The Women's Victory—and After: Personal Reminiscences, 1911-1918

"Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof."

    – Lev. xxv. 10.

The Pilgrimage was a piece of work which could only have been undertaken successfully by a powerful organization, and such the N.U.W.S.S. certainly was. We had divided the whole area of Great Britain into nineteen federations; in each federation there was a working committee meeting regularly, whose aim was to form a non-militant, non-party women's suffrage society in every parliamentary borough in its area. Each federation and each society aimed at being self-supporting; but the large sums, amounting to many thousands of pounds, collected at our big Albert Hall demonstrations in London enabled the executive committee of the whole N.U.W.S.S. to make grants for special work to specified societies or federations. Our organization was thoroughly democratic, the executive committee and all the officers being subject to election at our annual council meetings, where each society could claim representation in proportion to its numbers. No new departure in policy could be undertaken without the authority of the council. In 1913 we had over 400 societies, and they were constantly increasing; in 1914, just before the war, there were over 600. We calculated that, adding together the central funds, the Election Fighting Fund, and the funds raised and expended by our societies locally, the National Union at this time was using over £45,000 a year for the furtherance of the enfranchisement of women.

We were giving full time employment to scores of organizers, mostly highly intelligent young women of University education, who not only did admirable propaganda work throughout the country, but kept headquarters informed of all important local developments and incidents bearing on our movement.

The Pilgrimage was a march of bands of our societies, all non-militant suffragists, from every part of Great Britain, converging on London, and so arranged as to reach their goal on the same day. Eight routes were selected: the great North Road, the Fen Country, the East Coast, Watling Street, the West Country Road, the Portsmouth Road, the Brighton Road, and the Kentish Pilgrims' Way. In each case the Pilgrimage procession started at the point most distant from London, carrying banners, and accompanied, where possible, by music. The pilgrims were prepared to stop and hold meetings, distribute literature, and collect funds in towns and villages en route. As they proceeded their numbers rolled up; friends lent motor-cars for conveying luggage, and the most wonderfully generous hospitality was extended to them all along the route, especially in the towns where we had powerful societies. This we might have been said to expect; but what surprised us was the extraordinarily warm welcome we received from the villages we passed through. Once their inhabitants understood that we were non-militant, and had no desire to injure anybody or anything, they gave us the most cordial reception; indeed, we were often stopped as we were passing through villages which we had deemed hardly large enough for a meeting with the remonstrance, "You are surely never going to pass us by without saying a word!"

The meetings in the towns were not so uniformly friendly. Hooligans sometimes declined to believe that we were non-militant, and demonstrated their enthusiasm for law and order by throwing dead rats, potatoes, rotten eggs, and other garbage, at our speakers. No real harm was done to any of us, but occasionally the services of the police were needed to protect our speakers. This, however, was exceptional, and had reactions in our favour. For instance, one lady, well on her way towards old age, who had started on our Pilgrimage at Land's End, originally intended to break off her march at Plymouth, but, being roughly treated by a band of disorderly youths at Camborne, resolved that she would accompany the pilgrims all the way to London, which she did. The start was made in each case from the points most distant from London on June 18th, and the Pilgrimage in all its eight branches arrived in London on July 25th, the final demonstration being held in Hyde Park on July 26th. Here there were nineteen platforms, representing the nineteen federations of the N.U.W.S.S. There was a huge and an entirely sympathetic crowd in the Park. When a bugle sounding from the central platform announced the putting of the resolution, there was hardly a hand held up against it.

On the next day – Sunday, July 27th – many hundreds of the pilgrims, wearing their badges and colours, assembled in Trafalgar Square and walked in procession, but without banners, to St. Paul's to attend the afternoon service. A large number of seats had been courteously reserved for them under the dome, and a sermon appropriate to the occasion was preached by Canon Simpson. We thought it just like our good luck that the first Psalm for the evening service on the twenty-seventh day of the month was the absolutely appropriate one: "When the Lord turned again the captivity of Sion, then were we like unto them that dream… They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that goeth on his way weeping, and bearing forth good seed, shall doubtless come again with joy, and bring his sheaves with him." A deep sense of peace and of absolute confidence in our ultimate triumph came upon us. We were as certain of it as if it had already been in our grasp.

It may not be inappropriate here to add a few words about Mrs. Harley, who originated the Pilgrimage. She was a woman of great originality and imagination. The widow of a soldier, and sister of General French, she had lived most of her life among military people and in a military atmosphere. She was the life and soul of the suffrage movement in Shrewsbury and the neighbourhood, where her fine character has left a lasting impression. In December, 1914, she joined the first unit of the Scottish Women's Hospitals for foreign service under Dr. Elsie Inglis, and acted as administrator of the great hospital, afterwards so famous, which was opened in the Abbaye de Royaumont. Mrs. Harley took her young daughter with her as one of her orderlies. On one occasion, when this gently nurtured girl was scrubbing a ward, a sick French soldier asked her if it were true that she was the niece of Lord French. When she replied in the affirmative, the poilu rejoined: "I don't think General Joffre's niece would scrub our ward." These little things made a deep impression, and, I am told, puzzled our French friends not a little. When the French Government asked the S.W.H. for a second hospital, one was opened at Troyes, and Mrs. Harley accompanied it, again acting as administrator. It was the first open-air hospital ever seen in France. The soldiers nursed in it were enthusiastic in their praise. When the French Expeditionary Force was sent to Salonica the French Government asked the Scottish Women's Hospitals Committee to allow this unit to go with it, a request which was, of course, willingly granted. While at Salonica Mrs. Harley received from the French military authorities the Croix de Guerre avec Palme, a decoration which she brought to show us at our suffrage office in the summer of 1916, when she was in London for a short time arranging for the transport to Serbia of a couple of motor ambulances. This was the last time we saw her, for she was killed by Bulgarian shell-fire at Monastir on March 7th, 1917. Her works do follow her. A very fine tribute to her memory was paid by the Serbian authorities on the occasion of the unveiling of a memorial to her. "To die for one's country," said one of the Serbs, "that is fine, but that we understand; but to die for another country, that is superb – that is something beyond us."

Returning to the Pilgrimage and its results. Petitions to Parliament in favour of women's suffrage had been sent up from the very numerous meetings which the pilgrims had held while on their march towards London. These were presented by our friends in the House in batches, with short speeches, not just dropped silently into the bag behind the Speaker's chair, as in the old days. A number of M.P.'s received deputations from their constituents who had taken part in the Pilgrimage. At the end of July the Home Secretary, Mr. McKenna, received a deputation from some of the pilgrims, who wished to bring to his notice the inadequacy of police protection given at some of the meetings they had addressed. One of the speakers said there was an impression abroad that women's suffrage meetings were fair game, and that disorder and hooliganism could take place at these without disagreeable consequences to those who indulged in them. In his reply there was a notable change for the better in Mr. McKenna's attitude towards the N.U.W.S.S. He asked for a list of the meetings of which complaint was made, and promised enquiry, adding that he would do his utmost to give suffragists protection as complete as that extended to other citizens holding peaceful political meetings. He even added: "I sincerely admire the courage with which you have carried on your work … and I honestly believe that your method of action has assisted your cause." This was a great improvement compared with the time, not many months earlier, when he was so long in making up his mind whether or not to prosecute us for promoting the sale of an "obscene" book.

The Pilgrimage also led to a deputation from the N.U.W.S.S. being received by Mr. Asquith. We noted, too, in his attitude and language a notable improvement; we felt that his education in the principles of representative government was progressing. Mrs. Harley, Miss Margaret Robertson, Mrs. Rackham, and Miss Royden spoke chiefly of the widespread interest in and sympathy with our movement which had been demonstrated during the Pilgrimage. It fell to me, as leader of the deputation, to try to wring from him some acknowledgment that he had not fulfilled the pledges he had given the suffrage deputation in November, 1911. I reminded him of these pledges, and maintained that they had not been fulfilled, and reviewed the series of events which had led suffragists to the unanimous conclusion that the only way in which their fulfilment was now possible was by means of a Government Bill. I reminded Mr. Asquith that several of his colleagues had repeatedly assured us that the opportunity offered them by him in November, 1911, was far better than any chances afforded by a private Member's Bill. Mr. Asquith at this point interjected, "So they were. It was the truth." This enabled me again to emphasize our main point – namely, that the offer of time for a private Member's Bill was a totally inadequate substitute for what we had lost by the Government's mishandling of their own measure. Proceeding, I recalled two comparatively modern instances in which Liberal Governments had been divided on the question of franchise reform. Lord Palmerston, leader of the Liberals in the early sixties, opposed the extension of the franchise to working men just as Mr. Asquith now opposed its extension to women. The result was that it was left to a Conservative Government to carry the needed reform. Lord Goschen, in 1880, had stood aside from active participation in party politics because of his opposition to the enfranchisement of the agricultural labourer. I pressed Mr. Asquith to follow the example of Lord Goschen rather than that of Lord Palmerston, and not to allow his own views to stand in the way of what he himself had acknowledged to be the desire of the majority of his colleagues in the Government and the House of Commons. Finally, I urged him not to shut his eyes to the fact that the women's demand to share in self-government was a vital and living movement, a development of the basic principle of democracy, and was founded on the growth of education and the wider industrial and professional opportunities which women had won for themselves during the last two generations. "We have ceased to have the serf's mind and the serf's economic helplessness, and it follows that the serf's political status no longer contents us. The Government is now meeting the demand of women for free institutions with coercion, and nothing but coercion. It is not thus that the victories of Liberalism have been won. I readily admit that the maintenance of order is one of the first duties of every Government. But another is to redress the grievances from which disorder has sprung."

In reply, Mr. Asquith confessed himself to have been greatly impressed by the Pilgrimage and its reception in the country; but though he admitted that we were in a position of great hardship, and virtually acknowledged that what he had offered us in January, 1913, was no equivalent for what he had promised us in November, 1911, he declined to say what steps his Government were prepared to take in the future on the suffrage question. But he said: "Proceed as you have been proceeding. Continue to the end;" and that it would be quite impossible for a minority in the Liberal Party to obstruct or prevent the realization of our hopes. Parliament would yield, as it had always hitherto done, and as it was bound to do, to the opinion of the country … it was a matter which in the final resort must be decided by the people themselves. Asked how he expected the judgment of the people to express itself, Mr. Asquith replied: "I think, in the long run, there is only one way of finding out what people think, and that is by an election." But under present conditions, as we did not fail to remind him, those most concerned in the present matter would not possess one single vote. Members of the Government favourable to women's suffrage also received a deputation from the N.U.W.S.S. on the same day. The interview was private, but when members of both deputations compared notes, we agreed that the antisuffrage Prime Minister was less discouraging than his prosuffrage colleagues. They plentifully douched us with cold water. Only one of them, Sir John Simon, made any helpful suggestion.

One part of the remarks made by me to the Prime Minister seems to call for some further explanation: it is that in which I had referred to the existence of disorder, and that the Government's one and only remedy for disorder was coercion, and again coercion, ever more and more harshly and relentlessly applied, unaccompanied by any statesmanlike effort to redress the grievances from which disorder had sprung. This, of course, had reference to militantism, which was at its height in 1913. Liberals all over the country were quite willing to endorse John Bright's wise saying, "Force is no remedy"; but they seemed absolutely incapable of finding the real remedy – the extension to women of free institutions. Mr. Asquith had proclaimed that the object of his Government was "to set upon an unshakable foundation the principles of Representative Government," while maintaining that its application to women would be a political mistake of a disastrous nature. Quite recently, at a Lord Mayor's banquet, he had referred with well-founded complacency to the rapid reconciliation of the Boer population of South Africa, and had exclaimed, "Great is the magic of free institutions!" What we demanded was not the repetition of these mouth-filling phrases, but their application in our own case. The N.U.W.S.S. had consistently and persistently opposed militantism from the moment when the so-called militants attempted to promote their political aims by the use of personal violence. At the outset they had suffered violence, but used none; but this policy had, from 1908 onwards, been abandoned, and they openly took up the weapon of physical force, and in retaliation physical force was used against them brutally and unscrupulously. Forcible feeding, the Cat and Mouse Act, were the weapons of the Government. "Frightfulness" in the German sense had been used on both sides, and the frightfulness of the Government was as sincerely deprecated by all of us as the frightfulness of the militants. Again and again, on all possible occasions, we urged that the redress of grievances was the true remedy for disorder. We recognized, along with very large numbers of people hitherto uninterested in our movement, the courage and power of self-sacrifice of the militants, but we felt that the use of the weapon of physical force was the negation of the very principle for which we struggled; it was denying our faith to make our faith prevail.

In the early summer of 1913 an incident occurred which deeply touched the popular imagination, and placed the principle of self-sacrifice as illustrated by the militants on a hill-top from which it was seen not only all over our own country, but throughout the world. Courage calls to courage everywhere, and its voice cannot be denied.

The race for the Derby was held on the last Wednesday of May. The King's horse was the favourite. Crowds even more enormous than usual gathered to witness it; among them a young woman, a militant suffragist, Emily Davidson, of Morpeth, in Northumberland, had managed to place herself close to the winning-post against the rope barrier which kept the crowd off the actual track. As the King's horse swept by at a tremendous speed, Emily Davidson threw herself in front of it. Down came the horse with fearful violence; the jockey was, of course, thrown, and seriously injured; and there lay Emily Davidson, mortally injured. She had deliberately sacrificed her life in order, in this sensational way, to draw the attention of the whole world to the determination of women to share in the heritage of freedom which was the boast of every man in the country. The King enquired for the jockey; the Queen enquired for the injured woman. In a day or two it was announced that she was dead. She never recovered consciousness. She had died for her cause. After one of the military disasters which accompanied the early development of the Risorgimento in Italy, the historian writes that young Italy had, at least, shown that it knew how to die. Emily Davidson had shown that she, too, knew how to die. I happened to be in Vienna at the time, and I shall not easily forget the awed solemnity with which a Viennese with whom I had had some halting conversation in German on the suffrage question came to me and said, "Miss Davidson ist todt."

It is said that the urgency of the suffrage problem in Great Britain was one reason which induced the ex-Kaiser and his advisers to consider England a decadent power; if this is true, it is only an example of the way in which he misread every sign of the times and totally misunderstood this country. That a woman was capable of throwing away her life on the chance that it might serve the cause of freedom might have taught him to expect what happened about fourteen months later, when over 5,000,000 young Englishmen voluntarily joined the army in order to preserve the principles of liberty and self-government throughout the world.

CHAPTER VI

THE TURN OF THE TIDE

"Yet die not: do thou
Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow.
Live and take comfort… Thou hast great allies."

After the Pilgrimage, but whether because of it or not we could not judge, we began to receive much more general support from the public and from the Press than ever before. This process was probably accelerated by the character of some of the legislation which had recently passed through Parliament. The National Insurance Act, for instance, in 1912, caused a great stir, some of it extremely nonsensical, such as a huge meeting got up mainly by antisuffrage women to protest that they would perish rather than stick the insurance stamps on their servants' policies. The Society for Opposing the Extension of the Parliamentary Suffrage to Women, however, presented to Mr. Lloyd George a really excellent memorial on the subject of the Insurance Bill as it affected women, in the course of which they asked whether it would not be better if the Bill provided for women the kind of insurance they wanted rather than the kind which they did not want. We suffragists, of course, did not fail to point the moral that the way to get the legislation women wanted was to let women have votes. Mr. Lloyd George, who had charge of the Bill throughout, was, however, very accessible to suggestions about it, and received deputations in which women of all kinds took part, mistresses and maids, as well as women in industrial occupations. He said he had learnt much from them, and that their point of view had not occurred to him before he had had the opportunity of meeting them. The suffragists again were not slow to point the moral: If women had been voters, their point of view would have been ascertained and considered from the outset.

One almost ludicrous feature of the Insurance Bill as it first passed through Parliament was the payment of the maternity benefit granted under it to the father and not to the mother. One of our Conservative supporters, Mr. R. Prothero (now Lord Ernle), said, in reference to this: "It is a small detail. But it is impossible to imagine that a Parliament elected by women would have allowed the maternity benefit to be paid to the husband, and would have given the woman the remedy of prosecuting the man, with whom she must continue to live, if he does not spend it properly." The improper use of the maternity benefit by the husband probably was quite exceptional; but there were cases known in which the husband had spent it in the public-house or to buy himself a gramophone; and in such cases it was poor comfort to the wife to tell her that she could protect herself by prosecuting her husband, and get him fined or sent to prison.

As far as argument was concerned our battle was won. The antisuffragists, when they pulled themselves together sufficiently to have a great meeting, continually fell back, even in the case of their more distinguished speakers, on the undeniable statement that men were men, and women were women. Another speaker at the Albert Hall antisuffrage meeting gravely reproached the suffragists for wilfully misleading industrial women by persuading them that women's wages would be favourably affected by the possession of political power. His words were: "It is a heartless and cruel deception to tell poor women that the possession of a vote would enable them to raise their wages. Parliament has never attempted such a thing for men." This was on February 28th, 1912. Within less than a month the Government, of which he remained a member, did regulate the minimum rate of wages for men and boys in coal-mines. We believed that the triumph of the miners was in part due to their electoral power.

The antisuffragists were greatly elated by the success of their Albert Hall meeting, and their monthly organ, The Antisuffrage Review, for March triumphantly exclaimed: "The great demonstration has been held, and the woman's suffrage bubble has been pricked." Mrs. Humphry Ward, however, took a different and a more subdued line. Speaking at Oxford a little later, she said that "the real fight was only beginning, and would probably last a long time." As pricked bubbles are not of a very durable character, she thus virtually disowned the exuberant metaphor of her paper. But the small fry in the antisuffrage movement were about this time more than usually offensive and inept. One of them, a woman writer with a tolerably well-known name, published the following: "For social purposes, now and always, man is superior to woman. Organized society rests on him. It would go on quite comfortably if every woman retired to her own particular wigwam and did nothing but breed." Another writer, probably male, not to be left behind in offensive rubbish, wrote in the Liverpool Courier: "Votes for women! Why, the matter is in a nutshell. If married, she exercises the franchise through her husband. If a widow, she is a past-partner in a joint concern, and should rest content with the achievement of other days. If single, she is, or ought to be, too busily engaged in trying to capture 'John Henry Charles' to think about votes." Degrading and vulgar nonsense of this kind was nauseating to every decent-minded man or woman, whether for or against suffrage; but it made many who had previously been indifferent turn with sympathy to those who were claiming political freedom for women and trying to preach and live the gospel of a nobler and truer relationship between the sexes.

"Self-reverent each and reverencing each,
Distinct in individualities,
But like each other ev'n as those who love."

These coarse and foolish attacks upon our whole movement did it not one ounce of harm.

It was in the spring of 1914 that Lord Selborne raised the question of women's suffrage in the House of Lords. It was the first time that suffrage ground had been broken in any serious sense in the Upper Chamber. A Bill was introduced on the lines of the Conciliation Bill, and came on for Second Reading on May 5th. Eleven peers spoke in its favour, and seven in opposition. Among the speeches on our side Lord Lytton's rose to the level of the very highest excellence. The House, so proverbially difficult to move in any emotional sense, was obviously and deeply moved by his earnestness, transparent sincerity, and closely reasoned argument. Gossip said that as he concluded Lord Curzon threw himself back in his seat and exclaimed, sotto voce, to his next neighbour: "What a tragedy that such talent should be wasted upon women!" Another peer who took the antisuffrage side, and used language comparable to the specimens quoted on the previous page, caused an old-fashioned country gentleman type of antisuffrage peer sitting on the Conservative side to exclaim: "I shall go. If I listen to this fellow any longer I should be driven to vote for the Bill." Lord Curzon moved its rejection, and it was defeated by 104 votes to 60. The suffragists were more than gratified by this result, and by the debate and the general reception given to the subject.

A number of other things were happening month by month which indicated the growing strength of our movement. The Labour Party, preparing its programme for the next General Election, placed in the forefront of its demands "a Government Reform Bill, which must include the enfranchisement of women." Within the Women's Liberal Federation a Liberal Women's Suffrage Union was formed, pledging its members to undertake no work in support of antisuffrage Liberal candidates. A Liberal Men's Association for Women's Suffrage was also formed, under the chairmanship of Mr. W. Barton, M.P. for Oldham. Mr. Barton had recently claimed the right of Liberal women in his constituency to attend a party meeting to be addressed by Mr. Asquith, and this not as guests accompanying the speakers, but as political workers in the constituency. The extraordinary attitude adopted by many Liberal Associations towards women at this time may be gauged by the fact that Mr. Barton had to threaten to resign his seat before he could induce the Oldham Liberal Association to admit women Liberals to their meeting.

Contemporaneously with this, women's suffrage was making way within the Conservative Party. At the annual conference of the National Conservative and Unionist Associations at Norwich, Lord Robert Cecil moved "that it is expedient to extend the franchise to all citizens, regardless of sex, who have the qualifications at present required of men for the exercise of the suffrage." The opponents did not venture on a direct negative, but moved "that it is not expedient to grant the parliamentary franchise to women on any terms until this great constitutional change has received the express sanction of the electors." This amendment was carried by a large majority; but Lord Robert Cecil had made a deep impression on the association in connection with this and other subjects debated by them, and his present very leading position in politics was from this date distinctly indicated.

Support for suffrage came at this time from another and a much less expected quarter. The Ulster Unionist Council in September, 1913, approved the draft articles of the Ulster Provincial Government which it was intended to set up in the event of the Home Rule Act coming into operation, and these articles embodied the enfranchisement of women on the basis of the Local Government register. Indeed, the Ulster Unionist Council went further than this. For, writing to the Ulster Women's Unionist Association, the secretary of the U.U. Council asked for "names of women willing to act upon the various committees which will on that date (the date of the creation of a Nationalist Parliament) be established. This ensures that those who have so heartily supported us in the past will immediately be co-opted with a view to taking their proper share in the management of the affairs of Ulster whilst we are holding the province on trust for the British nation, in which matter we fully realize that their interests are as much at stake as those of the men."

This attitude on the part of the Ulster Unionist Council was all the more satisfactory to us because up to that time we had reason to believe Sir Edward Carson to be among our most determined opponents.

About the same time the Church Congress, meeting in Southampton under the presidency of the Bishop of Winchester, arranged a debate on the Ideals of Manhood and Womanhood. The Bishop ruled that the political aspects of the subject would not be out of order. Miss Royden spoke, and made so deep an impression that her speech was referred to a year later by the Bishop of Lichfield, preaching in Hull, "as the epoch-making address of Miss Maude Royden." The Bishop of Winchester wrote to the Press, replying to attacks made upon him in defence of his attitude on women's suffrage at the Church Congress. He pleaded for truce and amnesty between the Government and the suffrage party, and urged as a necessary preliminary to this the definite prospect of the introduction by the Government of a Women's Suffrage Bill as a first-class measure. From that meeting of the Church Congress at Southampton dates, I believe, the very strong and undivided support given to our movement by the Bishops in the House of Lords.

We also had evidence at this time of the support of another religious body, the Society of Friends, who this year, in their Annual Epistle, issued from the London yearly meeting, made a very sympathetic reference to the women's movement. We valued this all the more because of their fine record in the matter of sex equality in religious matters from the foundation of their society. They had from the first practised as well as preached the doctrine of equality as between men and women, and had again and again been pioneers in matters of education and social reform, besides giving us many of our most valued colleagues and leaders.

In 1913 also the National Union of Women Workers (now the National Council of Women) had the last of a series of tussles with Mrs. Humphry Ward. The point at issue between the suffragists and antisuffragists in the N.U.W.W. was the necessary majority required on any particular subject before the executive committee was justified in taking action upon it. A committee for revising the constitution had been at work, and had presented a report recommending, among other things, that no action should be taken on any controversial point unless such action were supported by a three-fourths majority; this was by way of an olive-branch, as the necessary majority under the old constitution had been one of two-thirds. To this proposed compromise the antisuffragists presented a solid opposition. Some desired that the council should be deprived of the power of passing resolutions at all. Mrs. Ward proposed that no resolution should be binding unless passed unanimously – a reminiscence, apparently, of the liberum veto which contributed so much to the ruin of the old Polish Constitution. Driven from this position, she then proposed to give to any five branches and five affiliated societies an absolute veto upon the proceedings of the council. In each of these efforts Mrs. Ward was unsuccessful, and in a gathering of over 400 she could not rally sufficient votes to carry any of her points. The Antisuffrage Society in consequence withdrew from the N.U.W.W., and figuratively shook its dust from their feet.

At the opening of this chapter I referred to the more favourable tone in the Press upon women's suffrage and allied questions. For quite a number of years we had had true and faithful friends in the Manchester Guardian, the Aberdeen FreePress, and in Punch, and other papers. The latter gave us a series of first-rate pictures and cartoons, which I hope one day may be reproduced as Punch's "History of Women's Suffrage." Its occasional verses were also very crisp and to the point. A couple of specimens are here reproduced. The first was apropos of Mr. Asquith's frequent statement in the course of his struggle with the House of Lords that "the will of the people must prevail."

"You speak, Mr. Asquith, the suffragist said,
Of the Will of the People wholesale;
But has the idea never entered your head
That the People are not wholly male?"

Another, which was headed "Any Premier to any Suffragist," ran thus:

"So, lady, it is plain,
While at your claim one man shies,
Until you have the vote 'tis vain
To ask us for the franchise."

About this time the editor of the Daily Telegraph allotted space in his paper once a week, under the heading of "Women in Public Life," for the discussion of all kinds of women's activities, including suffrage. It also gave good telegraphic summaries of events bearing on the women's cause in foreign countries, and sometimes even printed the speeches of suffrage leaders verbatim. As our struggle for suffrage became more and more a struggle with Mr. Asquith it not unnaturally followed that those papers were naturally estranged from us which lived, and moved, and had their being in believing that he was the first of men, and that everything he said and did was perfect. They did not go back definitely, and in so many words, upon their former record in support of free representative institutions, but they gave us many a back-hander, published everything conspicuously which they thought likely to be damaging to us, and suppressed such events as told in our favour. I give an instance. In a copy of an evening paper in 1913 I saw in one column, apropos of some House of Commons incident, that "Mrs. Fawcett was in despair"; in another that "Mr. Birrell had finished with women's suffrage for ever"; and that "Mr. Wilfred Ashley had felt compelled to vote against it." As I knew I was not in despair, and had never given any justification for the assertion that I was, I contemplated with some calm the assertions about Mr. Birrell and Mr. Ashley. We did not complain of this sort of treatment. The tactics it revealed were too transparent to do our movement any real harm. The papers which we familiarly referred to as "the three Posts" – the Morning Post, the Birmingham Post, and the Yorkshire Post– remained out-and-out antisuffrage all through down to the very end of our struggle. But the Standard, which at one time had refused even to insert colourless paragraphs of suffrage news, passed to new editorship, and became much more favourable. It referred sympathetically to our by-election campaigns in 1912 and 1913, saying that suffragists "were displaying energy of the first order"; and after the procession in the Coronation year, which had attracted much favourable notice, it arranged for the daily appearance of a special page, entitled "Woman's Platform," in which facts and arguments for and against suffrage were inserted. This was of great use to us, and we welcomed the publication of the antisuffrage copy, because this gave the paper an entry into the strongholds of our opponents, and also enabled us to judge of their policy and tactics. For instance, it was in the "Woman's Platform" of the Standard, in 1913, that Mr. MacCallum Scott called upon his Liberal friends in the House of Commons to break their suffrage pledges in order to save Mr. Asquith from the humiliation of keeping the promises he had made to us.

In 1913 the Conservative and Unionist Women's Franchise Association, of which the Countess of Selborne had become President, had the happy thought of instituting through the medium of a joint committee of suffragists and antisuffragists a systematic and careful enquiry into the results of women's suffrage in those States of the U.S.A. where it had been put into operation. A questionnaire was drawn up and sent to men and women occupying positions of authority and influence in these States. Of the sixty-three replies received, forty-six were wholly favourable, eight neutral, five vaguely unfavourable, and only four wholly adverse.

The late Hon. Robert Palmer, Lady Selborne's son, tabulated the replies, and published an explanatory comment on them from the suffrage point of view, while the same task on behalf of the antisuffragists was performed by Mr. MacCallum Scott, M.P.

Both reports appeared in the form of articles in the Nineteenth Century and After of February, 1914. Mr. Palmer's article was later published as a small volume, and formed a valuable handbook for suffrage speakers. The supporters of suffrage in the U.S.A. frequently expressed themselves as convinced by experience that the women voters strengthened the forces which made for good government, using such expressions as this: "I do not think we could have cleaned up the city without the women's vote"; or, "At that time I was opposed to woman suffrage … but since I have had experience of it I have become favourable." Mr. MacCallum Scott did not, of course, deny that by an immense majority the replies had supported the women's vote, or that it had been followed, in California, for example, by the immediate passing of much long-sought-for social legislation; but he concluded his article with the words: "I have tried to sum up the evidence as impartially as possible, but I have not tried to conceal my own views, and I have found nothing in the evidence to modify them."

Another very significant breach in the antisuffragist Press stronghold was revealed when on the last day of 1913 The Times published one of its American Supplements "On the Pacific Coast," and, to the amazement and joy of suffragists, wrote most warmly in praise of the complete success of women's suffrage on the whole Pacific seaboard. Suffragists had won the State of Washington in 1910, California in 1911, Oregon and Arizona in 1912. We had expected nothing from The Times but flouts, and gibes, and sneers, and lo! it blessed us altogether. The concluding paragraph sufficiently indicates the general character of the article. It ran thus:

"One-fifth of the United States Senate, one-seventh of the House of Representatives, and one-sixth of the Presidential electoral vote of the United States comes now from States where women exercise suffrage just as men do. Homes have not been disrupted, marriages have not lessened, children have not failed because of the political enfranchisement of women. Instead, there has come a more solemn feeling of obligation, a greater feeling of responsibility on the part of men and women, a higher moral tone in candidates and in measures, and an effort to make the city streets and the country at large a safer place for children when they leave the precincts where maternal love reigns supreme. The women of the suffrage States care not only for their own children, but for the children of women not so fortunately placed."

What a change this represented from the time, three years earlier, when every day for nearly a fortnight The Times in its leading articles and correspondence columns fulminated on the unmeasured national misfortunes which must necessarily result from the enfranchisement of women.

Immediately all our group wrote for as many copies of this blessed supplement as our newsagents could supply. The stock from this source was quickly exhausted; then I wrote officially to The Times office, asking for more, only to receive the reply that no more copies could be obtained. Then we applied for leave to reprint, but the request was declined on the ground that it was the intention of the management to publish the whole supplement in book form. On enquiring the probable date and price, the first question was unanswered, and the reply to the second mentioned what we considered a prohibitive sum.

But we never saw that book. Of course, I carefully preserved my own copy, and quoted it continually when I was speaking. The evidence it gave coincided entirely with what we had learned from our American friends at the Congress of the International Women's Suffrage Alliance held the previous June at Buda Pest, when ladies from the newly enfranchised State of California had told us that, after winning the vote, they had gained in six months legislative reforms for which (without the vote) they had been labouring in vain for twenty years. Twenty months of suffrage, our American friends told us, were worth more than twenty years of "influence."