appeared before the House of Commons with the same plea, but the
Liberal Government was unmoved.

In the passing years petitions aggregating over four million signatures
have been sent in. Just before the recent election the Conservative
National Association presented one signed by 300,000 voters. In their
processions and Hyde Park gatherings the women have made the largest
political demonstrations in history. There have been more meetings
held, more money raised, and more workers enlisted than to obtain
suffrage for the men of the entire world.

From the beginning the various associations have asked for the
franchise on the same terms as granted to men, not all of whom can
vote. For political reasons it seemed impossible to obtain this, and
meanwhile the so-called "militant" movement was inaugurated by women
outraged at the way the measure had been put aside for nearly forty
years. The treatment of these women by the Government forms one of the
blackest pages in English history, and the situation finally became so
alarming that the Parliament was obliged to take action. A Conciliation
Committee was formed of sixty members from all parties, who prepared a
bill that would enfranchise only women householders, those who already
had possessed the municipal franchise since 1869. This does not mean
property-owners, but includes women who may pay rent for only one room.
The associations accepted it partly because it recognized the principle
that sex should not disqualify, but principally because it was
unquestionably all that they could get at present. This is the bill
which was denied a third reading for two years on the ground that it
was not democratic enough! A careful canvass has shown that in the
different parts of the United Kingdom from 80 to 90 per cent, of those
whom it would enfranchise are wage- or salary-earning women, and not one
Labor member of Parliament voted against it.

Women in England have been eligible for School Boards since 1870; have
had the county franchise since 1888; have been eligible for parish and
district councils and for various boards and commissions since 1894,
and hundreds have served in the above offices. In 1907, as recommended
in the address of King Edward, women were made eligible as mayors and
county and city councilors, or aldermen. Three or four have been
elected mayors, and women are now sitting on the councils of London,
Manchester, and other cities. The municipal franchise was conferred on
the women of Scotland in 1882, and of Ireland in 1898.

The Irishwomen's Franchise League demands that the proposed Home Rule
bill shall give to the women of Ireland the same political rights as it
gives to men. This demand is strongly supported by many of the
Nationalist members of Parliament and some of the cabinet, and it is
not impossible that after all these years of oppression the women of
Ireland may be fully enfranchised before those of England, Scotland,
and Wales.

In the Isle of Man women property-owners have had the full suffrage
since 1881, and women rate- or rent-payers, since 1892.


ENGLISH COLONIES

The Parliament of New Zealand gave school suffrage to women in 1877,
municipal in 1886, and Parliamentary in 1893. It was the first country
in the world to grant the complete universal franchise to women.

The six States of Australia had municipal suffrage for women from the
early days of their self-government. South Australia gave them the
right to vote for its State Parliament, or legislature, in 1894, and
West Australia took similar action in 1899. The States federated in a
Commonwealth in 1902 and almost the first act of its national
Parliament was to give the suffrage for its members to all women and
make them eligible to membership. New South Wales immediately conferred
State suffrage on women, and was soon followed by Tasmania and
Queensland. Victoria yielded in 1909. Women of Australia have now
exactly the same franchise rights as men.

In all the provinces of Canada for the last twenty years widows and
spinsters who are rate-payers or property-owners have had the school or
municipal suffrage, in some instances both, and in a few this right is
given to married women. There has been some effort to have this
extended to State and Federal suffrage, but with little force except in
Toronto, where in 1909 a thousand women stormed the House of
Parliament, with a petition signed by 100,000 names.

When the South African Union was formed its constitution took away from
women tax-payers the fragmentary vote they possessed. Petitions to give
them the complete suffrage, signed by 4,000 men and women, were
ignored. Franchise Leagues are working in Cape Colony, Natal, and the
Transvaal, and their efforts are supported by General Botha, the
premier; General Smuts, Minister of the Interior; Mr. Cronwright,
husband of Olive Schreiner, and other members of Parliament, but the
great preponderance of Boer women over English will prevent this
English-controlled body from enfranchising women in the near future.

There are cities in India where women property-owners have a vote in
municipal affairs.


SCANDINAVIA

The Parliament of Norway in 1901 granted municipal suffrage to all
women who in the country districts pay taxes on an income of 300 crowns
(about $75), and in the cities on one of 400 crowns; and they were made
eligible to serve on councils and grand and petit juries. After
strenuous effort on the part of women the Parliament of 1907, by a vote
of 96 to 23, conferred the complete franchise on all who possessed the
municipal. This included about 300,000 of the half-million women. They
were made eligible for Parliament, and at the first election in 1909
one was elected as alternate or deputy, and took her seat with a most
enthusiastic welcome from the other members. In 1910, by a vote of 71
to 10, the taxpaying qualification for the municipal vote was removed.
In 1911, a bill to abolish it for the full suffrage was carried by a
large majority in Parliament, but lacked five votes of the necessary
two-thirds. More than twice as many women as voted in 1907 went to the
polls in 1910 at the municipal elections. Last year 178 women were
elected to city councils, nine to that of Christiania. This year 210
were elected and 379 alternates to fill vacancies that may occur.

Sweden gave municipal suffrage to tax-paying widows and spinsters in
1862. At that time and for many years afterward not one-tenth of the
men had a vote. Then came the rise of the Liberal party and the Social
Democracy, and by 1909 the new Franchise law had been enacted, which
immensely increased the number of men voters, extended the municipal
suffrage to wives, greatly reduced the tax qualification, and made
women eligible to all offices for which they could vote. At the last
election 37 were elected to the councils of 34 towns, 11 in the five
largest. The Woman Suffrage Association is said to be the best
organized body in the country, its branches extending beyond the arctic
circle. It has over 12,000 paid members and has held 1,550 meetings
within a year. In 1909 a bill to extend the full suffrage to women
passed the Second Chamber of the Parliament unanimously, but was
defeated by four to one in the First Chamber, representing the
aristocracy. This year the Suffrage Association made a strong campaign
for the Liberal and Social Democratic parties, and a large majority of
their candidates were elected. The Conservative cabinet was deposed and
the King has called for a new election of the First Chamber. As its
members are chosen by the Provincial Councils and those of the five
largest cities, and women have a vote for these bodies and are members
of them, they will greatly reduce the number of Conservative members of
the Upper House. On the final passage of a suffrage bill the two
chambers must vote jointly and it seems assured of a majority.

Denmark's Parliament in 1908 gave the municipal suffrage to women on
the same terms as exercised by men--that is, to all over 25 years of
age who pay any taxes. Property owned by husband or wife or in common
entitles each to a vote. At the first election 68 per cent. of all the
enfranchised women in the country, and 70 per cent. in Copenhagen,
voted. Seven were elected to the city council of 42 members and one was
afterward appointed to fill a vacancy, and 127 were elected in other
places. Women serve on all committees and are chairmen of important
ones; two are city treasurers. There are two Suffrage Associations
whose combined membership makes the organization of that country in
proportion to population the largest of the kind in the world. They
have 314 local branches and one of the associations has held 1,100
meetings during the past year. The Lower House of Parliament has passed
a bill to give women the complete franchise, which has not been acted
on by the Upper House, composed mainly of the aristocracy. The Prime
Minister and the Speakers of both houses are outspoken in advocacy of
enfranchising women, but political considerations are holding it back.
All say, however, that it will come in the near future.

Iceland, a dependency of Denmark, with its own Parliament, gave
municipal suffrage in 1882 to all widows and spinsters who were
householders or maintained a family, or were self-supporting. In 1902
it made these voters eligible to all municipal offices, and since then
a fourth of the council members of Reykjavik, the capital, have been
women. In 1909 this franchise was extended to all those who pay taxes.
A petition signed by a large majority of all the women in Iceland asked
for the complete suffrage, and during the present year the Parliament
voted to give this to all women over 25 years old. It must be acted
upon by a second Parliament, but its passage is assured, and Icelandic
women will vote on the same terms as men in 1913.


OTHER COUNTRIES

First place must be given to the Grand Duchy of Finland, far more
advanced than any other part of the empire. In 1905, by permission of
the Czar, after a wonderful uprising of the people, they reorganized
their Government and combined the four antiquated chambers of their
Diet into one body. The next year, on demand of thousands of women,
expressed by petitions and public meetings, this new Parliament, almost
without a dissenting voice, conferred the full suffrage on all women.
Since that time from 16 to 25 have been elected to the different
Parliaments by all the political parties.

In Russia women as well as men are struggling for political freedom. In
many of the villages wives cast the votes for their husbands when the
latter are away; women have some suffrage for the zemstvos, local
governing bodies; the Duma has tried to enlarge their franchise rights,
but at present these are submerged in the general chaos.

In Poland an active League for Woman's Rights is cooperating with the
Democratic party of men.

A very strong movement for woman suffrage is proceeding against great
difficulties in the seventeen provinces of Austria, where almost as
many languages are spoken and the bitterest racial feuds exist. Women
are not allowed to form political associations or hold public meetings,
but 4,000 have paraded the streets of Vienna demanding the suffrage. In
Bohemia since 1864 women have had a vote for members of the Diet and
are eligible to sit in it. In all the municipalities outside of Prague
and Liberic, women taxpayers and those of the learned professions may
vote by proxy. Women belong to all the political parties except the
Conservative and constitute 40 per cent, of the Agrarian party. They
are well organized to secure the full suffrage and are holding hundreds
of meetings and distributing thousands of pamphlets. In Bosnia and
Herzegovina women property-owners vote by proxy.

In Hungary the National Woman Suffrage Association includes many
societies having other aims also, and it has branches in 87 towns and
cities, combining all classes of women from the aristocracy to the
peasants. Men are in a turmoil there to secure universal suffrage for
themselves and women are with them in the thick of the fight.

Bulgaria has a Woman Suffrage Association composed of 37 auxiliaries
and it held 456 meetings during the past year.

In Servia women have a fragmentary local vote and are now organizing to
claim the parliamentary franchise.

In Germany it was not until 1908 that the law was changed which forbade
women to take part in political meetings, and since then the Woman
Suffrage Societies, which existed only in the Free Cities, have
multiplied rapidly. Most of them are concentrating on the municipal
franchise, which those of Prussia claim already belongs to them by an
ancient law. In a number of the States women landowners have a proxy
vote in communal matters, but have seldom availed themselves of it. In
Silesia this year, to the amazement of everybody, 2,000 exercised this
privilege. The powerful Social Democratic party stands solidly for
enfranchising women.

A few years ago when the Liberal party in Holland was in power it
prepared to revise the constitution and make woman suffrage one of its
provisions. In 1907 the Conservatives carried the election and blocked
all further progress. Two active Suffrage Associations approximate a
membership of 8,000, with nearly 200 branches, and are building up
public sentiment.

Belgium in 1910 gave women a vote for members of the Board of Trade, an
important tribunal, and made them eligible to serve on it. A Woman
Suffrage Society is making considerable progress.

Switzerland has had a Woman Suffrage Association only a few years.
Geneva and Zurich in 1911 made women eligible to their boards of trade
with a vote for its members, and Geneva gave them a vote in all matters
connected with the State Church.

Italy has a well-supported movement for woman suffrage, and a
discussion in Parliament showed a strong sentiment in favor. Mayor
Nathan, of Rome, is an outspoken advocate. In 1910 all women in trade
were made voters for boards of trade.

The woman-suffrage movement in France differs from that of most other
countries in the number of prominent men in politics connected with it.
President Fallieres loses no opportunity to speak in favor and leading
members of the ministry and the Parliament approve it. Committees have
several times reported a bill, and that of M. Dussaussoy giving all
women a vote for Municipal, District, and General Councils was reported
with full parliamentary suffrage added. In 1910, 163 members asked to
have the bill taken up. Finally it was decided to have a committee
investigate the practical working of woman suffrage in the countries
where it existed. Its extensive and very favorable report has just been
published, and the Woman Suffrage Association states that it expects
early action by Parliament. More than one-third of the wage-earners of
France are women, and these may vote for tribunes and chambers of
commerce and boards of trade. They may be members of the last named and
serve as judges.

The constitution of the new Republic of Portugal gave "universal"
suffrage, and Dr. Beatrice Angelo applied for registration, which was
refused. She carried her case to the courts, her demand was sustained,
and she cast her vote. It was too late for other women to register, but
an organization of 1,000 women was at once formed to secure definite
action of Parliament, with the approval of President Braga and several
members of his cabinet.

The Spanish Chamber has proposed to give women heads of families in the
villages a vote for mayor and council.

A bill to give suffrage to women was recently introduced in the
Parliament of Persia, but was ruled out of order by the president
because the Koran says women have no souls.

Siam has lately adopted a constitution which gives women a municipal
vote.

The leaders of the revolution in China have promised suffrage for women
if it is successful.

Several women voted in place of their husbands at the recent election
in Mexico. Belize, the capital of British Honduras, has just given the
right to women to vote for town council.

Throughout the entire world is an unmistakable tendency to accord woman
a voice in the government, and, strange to say, this is stronger in
monarchies than in republics. In Europe the republics of France and
Switzerland give almost no suffrage to women. Norway and Finland, where
they have the complete franchise; Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, and Great
Britain, where they have all but the parliamentary, and that close at
hand, are monarchies. New Zealand and Australia, where women are fully
enfranchised, are dependencies of a monarchical government.


JANE ADDAMS

The comfortable citizen possessing a vote won for him in a previous
generation, who is so often profoundly disturbed by the cry of "Votes
for Women," seldom connects the present attempt to extend the franchise
with those former efforts, as the results of which he himself became a
member of the enfranchised class. Still less does the average voter
reflect that in order to make self-government a great instrument in the
hands of those who crave social justice, it must ever be built up anew
in relation to changing experiences, and that unless this readjustment
constantly takes place self-government itself is placed in jeopardy.

Yet the adherents of representative government, with its foundations
laid in diversified human experiences, must concede that the value of
such government bears a definite relation to the area of its base and
that the history of its development is merely a record of new human
interests which have become the subjects of governmental action, and
the incorporation into the government itself of those classes who
represented the new interests.

As the governing classes have been increased by the enfranchisement of
one body of men after another, the art of government has been enriched
in human interests, and at the same time as government has become thus
humanized by new interests it has inevitably become further
democratized through the accession of new classes. The two propositions
are complementary. For centuries the middle classes in every country in
Europe struggled to wrest governmental power from the nobles because
they insisted that government must consider the problems of a rising
commerce; on the other hand, the merchants claimed direct
representation because government had already begun to concern itself
with commercial affairs. When the working men of the nineteenth
century, the Chartists in England and the "men of '48" in Germany
vigorously demanded the franchise, national parliaments had already
begun to regulate the condition of mines and the labor of little
children. The working men insisted that they themselves could best
represent their own interests, but at the same time their very entrance
into government increased the volume and pressure of those interests.

Much of the new demand for political enfranchisement arises from a
desire to remedy the unsatisfactory and degrading social conditions
which are responsible for so much wrongdoing and wretchedness. The fate
of all the unfortunate, the suffering, the criminal, is daily forced
upon public attention in painful and intimate ways. But because of the
tendency to nationalize all industrial and commercial questions, to
make the state responsible for the care of the helpless, to safeguard
by law the food we eat and the liquid we drink, to subordinate the
claim of the individual family to the health and well-being of the
community, contemporary women who are without the franchise are much
more outside the real life of the world than any set of disenfranchised
men could possibly have been in all history, unless it were the men
slaves of ancient Greece, because never before has so large an area of
life found civic expression, never has Hegel's definition of the state
been so accurate, that it is the "realization of the moral ideal."
Certain it is that the phenomenal entrance of women into governmental
responsibility in the dawn of the twentieth century is coincident with
the consideration by governmental bodies of the basic human interests
with which women have been traditionally concerned. A most advanced
German statesman recently declared in the Reichstag that it was a
reproach to the Imperial Government itself that out of two million
children born annually in Germany, 400,000 died during the first twelve
months of their existence. He proceeded to catalog various reforms
which might remedy this, such as better housing, the increase of park
areas, the erection of municipal hospitals, the provision for an
adequate milk supply, and many another, but he did not make the very
obvious suggestion that women might be of service in a situation
involving the care of children less than a year old.

Nevertheless, in spite of this lack of perception, women all over the
world are claiming and receiving a place in representative government
because they insist that they will not cease to perform their
traditional duties, simply because these duties have been taken over by
existing governments.

The contemporaneous "Votes for Women" movement is often amorphous and
sporadic, but always spontaneous. It not only appears simultaneously in
various countries, but manifests itself in widely separated groups in
the same country; in every city it embraces the "smart set" and the
hard-driven working women; sometimes it is sectarian and dogmatic, at
others philosophic and grandiloquent, but it is always vital and
constantly becoming more widespread.

In certain aspects it differs from former efforts to extend the
franchise. We recall that the final entrance of the middle class into
government was characterized by two dramatic revolutions, one in
America and one in France, neither of them without bloodshed, and that
although the final efforts of the working men were more peaceful, even
in restrained England the Chartists burned hayricks and destroyed town
property. This world-wide entrance into government on the part of women
is happily a bloodless one. Although some glass has been broken in
England it is noteworthy that the movement as a whole has been without
even a semblance of violence. The creed of the movement, however, is
similar to that promulgated by the doctrinaires of the eighteenth
century: that if increasing the size of the governing body
automatically increases the variety and significance of government,
then only when all the people become the governing class can the
collective resources and organizations of the community be consistently
utilized for the common weal.


DAVID LLOYD-GEORGE

I have long been a convinced advocate of woman suffrage and am now
firmer than ever in supporting it. It seems to me a necessary and
desirable consequence of the vast extension of the functions of
Government which the past century and a half has witnessed. The state,
nowadays, enters the homes of the people and insists on having a voice
in questions that individual men and women, acting together, taking
counsel together, used to settle for themselves in their own way.
Education and the training and feeding of children, the housing and
sanitation problems, provision against old age and sickness, the
prevention of disease--all these are questions that formerly were dealt
with, of course, in a very isolated and inadequate way, by cooperation
and discussion between the heads of each household. What reason is
there why the same cooperation should not continue now that these
matters have been raised to the sphere of legislative enactments and
official administration?

Laws to-day affect the interests of women just as deeply as they do the
interests of men. Some laws--many laws--affect them more gravely and
intimately; and I do not believe you can trust the welfare of a class
or a sex entirely to another class or sex. It is not that their
interests are not identical, but that their point of view is different.
Take the housing problem. A working man leaves home in the morning
within half an hour after he wakes. He is not there all day. He turns
up in the evening and does not always remain there. If the house is a
poor, uncomfortable, dismal one, he very often seeks consolation in the
glare and warmth of the nearest public-house, but he takes very good
care that the wife shall not do as he does. She has got to stay at home
all day, however wretched her surroundings. Who can say that her
experience, her point of view, is not much better worth consulting than
her husband's on the housing problem? Up to the present the only and
the whole share of women in the housing question has been suffering.
Slums are often the punishment of the man. They are almost always the
martyrdom of the woman. Give women the vote, give them an effective
part in the framing and administration of the laws which touch not
merely their own lives but the lives of their children, and they will
soon, I believe, cleanse the land of these foul dens.

All sorts of women's interests were affected by the National Insurance
Act, and all sorts of questions sprang up in connection with it on
which women alone could speak with real authority. But, being voteless,
there was no way in which their views could be authoritatively set
forth. Four million women workers and seven million married women have
come under the operation of the Act, yet not one of them was given the
opportunity of making their opinions known and felt through a
representative in the House of Commons. It was the experience of every
friendly society official I consulted that had it not been for the
women and their splendid self-sacrifice, the subscriptions of the men
would have lapsed long ago. Yet these women who had thus kept the
societies going were not considered worth consulting as to their status
under the Act. The House of Commons itself insisted on there being at
least one woman Commissioner. But if a woman is fit to be a
Commissioner--a very heavy and difficult position involving enormous
responsibilities and demanding great skill and judgment and
experience--how can she be said to be unfit to have a vote?

What is the meaning of democracy? It is that the citizens who are
expected to obey the law are those who make the law. But that is not
true of Great Britain. At least half the adult citizens whose lives are
deeply affected by every law that is carried on the statute-books have
absolutely no voice in making that law. They have no more influence in
the matter than the horses that drag their lords and masters to the
polling-booth.

The drunken loafer who has not earned a living for years is consulted
by the Constitution on questions like the training and upbringing of
children, the national settlement of religion in Wales and elsewhere,
and as to the best method of dealing with the licensing problem. But
the wife whose industry keeps him and his household from beggary, who
pays the rent and taxes which constitute him a voter, who is therefore
really responsible for his qualification to vote, is not taken into
account in the slightest degree. I came in contact not long ago with a
great girls' school in the south of England. It was founded by women,
and it is administered by women. It is one of the most marvelous
organizations in the whole country, and yet, when we had, in the year
1906, to give a national verdict on the question of education, the man
who split the firewood in that school was asked for his opinion about
it, while those ladies were deemed to be absolutely unfit to pass any
judgment on it at all. That is a preposterous and barbarous
anachronism, and so long as it lasts our democracy is one-sided and
incomplete. But it will not last long. No franchise bill can ever again
be brought forward in this country without raising the whole problem of
whether you are going to exclude more than half the citizens of the
land. Women have entered pretty nearly every sphere of commerce and
industry and professional activity and public employment; and there
never was a time when the nation stood more in need of the special
experience, instincts, and sympathy of womanhood in the management of
its affairs. When women get the vote the horizon of the home will be
both brightened and expanded, and their influence on moral and social
and educational questions, especially on the temperance question, and
possibly on the peace of nations, will be constant and humanizing.

Those are a few of the reasons why I favor woman suffrage. But because
I favor it I do not therefore hold myself bound to either speak or vote
for any and every suffrage bill that may be introduced into Parliament.
I voted against the so-called Conciliation Bill which proposed to give
the vote to every woman of property if she chose to take the trouble to
get it, and at the same time enfranchise only about one-tenth or
one-fifteenth of the working women of the country. That was simply a
roundabout way of doubling the plural voters and no democrat could
possibly support it, so long as there remained a single alternative.
The solution that most appeals to me is the one embodied in the
Dickinson Bill, that is to say, a measure conferring the vote on women
householders and on the wives of married electors; and I believe that
it is in that form that woman suffrage will eventually come in this
country. How soon it will come depends very largely on how soon the
militants come to their senses.

I say, unhesitatingly, that the main obstacle to women getting the vote
is militancy and nothing else. Its practitioners really seem to think
that they can terrorize and pinprick Parliament into giving it to them;
and until they learn something of the people they are dealing with,
their whole agitation, so far as the House of Commons is concerned, is
simply and utterly damned. It is perfectly astonishing to recall with
what diabolical ingenuity they have contrived to infuriate all their
opponents, to alienate all their sympathizers, and to stir up against
themselves every prejudice in the average man's breast. A few years ago
they found three-fourths of the Liberal M.P.'s on their side. They at
once proceeded to cudgel their brains as to how they could possibly
drive them into the enemy's camp. They rightly decided that this could
not be done more effectually than by insulting and assaulting the Prime
Minister, the chief of the Party, and a leader for whom all his
colleagues and followers feel an unbounded admiration, regard, and
affection. When they had thus successfully estranged the majority of
Liberals they began to study the political situation a little more
closely. They saw that the Irish Nationalists were very powerful
factors in the Ministerial Coalition. The next problem, therefore, was
how to destroy the last chance that the Irish Nationalists would
support their cause. They achieved this triumphantly first by making
trouble in Belfast where the only Nationalist member is or was a strong
Suffragist, and secondly by going to Dublin when all Nationalist
Ireland had assembled to welcome Mr. Asquith, throwing a hatchet at Mr.
Redmond, and trying to burn down a theater. That finished Ireland, but
still they were dissatisfied. There was a dangerous movement of
sympathy with their agitation in Wales, and they felt that at any cost
it had to be checked. They not only checked, but demolished, it with
the greatest ease by breaking in upon the proceedings at an Eisteddfod.
Now the Eisteddfod is not only the great national festival of Welsh
poetry and music and eloquence, it is also an oasis of peace amid the
sharp contentions of Welsh life. To bring into it any note of politics
or sectarianism or public controversy, even when these things are
rousing the most passionate emotions outside, seems to a Welshman like
the desecration of an altar. That is just what the militants did, and
Welsh interest in their cause fell dead on the spot. But even then they
were not happy. They were still encumbered by the good-will of perhaps
a hundred Tory M.P.'s. But they proved entirely equal to the task of
antagonizing them. They began smashing windows, burning country
mansions, firing race-stands, damaging golf-greens, striking as hard as
they could at the Tory idol of Property. There is really nothing more
left for them to do; they have alienated every friend they ever had;
their work is complete beyond their wildest hopes.

Well, one can not dignify such tactics and antics by the title of
"political propaganda." The proper name for them is sheer organized
lunacy. The militants have erected militancy into a principle. I am
beginning to think that a good many of them are more concerned with the
success of their method than with the success of their cause. They
would rather not have the vote than fail to win it by the particular
brand of agitation they have pinned their faith to. They don't really
want the vote to be given them; they want to get it and to get it by
force; and they are quite unable to see that the more force they use
the stronger becomes the resolve both of Parliament and of the country
to send them away empty-handed. If they had accepted Mr. Asquith's
pledge of two years ago and thanked him for it and helped him redeem
it, woman suffrage by now would be an accomplished fact. But they
preferred their own ways, and what is the result? The result is that
working for their cause in the House of Commons to-day is like swimming
not merely against a tide but against a cataract. The real reason why
the attempts to carry woman suffrage through the House of Commons
during the past two years have failed is not merely the difficulty of
trying to combine a non-party measure with the party system; it is,
above all, the impossibility of using Parliament to pass a bill that
the opinion of the country has been fomented to condemn. The fact that
in both the principal parties there is a clean division of opinion on
this issue and that no Government, or none that is at present
conceivable, can bring forward a measure for the enfranchisement of
women as a Government, is a great, but not necessarily an insuperable
obstacle. The one barrier, there is no surmounting and no getting
round, is the decided and increasing hostility of public sentiment; and
for that the militants have only themselves to thank.

Personally I always try to remember, first, that militancy is the work
of only a very small fraction of the women who want the vote and ought
to have it, and, secondly, that there have been crazy men just as there
are crazy women. Militancy has not affected my own individual attitude
toward the main question and never will. But I recognize that it has
killed the immediate Parliamentary prospects of any and every Suffrage
Bill, and that so long as militancy continues the House of Commons will
do nothing. Only a new movement altogether can now bring women to the
goal of political emancipation; and it will have to be a sane,
hard-headed, practical movement, as full of liveliness as you please,
but absolutely divorced from stones and bombs and torches. When it
arises the friends of the Women's cause will begin to take heart again.


ISRAEL ZANGWILL

THE AWKWARD AGE OF THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT

"And what did she get by it?" said my Uncle Toby.
"What does any woman get by it?" said my father.
"_Martyrdom_" replied the young Benedictine.

TRISTRAM SHANDY.

The present situation of woman suffrage in England recalls the old
puzzle: What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable
body? The irresistible force is the religious passion of myriads of
women, the fury of self-sacrifice, the righteous zeal that shrinks not
even from crime; the immovable body may be summed up as Mr. Asquith.
Almost as gross an incarnation of Tory prejudice as Squire Western, who
laid it down that women should come in with the first dish and go out
with the first glass, Mr. Asquith is all that stands between the sex
and the suffrage.

The answer to the old puzzle, I suppose, would be that though the
immovable body does not move, yet the impact of the irresistible force
generates heat, which, as we know from Tyndall, is a mode of motion. At
any rate, heat is the only mode in which the progress of woman suffrage
can be registered to-day. The movement has come to what Mr. Henry James
might call "the awkward age": an age which has passed beyond argument
without arriving at achievement; an age for which words are too small
and blows too big. And because impatience has been the salvation of the
movement, and because the suffragette will not believe that the fiery
charger which has carried her so far can not really climb the last
ridge of the mountain, but must be replaced by a mule--that miserable
compromise between a steed and an anti-suffragist--the awkward age is
also the dangerous age.

When the Cabinet of Clement's Inn, perceiving that if a woman suffrage
Bill did not pass this session, the last chance--under the Parliament
Act--was gone for this Parliament, resolved to rouse public opinion by
breaking tradesmen's windows, it overlooked that the English are a
nation of shopkeepers, and that the public opinion thus roused would be
for the first time almost unreservedly on the side of the Government.
And when the Cabinet of Downing Street, moved to responsive
recklessness, raided the quarters of the Women's Social and Political
Union and indicted the leaders for criminal conspiracy, it equally
overlooked an essential factor of the situation. The Cabinet of the
conspiracy was at least as much a restraint to suffragettes as an
incentive. It held in order the more violent members, the souls
naturally daring or maddened by forcible feeding. By its imposition of
minor forms of lawlessness, it checked the suggestion of major forms.
Crime was controlled by a curriculum and temper studied by a
time-table. The interruptions at meetings were distributed among the
supposed neuropaths like parts at a play, and we to the maenad who
missed her cue. With the police, too, the suffragettes lived for the
most part on terms of cordial cooperation, each side recognizing that
the other must do its duty. When the suffragettes planned a raid upon
Downing Street or the House of Commons, they gave notice of time and
place, and were provided with a sufficient force of police to prevent
it. Were the day inconvenient for the police, owing to the pressure of
social engagements, another day was fixed, politics permitting. The
_entente cordiale_ extended even in some instances to the jailers and
the bench, and, as in those early days of the Quaker persecution of
which Milton's friend, Ellwood, has left record, prisoners sometimes
left their cells for a night to attend to imperative affairs, or
good-naturedly shortened or canceled their sentences at the pressing
solicitation of perturbed magistrates. Prison was purified by all these
gentle presences, and women criminals profited by the removal of the
abuses they challenged. Holloway became a home from home, in which
beaming wardresses welcomed old offenders, and to which husbands
conducted erring wives in taxicabs, much as Ellwood and his brethren
marched of themselves from Newgate to Bridewell, explaining to the
astonished citizens of London that their word was their keeper. A
suffragette's word stood higher than consols, and the war-game was
played cards on table. True, there were brutal interludes when Home
Secretaries lost their heads, or hysterical magistrates their sense of
justice, or when the chivalrous constabulary of Westminster was
replaced by Whitechapel police, dense to the courtesies of the
situation; but even these tragedies were transfused by its humors, by
the subtle duel of woman's wit and man's lumbering legalism. The
hunger-strike itself, with all its grim horrors and heroisms, was like
the plot of a Gilbertian opera. It placed the Government on the horns
of an Irish bull. Either the law must kill or torture prisoners
condemned for mild offenses, or it must permit them to dictate their
own terms of durance. The criminal code, whose dignity generations of
male rebels could not impair, the whole array of warders, lawyers,
judges, juries, and policemen, which all the scorn of a Tolstoy could
not shrivel, shrank into a laughing-stock. And the comedy of the
situation was complicated and enhanced by the fact that the Home
Office, so far from being an Inquisition, was more or less tenanted by
sympathizers with Female Suffrage, and that a Home Secretary who
secretly admired the quixotry of the hunger-strikers was forced to feed
them forcibly. He must either be denounced by the suffragettes as a
Torquemada or by the public as an incapable. Bayard himself could not
have coped with the position. There was no place like the Home Office,
and its administrators, like the Governors of the Gold Coast, had to be
relieved at frequent intervals. As for the police, their one aim in
life became to avoid arresting suffragettes.

Such was the situation which the Governmental _coup_ transformed to
tragedy unrelieved, giving us in the place of ordered lawlessness and
responsible leadership a guerrilla warfare against society by
irresponsive individuals, more or less unbalanced. That the heroic
incendiary Mrs. Leigh, who deserved penal servitude and a statue, had
been driven wild by forcible feeding was a fact that had given
considerable uneasiness to headquarters, but she had been kept in
comparative discipline. Now that discipline has been destroyed, it is
possible that other free-lances will catch the contagion of crime; nay,
there are signs that the leaders themselves are being infected through
the difficulty of disavowing their martyrs. The wisest course for the
Government would be to pardon Miss Pankhurst, of Paris, and officially
invite her to resume control of her followers before they have quite
controlled her.

But even without such a crowning confession of the failure of its
_coup_, the humiliation of the Government has been sufficiently
complete. Forced to put Mrs. Pankhurst and the Pethick Lawrences into
the luxurious category of political prisoners, next to release them
altogether, and finally to liberate their humblest followers, their
hunger-strike on behalf of whose equal treatment set a new standard of
military chivalry, the Government succeeded only in investing the
vanished Christabel with a new glamour. The Women's Social and
Political Union has again baffled the Government, and come triumphantly
even through the window-breaking episode. For if that episode was
followed by the rejection of the second reading of the woman suffrage
Bill, second readings, like the oaths of the profane, had come to be
absolutely without significance, and the blocking of the Bill beyond
this stage has been assured long before by the tactics of Mr. Redmond,
whose passion for justice, like Mr. Asquith's passion for popular
government, is so curiously monosexual. The only discount from the
Union's winnings is that it gave mendacious M.P.'s, anxious to back out
of woman suffrage, a soft bed to lie on.

One should perhaps also add to the debit side of the account a
considerable loss of popularity on the part of the suffragettes, a loss
which would become complete were window-breaking to pass into graver
crimes, and which would entirely paralyze the effect of their tactics.