-peter-martell/
The Sit Room: In the Theater of War and Peace David
Scheffer
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-sit-room-in-the-theater-of-war-
and-peace-david-scheffer/
Women and the Politics of Resistance in the Iranian

Constitutional Revolution Maryam Dezhamkhooy
https://ebookmass.com/product/women-and-the-politics-of-
resistance-in-the-iranian-constitutional-revolution-maryam-
dezhamkhooy/
War And The Politics Of Ethics Maja Zehfuss
https://ebookmass.com/product/war-and-the-politics-of-ethics-
maja-zehfuss/
Management and War: How Organisations Navigate Conflict

and Build Peace 1st ed. Edition Joanne Murphy
https://ebookmass.com/product/management-and-war-how-
organisations-navigate-conflict-and-build-peace-1st-ed-edition-
joanne-murphy/
Hunger in War and Peace: Women and Children in Germany,

1914–1924 Mary Elisabeth Cox
https://ebookmass.com/product/hunger-in-war-and-peace-women-and-
children-in-germany-1914-1924-mary-elisabeth-cox/
The Suffragist Peace
•
The Suffragist
Peace
•
HOW WOMEN SHAPE
THE POLITICS OF WAR
Joslyn N. Barnhart
Robert F. Trager
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2023
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with
the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning
reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the
Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Barnhart, Joslyn, author. | Trager, Robert F., author.
Title: The suffragist peace : / how women shape the politics of war Joslyn
N. Barnhart, University of California, Santa Barbara, Robert F. Trager,
University of California, Los Angeles.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2022] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022027327 (print) | LCCN 2022027328 (ebook) | ISBN
9780197629758 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197629765 (ebook) | ISBN
9780197629772 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Women—Suffrage—History—20th century. | Women and
war—History—20th century. | Women—Political
participation—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC JF851 .B37 2022 (print) | LCC JF851 (ebook) | DDC
324.6/230973—dc23/eng/20220811
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022027327
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022027328
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
cont en ts
List of Figures vii

List of Tables ix
Introduction xi
1. The Hope for Democracy 1

2. The Hope for Suffrage and Peace in the New Century 22
3. Gender and Aggression: Nature or Nurture? 40
4. Suffrage, Democracy, and War 66
5. Women’s Votes and the World Wars 87
6. Do Women Leaders Spell the End of War? 115
7. Women and War in the Modern Era 135
8. The Future 157
Appendix 168
Notes 179
References 219
Acknowledgements 238
Index 239
list of fig ures
1. Campaign flyer for the Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage

Association. 34
2. National Woman Suffrage Association poster, 1915. 37
3. Homicides in the United States by sex. 46
4. Women and men’s preferences in foreign affairs trend together,
almost always. 46
5. The pace of suffrage and democracy. 77
6. The effects of women’s votes as democratic institutions expand. 78
7. How likely two countries are to have military disputes. 80
8. The spread of women’s suffrage in the United States. 88
9. Partisan voting maps showing the shift in the West (states with women’s
suffrage are marked in white). 95
10. Reagan foreign policy approval by sex. 110
11. Whether to use force to defend a NATO ally. 113
12. The (slow) growth of women leaders in the modern era. 116
13. Pitch range for the 116th United States Congress by sex. 129
14–15. University of Tokyo Asahi-Shimbun surveys. 153
16. The polity scores of all states with female suffrage. 171
list of ta bles
1. All states granting suffrage in waves. 169

2. Regression table for monadic analysis. 172
3. Regression table for dyadic analysis. 174
4. Percentage change in frequency of disputes. 176
introd uc tio n
Not all radical social changes are revolutionary and not all revolutionary
changes are noticed. Profound changes sometimes unfold over time;
they may even remain invisible for centuries. When the printing press
was invented, no one understood that a half millennium later printed
material would create a new form of political allegiance: nationalism.
And yet, that seems to be what happened as the prevalence of printed
material spurred literacy, creating common political narratives across
expanding realms. National identities eventually covered the globe,
redrawing political maps and recasting the social order. At the dawn
of the industrial revolution, many recognized the impacts of the “dark
Satanic mills” on human life.1 But no one understood that the resulting
expansion of the human population would disrupt planetary systems
leading to the sixth mass extinction since the birth of life on earth. And
yet, that now appears likely too.
The year 1893 witnessed the dawn of another era—one in which
women around the world entered the political realm. At first, this era
seemed to have little in common with those earlier transformations.
People expected profound social change to follow. They spoke in revo-
lutionary terms—with exultancy or fear—of the coming fundamental
reordering of society. Women voting en masse would bring a “grand
era of moral reform,” The Atlantic wrote in 1890.2 Their votes would
xii introduction
give rise to “a new evangel of womanhood, to exalt purity, virtue,

morality . . . to lift man up into higher realms of thought and action.”3
Political parties centered solely around women’s issues would emerge
over night, pundits predicted, as formidable, unified forces on the
political scene, enabling women to dramatically remodel the world in
their more virtuous guise.
But this understanding of the meaning of women’s suffrage did not
last. As women became voters and leaders, no powerful women’s parties
emerged. Women’s politics looked much like men’s politics. Change
seemed so distant that women’s periodicals questioned whether the
suffrage movement had ultimately failed in its objectives.4 And this view
persists today. Writing of the early expectations in the New York Times,
Gail Collins went so far as to call women’s suffrage a “big flop.”5 A
1999 Gallup poll named women’s suffrage as the second most important
event of the twentieth century (World War II was first), tied with the
dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But many
would be hard pressed to identify a lasting and significant social or
political change brought about by women’s votes. Suffrage is viewed
narrowly, as a major step in women’s long march toward equality, but
not a source of fundamental political and social change. The advocates
of women’s suffrage saw it as a means; we have come to see it as an end.
And yet, could it be that radical change has gone unnoticed and
unappreciated? Perhaps women’s entrance into political life has some-
thing in common with these long-run processes whose impacts were
profound but difficult to detect at first. Perhaps the changing political
status of women—a process which is ongoing—has created the modern
world more than we realize.
In this book, we ask whether women’s political influence is changing
politics between nations. While it is too soon to characterize the full
extent, and impossible to know for sure, we find that the historical
facts are strikingly consistent with the idea that women’s inclusion in
democratic electorates has been a cause of peace in the modern era.
From the early days of the suffrage movement, the pursuit of peace
was seen by many to be one and the same with the pursuit of the
vote. Julia Ward Howe, author of the Civil War song “The Battle
Hymn of the Republic” and eventual leader of the American Women
Suffrage Association, anticipated that once women freed themselves
introduction xiii
from their almost military subjection to men, they would exercise their
superior moral force in pursuit of global cooperation and compromise.6
Elizabeth Cady Stanton predicted in 1872 that women’s suffrage would
bring not only prosperity but a “golden age of peace.” Such expectations
were common, as we will see. Excessive optimism is indeed a useful trait
for any activist and, alas, we do not live in an era of global peace. But,
the evidence now—over one hundred years later—suggests that these
early suffragists were on to something.
Deciphering the levers of war and peace, conflict and cooperation,
has arguably never been more important. With the number of nuclear
weapons on the planet on the rise again, after declining by over 75%
from their Cold War peak, and new technologies of violence made
possible by advances in artificial intelligence no doubt on the horizon,
war between great powers today could very well pose an existential
threat to the planet.7 The magnitude of this threat may inspire caution
among world leaders, but any resulting peace is a devil’s bargain, struck
only through the always-present risk of catastrophic war. A “suffragist
peace” provides a firmer foundation for futures of human flourishing.
Democracy itself is also at a crossroads. Signs of disaffection with
democratic rule are everywhere, especially amongst the young. Two-
thirds of Americans born in the 1930s believe that it is essential to
live in a democracy. Less than one-third of those born half a century
later agree.8 The trend is similarly acute in other democracies around
the world. More than half of respondents in Argentina, South Korea,
Colombia, Mexico, South Africa, Taiwan, India, and Romania, to name
a few, believe that having a strong leader who is unconstrained by
parliaments or elections would be a “good way” to run a country.9 Yet,
in some places where democracy does not exist, people remain willing to
take immense risks in the hope that they might one day be able to cast
a ballot of their own. As many people in long-standing democracies
believe their vote too valueless to be worth casting, people elsewhere
hazard their lives for the same privilege. This book shows us part of
what such people are fighting for and what those in existing democracies
would be giving up in the tradeoff for the supposed efficiencies of more
streamlined, less democratic leadership.
Since 1950, seventy-four countries have elected or appointed a
woman as head of state. This sounds like a lot, but it implies that
xiv introduction
over 110 countries have not. As of January 2021, the UN reported

that women were serving as head of state in only twenty-two countries
of the 193 countries around the world. Given the recent annual rate
of increase, gender parity in the world’s highest offices would not be
reached until the year 2150.10 But there are signs that the rate of
change is itself changing. In 2020, six women ran for president of the
United States, the highest number ever. One of them, Kamala Harris,
became the highest-ranked woman in U.S. history. Roughly 25% of
all parliamentarians in the world were women in 2020, more than
double the number in 1995.11 This book helps us understand what these
changes might mean for the future of democracy and the future of the
international conflict.
You would be right at this point to feel skeptical about some of

the core concepts explored in this book. Such skepticism should be
embraced when approaching any new explanation of complex social
phenomena. You might argue that the world does not look all that
peaceful. According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the world
is more vulnerable to existential danger than at any time in the last
seventy-five years, a period which includes the extreme perils of the
Cold War. The organization’s Doomsday Clock was set to only 100
seconds to midnight in 2020, down from a far more comfortable setting
of seventeen minutes in 1991 at the end of the Cold War.12 The
current danger stems in large part from the threat of nuclear war in
an international atmosphere of increasing mistrust and competition. If
this current outlook is the product of a world created by women’s votes,
one might argue that such votes have not gotten us very far.
There is spirited debate about if and how the rate and deadliness
of wars have declined in the modern era. Some like Steven Pinker
and John Lewis Gaddis argue that international violence is lower at
present than in any prior period in history, though they disagree among
themselves about the time scales.13 Others argue that the absence of
great power war since 1945 is simply a statistical artifact explained by
random chance.14 In this book, we will not settle this debate. What
seems certain, regardless of broader global trends, is that individuals in
certain parts of the world have been far less likely to die in war in the
twenty-first century than in any century in the past. The continents
introduction xv
of North and South America have also experienced prolonged periods

without major war. This book will not suggest that major war is unlikely
to happen in the future. In fact, it will provide insight into why war
may emerge along the lines that it does. But the book does provide one
reason why war is so rare where it is so.
You might accept that you are living in a more peaceful era but
direct your skepticism at the idea that this peace is in part a product
of the preferences of women. To speak so bluntly about gendered
preference today is to invite immediate reaction. And such reaction
makes sense, given the insensitive and inaccurate wholesale assignment
of characteristics or traits to groups defined by sex or race throughout
much of human history. As we will see in Chapter 3, and as we all
know from experienced reality, those who self-identify as women are not
monolithic in their preferences and traits—just as those who identify as
men or as part of other large ethnic or religious groups are not. But
the acknowledged complexities of sex and gender should not prevent
us from recognizing differences in the average preferences between
groups. Such differences can provide key insights into understanding
the preferences of democratic electorates more broadly and the political
outcomes these electorates produce.
You may even accept that it makes sense to talk about average
differences between men and women on certain traits, but doubt that
attitudes about war and peace is one of them. Many early suffragists
certainly viewed women as inherently peaceful, but how do we square
such a view with the historical record? When Elizabeth Cady Stanton
and Julia Ward Howe were writing in the 1870s, imperialism had not
yet reached its zenith. Great powers would soon forcefully occupy whole
continents and prominent women on both sides of the Atlantic would
vocally support the necessity to spread civilization abroad by force.
Susan B. Anthony condemned the U.S. Congress for embarking on
war in the Philippines in 1898 but at the same time viewed the violent
suppression of the Filipino people as a necessity. To her, it made no sense
to give the barbaric “guerillas in the Philippines” liberty, for they would
only “murder and pillage every which person on the island.”15 As World
War I approached, many prominent activists in Britain immediately put
aside their campaigns for peace and voting and volunteered to make the
munitions to supply the frontlines.
xvi introduction
The record of women’s leadership might also give idealists pause.

Women in positions of political power, though historically few in
number, have often failed to exemplify unusual levels of restraint
or serenity. In response to Roman assaults upon her land and her
daughters, Queen Boudica of the Celtic Iceni tribe in England in the
first century ad raised an army of a hundred thousand and led it in
a scorched-earth campaign against prominent Roman towns, burning
them to the ground and torturing and slaughtering an estimated
seventy-five thousand inhabitants, in her quest to drive the Romans out
of Britain.16
The Russian Empress Catherine the Great was certainly no paragon
of international compromise, restraint, or calm. Half of her thirty-four-
year reign was marked by war—with the Ottomans, the Persians, the
Swedes. She relentlessly sought the expansion of her empire, violently
suppressing uprisings among the people she conquered, including the
people of Poland after she led the charge to carve up and erase their
country from the map.17 When a Prussian prince visiting the Russian
court commented that to take land, “it seems that in Poland one only
has to stoop and help oneself,” Empress Catherine smugly responded,
“Why shouldn’t we both take our share?”
Catherine’s contemporary Maria Theresa, eventual Holy Roman
Empress, Queen of Bohemia, Austria, and Hungary, certainly showed
no reservations about raising an army to fight against the European
forces encroaching upon her empire when she ascended to the throne
as a young and inexperienced queen in 1740. Far into pregnancy and
facing internal challengers as well as external predators, Maria spared
nothing to keep her kingdom intact. “My mind is made up,” she wrote
to the Bohemian chancellor. “We must put everything at stake to save
Bohemia.” But she was also not above external predation herself. Her
annexation of Galicia in 1772 paved the way for the total destruction
of Poland. While Catherine the Great carved up Poland, Maria Theresa
was by her side. “She wept,” Frederick the Great snidely commented,
“but she took nonetheless,” and the map of Eastern Europe was redrawn
to Austria’s advantage.
Such cases suggest the latter half of the eighteenth century was no
more peaceful because half of the major continental European powers
were ruled by women. What then are we to expect from any expansion
introduction xvii
of women’s political leadership that might take place in the twenty-first

century?
Finally, you might question the value of democracy itself. Women’s
preferences would, after all, have little effect on our world without
democratic institutions to give them voice. Democracy itself has been
the target of sustained skepticism in recent years. Why put faith in
voting when those who get elected don’t appear to share your priorities?
Ample data shows that democratic alignment does not always work.
Sometimes the will of the people goes one way and their leaders go
the other on all sorts of domestic and international issues. But as we
will see, issues of war and peace can take on unusually high salience
among voters and when they do, politicians who fail to pay attention
risk electoral defeat.
Each of these reasonable skepticisms suggest that we have our work

cut out for us. We must convince you that it makes sense to even
talk about gender differences in preferences for war and peace. We
must also convince you that individual cases of women’s votes causing
peaceful outcomes were representative of a broader trend, one that
cannot be explained with other factors. And we must convince you that
democracy, as ineffective as it might sometimes seem, has the potential
to bind national leaders to the will of the people, just as early advocates
of democracy had hoped.
This book presents evidence from our own research on the effects of
women on world affairs, while also drawing extensively on the work of
others in international relations, political science, biology, psychology,
gender studies, economics, and history. Ultimately, we cannot be 100%
certain that this evidence is getting at the truth. The world as it is
simply does not allow for such certainty on this issue. We cannot
randomly assign democratic institutions and women’s suffrage to only
some countries around the world and then watch to see what happens.
Alas, we do not have that kind of power. But we can explore life
before and after suffrage to outline the important ways they differ.
We can examine systematic trends that define when men and women’s
attitudes about war and peace are most likely to differ and when they
are most likely to be the same. And we can put together the pieces of
how such differences may trickle up to affect government policy at the
xviii introduction
highest level. Much can be gained from exploring the evidence the world
presents to us.
The twentieth century witnessed some of the most radical techno-
logical, economic, and political change in history. Nuclear weapons
dramatically increased the scale and speed with which countries could
inflict pain. Capitalism spread in unprecedented ways in the aftermaths
of World War II and the Cold War and international organizations
emerged which emphasized openness, diplomacy, and compromise.
People around the world replaced centuries of arbitrary monarchical
rule with democratic institutions aimed at aligning the will of the people
with their leaders. Each of these extraordinary changes has been perhaps
rightfully credited with reordering international affairs and fostering
international peace in the twentieth century. But these accounts have
long overlooked one of the most dramatic transformations of the twen-
tieth century as a potential source of peace: the massive redistribution
of political power as millions of women around the world gained a say
in national politics. The persistent decline in war between nations, we
argue, is a world made in part by women. Understanding the story
of how and why is a window onto gender differences, the sources of
conflict, and the nature of democracy itself.
•
The Hope for Democracy
1
The spirit of monarchy is war and enlargement of dominion . . . peace

and moderation are the spirit of a republic.
Montesquieu, 1748
Nor do I say, with some, that peace is wholly bad. Even amid the
horrors of peace you will find little shoots of character fed by the
gentle and timely rains of plague and famine.
“A [British] Patriot,” 1900
The impact of women’s participation in political life can best be under-

stood against the backdrop of what came before. Until the twentieth
century, most people who had ever lived on earth had lived under
monarchy or tyranny.1 The United States constitution in 1787, with
its affirmation of “we the people,” was the first glimmer of radical
political change—peoples seeking to overthrow arbitrary rulers and
establish majority rule by men. Revolutionary uprisings spanned the
globe throughout the nineteenth century. But women would in many
ways be excluded from these original acts of liberation. They would be
freed of monarchic rule, but would remain under the economic and
legal dominion of their husbands, unable to own property, keep their
own wages, or have a say in the laws or leaders who governed them.2
The optimism that surrounded the first democratic revolution was
nevertheless intense. Like the women suffragists who came after them,
early liberal theorists like Thomas Paine believed that voting would
bring fundamental social, economic, and political change. Monarchy
The Suffragist Peace: How Women Shape the Politics of War. Joslyn N. Barnhart and Robert F. Trager,
Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197629758.003.0001
2 the suffragist peace
had sated the interests of the few, he believed. But democracies would
pursue the good of all. Monarchs had stymied commerce and purloined
the people’s wealth to maintain a grip on power. Democratic leaders
would redistribute wealth and bring widespread prosperity to the
people.
Above all, monarchs waged wars—endless wars—for the spoils that
would enhance royal coffers, for the pride of victory and for the plea-
sure of revenge. According to Paine’s contemporary Immanuel Kant,
monarchs did not “lose a whit by war.” Rather, they chose war “for
the most trivial reasons,” as a sort of diversion or pleasure. Commoners
faced the consequences on the battlefield while those they fought for
continued to revel in the delights of “their table, their sport, and their
palaces.”3 According to the growing liberal faith, once the people held
sway over international affairs, wars would cease. Governments of the
people would think long and hard before “decreeing for themselves all
the calamities of war.”4 Those who bore the brunt of war would relish
punishing war-mongering leaders at the polls. And with commerce and
trade no longer hamstrung by greedy monarchs, people would be lifted
from poverty and the feelings of pride, revenge, hatred, and jealousy that
fostered war would simply fade away. Before there were kings, there
were no wars, Paine argued. The same would be true after kings no
longer ruled the earth.5
Paine’s ideas about the virtues of democracy were not just the subject
of scholarly debate. His pamphlet Common Sense was read by hundreds
of thousands of American colonists—potentially 20% of the entire
colonial population—in the year after it was published in 1776.6 His
writings in defense of the revolution in France a decade later would
make him so beloved among the French that he would be elected a
member to the first National Convention despite not speaking French.
By the time Paine and Kant died—in 1809 and 1804 respectively—
both had lived long enough to witness the first manifestations of
democracy, however bloody they might have been. But they did not
live long enough for their faith in democratic institutions to be truly
tested. They would die optimists, steadfast in the belief that democracy
would bring prosperity and perpetual peace. But as democracy among
men began to spread in fits and starts, would their optimism prove
warranted? Would cool reason counsel peace out of self interest or
the hope for democracy 3
would inflamed passions mean war? Over the next century, as male
democratic electorates expanded, this question would be put to the test
time and again.
Britain and the Fate of the Ottoman Empire

For those seeking to assess the true effects of democracy on war and
peace, the case of British democratization is a fascinating one.7 While
in some countries like France, dramatic political transformation took
place over night, in Britain, democracy came in piecemeal fashion—
in incremental waves of electoral expansion that spanned centuries.
With each successive expansion of the electorate, Britain increased the
number of people involved in governing matters of war and peace. How
many voters would be enough to check elites’ hunger for expansion and
power? Would the votes of the working class—those most likely to end
up on the frontlines—be required to achieve the promise of peace or
would the votes of the wealthiest and best educated be enough? The
course of Britain’s democracy provides a first window onto answers.
The origins of democracy in Britain are rooted in the Glorious
Revolution of 1688 when the concept of “constitutional monarchy” was
first introduced—a transformative shift in the distribution of political
power. Although the king would maintain considerable influence, an
elected parliament would make the laws. But who was now responsible
for electing the parliament? For over one hundred and fifty years,
an incredibly narrow slice of the public—roughly 400,000 men of
property and wealth, or less than 2% of the British population—shaped
and controlled parliament. By the early 1800s, change was inevitable.
The working and middle classes, ignited by the economic inequalities
brought on by the Napoleonic Wars and the industrial revolution,
began to demand a voice.
In 1831, political tension came to a head. Parliament refused to
expand suffrage, resulting in the bloodiest and costliest political event
of the century in England. Fearing full-scale revolution, parliament
begrudgingly passed the first of three major reform bills, increasing the
number of parliamentary seats and expanding the size of the electorate
by roughly 250,000 men. All British men with over ten pounds to
their name—roughly one in five—could now vote. Given the scale of
citizens’ demands, the act was paltry and unsatisfying. But for those men
who did meet the new criteria, the law provided them with their first
opportunity to have a say in governmental affairs. Would their inclusion
be enough to tip the scales towards peace?
Their first serious test came in the aftermath of this limited elec-
toral reform. By the mid-1800s, repeated military defeats, unrelenting
financial insolvency, a successful push for independence by the Greeks,
and violent uprisings by the Serbs had left the Ottoman Empire weak
and fragile. British democrats believed that Britain’s interests would
best be maintained by the preservation of the autocratic empire—or
at the very least, a demise from which no other European power would
benefit disproportionately. These interests were threatened when Russia
invaded Ottoman territory. After success gaining much of the eastern
shore of the Black Sea and the mouth of the Danube River in 1829,
Tsar Nicholas I appeared in 1853 to be going for more. British leaders
were forced to decide if and how to respond. With reelection always a
looming prospect, voting-eligible Brits would play a role in shaping that
choice.
Debate on how to respond to Russian assertiveness was full-throated

and intense. Stratford Canning, the British ambassador to the Ottoman
Empire, and Home Secretary Lord Palmerston were, on the one hand,
“bent on war.” They sought an assertive, if not aggressive, response
to defend Turkish sovereignty and to keep Russia out of the Middle
East, away from British trade routes, and far away from India, the so-
called crown jewel of the British Empire.8 The prime minister Lord
Aberdeen and Secretary for Foreign Affairs Clarendon, on the other
hand, professed an “unabated desire for peace.” They saw no immediate
demand for British military involvement in the conflict. Consistent
diplomatic efforts would be sufficient to restrain Russian ambitions.
A war to prevent a Russian expansion that they believed would never
occur was, in Bismarck’s later phrase, akin to suicide for fear of death.
The Russians also sought to avoid an unnecessary fight. Tsar Nicholas
wrote personal appeals to Queen Victoria professing a commitment
to peace and a willingness to compromise.9 The Sultan, meanwhile,
revealed himself to be a particularly unreliable and disingenuous ally
who was not above instigating conflict in the hopes of obtaining
full British military involvement.10 But British leaders continued to

negotiate with Russia, while still making their support for the Turks
clear. Despite these diplomatic overtures, they would not be able to
keep their countries out of war.
The reasons for this may be varied. What is clear and consistent across
essentially all major historical accounts of the war, however, is that
the British public played a pivotal role.11 And it was not the role that
Paine and his optimistic contemporaries had envisioned. Enfranchised
Brits were not sentinels of peace, but rather a hindrance to it. Their
“indisputably warlike” mood, as Prime Minister Aberdeen called it,
thwarted peaceful compromise.12 Had he been properly supported by
the public during the course of negotiations, Aberdeen argued, “peace
might have been honourably and advantageously secured.”13 But fear
of the public’s intense patriotism and enthusiasm for war forced him to
abandon a more peaceful approach.14
Certainly, the Battle of Sinope—during which armed Russian ships
chased down and sunk or grounded thirteen Turkish ships and killed
nearly three thousand Turkish troops in a matter of hours—did little
to help Aberdeen’s case.15 For the Sultan, Sinope was but one in a
long line of military disasters in his endless wars against Russia. But
for the British public, Russian action amounted to callous butchery.
British leaders perceived that, as a result, a declaration of war was the
only option.16
What exactly made British voters so bent on war? For starters, these
new voters seemed ready to embrace a fight against an autocratic bully.17
To many British, Tsar Nicholas represented monarchy’s vile nature.
He was ambitious, greedy, and indifferent to human suffering. “The
first blow has probably been struck by oppressive absolutism against
the peace and liberty of Europe,” the Daily News decried as the Tsar’s
forces entered the Danubian provinces in 1853.18 Armed struggle to
“defend right against might, and justice against oppression” was noble,
Palmerston argued. The British people deserved credit for waging war
not out of self-interest or a desire to oppress, but for the higher cause of
liberty.19 In this episode, Nicholas was the clear villain, booed at public
rallies, and the Sultan, whose name few could probably pronounce,
himself no champion of liberty, was the noble leader, revered and
greeted with cheers usually reserved for favorite athletes.20
But beyond this pure nobility of spirit, the British public was
also influenced by the visceral draw of war. “We have been so long
without having experienced the horrors and miseries of war,” Aberdeen
observed, that it was all too common to look upon it as a source of
“pleasurable excitement.”21 British soldiers had not fought in a serious
and protracted major war since 1815 and “the long, long canker of
peace,” as Tennyson called it, had eroded British men’s energy and
had degraded their morals.22 Many in the public sphere encouraged
the passion and militant gallantry of war if, for nothing else, the sake
of British civilization.23 War would renew patriotism, chivalry, and
innovation.24 It would break down political divides and restore courage
and heroism while removing the “curse of prosperity” brought about by
modernity and industrialization. The Church of England even preached
that war could be a source of salvation. God would obviously grant
honor and glory to those who violently defended the moral order against
absolutism.25
British men who set off to war in 1854 were also motivated by a desire
to gain personal honor in an epic struggle against the forces of evil, while
also fighting for the honor of their beloved nation. Lord John Russell,
who became Foreign Secretary in 1859, wrote to Clarendon in late 1853
of the essentiality of national honor. “I know something of the English
people,” he wrote, “and feel sure that they would fight to the stumps for
the honour of England.”26 The Times editorial page agreed: “We have
thought it our duty to uphold and defend the cause of peace as long
as peace was compatible with the honour and dignity of our country.
But now, war must begin in earnest.” Three months later, the public
indeed seemed ready to stand for the honor of queen and country, even
as many in the British government who had hoped to remain on the
sidelines were mocked in the press and the House of Commons. Over
100,000 British men were sent to fight for British honor and the stability
of a faraway empire. Over more than two years of fighting, more than
20,000 of them lost their lives, sent off to battle not by monarchs but
by an uproar among the British public and the elected representatives
of the wealthier fraction of it.
The Crimean War did not resolve the fate of the Ottoman Empire. The
war managed to prop up an ailing ally and ward off the Tsar. But these
feats were temporary. If anything, the humiliation wrought by the war’s

aftermath likely redoubled Russia’s commitment to its original cause.27
The voices of the people had failed to stop war—on the contrary,
political leaders believed that public sentiment had actively encouraged
the fight. Perhaps the issue was not democracy itself, but rather that too
few Brits had been allowed to vote. A small, relatively wealthy minority
still held sway over the political process—not, as Paine had envisioned,
those who shouldered the heaviest burdens of war and would, as a result,
be the most zealous advocated for peace.
Following the Crimean War, the liberal faith that true democracy
would bring peace received a stricter test when more Brits gained the
right to vote. In 1867, the British electorate more than doubled to
include all male heads of household over 21 within townships—roughly
two out of every five British men. Surely some of these men, who
would be among those on the frontlines, would go to great lengths
to pursue peace. Their appetite for war would be put to the test in
1871, when Napoleon III was captured on the battlefield by Prussian
forces during the Franco-Prussian War. Napoleon’s surrender signaled
the demise of the French Empire and the rise of the new government
that cared far less about joining Britain to check the Tsar’s plans for
extended domination in Eastern Europe. Within a decade, Russia and
the Ottoman Empire were at war again, except this time with the
independence of Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro at stake.
As Russian forces advanced on Constantinople—a fate feared by so
many Brits just a few decades prior—Britain did nothing. While Russia
blatantly flouted Britain’s grounds for peace, British soldiers stayed
home. Had these more working-class voters succeeded in curbing the
bellicose impulses of prior British voters? Had Brits lost their appetite
for war altogether?28
No, the British public was not quite ready to accept the canker of
peace. Public reaction to Russia’s decision to remilitarize the Black Sea
in 1870 showed that if national bellicosity and strong anti-Russian
sentiment had retreated at all in the aftermath of the Crimean War,
it hadn’t receded very far.29 The Tsar’s decision was met with near
unanimous outrage in the press.30 The Saturday Review was sure that
England would do the right thing and declare war, given the unanimity
of popularity of support for war.31 “England, if challenged by a direct,
deliberate insult, means prompt earnest resolute fighting,” its editors

argued.32 Editors at the Daily News were more measured in their
assessment: Britain would likely drift into war, not because of the
government but “through the madness of a nation whose pugnacious
instinct is so easy for fanatics and intriguers to arouse. . . . We are in
danger as a nation of losing our heads, our sense and even our national
character for phlegmatic calmness. . . .”33
Calmness, it seemed, was difficult to maintain in the face of such
an affront to the nation. Once again, more vital than British national
interest in the East was the question, as The Standard argued, of
“[British] honour—our very existence as a great Power.”34 The Morning
Post argued that a “manly policy—what used to be called, and what
we trust may still be called, an English policy,” would also be a safe
policy.35 Indeed, a firm policy would be the only policy that would
prevent an Englishman from “blush[ing] at the name which he bears.”36
A small but vocal group of peace-mongers like John Stuart Mill pleaded
with the British people that they not allow journalists to push the
nation into a war “under the plea of honour.” “Let the [English people]
cast away the clap-trap about honour and prestige, and do right,”
one implored.37 England should do all it could, they argued, to avoid
another Crimean War.
What, then, kept the British out of war? Although many among the
British people had quickly forgotten the horrors of war, many of their
leaders had not. Like Aberdeen, Prime Minister William Gladstone’s
natural predilection was for peace. Another war with Russia would be
devastating for Britain’s people and threaten the country’s place in the
world. William Gladstone was determined to pursue a peaceful solution
even in the face of a “highly inflammable and susceptible state of the
public mind.”38 Many of his ministers implored William Gladstone to
be“strong for peace,” even as men enlisted for the fight and the public
demand for military action grew. Unlike his predecessor in 1854, Prime
Minister William Gladstone managed to withstand the demands of the
war-hungry public and, in doing so, he kept Britain out of war.
The Sun Never Sets

If the liberal thinkers heralding the promise of democracy had been
alive during the latter half of the nineteenth century, they might have
concluded that Britain still didn’t have enough democracy. Perhaps the
franchise was still too restricted to bring peace. While more men than
ever could vote in the latter part of the nineteenth century, still less than
half of all British men had a say in politics. In 1884, following a long
and persistent popular campaign, the British government adopted the
most wide-sweeping electoral reforms yet to extend suffrage to all British
men paying rents of ten pounds or possessing equivalently valued
land anywhere in the country. With this bill, electoral power shifted
from towns to countryside, from aristocrats to rural mineworkers and
those working in the fields. For the first time in history, more than
50% of British men could vote in parliamentary elections.39 Joseph
Chamberlain called it the “greatest revolution the country has ever
undergone.”
These new voters brought renewed faith and optimism that they—
the working-class men who would most likely find themselves on the
frontlines of any significant war—would exhibit the pacific qualities
foreseen by early liberal optimists. Remarking upon the prevalence of
this hope in 1885, one journal predicted that the largest democratic
infusion Britain had ever seen would bring about a foreign policy
based more on ethics and altruism and less on “national security and
dignity.”40
Around the same time, democracy faced a new challenge: how would
white, male democracies interact with different people and cultures
encountered through the accelerated quest for empire? To liberals’
dismay, these new voters would prove no more fundamentally opposed
to war and violence. The end of the nineteenth century witnessed
relative peace in Europe, though sometimes against the will of the
British people. And abroad, a form of rapacious and often violent
imperialism brought conflict to far-flung corners of the world.
Between 1875 and 1900, British forces fought in no fewer than eight
wars with non-European peoples. In 1878, British troops, for example,
established dominance over the Zulu kingdom in South Africa when the
Zulus refused to disband their army and abandon their tribal customs,
killing roughly 10,000 Zulus in the process. In 1885, British troops
succeeded in dismantling the Konbuang dynasty, wiping independent
Burma off the map. In 1896, equipped with the most modern machined
guns and artillery of the time and backed by a flotilla of gunboats on
the Nile, Herbert Kitchener, newly named commander of the Anglo-

Egyptian Army, led 11,000 British men into Khartoum, Sudan to fight
60,000 Mahdist warriors and regain possession of the city, killing or
wounding over 25,000. Kitchener was celebrated throughout Britain for
avenging the death of Charles Gordon, the national hero taken down
by Mahdists forces after a 313-day siege in 1885.41
To be sure, the British people did not always express active support
for each act of violent conquest. The public was sometimes indifferent
and disinterested in colonial affairs, having little knowledge about
whom British troops were fighting or where.42 The Empire was a project
of vast complexity, the details of which could be lost on those not paying
close attention. What was certain, however, was that the popularity
of the imperial project—which was often explicitly intertwined with
violent conquest—ballooned just as the electorate expanded to include
a broad swathe of male voters.43
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Empire came to “infuse
and be propagated by every organ of British life,” as British imperial
historian John Mackenzie wrote.44 Imperial enthusiasm reached its peak
in 1897 with Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, which doubled as a “Festival
of the British Empire” replete with a naval and military parade. The
streets of London were resplendent with colorful displays of patriotism,
beaming faces, and ceaseless cheers. At this point, the Empire governed
land in every continent and over 20% of all peoples on earth.45
Much like conflicts of the past, “the pretexts” for Britain’s imperial
wars were “always found in some specious appearance of a real good,” as
Edmund Burke once wrote. In these cases, religion, morality, humani-
tarianism, and the rights of men were all invoked as just cause. It was,
after all, the responsibility of the civilized to “liberate” and educate those
beyond civilization.46 But it would be liberation achieved through war.
And, for many in the British public, war continued to hold attractions
of its own.
“We don’t want to fight but by jingo if we do. . . . We’ve got the
ships, we’ve got the men, and got the money too!,” declared a popular
song written in 1878. In the late 1900s, many Brits came to self-
consciously embrace the label of “jingo,” first used in this song, as an
indication of their unimpeachable patriotism and their preference for
war over compromise. A high tolerance for the use of force and violence
enabled popular support for imperialism. War brings about “nothing

but a chuckle of savage satisfaction in the common man,” J. A. Hobson
observed at the time.47
In this context, war was viewed as both necessary and glorified.48 The
idea of using brute force to destroy hated and contemptible foreigners
was portrayed as a “theatrical event of sombre magnificence”—one
which provided young men the ability to prove themselves and their
love of country. Militarism and patriotism came to be viewed as essential
characteristics to be instilled in grade school.49 The extension of empire
came to be seen not only as essential to British preeminence but also as
a patriotic duty requiring sacrifice and supported by a “general ethos of
force . . . and almost hysterical antagonism” to states that dared to defy
Britain.50
France was one such state that flouted Britain’s perceived preemi-
nence and imperial ambitions. In 1898, French Captain Jean-Baptiste
Marchand and his forces set off on an epic fourteen-month trek through
the jungles of the Congo and the deserts of the Sudan to seize the
territory around Fashoda, a small town at the neck of the Upper Nile.
The expedition arrived on July 10, 1898, planted a French flag in the
ground near the desolate fort, and set up camp. Two months later,
fresh off of victory against Mahdist forces in Khartoum, Lord Kitchener
arrived with 1,500 British and Egyptian troops, set up camp, and
raised an Egyptian flag at some distance from the Tricolour. Those who
controlled the Upper Nile, it was said, would control Egypt and, along
with it, a coveted base for further conquest throughout Africa.
News of Marchand’s bold act reached London quickly, where it was
met with national outrage, resentment, jingoism, and a call for war in
the streets.51 “National or acquisitional feeling has been aroused,” Prime
Minister Salisbury observed. “It has tasted the flesh pots and will not
let them go.”52 The diplomatically minded Salisbury had managed to
outmaneuver martially spirited colleagues for years. This time, he feared,
would be different. He dismayed that the public’s determination to go
to war with France might constrain his ability to negotiate Britain’s way
out of the crisis.53 Upon receiving word of Queen Victoria’s concerns
about possible war, Salisbury wrote to her: “I deeply sympathize with
your Majesty’s dissatisfaction at the present deadlock, but no offer of
territorial concession on our part would be endured by public opinion
here.”54 In this case, peace and moderation were the spirit of the
monarchy, war the mood of the republic.
Salisbury had once argued that leaders should never simply allow the
bellicose sentiment of the people to drive foreign policy. But in late
1898, he thought he had little choice but to follow through with their
demands if he wanted to remain in his post.55 As the Royal Navy drafted
war orders and mobilized its reserves, he warned the French to leave
Sudan or else face consequences.56 Luckily for those on both sides of
the Channel, the Dreyfus Affair—a domestic scandal that implicated
a 35-year-old French Jew in the dissemenation of military secrets to
Germany—pivoted public attention, allowing French leaders to quietly
pull Marchand from the region, thereby ending the crisis.57
Just as the cries for war over Fashoda were fading, another imperial crisis
emerged in modern-day South Africa, where since 1814, Britain had
held land around the Cape of Good Hope. Throughout the nineteenth
century, the British army had slowly expanded their control in the
region until they pushed against the Boer Republics in the east. The
Boers were descendants of Dutch farmers who had originally settled
around the Cape of Good Hope but had continued to move east to
escape British rule, forming the Orange Free State and the Transvaal.
Tension between Britain and the two independent states had been
growing for decades as British citizens—“uitlanders” to the Boers—
had sought jobs in the Boers’ new mining industry but had been
met with significant discrimination. Tensions boiled over in 1899
after the Secretary of Colonial Affairs Joseph Chamberlain, arrogant
and generally ruthless in his imperial ambitions, demanded that all
uitlanders be granted equal rights. The crusty Boer leader Kruger refused
to abide by these terms. In what would be the deadliest of their imperial
encounters, the British would eventually commit over 350,000 British
soldiers to the fight.
In the lead up to war, the attitude of the British public regarding the
situation in South Africa underscored the challenges that British leaders
faced as they attempted to conduct a steady and predictable foreign
policy during this period. South Africa was distant and circumstances
on the ground were constantly evolving. The plight of the uitlanders
was forced to compete for public attention with domestic and other
imperial affairs. As tensions grew between Boer and British leaders,

many in the British public remained uninformed and indifferent to
South African affairs.58 But as British leaders who defended the causes
of imperialism and expansion educated the masses about the treatment
of British citizens by the Boers, indifference quickly turned to righteous
and fanatical enthusiasm for war.
Backed by pro-war imperial enthusiasts like Sir Alfred Milner, the
Governor of the Cape Colony, Chamberlain worked to focus the British
public’s attention on the harsh discrimination against British citizens
by the Boers, eventually succeeding in arousing the vengeful spirit
of jingoes at home.59 Pacifists who gathered in London to protest a
possible war were shouted down and violently disbanded throughout
London.60 British citizens rallied around a demand for revenge—
a desire stemming from the perceived humiliation experienced by
colonists after they lost the first small and short war against the Boers
in 1881. “The root-passion of sheer brutality,” Hobson observed of the
era, was blended with “admiration of courage and adroitness” fed by
“the wildest rumours and the most violent appeals to hate.”61 The war
in South Africa would come to be viewed as a sport, “something of
a magnificent game” in which young and old felt they wanted to be
a part.62
The Church once again portrayed war as admirable. The Boer War
was one of God’s wars, the clergy argued. In particular, it offered a
spiritual opportunity to develop “hardier and manly virtues” such as
endurance, self-control, and contempt for danger and death, the “origin
of every fountainhead of honour.” Christian principles and “manliness”
converged in the act of war, it was argued. The loss of war-like deeds
was a symptom of the degeneracy of the race.63 One letter published
in the Manchester Guardian in August of 1900, however, exposed the
hypocrisy behind the Church’s belligerence:
For a year the heads of our Church have been telling us what
war is and does—that it is a school of character, that it sobers
men, cleans them, strengthens them, knits their hearts, makes them
brave. . . . Man’s moral nature cannot . . . live by war alone. Nor do
I say, with some, that peace is wholly bad. Even amid the horrors
of peace you will find little shoots of character fed by the gentle and
timely rains of plague and famine. . . . But these are second bests, the
halting substitute for war. . . . Every year thousands of women and
children must go their way bereft of the rich spiritual experience of
the widow and the orphan. Signed “A Patriot”.64
Salisbury, in his thirteenth non-consecutive year as prime minister

blamed the jingoes, including Milner, for simplifying complex inter-
national issues with the purpose of igniting tensions and necessitating
the “considerable military effort” which was to come on behalf of
“people whom we despise and for territory which will bring no profit
and no power to England.”65 However, in igniting the passions of the
voting public, Chamberlain had conjured a straitjacket—a public ire
that undermined Salisbury’s ability to flexibly maneuver out of war.66
Three months into the Boer War, the world marked the arrival of a
new century. Peace did not greet British efforts in the new year. But
by September 1900, Boer political leaders relented, allowing British
officials to declare victory over both republics, with the exception of
the northern parts of the Transvaal. Boer military commanders were
not willing to relinquish their sovereignty so easily and they would
continue to fight for another year and a half, using guerrilla tactics
to attack rail lines and British camps. The British responded with a
scorched-earth policy—the destruction of crops and the burning of
homesteads. They forced Boer women and children into concentration
camps, where over 27,000 perished from starvation or disease. It was
the first time in modern history that a concentration camp system was
used to systematically target a whole nation—an outcome at least tacitly
sanctioned by the fervor of a British electorate in favor of war.
In Another Democracy Far, Far Away . . .

In 1900, all women and more than 40% of men in Britain remained
unable to vote. Although the recurring fear of total revolt had coerced
reluctant Lords and aristocrats to slowly hand over increasing political
power in pieces throughout the nineteenth century, Britain’s demo-
cratic project was far from complete. Perhaps, then, Britain at the end
of the nineteenth century still did not provide an adequate test of
the effects of democratic institutions on international affairs. Could a
country truly be labeled a democracy if such a large segment of the

population remained excluded from the voter rolls?
As the oldest democracy in the world, the United States’ democratic
institutions were relatively well established. The Fifteenth Amendment,
ratified in 1870, had prevented states from denying the right to vote
on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” but not
on the basis of gender. All males over 21 therefore held a constitutional
right to vote, even though some states continued their quest to raise
barriers to minority voting. Perhaps the United States at the turn of
the century provides a better test of the pacifying effects of democratic
institutions.
On March 30, 1898, President William McKinley began to cry.67 He

did not want war with Spain, he told an associate. He had served as an
enlisted soldier throughout the Civil War, witnessing the deaths of over
23,000 in a single day at the Battle of Antietam. “I have been through
one war,” he wrote, “I have seen the dead piled up, and I do not want
to see another.”68
Theodore Roosevelt could not have viewed the prospects of war more
differently. “No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme
triumphs of war,” he declared in a speech to the War College in 1897,
before concluding, “Cowardice in a race . . . is the unpardonable sin.”
“I should welcome almost any war, for I think the country needs one,”
he proclaimed a year later.69 “Personally, I rather hope the fight will
come soon,” he had written to his college companion and life-long
friend Henry Cabot Lodge. Both Lodge and Roosevelt scoffed at the
“cult of non-virility,” whose members supported the avoidance of war
and the arbitration of disputes, a cult of which, they often implied,
President McKinley was a member.70 McKinley had all the backbone
of a chocolate eclair, Roosevelt had once famously mocked.
By early 1898, McKinley had come to realize that such pro-war
attitudes were not limited to a small, but powerful, few. As tensions
with Spain built, a martial spirit had become palpable throughout
the country. “The whole country thrills with war fever,” the Journal
reported on February 18, 1898. “Hurray for War!” opponents of
a prospective treaty shouted in New York, and not just war with
Spain, one commentator noted, but “war with anybody anywhere.”71
Republicans, having recently lost in municipal elections, feared losses

at the national level if they did not adopt an aggressive policy towards
Spain.72 Democrats dared not allow their opponents to adopt the
mantle of sole defenders of national self-respect and honor.
With midterm and upcoming presidential elections in mind, McKin-
ley confronted his reality. A significant majority in Congress supported
war with Spain largely because they feared unemployment if they did
not.73 In the face of such public unanimity, any attempt McKinley
made to maintain peace left him open to public disparagement. One
newspaper infamously portrayed him as an old woman, donning a
house dress and bonnet, attempting fecklessly to sweep back the sea—
its waves comprised of pro-war sentiment seeded by the rain clouds
of public opinion.74 “I can no longer hold back the Senate,” Vice
President Garret Hobart wrote to McKinley. “They will act without
you if you do not act at once.”75 “Fruitless attempts to hold back or
retard the enormous momentum of the people bent upon war would
result in the destruction of the President’s power and influence,” the
U.S. ambassador to Spain Elihu Root wrote at the time.76 Even then,
McKinley declined to request war powers for himself, leaving the matter
in the hands of the Congress, which promptly voted for war.77
For some voters, the desire for war against Spain stemmed from depic-
tions of Cuban plight under Spanish colonial rule. Depictions in the
American press of the “barbarities, bloodshed, starvation and horrible
miseries” at the hands of the Spanish motivated some Americans to
advocate for U.S. forces to assist in the Cuban people’s liberation from
their colonial overlords.78 As in Britain, outrage at the atrocious crimes
of autocrats was easy to conjure in democratic publics.79
Humanitarian goals, however, were only part of the story. The
Cubans had long rebelled against Spain and previous American gov-
ernments had actually tried, at times, to prevent aid from reaching
Cuba.80 Support for Cuban freedom also did not mandate an American
declaration of war, especially since Spain had already more or less given
in to U.S. and Cuban demands by the time of the war authorization.
These facts, among others, have led many historians of the era to
conclude that the United States went to war not because it wanted
freedom for the Cuban people but because it wanted a war. Whether
the Cuban people were freed as a result was of secondary concern.81
What made war such an attractive option to the American public?
Spain did not represent a clear security threat to the United States and
Cuba offered few economic advantages.82 Echoing sentiments expressed
in Britain at the time, war was seen by many in the American public
as a way for men to escape their fate in a newly industrialized world
of material and social progress. War would keep men out of brothels
and reduce crime. It would restore moral order and the “sturdy virtues”
of a generation of men that had been enervated by easy riches and
materialism, men who had become entranced by “the ignoble and
in the inglorious,” as one Denver newspaper put it.83 For Admiral
Stephen Luce, war was “one of the great agencies by which human
progress is effected.” The philosopher William James agreed, arguing
that militarism was the “great preserver of our ideals of hardihood.”84
Peace to Alfred Mahan was an “alluring, albeit somewhat ignoble, ideal”
which could “not be allowed to sap American men of their manhood.”85
“No greater danger could befall civilization,” Mahan concluded, “than
the disappearance of the warlike spirit (I daresay war) among civilized
men.”86
Pro-war sentiment did not exist solely within the intellectual sphere.
Such views were openly expressed within Congress. “I think a little
blood-letting would be an admirably good thing about this time for
the people of the United States,” said one congressmen.87 “War is a bad
thing no doubt,” argued Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge,
“but there are worse things both for nations and for men.” Senator
Hernando de Soto Money, a Democrat from Mississippi, praised war
for teaching sacrifice. “Any sort of war,” he proclaimed to Congress to
wide applause, was better “than a rotting peace that eats out the core
and heart of the manhood of this country.” War with Spain would have
a purgatorial effect upon the nation, he concluded, and national honor
would rise again from it “like the Phoenix from its ashes renewed with
glory.”88 Some congressmen were so fervent in their support of war that
they personally promised to join the fight. As in Britain, the honor
of men and the honor of the nation were often depicted as sharing
a common fate. Male honor was achieved through competition and
combat—through demonstrations that one was prepared to assume the

common male role of physical defender of family, tribe, and state.
On February 15, 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine exploded in
the harbor off of Havana, killing over 250 American seamen. Naval
commanders were quick to convey that the explosion was most likely an
accident. But an alternative narrative, actively promoted by journalists,
quickly and easily took root in the American psyche. This narrative
blamed Spain for the death of innocent American men and portrayed
the explosion as a blatant attack on American honor.89 The situa-
tion demanded, many congressmen argued, a full-fledged defense—a
demonstration of the bravery of American men and their unwillingness
to suffer such blatant insult of their nation, no matter the cost. Senator
James Norton of Ohio hated war, he said, but it would be “better far that
this war should come through at the cost of untold treasure of countless
wealth and human life, than the degradation of the country’s honor.”90
“There is a crucifixion of the soul when honor dies,” Senator Turner
argued. He equated life under such conditions to a horrid nightmare in
which “men shun their fellows and the laugh of little children becomes
a taunt and a mockery.” Men could exist without national honor, “like
worms in a muck heap” he descriptively argued, but the fate of their
nation would be grave as a result. The unprecedented number of men
who tried to enlist in the lead up to war must have, in some part, agreed.
Some have blamed overactive yellow journalists of the era for con-
juring up the Spanish-American War. If editors had not doubled down
a narrative of Spanish barbarism, deceit, and aggression, the public
would have likely not been so keen on war. The newspapers of the
day, including William Randolph Hearst’s New York Morning Journal
and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, did compete for the attention
of readers by offering salacious details of Cuba’s fate.91 And even after
investigators were brought in to assess whether the downing of the
Maine had resulted from accident, newspapers continued to suggest the
evidence against Spain was definitive.92 Though there is no polling data
from the period, it is hard to imagine that the graphic attention paid to
the fate of the Cuban people did not affect American public opinion.93
But newspaper editors know their audience. The editors of the day
must have known that they were tapping into the existing propensities
and prejudices of the American public just as much as they were
creating and shaping them.94 Pro-war editorials found an instantaneous

audience, illustrating, as Mahan wrote, the “readiness with which a seed
of thought germinates when it falls upon mental soil prepared already
to receive it.”95
The war with Spain was not, it turned out, a one-off for the U.S.
military, but just the first step in a brief period of American imperial
expansion. After defeating the Spanish in just four short months, the
United States turned its attention towards another former Spanish
colony—the Philippines. The Philippine-American War, typically far
less known but far more costly in terms of lives, money, and time, began
on February 4, 1899. After fighting for the supposed liberation of the
Cuban people, over 125,000 American soldiers were sent to violently
subdue the Filipinos’ quest for independence after Spain had transferred
control of the islands to the United States.
For many, the war with Spain had only briefly sated the thirst for
war. “There is not a man here who does not feel four hundred percent
bigger in 1900 than he did in 1896,” Senator Depew argued as part
of McKinley’s reelection bid, in part because the United States was
now, for the first time, an imperial power.96 The pursuit of empire
would help in the continued quest to stave off degeneracy and national
softness while simultaneously invigorating American manhood. As they
had in the lead up to the war with Spain, jingoes argued that those
who opposed expansion in the Philippines were tainted by effeminacy—
“old women with trousers on,” they were called.97 Militancy served as
a mark of manliness. Peaceniks were likened to nagging wives. One
congressman from Minnesota equated withdrawal from the fight in the
Philippines to a “confession of impotence,” a renouncing of manly duty.
War in the Philippines would eventually lead to American victory,
but at the cost of over 7,000 American and over 215,000 Filipino
lives. McKinley, a convert to the imperial project, campaigned on the
issue alongside Roosevelt, his new running mate who had been chosen
in part because some thought his “barbarian ways,” as he referred to
them, could strengthen the ticket in the West.98 McKinley’s opponent,
William Jennings Bryan, deemed imperialism the “paramount issue” of
the campaign early on, hoping to sway voters with a platform of anti-
militarism and anti-imperialism. Midway through the short campaign,
he realized peace was a losing issue with American voters and started
campaigning on the issue of free silver. He lost the election by over six
percentage points.99
Conclusion
Contrary to early and modern faith in democratic pacifism, it was often
the all-men voting publics that pushed reluctant leaders to promote
policies of violence and conquest in the latter half of the nineteenth
century. Lord Salisbury, who served as leader of the British people for
much of the 1880s and 1890s, offered a concise prediction in 1879.
Early theories predicting that the decline of monarchs would mean
peace had it exactly wrong, he argued. “If there is any possible danger
in the future,” he concluded, “it rather arises from another cause—from
possible gusts of passionate and often ill-informed feeling arising from
great masses of population.”100
Great powers largely avoided fighting each other during this period.
But great power democracies were anything but serene and satisfied.
The slow march towards universal manhood suffrage coincided with
the most significant period of colonial subjugation the world has ever
seen. And support for the pursuit of honor and prestige by rabid voting
publics was by no means limited to the United States and Britain. France
acquired much of what would become one the largest empires in history
only in the aftermath of the emergence of the Third Republic, the
democratic government that rose in the wake of Emperor Napoleon
III’s capture.101 In the early twentieth century, nominally democratic
Belgium steamrolled over indigenous interests in the Congo, enacting
one of the most violent and exploitative systems of colonial rule in
history. Voters within these democratic states did not expressly consent
to each act of often violent expansion. But they did not actively protest
them either.
These stories of conquest and war cannot tell us if democracies were
any more or less war-prone than their autocratic contemporaries. We
address that question in later chapters. But these stories do provide
evidence that Salisbury’s view about democracy’s effects hewed closer
to the truth than Paine’s—at least for democracy as it stood in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Male voters could be
unpredictable, urging peace at times and sometimes supporting wars

with a passion “reminiscent of the worst years of the Wars of Religion,”
as the historian Michael Howard put it, even if it might cost them their
lives.102 Voters did in fact constrain their leaders—not always in the way
that Kant and Paine predicted, but by cornering their worst instincts.
Popular demands for war even in far-flung, unknown places could make
the path to diplomacy and international compromise more difficult.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the number of democratic
countries in the world had expanded to ten.103 In only one country—
New Zealand—were women able to vote in national elections. In all
others, democratic or not, public life largely remained a male affair.
This did not mean that all women around the world were idle or
silent on political issues, including war and peace. Many of the most
prominent women of the day—women like Elizabeth Cady Stan-
ton, Carrie Chapman Catt, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, and many
others—took on male and female gender roles more durable than
monarchy itself, making a name for themselves through their activism
and their outspoken views of the world governed by men. As we will
see, their reports were not good.
•
The Hope for Suffrage and Peace in the
2
New Century
Why we oppose votes for men. . . . Because men are too emotional
to vote. Their conduct at baseball games and political conventions
shows this, while their innate tendency to appeal to force renders
them particularly unfit for the task of government.
Alice Duer Miller, 1915
The “male element is a destructive force, stern, selfish, aggrandizing,

loving war, violence, conquest, acquisition, breeding in the material
and moral world alike discord, disorder, slaughter, disease and death,”
founder of the suffrage movement Elizabeth Cady Stanton lamented in
her self-titled speech “The Destructive Male” in the aftermath of the
Civil War. Carrie Chapman Catt often disagreed with Stanton about
many things, but on this point wholeheartedly agreed that war was a
product of men’s priorities, selfishness, and immorality. “The politics
of men have embroiled the world in the most wholesale slaughter of
the sons of mothers the world has ever known,” Catt wrote in 1915
before concluding that “when war murders the husbands and sons of
women, destroys their homes, desolates their country and makes them
refugees and paupers, it becomes the undeniable business of women.”1
Some, like American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, located the
“destructive belligerence” of men within their innate tendencies. Men’s
“all too-natural instinct to wander, kill and rob” would still run
rampant, Gilman cheekily observed, if it had not been subdued by the
The Suffragist Peace: How Women Shape the Politics of War. Joslyn N. Barnhart and Robert F. Trager,
Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197629758.003.0002
the hope for suffrage and peace in the new century 23
attractions of the home created by women.2 Others, Gilman included,

blamed the entrenched culture of masculinity and masculine honor.
“In warfare, we find maleness in its absurdist extremes,” Gilman wrote
in her book, The Man-Made World. “Here is . . . the whole gamut of
basic masculinity, from the initial instinct of combat, through every
form of glorious ostentation with the loudest possible accompaniment
of noise.”3 Young men were praised for a rationality and aggression that
would enable success within business or on the battlefield. A notion
of masculine honor, which Elizabeth Ward defined as “killing or being
killed,” was imbued in them on multiple fronts, from national myths
that celebrated military heroes and past victories to children’s toys that
normalized violence, revenge, and military glory.4
Regardless of the exact source of men’s belligerence, the prescription
for peace was clear—involve women in decisions about war and peace.5
Men might be able, for whatever reason, to tolerate the “battle fields
sodden with the blood of our human fellow beings . . . those mothers
stifling the wailing of their children in their arms . . . those trains bearing
back to their homes the dead to be buried on the refuse heaps,”
Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence decried in 1915, but women could not!6
For this reason, men had proven themselves unfit to have control “of
the human family” solely in their hands. Stanton stated the expectation
clearly: a woman’s love, “if permitted to assert itself as it naturally would
in freedom against oppression, violence and war, would hold all these
destructive forces in check.”7
Stanton’s statement locates women’s opposition to war in natural
differences. In this, Stanton was not alone. The writings of renowned
pacifist and Nobel Prize winner Jane Addams at times also pointed to
nature as a source of women’s relative pacifism. She wrote of women
being dominated “by one of those overwhelming impulses belonging
to women as such, irrespective of their mental training, in their revolt
against war.”8 Similarly, Pethick-Lawrence argued that within every
woman is a “rooted revolt against the destruction of the blossoming
manhood of the race,” regardless of the social role they played.9
Plenty of other accounts cited women’s unique social roles and their
upbringing as the dominant if not sole source of women’s relative
pacifism. Young men were trained for competition—in business, pol-
itics, and on the battlefield. Women were trained for selflessness and
sentimentality, nurturing qualities that best suited their expected roles

of wives and mothers.10 Women brought life into the world whereas
men destroyed it. Their experiences and obligations as caregivers and
mothers made women uniquely sensitive to the loss of human life
and served as a powerful source of women’s moral authority in their
opposition to war.11
Stanton, Catt, Addams and others were far from alone in their belief that
war was the purview of men and peace the purview of women, as we will
see. Such essentialized views of the sexes might sound odd to modern
eras, but they pervaded public thought in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, despite the obvious empirical inconsistencies. Some
men, of course, strongly opposed war.12 Many of these women joined
the ranks in pacifist organizations founded by men at one time or
another. And clearly not all women, prominent or otherwise, were
equally committed to peace. Stanton herself acknowledged in 1898 that
though she hated war, she hoped to see Spain “swept from the face
of the earth.”13 Women of the British Women’s Social and Political
Union blew up the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s house in one of many
bombings intended to terrorize the British government into granting
women the vote, though they took care to avoid any injury or death.14
But on the whole, such inconsistencies were downplayed. Some men
might oppose war, they argued, but women’s opposition differed in
its nature and intensity. Women possess a “peculiar moral passion of
revolt against both the cruelty and the waste of war,” declared the
preamble of the Woman’s Peace Party written in 1915. Hannah Bailey,
head of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union’s Department of
Peace and International Arbitration, also pointed to women’s distinctive
enthusiasm for peace. “Many a man has not the moral courage to plead
for peace, for fear he shall be accused of effeminacy and cowardice.
Woman has no such fear; to be the advocate of peace is congenial
to her character.”15 The challenge, of course, would be how to make
men listen.
They had their work cut out for them. Just as women had begun to make
strident demands—for political voice, for financial independence, for
freedoms more broadly—idealized conceptions of masculinity seemed
the hope for suffrage and peace in the new century 25
to intensify in response. Traditional gender roles reasserted themselves

and existing notions of masculinity were thrown into high relief. The
brazen Teddy Roosevelt on horseback, displaying virility, energy, and
even enthusiasm to engage in brutality and violence in the name of
honor and country, epitomized American manliness at the turn of the
twentieth century.16 The image would have been familiar to those who
revered images of the honorable and inspiring British colonial soldier,
heading off for adventure in the wild unknowns of Africa on behalf of
queen and country, but with perhaps a bit more cowboy flair.
Little was new about this construction of masculinity. Through their
great epics of war and sacrifice, the ancient Greek and Romans—also
some of the first to experiment with ideas of democracy—provided
the natural archetypes to emulate. For women, honor has historically
been achieved through restraint. For men in the era of Thucydides,
moderation was but a “cloak for unmanliness” and “prudent hesitation”
was a mere demonstration of cowardice. The Homeric hero Achilles
embodied what was to be admired in a man: physical strength, daring,
bravery, and the willingness to trade away a long life in exchange
for honor achieved through success on the battlefield.17 “By nature,
we yearn and hunger for honor,” Cicero wrote, “and once we have
glimpsed, as it were, some part of its radiance, there is nothing we are
not prepared to bear and suffer in order to secure it.”
The sense of excitement and the romantic draw of war that were felt
in the towns and cities of Britain before the Crimean War or of France
in August 1914, as young men cheerfully made their way to the front,
would have been familiar to Cicero. Men forced to remain home, away
from the battlefield and unable to glimpse the “radiance” of honor,
were deemed unpatriotic and unmanly—a more dire outcome, some
thought, than the horrors and glory of the front.
Eliminating war would be a lofty goal that would require, some
women concluded, fundamentally reshaping the ideal character of
men.18 Peace will emerge only upon a “rising tide of moral feeling . . .
slowly engulfing all pride of conquest and making war impossible,”
Jane Addams believed.19 To alter the status quo, the culture in which
the tin soldier was a popular toy would have to give way to ideals of
reconciliation and compromise if the prospect of war were to decrease,
Charlotte Gilman argued. The honor of a nation would have to be
judged by a state’s success at compelling peace rather than war, Laura

Elizabeth Ward believed. And British voters would need to be taught
that rights were not bestowed “on the virtue of strength,” well-known
British activist Priscilla Peckover claimed.20
But how does one, or even many, begin to challenge deeply entrenched
norms? One strategy was to mobilize women to speak up about the
cause of peace. Julia Ward Howe, eventual leader of the American
Women Suffrage Association and author of the “The Battle Hymn
of the Republic,” was among the first in the United States to try her
hand.21 The Franco-Prussian War in 1870 appalled Howe and led her
to pen an “Appeal to Womanhood,” later called the “Mother’s Day
Proclamation.” In it, she claimed that men would continue to forsake
the “domestic life for the bloody exchanges of the battle field.” But
women “need no longer be made party” to such grief and horror. They
could use their moral authority as wives and mothers to say firmly to
their husbands and sons: “[do] not come to us, reeking with carnage, for
caresses and applause. The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.
Disarm, disarm! . . . Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence
vindicate possession.”22 Howe called for an annual day to be held on
June 2nd on which women would speak out at regional “Women’s Peace
Festivals” on the unique sufferings wrought on mothers by war. Howe’s
“Mother’s Day,” as she would call it, failed to take root in the 1870s, but
would later serve as inspiration for Mother’s Day as we know it today.23
Over the decades that followed, peace organizations organized by
women increased in prominence. The Women’s Christian Temperance
Union—founded in 1874 to advocate for a wide-reaching policy plat-
form that promoted abstinence, temperance, as well as international
peace—by 1890 had become the largest women’s group in the world.
Events in Europe in 1914 motivated even greater commitment and
effort to organize women for peace. At the Women’s Peace Parade in
1914, fifteen hundred women dressed in black or black arm bands
marched in dead silence behind the banner of a dove down Fifth
Avenue. After the parade, organizers Fanny Garrison Villard and Carrie
Chapman Catt founded the Woman’s Peace Party (WPP), convened on
a platform of the limitation of armaments and opposition to militarism.
The party’s founding documents described women, as “custodians of the
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Dawn, sometimes as her lover[57], once even as kissing her[58], there
are other deities, equally representative of light, but more specialised
in their functions. Sûrya himself, the Greek Helios, appears among
the Vedic deities, and Ushas (Eos), the dawn, is called Sûrya-prabhâ
or sunshine.
We have so far watched the daily procession of the Vedic gods as
reflected in the hymns, beginning with Agni, as god of light,
especially the light of the morning, and in many respects the alter
ego of the sun. We saw that in one sense the Dawn also is only a
female repetition of the auroral Agni (Agnir aushasya), and we met
with a third personification of the morning sun in the shape of
Savitri, who is perhaps the most dramatic among the solar heroes,
such as Mitra, Âditya, Vishnu and others.
The procession of the matutinal gods, which we have followed so
far under the guidance of our old grammarian, Yâska, can be shown
to rest on even earlier authority. Thus we read in one of the hymns
themselves, Rig-Veda I, 157, 1:—
Agni awoke, from earth arises Sûrya,
Ushas, the great and bright, throws heaven open,
The pair of Asvins yoked their car to travel,
God Savitri has roused the world to labour.
There are other hymns, of course, that refer to the light of day or to
the sun in his later stages also, culminating as Vishnu, or setting with
Trita, till at last Râtrî, night, appears, and Varuna, the coverer, reigns
once more supreme in heaven. When we see Varuna together with
Mitra, the sun-god, they represent a divine couple, dividing between
them the sovereignty of the whole world, heaven and earth, very
much like the Asvins. They are not so much in opposition to each
other, as partners in a common work.
Just as the night, the sister of the Dawn, is sometimes conceived as
a dawn or day (Ahan) herself, Mitra and Varuna also seem often to
be charged with the same duties. They hold heaven and earth
asunder, they support heaven and earth and are the common
guardians of the whole world. Varuna as well as Mitra is represented
as sun-eyed. Still the contrast between the two becomes gradually
more and more pointed, and we can clearly see that, while light and
day become the portion of Mitra, night and darkness fall more and
more to the share of Varuna. The sun is said to rise from the abode of
Mitra and Varuna, but night, moon, and stars are mentioned in the
hymns already, as more closely related to Varuna. Thus we read, Rig-
Veda I, 27, 10:—
The stars fixed high in heaven and shining brightly
By night, Oh say, where have they gone by daytime?
The laws of Varuna are everlasting,
The moon moves on by night in brilliant splendour.
In Rig-Veda VIII, 41, 10, we ought surely to translate, “He made

the white-clothed black-clothed,” and not, as proposed, “He made
the black-clothed white-clothed,” a change which is never ascribed to
Varuna.
This explains why some scholars went so far as to recognise in
Varuna the original representative of the moon or of the evening star,
a far too narrow conception, however, of that supreme deity, though
true, no doubt, so far as Varuna, like the sky, comprehends within his
sphere of influence night and stars as well as sun and dawn. The
almost perfect identity of name between Varuna and Ouranos shows
that Varuna was not only a Vedic or Indian deity, but had been
named already in the Aryan period. There are phonetic difficulties,
but how should we account for the coincidences in the name and
character of these two gods?
These few specimens of Vedic poetry will suffice, I hope, to show
what is meant by the Solar Theory. It means that most of the physical
phenomena which impressed the mind of primitive races, like those
that have left us their religious utterances in the Veda, were
connected with the sun, with the light of the morning, with day and
night succeeding each other, and regulating the whole life of an
agricultural population. What else was there to interest such people
and to draw away their thoughts from a visible to an invisible world?
If I have sometimes called that population uncivilised, what I meant
was that we come across customs, such as the selling of children or
offering them as victims, polygamy, possibly even polyandry, which
are generally considered as signs or survivals of savagery. Such
general terms, however, are often very misleading, and because in
the Râgasûya sacrifice, for instance, there are remnants of disgusting
customs, we must not allow ourselves to indulge with certain so-
called missionaries in a general condemnation of the Vedic
ceremonial. We should rather learn the lesson that ceremonial is
generally the accumulation of centuries, and contains, besides much
that may be useful, a large quantity of old rubbish, mostly
misunderstood, muddled, and complicated, till the meaning of it, if it
ever had any, is lost beyond the hope of recovery.
If anybody, after reading these few hymns, selected quite at
random, can still doubt whether the Solar Theory is the only possible
theory to account for these Vedic deities, and in consequence, for the
Aryan deities connected with them by name or character, I have
nothing more to say. I doubt the existence of such a person. He must
in very truth be a solar myth. Let me say once more that I have never
looked upon all Vedic deities as solar or matutinal, but that other
physical phenomena also, such as rivers, clouds, earth, night, storms,
and rain had been personified or deified before these hymns could
have been composed. It is true there is one hymn only addressed
exclusively to the Night (X, 127), two only addressed to the Earth, but
I pointed out before why such statistics, though very tempting, are
altogether untrustworthy and have nothing whatever to do with the
real importance or popularity of these deities. Does the ninth
Mandala of the Rig-Veda, with its 114 hymns almost entirely
addressed to Soma, prove the supreme popularity of Soma as a
member of the Vedic Pantheon? However, to guard against all
possibility of misapprehending my purpose, here follows the hymn to
Râtrî or Night; which can hardly be called solar in the usual sense of
that word.
Hymn to Râtrî, Night.
1.
The Night comes near and looks about,
The goddess with her many eyes,
She has put on her glories all.
2.
Immortal, she has filled the space,
Both far and wide, both low and high,
She conquers darkness with her light[59].
3.
She has undone her sister, Dawn[60],
The goddess Night, as she approached,
And utter darkness[61] flies away.
4.
For thou art she in whose approach
We seek to-day for rest, like birds
Who in the branches seek their nest.
5.
The villages have sought for rest,
And all that walks and all that flies,
The falcons come, intent on prey.
6.
Keep off the she-wolf, keep the wolf,
Keep off the thief, O kindly Night,
And be thou light for us to pass.
7.
Black darkness came, yet bright with stars,
It came to us, with brilliant hues;
Dawn, free us as from heavy debt!
8.
Like cows, I brought this hymn to thee,
As to a conqueror, child of Dyaus,
Accept it graciously, O Night!
We must remember that the night to the Vedic poet was not the
same as darkness, but that on the contrary, when the night had
driven away the day, she was supposed to lighten the darkness, and
even to rival her sister, the bright day, with her starlight beauty. The
night, no doubt, gives peace and rest, yet the Dawn is looked upon as
the kindlier light, and is implored to free mortals from the dangers of
the night, as debtors are freed from a debt. Many conjectural
alterations have been proposed in this hymn, but it seems to me to be
intelligible even as it stands.
One more hymn to show how the belief in and the worship of these
physical gods, the actors behind the phenomena of nature, could
grow naturally into a belief in and a worship of moral powers,
endowed with all the qualities essential to divine beings. Moral ideas
are not so entirely absent from the Veda, as has sometimes been
asserted, and nothing can be more instructive than to watch the
process by which they spring naturally from a belief in the gods of
nature. I give the hymn to Varuna from Rig-Veda VII, 86, which I
translated for the first time in my “History of Ancient Sanskrit
Literature” in the year 1859, and which, with the help of other
translations published in the meantime, I have now tried to improve
and to clothe in the metrical form of the original.
Hymn to Varuna.
1.
Wise, surely, through his might is his creation,
Who stemmed asunder spacious earth and heaven;
He pushed the sky, the bright and glorious, upward,
And stretched the starry sky and earth asunder.
2.
With my own heart I commune, how I ever
Can now approach Varuna’s sacred presence;
Will he accept my gift without displeasure?
When may I fearless look and find him gracious?
3.
Fain to discover this my sin, I question,
I go to those who know, and ask for counsel.
The same reply I get from all the sages,
’Tis Varuna indeed whom thou hast angered.
4.
What was my chief offence that thou wilt slay me,
Thy oldest friend who always sang thy praises?
Tell me, unconquered Lord, and I shall quickly
Fall down before thee, sinless with my homage.
5.
Loose us from sins committed by our fathers,
From others too which we ourselves committed,
As from a calf, take from us all our fetters,
Loose us as thieves are loosed that lifted cattle.
6.
’Twas not our own free will, ’twas strong temptation,
Or thoughtlessness, strong drink, or dice, or passion,
The old was near to lead astray the younger,
Nay, sleep itself suggests unrighteous actions.
7.
Let me do service to the bounteous giver,
The angry god, like to a slave, but sinless;
The gracious god gave wisdom to the foolish,
And he, the wiser, leads the wise to riches.
8.
O let this song, god Varuna, approach thee,
And let it reach thy heart, O Lord and Master!
Prosper thou us in winning and in keeping,
Protect us, gods, for evermore with blessings!
I wish I could have introduced a larger number of my so-called

Indian friends, the poets of sacred songs who may have lived
thousands of years ago. But I am afraid I have already tired out the
patience of my readers with these very ancient friends of mine. The
only excuse I can plead is that my own friends in England and in
Germany have so often wondered how I could have fallen in love
with the Veda, and actually left my own country in order to rescue
this forgotten Bible from utter oblivion. It is fortunate that people
have different tastes and that we are not all devoted to the same
beauty.
One more hymn I must add, however, for I am afraid if I do not, I
shall be accused of having misrepresented the character of the Veda,
as reflecting only the simplest thoughts of shepherds and cultivators
of the land. I have remarked several times before that the Rig-Veda
contains some very striking philosophical passages, and how far
some of the Vedic poets must have been carried by purely
metaphysical speculations may be seen by a hymn which I translated
for the first time in my “History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature,”
1859. In putting it into a metrical form I was helped at the time by
my departed friend, the late Archbishop of York, then Mr. Thomson,
and I am glad to say I find little to alter in his translation even now.
Hymn X, 129.
Nor aught nor naught existed; yon bright sky
Was not, nor heaven’s broad woof outstretched above;
What covered all? what sheltered? what concealed?
Was it the waters’ fathomless abyss?
There was not death, hence was there naught immortal,
There was no light of night, no light of day,
The only One breathed breathless in itself,
Other than it there nothing since has been.
Darkness there was, and all at first was veiled
In gloom profound, an ocean without light;
The germ that still lay covered in the husk,
Burst forth, one nature, from the fervent heat.
Then first came Love upon it, the new germ,
Of mind; yea, poets in their hearts discerned
Pondering this bond between created things
And uncreated. Came this ray from earth
Piercing and all-pervading, or from heaven?
Then seeds were sown, and mighty powers arose,
Nature below, and Power and Will above;
Who knows the secret? who proclaimed it here,
Whence, whence this manifold creation sprang?
The gods themselves came later into being,
Who knows from whence this great creation sprang?
He from whom all this great creation came,
Whether his will created or was mute,
The most high Seer that is in highest heaven,
He knows it—or perchance e’en He knows not.
This hymn is important, not only by what it says, but by what it

presupposes. Whatever date we may ascribe to it as incorporated in
the Rig-Veda, many generations of thinkers must have passed before
such questions could have been asked or could have been answered.
As yet we see the Vedic age only as through a glass darkly. The first
generation of Vedic scholars is passing away. It has done its work
bravely, though well aware of its limits. Let the next generation dig
deeper and deeper. What is wanted is patient, but independent and
original work. There is so much new ground still to be broken, that
the time has hardly come as yet for going again and again over the
same ploughed field.
I must now part with my Vedic Friends. I can hardly hope that I
have persuaded many of my English friends to share my feelings for
my antediluvian acquaintances. All I care for is to make others
understand how my heart was caught, and what I saw in my Indian
love, not only in her Vedântic dreams and aspirations, but in the
simplicity of her earliest utterances of trust in powers invisible, yet
present behind what is visible, and in her faith in a law that rules
both the natural and the supernatural world.
MY INDIAN FRIENDS.
V.
A Prime Minister and a Child-wife.

I have often had to give expression to a certain disappointment at
not being able, when speaking of my Indian friends, to reveal more of
their inner life. That life, we may be certain, is not absent, but it is
kept hidden, just as Indian women are kept behind their purdahs or
curtains and hidden under veils, more or less transparent. Some of
our own distinguished men and women are perhaps too much given
to perform their confessions and moral ablutions in public, while in
India such books as Rousseau’s Confessions, or the Confessions of St.
Augustine, nay, of Amiel or Marie Bashkirtseff, to mention some
well-known instances only, can hardly be imagined. Introspection or
self-examination exists no doubt among the men and women of
India as well as anywhere else. But unless such inward searchings
take a definite form in words, nay, in written and published words,
they can hardly be said to exist. A man may enter into a dark cave
and see visions, but unless he can find his way back into the bright
light of day, unless he can find words for what was vaguely passing
through the twilight of his memory, all vanishes again and leaves
nothing behind but a nameless sentiment, like the feeling that is left
by a dream, when we know indeed that we have been dreaming, but
cannot recall what we saw in our dreams.
Even in the prayers which we possess of the people in India we
find no very deep delvings into the soul of man. They consist chiefly
of praises of the greatness of the gods or of God, of general
confessions of human weakness or sin, but we hardly ever come
across the agonised sufferings of self-reproachful saints, and we see
little of that moral vivisection which, painful as it is to witness, often
reveals to us some of the most secret springs of human nature which
nothing else will bring to our view.
I cannot, therefore, even in the two cases of Indian friends which I
have selected for my purpose here, promise anything like that
minute moral and spiritual analysis which we find in the works of St.
Augustine, of Rousseau, or Marie Bashkirtseff. One of my friends
belonged to the highest, the other to the lowest ranks of Indian life;
the one was a Prime Minister, the other what we should call a poor
peasant-girl. I was brought into contact with them, not indeed face to
face, but by correspondence only. The Prime Minister was the well-
known Gaurîshankar Udayshankar Ozá, Minister of Bhavnagar. I am
afraid that when people see these long and unpronounceable names
they will at once put down the book. Names such as Rudyard Kipling,
Bashkirtseff, or Pobedonostzeff may be mastered in time, but
Gaurîshankar Udayshankar Ozá is too much for most people’s
memories; and how can people, even if they manage to pronounce
such a name, attach any meaning whatever to it? It might be better,
perhaps, to give the name in its Sanskrit form, viz. Gaurî-samkara;
we could then see some kind of meaning in it, provided we knew a
little of Sanskrit. So far as one may guess the meaning of any proper
names, Gaurî-samkara would be the name of the divine couple, Siva,
sometimes called Samkara, and Gaurî, better known under the name
of Pârvatî, his wife. Of course the name may be interpreted
differently also, but when we know that Gaurî stands for Pârvatî, and
Shankar for Siva, we move at once in more or less familiar spheres,
and we may look on the name as something like the Christian name
Joseph Maria, which is not unusual as a Christian name in Roman
Catholic countries. But when I call Gaurî-samkara the well-known
Prime Minister of Bhavnagar, I anticipate another shrugging of the
shoulders. What is Bhavnagar, where is it, and what is there really
known about its “well-known” Prime Minister? Here are our
difficulties, when we want to rouse the sympathies of our readers for
anything connected with India. Yes, if Gaurî-samkara of Bhavnagar
were Fergus McIvor, chief of Glennaquoich, all would go well. But to
most people, except those who have been in India, Bhavnagar is
almost a terra incognita, and as there are now no separate postage-
stamps for the independent states of India, even children would say
that there is no such state as Bhavnagar anywhere. Still there is a
native state of that name in Kathiawar, with about 500,000
inhabitants, and there is a Râjah, who is called the Thakur Sahib of
Bhavnagar. There is also a town of Bhavnagar, the capital of the
state. Like most of the protected Rajput states, Bhavnagar enjoys as
much freedom as is compatible with the welfare of its neighbours
and the imperial interests of India. Under such conditions conflicts
are, no doubt, inevitable, and it required no little statesmanship in
the Râjah, and in his Dewân, or Prime Minister, to reconcile the
interests of their subjects with those of their neighbours and with
those of the British Empire. Quite a new class of native statesmen
seems to have sprung up of late in these various dependent states,
who are enabled, through the moral support which they receive from
the Central Government, to reform the abuses of a personal and
autocratic régime, to revive education, and to improve the sanitary
condition of the towns and villages, to open commercial
communications, and altogether to raise the political and moral
status and character of the people committed to their charge. In
many cases they had at the same time to keep on good terms with the
English residents, who are not always the most amiable, and to
protect the Râjahs themselves against the corrupting influences of
their little courts and harems. Taking all this together, it is not
difficult to see that their position was by no means an easy one, and
that it required high qualities indeed in these native statesmen to
enable them to hold their own, to satisfy the claims of all the parties
with whom they had to deal, and at the same time not to stifle the
voice of their own conscience.
But when an opening had once been made for native talent in this
direction, native talent was not wanting. The names of such men as
Sir Salar Jung in Hyderabad, Sir T. Madao Rao in Travancore,
Indore, and Baroda, Sir Dinkar Rao in Gwalior, are well known, not
in India only, but in England also, and not the least successful among
them was our friend Gaurî-samkara.
With all the narrow prejudices of Oriental society, particularly in
India, there was always a carrière ouverte aux talents. Gaurî-
samkara was the son of a poor man, though he belonged to a good
Brâhmanic family. His education would not, perhaps, have enabled
him to pass the Indian Civil Service Examination, and yet what an
excellent Civil servant would he have made. Examinations prevent
many evils, but they cannot create or even discover the qualities
necessary for a ruler of men.
Like Mr. Gladstone, Gaurî-samkara became known in India as the
Grand Old Man, or, better still, as the Good Old Man, and, like Mr.
Gladstone, he represented in himself a striking combination of the
thinker and the doer, of the meditative and the active man. His
deepest interest lay with the great problems of human life on earth,
but this did not prevent him from taking a most active part in the
great and small concerns of the daily life and the daily cares of a
small state. He acted as Minister to four generations of the rulers of
Bhavnagar, and he was a constant referee on intricate political
questions to successive Political agents of Kathiawar. He could
remember the first establishment of British authority in the Bombay
Presidency, and he had been the contemporary and fellow-worker of
Mountstuart Elphinstone at the time when the settlement of Guzarat
and Kathiawar had to be worked out between the Gaikwar on one
side and the English Government, as successor of the Peshwa, on the
other. He came in contact not only with Mountstuart Elphinstone,
who visited Kathiawar in 1821, but with Sir John Malcolm also, with
Lord Elphinstone and Sir Bartle Frere—nay, as late as 1886, with
Lord Reay, then Governor of the Bombay Presidency. After a
conference with the old man—he was then eighty-one years of age,
having been born in 1805—Lord Reay declared that he was struck as
much by the clearness of his intellect as by the simplicity and
fairness and openness of his mind; “and if we admire
administrators,” he added, “we also admire straightforward advisers
—those who tell their chiefs the real truth about the condition of
their country and their subjects. In seeing the man who freed this
State from all encumbrances, who restored civil and criminal
jurisdiction to their villages, who settled grave disputes with
Junaghad, who got rid of refractory Jemadars, I could not help
thinking what could be done by such men of purpose and strength of
character.
These words contain a rapid survey of the work of a whole life, and
if we were to enter here into the details of what was actually achieved
by this native statesman we should find that few Prime Ministers
even of the greatest states in Europe had so many tasks on their
hands, and performed them so boldly and so well. The clock on the
tower of the Houses of Parliament strikes louder than the repeater in
our waistcoat pocket, but the machinery, the wheels within wheels,
and particularly the spring, have all the same tasks to perform as in
Big Ben himself. Even men like Disraeli or Gladstone, if placed in the
position of these native statesmen, could hardly have been more
successful in grappling with the difficulties of a new state, with
rebellious subjects, envious neighbours, a weak sovereign, and an all-
powerful suzerain, to say nothing of court intrigues, religious
squabbles, and corrupt officials. We are too much given to measure
the capacity of ministers and statesmen by the magnitude of the
results which they achieve with the immense forces placed at their
disposal. But most of them are very ordinary mortals, and it is not
too much to say that for making a successful marriage-settlement a
country solicitor stands often in need of the same vigilance, the same
knowledge of men and women, the same tact, and the same
determination or bluff which Bismarck displayed in making the
treaty of Prague or of Frankfurt. Nay, there are mistakes made by the
greatest statesmen in history which, if made by our solicitor, would
lead to his instant dismissal. If Bismarck made Germany, Gaurî-
samkara made Bhavnagar. The two achievements are so different
that even to compare them seems absurd, but the methods to be
followed in either case are, after all, the same; nay, it is well known
that the making or regulating of a small watch may require more
nimble and careful fingers than the large clock of a cathedral. We are
so apt to imagine that the man who performs a great work is a great
man, though from revelations lately made we ought to have learnt
how small—nay, how mean—some of these so-called great men have
really been.
Gaurî-samkara found nothing to begin with—or rather, less than
nothing, for he found not only an unorganised but a disorganised
state. General Keatinge, who was Political Agent of Kathiawar during
the years 1863 to 1867, found the transformation that had been
wrought by Gaurî-samkara so complete that he could hardly believe
that Bhavnagar was the same town which he had known in former
days. Splendid buildings had arisen, devoted either to education or
to the relief of the sick, the poor, and the needy. The harbour had
been improved, and roads for trade and communications of every
kind had been newly laid out or made serviceable. There was a large
reservoir to supply the town with water; there were paddocks, a new
jail, two medical dispensaries, and an immense hospital; there were
telegraph and post offices, a High School, and a High Court of
Justice. A railway had been built from Bhavnagar to Gondal, and so
well was it administered, without syndicates or any other kind of
jobbery, that it yielded annually a fair revenue to the state. The
responsibility for all these undertakings rested on the shoulders of
one man, and the credit for them should rest there also.
All this, however, is not what interested me in the old man, nor
will it, I fear, interest many of my readers. He is after all but one of
the many unknown ants that build up hills which, for all we know,
one stroke of a stick may destroy again. Nor was it his moral
character, noble and pure as it doubtless must have been, that
riveted my attention chiefly. A man could hardly have achieved what
he did, unless he stood high above the reach of the vulgar vices and
failings of mankind. In that direction, I may quote a few more
judgments from the mouths of those who had known him during his
long active life. “His chief strength,” as one of his friends writes, “was
to be found in his exemplary private character—
“His words were bonds, his oaths were oracles,
His love sincere, his thoughts immaculate;
His tears pure messengers sent from his heart;
His heart as far from fraud as heaven from earth.”
This is beautifully expressed; but does it give us an image of the man

himself? Even the strongest words seem so colourless when they are
meant to give us the picture of a living man. It may be quite true that
he enjoyed in private and domestic life a veneration that was due to
his noble and patriarchal character, and that his influence was, as we
are told, invariably and unerringly exerted in putting an extinguisher
on private feuds and disagreements among a wide and ever-widening
circle of relations, friends, and members of his caste. We read that
“in order to promote harmony among them he often made personal
sacrifices, and that he proved himself a friend of the needy and the
helpless, of genius and talent struggling to rise. If it was not to be a
blessing to others, life seemed to him not worth living.”
All this is very strong testimony; and yet of how many people has
the same been said, particularly by mourners at the grave of one
whom they loved, and who had loved them! Funeral eloquence has
its bright, but it also has its very dark side. It is delightful to see how
much can be forgotten and forgiven at the grave, how gently all faults
can be passed over or accounted for, how none but the noblest
motives can then be imputed. But all is spoiled at once if rhetorical
exaggeration comes in, so that even the truth contained in the
panegyrics is hidden and choked by a rank growth of adulation and
untruthfulness.
But though I was quite prepared to believe all that we were told
about the private as well as public character of Gaurî-samkara, what
attracted me most in him was that the same man should through life
have been a true philosopher, nay, what men of the world would call
a dreamer of dreams; and should yet have proved so excellent a man
of business. Plato’s dictum, which has so often been ridiculed, that
philosophers are the true rulers of men, has indeed been signally
vindicated in Gaurî-samkara’s case. And his philosophy was not what
may be called useful philosophy—a knowledge of nature and its laws.
This might be tolerated in a Prime Minister, even in Europe. No; it
consisted in the most abstruse metaphysics which would turn even
the hardened brains of some of our best philosophers perfectly giddy.
And yet that very philosophy, so far from unfitting Gaurî-samkara
for his arduous work, gave him the proper strength for doing and
doing well whatever from day to day his hands found to do. He felt
the importance of his official work to the fullest extent, but he always
felt that there was something more important still. Though devoting
all his powers to this life and its duties, he felt convinced that this life
would soon pass away, that there was no true reality in it, that it was
Mâyâ, illusion, arising from Avidyâ, nescience, and that there was
behind, beneath, and above, another and higher life which alone was
worth living. It was his faith in, or his knowledge of, that higher life
which best fitted him to perform his work in the turmoil of the world.
Thus it was that when any of his schemes ended in failure,
disappointment never upset him, and that though he was often
deceived in the friends he had trusted, he never became a pessimist.
It is very difficult to describe what was the faith or the philosophy
which supported him throughout his busy life. From his early youth
he was impressed with certain views of the Vedânta philosophy,
which form the common spiritual property, so to say, of all the
inhabitants of India. That philosophy seems to have entered into the
very life-blood of the nation, but it assumed, of course, very different
forms as believed in by men of talent and education, and by the
drudging tillers of the soil throughout the land. The number of those
who study the Vedânta in the works of such minute philosophers as
Bâdarâyana and Samkara is naturally very small, but the number of
those who have drunk in the spirit of it, it may be in a few sayings
only, is legion.
It seems almost impossible to give a short and clear account of that
ancient philosophy, though, when once known, it can be, and has
been, described and epitomised in a few very short lines. The
approaches to it are very various, but anybody accustomed to Greek
or European forms of thought is sorely perplexed how to find an
entrance into it from exactly the same point as the Hindus
themselves. The Vedânta philosophy is meant to be an interpretation
of the world, different from all other interpretations, whether
philosophical or religious. It was to lead to a new birth, and therefore
remained unintelligible and unmeaning to souls that will not be
regenerated. It is partly an advantage, partly a disadvantage, that for
several of their most important tenets the Vedântists simply appeal
to the Vedas, their Bible, as containing the absolute truth, as being
the highest seat of authority, or the last Court of Appeal on questions
which with us would require very different arguments to prove that,
given our reasoning powers, such as they are, and the world, such as
it is, certain doctrines are inevitable, or that at all events their
opposites are unthinkable. To make the results at which the
Vedântists arrive intelligible, it is best for us to start with a few
maxims which seem to underlie their philosophy, and which,
whether true in themselves or not, do not at all events offend against
our own rules of reasoning.
If, then, we start with the idea of the Godhead, which is never quite
absent in any system of philosophy or religion, we may, excluding all
polytheistic forms of faith, allow our friends, the Vedântists, to lay it
down that before all things the Godhead must be one, so that it may
not be limited or conditioned by anything else. This is the Vedânta
tenet which they express by the ever-recurring formula that the Sat,
the true Being or Brahman, must be Ekam, one, and Advitîyam,
without any second whatsoever. If, then, it is once admitted that in
the beginning, in the present, and in the future, the Godhead must be
one, all, and everything, it follows that nothing but that Godhead can
be conceived as the true, though distant cause of everything material
as well as spiritual, of our body as well as of our soul. Another maxim
of the Vedântist, which likewise could hardly be gainsaid by any
thinker, is that the Godhead, if it exists at all in its postulated
character, must be unchangeable, because it is perfect and cannot
possibly be interfered with by anything else, there being nothing
beside itself. On this point also all the advanced religions seem
agreed. But then arises at once the next question, If the Godhead is
one without a second, and if it is unchangeable, whence comes
change or development into the world; nay, whence comes the world
itself, or what we call creation—whence comes nature with its ever-
changing life and growth and decay?
Here the Vedântist answer sounds at first very strange to us, and
yet it is not so very different from other philosophies. The Vedântist
evidently holds, though this view is implied rather than enunciated,
that, as far as we are concerned, the objective world is, and can only
be, our knowledge of the objective world, and that everything that is
objective is ipso facto phenomenal. Objective, if properly analysed, is
to the Vedântist the same as phenomenal, the result of what we see,
hear, and touch. Nothing objective could exist objectively, except as
perceived, by us, nor can we ever go beyond this, and come nearer in
any other way to the hidden, subjective part of the objective world, to
the Ding an sich supposed to be without us. If, then, we perceive that
the objective world—that is, whatever we know by our senses, call it
nature or anything else—is always changing, whilst on the other
hand, the one Being that exists, the Sat, can be one only, without a
second, and without change, the only way to escape from this
dilemma is to take the world when known to us as purely
phenomenal, i.e. as created by our knowledge of it, only that what we
call knowledge is called from a higher point of view not knowledge,
but Avidyâ, i.e. Nescience. Thus the Godhead, though being that
which alone supplies the reality underlying the objective world, is
never itself objective, still less can it be changing. This is illustrated
by a simile, such as are frequently used by the Vedântists, not to
prove a thing, but to make things clear and intelligible. When the sun
is reflected in the running water it seems to move and to change, but
in reality it remains unaffected and unchanged. What our senses see
is phenomenal, but it evidences a reality sustaining it. It is, therefore,
not false or illusory, but it is phenomenal. It is fully recognised that
there could not be even a phenomenal world without that postulated
real Sat, that power which we call the Godhead, as distinguished
from God or the gods, which are its phenomenal manifestations,
known to us under different names.
The Sat, or the cause, remains itself, always one and the same,
unknowable and nameless. And what applies to external nature
applies likewise to whatever name we may give to our internal,
eternal, or subjective nature. Our true being—call it soul, or mind, or
anything else—is the Sat, the Godhead, and nothing else, and that is
what the Vedântists call the Self or the Âtman. That Âtman, however,
as soon as it looks upon itself, becomes ipso facto phenomenal, at
least for a time; it becomes the I, and that I may change. The I is not
one, but many. It is the Âtman in a state of Nescience, but when that
Nescience is removed by Vidyâ, or philosophy, the phenomenal I
vanishes in death, or even before death, and becomes what it always
has been, Âtman, which Âtman is nothing but the Sat, the Brahman,
or, in our language, the Godhead.
These ideas, though not exactly in this form or in this succession,
seem to me to underlie all Vedântic philosophy, and they will, at all
events, form the best and easiest introduction to its sanctuary. And,
strange as some of these ideas may sound to us, they are really not so
very far removed from the earlier doctrines of Christianity. The belief
in a Godhead beyond the Divine Persons is clearly enunciated in the
much-abused Athanasian Creed, of which in my heart of hearts I
often feel inclined to say: “Except a man believe it faithfully, he
cannot be saved.” There is but one step which the Vedântists would
seem inclined to take beyond us. The Second Person, or what the
earliest Christians called the Word—that is, the divine idea of the
universe, culminating in the highest concept, the Logos of Man—
would be with them the Thou, i.e. the created world. And while the
early Christians saw that divine ideal of manhood realized and
incarnate in one historical person, the Vedântist would probably not
go beyond recognising that highest Logos, the Son of God and the
Son of man, as Man, as every man, whose manhood, springing from
the Godhead, must be taken back into the Godhead. And here is the
point where the Vedântist differs from all other so-called mystic
religions which have as their highest object the approach of the soul
to God, the union of the two, or the absorption of the one into the
other. The Vedântist does not admit any such approach or union
between God and man, but only a recovery of man’s true nature, a
remembrance or restoration of his divine nature or of his godhead,
which has always been there, though covered for a time by
Nescience. After this point has once been reached, there would be no
great difficulty in bringing on an agreement between Christianity,
such as it was in its original form, and Vedântism, the religious
philosophy of India. What seems to us almost blasphemy—a kind of
apotheosis of man, is with the Vedântist an act of the highest
reverence. It is taken as man’s anatheosis, or return to his true
Father, a recovery of his true godlike nature. And what is or can be
the meaning of God-like? Can anything be godlike that is not
originally divine, though hidden for a time by Nescience? After all,
though Nescience may represent Manhood as the very opposite of
Godhead, what beings are there, or can be imagined to be, that could
fill the artificial interval that has been established long ago between
God and man, unless we allow our poets to people that interval with
angels and devils? The real difficulty is how that interval, that abyss
between God and man, was ever created, and if the Vedântist says by
Nescience, is that so different from what we say “By human
ignorance”?
It was necessary to give these somewhat abstruse, explanations—
though in reality they are not abstruse, but intelligible to every
unsophisticated and childlike mind. These, then, were the ideas that
supported our friend Gaurî-samkara, and which support, under
different disguises, millions of human beings in India—men, women,
and children. On such simple but solid foundations it is easy to erect
ever so many religions, to build ever so many temples, and to find
room for the most elevated and the most superstitious minds, all
yearning for the same Peace of God, and for the same Giver of Peace
and Rest. Names may differ and truth may adopt different disguises.
But, after all, the peace which Gaurî-samkara enjoyed amid the daily
cares of his official life, and which arose from his forgetting himself
and finding himself in God, or, as he would say, forgetting his
phenomenal in his real Âtman, could it have been so very different
from what we call the peace of God that passes all understanding?
Such a view of the world as his was, is generally supposed to unfit a

The Suffragist Peace How Women Shape The Politics of War Robert F Trager Full Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

The Suffragist Peace How Women Shape The Politics of War Robert F Trager Full Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Suffragist Peace How Women Shape The Politics of War Robert F Trager Full Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Suffragist Peace: How Women

Shape the Politics of War Robert F.

The Politics Of Peace: A Global Cold War History 1st

The Insiders' Game: How Elites Make War and Peace

John F. Kennedy's 1957 Algeria Speech: The Politics of

Women and the Politics of Resistance in the Iranian

War And The Politics Of Ethics Maja Zehfuss

Management and War: How Organisations Navigate Conflict

Hunger in War and Peace: Women and Children in Germany,

List of Figures vii

1. The Hope for Democracy 1

1. Campaign flyer for the Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage

1. All states granting suffrage in waves. 169

give rise to “a new evangel of womanhood, to exalt purity, virtue,

over 110 countries have not. As of January 2021, the UN reported

You would be right at this point to feel skeptical about some of

of North and South America have also experienced prolonged periods

The record of women’s leadership might also give idealists pause.

of women’s political leadership that might take place in the twenty-first

Each of these reasonable skepticisms suggest that we have our work

The spirit of monarchy is war and enlargement of dominion . . . peace

The impact of women’s participation in political life can best be under-

Britain and the Fate of the Ottoman Empire

Debate on how to respond to Russian assertiveness was full-throated

full British military involvement.10 But British leaders continued to

feats were temporary. If anything, the humiliation wrought by the war’s

deliberate insult, means prompt earnest resolute fighting,” its editors

The Sun Never Sets

the Nile, Herbert Kitchener, newly named commander of the Anglo-

enabled popular support for imperialism. War brings about “nothing

imperial affairs. As tensions grew between Boer and British leaders,

Salisbury, in his thirteenth non-consecutive year as prime minister

In Another Democracy Far, Far Away . . .

country truly be labeled a democracy if such a large segment of the

On March 30, 1898, President William McKinley began to cry.67 He

Republicans, having recently lost in municipal elections, feared losses

combat—through demonstrations that one was prepared to assume the

creating and shaping them.94 Pro-war editorials found an instantaneous

unpredictable, urging peace at times and sometimes supporting wars

The “male element is a destructive force, stern, selfish, aggrandizing,

attractions of the home created by women.2 Others, Gilman included,

sentimentality, nurturing qualities that best suited their expected roles

to intensify in response. Traditional gender roles reasserted themselves

judged by a state’s success at compelling peace rather than war, Laura

In Rig-Veda VIII, 41, 10, we ought surely to translate, “He made

I wish I could have introduced a larger number of my so-called

This hymn is important, not only by what it says, but by what it

A Prime Minister and a Child-wife.

This is beautifully expressed; but does it give us an image of the man

You might also like