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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of My Own Story, by Emmeline Pankhurst
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: My Own Story
+
+Author: Emmeline Pankhurst
+
+Release Date: January 6, 2011 [EBook #34856]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY OWN STORY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif, Martin Pettit, University of
+Toronto Libraries and the Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+MRS. PANKHURST'S OWN STORY
+
+[Illustration: E. Pankhurst]
+
+
+MY OWN STORY
+
+BY
+EMMELINE PANKHURST
+
+[Illustration: Logo]
+
+ILLUSTRATED
+
+LONDON
+EVELEIGH NASH
+
+1914
+
+
+Copyright, 1914, by
+
+HEARSTS'S INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY CO., INC.
+
+_All rights reserved, including the translation into foreign
+languages, including the Scandinavian._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+
+THE MAKING OF A MILITANT
+
+CHAPTER                     PAGE
+      I                        1
+
+     II                       18
+
+    III                       37
+
+     IV                       57
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+
+FOUR YEARS OF PEACEFUL MILITANCY
+
+CHAPTER                     PAGE
+      I                       81
+
+     II                       97
+
+    III                      116
+
+     IV                      131
+
+      V                      149
+
+     VI                      160
+
+    VII                      166
+
+   VIII                      185
+
+
+BOOK III
+
+
+THE WOMEN'S REVOLUTION
+
+CHAPTER                     PAGE
+
+      I                      205
+
+     II                      221
+
+    III                      249
+
+     IV                      270
+
+      V                      285
+
+     VI                      303
+
+    VII                      323
+
+   VIII                      339
+
+     IX                      350
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+Portrait of Mrs. Pankhurst                       _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                         FACING
+                                                           PAGE
+
+Mrs. Pankhurst addressing a by-election crowd                74
+
+Mrs. Pankhurst and Christabel hiding from the police
+on the roof garden at Clements Inn, October, 1908           120
+
+Christabel, Mrs. Drummond and Mrs. Pankhurst in the
+dock, First Conspiracy Trial, October, 1908                 126
+
+Mrs. Pankhurst and Miss Christabel Pankhurst in prison
+dress                                                       132
+
+Inspector Wells conducting Mrs. Pankhurst to the
+House of Commons, June, 1908                                140
+
+Over 1,000 women had been in prison--Broad arrows in
+the 1910 parade                                             170
+
+The head of the deputation on Black Friday, November,
+1910                                                        178
+
+For hours scenes like this were enacted on Black Friday,
+November, 1910                                              180
+
+Riot scenes on Black Friday, November, 1910                 186
+
+In this manner thousands of women throughout the
+Kingdom slept in unoccupied houses over census night        194
+
+The argument of the broken window pane                      218
+
+A suffragette throwing a bag of flour at Mr. Asquith
+in Chester                                                  260
+
+Re-Arrest of Mrs. Pankhurst at Woking, May 26,
+1913                                                        312
+
+Mrs. Pankhurst and Christabel in the garden of
+Christabel's home in Paris                                  324
+
+"Arrested at the King's gate!" May, 1914                    348
+
+
+
+
+ACKNOWLEDGMENT
+
+
+The author wishes to express her deep obligation to Rheta Childe Dorr
+for invaluable editorial services performed in the preparation of this
+volume, especially the American edition.
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD
+
+
+The closing paragraphs of this book were written in the late summer of
+1914, when the armies of every great power in Europe were being
+mobilised for savage, unsparing, barbarous warfare--against one another,
+against small and unaggressive nations, against helpless women and
+children, against civilisation itself. How mild, by comparison with the
+despatches in the daily newspapers, will seem this chronicle of women's
+militant struggle against political and social injustice in one small
+corner of Europe. Yet let it stand as it was written, with
+peace--so-called, and civilisation, and orderly government as the
+background for heroism such as the world has seldom witnessed. The
+militancy of men, through all the centuries, has drenched the world with
+blood, and for these deeds of horror and destruction men have been
+rewarded with monuments, with great songs and epics. The militancy of
+women has harmed no human life save the lives of those who fought the
+battle of righteousness. Time alone will reveal what reward will be
+allotted to the women.
+
+This we know, that in the black hour that has just struck in Europe, the
+men are turning to their women and calling on them to take up the work
+of keeping civilisation alive. Through all the harvest fields, in
+orchards and vineyards, women are garnering food for the men who fight,
+as well as for the children left fatherless by war. In the cities the
+women are keeping open the shops, they are driving trucks and trams, and
+are altogether attending to a multitude of business.
+
+When the remnants of the armies return, when the commerce of Europe is
+resumed by men, will they forget the part the women so nobly played?
+Will they forget in England how women in all ranks of life put aside
+their own interests and organised, not only to nurse the wounded, care
+for the destitute, comfort the sick and lonely, but actually to maintain
+the existence of the nation? Thus far, it must be admitted, there are
+few indications that the English Government are mindful of the unselfish
+devotion manifested by the women. Thus far all Government schemes for
+overcoming unemployment have been directed towards the unemployment of
+men. The work of women, making garments, etc., has in some cases been
+taken away.
+
+At the first alarm of war the militants proclaimed a truce, which was
+answered half-heartedly by the announcement that the Government would
+release all suffrage prisoners who would give an undertaking "not to
+commit further crimes or outrages." Since the truce had already been
+proclaimed, no suffrage prisoner deigned to reply to the Home
+Secretary's provision. A few days later, no doubt influenced by
+representations made to the Government by men and women of every
+political faith--many of them never having been supporters of
+revolutionary tactics--Mr. McKenna announced in the House of Commons
+that it was the intention of the Government, within a few days, to
+release unconditionally, all suffrage prisoners. So ends, for the
+present, the war of women against men. As of old, the women become the
+nurturing mothers of men, their sisters and uncomplaining helpmates. The
+future lies far ahead, but let this preface and this volume close with
+the assurance that the struggle for the full enfranchisement of women
+has not been abandoned; it has simply, for the moment, been placed in
+abeyance. When the clash of arms ceases, when normal, peaceful, rational
+society resumes its functions, the demand will again be made. If it is
+not quickly granted, then once more the women will take up the arms they
+to-day generously lay down. There can be no real peace in the world
+until woman, the mother half of the human family, is given liberty in
+the councils of the world.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+THE MAKING OF A MILITANT
+
+
+Mrs. Pankhurst's Own Story
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Those men and women are fortunate who are born at a time when a great
+struggle for human freedom is in progress. It is an added good fortune
+to have parents who take a personal part in the great movements of their
+time. I am glad and thankful that this was my case.
+
+One of my earliest recollections is of a great bazaar which was held in
+my native city of Manchester, the object of the bazaar being to raise
+money to relieve the poverty of the newly emancipated negro slaves in
+the United States. My mother took an active part in this effort, and I,
+as a small child, was entrusted with a lucky bag by means of which I
+helped to collect money.
+
+Young as I was--I could not have been older than five years--I knew
+perfectly well the meaning of the words slavery and emancipation. From
+infancy I had been accustomed to hear pro and con discussions of slavery
+and the American Civil War. Although the British government finally
+decided not to recognise the Confederacy, public opinion in England was
+sharply divided on the questions both of slavery and of secession.
+Broadly speaking, the propertied classes were pro-slavery, but there
+were many exceptions to the rule. Most of those who formed the circle
+of our family friends were opposed to slavery, and my father, Robert
+Goulden, was always a most ardent abolitionist. He was prominent enough
+in the movement to be appointed on a committee to meet and welcome Henry
+Ward Beecher when he arrived in England for a lecture tour. Mrs. Harriet
+Beecher Stowe's novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," was so great a favourite
+with my mother that she used it continually as a source of bedtime
+stories for our fascinated ears. Those stories, told almost fifty years
+ago, are as fresh in my mind to-day as events detailed in the morning's
+papers. Indeed they are more vivid, because they made a much deeper
+impression on my consciousness. I can still definitely recall the thrill
+I experienced every time my mother related the tale of Eliza's race for
+freedom over the broken ice of the Ohio River, the agonizing pursuit,
+and the final rescue at the hands of the determined old Quaker. Another
+thrilling tale was the story of a negro boy's flight from the plantation
+of his cruel master. The boy had never seen a railroad train, and when,
+staggering along the unfamiliar railroad track, he heard the roar of an
+approaching train, the clattering car-wheels seemed to his strained
+imagination to be repeating over and over again the awful words, "Catch
+a nigger--catch a nigger--catch a nigger--" This was a terrible story,
+and throughout my childhood, whenever I rode in a train, I thought of
+that poor runaway slave escaping from the pursuing monster.
+
+These stories, with the bazaars and the relief funds and subscriptions
+of which I heard so much talk, I am sure made a permanent impression on
+my brain and my character. They awakened in me the two sets of
+sensations to which all my life I have most readily responded: first,
+admiration for that spirit of fighting and heroic sacrifice by which
+alone the soul of civilisation is saved; and next after that,
+appreciation of the gentler spirit which is moved to mend and repair the
+ravages of war.
+
+I do not remember a time when I could not read, nor any time when
+reading was not a joy and a solace. As far back as my memory runs I
+loved tales, especially those of a romantic and idealistic character.
+"Pilgrim's Progress" was an early favourite, as well as another of
+Bunyan's visionary romances, which does not seem to be as well known,
+his "Holy War." At nine I discovered the Odyssey and very soon after
+that another classic which has remained all my life a source of
+inspiration. This was Carlyle's "French Revolution," and I received it
+with much the same emotion that Keats experienced when he read Chapman's
+translation of Homer--" ... like some watcher of the skies, When a new
+planet swims into his ken."
+
+I never lost that first impression, and it strongly affected my attitude
+toward events which were occurring around my childhood. Manchester is a
+city which has witnessed a great many stirring episodes, especially of a
+political character. Generally speaking, its citizens have been liberal
+in their sentiments, defenders of free speech and liberty of opinion. In
+the late sixties there occurred in Manchester one of those dreadful
+events that prove an exception to the rule. This was in connection with
+the Fenian Revolt in Ireland. There was a Fenian riot, and the police
+arrested the leaders. These men were being taken to the jail in a prison
+van. On the way the van was stopped and an attempt was made to rescue
+the prisoners. A man fired a pistol, endeavouring to break the lock of
+the van door. A policeman fell, mortally wounded, and several men were
+arrested and were charged with murder. I distinctly remember the riot,
+which I did not witness, but which I heard vividly described by my older
+brother. I had been spending the afternoon with a young playmate, and my
+brother had come after tea to escort me home. As we walked through the
+deepening November twilight he talked excitedly of the riot, the fatal
+pistol shot, and the slain policeman. I could almost see the man
+bleeding on the ground, while the crowd swayed and groaned around him.
+
+The rest of the story reveals one of those ghastly blunders which
+justice not infrequently makes. Although the shooting was done without
+any intent to kill, the men were tried for murder and three of them were
+found guilty and hanged. Their execution, which greatly excited the
+citizens of Manchester, was almost the last, if not the last, public
+execution permitted to take place in the city. At the time I was a
+boarding-pupil in a school near Manchester, and I spent my week-ends at
+home. A certain Saturday afternoon stands out in my memory, as on my way
+home from school I passed the prison where I knew the men had been
+confined. I saw that a part of the prison wall had been torn away, and
+in the great gap that remained were evidences of a gallows recently
+removed. I was transfixed with horror, and over me there swept the
+sudden conviction that that hanging was a mistake--worse, a crime. It
+was my awakening to one of the most terrible facts of life--that justice
+and judgment lie often a world apart.
+
+I relate this incident of my formative years to illustrate the fact that
+the impressions of childhood often have more to do with character and
+future conduct than heredity or education. I tell it also to show that
+my development into an advocate of militancy was largely a sympathetic
+process. I have not personally suffered from the deprivations, the
+bitterness and sorrow which bring so many men and women to a realisation
+of social injustice. My childhood was protected by love and a
+comfortable home. Yet, while still a very young child, I began
+instinctively to feel that there was something lacking, even in my own
+home, some false conception of family relations, some incomplete ideal.
+
+This vague feeling of mine began to shape itself into conviction about
+the time my brothers and I were sent to school. The education of the
+English boy, then as now, was considered a much more serious matter than
+the education of the English boy's sister. My parents, especially my
+father, discussed the question of my brothers' education as a matter of
+real importance. My education and that of my sister were scarcely
+discussed at all. Of course we went to a carefully selected girls'
+school, but beyond the facts that the head mistress was a gentlewoman
+and that all the pupils were girls of my own class, nobody seemed
+concerned. A girl's education at that time seemed to have for its prime
+object the art of "making home attractive"--presumably to migratory male
+relatives. It used to puzzle me to understand why I was under such a
+particular obligation to make home attractive to my brothers. We were on
+excellent terms of friendship, but it was never suggested to them as a
+duty that they make home attractive to me. Why not? Nobody seemed to
+know.
+
+The answer to these puzzling questions came to me unexpectedly one night
+when I lay in my little bed waiting for sleep to overtake me. It was a
+custom of my father and mother to make the round of our bedrooms every
+night before going themselves to bed. When they entered my room that
+night I was still awake, but for some reason I chose to feign slumber.
+My father bent over me, shielding the candle flame with his big hand. I
+cannot know exactly what thought was in his mind as he gazed down at me,
+but I heard him say, somewhat sadly, "What a pity she wasn't born a
+lad."
+
+My first hot impulse was to sit up in bed and protest that I didn't want
+to be a boy, but I lay still and heard my parents' footsteps pass on
+toward the next child's bed. I thought about my father's remark for many
+days afterward, but I think I never decided that I regretted my sex.
+However, it was made quite clear that men considered themselves superior
+to women, and that women apparently acquiesced in that belief.
+
+I found this view of things difficult to reconcile with the fact that
+both my father and my mother were advocates of equal suffrage. I was
+very young when the Reform Act of 1866 was passed, but I very well
+remember the agitation caused by certain circumstances attending it.
+This Reform Act, known as the Household Franchise Bill, marked the first
+popular extension of the ballot in England since 1832. Under its terms,
+householders paying a minimum of ten pounds a year rental were given the
+Parliamentary vote. While it was still under discussion in the House of
+Commons, John Stuart Mill moved an amendment to the bill to include
+women householders as well as men. The amendment was defeated, but in
+the act as passed the word "man," instead of the usual "male person,"
+was used. Now, under another act of Parliament it had been decided that
+the word "man" always included "woman" unless otherwise specifically
+stated. For example, in certain acts containing rate-paying clauses, the
+masculine noun and pronoun are used throughout, but the provisions apply
+to women rate-payers as well as to men. So when the Reform Bill with the
+word "man" in it became law, many women believed that the right of
+suffrage had actually been bestowed upon them. A tremendous amount of
+discussion ensued, and the matter was finally tested by a large number
+of women seeking to have their names placed upon the register as voters.
+In my city of Manchester 3,924 women, out of a total of 4,215 possible
+women voters, claimed their votes, and their claim was defended in the
+law courts by eminent lawyers, including my future husband, Dr.
+Pankhurst. Of course the women's claim was settled adversely in the
+courts, but the agitation resulted in a strengthening of the
+woman-suffrage agitation all over the country.
+
+I was too young to understand the precise nature of the affair, but I
+shared in the general excitement. From reading newspapers aloud to my
+father I had developed a genuine interest in politics, and the Reform
+Bill presented itself to my young intelligence as something that was
+going to do the most wonderful good to the country. The first election
+after the bill became law was naturally a memorable occasion. It is
+chiefly memorable to me because it was the first one in which I ever
+participated. My sister and I had just been presented with new winter
+frocks, green in colour, and made alike, after the custom of proper
+British families. Every girl child in those days wore a red flannel
+petticoat, and when we first put on our new frocks I was struck with the
+fact that we were wearing red and green--the colours of the Liberal
+party. Since our father was a Liberal, of course the Liberal party ought
+to carry the election, and I conceived a brilliant scheme for helping
+its progress. With my small sister trotting after me, I walked the
+better part of a mile to the nearest polling-booth. It happened to be in
+a rather rough factory district, but we did not notice that. Arrived
+there, we two children picked up our green skirts to show our scarlet
+petticoats, and brimful of importance, walked up and down before the
+assembled crowds to encourage the Liberal vote. From this eminence we
+were shortly snatched by outraged authority in the form of a
+nursery-maid. I believe we were sent to bed into the bargain, but I am
+not entirely clear on this point.
+
+I was fourteen years old when I went to my first suffrage meeting.
+Returning from school one day, I met my mother just setting out for the
+meeting, and I begged her to let me go along. She consented, and without
+stopping to lay my books down I scampered away in my mother's wake. The
+speeches interested and excited me, especially the address of the great
+Miss Lydia Becker, who was the Susan B. Anthony of the English movement,
+a splendid character and a truly eloquent speaker. She was the secretary
+of the Manchester committee, and I had learned to admire her as the
+editor of the _Women's Suffrage Journal_, which came to my mother every
+week. I left the meeting a conscious and confirmed suffragist.
+
+I suppose I had always been an unconscious suffragist. With my
+temperament and my surroundings I could scarcely have been otherwise.
+The movement was very much alive in the early seventies, nowhere more so
+than in Manchester, where it was organised by a group of extraordinary
+men and women. Among them were Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Bright, who were
+always ready to champion the struggling cause. Mr. Jacob Bright, a
+brother of John Bright, was for many years member of Parliament for
+Manchester, and to the day of his death was an active supporter of woman
+suffrage. Two especially gifted women, besides Miss Becker, were members
+of the committee. These were Mrs. Alice Cliff Scatcherd and Miss
+Wolstentholm, now the venerable Mrs. Wolstentholm-Elmy. One of the
+principal founders of the committee was the man whose wife, in later
+years, I was destined to become, Dr. Richard Marsden Pankhurst.
+
+When I was fifteen years old I went to Paris, where I was entered as a
+pupil in one of the pioneer institutions in Europe for the higher
+education of girls. This school, one of the founders of which was Madame
+Edmond Adam, who was and is still a distinguished literary figure, was
+situated in a fine old house in the Avenue de Neuilly. It was under the
+direction of Mlle. Marchef-Girard, a woman distinguished in education,
+and who afterward was appointed government inspector of schools in
+France. Mlle. Marchef-Girard believed that girls' education should be
+quite as thorough and even more practical than the education boys were
+receiving at that time. She included chemistry and other sciences in her
+courses, and in addition to embroidery she had her girls taught
+bookkeeping. Many other advanced ideas prevailed in this school, and the
+moral discipline which the pupils received was, to my mind, as valuable
+as the intellectual training. Mlle. Marchef-Girard held that women
+should be given the highest ideals of honour. Her pupils were kept to
+the strictest principles of truth-telling and candour. Myself she
+understood and greatly benefited by an implicit trust which I am sure I
+could not have betrayed, even had I felt for her less real affection.
+
+My roommate in this delightful school was an interesting young girl of
+my own age, Noemie Rochefort, daughter of that great Republican,
+Communist, journalist, and swordsman, Henri Rochefort. This was very
+shortly after the Franco-Prussian War, and memories of the Empire's
+fall and of the bloody and disastrous Commune were very keen in Paris.
+Indeed my roommate's illustrious father and many others were then in
+exile in New Caledonia for participation in the Commune. My friend
+Noemie was torn with anxiety for her father. She talked of him
+constantly, and many were the blood-curdling accounts of daring and of
+patriotism to which I listened. Henri Rochefort was, in fact, one of the
+moving spirits of the Republican movement in France, and after his
+amazing escape in an open boat from New Caledonia, he lived through many
+years of political adventures of the most lively and picturesque
+character. His daughter and I remained warm friends long after our
+school-days ended, and my association with her strengthened all the
+liberal ideas I had previously acquired.
+
+I was between eighteen and nineteen when I finally returned from school
+in Paris and took my place in my father's home as a finished young lady.
+I sympathised with and worked for the woman-suffrage movement, and came
+to know Dr. Pankhurst, whose work for woman suffrage had never ceased.
+It was Dr. Pankhurst who drafted the first enfranchisement bill, known
+as the Women's Disabilities Removal Bill, and introduced into the House
+of Commons in 1870 by Mr. Jacob Bright. The bill advanced to its second
+reading by a majority vote of thirty-three, but it was killed in
+committee by Mr. Gladstone's peremptory orders. Dr. Pankhurst, as I have
+already said, with another distinguished barrister, Lord Coleridge,
+acted as counsel for the Manchester women, who tried in 1868 to be
+placed on the register as voters. He also drafted the bill giving
+married women absolute control over their property and earnings, a bill
+which became law in 1882.
+
+My marriage with Dr. Pankhurst took place in 1879.
+
+I think we cannot be too grateful to the group of men and women who,
+like Dr. Pankhurst, in those early days lent the weight of their
+honoured names to the suffrage movement in the trials of its struggling
+youth. These men did not wait until the movement became popular, nor did
+they hesitate until it was plain that women were roused to the point of
+revolt. They worked all their lives with those who were organising,
+educating, and preparing for the revolt which was one day to come.
+Unquestionably those pioneer men suffered in popularity for their
+feminist views. Some of them suffered financially, some politically. Yet
+they never wavered.
+
+My married life lasted through nineteen happy years. Often I have heard
+the taunt that suffragists are women who have failed to find any normal
+outlet for their emotions, and are therefore soured and disappointed
+beings. This is probably not true of any suffragist, and it is most
+certainly not true of me. My home life and relations have been as nearly
+ideal as possible in this imperfect world. About a year after my
+marriage my daughter Christabel was born, and in another eighteen months
+my second daughter Sylvia came. Two other children followed, and for
+some years I was rather deeply immersed in my domestic affairs.
+
+I was never so absorbed with home and children, however, that I lost
+interest in community affairs. Dr. Pankhurst did not desire that I
+should turn myself into a household machine. It was his firm belief that
+society as well as the family stands in need of women's services. So
+while my children were still in their cradles I was serving on the
+executive committee of the Women's Suffrage Society, and also on the
+executive board of the committee which was working to secure the Married
+Women's Property Act. This act having passed in 1882, I threw myself
+into the suffrage work with renewed energy. A new Reform Act, known as
+the County Franchise Bill, extending the suffrage to farm labourers, was
+under discussion, and we believed that our years of educational
+propaganda work had prepared the country to support us in a demand for a
+women's suffrage amendment to the bill. For several years we had been
+holding the most splendid meetings in cities all over the kingdom. The
+crowds, the enthusiasm, the generous response to appeals for support,
+all these seemed to justify us in our belief that women's suffrage was
+near. In fact, in 1884, when the County Franchise Bill came before the
+country, we had an actual majority in favour of suffrage in the House of
+Commons.
+
+But a favourable majority in the House of Commons by no means insures
+the success of any measure. I shall explain this at length when I come
+to our work of opposing candidates who have avowed themselves
+suffragists, a course which has greatly puzzled our American friends.
+The Liberal party was in power in 1884, and a great memorial was sent
+to the Prime Minister, the Right Honourable William E. Gladstone, asking
+that a women's suffrage amendment to the County Franchise Bill be
+submitted to the free and unbiased consideration of the House. Mr.
+Gladstone curtly refused, declaring that if a women's suffrage amendment
+should be carried, the Government would disclaim responsibility for the
+bill. The amendment was submitted nevertheless, but Mr. Gladstone would
+not allow it to be freely discussed, and he ordered Liberal members to
+vote against it. What we call a whip was sent out against it, a note
+virtually commanding party members to be on hand at a certain hour to
+vote against the women's amendment. Undismayed, the women tried to have
+an independent suffrage bill introduced, but Mr. Gladstone so arranged
+Parliamentary business that the bill never even came up for discussion.
+
+I am not going to write a history of the woman suffrage movement in
+England prior to 1903, when the Women's Social and Political Union was
+organised. That history is full of repetitions of just such stories as
+the one I have related. Gladstone was an implacable foe of woman
+suffrage. He believed that women's work and politics lay in service to
+men's parties. One of the shrewdest acts of Mr. Gladstone's career was
+his disruption of the suffrage organisation in England. He accomplished
+this by substituting "something just as good," that something being
+Women's Liberal Associations. Beginning in 1881 in Bristol, these
+associations spread rapidly through the country and, in 1887, became a
+National Women's Liberal Federation. The promise of the Federation was
+that by allying themselves with men in party politics, women would soon
+earn the right to vote. The avidity with which the women swallowed this
+promise, left off working for themselves, and threw themselves into the
+men's work was amazing.
+
+The Women's Liberal Federation is an organisation of women who believe
+in the principles of the Liberal party. (The somewhat older Primrose
+League is a similar organisation of women who adhere to Conservative
+party principles.) Neither of these organisations have woman suffrage
+for their object. They came into existence to uphold party ideas and to
+work for the election of party candidates.
+
+I am told that women in America have recently allied themselves with
+political parties, believing, just as we did, that such action would
+break down opposition to suffrage by showing the men that women possess
+political ability, and that politics is work for women as well as men.
+Let them not be deceived. I can assure the American women that our long
+alliance with the great parties, our devotion to party programmes, our
+faithful work at elections, never advanced the suffrage cause one step.
+The men accepted the services of the women, but they never offered any
+kind of payment.
+
+As far as I am concerned, I did not delude myself with any false hopes
+in the matter. I was present when the Women's Liberal Federation came
+into existence. Mrs. Gladstone presided, offering the meeting many
+consolatory words for the absence of "our great leader," Mr. Gladstone,
+who of course had no time to waste on a gathering of women. At Mrs.
+Jacob Bright's request I joined the Federation. At this stage of my
+development I was a member of the Fabian Society, and I had considerable
+faith in the permeating powers of its mild socialism. But I was already
+fairly convinced of the futility of trusting to political parties. Even
+as a child I had begun to wonder at the _naïve_ faith of party members
+in the promises of their leaders. I well remember my father returning
+home from political meetings, his face aglow with enthusiasm. "What
+happened, father?" I would ask, and he would reply triumphantly, "Ah! We
+passed the resolution."
+
+"Then you'll get your measure through the next session," I predicted.
+
+"I won't say that," was the usual reply. "Things don't always move as
+quickly as that. But we passed the resolution."
+
+Well, the suffragists, when they were admitted into the Women's Liberal
+Federation must have felt that they had passed their resolution. They
+settled down to work for the party and to prove that they were as
+capable of voting as the recently enfranchised farm labourers. Of course
+a few women remained loyal to suffrage. They began again on the old
+educational lines to work for the cause. Not one woman took counsel with
+herself as to how and why the agricultural labourers had won their
+franchise. They had won it, as a matter of fact, by burning hay-ricks,
+rioting, and otherwise demonstrating their strength in the only way that
+English politicians can understand. The threat to march a hundred
+thousand men to the House of Commons unless the bill was passed played
+its part also in securing the agricultural labourer his political
+freedom. But no woman suffragist noticed that. As for myself, I was too
+young politically to learn the lesson then. I had to go through years of
+public work before I acquired the experience and the wisdom to know how
+to wring concessions from the English Government. I had to hold public
+office. I had to go behind the scenes in the government schools, in the
+workhouses and other charitable institutions; I had to get a close-hand
+view of the misery and unhappiness of a man-made world, before I reached
+the point where I could successfully revolt against it. It was almost
+immediately after the collapse of the woman suffrage movement in 1884
+that I entered upon this new phase of my career.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+In 1885, a year after the failure of the third women's suffrage bill, my
+husband, Dr. Pankhurst, stood as the Liberal candidate for Parliament in
+Rotherline, a riverside constituency of London. I went through the
+campaign with him, speaking and canvassing to the best of my ability.
+Dr. Pankhurst was a popular candidate, and unquestionably would have
+been returned but for the opposition of the Home-Rulers. Parnell was in
+command, and his settled policy was opposition to all Government
+candidates. So, in spite of the fact that Dr. Pankhurst was a staunch
+upholder of home rule, the Parnell forces were solidly opposed to him,
+and he was defeated. I remember expressing considerable indignation, but
+my husband pointed out to me that Parnell's policy was absolutely right.
+With his small party he could never hope to win home rule from a hostile
+majority, but by constant obstruction he could in time wear out the
+Government, and force it to surrender. That was a valuable political
+lesson, one that years later I was destined to put into practice.
+
+The following year found us living in London, and, as usual, interesting
+ourselves with labour matters and other social movements. This year was
+memorable for a great strike of women working in the Bryant and May
+match factories. I threw myself into this strike with enthusiasm,
+working with the girls and with some women of prominence, among these
+the celebrated Mrs. Annie Besant. The strike was a successful one, the
+girls winning substantial improvements in their working conditions.
+
+It was a time of tremendous unrest, of labour agitations, of strikes and
+lockouts. It was a time also when a most stupid reactionary spirit
+seemed to take possession of the Government and the authorities. The
+Salvation Army, the Socialists, the trade-unionists--in fact, all bodies
+holding outdoor meetings--were made special objects of attack. As a
+protest against this policy a Law and Liberty League was formed in
+London, and an immense Free Speech meeting was held in Trafalgar Square,
+John Burns and Cunningham Graham being the principal speakers. I was
+present at this meeting, which resulted in a bloody riot between the
+police and the populace. The Trafalgar Square Riot is historic, and to
+it Mr. John Burns owes, in large part, his subsequent rise to political
+eminence. Both John Burns and Cunningham Graham served prison sentences
+for the part they played in the riot, but they gained fame, and they did
+much to establish the right of free speech for English men. English
+women are still contending for that right.
+
+In 1890 my last child was born in London. I now had a family of five
+young children, and for a time I was less active in public work. On the
+retirement of Mrs. Annie Besant from the London School Board I had been
+asked to stand as candidate for the vacancy, but although I should have
+enjoyed the work, I decided not to accept this invitation. The next
+year, however, a new suffrage association, the Women's Franchise League,
+was formed, and I felt it my duty to become affiliated with it The
+League was preparing a new suffrage bill, the provisions of which I
+could not possibly approve, and I joined with old friends, among whom
+were Mrs. Jacob Bright, Mrs. Wolstentholm-Elmy, who was a member of the
+London School Board, and Mrs. Stanton Blatch, then resident in England,
+in an effort to substitute the original bill drafted by Dr. Pankhurst.
+As a matter of fact, neither of the bills was introduced into Parliament
+that year. Mr. (now Lord) Haldane, who had the measure in charge,
+introduced one of his own drafting. It was a truly startling bill,
+royally inclusive in its terms. It not only enfranchised all women,
+married and unmarried, of the householding classes, but it made them
+eligible to all offices under the Crown. The bill was never taken
+seriously by the Government, and indeed it was never intended that it
+should be, as we were later made to understand. I remember going with
+Mrs. Stanton Blatch to the law courts to see Mr. Haldane, and to protest
+against the introduction of a measure that had not the remotest chance
+of passing.
+
+"All, that bill," said Haldane, "is for the future."
+
+All their woman suffrage bills are intended for the future, a future so
+remote as to be imperceptible. We were beginning to understand this even
+in 1891. However, as long as there was a bill, we determined to support
+it. Accordingly, we canvassed the members, distributed a great deal of
+literature, and organised and addressed meetings. We not only made
+speeches ourselves, but we induced friendly members of Parliament to go
+on our platforms. One of these meetings, held in an East End Radical
+club, was addressed by Mr. Haldane and a young man who accompanied him.
+This young man, Sir Edward Grey, then in the beginning of his career,
+made an eloquent plea for woman's suffrage. That Sir Edward Grey should,
+later in life, become a bitter foe of woman's suffrage need astonish no
+one. I have known many young Englishmen who began their political life
+as suffrage speakers and who later became anti-suffragists or traitorous
+"friends" of the cause. These young and aspiring statesmen have to
+attract attention in some fashion, and the espousal of advanced causes,
+such as labour or women's suffrage, seems an easy way to accomplish that
+end.
+
+Well, our speeches and our agitation did nothing at all to assist Mr.
+Haldane's impossible bill. It never advanced beyond the first reading.
+
+Our London residence came to an end in 1893. In that year we returned to
+our Manchester home, and I again took up the work of the Suffrage
+Society. At my suggestion the members began to organise their first
+out-of-door meetings, and we continued these until we succeeded in
+working up a great meeting that filled Free Trade Hall, and overflowed
+into and crowded a smaller hall near at hand. This marked the beginning
+of a campaign of propaganda among working people, an object which I had
+long desired to bring about.
+
+And now began a new and, as I look back on it, an absorbingly
+interesting stage of my career. I have told how our leaders in the
+Liberal Party had advised the women to prove their fitness for the
+Parliamentary franchise by serving in municipal offices, especially the
+unsalaried offices. A large number of women had availed themselves of
+this advice, and were serving on Boards of Guardians, on school boards,
+and in other capacities. My children now being old enough for me to
+leave them with competent nurses, I was free to join these ranks. A year
+after my return to Manchester I became a candidate for the Board of Poor
+Law Guardians. Several weeks before, I had contested unsuccessfully for
+a place on the school board. This time, however, I was elected, heading
+the poll by a very large majority.
+
+For the benefit of American readers I shall explain something of the
+operation of our English Poor Law. The duty of the law is to administer
+an act of Queen Elizabeth, one of the greatest reforms effected by that
+wise and humane monarch. When Elizabeth came to the throne she found
+England, the Merrie England of contemporary poets, in a state of
+appalling poverty. Hordes of people were literally starving to death, in
+wretched hovels, in the streets, and at the very gates of the palace.
+The cause of all this misery was the religious reformation under Henry
+VIII, and the secession from Rome of the English Church. King Henry, it
+is known, seized all the Church lands, the abbeys and the convents, and
+gave them as rewards to those nobles and favourites who had supported
+his policies. But in taking over the Church's property the Protestant
+nobles by no means assumed the Church's ancient responsibilities of
+lodging wayfarers, giving alms, nursing the sick, educating youths, and
+caring for the young and the superannuated. When the monks and the nuns
+were turned out of their convents these duties devolved on no one. The
+result, after the brief reign of Edward VI and the bloody one of Queen
+Mary, was the social anarchy inherited by Elizabeth.
+
+This great queen and great woman, perceiving that the responsibility for
+the poor and the helpless rightfully rests on the community, caused an
+act to be passed creating in the parishes public bodies to deal with
+local conditions of poverty. The Board of Poor Law Guardians disburses
+for the poor the money coming from the Poor Rates (taxes), and some
+additional moneys allowed by the local government board, the president
+of which is a cabinet minister. Mr. John Burns is the present incumbent
+of the office. The Board of Guardians has control of the institution we
+call the workhouse. You have, I believe, almshouses, or poorhouses, but
+they are not quite so extensive as our workhouses, which are all kinds
+of institutions in one. We had, in my workhouse, a hospital with nine
+hundred beds, a school with several hundred children, a farm, and many
+workshops.
+
+When I came into office I found that the law in our district, Chorlton,
+was being very harshly administered. The old board had been made up of
+the kind of men who are known as rate savers. They were guardians, not
+of the poor but of the rates, and, as I soon discovered, not very astute
+guardians even of money. For instance, although the inmates were being
+very poorly fed, a frightful waste of food was apparent. Each inmate was
+given each day a certain weight of food, and bread formed so much of the
+ration that hardly anyone consumed all of his portion. In the farm
+department pigs were kept on purpose to consume this surplus of bread,
+and as pigs do not thrive on a solid diet of stale bread the animals
+fetched in the market a much lower price than properly fed farm pigs. I
+suggested that, instead of giving a solid weight of bread in one lump,
+the loaf be cut in slices and buttered with margarine, each person being
+allowed all that he cared to eat. The rest of the board objected, saying
+that our poor charges were very jealous of their rights, and would
+suspect in such an innovation an attempt to deprive them of a part of
+their ration. This was easily overcome by the suggestion that we consult
+the inmates before we made the change. Of course the poor people
+consented, and with the bread that we saved we made puddings with milk
+and currants, to be fed to the old people of the workhouse. These old
+folks I found sitting on backless forms, or benches. They had no
+privacy, no possessions, not even a locker. The old women were without
+pockets in their gowns, so they were obliged to keep any poor little
+treasures they had in their bosoms. Soon after I took office we gave the
+old people comfortable Windsor chairs to sit in, and in a number of ways
+we managed to make their existence more endurable.
+
+These, after all, were minor benefits. But it does gratify me when I
+look back and remember what we were able to do for the children of the
+Manchester workhouse. The first time I went into the place I was
+horrified to see little girls seven and eight years old on their knees
+scrubbing the cold stones of the long corridors. These little girls were
+clad, summer and winter, in thin cotton frocks, low in the neck and
+short sleeved. At night they wore nothing at all, night dresses being
+considered too good for paupers. The fact that bronchitis was epidemic
+among them most of the time had not suggested to the guardians any
+change in the fashion of their clothes. There was a school for the
+children, but the teaching was of the poorest order. They were forlorn
+enough, these poor innocents, when I first met them. In five years' time
+we had changed the face of the earth for them. We had bought land in the
+country and had built a cottage system home for the children, and we had
+established for them a modern school with trained teachers. We had even
+secured for them a gymnasium and a swimming-bath. I may say that I was
+on the building committee of the board, the only woman member.
+
+Whatever may be urged against the English Poor Law system, I maintain
+that under it no stigma of pauperism need be applied to workhouse
+children. If they are treated like paupers of course they will be
+paupers, and they will grow up paupers, permanent burdens on society;
+but if they are regarded merely as children under the guardianship of
+the state, they assume quite another character. Rich children are not
+pauperized by being sent to one or another of the free public schools
+with which England is blest. Yet a great many of those schools, now
+exclusively used for the education of upper middle-class boys, were
+founded by legacies left to educate the poor--girls as well as boys. The
+English Poor Law, properly administered, ought to give back to the
+children of the destitute what the upper classes have taken from them, a
+good education on a self-respecting basis.
+
+The trouble is, as I soon perceived after taking office, the law cannot,
+in existing circumstances, do all the work, even for children, that it
+was intended to do. We shall have to have new laws, and it soon became
+apparent to me that we can never hope to get them until women have the
+vote. During the time I served on the board, and for years since then,
+women guardians all over the country have striven in vain to have the
+law reformed in order to ameliorate conditions which break the hearts of
+women to see, but which apparently affect men very little. I have spoken
+of the little girls I found scrubbing the workhouse floors. There were
+others at the hateful labour who aroused my keenest pity. I found that
+there were pregnant women in that workhouse, scrubbing floors, doing the
+hardest kind of work, almost until their babies came into the world.
+Many of them were unmarried women, very, very young, mere girls. These
+poor mothers were allowed to stay in the hospital after confinement for
+a short two weeks. Then they had to make a choice of staying in the
+workhouse and earning their living by scrubbing and other work, in
+which case they were separated from their babies; or of taking their
+discharges. They could stay and be paupers, or they could leave--leave
+with a two-weeks-old baby in their arms, without hope, without home,
+without money, without anywhere to go. What became of those girls, and
+what became of their hapless infants? That question was at the basis of
+the women guardians' demand for a reform of one part of the Poor Law.
+
+That section deals with the little children who are boarded out, not by
+the workhouse, but by the parents, that parent being almost always the
+mother. It is from that class of workhouse mothers--mostly young servant
+girls--which thoughtless people say all working girls ought to be; it is
+from that class more than from any other that cases of illegitimacy
+come. Those poor little servant girls, who can get out perhaps only in
+the evening, whose minds are not very cultivated, and who find all the
+sentiment of their lives in cheap novelettes, fall an easy prey to those
+who have designs against them. These are the people by whom the babies
+are mostly put out to nurse, and the mothers have to pay for their keep.
+Of course the babies are very badly protected. The Poor Law Guardians
+are supposed to protect them by appointing inspectors to visit the homes
+where the babies are boarded. But, under the law, if a man who ruins a
+girl pays down a lump sum of twenty pounds, less than a hundred dollars,
+the boarding home is immune from inspection. As long as a baby-farmer
+takes only one child at a time, the twenty pounds being paid, the
+inspectors cannot inspect the house. Of course the babies die with
+hideous promptness, often long before the twenty pounds have been spent,
+and then the baby-farmers are free to solicit another victim. For years,
+as I have said, women have tried in vain to get that one small reform of
+the Poor Law, to reach and protect all illegitimate children, and to
+make it impossible for any rich scoundrel to escape future liability for
+his child because of the lump sum he has paid down. Over and over again
+it has been tried, but it has always failed, because the ones who really
+care about the thing are mere women.
+
+I thought I had been a suffragist before I became a Poor Law Guardian,
+but now I began to think about the vote in women's hands not only as a
+right but as a desperate necessity. These poor, unprotected mothers and
+their babies I am sure were potent factors in my education as a
+militant. In fact, all the women I came in contact with in the workhouse
+contributed to that education. Very soon after I went on the board I saw
+that the class of old women who came into the workhouse were in many
+ways superior to the kind of old men who came into the workhouse. One
+could not help noticing it. They were, to begin with, more industrious.
+In fact, it was quite touching to see their industry and patience. Old
+women, over sixty and seventy years of age, did most of the work of that
+place, most of the sewing, most of the things that kept the house clean
+and which supplied the inmates with clothing. I found that the old men
+were different. One could not get very much work out of them. They liked
+to stop in the oakum picking-room, where they were allowed to smoke;
+but as to real work, very little was done by our old men.
+
+I began to make inquiries about these old women. I found that the
+majority of them were not women who had been dissolute, who had been
+criminal, but women who had lead perfectly respectable lives, either as
+wives and mothers, or as single women earning their own living. A great
+many were of the domestic-servant class, who had not married, who had
+lost their employment, and had reached a time of life when it was
+impossible to get more employment. It was through no fault of their own,
+but simply because they had never earned enough to save. The average
+wage of working women in England is less than two dollars a week. On
+this pittance it is difficult enough to keep alive, and of course it is
+impossible to save. Every one who knows anything about conditions under
+which our working women live knows that few of them can ever hope to put
+by enough to keep them in old age. Besides, the average working woman
+has to support others than herself. How can she save?
+
+Some of our old women were married. Many of them, I found, were widows
+of skilled artisans who had had pensions from their unions, but the
+pensions had died with the men. These women, who had given up the power
+to work for themselves, and had devoted themselves to working for their
+husbands and children, were left penniless. There was nothing for them
+to do but to go into the workhouse. Many of them were widows of men who
+had served their country in the army or the navy. The men had had
+pensions from the government, but the pensions had died with them, and
+so the women were in the workhouse.
+
+We shall not in future, I hope, find so many respectable old women in
+English workhouses. We have an old-age pension law now, which allows old
+women as well as old men the sum of five shillings--$1.20--a week;
+hardly enough to live on, but enough to enable the poor to keep their
+old fathers and mothers out of the workhouse without starving themselves
+or their children. But when I was a Poor Law Guardian there was simply
+nothing to do with a woman when her life of toil ceased except make a
+pauper of her.
+
+I wish I had space to tell you of other tragedies of women I witnessed
+while I was on that board. In our out-relief department, which exists
+chiefly for able-bodied poor and dependent persons, I was brought into
+contact with widows who were struggling desperately to keep their homes
+and families together. The law allowed these women relief of a certain
+very inadequate kind, but for herself and one child it offered no relief
+except the workhouse. Even if the woman had a baby at her breast she was
+regarded, under the law, as an able-bodied man. Women, we are told,
+should stay at home and take care of their children. I used to astound
+my men colleagues by saying to them: "When women have the vote they will
+see that mothers _can_ stay at home and care for their children. You men
+have made it impossible for these mothers to do that."
+
+I am convinced that the enfranchised woman will find many ways in which
+to lessen, at least, the curse of poverty. Women have more practical
+ideas about relief, and especially of prevention of dire poverty, than
+men display. I was struck with this whenever I attended the District
+Conferences and the annual Poor Law Union Meetings. In our discussions
+the women showed themselves much more capable, much more resourceful,
+than the men. I remember two papers which I prepared and which caused
+considerable discussion. One of these was on the Duties of Guardians in
+Times of Unemployment, in which I pointed out that the government had
+one reserve of employment for men which could always be used. We have,
+on our northwest coast, a constant washing away of the fore shore. Every
+once in a while the question of coast reclamation comes up for
+discussion, but I had never heard any man suggest coast reclamation as a
+means of giving the unemployed relief.
+
+
+In 1898 I suffered an irreparable loss in the death of my husband. His
+death occurred suddenly and left me with the heavy responsibility of
+caring for a family of children, the eldest only seventeen years of age.
+I resigned my place on the Board of Guardians, and was almost
+immediately appointed to the salaried office of Registrar of Births and
+Deaths in Manchester. We have registrars of births, deaths and marriages
+in England, but since the act establishing the last named contains the
+words "male person," a woman may not be appointed a registrar of
+marriages. The head of this department of the government is the
+registrar-general, with offices at Somerset House, London, where all
+vital statistics are returned and all records filed.
+
+It was my duty as registrar of births and deaths to act as chief census
+officer of my district; I was obliged to receive all returns of births
+and deaths, record them, and send my books quarterly to the office of
+the registrar-general. My district was in a working-class quarter, and
+on this account I instituted evening office hours twice a week. It was
+touching to observe how glad the women were to have a woman registrar to
+go to. They used to tell me their stories, dreadful stories some of
+them, and all of them pathetic with that patient and uncomplaining
+pathos of poverty. Even after my experience on the Board of Guardians, I
+was shocked to be reminded over and over again of the little respect
+there was in the world for women and children. I have had little girls
+of thirteen come to my office to register the births of their babies,
+illegitimate, of course. In many of these cases I found that the child's
+own father or some near male relative was responsible for her state.
+There was nothing that could be done in most cases. The age of consent
+in England is sixteen years, but a man can always claim that he thought
+the girl was over sixteen. During my term of office a very young mother
+of an illegitimate child exposed her baby, and it died. The girl was
+tried for murder and was sentenced to death. This was afterwards
+commuted, it is true, but the unhappy child had the horrible experience
+of the trial and the sentence "to be hanged by the neck, until you are
+dead." The wretch who was, from the point of view of justice, the real
+murderer of the baby, received no punishment at all.
+
+I needed only one more experience after this one, only one more contact
+with the life of my time and the position of women, to convince me that
+if civilisation is to advance at all in the future, it must be through
+the help of women, women freed of their political shackles, women with
+full power to work their will in society. In 1900 I was asked to stand
+as a candidate for the Manchester School Board. The schools were then
+under the old law, and the school boards were very active bodies. They
+administered the Elementary Education Act, bought school sites, erected
+buildings, employed and paid teachers. The school code and the
+curriculum were framed by the Board of Education, which is part of the
+central government. Of course this was absurd. A body of men in London
+could not possibly realise all the needs of boys and girls in remote
+parts of England. But so it was.
+
+As a member of the school board I very soon found that the teachers,
+working people of the higher grade, were in exactly the same position as
+the working people of the lower grades. That is, the men had all the
+advantage. Teachers had a representative in the school board councils.
+Of course that representative was a man teacher, and equally of course,
+he gave preference to the interests of the men teachers. Men teachers
+received much higher salaries than the women, although many of the
+women, in addition to their regular class work, had to teach sewing and
+domestic science into the bargain. They received no extra pay for their
+extra work. In spite of this added burden, and in spite of the lower
+salaries received, I found that the women cared a great deal more about
+their work, and a great deal more about the children than the men. It
+was a winter when there was a great deal of poverty and unemployment in
+Manchester. I found that the women teachers were spending their slender
+salaries to provide regular dinners for destitute children, and were
+giving up their time to waiting on them and seeing that they were
+nourished. They said to me, quite simply: "You see, the little things
+are too badly off to study their lessons. We have to feed them before we
+can teach them."
+
+Well, instead of seeing that women care more for schools and school
+children than men do and should therefore have more power in education,
+the Parliament of 1900 actually passed a law which took education in
+England entirely out of the hands of women. This law abolished the
+school board altogether and placed the administration of schools in the
+hands of the municipalities. Certain corporations had formerly made
+certain grants to technical education--Manchester had built a
+magnificent technical college--and now the corporations had full control
+of both elementary and secondary education.
+
+The law did indeed provide that the corporations should co-opt at least
+one woman on their education boards. Manchester co-opted four women, and
+at the strong recommendation of the Labour Party, I was one of the
+women chosen. At their urgent solicitation I was appointed to the
+Committee on Technical Instruction, the one woman admitted to this
+committee. I learned that the Manchester Technical College, called the
+second best in Europe, spending thousands of pounds annually for
+technical training, had practically no provision for training women.
+Even in classes where they might easily have been admitted, bakery and
+confectionery classes and the like, the girls were kept out because the
+men's trades unions objected to their being educated for such skilled
+work. It was rapidly becoming clear to my mind that men regarded women
+as a servant class in the community, and that women were going to remain
+in the servant class until they lifted themselves out of it. I asked
+myself many times in those days what was to be done. I had joined the
+Labour Party, thinking that through its councils something vital might
+come, some such demand for the women's enfranchisement that the
+politicians could not possibly ignore. Nothing came.
+
+All these years my daughters had been growing up. All their lives they
+had been interested in women's suffrage. Christabel and Sylvia, as
+little girls, had cried to be taken to meetings. They had helped in our
+drawing-room meetings in every way that children can help. As they grew
+older we used to talk together about the suffrage, and I was sometimes
+rather frightened by their youthful confidence in the prospect, which
+they considered certain, of the success of the movement. One day
+Christabel startled me with the remark: "How long you women have been
+trying for the vote. For my part, I mean to get it."
+
+Was there, I reflected, any difference between trying for the vote and
+getting it? There is an old French proverb, "If youth could know; if age
+could do." It occurred to me that if the older suffrage workers could in
+some way join hands with the young, unwearied and resourceful
+suffragists, the movement might wake up to new life and new
+possibilities. After that I and my daughters together sought a way to
+bring about that union of young and old which would find new methods,
+blaze new trails. At length we thought we had found a way.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+In the summer of 1902--I think it was 1902--Susan B. Anthony paid a
+visit to Manchester, and that visit was one of the contributory causes
+that led to the founding of our militant suffrage organisation, the
+Women's Social and Political Union. During Miss Anthony's visit my
+daughter Christabel, who was very deeply impressed, wrote an article for
+the Manchester papers on the life and works of the venerable reformer.
+After her departure Christabel spoke often of her, and always with
+sorrow and indignation that such a splendid worker for humanity was
+destined to die without seeing the hopes of her lifetime realised. "It
+is unendurable," declared my daughter, "to think of another generation
+of women wasting their lives begging for the vote. We must not lose any
+more time. We must act."
+
+By this time the Labour Party, of which I was still a member, had
+returned Mr. Keir Hardie to Parliament, and we decided that the first
+step in a campaign of action was to make the Labour Party responsible
+for a new suffrage bill. At a recent annual conference of the party I
+had moved a resolution calling upon the members to instruct their own
+member of Parliament to introduce a bill for the enfranchisement of
+women. The resolution was passed, and we determined to organise a
+society of women to demand immediate enfranchisement, not by means of
+any outworn missionary methods, but through political action.
+
+It was in October, 1903, that I invited a number of women to my house in
+Nelson street, Manchester, for purposes of organisation. We voted to
+call our new society the Women's Social and Political Union, partly to
+emphasise its democracy, and partly to define its object as political
+rather than propagandist. We resolved to limit our membership
+exclusively to women, to keep ourselves absolutely free from any party
+affiliation, and to be satisfied with nothing but action on our
+question. Deeds, not words, was to be our permanent motto.
+
+To such a pass had the women's suffrage cause come in my country that
+the old leaders, who had done such fine educational work in the past,
+were now seemingly content with expressions of sympathy and regret on
+the part of hypocritical politicians. This fact was thrust upon me anew
+by an incident that occurred almost at the moment of the founding of the
+Women's Social and Political Union. In our Parliament no bill has a
+chance of becoming a law unless it is made a Government measure. Private
+members are at liberty to introduce measures of their own, but these
+rarely reach the second reading, or debatable stage. So much time is
+given to discussion of Government measures that very little time can be
+given to any private bills. About one day in a week is given over to
+consideration of private measures, to which, as we say, the Government
+give facilities; and since there are a limited number of weeks in a
+session, the members, on the opening days of Parliament, meet and draw
+lots to determine who shall have a place in the debates. Only these
+successful men have a chance to speak to their bills, and only those who
+have drawn early chances have any prospect of getting much discussion on
+their measures.
+
+Now, the old suffragists had long since given up hope of obtaining a
+Government suffrage bill, but they clung to a hope that a private
+member's bill would some time obtain consideration. Every year, on the
+opening day of Parliament, the association sent a deputation of women to
+the House of Commons, to meet so-called friendly members and consider
+the position of the women's suffrage cause. The ceremony was of a most
+conventional, not to say farcical character. The ladies made their
+speeches and the members made theirs. The ladies thanked the friendly
+members for their sympathy, and the members renewed their assurances
+that they believed in women's suffrage and would vote for it when they
+had an opportunity to do so. Then the deputation, a trifle sad but
+entirely tranquil, took its departure, and the members resumed the real
+business of life, which was support of their party's policies.
+
+Such a ceremony as this I attended soon after the founding of the
+W. S. P. U. Sir Charles M'Laren was the friendly member who presided
+over the gathering, and he did his full duty in the matter of formally
+endorsing the cause of women's suffrage. He assured the delegation of
+his deep regret, as well as the regret of numbers of his colleagues,
+that women so intelligent, so devoted, etc., should remain
+unenfranchised. Other members did likewise. The ceremonies drew to a
+close, but I, who had not been asked to speak, determined to add
+something to the occasion.
+
+"Sir Charles M'Laren," I began abruptly, "has told us that numbers of
+his colleagues desire the success of the women's suffrage cause. Now
+every one of us knows that at this moment the members of the House of
+Commons are balloting for a place in the debates. Will Sir Charles
+M'Laren tell us if any member is preparing to introduce a bill for
+women's suffrage? Will he tell us what he and the other members will
+pledge themselves to _do_ for the reform they so warmly endorse?"
+
+Of course, the embarrassed Sir Charles was not prepared to tell us
+anything of the kind, and the deputation departed in confusion and
+wrath. I was told that I was an interloper, an impertinent intruder. Who
+asked me to say anything? And what right had I to step in and ruin the
+good impression they had made? No one could tell how many friendly
+members I had alienated by my unfortunate remarks.
+
+I went back to Manchester and with renewed energy continued the work of
+organising for the W. S. P. U.
+
+In the spring of 1904 I went to the annual conference of the Independent
+Labour Party, determined if possible to induce the members to prepare a
+suffrage bill to be laid before Parliament in the approaching session.
+Although I was a member of the National Administrative Council and
+presumably a person holding some influence in the party, I knew that my
+plan would be bitterly opposed by a strong minority, who held that the
+Labour Party should direct all its efforts toward securing universal
+adult suffrage for both men and women. Theoretically, of course, a
+Labour party could not be satisfied with anything less than universal
+adult suffrage, but it was clear that no such sweeping reform could be
+effected at that time, unless indeed the Government made it one of their
+measures. Besides, while a large majority of members of the House of
+Commons were pledged to support a bill giving women equal franchise
+rights with men, it was doubtful whether a majority could be relied upon
+to support a bill giving adult suffrage, even to men. Such a bill, even
+if it were a Government measure, would probably be difficult of passage.
+
+After considerable discussion, the National Council decided to adopt the
+original Women's Enfranchisement Bill, drafted by Dr. Pankhurst, and
+advanced in 1870 to its second reading in the House of Commons. The
+Council's decision was approved by an overwhelming majority of the
+conference.
+
+The new session of Parliament, so eagerly looked forward to, met on
+February 13, 1905. I went down from Manchester, and with my daughter
+Sylvia, then a student at the Royal College of Art, South Kensington,
+spent eight days in the Strangers' Lobby of the House of Commons,
+working for the suffrage bill. We interviewed every one of the members
+who had pledged themselves to support a suffrage bill when it should be
+introduced, but we found not one single member who would agree that his
+chance in the ballot, if he drew such a chance, should be given to
+introducing the bill. Every man had some other measure he was anxious to
+further. Mr. Keir Hardie had previously given us his pledge, but his
+name, as we had feared, was not drawn in the ballot. We next set out to
+interview all the men whose names had been drawn, and we finally induced
+Mr. Bamford Slack, who held the fourteenth place, to introduce our bill.
+The fourteenth place was not a good one, but it served, and the second
+reading of our bill was set down for Friday, May 12th, the second order
+of the day.
+
+This being the first suffrage bill in eight years, a thrill of
+excitement animated not only our ranks but all the old suffrage
+societies. Meetings were held, and a large number of petitions
+circulated. When the day came for consideration on our bill, the
+Strangers' Lobby could not hold the enormous gathering of women of all
+classes, rich and poor, who flocked to the House of Commons. It was
+pitiful to see the look of hope and joy that shone on the faces of many
+of these women. We knew that our poor little measure had the very
+slightest chance of being passed. The bill that occupied the first order
+of the day was one providing that carts travelling along public roads at
+night should carry a light behind as well as before. We had tried to
+induce the promoters of this unimportant little measure to withdraw it
+in the interests of our bill, but they refused. We had tried also to
+persuade the Conservative Government to give our bill facilities for
+full discussion, but they also refused. So, as we fully anticipated,
+the promoters of the Roadway Lighting Bill were allowed to "talk out"
+our bill. They did this by spinning out the debate with silly stories
+and foolish jokes. The members listened to the insulting performance
+with laughter and applause.
+
+When news of what was happening reached the women who waited in the
+Strangers' Lobby, a feeling of wild excitement and indignation took
+possession of the throng. Seeing their temper, I felt that the moment
+had come for a demonstration such as no old-fashioned suffragist had
+ever attempted. I called upon the women to follow me outside for a
+meeting of protest against the government. We swarmed out into the open,
+and Mrs. Wolstenholm-Elmy, one of the oldest suffrage workers in
+England, began to speak. Instantly the police rushed into the crowd of
+women, pushing them about and ordering them to disperse. We moved on as
+far as the great statue of Richard Coeur de Lion that guards the
+entrance to the House of Lords, but again the police intervened. Finally
+the police agreed to let us hold a meeting in Broad Sanctuary, very near
+the gates of Westminster Abbey. Here we made speeches and adopted a
+resolution condemning the Government's action in allowing a small
+minority to talk out our bill. This was the first militant act of the
+W. S. P. U. It caused comment and even some alarm, but the police
+contented themselves with taking our names.
+
+The ensuing summer was spent in outdoor work. By this time the Women's
+Social and Political Union had acquired some valuable accessions, and
+money began to come to us. Among our new members was one who was
+destined to play an important rôle in the unfolding drama of the
+militant movement. At the close of one of our meetings at Oldham a young
+girl introduced herself to me as Annie Kenney, a mill-worker, and a
+strong suffrage sympathiser. She wanted to know more of our society and
+its objects, and I invited her and her sister Jenny, a Board School
+teacher, to tea the next day. They came and joined our Union, a step
+that definitely changed the whole course of Miss Kenney's life, and gave
+us one of our most distinguished leaders and organisers. With her help
+we began to carry our propaganda to an entirely new public.
+
+In Lancashire there is an institution known as the Wakes, a sort of
+travelling fair where they have merry-go-rounds, Aunt-Sallies, and other
+festive games, side-shows of various kinds, and booths where all kinds
+of things are sold. Every little village has its Wakes-week during the
+summer and autumn, and it is the custom for the inhabitants of the
+villages to spend the Sunday before the opening of the Wakes walking
+among the booths in anticipation of tomorrow's joys. On these occasions
+the Salvation Army, temperance orators, venders of quack medicines,
+pedlars, and others, take advantage of the ready-made audience to
+advance their propaganda. At Annie Kenney's suggestion we went from one
+village to the other, following the Wakes and making suffrage speeches.
+We soon rivalled in popularity the Salvation Army, and even the
+tooth-drawers and patent-medicine pedlars.
+
+The Women's Social and Political Union had been in existence two years
+before any opportunity was presented for work on a national scale. The
+autumn of 1905 brought a political situation which seemed to us to
+promise bright hopes for women's enfranchisement. The life of the old
+Parliament, dominated for nearly twenty years by the Conservative Party,
+was drawing to an end, and the country was on the eve of a general
+election in which the Liberals hoped to be returned to power. Quite
+naturally the Liberal candidates went to the country with perfervid
+promises of reform in every possible direction. They appealed to the
+voters to return them, as advocates and upholders of true democracy, and
+they promised that there should be a Government united in favour of
+people's rights against the powers of a privileged aristocracy.
+
+Now repeated experiences had taught us that the only way to attain
+women's suffrage was to commit a Government to it. In other words,
+pledges of support from candidates were plainly useless. They were not
+worth having. The only object worth trying for was pledges from
+responsible leaders that the new Government would make women's suffrage
+a part of the official programme. We determined to address ourselves to
+those men who were likely to be in the Liberal Cabinet, demanding to
+know whether their reforms were going to include justice to women.
+
+We laid our plans to begin this work at a great meeting to be held in
+Free Trade Hall, Manchester, with Sir Edward Grey as the principal
+speaker. We intended to get seats in the gallery, directly facing the
+platform and we made for the occasion a large banner with the words:
+"Will the Liberal Party Give Votes for Women?" We were to let this
+banner down over the gallery rails at the moment when our speaker rose
+to put the question to Sir Edward Grey. At the last moment, however, we
+had to alter the plan because it was impossible to get the gallery seats
+we wanted. There was no way in which we could use our large banner, so,
+late in the afternoon on the day of the meeting, we cut out and made a
+small banner with the three-word inscription: "Votes for Women." Thus,
+quite accidentally, there came into existence the present slogan of the
+suffrage movement around the world.
+
+Annie Kenney and my daughter Christabel were charged with the mission of
+questioning Sir Edward Grey. They sat quietly through the meeting, at
+the close of which questions were invited. Several questions were asked
+by men and were courteously answered. Then Annie Kenney arose and asked:
+"If the Liberal party is returned to power, will they take steps to give
+votes for women?" At the same time Christabel held aloft the little
+banner that every one in the hall might understand the nature of the
+question. Sir Edward Grey returned no answer to Annie's question, and
+the men sitting near her forced her rudely into her seat, while a
+steward of the meeting pressed his hat over her face. A babel of
+shouts, cries and catcalls sounded from all over the hall.
+
+As soon as order was restored Christabel stood up and repeated the
+question: "Will the Liberal Government, if returned, give votes to
+women?" Again Sir Edward Grey ignored the question, and again a perfect
+tumult of shouts and angry cries arose. Mr. William Peacock, chief
+constable of Manchester, left the platform and came down to the women,
+asking them to write their question, which he promised to hand to the
+speaker. They wrote: "Will the Liberal Government give votes to
+working-women? Signed, on behalf of the Women's Social and Political
+Union, Annie Kenney, member of the Oldham committee of the card-and
+blowing-room operatives." They added a line to say that, as one of
+96,000 organised women textile-workers, Annie Kenney earnestly desired
+an answer to the question.
+
+Mr. Peacock kept his word and handed the question to Sir Edward Grey,
+who read it, smiled, and passed it to the others on the platform. They
+also read it with smiles, but no answer to the question was made. Only
+one lady who was sitting on the platform tried to say something, but the
+chairman interrupted by asking Lord Durham to move a vote of thanks to
+the speaker. Mr. Winston Churchill seconded the motion, Sir Edward Grey
+replied briefly, and the meeting began to break up. Annie Kenney stood
+up in her chair and cried out over the noise of shuffling feet and
+murmurs of conversation: "Will the Liberal Government give votes to
+women?" Then the audience became a mob. They howled, they shouted and
+roared, shaking their fists fiercely at the woman who dared to intrude
+her question into a man's meeting. Hands were lifted to drag her out of
+her chair, but Christabel threw one arm about her as she stood, and with
+the other arm warded off the mob, who struck and scratched at her until
+her sleeve was red with blood. Still the girls held together and shouted
+over and over: "The question! The question! Answer the question!"
+
+Six men, stewards of the meeting, seized Christabel and dragged her down
+the aisle, past the platform, other men following with Annie Kenney,
+both girls still calling for an answer to their question. On the
+platform the Liberal leaders sat silent and unmoved while this
+disgraceful scene was taking place, and the mob were shouting and
+shrieking from the floor.
+
+Flung into the streets, the two girls staggered to their feet and began
+to address the crowds, and to tell them what had taken place in a
+Liberal meeting. Within five minutes they were arrested on a charge of
+obstruction and, in Christabel's case, of assaulting the police. Both
+were summonsed to appear next morning in a police court, where, after a
+trial which was a mere farce, Annie Kenney was sentenced to pay a fine
+of five shillings, with an alternative of three days in prison, and
+Christabel Pankhurst was given a fine of ten shillings or a jail
+sentence of one week.
+
+Both girls promptly chose the prison sentence. As soon as they left the
+court-room I hurried around to the room where they were waiting, and I
+said to my daughter: "You have done everything you could be expected to
+do in this matter. I think you should let me pay your fines and take you
+home." Without waiting for Annie Kenney to speak, my daughter exclaimed:
+"Mother, if you pay my fine I will never go home." Before going to the
+meeting she had said, "We will get our question answered or sleep in
+prison to-night." I now knew her courage remained unshaken.
+
+Of course the affair created a tremendous sensation, not only in
+Manchester, where my husband had been so well known and where I had so
+long held public office, but all over England. The comments of the press
+were almost unanimously bitter. Ignoring the perfectly well-established
+fact that men in every political meeting ask questions and demand
+answers of the speakers, the newspapers treated the action of the two
+girls as something quite unprecedented and outrageous. They generally
+agreed that great leniency had been shown them. Fines and jail-sentences
+were too good for such unsexed creatures. "The discipline of the
+nursery" would have been far more appropriate. One Birmingham paper
+declared that "if any argument were required against giving ladies
+political status and power it had been furnished in Manchester."
+Newspapers which had heretofore ignored the whole subject now hinted
+that while they had formerly been in favour of women's suffrage, they
+could no longer countenance it. The Manchester incident, it was said,
+had set the cause back, perhaps irrevocably.
+
+This is how it set the cause back. Scores of people wrote to the
+newspapers expressing sympathy with the women. The wife of Sir Edward
+Grey told her friends that she considered them quite justified in the
+means they had taken. It was stated that Winston Churchill, nervous
+about his own candidacy in Manchester, visited Strangeways Gaol, where
+the two girls were imprisoned, and vainly begged the governor to allow
+him to pay their fines. On October 20, when the prisoners were released,
+they were given an immense demonstration in Free-Trade Hall, the very
+hall from which they had been ejected the week before. The Women's
+Social and Political Union received a large number of new members. Above
+all, the question of women's suffrage became at once a live topic of
+comment from one end of Great Britain to the other.
+
+We determined that from that time on the little "Votes For Women"
+banners should appear wherever a prospective member of the Liberal
+Government rose to speak, and that there should be no more peace until
+the women's question was answered. We clearly perceived that the new
+Government, calling themselves Liberal, were reactionary so far as women
+were concerned, that they were hostile to women's suffrage, and would
+have to be fought until they were conquered, or else driven from office.
+
+We did not begin to fight, however, until we had given the new
+Government every chance to give us the pledge we wanted. Early in
+December the Conservative Government had gone out, and Sir Henry
+Campbell-Bannerman, the Liberal leader, had formed a new Cabinet. On
+December 21 a great meeting was held in Royal Albert Hall, London, where
+Sir Henry, surrounded by his cabinet, made his first utterance as Prime
+Minister. Previous to the meeting we wrote to Sir Henry and asked him,
+in the name of the Women's Social and Political Union, whether the
+Liberal Government would give women the vote. We added that our
+representatives would be present at the meeting, and we hoped that the
+Prime Minister would publicly answer the question. Otherwise we should
+be obliged publicly to protest against his silence.
+
+Of course Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman returned no reply, nor did his
+speech contain any allusion to women's suffrage. So, at the conclusion,
+Annie Kenney, whom we had smuggled into the hall in disguise, whipped
+out her little white calico banner, and called out in her clear, sweet
+voice: "Will the Liberal Government give women the vote?"
+
+At the same moment Theresa Billington let drop from a seat directly
+above the platform a huge banner with the words: "Will the Liberal
+Government give justice to working-women?" Just for a moment there was a
+gasping silence, the people waiting to see what the Cabinet Ministers
+would do. They did nothing. Then, in the midst of uproar and conflicting
+shouts, the women were seized and flung out of the hall.
+
+This was the beginning of a campaign the like of which was never known
+in England, or, for that matter, in any other country. If we had been
+strong enough we should have opposed the election of every Liberal
+candidate, but being limited both in funds and in members we
+concentrated on one member of the Government, Mr. Winston Churchill. Not
+that we had any animus against Mr. Churchill. We chose him simply
+because he was the only important candidate standing for constituencies
+within reach of our headquarters. We attended every meeting addressed by
+Mr. Churchill. We heckled him unmercifully; we spoiled his best points
+by flinging back such obvious retorts that the crowds roared with
+laughter. We lifted out little white banners from unexpected corners of
+the hall, exactly at the moment when an interruption was least desired.
+Sometimes our banners were torn from our hands and trodden under foot.
+Sometimes, again, the crowds were with us, and we actually broke up the
+meeting. We did not succeed in defeating Mr. Churchill, but he was
+returned by a very small majority, the smallest of any of the Manchester
+Liberal candidates.
+
+We did not confine our efforts to heckling Mr. Churchill. Throughout the
+campaign we kept up the work of questioning Cabinet Ministers at
+meetings all over England and Scotland. At Sun Hall, Liverpool,
+addressed by the Prime Minister, nine women in succession asked the
+important question, and were thrown out of the hall; this in the face of
+the fact that Sir Campbell-Bannerman was an avowed suffragist. But we
+were not questioning him as to his private opinions on the suffrage; we
+were asking him what his Government were willing to do about suffrage.
+We questioned Mr. Asquith in Sheffield, Mr. Lloyd-George in Altrincham,
+Cheshire, the Prime Minister again in Glasgow, and we interrupted a
+great many other meetings as well. Always we were violently thrown out
+and insulted. Often we were painfully bruised and hurt.
+
+What good did it do? We have often been asked that question, even by the
+women our actions spurred into an activity they had never before thought
+themselves capable of. For one thing, our heckling campaign made women's
+suffrage a matter of news--it had never been that before. Now the
+newspapers were full of us. For another thing, we woke up the old
+suffrage associations. During the general election various groups of
+non-militant suffragists came back to life and organised a gigantic
+manifesto in favour of action from the Liberal Government. Among others,
+the manifesto was signed by the Women's Co-operative Guild with nearly
+21,000 members; the Women's Liberal Federation, with 76,000 members; the
+Scottish Women's Liberal Federation, with 15,000 members; the
+North-of-England Weavers' Association, with 100,000 members; the British
+Women's Temperance Association, with nearly 110,000 members; and the
+Independent Labour Party with 20,000 members. Surely it was something to
+have inspired all this activity.
+
+We decided that the next step must be to carry the fight to London, and
+Annie Kenney was chosen to be organiser there. With only two pounds,
+less than ten dollars, in her pocket the intrepid girl set forth on her
+mission. In about a fortnight I left my official work as registrar in
+the hands of a deputy and went down to London to see what had been
+accomplished. To my astonishment I found that Annie, working with my
+daughter Sylvia, had organised a procession of women and a demonstration
+to be held on the opening day of Parliament. The confident young things
+had actually engaged Caxton Hall, Westminster; they had had printed a
+large number of handbills to announce the meeting, and they were busily
+engaged in working up the demonstration. Mrs. Drummond, who had joined
+the Union shortly after the imprisonment of Annie Kenney and Christabel,
+sent word from Manchester that she was coming to help us. She had to
+borrow the money for her railroad-fare, but she came, and, as ever
+before and since, her help was invaluable.
+
+How we worked, distributing handbills, chalking announcements of the
+meeting on pavements, calling on every person we knew and on a great
+many more we knew only by name, canvassing from door to door!
+
+At length the opening day of Parliament arrived. On February 19, 1906,
+occurred the first suffrage procession in London. I think there were
+between three and four hundred women in that procession, poor
+working-women from the East End, for the most part, leading the way in
+which numberless women of every rank were afterward to follow. My eyes
+were misty with tears as I saw them, standing in line, holding the
+simple banners which my daughter Sylvia had decorated, waiting for the
+word of command. Of course our procession attracted a large crowd of
+intensely amused spectators. The police, however, made no attempt to
+disperse our ranks, but merely ordered us to furl our banners. There
+was no reason why we should not have carried banners but the fact that
+we were women, and therefore could be bullied. So, bannerless, the
+procession entered Caxton Hall. To my amazement it was filled with
+women, most of whom I had never seen at any suffrage gathering before.
+
+Our meeting was most enthusiastic, and while Annie Kenney was speaking,
+to frequent applause, the news came to me that the King's speech (which
+is not the King's at all, but the formally announced Government
+programme for the session) had been read, and that there was in it no
+mention of the women's suffrage question. As Annie took her seat I arose
+and made this announcement, and I moved a resolution that the meeting
+should at once proceed to the House of Commons to urge the members to
+introduce a suffrage measure. The resolution was carried, and we rushed
+out in a body and hurried toward the Strangers' Entrance. It was pouring
+rain and bitterly cold, yet no one turned back, even when we learned at
+the entrance that for the first time in memory the doors of the House of
+Commons were barred to women. We sent in our cards to members who were
+personal friends, and some of them came out and urged our admittance.
+The police, however, were obdurate. They had their orders. The Liberal
+government, advocates of the people's rights, had given orders that
+women should no longer set foot in their stronghold.
+
+Pressure from members proved too great, and the government relented to
+the extent of allowing twenty women at a time to enter the lobby.
+Through all the rain and cold those hundreds of women waited for hours
+their turn to enter. Some never got in, and for those of us who did
+there was small satisfaction. Not a member could be persuaded to take up
+our cause.
+
+Out of the disappointment and dejection of that experience I yet reaped
+a richer harvest of happiness than I had ever known before. Those women
+had followed me to the House of Commons. They had defied the police.
+They were awake at last. They were prepared to do something that women
+had never done before--fight for themselves. Women had always fought for
+men, and for their children. Now they were ready to fight for their own
+human rights. Our militant movement was established.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+To account for the phenomenal growth of the Women's Social and Political
+Union after it was established in London, to explain why it made such an
+instant appeal to women hitherto indifferent, I shall have to point out
+exactly wherein our society differs from all other suffrage
+associations. In the first place, our members are absolutely single
+minded; they concentrate all their forces on one object, political
+equality with men. No member of the W. S. P. U. divides her attention
+between suffrage and other social reforms. We hold that both reason and
+justice dictate that women shall have a share in reforming the evils
+that afflict society, especially those evils bearing directly on women
+themselves. Therefore, we demand, before any other legislation whatever,
+the elementary justice of votes for women.
+
+There is not the slightest doubt that the women of Great Britain would
+have been enfranchised years ago had all the suffragists adopted this
+simple principle. They never did, and even to-day many English women
+refuse to adopt it. They are party members first and suffragists
+afterward; or they are suffragists part of the time and social theorists
+the rest of the time. We further differ from other suffrage
+associations, or from others existing in 1906, in that we clearly
+perceived the political situation that solidly interposed between us and
+our enfranchisement.
+
+For seven years we had had a majority in the House of Commons pledged to
+vote favourably on a suffrage bill. The year before, they had voted
+favourably on one, yet that bill did not become law. Why? Because even
+an overwhelming majority of private members are powerless to enact law
+in the face of a hostile Government of eleven cabinet ministers. The
+private member of Parliament was once possessed of individual power and
+responsibility, but Parliamentary usage and a changed conception of
+statesmanship have gradually lessened the functions of members. At the
+present time their powers, for all practical purposes, are limited to
+helping to enact such measures as the Government introduces or, in rare
+instances, private measures approved by the Government. It is true that
+the House can revolt, can, by voting a lack of confidence in the
+Government, force them to resign. But that almost never happens, and it
+is less likely now than formerly to happen. Figureheads don't revolt.
+
+This, then, was our situation: the Government all-powerful and
+consistently hostile; the rank and file of legislators impotent; the
+country apathetic; the women divided in their interests. The Women's
+Social and Political Union was established to meet this situation, and
+to overcome it. Moreover we had a policy which, if persisted in long
+enough, could not possibly fail to overcome it. Do you wonder that we
+gained new members at every meeting we held?
+
+There was little formality about joining the Union. Any woman could
+become a member by paying a shilling, but at the same time she was
+required to sign a declaration of loyal adherence to our policy and a
+pledge not to work for any political party until the women's vote was
+won. This is still our inflexible custom. Moreover, if at any time a
+member, or a group of members, loses faith in our policy; if any one
+begins to suggest, that some other policy ought to be substituted, or if
+she tries to confuse the issue by adding other policies, she ceases at
+once to be a member. Autocratic? Quite so. But, you may object, a
+suffrage organisation ought to be democratic. Well the members of the
+W. S. P. U. do not agree with you. We do not believe in the
+effectiveness of the ordinary suffrage organisation. The W. S. P. U. is
+not hampered by a complexity of rules. We have no constitution and
+by-laws; nothing to be amended or tinkered with or quarrelled over at an
+annual meeting. In fact, we have no annual meeting, no business
+sessions, no elections of officers. The W. S. P. U. is simply a suffrage
+army in the field. It is purely a volunteer army, and no one is obliged
+to remain in it. Indeed we don't want anybody to remain in it who does
+not ardently believe in the policy of the army.
+
+The foundation of our policy is opposition to a Government who refuse
+votes to women. To support by word or deed a Government hostile to woman
+suffrage is simply to invite them to go on being hostile. We oppose the
+Liberal party because it is in power. We would oppose a Unionist
+government if it were in power and were opposed to woman suffrage. We
+say to women that as long as they remain in the ranks of the Liberal
+party they give their tacit approval to the Government's anti-suffrage
+policy. We say to members of Parliament that as long as they support any
+of the Government's policies they give their tacit approval to the
+anti-suffrage policy. We call upon all sincere suffragists to leave the
+Liberal party until women are given votes on equal terms with men. We
+call upon all voters to vote against Liberal candidates until the
+Liberal Government does justice to women.
+
+We did not invent this policy. It was most successfully pursued by Mr.
+Parnell in his Home Rule struggle more than thirty-five years ago. Any
+one who is old enough to remember the stirring days of Parnell may
+recall how, in 1885, the Home Rulers, by persistently voting against the
+Government in the House of Commons, forced the resignation of Mr.
+Gladstone and his Cabinet. In the general election which followed, the
+Liberal party was again returned to power, but by the slender majority
+of eighty-four, the Home Rulers having fought every Liberal candidate,
+even those, who, like my husband, were enthusiastic believers in Home
+Rule. In order to control the House and keep his leadership, Mr.
+Gladstone was obliged to bring in a Government Home Rule Bill. The
+downfall, through private intrigue, and the subsequent death of Parnell
+prevented the bill from becoming law. For many years afterward the Irish
+Nationalists had no leader strong enough to carry on Parnell's
+anti-government policy, but within late years it was resumed by Mr.
+James Redmond, with the result that the Commons passed a Home Rule
+Bill.
+
+The contention of the old-fashioned suffragists, and of the politicians
+as well, has always been that an educated public opinion will ultimately
+give votes to women without any great force being exerted in behalf of
+the reform. We agree that public opinion must be educated, but we
+contend that even an educated public opinion is useless unless it is
+vigorously utilised. The keenest weapon is powerless unless it is
+courageously wielded. In the year 1906 there was an immensely large
+public opinion in favour of woman suffrage. But what good did that do
+the cause? We called upon the public for a great deal more than
+sympathy. We called upon it to demand of the Government to yield to
+public opinion and give women votes. And we declared that we would wage
+war, not only on all anti-suffrage forces, but on all neutral and
+non-active forces. Every man with a vote was considered a foe to woman
+suffrage unless he was prepared to be actively a friend.
+
+Not that we believed that the campaign of education ought to be given
+up. On the contrary, we knew that education must go on, and in much more
+vigorous fashion than ever before. The first thing we did was to enter
+upon a sensational campaign to arouse the public to the importance of
+woman suffrage, and to interest it in our plans for forcing the
+Government's hands. I think we can claim that our success in this regard
+was instant, and that it has proved permanent. From the very first, in
+those early London days, when we were few in numbers and very poor in
+purse, we made the public aware of the woman suffrage movement as it had
+never been before. We adopted Salvation Army methods and went out into
+the highways and the byways after converts. We threw away all our
+conventional notions of what was "ladylike" and "good form," and we
+applied to our methods the one test question, Will it help? Just as the
+Booths and their followers took religion to the street crowds in such
+fashion that the church people were horrified, so we took suffrage to
+the general public in a manner that amazed and scandalised the other
+suffragists.
+
+We had a lot of suffrage literature printed, and day by day our members
+went forth and held street meetings. Selecting a favourable spot, with a
+chair for a rostrum, one of us would ring a bell until people began to
+stop to see what was going to happen. What happened, of course, was a
+lively suffrage speech, and the distribution of literature. Soon after
+our campaign had started, the sound of the bell was a signal for a crowd
+to spring up as if by magic. All over the neighbourhood you heard the
+cry: "Here are the Suffragettes! Come on!" We covered London in this
+way; we never lacked an audience, and best of all, an audience to which
+the woman-suffrage doctrine was new. We were increasing our favourable
+public as well as waking it up. Besides these street meetings, we held
+many hall and drawing-room meetings, and we got a great deal of press
+publicity, which was something never accorded the older suffrage
+methods.
+
+Our plans included the introduction of a Government suffrage bill at
+the earliest possible moment, and in the spring of 1906 we sent a
+deputation of about thirty of our members to interview the Prime
+Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. The Prime Minister, it was
+stated, was not at home; so in a few days we sent another deputation.
+This time the servant agreed to carry our request to the Prime Minister.
+The women waited patiently on the doorstep of the official residence,
+No. 10 Downing Street, for nearly an hour. Then the door opened and two
+men appeared. One of the men addressed the leader of the deputation,
+roughly ordering her and the others to leave. "We have sent a message to
+the Prime Minister," she replied, "and we are waiting for the answer."
+"There will be no answer," was the stern rejoinder, and the door closed.
+
+"Yes, there will be an answer," exclaimed the leader, and she seized the
+door-knocker and banged it sharply. Instantly the men reappeared, and
+one of them called to a policeman standing near, "Take this woman in
+charge." The order was obeyed, and the peaceful deputation saw its
+leader taken off to Canon Row Station.
+
+Instantly the women protested vigorously. Annie Kenney began to address
+the crowd that had gathered, and Mrs. Drummond actually forced her way
+past the doorkeeper into the sacred residence of the Prime Minister of
+the British Empire! Her arrest and Annie's followed. The three women
+were detained at the police station for about an hour, long enough, the
+Prime Minister probably thought, to frighten them thoroughly and teach
+them not to do such dreadful things again. Then he sent them word that
+he had decided not to prosecute them, but would, on the contrary,
+receive a deputation from the W. S. P. U., and, if they cared to attend,
+from other suffrage societies as well.
+
+All the suffrage organisations at once began making preparations for the
+great event. At the same time two hundred members of Parliament sent a
+petition to the Prime Minister, asking him to receive their committee
+that they might urge upon him the necessity of a Government measure for
+woman suffrage. Sir Henry fixed May 19th as the day on which he would
+receive a joint deputation from Parliament and from the women's suffrage
+organisations.
+
+The W. S. P. U. determined to make the occasion as public as possible,
+and began preparations for a procession and a demonstration. When the
+day came we assembled at the foot of the beautiful monument to the
+warrior-queen, Boadicea, that guards the entrance to Westminster Bridge,
+and from there we marched to the Foreign Office. At the meeting eight
+women spoke in behalf of an immediate suffrage measure, and Mr. Keir
+Hardie presented the argument for the suffrage members of Parliament. I
+spoke for the W. S. P. U., and I tried to make the Prime Minister see
+that no business could be more pressing than ours. I told him that the
+group of women organised in our Union felt so strongly the necessity for
+women enfranchisement that they were prepared to sacrifice for it
+everything they possessed, their means of livelihood, their very lives,
+if necessary. I begged him to make such a sacrifice needless by doing us
+justice now.
+
+What answer do you think Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman made us? He
+assured us of his sympathy with our cause, his belief in its justice,
+and his confidence in our fitness to vote. And then he told us to have
+patience and wait; he could do nothing for us because some of his
+Cabinet were opposed to us. After a few more words the usual vote of
+thanks was moved, and the deputation was dismissed. I had not expected
+anything better, but it wrung my heart to see the bitter disappointment
+of the W. S. P. U. women who had waited in the street to hear from the
+leaders the result of the deputation. We held a great meeting of protest
+that afternoon, and determined to carry on our agitation with increased
+vigor.
+
+Now that it had been made plain that the Government were resolved not to
+bring in a suffrage bill, there was nothing to do but to continue our
+policy of waking up the country, not only by public speeches and
+demonstrations, but by a constant heckling of Cabinet Ministers. Since
+the memorable occasion when Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney were
+thrown out of Sir Edward Grey's meeting in Manchester, and afterward
+imprisoned for the crime of asking a courteous question, we had not lost
+an opportunity of addressing the same question to every Cabinet Minister
+we could manage to encounter. For this we have been unmercifully
+criticised, and in a large number of cases most brutally handled.
+
+In almost every one of my American meetings I was asked the question,
+"What good do you expect to accomplish by interrupting meetings?" Is it
+possible that the time-honoured, almost sacred English privilege of
+interrupting is unknown in America? I cannot imagine a political meeting
+from which "the Voice" was entirely absent. In England it is invariably
+present. It is considered the inalienable right of the opposition to
+heckle the speaker and to hurl questions at him which are calculated to
+spoil his arguments. For instance, when Liberals attend a Conservative
+gathering they go prepared to shatter by witticisms and pointed
+questions all the best effects of the Conservative orators. The next day
+you will read in Liberal newspapers headlines like these: "The Voice in
+Fine Form," "Short Shrift for Tory Twaddle," "Awkward Answers from the
+Enemy's Platform." In the body of the article you will learn that "Lord
+X found that the Liberals at his meeting were more than a match for
+him," that "there was continued interruption during Sir So-and-so's
+speech," that "Lord M fared badly last night in his encounter with the
+Voice," or that "Captain Z had the greatest difficulty in making himself
+heard."
+
+In accordance with this custom we heckle Cabinet Ministers. Mr. Winston
+Churchill, for example, is speaking. "One great question," he exclaims,
+"remains to be settled."
+
+"And that is woman suffrage," shouts a voice from the gallery.
+
+Mr. Churchill struggles on with his speech: "The men have been
+complaining of me----"
+
+"The women have been complaining of you, too, Mr. Churchill," comes
+back promptly from the back of the hall.
+
+"In the circumstances what can we do but----"
+
+"Give votes to women."
+
+Our object, of course, is to keep woman suffrage in the foreground of
+interest and to insist on every possible occasion that no other reform
+advocated is of such immediate importance.
+
+From the first the women's interruptions have been resented with
+unreasoning anger. I remember hearing Mr. Lloyd-George saying once of a
+man who interrupted him:
+
+"Let him remain. I like interruptions. They show that people holding
+different opinions to mine are present, giving me a chance to convert
+them." But when suffragists interrupt Mr. Lloyd-George he says something
+polite like this: "Pay no attention to those cats mewing."
+
+Some of the ministers are more well bred in their expressions, but all
+are disdainful and resentful. All see with approval the brutal ejection
+of the women by the Liberal stewards.
+
+At one meeting where Mr. Lloyd-George was speaking, we interrupted with
+a question, and he claimed the sympathy of the audience on the score
+that he was a friend to woman suffrage. "Then why don't you do something
+to give votes to women?" was the obvious retort. But Mr. Lloyd-George
+evaded this by the counter query: "Why don't they go for their enemies?
+Why don't they go for their greatest enemy?" Instantly, all over the
+hall, voices shouted, "Asquith! Asquith!" For even at that early day it
+was known that the then Chancellor of the Exchequer was a stern foe of
+women's independence.
+
+In the summer of 1906, together with other members of the W. S. P. U., I
+went to Northampton, where Mr. Asquith was holding a large meeting in
+behalf of the Government's education bills. We organised a number of
+outdoor meetings, and of course prepared to attend Mr. Asquith's
+meeting. In conversation with the president of the local Women's Liberal
+Association, I mentioned the fact that we expected to be put out, and
+she indignantly declared that such a thing could not happen in
+Northampton, where the women had done so much for the Liberal party. I
+told her that I hoped she would be at the meeting.
+
+I had not intended to go myself, my plans being to hold a meeting of my
+own outside the door. But our members, before Mr. Asquith began to
+speak, attempted to question him, and were thrown out with violence. So
+then, turning my meeting over to them, I slipped quietly into the hall
+and sat down in the front row of a division set apart for wives and
+women friends of the Liberal leaders. I sat there in silence, hearing
+men interrupt the speaker and get answers to their questions. At the
+close of the speech I stood up and, addressing the chairman, said: "I
+should like to ask Mr. Asquith a question about education." The chairman
+turned inquiringly to Mr. Asquith, who frowningly shook his head. But
+without waiting for the chairman to say a word, I continued: "Mr.
+Asquith has said that the parents of children have a right to be
+consulted in the matter of their children's education, especially upon
+such questions as the kind of religious instruction they should receive.
+Women are parents. Does not Mr. Asquith think that women should have the
+right to control their children's education, as men do, through the
+vote?" At this point the stewards seized me by the arms and shoulders
+and rushed me, or rather dragged me, for I soon lost my footing, to the
+door and threw me out of the building.
+
+The effect on the president of the Northampton Women's Liberal
+Association was most salutary. She resigned her office and became a
+member of the W. S. P. U. Perhaps her action was influenced further by
+the press reports of the incident. Mr. Asquith was reported as saying,
+after my ejection, that it was difficult to enter into the minds of
+people who thought they could serve a cause which professed to appeal to
+the reason of the electors of the country by disturbing public meetings.
+Apparently he could enter into the minds of the men who disturbed public
+meetings.
+
+To our custom of public heckling of the responsible members of the
+hostile Government we added the practice of sending deputations to them
+for the purpose of presenting orderly arguments in favour of our cause.
+After Mr. Asquith had shown himself so uninformed as to the objects of
+the suffragists, we decided to ask him to receive a deputation from the
+W. S. P. U. To our polite letter Mr. Asquith returned a cold refusal to
+be interviewed on any subject not connected with his particular office.
+Whereupon we wrote again, reminding Mr. Asquith that as a member of the
+Government he was concerned with all questions likely to be dealt with
+by Parliament. We said that we urgently desired to put our question
+before him, and that we would send a deputation to his house hoping that
+he would feel it his duty to receive us.
+
+Our first deputation was told that Mr. Asquith was not at home. He had,
+in fact, escaped from the house through the back door, and had sped away
+in a fast motor-car. Two days later we sent a larger deputation, of
+about thirty women, to his house in Cavendish Square. To be accurate,
+the deputation got as near the house as the entrance to Cavendish
+Square; there the women met a strong force of police, who told them that
+they would not be permitted to go farther.
+
+Many of the women were carrying little "Votes for Women" banners, and
+these the police tore from them, in some cases with blows and insults.
+Seeing this, the leader of the deputation cried out: "We will go
+forward. You have no right to strike women like that." The reply, from a
+policeman near her, was a blow in the face. She screamed with pain and
+indignation, whereupon the man grasped her by the throat and choked her
+against the park railings until she was blue in the face. The young
+woman struggled and fought back, and for this she was arrested on a
+charge of assaulting the police. Three other women were arrested, one
+because, in spite of the police, she succeeded in ringing Mr. Asquith's
+door-bell and another because she protested against the laughter of
+some ladies who watched the affair from a drawing-room window. She was a
+poor working-woman, and it seemed to her a terrible thing that rich and
+protected women should ridicule a cause that to her was so profoundly
+serious. The fourth woman was taken in charge, because after she had
+been pushed off the pavement, she dared to step back. Charged with
+disorderly conduct, these women were sentenced to six weeks in the
+Second Division. They were given the option of a fine, it is true, but
+the payment of a fine would have been an acknowledgment of guilt, which
+made such a course impossible. The leader of the deputation was given a
+two months' sentence, with the option of a fine of ten pounds. She, too,
+refused to pay, and was sent to prison; but some unknown friend paid the
+fine secretly, and she was released before the expiration of her
+sentence.
+
+About the time these things were happening in London, similar violence
+was offered our women in Manchester, where John Burns, Lloyd-George, and
+Winston Churchill, all three Cabinet Ministers, were addressing a great
+Liberal demonstration. The women were there, as usual, to ask government
+support for our measure. There, too, they were thrown out of the
+meeting, and three of them were sent to prison.
+
+There are people in England, plenty of them, who will tell you that the
+Suffragettes were sent to prison for destroying property. The fact is
+that hundreds of women were arrested for exactly such offences as I have
+described before it ever occurred to any of us to destroy property. We
+were determined, at the beginning of our movement, that we would make
+ourselves heard, that we would force the Government to take up our
+question and answer it by action in Parliament. Perhaps you will see
+some parallel to our case in the stand taken in Massachusetts by the
+early Abolitionists, Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison. They,
+too, had to fight bitterly, to face insult and arrest, because they
+insisted on being heard. And they were heard; and so, in time, were we.
+
+I think we began to be noticed in earnest after our first success in
+opposing a Liberal candidate. This was in a by-election held at
+Cockermouth in August, 1906. I shall have to explain that a by-election
+is a local election to fill a vacancy in Parliament caused by a death or
+a resignation. The verdict of a by-election is considered as either an
+indorsement or a censure of the manner in which the Government have
+fulfilled their pre-election pledges. So we went to Cockermouth and told
+the voters how the Liberal party had fulfilled its pledges of democracy
+and lived up to its avowed belief in the rights of all the people. We
+told them of the arrests in London and Manchester, of the shameful
+treatment of women in Liberal meetings, and we asked them to censure the
+Government who had answered so brutally our demand for a vote. We told
+them that the only rebuke that the politicians would notice was a lost
+seat in Parliament, and that on that ground we asked them to defeat the
+Liberal candidate.
+
+How we were ridiculed! With what scorn the newspapers declared that
+"those wild women" could never turn a single vote. Yet when the
+election was over it was found that the Liberal candidate had lost the
+seat, which, at the general election a little more than a year before,
+had been won by a majority of 655. This time the Unionist candidate was
+returned by a majority of 609. Tremendously elated, we hurried our
+forces off to another by-election.
+
+Now the ridicule was turned to stormy abuse. Mind you, the Liberal
+Government still refused to notice the women's question; they declared
+through the Liberal press that the defeat at Cockermouth was
+insignificant, and that anyhow it wasn't caused by the Suffragettes; yet
+the Liberal leaders were furiously angry with the W. S. P. U. Many of
+our members had been Liberals, and it was considered by the men that
+these women were little better than traitors. They were very foolish and
+ill-advised, into the bargain, the Liberals said, because the vote, if
+won at all, must be gained from the Liberal party; and how did the women
+suppose the Liberal party would ever give the vote to open and avowed
+enemies? This sage argument was used also by the women Liberals and the
+constitutional suffragists. They advised us that the proper way was to
+work for the party. We retorted that we had done that unsuccessfully for
+too many years already, and persisted with the opposite method of
+persuasion.
+
+Throughout the summer and autumn we devoted ourselves to the by-election
+work, sometimes actually defeating the Liberal candidate, sometimes
+reducing the Liberal majority, and always raising a tremendous sensation
+and gaining hundreds of new members to the Union. In almost every
+neighbourhood we visited we left the nucleus of a local union, so that
+before the year was out we had branches all over England and many in
+Scotland and Wales. I especially remember a by-election in Wales at
+which Mr. Samuel Evans, who had accepted an officership under the Crown,
+had to stand for re-election. Unfortunately no candidate had been
+brought out against him. So there was nothing for my companions and me
+to do but make his campaign as lively as possible. Mr.--now Sir
+Samuel--Evans was the man who had incensed women by talking out a
+suffrage resolution introduced into the House by Keir Hardie. So we went
+to two of his meetings and literally talked him out, breaking up the
+gatherings amid the laughter and cheers of delighted crowds.
+
+On October 23d Parliament met for its autumn session, and we led a
+deputation to the House of Commons in another effort to induce the
+Government to take action on woman suffrage. In accordance with orders
+given the police, only twenty of us were admitted to the Strangers'
+Lobby. We sent in for the chief Liberal whip, and asked him to take a
+message to the Prime Minister, the message being the usual request to
+grant women the vote that session. We also asked the Prime Minister if
+he intended to include the registration of qualified women voters in the
+provisions of the plural voting bill, then under consideration. The
+Liberal whip came back with the reply that nothing could be done for
+women that session.
+
+[Illustration: MRS. PANKHURST ADDRESSING A BY-ELECTION CROWD]
+
+"Does the Prime Minister," I asked, "hold out any hope for the women
+for any session during this Parliament, or at any future time?" The
+Prime Minister, you will remember, called himself a suffragist.
+
+The Liberal whip replied, "No, Mrs. Pankhurst, the Prime Minister does
+not."
+
+What would a deputation of unenfranchised men have done in these
+circumstances--men who knew themselves to be qualified to exercise the
+franchise, who desperately needed the protection of the franchise, and
+who had a majority of legislators in favour of giving them the
+franchise? I hope they would have done at least as much as we did, which
+was to start a meeting of protest on the spot. The newspapers described
+our action as creating a disgraceful scene in the lobby of the House of
+Commons, but I think that history will otherwise describe it. One of the
+women sprang up on a settee and began to address the crowd. In less than
+a minute she was pulled down, but instantly another woman took her
+place; and after she had been dragged down, still another sprang to her
+place, and following her another and another, until the order came to
+clear the lobby, and we were all forced outside.
+
+In the mêlée I was thrown to the floor and painfully hurt. The women,
+thinking me seriously injured, crowded around me and refused to move
+until I was able to regain myself. This angered the police, who were
+still more incensed when they found that the demonstration was continued
+outside. Eleven women were arrested, including Mrs. Pethick Lawrence,
+our treasurer, Mrs. Cobden Sanderson, Annie Kenney and three more of our
+organisers; and they were all sent to Holloway for two months. But the
+strength of our movement was proved by the number of volunteers who
+immediately came forward to carry on the work. Mrs. Tuke, now Hon.
+Secretary of the W. S. P. U., joined the Union at this time. It had not
+occurred to the authorities that their action would have this effect.
+They thought to crush the Union at a blow, but they gave it the greatest
+impetus it had yet received. The leaders of the older suffrage
+organisations for the time forgot their disapproval of our methods, and
+joined with women writers, physicians, actresses, artists, and other
+prominent women in denouncing the affair as barbarous.
+
+One more thing the authorities failed to take into account. The
+condition of English prisons was known to be very bad, but when two of
+our women were made so ill in Holloway that they had to be released
+within a few days, the politicians began to tremble for their prestige.
+Questions were asked in Parliament concerning the advisability of
+treating the Suffragettes not as common criminals but as political
+offenders with the right to confinement in the First Division. Mr.
+Herbert Gladstone, the Home Secretary, replied to these questions that
+he had no power to interfere with the magistrates' decisions, and could
+do nothing in the matter of the suffragettes' punishment. I shall ask
+you to remember this statement of Mr. Herbert Gladstone's, as later we
+were able to prove it a deliberate falsehood--although really the
+falsehood proved itself when the women, by Government order, were
+released from prison when they had served just half their sentences.
+The reason for this was that an important by-election was being held in
+the north of England, and we had distributed broadcast throughout the
+constituency hand bills telling the electors that nine women, including
+the daughter of Richard Cobden, were being held as common criminals by
+the Liberal Government who were asking for their votes.
+
+I took a group of the released prisoners to Huddersfield, and they told
+prison stories to such effect that the Liberal majority was reduced by
+540 votes. As usual the Liberal leaders denied that our work had
+anything to do with the slender majority by which the party retained the
+seat, but among our souvenirs is a handbill, one of thousands given out
+from Liberal headquarters:
+
+
+     +------------------------------+
+     |     MEN OF HUDDERSFIELD      |
+     |       DON'T BE MISLED        |
+     | BY SOCIALISTS, SUFFRAGETTES  |
+     |          OR TORIES           |
+     |      VOTE FOR SHERWELL       |
+     +------------------------------+
+
+
+Meanwhile, other demonstrations had taken place before the House of
+Commons, and at Christmas time twenty-one suffragettes were in Holloway
+Prison, though they had committed no crime. The Government professed
+themselves unmoved, and members of Parliament spoke with sneers of the
+"self-made martyrs." However, a considerable group of members, strongly
+moved by the passion and unquenchable ardor of this new order of
+suffragists, met during the last week of the year and formed a
+committee whose object it was to press upon the government the necessity
+of giving the franchise to women during that Parliament. The committee
+resolved that its members would work to educate a wider public opinion
+on the question, and especially to advocate suffrage when addressing
+meetings in their constituencies, to take Parliamentary action on every
+possible occasion, and to induce as many members of Parliament as
+possible to ballot for the introduction of a suffrage bill or motion
+next session.
+
+Our first year in London had borne wonderful fruits. We had grown from a
+mere handful of women, a "family party" the newspapers had derisively
+called us, to a strong organisation with branches all over the country,
+permanent headquarters in Clements Inn, Strand; we had found good
+financial backing, and above all, we had created a suffrage committee in
+the House of Commons.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+FOUR YEARS OF PEACEFUL MILITANCY
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+The campaign of 1907 began with a Women's Parliament, called together on
+February 13th in Caxton Hall, to consider the provisions of the King's
+speech, which had been read in the national Parliament on the opening
+day of the session, February 12th. The King's speech, as I have
+explained, is the official announcement of the Government's programme
+for the session. When our Women's Parliament met at three o'clock on the
+afternoon of the thirteenth we knew that the Government meant to do
+nothing for women during the session ahead.
+
+I presided over the women's meeting, which was marked with a fervency
+and a determination of spirit at that time altogether unprecedented. A
+resolution expressing indignation that woman suffrage should have been
+omitted from the King's speech, and calling upon the House of Commons to
+give immediate facilities to such a measure, was moved and carried. A
+motion to send the resolution from the hall to the Prime Minister was
+also carried. The slogan, "Rise up, women," was cried from the platform,
+the answering shout coming back as from one woman, "Now!" With copies of
+the resolution in their hands, the chosen deputation hurried forth into
+the February dusk, ready for Parliament or prison, as the fates decreed.
+
+Fate did not leave them very long in doubt. The Government, it
+appeared, had decided that not again should their sacred halls of
+Parliament be desecrated by women asking for the vote, and orders had
+been given that would henceforth prevent women from reaching even the
+outer precincts of the House of Commons. So when our deputation of women
+arrived in the neighbourhood of Westminster Abbey they found themselves
+opposed by a solid line of police, who, at a sharp order from their
+chief, began to stride through and through the ranks of the procession,
+trying to turn the women back. Bravely the women rallied and pressed
+forward a little farther. Suddenly a body of mounted police came riding
+up at a smart trot, and for the next five hours or more, a struggle,
+quite indescribable for brutality and ruthlessness, went on.
+
+The horsemen rode directly into the procession, scattering the women
+right and left. But still the women would not turn back. Again and again
+they returned, only to fly again and again from the merciless hoofs.
+Some of the women left the streets for the pavements, but even there the
+horsemen pursued them, pressing them so close to walls and railings that
+they were obliged to retreat temporarily to avoid being crushed. Other
+strategists took refuge in doorways, but they were dragged out by the
+foot police and were thrown directly in front of the horses. Still the
+women fought to reach the House of Commons with their resolution. They
+fought until their clothes were torn, their bodies bruised, and the last
+ounce of their strength exhausted. Fifteen of them did actually fight
+their way through those hundreds on hundreds of police, foot and
+mounted, as far as the Strangers' Lobby of the House. Here they
+attempted to hold a meeting, and were arrested. Outside, many more women
+were taken into custody. It was ten o'clock before the last arrest was
+made, and the square cleared of the crowds. After that the mounted men
+continued to guard the approaches to the House of Commons until the
+House rose at midnight.
+
+The next morning fifty-seven women and two men were arraigned, two and
+three at a time, in Westminster police court. Christabel Pankhurst was
+the first to be placed in the dock. She tried to explain to the
+magistrate that the deputation of the day before was a perfectly
+peaceful attempt to present a resolution, which, sooner or later, would
+be presented and acted upon. She assured him that the deputation was but
+the beginning of a campaign that would not cease until the Government
+yielded to the women's demand. "There can be no going back for us," she
+declared, "and more will happen if we do not get justice."
+
+The magistrate, Mr. Curtis Bennett, who was destined later to try women
+for that "more," rebuked my daughter sternly, telling her that the
+Government had nothing to do with causing the disorders of the day
+before, that the women were entirely responsible for what had occurred,
+and finally, that these disgraceful scenes in the street must
+cease--just as King Canute told the ocean that it must roll out instead
+of in. "The scenes can be stopped in only one way," replied the
+prisoner. His sole reply to that was, "Twenty shillings or fourteen
+days," Christabel chose the prison sentence, and so did all the other
+prisoners. Mrs. Despard, who headed the deputation, and Sylvia
+Pankhurst, who was with her, were given three weeks in prison.
+
+Of course the raid, as it was called, gave the Women's Social and
+Political Union an enormous amount of publicity, on the whole,
+favourable publicity. The newspapers were almost unanimous in condemning
+the Government for sending mounted troops out against unarmed women.
+Angry questions were asked in Parliament, and our ranks once more
+increased in size and ardour. The old-fashioned suffragists, men as well
+as women, cried out that we had alienated all our friends in Parliament;
+but this proved to be untrue. Indeed, it was found that a Liberal
+member, Mr. Dickinson, had won the first place in the ballot, and had
+announced that he intended to use it to introduce a women's suffrage
+bill. More than this, the prime minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman,
+promised to give the bill his support. For a time, a very short time, it
+is true, we felt that the hour of our freedom might be at hand, that our
+prisoners had perhaps already won us our precious symbol--the vote.
+
+Soon, however, a number of professed suffragists in the House began to
+complain that Mr. Dickinson's bill, practically the original bill, was
+not "democratic" enough, that it would enfranchise only the women of the
+upper classes--to which, by the way, most of them belonged. That this
+was not true had been proved again and again from the municipal
+registers, which showed a majority of working women's names as qualified
+householders. The contention was but a shallow excuse, and we knew it.
+Therefore we were not surprised when Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman
+departed from his pledge of support, and allowed the bill to be talked
+out.
+
+Following this event, the second Women's Parliament assembled, on the
+afternoon of March 20, 1907. As before, we adopted a resolution calling
+upon the Government to introduce an official suffrage measure, and again
+we voted to send the resolution from the hall to the Prime Minister.
+Lady Harberton was chosen to lead the deputation, and instantly hundreds
+of women sprang up and volunteered to accompany her. This time the
+police met the women at the door of the hall, and another useless,
+disgraceful scene of barbarous, brute-force opposition took place.
+Something like one thousand police had been sent out to guard the House
+of Commons from the peaceful invasion of a few hundred women. All
+afternoon and evening we kept Caxton Hall open, the women returning
+every now and again, singly and in small groups, to have their bruises
+bathed, or their torn clothing repaired. As night fell the crowds in the
+street grew denser, and the struggle between the women and the police
+became more desperate. Lady Harberton, we heard, had succeeded in
+reaching the entrance to the House of Commons, nay, had actually managed
+to press past the sentries into the lobby, but her resolution had not
+been presented to the Prime Minister. She and many others were arrested
+before the police at last succeeded in clearing the streets, and the
+dreadful affair was over.
+
+The next day, in Westminster police court, the magistrate meted out
+sentences varying from twenty shillings or fourteen days to forty
+shillings or one month's imprisonment. Two of the women, Miss Woodlock
+and Mrs. Chatterton, who had left Holloway only a week before, were, as
+"old offenders," given thirty days without the option of a fine. Another
+woman, Mary Leigh, was given thirty days because she offended the
+magistrate's dignity by hanging a "Votes for Women" banner over the edge
+of the dock. Those of my readers who are unable to connect the word
+"militancy" with anything milder than arson are invited to reflect that
+within the first two months of the year 1907 the English Government sent
+to prison one hundred and thirty women whose "militancy" consisted
+merely of trying to carry a resolution from a hall to the Prime Minister
+in the House of Commons. Our crime was called obstructing the police. It
+will be seen that it was the police who did the obstructing.
+
+It may be asked why neither of these deputations was led by me
+personally. The reason was that I was needed in another capacity, that
+of leader and supervisor of the suffrage forces in the field to defeat
+Government candidates at by-elections. On the night of the second
+"riot," while our women were still struggling in the streets, I left
+London for Hexham in Northumberland, where by our work the majority of
+the Liberal candidate was reduced by a thousand votes. Seven more
+by-elections followed in rapid succession.
+
+Our by-election work was such a new thing in English politics that we
+attracted an enormous amount of attention wherever we went. It was our
+custom to begin work the very hour we entered a town. If, on our way
+from the station to the hotel, we encountered a group of men, say, in
+the market-place, we either stopped and held a meeting on the spot, or
+else we stayed long enough to tell them when and where our meetings were
+to be held, and to urge them to attend. The usual first step, after
+securing lodgings, was to hire a vacant shop, fill the windows with
+suffrage literature, and fling out our purple, green, and white flag.
+Meanwhile, some of us were busy hiring the best available hall. If we
+got possession of the battle-ground before the men, we sometimes
+"cornered" all the good halls and left the candidate nothing but
+schoolhouses for his indoor meetings. Truth to tell, our meetings were
+so much more popular than theirs that we really needed the larger halls.
+Often, a candidate with the Suffragettes for rivals spoke to almost
+empty benches. The crowds were away listening to the women.
+
+Naturally, this greatly displeased the politicians, and it scandalised
+many of the old-fashioned Liberal partisans. In one place, I think it
+was Colne Valley in Yorkshire, an amusing instance of masculine
+hostility occurred. We had arrived on a day when both Conservative and
+Liberal committees were choosing their candidates, and we thought it a
+good opportunity to hold a series of outdoor meetings. We tried to get
+a lorry for a rostrum, but the only man in town who had these big vans
+to let disapproved of Suffragettes so violently that he wouldn't let us
+have one. So we borrowed a chair from a woman shopkeeper, and went at
+it. Soon we had a large crowd and an interested audience. We also got
+the attention of a number of small boys with pea-shooters, and had to
+make our speeches under a blistering fire of dried peas.
+
+While I was speaking the fire ceased, to my relief--for dried peas
+sting. I continued my speech with renewed vigor, only to have one of my
+best points spoiled by roars of laughter from the crowd. I finished
+somehow, and sat down; and then it was explained to me that the
+pea-shooters had been financed by one of the prominent Liberals of the
+town, another man who disapproved of our policy of opposing the
+Government. As soon as the ammunition gave out this man furnished the
+boys with a choice supply of rotten oranges. These were not so easily
+handled, it appeared, for the very first one went wild, and struck the
+chivalrous gentleman violently in the neck. This it was that had caused
+the laughter, and stopped the attack on the women.
+
+We met with some pretty rough horse-play, and even with some brutality,
+in several by-elections, but on the whole we found the men ready, and
+the women more than ready, to listen to us. We tamed and educated a
+public that had always been used to violence at elections. We even tamed
+the boys, who came to the meetings on purpose to skylark. When we were
+in Rutlandshire that spring three schoolboys came to see me and told me,
+shyly, that they were interested in suffrage. They had had a debate on
+the subject at their school, and although the decision had been for the
+other side, all the boys wanted to know more about it. Wouldn't I please
+have a meeting especially for them? Of course I consented, and I found
+my boy audience quite delightful. Indeed, I hope they liked me half as
+well as I did them.
+
+All through the spring our by-election work continued with amazing
+success, although our part in the Government losses was rarely admitted
+by the politicians. The voters knew, however. At an election in Suffolk,
+where we helped to double the Unionist vote, the successful candidate,
+speaking to the crowd from his hotel window, said, "What has been the
+cause of the great and glorious victory?" Instantly the crowd roared,
+"Votes for Women!"--"Three cheers for the Suffragettes!" This was not at
+all what the successful candidate had intended, but he waved his hand
+graciously and said, "No doubt the ladies had something to do with it."
+
+The newspaper correspondents were not so reluctant to acknowledge our
+influence. Even when they condemned our policy, they were unsparing in
+their admiration for our energy, and the courage and ardour of our
+workers. Said the correspondent of the London _Tribune_, a Liberal paper
+hostile to our tactics: "Their staying power, judging them by the
+standards of men, is extraordinary. By taking afternoon as well as
+evening meetings, they have worked twice as hard as the men. They are
+up earlier, they retire just as late. Women against men, they are
+better speakers, more logical, better informed, better phrased, with a
+surer insight for the telling argument."
+
+After a summer spent in strengthening our forces, organising new
+branches, holding meetings--something like three thousand of these
+between May and October--invading meetings of Cabinet Ministers--we
+managed to do that about once every day--electioneering, and getting up
+huge demonstrations in various cities, we arrived at the end of the
+year. In the last months of the year, I directed several hotly contested
+by-elections, at one of which I met with one of the most serious
+misadventures of my life.
+
+This by-election was held in the division of Mid-Devon, a stronghold of
+Liberalism. In fact, since its creation in 1885, the seat has never been
+held by any except a Liberal member. The constituency is a large one,
+divided into eight districts. The population of the towns is a rough and
+boisterous one, and its devotion, blind and unreasoning, to the Liberal
+party has always reflected the rude spirit of the voters. A Unionist
+woman told me, shortly after my arrival, that my life would be unsafe if
+I dared openly to oppose the Liberal candidate. She had never dared, she
+assured me, to wear her party colours in public. However, I did
+speak--in our headquarters at Newton Abbott, the principal town of the
+division, at Hull, and at Bovey Tracey. We held meetings twice a day,
+calling upon the voters to "beat the Government in Mid-Devon, as a
+message that women must have votes next year." Although some of the
+meetings were turbulent, we were treated with much more consideration
+than either of the candidates, who, not infrequently, were howled down
+and put to flight. Often the air of their meetings was thick with
+decayed vegetables and dirty snowballs. We had some rather lively
+sessions, too. Once, at an outdoor meeting, some young roughs dragged
+our lorry round and round until it seemed that we must be upset, and
+several times the language hurled at us from the crowd was quite unfit
+for me to repeat. Still, we escaped actual violence until the day of the
+election, when it was announced that the Unionist candidate had won the
+seat by a majority of twelve hundred and eighty. We knew instantly that
+the deepest resentment of the Liberals would be aroused, but it did not
+occur to us that the resentment would be directed actively against us.
+
+After the declaration at the polls, my companion, Mrs. Martel, and I
+started to walk to our lodgings. Some of our friends stopped us, and
+drew our attention to the newly elected Unionist member of Parliament,
+who was being escorted from the polling place by a strong guard of
+police. We were warned that our safety demanded an immediate flight from
+the town. I laughingly assured our friends that I was never afraid to
+trust myself in a crowd, and we walked on. Suddenly we were confronted
+by a crowd of young men and boys, clay-cutters from the pits on the edge
+of town. These young men, who wore the red rosettes of the Liberal
+party, had just heard of their candidate's defeat, and they were mad
+with rage and humiliation. One of them pointed to us, crying: "They did
+it! Those women did it!" A yell went up from the crowd, and we were
+deluged with a shower of clay and rotten eggs. We were not especially
+frightened, but the eggs were unbearable, and to escape them we rushed
+into a little grocer's shop close at hand. The grocer's wife closed and
+bolted the door, but the poor grocer cried out that his place would be
+wrecked. I did not want that to happen, of course, so I asked them to
+let us out by the back door. They led us out the door, into a small back
+yard which led into a little lane, whence we expected to make our
+escape. But when we reached the yard we found that the rowdies,
+anticipating our move, had surged round the corner, and were waiting for
+us.
+
+They seized Mrs. Martel first, and began beating her over the head with
+their fists, but the brave wife of the shopkeeper, hearing the shouts
+and the oaths of the men, flung open the door and rushed to our rescue.
+Between us we managed to tear Mrs. Martel from her captors and get her
+into the house. I expected to get into the house, too, but as I reached
+the threshold a staggering blow fell on the back of my head, rough hands
+grasped the collar of my coat, and I was flung violently to the ground.
+Stunned, I must have lost consciousness for a moment, for my next
+sensation was of cold, wet mud seeping through my clothing. Sight
+returning to me, I perceived the men, silent now, but with a dreadful,
+lowering silence, closing in a ring around me. In the centre of the ring
+was an empty barrel, and the horrid thought occurred to me that they
+might intend putting me in it. A long time seemed to pass, while the
+ring of men slowly drew closer. I looked at them, in their drab clothes
+smeared with yellow pit-clay, and they appeared so underfed, so puny and
+sodden, that a poignant pity for them swept over me. "Poor souls," I
+thought, and then I said suddenly, "Are none of you _men_?" Then one of
+the youths darted toward me, and I knew that whatever was going to
+happen to me was about to begin.
+
+At that very moment came shouts, and a rush of police who had fought
+their way through hostile crowds to rescue us. Of course the mob turned
+tail and fled, and I was carried gently into the shop, which the police
+guarded for two hours, before it was deemed safe for us to leave in a
+closed motor-car. It was many months before either Mrs. Martel or I
+recovered from our injuries.
+
+The rowdies, foiled of their woman prey, went to the Conservative Club,
+smashed all the windows in the house, and kept the members besieged
+there through the night. The next morning the body of a man, frightfully
+bruised about the head, was found in the mill-race. Throughout all this
+disorder and probable crime, not a man was arrested. Contrast this, if
+you like, with the treatment given our women in London.
+
+The King opened Parliament in great state on January 29, 1908. Again his
+speech omitted all mention of woman suffrage, and again the W. S. P. U.
+issued a call for a Women's Parliament, for February 11th, 12th and
+13th. Before it was convened we heard that an excellent place in the
+ballot had been won by a friend of the movement, Mr. Stanger, who
+promised to introduce a suffrage bill, February 28th was the day fixed
+for the second reading, and we realised that strong pressure would have
+to be brought to bear to prevent the bill being wrecked, as the
+Dickinson bill had been the previous year. Therefore, on the first day
+of the Women's Parliament, almost every woman present volunteered for
+the deputation, which was to try to carry the resolution to the prime
+minister. Led by two well-known portrait painters, the deputation left
+Caxton Hall and proceeded in orderly ranks, four abreast, toward the
+House of Commons. The crowds in the streets were enormous, thousands of
+sympathisers coming out to help the women, thousands of police
+determined that the women should not be helped, and thousands of curious
+spectators. When the struggle was over, fifty women were locked up in
+police-court cells.
+
+The next morning, when the cases were tried, Mr. Muskett, who prosecuted
+for the Crown, and who was perhaps a little tired of telling the
+Suffragettes that these scenes in the streets must cease, and then
+seeing them go on exactly as if he had not spoken, made a very severe
+and terrifying address. He told the women that this time they would be
+subject to the usual maximum of two months' imprisonment, with the
+option of a fine of five pounds, but that, in case they ever offended
+again, the law had worse terrors in store for them. It was proposed to
+revive, for the benefit of the Suffragettes, an Act passed in the reign
+of Charles II, which dealt with "Tumultuous Petitions, either to the
+Crown or Parliament." This Act provided that no person should dare to go
+to the King or to Parliament "with any petition, complaint,
+remonstrance, declaration or other address" accompanied with a number of
+persons above twelve. A fine of one hundred pounds, or three months'
+imprisonment, might be imposed under this law. The magistrate then
+sentenced all but two of the women to be bound over for twelve months,
+or to serve six weeks in the second division. Two other women, "old
+offenders," were given one month in the third division, or lowest class.
+All the prisoners, except two who had very ill relatives at home, chose
+the prison sentence.
+
+The next day's session of the Women's Parliament was one of intense
+excitement, as the women reviewed the events of the previous day, the
+trials, and especially the threat to revive the obsolete Act of Charles
+II, an act _which was passed to obstruct the progress of the Liberal
+party, which came into existence under the Stuarts, and under the second
+Charles was fighting for its life_. It was an amazing thing that the
+political descendants of these men were proposing to revive the Act to
+obstruct the advance of the women's cause, fighting for its life under
+George V and his Liberal government. At least, it was evidence that the
+Government were baffled in their attempt to crush our movement.
+Christabel Pankhurst, presiding over the second session of the Women's
+Parliament, said: "At last it is realized that women are fighting for
+freedom, as their fathers fought. If they want twelve women, aye, and
+more than twelve, if a hundred women are wanted to be tried under that
+act and sent to prison for three months, they can be found."
+
+I was not present at this session, nor had I been present at the first
+one. I was working in a by-election at South Leeds, the last of several
+important by-elections in great industrial centres, where our success
+was unquestioned, except by the Liberal press. The elections had wound
+up with a great procession, and a meeting of 100,000 people on Hounslet
+Moor. The most wonderful enthusiasm marked that meeting. I shall never
+forget what splendid order the people kept, in spite of the fact that no
+police protection was given us; how the vast crowd parted to let our
+procession through; how the throngs of mill women kept up a chorus in
+broad Yorkshire: "Shall us win? Shall us have the vote? We shall!" No
+wonder the old people shook their beads, and declared that "there had
+never been owt like it."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+With those brave shouts in my ears, I hurried down to London for the
+concluding session of the parliament, for I had determined that I must
+be the first person to challenge the Government to carry out their
+threat to revive the old Act of Charles II. I made a long speech to the
+women that day, telling them something of my experiences of the past
+months, and how all that I had seen and heard throughout the country had
+only deepened my conviction of the necessity for women's votes. "I
+feel," I concluded, "that the time has come when I must act, and I wish
+to be one of those to carry our resolution to Parliament this afternoon.
+My experience in the country, and especially in South Leeds, has taught
+me things that Cabinet Ministers, who have not had that experience, do
+not know, and has made me feel that I must make one final attempt to see
+them, and to urge them to reconsider their position before some terrible
+disaster has occurred."
+
+Amid a good deal of excitement and emotion, we chose the requisite
+thirteen women, who were prepared to be arrested and tried under the
+Charles II "Tumultuous Petitions" Act. I had not entirely recovered from
+the attack made upon me at Mid-Devon, and my wrenched ankle was still
+too sensitive to make walking anything but a painful process. Seeing me
+begin almost at once to limp badly, Mrs. Drummond, with characteristic,
+blunt kindness, called to a man driving a dog-cart and asked him if he
+would drive me to the House of Commons. He readily agreed, and I mounted
+to the seat behind him, the other women forming in line behind the cart.
+We had not gone far when the police, who already surrounded us in great
+force, ordered me to dismount. Of course I obeyed and walked, or rather
+limped along with my companions. They would have supported me, but the
+police insisted that we should walk single-file. Presently I grew so
+faint from the pain of the ankle that I called to two of the women, who
+took hold of my arms and helped me on my way. This was our one act of
+disobedience to police orders. We moved with difficulty, for the crowd
+was of incredible size. All around, as far as eye could see, was the
+great moving, swaying, excited multitude, and surrounding us on all
+sides were regiments of uniformed police, foot and mounted. You might
+have supposed that instead of thirteen women, one of them lame, walking
+quietly along, the town was in the hands of an armed mob.
+
+We had progressed as far as the entrance to Parliament Square, when two
+stalwart policemen suddenly grasped my arms on either side and told me
+that I was under arrest. My two companions, because they refused to
+leave me, were also arrested, and a few minutes later Annie Kenney and
+five other women suffered arrest. That night we were released on bail,
+and the next morning we were arraigned in Westminster police court for
+trial under the Charles II Act. But, as it turned out, the authorities,
+embarrassed by our readiness to test the act, announced that they had
+changed their minds, and would continue, for the present, to treat us as
+common street brawlers.
+
+This was my first trial, and I listened, with a suspicion that my ears
+were playing tricks with my reason, to the most astonishing perjuries
+put forth by the prosecution. I heard that we had set forth from Caxton
+Hall with noisy shouts and songs, that we had resorted to the most
+riotous and vulgar behaviour, knocking off policemen's helmets,
+assaulting the officers right and left as we marched. Our testimony, and
+that of our witnesses, was ignored. When I tried to speak in my own
+defence, I was cut short rudely, and was told briefly that I and the
+others must choose between being bound over or going to prison, in the
+second division, for six weeks.
+
+I remember only vaguely the long, jolting ride across London to Holloway
+Prison. We stopped at Pentonville, the men's prison, to discharge
+several men prisoners, and I remember shuddering at the thought of our
+women, many of them little past girlhood, being haled to prison in the
+same van with criminal men. Arriving at the prison, we groped our way
+through dim corridors into the reception-ward, where we were lined up
+against the wall for a superficial medical examination. After that we
+were locked up in separate cells, unfurnished, except for low, wooden
+stools.
+
+It seemed an endless time before my cell door was opened by a wardress,
+who ordered me to follow her. I entered a room where another wardress
+sat at a table, ready to take an inventory of my effects. Obeying an
+order to undress, I took off my gown, then paused. "Take off
+everything," was the next order. "Everything?" I faltered. It seemed
+impossible that they expected me to strip. In fact, they did allow me to
+take off my last garments in the shelter of a bath-room. I shivered
+myself into some frightful underclothing, old and patched and stained,
+some coarse, brown woollen stockings with red stripes, and the hideous
+prison dress stamped all over with the broad arrow of disgrace. I fished
+a pair of shoes out of a big basket of shoes, old and mostly mismates. A
+pair of coarse but clean sheets, a towel, a mug of cold cocoa, and a
+thick slice of brown bread were given me, and I was conducted to my
+cell.
+
+My first sensations when the door was locked upon me were not altogether
+disagreeable. I was desperately weary, for I had been working hard,
+perhaps a little too hard, for several strenuous months. The excitement
+and fatigue of the previous day, and the indignation I had suffered
+throughout the trial, had combined to bring me to the point of
+exhaustion, and I was glad to throw myself on my hard prison bed and
+close my eyes. But soon the relief of being alone, and with nothing to
+do, passed from me. Holloway Prison is a very old place, and it has the
+disadvantages of old places which have never known enough air and
+sunshine. It reeks with the odours of generations of bad ventilation,
+and it contrives to be at once the stuffiest and the draughtiest
+building I have ever been in. Soon I found myself sickening for fresh
+air. My head began to ache. Sleep fled. I lay all night suffering with
+cold, gasping for air, aching with fatigue, and painfully wide awake.
+
+The next day I was fairly ill, but I said nothing about it. One does not
+expect to be comfortable in prison. As a matter of fact, one's mental
+suffering is so much greater than any common physical distress that the
+latter is almost forgotten. The English prison system is altogether
+mediæval and outworn. In some of its details the system has improved
+since they began to send the Suffragettes to Holloway. I may say that
+we, by our public denunciation of the system, have forced these slight
+improvements. In 1907 the rules were excessively cruel. The poor
+prisoner, when she entered Holloway, dropped, as it were, into a tomb.
+No letters and no visitors were allowed for the first month of the
+sentence. Think of it--a whole month, more than four weeks, without
+sending or receiving a single word. One's nearest and dearest may have
+gone through dreadful suffering, may have been ill, may have died,
+meantime. One was given plenty of time to imagine all these things, for
+the prisoner was kept in solitary confinement in a narrow, dimly-lit
+cell, twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four. Solitary confinement is
+too terrible a punishment to inflict on any human being, no matter what
+his crime. Hardened criminals in the men's prisons, it is said, often
+beg for the lash instead. Picture what it must be to a woman who has
+committed some small offence, for most of the women who go to Holloway
+are small offenders, sitting alone, day after day, in the heavy silence
+of a cell--thinking of her children at home--thinking, thinking. Some
+women go mad. Many suffer from shattered nerves for a long period after
+release. It is impossible to believe that any woman ever emerged from
+such a horror less criminal than when she entered it.
+
+Two days of solitary confinement, broken each day by an hour of silent
+exercise in a bitterly cold courtyard, and I was ordered to the
+hospital. There I thought I should be a little more comfortable. The bed
+was better, the food a little better, and small comforts, such as warm
+water for washing, were allowed. I slept a little the first night. About
+midnight I awoke, and sat up in bed, listening. A woman in the cell next
+mine was moaning in long, sobbing breaths of mortal pain. She ceased for
+a few minutes, then moaned again, horribly. The truth flashed over me,
+turning me sick, as I realised that a life was coming into being, there
+in that frightful prison. A woman, imprisoned by men's laws, was giving
+a child to the world. A child born in a cell! I shall never forget that
+night, nor what I suffered with the birth-pangs of that woman, who, I
+found later, was simply waiting trial on a charge which was found to be
+baseless.
+
+The days passed very slowly, the nights more slowly still. Being in
+hospital, I was deprived of chapel, and also of work. Desperate, at last
+I begged the wardress for some sewing, and she kindly gave me a skirt of
+her own to hem, and later some coarse knitting to do. Prisoners were
+allowed a few books, mostly of the "Sunday-school" kind. One day I
+asked the chaplain if there were not some French or German books in the
+library, and he brought me a treasure, "_Autour de mon Jardin_," by
+Jules Janin. For a few days I was quite happy, reading my book and
+translating it on the absurd little slate they gave us in lieu of paper
+and pencil. That slate was, after all, a great comfort. I did all kinds
+of things with it. I kept a calendar, I wrote all the French poetry I
+could remember on it, I even recorded old school chorals and old English
+exercises. It helped wonderfully to pass the endless hours until my
+release. I even forgot the cold, which was the harder to bear because of
+the fur coat, which I knew was put away, ticketed with my name. I begged
+them for the coat, but they wouldn't let me have it.
+
+At last the time came when they gave me back all my things, and let me
+go free. At the door the Governor spoke to me, and asked me if I had any
+complaints to make. "Not of you," I replied, "nor of any of the
+wardresses. Only of this prison, and all of men's prisons. We shall raze
+them to the ground."
+
+Back in my comfortable home, surrounded by loving friends, I would have
+rested quietly for a few days, but there was a great meeting that night
+at Albert Hall, to mark the close of a week of self-denial to raise
+money for the year's campaign. Women had sold papers, flowers, toys,
+swept crossings, and sung in the streets for the cause. Many women, well
+known in the world of art and letters, did these things. I felt that I
+should be doing little if I merely attended the meeting. So I went. My
+release was not expected until the following morning, and no one thought
+of my appearing at the meeting. My chairman's seat was decorated with a
+large placard with the inscription, "Mrs. Pankhurst's Chair." After all
+the others were seated, the speakers, and hundreds of ex-prisoners. I
+walked quietly onto the stage, took the placard out of the chair and sat
+down. A great cry went up from the women as they sprang from their seats
+and stretched their hands toward me. It was some time before I could see
+them for my tears, or speak to them for the emotion that shook me like a
+storm.
+
+The next morning I, with the other released prisoners, drove off to
+Peckham, a constituency of London, where the W. S. P. U. members were
+fighting a vigorous by-election. In open brakes we paraded the streets,
+dressed in our prison clothes, or exact reproductions of them.
+Naturally, we attracted a great deal of attention and sympathy, and our
+daily meetings on Peckham Rye, as their common is known, drew enormous
+crowds. When polling day came our members were stationed at every
+polling booth, and many men as they came to the booths told us that they
+were, for the first time, voting "for the women," by which they meant
+against the Government. That night, amid great excitement, it was made
+known that the Liberal majority of 2,339 at the last general election
+had been turned into a Conservative majority of 2,494. Letters poured
+into the newspapers, declaring that the loss of this important Liberal
+seat was due almost entirely to the work of the Suffragettes, and many
+prominent Liberals called upon party leaders to start doing something
+for women before the next general election. The Liberal leaders, with
+the usual perspicacity of politicians, responded not at all. Instead
+they beheld with approval the rise to highest power the arch-enemy of
+the suffragists, Mr. Asquith.
+
+Mr. Asquith became prime minister about Easter time, 1908, on the
+resignation, on account of ill health, of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman.
+Mr. Asquith was chosen, not because of any remarkable record of
+statesmanship, nor yet because of great personal popularity--for he
+possessed neither--but simply because no better man seemed available
+just then. He was known as a clever, astute, and somewhat unscrupulous
+lawyer. He had filled several high offices to the satisfaction of his
+party, and under Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had been Chancellor of the
+Exchequer, a post which is generally regarded as a stepping-stone to the
+Premiership. The best thing the Liberal press found to say of the new
+Premier was that he was a "strong" man. Generally in politics this term
+is used to describe an obstinate man, and this we already knew Mr.
+Asquith to be. He was a bluntly outspoken opponent of woman suffrage,
+and it was sufficiently plain to us that no methods of education or
+persuasion would ever prove successful where he was concerned. Therefore
+the necessity of action on our part was greater than ever.
+
+Such an opportunity presented itself at once through changes that took
+place in the new Cabinet. According to English law, all new comers into
+the Cabinet are obliged to resign their seats in Parliament and offer
+themselves to their constituencies for re-election. Besides these
+vacancies there were several others, on account of death or elevations
+to the peerage. This made necessary a number of by-elections, and the
+Women's Social and Political Union once more went into the field against
+the Liberal candidates. I shall deal no further with these by-elections
+than is necessary to show the effect of our work on the Government, and
+its subsequent effect on our movement--which was to force us into more
+and more militancy. I shall leave it to the honest judgment of my
+readers to place where it ought rightly to be placed the responsibility
+for those first broken windows.
+
+We selected as our first candidate for defeat Mr. Winston Churchill, who
+was about to appeal to his constituency of North West Manchester to
+sanction his appointment as president of the Board of Trade. My daughter
+Christabel took charge of this election, and the work of herself and her
+forces was so successful that Mr. Churchill lost his seat by 420 votes.
+All the newspapers acknowledged that it was the Suffragettes who had
+defeated Mr. Churchill, and one Liberal newspaper, the London _Daily
+News_, called upon the party to put a stop to an intolerable state of
+affairs by granting the women's demand for votes.
+
+Another seat was immediately secured for Mr. Churchill, that of Dundee,
+then strongly--in the merely party sense--Liberal, and therefore safe.
+Nevertheless, we determined to fight Mr. Churchill there, to defeat him
+if possible, and to bring down the Liberal majority in any case. I took
+personal charge of the campaign, holding a very large meeting in
+Kinnaird Hall on the evening before Mr. Churchill's arrival. Although he
+felt absolutely sure of election in this Scottish constituency, Mr.
+Churchill dreaded the effect of our presence on the Liberal women. The
+second meeting he addressed in Dundee was held for women only, and
+instead of asking for support of the various measures actually on the
+government's programme, the politician's usual method, he talked about
+the certainty of securing, within a short time, the Parliamentary
+franchise for women. "No one," he declared, "can be blind to the fact
+that at the next general election woman suffrage will be a real,
+practical issue; and the next Parliament, I think, ought to see the
+gratification of the women's claims. I do not exclude the possibility of
+the suffrage being dealt with in this Parliament." Mr. Churchill
+earnestly reiterated his claim to be considered a true friend of the
+women's cause; but when pressed for a pledge that his Government would
+take action, he urged his inability to speak for his colleagues.
+
+This specious promise, or rather, prophecy of woman suffrage at some
+indefinite time, won over a great many of the Liberal women, who
+forthwith went staunchly to work for Mr. Churchill's election. Dundee
+has a large population of extremely poor people, workers in the jute
+mills and the marmalade factories. Some concessions in the matter of the
+sugar tax, timely made, and the announcement that the new Government
+meant to establish old age pensions, created an immense wave of Liberal
+enthusiasm that swept Mr. Churchill into office in spite of our work,
+which was untiring. We held something like two hundred meetings, and on
+election eve, five huge demonstrations--four of them in the open air and
+one which filled a large drill hall. Polling day, May 9th, was very
+exciting. For every Suffragette at the polling-booths there were half a
+dozen Liberal men and women, handing out bills with such legends as
+"Vote for Churchill, and never mind the women," and "Put Churchill in
+and keep the women out." Yet for all their efforts, Mr. Churchill polled
+2200 votes less than his Liberal predecessor had polled at the general
+election.
+
+In the first seven by-elections following Mr. Asquith's elevation to the
+premiership, we succeeded in pulling down the Liberal vote by 6663. Then
+something happened to check our progress. Mr. Asquith received a
+deputation of Liberal members of Parliament, who urged him to allow the
+Stanger suffrage bill, which had passed its second reading by a large
+majority, to be carried into law. Mr. Asquith replied that he himself
+did not wish to see women enfranchised, and that it would not be
+possible for the Government to give the required facilities to Mr.
+Stanger's bill. He added that he was fully alive to the many defects of
+the electoral system, and that the Government intended, "barring
+accidents," to bring in a reform bill before the close of that
+Parliament. Woman suffrage would have no place in it, but it would be so
+worded that a woman-suffrage amendment might be added if any member
+chose to move one. In that case, said Mr. Asquith, he should not
+consider it the duty of the Government to oppose the amendment if it
+were approved by a majority of the House of Commons--_provided_ that the
+amendment was on democratic lines, and that it had back of it the
+support, the strong and undoubted support, of the women of the country
+as well as the present electorate.
+
+One would not suppose that such an evasive utterance as this would be
+regarded in any quarter as a promise that woman suffrage would be given
+any real chances of success under the Asquith Government. That it was,
+by many, taken quite seriously is but another proof of the gullibility
+of the party-blinded public. The Liberal press lauded Mr. Asquith's
+"promise," and called for a truce of militancy in order that the
+Government might have every opportunity to act. Said the _Star_, in a
+leader typical of many others: "The meaning of Mr. Asquith's pledge is
+plain. Woman's suffrage will be passed through the House of Commons
+before the present Government goes to the country."
+
+As for the women's Liberal Associations, they were quite delirious with
+joy. In a conference called for the purpose of passing resolutions of
+gratitude, Lady Carlisle said: "This is a glorious day of rejoicing. Our
+great Prime Minister, all honour to him, has opened a way to us by which
+we can enter into that inheritance from which we have been too long
+debarred."
+
+At the two following by-elections, the last of the series, enormous
+posters were exhibited, "Premier's Great Reform Bill: Votes for Women."
+We tried to tell the electors that the pledge was false on the face of
+it; that the specious proviso that the amendment be "democratic" left no
+doubt that the Government would cause the rejection of any practical
+amendment that might be moved. Our words fell on deaf ears, and the
+Liberal majorities soared.
+
+Just a week later Mr. Asquith was questioned in the House of Commons by
+a slightly alarmed anti-suffragist member. The member asked Mr. Asquith
+whether he considered himself pledged to introduce the reform hill
+during that Parliament, whether he meant to allow such a bill to carry a
+woman-suffrage amendment, if such were moved, and whether, in that case,
+the suffrage amendment would become part of the Government policy.
+Evasive as ever, the Prime Minister, after some sparring, replied, "My
+honourable friend has asked me a question with regard to a remote and
+speculative future." Thus was our interpretation of Mr. Asquith's
+"promise" justified from his own lips. Yet the Liberal women still clung
+to the hope of Government action, and the Liberal press pretended to
+cling to it. As for the Women's Social and Political Union, we prepared
+for more work. We had to strike out along a new line, since it was
+evident that the Government could, for a time at least, neutralise our
+by-election work by more false promises. Consistent with our policy, of
+never going further than the Government compelled us to go, we made our
+first action a perfectly peaceable one.
+
+On the day when the Stanger bill had reached its second reading in the
+House, and several days after I had gone to Holloway for the first time,
+Mr. Herbert Gladstone, the Home Secretary, made a speech which greatly
+interested the Suffragettes. He professed himself a suffragist, and
+declared that he intended to vote for the bill. Nevertheless, he was
+confident that it could not pass, because of the division in the
+Cabinet, and because it had no political party united either for or
+against it. Woman suffrage, said Mr. Gladstone, must advance to victory
+through all the stages that are required for great reforms to mature.
+First academic discussion, then effective action, was the history of
+men's suffrage; it must be the same with women's suffrage. "Men,"
+declared Mr. Gladstone, "have learned this lesson and know the necessity
+for demonstrating the greatness of their movement, and for establishing
+that _force majeure_ which actuates and arms a Government for effective
+work. That is the task before the supporters of this great movement.
+Looking back at the great political crises in the thirties, the sixties
+and the eighties, it will be found that the people did not go about in
+small crowds, nor were they content with enthusiastic meetings in large
+halls; they assembled in their tens of thousands all over the country.
+
+"Of course," added Mr. Gladstone, "it is not to be expected that women
+can assemble in such masses, but power belongs to masses, and through
+this power a Government can be influenced into more effective action
+than a Government will be likely to take under present conditions."
+
+The Women's Social and Political Union determined to answer this
+challenge. If assembling in great masses was all that was necessary to
+convince the Government that woman suffrage had passed the academic
+stage and now demanded political action, we thought we could undertake
+to satisfy the most skeptical member of the Cabinet. We knew that we
+could organise a demonstration that would out-rival any of the great
+franchise demonstrations held by men in the thirties, sixties, and
+eighties. The largest number of people ever gathered in Hyde Park was
+said to have approximated 72,000. We determined to organise a Hyde Park
+demonstration of at least 250,000 people. Sunday, June 21, 1908, was
+fixed for the date of this demonstration, and for many months we worked
+to make it a day notable in the history of the movement. Our example was
+emulated by the non-militant suffragists, who organised a fine
+procession of their own, about a week before our demonstration. Thirteen
+thousand women, it was said, marched in that procession.
+
+On our demonstration we spent, for advertising alone, over a thousand
+pounds, or five thousand dollars. We covered the hoardings of London and
+of all the principal provincial cities with great posters bearing
+portraits of the women who were to preside at the twenty platforms from
+which speeches were to be made; a map of London, showing the routes by
+which the seven processions were to advance, and a plan of the Hyde Park
+meeting-place were also shown. London, of course, was thoroughly
+organised. For weeks a small army of women was busy chalking
+announcements on sidewalks, distributing handbills, canvassing from
+house to house, advertising the demonstration by posters and sandwich
+boards carried through the streets. We invited everybody to be present,
+including both Houses of Parliament. A few days before the demonstration
+Mrs. Drummond and a number of other women hired and decorated a launch
+and sailed up the Thames to the Houses of Parliament, arriving at the
+hour when members entertain their women friends at tea on the terrace.
+Everyone left the tables and crowded to the water's edge as the boat
+stopped, and Mrs. Drummond's strong, clear voice pealed out her
+invitation to the Cabinet and the members of Parliament to join the
+women's demonstration in Hyde Park. "Come to the park on Sunday," she
+cried. "You shall have police protection, and there will be no arrests,
+we promise you." An alarmed someone telephoned for the police boats, but
+as they appeared, the women's boat steamed away.
+
+What a day was Sunday, June 21st--clear, radiant, filled with golden
+sunshine! As I advanced, leading, with the venerable Mrs.
+Wolstenholm-Elmy, the first of the seven processions, it seemed to me
+that all London had turned out to witness our demonstration. And a
+goodly part of London followed the processions. When I mounted my
+platform in Hyde Park, and surveyed the mighty throngs that waited there
+and the endless crowds that were still pouring into the park from all
+directions, I was filled with amazement not unmixed with awe. Never had
+I imagined that so many people could be gathered together to share in a
+political demonstration. It was a gay and beautiful as well as an
+awe-inspiring spectacle, for the white gowns and flower-trimmed hats of
+the women, against the background of ancient trees, gave the park the
+appearance of a vast garden in full bloom.
+
+The bugles sounded, and the speakers at each of the twenty platforms
+began their addresses, which could not have been heard by more than half
+or a third of the vast audience. Notwithstanding this, they remained to
+the end. At five o'clock the bugles sounded again, the speaking ceased,
+and the resolution calling upon the Government to bring in an official
+woman-suffrage bill without delay was carried at every platform, often
+without a dissenting vote. Then, with a three-times-repeated cry of
+"Votes for Women!" from the assembled multitude, the great meeting
+dispersed.
+
+The London _Times_ said next day: "Its organisers had counted on an
+audience of 250,000. That expectation was certainly fulfilled, and
+probably it was doubled, and it would be difficult to contradict any one
+who asserted that it was trebled. Like the distances and the number of
+the stars, the facts were beyond the threshold of perception."
+
+The _Daily Express_ said: "It is probable that so many people never
+before stood in one square mass anywhere in England. Men who saw the
+great Gladstone meeting years ago said that compared with yesterday's
+multitude it was as nothing."
+
+We felt that we had answered the challenge in Mr. Gladstone's
+declaration that "power belongs to the masses," and that through this
+power the Government could be influenced; so it was with real hope that
+we despatched a copy of the resolution to the Prime Minister, asking him
+what answer the Government would make to that unparalleled gathering of
+men and women. Mr. Asquith replied formally that he had nothing to add
+to his previous statement--that the Government intended, at some
+indefinite time, to bring in a general reform bill which _might_ be
+amended to include woman suffrage. Our wonderful demonstration, it
+appeared, had made no impression whatever upon him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Now we had reached a point where we had to choose between two
+alternatives. We had exhausted argument. Therefore either we had to give
+up our agitation altogether, as the suffragists of the eighties
+virtually had done, or else we must act, and go on acting, until the
+selfishness and the obstinacy of the Government was broken down, or the
+Government themselves destroyed. Until forced to do so, the Government,
+we perceived, would never give women the vote.
+
+We realised the truth of John Bright's words, spoken while the reform
+bill of 1867 was being agitated. Parliament, John Bright then declared,
+had never been hearty for any reform. The Reform Act of 1832 had been
+wrested by force from the Government of that day, and now before
+another, he said, could be carried, the agitators would have to fill the
+streets with people from Charing Cross to Westminster Abbey. Acting on
+John Bright's advice, we issued a call to the public to join us in
+holding a huge demonstration, on June 30th outside the House of Commons.
+We wanted to be sure that the Government saw as well as read of our
+immense following. A public proclamation from the Commissioner of
+Police, warning the public not to assemble in Parliament Square and
+declaring that the approaches to the Houses of Parliament must be kept
+open, was at once issued.
+
+We persisted in announcing that the demonstration would take place, and
+I wrote a letter to Mr. Asquith telling him that a deputation would wait
+upon him at half-past four on the afternoon of June 30th. We held the
+usual Women's Parliament in Caxton Hall, after which Mrs. Pethick
+Lawrence, eleven other women, and myself, set forth. We met with no
+opposition from the police, but marched through cheering crowds of
+spectators to the Strangers' Entrance to the House of Commons. Here we
+were met by a large group of uniformed men commanded by Inspector
+Scantlebury, of the police. The inspector, whom I knew personally,
+stepped forward and demanded officially, "Are you Mrs. Pankhurst, and is
+this your deputation?"
+
+"Yes," I replied.
+
+"My orders are to exclude you from the House of Commons."
+
+"Has Mr. Asquith received my letter?" I asked.
+
+For answer the inspector drew my letter from his pocket and handed it to
+me.
+
+"Did Mr. Asquith return no message, no kind of reply?" I inquired.
+
+"No," replied the inspector.
+
+We turned and walked back to Caxton Hall, to tell the waiting audience
+what had occurred. We resolved that there was nothing to do but wait
+patiently until evening, and see how well the public would respond to
+our call to meet in Parliament Square. Already we knew that the streets
+were filled with people, and early as it was the crowds were increasing
+rapidly. At eight we went out in groups from Caxton Hall, to find
+Parliament Square packed with a throng, estimated next day at least
+100,000. From the steps of public buildings, from stone copings, from
+the iron railings of the Palace Yard, to which they clung precariously,
+our women made speeches until the police pulled them down and flung them
+into the moving, swaying, excited crowds. Some of the women were
+arrested, others were merely ordered to move on. Mingled cheers and
+jeers rose from the spectators. Some of the men were roughs who had come
+out to amuse themselves. Others were genuinely sympathetic, and tried
+valiantly to help us to reach the House of Commons. Again and again the
+police lines were broken, and it was only as the result of repeated
+charges by mounted police that the people's attacks were repelled. Many
+members of Parliament, including Mr. Lloyd-George, Mr. Winston
+Churchill, and Mr. Herbert Gladstone, came out to witness the struggle,
+which lasted until midnight and resulted in the arrest of twenty-nine
+women. Two of these women were arrested after they had each thrown a
+stone through a window of Mr. Asquith's official residence in Downing
+Street, the value of the windows being about $2.40.
+
+This was the first window-breaking in our history. Mrs. Mary Leigh and
+Miss Edith New, who had thrown the stones, sent word to me from the
+police court that, having acted without orders, they would not resent
+repudiation from headquarters. Far from repudiating them, I went at once
+to see them in their cells, and assured them of my approval of their
+act. The smashing of windows is a time-honoured method of showing
+displeasure in a political situation. As one of the newspapers,
+commenting on the affair, truly said, "When the King and Queen dine at
+Apsley on the 13th inst. they will be entertained in rooms the windows
+of which the Duke of Wellington was obliged to protect with iron
+shutters from the fury of his political opponents."
+
+In Winchester a few years ago, to give but one instance, a great riot
+took place as a protest against the removal of a historic gun from one
+part of the town to another. In the course of this riot windows were
+broken and other property of various kinds was destroyed, very serious
+damage being done. No punishment was administered in respect of this
+riot and the authorities, bowing to public opinion thus riotously
+expressed, restored the gun to its original situation.
+
+Window-breaking, when Englishmen do it, is regarded as honest expression
+of political opinion. Window-breaking, when Englishwomen do it, is
+treated as a crime. In sentencing Mrs. Leigh and Miss New to two months
+in the first division, the magistrate used very severe language, and
+declared that such a thing must never happen again. Of course the women
+assured him that it would happen again. Said Mrs. Leigh: "We have no
+other course but to rebel against oppression, and if necessary to resort
+to stronger measures. This fight is going on."
+
+The summer of 1908 is remembered as one of the most oppressively hot
+seasons the country had known for years. Our prisoners in Holloway
+suffered intensely, some being made desperately ill from the heat, the
+bad air, and the miserable food. We who spent the summer campaigning
+suffered also, but in less degree. It was a tremendous relief when the
+cool days of autumn set in, and it was with renewed vigour that we
+prepared for the opening day of Parliament, which was October 12th.
+Again we resolved to send a deputation to the Prime Minister, and again
+we invited the general public to take part in the demonstration. We had
+printed thousands of little handbills bearing this inscription: "Men and
+Women, Help the Suffragettes to Rush the House of Commons, on Tuesday
+Evening, October 13th, at 7:30."
+
+On Sunday, October 11th, we held a large meeting in Trafalgar Square, my
+daughter Christabel, Mrs. Drummond and I speaking from the plinth of the
+Nelson monument. Mr. Lloyd-George, as we afterward learned, was a member
+of the audience. The police were there, taking ample notes of our
+speeches. We had not failed to notice that they were watching us daily,
+dogging our footsteps, and showing in numerous ways that they were under
+orders to keep track of all our movements. The climax came at noon on
+October 12th, when Christabel, Mrs. Drummond and I were each served with
+an imposing legal document which read, "Information has been laid this
+day by the Commissioner of Police that you, in the month of October, in
+the year 1908, were guilty of conduct likely to provoke a breach of the
+peace by initiating and causing to be initiated, by publishing and
+causing to be published, a certain handbill, calling upon and inciting
+the public to do a certain wrongful and illegal act, viz., to rush the
+House of Commons at 7:30 P.M. on October 13th inst."
+
+[Illustration: MRS. PANKHURST AND CHRISTABEL HIDING FROM THE POLICE ON
+THE ROOF GARDEN AT CLEMENTS INN
+
+_October, 1908_]
+
+The last paragraph was a summons to appear at Bow Street police station
+that same afternoon at three o'clock. We did not go to Bow Street police
+station. We went instead to a crowded "At Home" at Queen's Hall, where
+it can be imagined that our news created great excitement. The place was
+surrounded by constables, and the police reporters were on hand to take
+stenographic reports of everything that was said from the platform. Once
+an excited cry was raised that a police inspector was coming in to
+arrest us. But the officer merely brought a message that the summons had
+been adjourned until the following morning.
+
+It did not suit our convenience to obey the adjourned summons quite so
+early, so I wrote a polite note to the police, saying that we would be
+in our headquarters, No. 4 Clements Inn, the next evening at six
+o'clock, and would then be at his disposal. Warrants for our arrests
+were quickly issued, and Inspector Jarvis was instructed to execute them
+at once. This he found impossible to do, for Mrs. Drummond was spending
+her last day of liberty on private business, while my daughter and I had
+retreated to another part of Clements Inn, which is a big, rambling
+building. There, in the roof-garden of the Pethick Lawrence's private
+flat, we remained all day, busy, under the soft blue of the autumn sky,
+with our work and our preparations for a long absence. At six we walked
+downstairs, dressed for the street. Mrs. Drummond arrived promptly, the
+waiting officers read the warrants, and we all proceeded to Bow Street
+in cabs. It was too late for the trial to be held. We asked for bail,
+but the authorities had no mind to allow us to take part in the "rush"
+which we had incited, so we were obliged to spend the night in the
+police station. All night I lay awake, thinking of the scenes which were
+going on in the streets.
+
+The next morning, in a courtroom crowded to its utmost capacity, my
+daughter rose to conduct her first case at law. She had earned the right
+to an LL.B. after her name, but as women are not permitted to practise
+law in England, she had never appeared at the bar in any capacity except
+that of defendant. Now she proposed to combine the two rôles of
+defendant and lawyer, and conduct the case for the three of us. She
+began by asking the magistrate not to try the case in that court, but to
+send it for trial before a judge and jury. We had long desired to take
+the Suffragettes' cases before bodies of private citizens, because we
+had every reason to suspect that the police-court officials acted under
+the direct commands of the very persons against whom our agitation was
+directed. Jury trial was denied us; but after the preliminary
+examination was over the magistrate, Mr. Curtis Bennett, allowed a
+week's adjournment for preparation of the case.
+
+On October 21st the trial was resumed, with the courtroom as full as
+before and the press table even more crowded, for it had been widely
+published that we had actually subpoenaed two members of the
+Government, who had witnessed the scenes on the night of October 13th.
+The first witness to enter the box was Mr. Lloyd-George. Christabel
+examined him at some length as to the meaning and merits of the word
+rush, and succeeded in making him very uncomfortable--and the charge
+against ourselves look very flimsy. She then questioned him about the
+speeches he had heard at Trafalgar Square, and as to whether there had
+been any suggestion that property be destroyed or personal violence
+used. He admitted that the speeches were temperate and the crowds
+orderly. Then Christabel suddenly asked, "There were no words used so
+likely to incite to violence as the advice you gave at Swansea, that the
+women should be ruthlessly flung out of your meeting?" Mr. Lloyd-George
+looked black, and answered nothing. The magistrate hastened to the
+protection of Mr. Lloyd-George. "This is quite irrelevant," he said.
+"That was a private meeting." It was a public meeting, and Christabel
+said so. "It was a private meeting _in a sense_," insisted the
+magistrate.
+
+Mr. Lloyd-George assumed an air of pompous indignation when Christabel
+asked him, "Have we not received encouragement from you, and if not from
+you from your colleagues, to take action of this kind?" Mr. Lloyd-George
+rolled his eyes upward as he replied, "I should be very much surprised
+to hear that, Miss Pankhurst."
+
+"Is it not a fact," asked Christabel, "that you yourself have set us an
+example of revolt?" "I never incited a crowd to violence," exclaimed
+the witness. "Not in the Welsh graveyard case?" she asked. "No!" he
+cried angrily. "You did not tell them to break down a wall and disinter
+a body?" pursued Christabel. He could not deny this but, "I gave advice
+which was found by the Court of Appeal to be sound legal advice," he
+snapped, and turned his back as far as he could in the narrow
+witness-box.
+
+Mr. Herbert Gladstone had asked to be allowed to testify early, as he
+was being detained from important public duties. Christabel asked to
+question one witness before Mr. Gladstone entered the box. The witness
+was Miss Georgiana Brackenbury, who had recently suffered six weeks'
+imprisonment for the cause, and had since met and had a talk with Mr.
+Horace Smith, the magistrate, who had made to her a most important and
+damaging admission of the government's interference in suffragists'
+trials. Christabel asked her one question. "Did Mr. Horace Smith tell
+you in sentencing you that he was doing what he had been told to do?"
+"You must not put that question!" exclaimed the magistrate. But the
+witness had already answered "Yes." There was an excited stir in the
+courtroom. It had been recorded under oath that a magistrate had
+admitted that Suffragettes were being sentenced not by himself,
+according to the evidence and according to law, but by the Government,
+for no one could possibly doubt where Mr. Horace Smith's orders came
+from.
+
+Mr. Gladstone, plump, bald, and ruddy, in no way resembles his
+illustrious father. He entered the witness-box smiling and confident,
+but his complacence vanished when Christabel asked him outright if the
+Government had not ordered the Commissioner of Police to take this
+action against us. Of course the magistrate intervened, and Mr.
+Gladstone did not answer the question. Christabel tried again. "Did you
+instruct Mr. Horace Smith to decide against Miss Brackenbury, and to
+send her to prison for six weeks?" That too was objected to, as were all
+questions on the subject.
+
+All through the examination the magistrate constantly intervened to save
+the Cabinet Minister from embarrassment, but Christabel finally
+succeeded in making Mr. Gladstone admit, point by point, that he had
+said that women could never get the vote because they could not fight
+for it as men had fought.
+
+A large number of witnesses testified to the orderly nature of the
+demonstration on the 13th, and then Christabel rose to plead. She began
+by declaring that these proceedings had been taken, as the legal saying
+is, "in malice and vexation," in order to lame a political enemy. She
+declared that, under the law, the charge which might properly be brought
+against us was that of illegal assembly, but the Government had not
+charged us with this offence, because the Government desired to keep the
+case in a police court.
+
+"The authorities dare not see this case come before a jury," she
+declared, "because they know perfectly well that if it were heard before
+a jury of our countrymen we should be acquitted, just as John Burns was
+acquitted years ago for taking action far more dangerous to the public
+peace than we have taken. We are deprived of trial by jury. We are also
+deprived of the right to appeal against the magistrate's decision. Very
+carefully has this procedure been thought out."
+
+Of the handbill she said: "We do not deny that we issued this bill; none
+of us three has wished to deny responsibility. We did issue the bill; we
+did cause it to be circulated; we did put upon it the words 'Come and
+help the suffragettes rush the House of Commons.' For these words we do
+not apologise. It is very well known that we took this action in order
+to press forward a claim, which, according to the British constitution,
+we are well entitled to make."
+
+In all that the Suffragettes had done, in all that they might ever do,
+declared my daughter, they would only be following in the footsteps of
+men now in Parliament. "Mr. Herbert Gladstone has told us in the speech
+I read to him that the victory of argument alone is not enough. As we
+cannot hope to win by force of argument alone, it is necessary to
+overcome by other means the savage resistance of the Government to our
+claim for citizenship. He says, 'Go on, fight as the men did.' And then,
+when we show our power and get the people to help us, he takes
+proceedings against us in a manner that would have been disgraceful even
+in the old days of coercion. Then there is Mr. Lloyd-George, who, if any
+man has done so, has set us an example. His whole career has been a
+series of revolts. He has said that if we do not get the vote--mark
+these words--we should be justified in adopting the methods the men had
+to adopt, namely, pulling down the Hyde Park railings." She quoted Lord
+Morley as saying of the Indian unrest: "'We are in India in the presence
+of a living movement, and a movement for what? For objects which we
+ourselves have taught them to think are desirable objects; and unless we
+can somehow reconcile order with satisfaction of those ideals and
+aspirations, the fault will not be theirs, it will be ours--it will mark
+the breakdown of British statesmanship.'--Apply those words to our
+case," she continued.
+
+[Illustration: CHRISTABEL, MRS. DRUMMOND AND MRS. PANKHURST IN THE DOCK,
+FIRST CONSPIRACY TRIAL
+
+_October, 1908_]
+
+"Remember that we are demanding of Liberal statesmen that which is for
+us the greatest boon and the most essential right--and if the present
+Government cannot reconcile order with our demand for the vote without
+delay, it will mark the breakdown of their statesmanship. Yes, their
+statesmanship has broken down already. They are disgraced. It is only in
+this court that they have the smallest hope of being supported."
+
+My daughter had spoken with passion and fervour, and her righteous
+indignation had moved her to words that caused the magistrate's face to
+turn an angry crimson. When I rose to address the Court I began by
+assuming an appearance of calmness which I did not altogether feel. I
+endorsed all that Christabel had said of the unfairness of our trial and
+the malice of the Government; I protested against the trial of political
+offenders in a common police court, and I said that we were not women
+who would come into the court as ordinary law-breakers. I described Mrs.
+Drummond's worthy career as a wife, a mother, and a self-sustaining
+business woman. I said, "Before you decide what is to be done with us,
+I should like you to hear from me a statement of what has brought me
+into the dock this morning." And then I told of my life and experiences,
+many of which I have related in these pages of what I had seen and known
+as a Poor Law Guardian and a registrar of births and deaths; of how I
+had learned the burning necessity of changing the status of women, of
+altering the laws under which they and their children live, and of the
+essential justice of making women self-governing citizens.
+
+"I have seen," I said, "that men are encouraged by law to take advantage
+of the helplessness of women. Many women have thought as I have, and for
+many, many years have tried, by that influence of which we have been so
+often reminded, to alter these laws, but we find that influence counts
+for nothing. When we went to the House of Commons we used to be told,
+when we were persistent, that members of Parliament were not responsible
+to women, they were responsible only to voters, and that their time was
+too fully occupied to reform those laws, although they agreed that they
+needed reforming.
+
+"We women have presented larger petitions in support of our
+enfranchisement than were ever presented for any other reform; we have
+succeeded in holding greater public meetings than men have ever held for
+any reform, in spite of the difficulty which women have in throwing off
+their natural diffidence, that desire to escape publicity which we have
+inherited from generations of our foremothers. We have broken through
+that. We have faced hostile mobs at street corners, because we were told
+that we could not have that representation for our taxes that men have
+won unless we converted the whole of the country to our side. Because we
+have done this, we have been misrepresented, we have been ridiculed, we
+have had contempt poured upon us, and the ignorant mob have been incited
+to offer us violence, which we have faced unarmed and unprotected by the
+safeguards which Cabinet Ministers enjoy. We have been driven to do
+this; we are determined to go on with this agitation because we feel in
+honour bound. Just as it was the duty of your forefathers, it is our
+duty to make the world a better place for women than it is to-day.
+
+"Lastly, I want to call attention to the self-restraint which was shown
+by our followers on the night of the 13th, after we had been arrested.
+Our rule has always been to be patient, exercise self-restraint, show
+our so-called superiors that we are not hysterical; to use no violence,
+but rather to offer ourselves to the violence of others.
+
+"That is all I have to say to you, sir. We are here, not because we are
+law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers."
+
+The burly policemen, the reporters, and most of the spectators were in
+tears as I finished. But the magistrate, who had listened part of the
+time with his hand concealing his face, still held that we were properly
+charged in a common police court as inciters to riot. Since we refused
+to be bound over to keep the peace, he sentenced Mrs. Drummond and
+myself to three months' imprisonment, and Christabel to ten weeks'
+imprisonment. It was destined to be a kind of imprisonment the
+authorities had never yet been called upon to deal with.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+My first act on reaching Holloway was to demand that the Governor be
+sent for. When he came I told him that the Suffragettes had resolved
+that they would no longer submit to being treated as ordinary
+law-breakers. In the course of our trial two Cabinet Ministers had
+admitted that we were political offenders, and therefore we should
+henceforth refuse to be searched or to undress in the presence of the
+wardresses. For myself I claimed the right, and I hoped the others would
+do likewise, to speak to my friends during exercise, or whenever I came
+in contact with them. The Governor, after reflection, yielded to the
+first two demands, but said that he would have to consult the Home
+Office before permitting us to break the rule of silence. We were
+accordingly allowed to change our clothing privately, and, as a further
+concession, were placed in adjoining cells. This was little advantage to
+me, however, since within a few days I was removed to a hospital cell,
+suffering from the illness which prison life always inflicts on me. Here
+the Governor visited me with the unwelcome news that the Home Secretary
+had refused to allow me the privilege of speech with my fellow
+prisoners. I asked him if I might, when I was strong enough to walk,
+take exercise with my friends. To this he assented, and I soon had the
+joy of seeing my daughter and the other brave comrades, and walking
+with them in the dismal courtyard of the prison. Single file we walked,
+at a distance of three or four feet from one another, back and forth
+under the stony eyes of the wardresses. The rough flags of the pavement
+hurt our feet, shod in heavy, shapeless prison boots. The autumn days
+were cold and cheerless, and we shivered violently under our scanty
+cloaks. But of all our hardships the ceaseless silence of our lives was
+worst.
+
+At the end of the second week I decided I would no longer endure it.
+That afternoon at exercise I suddenly called my daughter by name and
+bade her stand still until I came up to her. Of course she stopped, and
+when I reached her side we linked arms and began to talk in low tones. A
+wardress ran up to us, saying: "I shall listen to everything you say." I
+replied: "You are welcome to do that, but I shall insist on my right to
+speak to my daughter." Another wardress had hastily left the yard, and
+now she returned with a large number of wardresses. They seized me and
+quickly removed me to my cell, while the other suffrage prisoners
+cheered my action at the top of their voices. For their "mutiny" they
+got three days' solitary confinement, and I, for mine, a much more
+severe punishment. Unrepentant, I told the Governor that, in spite of
+any punishment he might impose on me, I would never again submit to the
+silence rule. To forbid a mother to speak to her daughter was infamous.
+For this I was characterised as a "dangerous criminal" and was sent into
+solitary confinement, without exercise or chapel, while a wardress was
+stationed constantly at my cell door to see that I communicated with no
+one.
+
+[Illustration: MRS. PANKHURST AND MISS CHRISTABEL PANKHURST IN PRISON
+DRESS]
+
+It was two weeks before I saw any of my friends again, and meantime the
+health of Mrs. Drummond had been so seriously impaired that she was
+released for hospital treatment. My daughter also, I learned, was ill,
+and in desperation I made application to the Board of Visiting
+Magistrates to be allowed to see her. After a long conference, during
+which I was made to wait outside in the corridor, the magistrates
+returned a refusal, saying that I might renew my application in a month.
+The answer then, they said, would depend on my conduct. A month! My girl
+might be dead by that time. My anxiety sent me to bed ill again, but,
+although I did not know it, relief was already on its way. I had told
+the visiting magistrates that I would wait until public opinion got
+within those walls, and this happened sooner than I had dared to hope.
+Mrs. Drummond, as soon as she was able to appear in public, and the
+other suffrage prisoners, as they were released, spread broadcast the
+story of our mutiny, and of a subsequent one led by Miss Wallace Dunlop,
+which sent a large number of women into solitary confinement. The
+Suffragettes marched by thousands to Holloway, thronging the approaches
+to the prison street. Round and round the prison they marched, singing
+the Women's Marseillaise and cheering. Faintly the sound came to our
+ears, infinitely lightening our burden of pain and loneliness. The
+following week they came again, so we afterwards learned, but this time
+the police turned them back long before they reached the confines of
+the prison.
+
+The demonstrations, together with a volley of questions asked in the
+House of Commons, told at last. Orders came from the Home Office that I
+was to see my daughter, and that we were to be allowed to exercise and
+to talk together for one hour each day. In addition, we were to be
+permitted the rare privilege of reading a daily newspaper. Then, on
+December 8th, the day of Christabel's release, orders came that I, too,
+should be discharged, two weeks before the expiration of my sentence.
+
+At the welcome breakfast given us, as released prisoners, at Lincoln's
+Inn Hotel, I told our members that henceforth we should all insist on
+refusing to abide by ordinary prison rules. We did not propose to break
+laws and then shirk punishment. We simply meant to assert our right to
+be recognised as political prisoners. We reached this point after due
+reflection. We first set ourselves not to complain of prison, not to say
+anything about it, to avoid it, to keep away from all side issues, to
+keep along the straight path of political reform, to get the vote;
+because we knew that when we had won it we could reform prisons and a
+great many other abuses as well. But now that we had had in the witness
+box the admission of Cabinet Ministers that we are political offenders,
+we should in future demand the treatment given to men political
+offenders in all civilised countries. "If nations," I said, "are still
+so governed that they make political offenders, then Great Britain is
+going to treat her political offenders as well as political offenders
+are treated by other nations. If it were the custom to treat political
+offenders as ordinary offenders against the well-being of society are
+treated, we should not have complained if we were treated like that; but
+it is not the international custom to do it, and so, for the dignity of
+the women of the country, and for the sake of the consciences of the men
+of the country, and for the sake of our nation amongst the nations of
+the earth, we are not going to allow the Liberal government to treat us
+like ordinary law-breakers in future."
+
+I said the same thing that night in a great meeting held in Queen's Hall
+to welcome the released prisoners, and, although we all knew that our
+determination involved a bitter struggle, our women endorsed it without
+a moment's hesitation. Had they been able to look forward to the events
+which were even then overshadowing us, could they have foreseen the new
+forms of suffering and danger that lay in waiting, I am certain that
+they would still have done the same thing, for our experiences had
+taught us to dispense with fear. Whatever of timidity, of shrinking from
+pain or hardship any of us had originally possessed, it had all
+vanished. There were no terrors that we were not now ready to face.
+
+The year 1909 marks an important point in our struggle, partly because
+of this decision of ours, never again to submit to be classed with
+criminals; and partly because in this year we forced the Liberal
+Government to go on record, publicly, in regard to the oldest of
+popular rights, the right of petition. We had long contemplated this
+step, and now the time seemed ripe for taking it.
+
+In the closing days of 1908 Mr. Asquith, speaking on the policy to be
+carried out in 1909, commented on the various deputations he was obliged
+at that time to receive. They called on him, he said, "from all quarters
+and in all causes, on an average of something like two hours on three
+days in every week." The deputations all asked for different things,
+and, although all of the things could not possibly be included in the
+King's speech, Mr. Asquith was inclined to agree that many of them ought
+to be included. This declaration from the Prime Minister that he was
+constantly receiving deputations of men, and listening favourably to
+their suggestions of what policies to pursue, aroused in the
+Suffragettes feelings of deep indignation. This in part they expressed
+on January 25th, when the first meeting of the Cabinet Council took
+place. A small deputation from the W. S. P. U. proceeded to Downing
+Street to claim the right to be heard, as men were heard. For knocking
+at the door of the official residence four of the women, including my
+sister, Mrs. Clark, were arrested and sent to prison for one month.
+
+A month later the seventh of our Women's Parliaments was called against
+this and against the fact that no mention of women had been included in
+the King's speech. Led by Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, Lady Constance Lytton
+and Miss Daisy Solomon, a deputation of women endeavoured to carry the
+resolution to the House of Commons. They were promptly arrested and,
+next day, were sent to prison on sentences of from one to two months.
+The time was rapidly approaching when the legality of these arrests
+would have to be tested. In June of the year 1909 the test was made.
+
+It will be remembered that we had endeavoured to force the authorities
+to make good their threat to charge us under the obsolete Charles II
+"Tumultuous Petitions Act," which prescribes severe penalties for
+persons proceeding to Parliament in groups of more than twelve for the
+purpose of presenting petitions. It had been stated that if we were
+charged under that act our case would be given a hearing before a judge
+and jury instead of a police magistrate. Since this was exactly what we
+desired to have happen we had sent deputation after deputation of more
+than twelve persons, but always they were tried in police courts, and
+were sent to prison often for periods as long as that prescribed in the
+Charles II Act. Now we determined to do something still more ambitious;
+we resolved to test, not the Charles II Act, but the constitutional
+right of the subject to petition the Prime Minister as the seat of
+power.
+
+The right of petition, which has existed in England since the earliest
+known period, was written into the Bill of Rights which became law in
+1689 on the accession of William and Mary. It was, in fact, one of the
+conditions attaching to the accession of the joint monarchs. According
+to the Bill of Rights, "It is the right of subjects to petition the King
+and all commitments, and prosecutions for such petitionings are
+illegal." The power of the King having passed almost completely into
+the hands of Parliament, the Prime Minister now stands where the King's
+majesty stood in former times. Clearly, then, the right of the subject
+to petition the Prime Minister cannot be legally denied. Thus were we
+advised, and in order to keep within the strict letter of the law, we
+accepted the limitations of the right of petition laid down in the
+Charles II Act, and decided that our petition should be carried to the
+House of Commons by small groups of women.
+
+Again I called together, on the evening of June 29th, a Parliament of
+women. Previously I had written to Mr. Asquith stating that a deputation
+of women would wait on him at the House of Commons at eight o'clock in
+the evening. I wrote him further that we were not to be refused, as we
+insisted upon our constitutional right to be received. To my note the
+Prime Minister returned a formal note declining to receive us.
+Nevertheless we continued our preparations, because we knew that the
+Prime Minister would continue to decline, but that in the end he would
+be forced to receive us.
+
+An incident which occurred a week before the date of the deputation was
+destined to have important consequences. Miss Wallace Dunlop went to St.
+Stephen's Hall in the House of Commons, and marked with printer's ink on
+the stone work of the Hall an extract from the Bill of Rights. The first
+time she made the attempt she was interrupted by a policeman, but two
+days later she succeeded in stamping on the ancient walls the reminder
+to Parliament that women as well as men possess constitutional rights,
+and that they were proposing to exercise those rights. She was arrested
+and sentenced to prison for one month, in the third division. The option
+of a heavy fine was given her, which of course she refused. Miss Wallace
+Dunlop's prison term began on June 22d. Perhaps her deed had something
+to do with the unusual interest taken in the approaching deputation, an
+interest which was shown not only by the public but by many members of
+Parliament. In the House of Commons a strong feeling that the women
+ought this time to be received manifested itself in many questions put
+to the Government. One member even asked leave to move the adjournment
+of the House on a matter of urgent public importance, namely the danger
+to the public peace, owing to the refusal of the Prime Minister to
+receive the deputation. This was denied, however, and the Government
+mendaciously disclaimed all responsibility for what action the police
+might take toward the deputation. The Home Secretary, Mr. Gladstone,
+when asked by Mr. Kier Hardie to give instructions that the deputation,
+if orderly, should be admitted to St. Stephen's, replied: "I cannot say
+what action the police ought to take in the matter." Our Women's
+Parliament met at half past seven on the evening of June 29th, and the
+petition to the Prime Minister was read and adopted. Then our deputation
+set forth. Accompanying me as leader were two highly respectable women
+of advanced years, Mrs. Saul Solomon, whose husband had been Prime
+Minister at the Cape, and Miss Neligan, one of the foremost of the
+pioneer educators of England. We three and five other women were
+preceded by Miss Elsie Howey, who, riding fast, went on horse-back to
+announce our coming to the enormous crowds that filled the streets. She,
+we afterward learned, progressed as far as the approaches to the House
+of Commons before being turned back by the police. As for the
+deputation, it pressed on through the crowd as far as St. Margaret's
+Church, Westminster, where we found a long line of police blocking the
+road. We paused for a moment, gathering strength for the ordeal of
+trying to push through the lines, when an unexpected thing happened. An
+order was given from some one, and instantly the police lines parted,
+leaving a clear space through which we walked towards the House. We were
+escorted on our way by Inspector Wells, and as we passed the crowd broke
+into vociferous cheering, firmly believing that we were after all to be
+received. As for myself I did little speculating as to what was about to
+happen. I simply led my deputation on as far as the entrance to St.
+Stephen's Hall. There we encountered another strong force of police
+commanded by our old acquaintance, Inspector Scantlebury, who stepped
+forward and handed me a letter. I opened it and read in aloud to the
+women. "The Prime Minister, for the reasons which he has already given
+in a written reply to their request, regrets that he is unable to
+receive the proposed deputation."
+
+I dropped the note to the ground and said: "I stand upon my rights, as a
+subject of the King, to petition the Prime Minister, and I am firmly
+resolved to stand here until I am received."
+
+[Illustration: INSPECTOR WELLS CONDUCTING MRS. PANKHURST TO THE HOUSE OF
+COMMONS
+
+_June, 1908_]
+
+Inspector Scantlebury turned away and walked rapidly towards the door
+of the Strangers' Entrance. I turned to Inspector Jarvis, who remained,
+to several members of Parliament and some newspaper men who stood
+looking on, and begged them to take my message to the Prime Minister,
+but no one responded, and the Inspector, seizing my arm, began to push
+me away. I now knew that the deputation would not be received and that
+the old miserable business of refusing to leave, of being forced
+backward, and returning again and again until arrested, would have to be
+re-enacted. I had to take into account that I was accompanied by two
+fragile old ladies, who, brave as they were to be there at all, could
+not possibly endure what I knew must follow. I quickly decided that I
+should have to force an immediate arrest, so I committed an act of
+technical assault on the person of Inspector Jarvis, striking him very
+lightly on the cheek. He said instantly, "I understand why you did
+that," and I supposed then that we would instantly be taken. But the
+other police apparently did not grasp the situation, for they began
+pushing and jostling our women. I said to the inspector: "Shall I have
+to do it again?" and he said "Yes." So I struck him lightly a second
+time, and then he ordered the police to make the arrests.
+
+The matter did not end with the arrest of our deputation of eight women.
+In recurring deputations of twelve the Suffragettes again and again
+pressed forward in vain endeavour to reach the House of Commons. In
+spite of the fact that the crowds were friendly and did everything they
+could to aid the women, their deputations were broken up by the police
+and many of the women arrested. By nine o'clock Parliament Square was
+empty, an enormous force of mounted police having beaten the people back
+into Victoria Street and across Westminster Bridge. For a short time all
+looked tranquil, but soon little groups of women, seven or eight at a
+time, kept appearing mysteriously and making spirited dashes toward the
+House. This extraordinary procedure greatly exasperated the police, who
+could not unravel the mystery of where the women came from. As a matter
+of bygone history the explanation is that the W. S. P. U. had hired
+thirty offices in the neighborhood, in the shelter of which the women
+waited until it was time for them to sally forth. It was a striking
+demonstration of the ingenuity of women opposing the physical force of
+men, but it served still another purpose. It diverted the attention of
+the police from another demonstration which was going on. Other
+Suffragettes had gone to the official residence of the First Lord of the
+Admiralty, to the Home Office, the Treasury and Privy Council Offices,
+and had registered their contempt for the Government's refusal to
+receive the deputation by the time-honoured method of breaking a window
+in each place.
+
+One hundred and eight women were arrested that night, but instead of
+submitting to arrests and trial, the Women's Social and Political Union
+announced that they were prepared to prove that the Government and not
+the women had broken the law in refusing to receive the petition. My
+case, coupled with that of the Hon. Mrs. Haverfield, was selected as a
+test case for all the others, and Lord Robert Cecil was retained for the
+defence. Mr. Muskett, who conducted the case for the prosecution, tried
+to prove that our women had not gone to the House of Commons to present
+a petition, but this was easily demonstrated to be an unwarranted claim.
+The speeches of the leader, the official articles published in our
+newspaper, _Votes for Women_, and the letters sent to Mr. Asquith, not
+to speak of the indisputable facts that every member of the deputation
+carried a copy of the petition in her hand, furnished evidence enough of
+the nature of our errand. The whole case of the subject's right of
+petition was then brought forward for discussion. Mr. Muskett spoke
+first, then our council, Mr. Henle, then Lord Robert Cecil. Last of all
+I spoke, describing the events of June 29th. I told the magistrate that
+should he decide that we and not the Government had been guilty of an
+infraction of the law, we should refuse to be bound over, but should all
+choose to go to prison. In that case we should not submit to being
+treated like criminals. "There are one hundred and eight of us here
+to-day," I said, pointing to the benches where my fellow-prisoners sat,
+"and just as we have thought it is our duty to defy the police in the
+street, so when we get into prison, as we are political prisoners, we
+shall do our best to bring back into the twentieth century the treatment
+of political prisoners which was thought right in the case of William
+Cobbett, and other political offenders of his time."
+
+The magistrate, Sir Albert de Rutzen, an elderly, amiable man, rather
+bewildered by this unprecedented situation, then gave his decision. He
+agreed with Mr. Henle and Lord Robert Cecil that the right of petition
+was clearly guaranteed to every subject, but he thought that when the
+women were refused permission to enter the House of Commons, and when
+Mr. Asquith had said that he would not receive them, the women acted
+wrongly to persist in their demands. He should, therefore, fine them
+five pounds each, or sentence them to prison for one month in the second
+division. The sentence would be suspended for the present until learned
+counsel could obtain a decision from a higher court on the legal point
+of the right of petition.
+
+I then put in a claim for all the prisoners, and asked that all their
+cases might be held over until the test case was decided, and this was
+agreed to, except in regard to fourteen women charged with
+window-breaking. They were tried separately and sent to prison on
+sentences varying from six weeks to two months. Of them later.
+
+The appeal against Sir Albert de Rutzen's decision was tried in a
+Divisional Court early in December of that year. Lord Robert Cecil again
+appeared for the defence, and in a masterly piece of argumentation,
+contended that in England there was and always had been the right of
+petition, and that the right had always been considered a necessary
+condition of a free country and a civilised Government. The right of
+petition, he pointed out, had three characteristics: In the first place,
+it was the right to petition the actual repositories of power; in the
+second place, it was the right to petition in person; and in the third
+place, the right must be exercised reasonably. A long list of historical
+precedents were offered in support of the right to petition in person,
+but Lord Robert argued that even if these did not exist, the right was
+admitted in the Charles II "Tumultuous Petitions Act," which provides
+"That no person or persons whatsoever shall repair to His Majesty or
+both or either Houses of Parliament upon pretence of presenting or
+delivering any petition, complaint, remonstrance, or declaration or
+other address, accompanied with excessive number of people ..." etc. The
+Bill of Rights had specially confirmed the right of petition in so far
+as the King personally was concerned. "The women," pursued Lord Robert,
+"had gone to Parliament Square on June 29th in the exercise of a plain
+constitutional right, and that in going there with a petition they had
+acted according to the only constitutional method they possessed, being
+voteless, for the redress of their grievances."
+
+If then it were true, as contended, the subject not only possessed the
+right to petition, but to petition in person, the only point to be
+considered was whether the right had been exercised reasonably. If
+persons desired to interview the Prime Minister, it was surely
+reasonable to go to the House of Commons, and to present themselves at
+the Strangers' Entrance. Mrs. Pankhurst, Mrs. Haverfield and the others
+had, as the evidence showed, proceeded along the public highway and had
+been escorted to the door of the House of Commons by an officer of the
+police, and could not therefore, up to that point, have been acting in
+an unlawful manner. The police had kept clear a large open space
+opposite the House of Commons, the crowd being kept at a certain
+distance away. Within the open space there were only persons having
+business in the House of Commons, members of the police force and the
+eight women who formed the deputation. It could not possibly be
+contended that these eight women had caused an obstruction. It was true
+that a police officer told them that the Prime Minister was not in the
+House of Commons, but when one desired an interview with a Member of
+Parliament one did not make his request of a casual policeman in the
+street. Moreover, the police did not possess any authority to stop
+anyone from going into the House of Commons.
+
+The letter given the women, in which the Prime Minister said that he
+could not or would not see them, had been cited. Now, had the Prime
+Minister, in his letter, said that he could not or would not see the
+women at that time, that the time was not convenient; but that he would
+at some future time, at a more convenient time, receive them, that would
+have been a sufficient answer. The women would not have been justified
+in refusing to accept such an answer, because the right to petition must
+be exercised reasonably. But the letter contained an unqualified
+refusal, and that, if we allow the right of petition to exist, was no
+answer at all. Last of all Lord Robert argued that if there is a right
+to petition a Member of Parliament, then it must be incumbent on the
+part of a Member of Parliament to receive the petition, and that no one
+has a right to interfere with the petitioner. If the eight women were
+legally justified in presenting their petition, then they were also
+justified in refusing to obey the orders of the police to leave the
+place.
+
+In an address full of bias, and revealing plainly that he had no
+accurate knowledge of any of the events that had led up to the case in
+hand, the Lord Chief Justice delivered judgment. He said that he
+entirely agreed with Lord Robert Cecil as to the right to present a
+petition to the Prime Minister, either as Prime Minister or as a Member
+of Parliament; and he agreed also that petitions to the King should be
+presented to the Prime Minister. But the claim of the women, he said,
+was not merely to present a petition, but to be received in a
+deputation. He did not think it likely that Mr. Asquith would have
+refused to receive a petition from the women, but his refusal to receive
+the deputation was not unnatural, "in consequence of what we know did
+happen on previous occasions."[1]
+
+Referring to the Metropolitan Police Act of 1839, which provides that it
+shall be lawful for the Commissioner of Police to make regulations and
+to give instructions to the constable for keeping order, and for
+preventing any obstruction of thoroughfares in the immediate
+neighbourhood of the House of Commons, and the Sessional Order
+empowering the police to keep clear the approaches to the House of
+Commons, the Lord Chief Justice decided that I and the other women were
+guilty of an infraction of the law when we insisted on a right to enter
+the House of Commons. The Lord Chief Justice therefore ruled that our
+conviction in the lower court had been proper, and our appeal was
+dismissed with costs.
+
+Thus was destroyed in England the ancient constitutional right of
+petition, secured to the people by the Bill of Rights, and cherished by
+uncounted generations of Englishmen. I say the right was destroyed, for
+of how much value is a petition which cannot be presented in person? The
+decision of the high court was appalling to the members of the
+W. S. P. U., as it closed the last approach, by constitutional means, to
+our enfranchisement. Far from discouraging or disheartening us, it
+simply spurred us on to new and more aggressive forms of militancy.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[1] Mr. Asquith had never, since becoming Prime Minister, received a
+deputation of women, nor had he ever received a deputation of the W. S.
+P. U. So it was absurd of the Lord Chief Justice to speak of "what did
+happen, on previous occasions."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Between the time of the arrest in June and the handing down of the
+absurd decision of the Lord Chief Justice that although we, as subjects,
+possessed the right of petition, yet we had committed an offence in
+exercising that right, nearly six months had passed. In that interval
+certain grave developments had lifted the militant movement onto a new
+and more heroic plane. It will be remembered that a week before our
+deputation to test the Charles II Act, Miss Wallace Dunlop had been sent
+to prison for one month for stamping an extract from the Bill of Rights
+on the stone walls of St. Stephen's Hall. On arriving at Holloway on
+Friday evening, July 2nd, she sent for the Governor and demanded of him
+that she be treated as a political offender. The Governor replied that
+he had no power to alter the sentence of the magistrate, whereupon Miss
+Wallace Dunlop informed him that it was the unalterable resolution of
+the Suffragettes never again to submit to the prison treatment given to
+ordinary offenders against the law. Therefore she should, if placed in
+the second division as a common criminal, refuse to touch food until the
+Government yielded her point. It is hardly likely that the Government or
+the prison authorities realised the seriousness of Miss Wallace Dunlop's
+action, or the heroic mould of the Suffragettes' character. At all
+events the Home Secretary paid no attention to the letter sent him by
+the prisoner, in which she explained simply but clearly her motives for
+her desperate act, and the prison authorities did nothing except seek
+means of breaking down her resistance. The ordinary prison diet was
+replaced by the most tempting food, and this instead of being brought to
+her cell at intervals, was kept there night and day, but always
+untouched. Several times daily the doctor came to feel her pulse and
+observe her growing weakness. The doctor, as well as the Governor and
+the wardresses argued, coaxed and threatened, but without effect. The
+week passed without any sign of surrender on the part of the prisoner.
+On Friday the doctor reported that she was rapidly reaching a point at
+which death might at any time supervene. Hurried conferences were
+carried on between the prison and the Home Office, and that evening,
+June 8th, Miss Wallace Dunlop was sent home, having served one-fourth of
+her sentence, and having ignored completely all the terms of her
+imprisonment.
+
+On the day of her release the fourteen women who had been convicted of
+window breaking received their sentences, and learning of Miss Wallace
+Dunlop's act, they, as they were being taken to Holloway in the prison
+van, held a consultation and agreed to follow her example. Arrived at
+Holloway they at once informed the officials that they would not give up
+any of their belongings, neither would they put on prison clothing,
+perform prison labour, eat prison food or keep the rule of silence.
+
+The Governor agreed for the moment to allow them to retain their
+property and to wear their own clothing, but he told them that they had
+committed an act of mutiny and that he would have to so charge them at
+the next visit of the magistrates. The women then addressed petitions to
+the Home Secretary, demanding that they be given the prison treatment
+universally allowed political offenders. They decided to postpone the
+hunger strike until the Home Secretary had had time to reply. Meanwhile,
+after a vain appeal for more fresh air, for the weather was stiflingly
+hot, the women committed one more act of mutiny, they broke the windows
+of their cells.
+
+We learned this from the prisoners themselves. Several days after they
+had gone to prison, my daughter Christabel and Mrs. Tuke, filled with
+anxiety for their fate, gained admission to an upper story room of a
+house overlooking the prison. Calling at the top of their voices and
+waving a flag of the Union, they succeeded in attracting the prisoners'
+attention. The women thrust their arms through the broken panes, waving
+handkerchiefs, Votes for Women badges, anything they could get hold of,
+and in a few shouted words told their tale. That same day the visiting
+magistrates arrived, and the mutineers were sentenced to terms of seven
+to ten days of solitary confinement in the punishment cells. In these
+frightful cells, dark, unclean, dripping with moisture, the prisoners
+resolutely hunger struck. At the end of five days one of the women was
+reduced to such a condition that the Home Secretary ordered her
+released. The next day several more were released, and before the end
+of the week the last of the fourteen had gained their liberty.
+
+The affair excited the greatest sympathy all over England, sympathy
+which Mr. Gladstone tried to divert by charging two of the prisoners
+with kicking and biting the wardresses. In spite of their vigorous
+denials these two women were sentenced, on these charges, one to ten
+days and the other to a month in prison. Although still very weak from
+the previous hunger strike, they at once entered upon a second hunger
+strike, and in three days had to be released.
+
+After this each succeeding batch of Suffragette prisoners, unless
+otherwise directed, followed the example of these heroic rebels. The
+prison officials, seeing their authority vanish, were panic stricken.
+Holloway and other women's prisons throughout the Kingdom became perfect
+dens of violence and brutality. Hear the account given by Lucy Burns of
+her experience:
+
+"We remained quite still when ordered to undress, and when they told us
+to proceed to our cells we linked arms and stood with our backs to the
+wall. The Governor blew his whistle and a great crowd of wardresses
+appeared, falling upon us, forcing us apart and dragging us towards the
+cells. I think I had twelve wardresses for my share, and among them they
+managed to trip me so that I fell helplessly to the floor. One of the
+wardresses grasped me by my hair, wound the long braid around her wrist
+and literally dragged me along the ground. In the cell they fairly
+ripped the clothing from my back, forcing on me one coarse cotton
+garment and throwing others on the bed for me to put on myself. Left
+alone exhausted by the dreadful experience I lay for a time gasping and
+shivering on the floor. By and by a wardress came to the door and threw
+me a blanket. This I wrapped around me, for I was chilled to the bone by
+this time. The single cotton garment and the rough blanket were all the
+clothes I wore during my stay in prison. Most of the prisoners refused
+everything but the blanket. According to agreement we all broke our
+windows and were immediately dragged off to the punishment cells. There
+we hunger struck, and after enduring great misery for nearly a week, we
+were one by one released."
+
+How simply they tell it. "After enduring great misery--" But no one who
+has not gone through the awful experience of the hunger strike can have
+any idea of how great that misery is. In an ordinary cell it is great
+enough. In the unspeakable squalor of the punishment cells it is worse.
+The actual hunger pangs last only about twenty-four hours with most
+prisoners. I generally suffer most on the second day. After that there
+is no very desperate craving for food. Weakness and mental depression
+take its place. Great disturbances of digestion divert the desire for
+food to a longing for relief from pain. Often there is intense headache,
+with fits of dizziness, or slight delirium. Complete exhaustion and a
+feeling of isolation from earth mark the final stages of the ordeal.
+Recovery is often protracted, and entire recovery of normal health is
+sometimes discouragingly slow.
+
+The first hunger strike occurred in early July. In the two months that
+followed scores of women adopted the same form of protest against a
+Government who would not recognise the political character of their
+offences. In some cases the hunger strikers were treated with unexampled
+cruelty. Delicate women were sentenced, not only to solitary
+confinement, but to wear handcuffs for twenty-four hours at a stretch.
+One woman on refusing prison clothes was put into a straightwaistcoat.
+
+The irony of all this appears the greater when it is considered that, at
+this precise time, the leaders of the Liberal Party in the House of
+Commons were in the midst of their first campaign against the veto power
+of the Lords.
+
+On September 17th a great meeting was held in Birmingham, on which
+occasion Mr. Asquith was to throw down his challenge to the Lords, and
+to announce that their veto was to be abolished, leaving the people's
+will paramount in England. Of course the Suffragettes seized this
+opportunity for a demonstration. This course was perfectly logical.
+Denied the right of petition, shut out now from every Cabinet Minister's
+meeting, the women were forced to take whatever means that remained to
+urge their cause upon the Government. Mrs. Mary Leigh and a group of
+Birmingham members addressed a warning to the public not to attend Mr.
+Asquith's meeting as disturbances were likely to happen. From the time
+that the Prime Minister and his Cabinet left the House of Commons until
+the train drew in to the station at Birmingham they were completely
+surrounded with detectives and policemen. The precautions taken to
+guard Mr. Asquith have never been equalled except in the case of the
+Tsar during outbreaks of revolution in Russia. From the station he was
+taken by an underground passage a quarter of a mile in length to his
+hotel, where he dined in solitary state, after having been carried
+upstairs in a luggage lift. Escorted to the Bingley Hall by a strong
+guard of mounted police, he was so fearful of encountering the
+Suffragettes that he entered by a side door. The hall was guarded as for
+a siege. Over the glass roof a thick tarpaulin had been stretched. Tall
+ladders were placed on either side of the building, and firemen's hose
+were laid in readiness--not to extinguish fires, but to play upon the
+Suffragettes should they appear at an inaccessible spot on the roof. The
+streets on every hand were barricaded, and police, in regiments, were
+drawn up to defend the barricades against the onslaughts of the women.
+Nobody was allowed to pass the barricades without showing his entrance
+tickets to long files of police, and then the ticket holders were
+squeezed through the narrow doors one by one.
+
+Their precautions were in vain, for the determined Suffragettes found
+more than one way in which to turn Mr. Asquith's triumph into a fiasco.
+Although no women gained access to the hall, there were plenty of men
+sympathisers present, and before the meeting had proceeded far thirteen
+men had been violently thrown out for reminding the Prime Minister that
+"the people" whose right to govern he was professing to uphold, included
+women as well as men. Outside, mingling in the vast crowds, bands of
+women attacked the barricades, the outer barricades being thrown down in
+spite of the thousands of police. From the roof of a neighbouring house
+Mrs. Leigh and Charlotte Marsh tore up dozens of slates and threw them
+on the roof of Bingley Hall and in the streets below, taking care,
+however, to strike no one. As Mr. Asquith drove away the women hurled
+slates at the guarded motor car. The fire hose was brought forth and the
+firemen were ordered to turn the water on the women. They refused, to
+their credit be it said, but the police, infuriated by their failure to
+keep the peace, did not scruple to play the cold water on the women as
+they crouched and clung to the dangerous slope of the roof. Roughs in
+the streets flung bricks at them, drawing blood. Eventually the women
+were dragged down by the police and in their dripping garments marched
+through the streets to the police station.
+
+The Suffragettes who had rushed the barricades and flung stones at Mr.
+Asquith's departing train received sentences from a fortnight to one
+month, but Miss Marsh and Mrs. Leigh were sent to prison for three and
+four months respectively. All of the prisoners adopted the hunger
+strike, as we knew they would.
+
+Several days later we were horrified to read in the newspapers that
+these prisoners were being forcibly fed by means of a rubber tube thrust
+into the stomach. Members of the Union applied at once both at the
+prison and at the Home Office to learn the truth of the report, but all
+information was refused. On the following Monday at our request, Mr.
+Keir Hardie, at question time in the House, insisted on information from
+the Government. Mr. Masterman, speaking for the Home Secretary,
+reluctantly admitted that, in order to preserve the dignity of the
+Government and at the same time save the lives of the prisoners,
+"hospital treatment" was being administered. "Hospital treatment" was
+the term used to draw attention from one of the most disgusting and
+brutal expedients ever resorted to by prison authorities. No law allows
+it except in the case of persons certified to be insane, and even then
+when the operation is performed by skilled nursing attendants under the
+direction of skilled medical men, it cannot be called safe. In fact, the
+asylum cases usually die after a short time. _The Lancet_, perhaps the
+best known medical journal in the language, published a long list of
+opinions from distinguished physicians and surgeons who condemned the
+practice as applied to the suffrage prisoners as unworthy of
+civilisation. One physician told of a case which had come under his
+observation in which death had occurred almost as soon as the tube had
+been inserted. Another cited a case where the tongue, twisted behind the
+feeding tube, had, in the struggle, been almost bitten off. Cases where
+food had been injected into the lungs were not unknown. Mr. C.
+Mansell-Moullin, M.D., F.R.C.S., wrote to _The Times_ that as a hospital
+surgeon of more than thirty years' experience he desired indignantly to
+protest against the Government's term "Hospital treatment" in connection
+with the forcible feeding of women. It was a foul libel, he declared,
+for violence and brutality have no place in hospitals. A memorial signed
+by 116 well-known physicians was addressed to the Prime Minister
+protesting against the practice of forcible feeding, and pointing out to
+him in detail the grave dangers attaching to it.
+
+So much for medical testimony against a form of brutality which
+continued and still continues in our English prisons, as a punishment
+for women who are there for consciences' sake. As for the testimony of
+the victims, it makes a volume of most revolting sort. Mrs. Leigh, the
+first victim, is a woman of sturdy constitution, else she could scarcely
+have survived the experience. Thrown into Birmingham prison after the
+Asquith demonstration, she had broken the windows of her cell, and as a
+punishment was sent to a dark and cold punishment cell. Her hands were
+handcuffed, behind her during the day, and at night in front of her body
+_with the palms out_. She refused to touch the food that was brought to
+her, and three days after her arrival she was taken to the doctor's
+room. What she saw was enough to terrify the bravest. In the centre of
+the room was a stout chair resting on a cotton sheet. Against the wall,
+as if ready for action stood four wardresses. The junior doctor was also
+on hand. The senior doctor spoke, saying: "Listen carefully to what I
+have to say. I have orders from my superior officers that you are not to
+be released even on medical grounds. If you still refrain from food I
+must take other measures to compel you to take it." Mrs. Leigh replied
+that she did still refuse, and she said further that she knew that she
+could not legally be forcibly fed because an operation could not be
+performed without the consent of the patient if sane. The doctor
+repeated that he had his orders and would carry them out. A number of
+wardresses then fell upon Mrs. Leigh, held her down and tilted her chair
+backward. She was so taken by surprise that she could not resist
+successfully that time. They managed to make her swallow a little food
+from a feeding cup. Later two doctors and the wardresses appeared in her
+cell, forced Mrs. Leigh down to the bed and held her there. To her
+horror the doctors produced a rubber tube, two yards in length, and this
+he began to stuff up her nostril. The pain was so dreadful that she
+shrieked again and again. Three of the wardresses burst into tears and
+the junior doctor begged the other to desist. Having had his orders from
+the Government, the doctor persisted and the tube was pushed down into
+the stomach. One of the doctors, standing on a chair and holding the
+tube high poured liquid food through a funnel almost suffocating the
+poor victim. "The drums of my ears," she said afterwards, "seemed to be
+bursting. I could feel the pain to the end of the breast bone. When at
+last the tube was withdrawn it felt as if the back of my nose and throat
+were being torn out with it."
+
+In an almost fainting condition Mrs. Leigh was taken back to the
+punishment cell and laid on her plank bed. The ordeal was renewed day
+after day. The other prisoners suffered similar experiences.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+The militant movement was at this point when, in October, 1909, I made
+my first visit to the United States. I shall never forget the excitement
+of my landing, the first meeting with the American "reporter," an
+experience dreaded by all Europeans. In fact the first few days seemed a
+bewildering whirl of reporters and receptions, all leading up to my
+first lecture at Carnegie Hall on October 25th. The huge hall was
+entirely filled, and an enormous crowd of people thronged the streets
+outside for blocks. With me on the stage were several women whom I had
+met in Europe, and in the chair was an old friend, Mrs. Stanton Blatch,
+whose early married life had been spent in England. The great crowd
+before me, however, was made up of strangers, and I could not know how
+they would respond to my story. When I rose to speak a deep hush fell,
+but at my first words: "I am what you call a hooligan--" a great shout
+of warm and sympathetic laughter shook the walls. Then I knew that I had
+found friends in America. And this all the rest of the tour
+demonstrated. In Boston the committee met me with a big grey automobile
+decorated in the colours of our Union, and that night at Tremont Temple
+I spoke to an audience of 2,500 people all most generous in their
+responsiveness. In Baltimore professors, and students from Johns
+Hopkins University acted as stewards of the meeting. I greatly enjoyed
+my visit to Bryn Mawr College and to Rosemary Hall, a wonderful school
+for girls in Connecticut. In Chicago, I met, among other notable people,
+Miss Jane Addams and Mrs. Ella Flagg Young, superintendent of schools.
+My visit to Canada will always be remembered, especially Toronto, where
+the mayor, dressed in the chains of his office, welcomed me. I met too
+the venerable Goldwin Smith, since dead.
+
+Everywhere I found the Americans kind and keen, and I cannot say too
+much for the wonderful hospitality they showed me. The women I found
+were remarkably interested in social welfare. The work of the women's
+clubs struck me very favourably, and I thought these institutions a
+perfect basis for a suffrage movement. But at that time, 1909, the
+suffrage movement in the United States was in a curious state of
+quiescence. A large number of women with whom I came in contact appeared
+to think it only just that they should have a vote, but few seemed to
+realise any actual need of it. Some, it is true, were beginning to
+connect the vote with the reforms for which they were working so
+unselfishly and so devotedly. It was when talking with the younger women
+that I came to feel that under the surface of things in America, a
+strong suffrage movement was stirring. Those young women, leaving their
+splendid colleges to begin life were realising in a very intelligent
+fashion that they needed and would be obliged to secure for themselves a
+political status.
+
+On December 1st I sailed on the _Mauretania_ for England, and on
+arriving I learned that the prison sentence which hung over me while the
+petitions case had been argued, was discharged, some unknown friend
+having paid my fine while I was on the ocean.
+
+The year 1910 began with a general election, precipitated by the House
+of Lords' rejection of Mr. Lloyd-George's 1909 budget. The Liberal Party
+went to the country with promises of taxes on land values. They promised
+also abolition of the veto power of the Lords, Irish Home Rule,
+disestablishment of the Church of Wales, and other reforms. Woman
+suffrage was not directly promised, but Mr. Asquith pledged that, if
+retained in office, he would introduce an electoral reform bill which
+could be amended to include woman suffrage. The Unionists under the
+leadership of Mr. Balfour, had tariff reform for their programme, and
+they offered not even a vague promise of a possible suffrage measure.
+Yet we, as usual, went into the constituencies and opposed the Liberal
+Party. We had no faith in Mr. Asquith's pledge, and besides, if we had
+failed to oppose the party in power we should but have invited Mr.
+Asquith and Mr. Balfour to enter into an agreement not to deal with the
+suffrage, with the view of keeping the cause permanently outside
+practical politics. We were in something of the same position as the
+Irish Nationalists in 1885, when neither the Liberal nor the
+Conservative leaders would include home rule in their programme. The
+Irish opposed the Liberal Party, with the result that it was returned by
+such a narrow majority that the Liberal Government was dependent on the
+Irish vote in Parliament in order to remain in office. On this account
+they were obliged to bring in a Home Rule Bill.
+
+The other suffrage societies and many of the Liberal women begged us not
+to oppose the Liberal party at this election. We were implored to waive
+our claim "just this once" in view of the importance of the struggle
+between the Commons and the House of Lords over the budget. We replied
+that the same plea had been made in 1906 when we were implored to waive
+our claim "just this once" on account of the fiscal issue. For women
+there was only one political issue, we said, and that was the issue of
+their own enfranchisement. The dispute between the Lords and the Commons
+was far less vital than the claims of the people--represented in this
+case by women--to be admitted to citizenship. From our point of view
+both Houses of Parliament were unrepresentative until women had a voice
+in choosing legislators and influencing law making.
+
+We opposed Liberal candidates in forty constituencies, and in almost
+every one of these the Liberal majorities were reduced and no less than
+eighteen seats were wrested from the Liberal candidates. It really was a
+terrible election for the Government. Mr. Asquith travelled from one
+constituency to another accompanied by a body guard of detectives, and
+official "chuckers out," whose sole duty was to eject women, and men as
+well, who interrupted his meetings on the question of Votes for Women.
+The halls where he spoke had the windows boarded up or the glass covered
+with strong wire netting. Every thoroughfare leading to the halls was
+barricaded, traffic was suspended, and large forces of police were on
+guard. The most extraordinary precautions were taken to protect the
+Prime Minister. At one place he went to his meeting strongly guarded and
+by way of a secret pathway that led through gooseberry bushes and a
+cabbage patch to a back door. After the meeting he escaped through the
+same door and was solemnly guided along a path heavily laid with sawdust
+to deaden his footsteps, to a concealed motor car, where he sat until
+the crowd had all dispersed.
+
+The other ministers had to resort to similar precautions. They lived
+under the constant protection of body-guards. Their meetings were
+policed in a manner without precedent. Of course no women were admitted
+to their meetings, but they got in just the same. Two women hid for
+twenty-five hours in the rafters of a hall in Louth where Mr.
+Lloyd-George spoke. They were arrested, but not until after they had
+made their demonstration. Two others hid under a platform for twenty-two
+hours in order to question the Prime Minister. I could continue this
+record almost indefinitely.
+
+We had printed a wonderful poster showing the process of forcible
+feeding, and we used it on hoardings everywhere. We told the electors
+that the "Liberal Party," the people's friend, had imprisoned 450 women
+for the crime of asking for a vote. They were torturing women at that
+time in Holloway. It was splendid ammunition and it told. The Liberal
+Party was returned to power, but with their majority over all sections
+of the House of Commons swept away. The Asquith Government were
+dependent now for their very existence on the votes of the Labour Party
+and the Irish Nationalists.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+The first months of 1910 were occupied by the re-elected Government in a
+struggle to keep control of affairs. A coalition with the Irish party,
+the leaders of which agreed, if the Home Rule bill were advanced, to
+stand by the budget. No publicly announced coalition with the Labour
+Party was made at that time, Keir Hardie, at the annual conference of
+the party, announcing that they would continue to be independent of the
+Government. This was important to us because it meant that the Labour
+Party, instead of entering into an agreement to give general support to
+all Government measures, would be free to oppose the Government in the
+event of the continued withholding of a franchise bill. Other things
+combined to make us hopeful that the tide had turned in our favour. It
+was hinted to us that the Government were weary of our opposition and
+were ready to end the struggle in the only possible way, providing they
+could do so without appearing to yield to coercion. We therefore, early
+in February, declared a truce to all militancy.
+
+Parliament met on February 15th and the King's speech was read on
+February 21st. No mention of women's suffrage was made in the speech nor
+was any private member successful in winning a place in the ballot for a
+suffrage bill. However, since the situation, on account of the proposed
+abolition of the Lord's power of veto, was strained and abnormal, we
+decided to wait patiently for a while. It was confidently expected that
+another general election would have to be held before the contentions
+between the two Houses of Parliament were settled, and this event
+unquestionably would have occurred, not later than June, but for the
+unexpected death of King Edward VII. This interrupted the strained
+situation. The passing of the King served as an occasion for the
+temporary softening of animosities and produced a general disposition to
+compromise on all troubled issues. The question of women's
+enfranchisement was taken up again in this spirit, and in a manner
+altogether creditable to the members with whom the movement originated.
+
+A strictly non-party committee on women's suffrage had been established
+in the House of Commons in 1887, mainly through the efforts of Miss
+Lydia Becker, whom I have mentioned before as the Susan B. Anthony of
+the English suffrage movement. In 1906, for reasons not necessary to
+enumerate, the original committee had been allowed to lapse, the Liberal
+supporters of women's suffrage forming a committee of their own. Now, in
+this period of good feeling, at the suggestion of certain members, led
+by Mr. H. N. Brailsford, not himself a member of Parliament, formed
+another non-party body which they called the Conciliation Committee. Its
+object was declared to be the bringing together of the full strength of
+suffragists of the House of Commons, regardless of party affiliation,
+and of framing a suffrage measure that could be passed by their united
+effort. The Earl of Lytton accepted the chairmanship of the committee
+and Mr. Brailsford was made its secretary. The committee consisted of
+twenty-five Liberals, seventeen Conservatives, six Irish Nationalists,
+and six members of the Labour Party. Under difficulties which I can
+hardly hope to make clear to American readers the committee laboured to
+frame a bill which should win the support of all sections of the House.
+The Conservatives insisted on a moderate bill, whilst the Liberals were
+concerned lest the terms of the bill should add to the power of the
+propertied classes. The original suffrage bill, drafted by my husband.
+Dr. Pankhurst, giving the vote to women on equal terms with men, was
+abandoned, and a bill was drawn up along the lines of the existing
+municipal franchise law. The basis of the municipal franchise is
+occupation, and the Conciliation Bill, as first drafted, proposed to
+extend the Parliamentary vote to women householders, and to women
+occupiers of business premises paying ten pounds rental and upwards. It
+was estimated that about ninety-five per cent. of the women who would be
+enfranchised under the bill were householders. This, in England, does
+not mean a person occupying a whole house. Any one who inhabits even a
+single room over which he or she exercises full control is a
+householder.
+
+The text of the Conciliation Bill was submitted to all the suffrage
+societies and other women's organisations, and it was accepted by every
+one of them. Our official newspaper said editorially: "We of the Women's
+Social and Political Union are prepared to share in this united and
+peaceful action. The new bill does not give us all that we want, but we
+are for it if others are also for it."
+
+It seemed certain that an overwhelming majority of the House of Commons
+were for the bill, and were prepared to vote it into law. Although we
+knew that it could not possibly pass unless the Government agreed that
+it should, we hoped that the leaders of all parties and the majority of
+their followers would unite in an agreement that the bill should pass.
+This settlement by consent is rare in the English Parliament, but some
+extremely important and hard fought measures have been carried thus. The
+extension of the franchise in 1867 is a case in point.
+
+The Conciliation Bill was introduced into the House of Commons on June
+14th, 1910, by Mr. D. J. Shackleton, and was received with the most
+extraordinary enthusiasm. The newspapers remarked on the feeling of
+reality which marked the attitude of the House towards the bill. It was
+plain that the members realised that here was no academic question upon
+which they were merely to debate and to register their opinions, but a
+measure which was intended to be carried through all its stages and to
+be written into English law. The enthusiasm of the House swept all over
+the Kingdom. The medical profession sent in a memorial in its favour,
+signed by more than three hundred of the most distinguished men and
+women in the profession. Memorials from writers, clergymen, social
+workers, artists, actors, musicians, were also sent. The Women's Liberal
+Federation met and unanimously resolved to ask the Prime Minister to
+give full facilities to the bill. Some advanced spirits in the
+Federation actually proposed to send then and there a deputation to the
+House of Commons with the resolution, but this proposal was rejected as
+savouring too much of militancy. A request for an interview was sent to
+Mr. Asquith, and he replied promising to receive, at an early day,
+representatives of both the Liberal Women's Federation and of the
+National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies.
+
+The joint deputation was received by Mr. Asquith on June 21st, and Lady
+M'Laren, as a representative of the Women's Liberal Federation, spoke
+very directly to her party's leader. She said in part: "If you refuse
+our request we shall have to go to the country and say you, who are
+against the veto of the House of Lords, are placing a veto on the House
+of Commons by refusing to allow a second reading of this bill."
+
+Mr. Asquith replied warily that he could not decide alone on such a
+serious matter, but would have to consult his Cabinet, the majority of
+whom, he admitted, were suffragists. Their decision, he said, would be
+given in the House of Commons.
+
+[Illustration: OVER 1,000 WOMEN HAD BEEN IN PRISON--BROAD ARROWS IN THE
+1910 PARADE]
+
+The Women's Social and Political Union arranged a demonstration in
+support of the Conciliation Bill, the greatest that had, up to that
+time, been made. It was a national, indeed an inter-national affair in
+which all the suffrage groups took part, and its massed ranks were so
+great that the procession required an hour and a half to pass a given
+point. At the head marched six hundred and seventeen women, white clad
+and holding long silver staves tipped with the broad arrow. These were
+the women who had suffered imprisonment for the cause, and all along the
+line of march they received a tribute of cheers from the public. The
+immense Albert Hall, the largest hall in England, although it was packed
+from orchestra to the highest gallery, was not large enough to hold all
+the marchers. Amid great joy and enthusiasm Lord Lytton delivered a
+stirring address in which he confidently predicted the speedy advance of
+the bill. The women, he declared, had every reason to believe that their
+enfranchisement was actually at hand.
+
+It was true that the time for passing a suffrage bill was ripe. Not in
+fifty years had the way been so clear, because the momentary absence of
+ordinary legislation left the field open for an electoral reform bill.
+Yet when the Prime Minister was asked in the House of Commons whether he
+would give the members an early opportunity for discussion, the answer
+was not encouraging. The Government, said Mr. Asquith, were prepared to
+give time before the close of the session for full debate and division
+on second reading, but they could not allow any further facilities. He
+stated frankly that he personally did not want the bill to pass, but the
+Government realised that the House of Commons ought to have an
+opportunity, if that was their deliberate desire, for effectively
+dealing with the whole question.
+
+This cryptic utterance was taken by the majority of the suffragists, by
+the press and by the public generally to mean that the Government were
+preparing gracefully to yield to the undoubted desire of the House of
+Commons to pass the bill. But the Women's Social and Political Union
+were doubtful. Mr. Asquith's remark was ambiguous, and was capable of
+being interpreted in several ways. It could mean that he was prepared to
+accept the verdict of the majority and let the bill pass through all its
+stages. That of course would be the only way to allow the House
+opportunity effectively to deal with the whole question. On the other
+hand Mr. Asquith might be intending to let the bill pass through its
+debating stages and be afterwards smothered in committee. We feared
+treachery, but in view of the announcement that the Government had set
+apart July 11 and 12 for debate on the second reading, we preserved a
+spirit of waiting calm. July 26th had been fixed as the day for the
+adjournment of Parliament, and if the bill was voted on favourably on
+the 12th there would be ample time to take it through its final stages.
+When a bill passes its second reading it is normally sent upstairs to a
+Grand Committee which sits while the House of Commons is transacting
+other business, and thus the committee stage can proceed without special
+facilities. The bill does not go back to the House until the report
+stage is reached, at which time the third and last reading occurs. After
+that the bill goes to the House of Lords. A week at most is all that is
+required for this procedure. A bill may be referred to the Whole House,
+and in this case it cannot be brought up for its committee stage unless
+it is given special facilities. In our paper and in many public
+speeches we urged that the members vote to send the bill to a Grand
+Committee.
+
+Some days before the bill reached its second reading it was rumoured
+that Mr. Lloyd-George was going to speak against it, but we refused to
+credit this. Unfair to women as Mr. Lloyd-George had shown himself in
+various ways, he had consistently posed as a staunch friend of women's
+suffrage, and we could not believe that he would turn against us at the
+eleventh hour. Mr. Winston Churchill, whose speech to the women of
+Dundee I quoted in a previous chapter, the promoters of the Bill also
+counted upon, as it was known that he had more than once expressed
+sympathy with its objects. But when the debates began we found both of
+these ardent suffragists arrayed against the bill. Mr. Churchill, after
+making a conventional anti-suffrage speech, in which he said that women
+did not need the ballot, and that they really had no grievances,
+attacked the Conciliation Bill because the class of women who would be
+enfranchised under it did not suit him. Some women, he conceded, ought
+to be enfranchised, and he thought the best plan would be to select
+"some of the best women of all classes" on considerations of property,
+education and earning capacity. These special franchises would be
+carefully balanced, "so as not on the whole to give undue advantage to
+the property vote against the wage earning vote." A more fantastic
+proposal and one less likely to find favour in the House of Commons
+could not possibly be imagined. Mr. Churchill's second objection to the
+bill was that it was anti-democratic! It seemed to us that anything was
+more democratic than his proposed "fancy" franchises.
+
+Mr. Lloyd-George said that he agreed with everything Mr. Churchill had
+said "both relevant and irrelevant." He made the amazing assertion that
+the Conciliation Committee that had drafted the bill was a "committee of
+women meeting outside the House." And that this committee said to the
+House of Commons not only that they must vote for a women's suffrage
+bill but "You must vote for the particular form upon which we agree, and
+we will not even allow you to deliberate upon any other form."
+
+Of course these statements were wholly false. The Conciliation Bill was
+drafted by men, and it was introduced because the Government had refused
+to bring in a party measure. The suffragists would have been only too
+glad to have had the Government deliberate on a broader form of
+suffrage. Because they refused to deliberate on any form, this private
+bill was introduced.
+
+This fact was brought forward in the course of Mr. Lloyd-George's
+speech. It had been urged, said he, that this bill was better than none
+at all, but why should that be the alternative? "What is the other?"
+called out a member, but Mr. Lloyd-George dodged the question with a
+careless "Well, I cannot say for the present."
+
+Later on he said: "If the promoters of this bill say that they regard
+the second reading merely as an affirmation of the principle of women's
+suffrage, and if they promise that when they re-introduce the bill it
+will be in a form which will enable the House of Commons to move any
+amendment either for restriction or extension I shall be happy to vote
+for this bill."
+
+Mr. Philip Snowden, replying to this, said: "We will withdraw this bill
+if the Right Honourable gentleman, on behalf of the Government, or the
+Prime Minister himself will undertake to give to this House the
+opportunity of discussing and carrying through its various stages
+another form of franchise bill. If we cannot get that, then we shall
+prosecute this bill."
+
+The Government made no reply at all to this, and the debate proceeded.
+Thirty-nine speeches were made, the Prime Minister showing plainly in
+his speech that he intended to use all his power to prevent the bill
+becoming law. He began by saying that a franchise measure ought never to
+be sent to a Grand Committee, but to one of the Whole House. He said
+also that his conditions, that the majority of women should show beyond
+any doubt that they desired the franchise, and that the bill be
+democratic in its terms, had not been complied with.
+
+When the division was taken it was seen that the Conciliation Bill had
+passed its second reading by a majority of 109, a larger majority than
+the Government's far famed budget or the House of Lords Resolution had
+received. In fact no measure during that Parliament had received so
+great a majority--299 members voted for it as against 190 opposed. Then
+the question arose as to which committee should deal with the bill. Mr.
+Asquith had said that all franchise bills should go to a Committee of
+the Whole House, so that in the division his words moved many sincere
+friends of the bill to send it there. Others understood that this was a
+mischievous course, but were afraid of incurring the anger of the Prime
+Minister. Of course all the anti-suffragists voted the same way, and
+thus the bill went to the Whole House.
+
+Even then the bill could have been advanced to its final reading. The
+House had time on their hands, as virtually all important legislative
+work was halted because of the deadlock between the Lords and the
+Commons. Following the death of the King a conference of leaders of the
+Conservative and the Liberal Parties had been arranged to adjust the
+matters at issue, and this conference had not yet reported. Hence
+Parliament had little business on hand. The strongest possible pressure
+was brought to bear upon the Government to give facilities to the
+Conciliation Bill. A number of meetings were held in support of the
+bill. The Men's Political Union for Women's Enfranchisement, the Men's
+League for Women's Suffrage and the Conciliation Committee held a joint
+meeting in Hyde Park. Some of the old school of suffragists held another
+large meeting in Trafalgar Square. The Women's Social and Political
+Union, on July 23rd, which was the anniversary of the day in 1867 on
+which working men, agitating for their vote, had pulled down the Hyde
+Park railings, held another enormous demonstration there. A space of
+half a square mile was cleared, forty platforms erected, and two great
+processions marched from east and west to the meeting. Many other
+suffrage societies co-operated with us on this occasion. On the very
+day of that meeting Mr. Asquith wrote to Lord Lytton refusing to allow
+any more time for the bill during that session.
+
+Those who still had faith that the Government could be induced to do
+justice to women set their hopes on the autumn session of Parliament.
+Resolutions urging the Government to give the bill facilities during the
+autumn were sent, not only by the suffrage associations but from many
+organisations of men. The Corporations of thirty-eight cities, including
+Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, Dublin and Cork, sent resolutions to
+this effect. Cabinet Ministers were besieged with requests to receive
+deputations of women, and since the country was on the verge of a
+general election, and the Liberal Party wanted the services of women,
+their requests could not altogether be ignored. Mr. Asquith, early in
+October, received a deputation of women from his own constituency of
+East Fife, but all he had to tell them was that the bill could not be
+advanced that year. "What about next year?" They asked, and he replied
+shortly: "Wait and see."
+
+It had been exceedingly difficult, during these troublous days, to hold
+all the members of the W. S. P. U. to the truce, and when it became
+perfectly apparent that the Conciliation Bill was doomed, war was again
+declared. At a great meeting held in Albert Hall on November 10th, I
+myself threw down the gage of battle. I said, because I wanted the whole
+matter to be clearly understood by the public as well as by our members:
+"This is the last constitutional effort of the Women's Social and
+Political Union to secure the passage of the bill into law. If the Bill,
+in spite of our efforts, is killed by the Government, then first of all,
+I have to say there is an end of the truce. If we are met by the
+statement that there is no power to secure on the floor of the House of
+Commons time for our measure, then our first step is to say, 'We take it
+out of your hands, since you fail to help us, and we resume the
+direction of the campaign ourselves.'"
+
+Another deputation, I declared, must go to the House of Commons to carry
+a petition to the Prime Minister. I myself would lead, and if no one
+cared to follow me I would go alone. Instantly, all over the hall, women
+sprang to their feet crying out, "Mrs. Pankhurst, I will go with you!"
+"I will go!" "I will go!" And I knew that our brave women were as ever
+ready to give themselves, their very lives, if need be, for the cause of
+freedom.
+
+The autumn session convened on Friday, November 18th, and Mr. Asquith
+announced that Parliament would be adjourned on November 28th. While his
+speech was in progress, 450 women, in small groups, to keep within the
+strict letter of the law, were marching from Caxton Hall and from the
+headquarters of the Union.
+
+[Illustration: THE HEAD OF THE DEPUTATION ON BLACK FRIDAY
+
+_November, 1910_]
+
+How to tell the story of that dreadful day, Black Friday, as it lives in
+our memory--how to describe what happened to English women at the behest
+of an English Government, is a difficult task. I will try to tell it as
+simply and as accurately as possible. The plain facts, baldly stated, I
+am aware will strain credulity.
+
+Remember that the country was on the eve of a general election, and that
+the Liberal Party needed the help of Liberal women. This fact made the
+wholesale arrest and imprisonment of great numbers of women, who were
+demanding the passage of the Conciliation Bill, extremely undesirable
+from the Government's point of view. The Women's Liberal Federations
+also wanted the passage of the Conciliation Bill, although they were not
+ready to fight for it. What the Government feared, was that the Liberal
+women would be stirred by our sufferings into refraining from doing
+election work for the party. So the Government conceived a plan whereby
+the Suffragettes were to be punished, were to be turned back and
+defeated in their purpose of reaching the House, but would not be
+arrested. Orders were evidently given that the police were to be present
+in the streets, and that the women were to be thrown from one uniformed
+or ununiformed policeman to another, that they were to be so rudely
+treated that sheer terror would cause them to turn back. I say orders
+were given and as one proof of this I can first point out that on all
+previous occasions the police had first tried to turn back the
+deputations and when the women persisted in going forward, had arrested
+them. At times individual policemen had behaved with cruelty and malice
+toward us, but never anything like the unanimous and wholesale brutality
+that was shown on Black Friday.
+
+The Government very likely hoped that the violence of the police
+towards the women would be emulated by the crowds, but instead the
+crowds proved remarkably friendly. They pushed and struggled to make a
+clear pathway for us, and in spite of the efforts of the police my small
+deputation actually succeeded in reaching the door of the Strangers'
+Entrance. We mounted the steps to the enthusiastic cheers of the
+multitudes that filled the streets, and we stood there for hours gazing
+down on a scene which I hope never to look upon again.
+
+At intervals of two or three minutes small groups of women appeared in
+the square, trying to join us at the Strangers' Entrance. They carried
+little banners inscribed with various mottoes, "Asquith Has Vetoed Our
+Bill," "Where There's a Bill There's a Way," "Women's Will Beats
+Asquith's Won't," and the like. These banners the police seized and tore
+in pieces. Then they laid hands on the women and literally threw them
+from one man to another. Some of the police used their fists, striking
+the women in their faces, their breasts, their shoulders. One woman I
+saw thrown down with violence three or four times in rapid succession,
+until at last she lay only half conscious against the curb, and in a
+serious condition was carried away by kindly strangers. Every moment the
+struggle grew fiercer, as more and more women arrived on the scene.
+Women, many of them eminent in art, in medicine and science, women of
+European reputation, subjected to treatment that would not have been
+meted out to criminals, and all for the offence of insisting upon the
+right of peaceful petition.
+
+[Illustration: FOR HOURS SCENES LIKE THIS WERE ENACTED ON BLACK FRIDAY
+
+_November, 1910_]
+
+This struggle lasted for about an hour, more and more women successfully
+pushing their way past the police and gaining the steps of the House.
+Then the mounted police were summoned to turn the women back. But,
+desperately determined, the women, fearing not the hoofs of the horses
+or the crushing violence of the police, did not swerve from their
+purpose. And now the crowds began to murmur. People began to demand why
+the women were being knocked about; why, if they were breaking the law,
+they were not arrested; why, if they were not breaking the law, they
+were not permitted to go on unmolested. For a long time, nearly five
+hours, the police continued to hustle and beat the women, the crowds
+becoming more and more turbulent in their defence. Then, at last the
+police were obliged to make arrests. One hundred and fifteen women and
+four men, most of them bruised and choked and otherwise injured, were
+arrested.
+
+While all this was going on outside the House of Commons, the Prime
+Minister was obstinately refusing to listen to the counsels of some of
+the saner and more justice-loving members of the House. Keir Hardie, Sir
+Alfred Mondell and others urged Mr. Asquith to receive the deputation,
+and Lord Castlereagh went so far as to move as an amendment to a
+Government proposal, another proposal which would have compelled the
+Government to provide immediate facilities to the Conciliation Bill. We
+heard of what was going on, and I sent in for one and another friendly
+member and made every possible effort to influence them in favour of
+Lord Castlereagh's amendment. I pointed to the brutal struggle that was
+going on in the square, and I begged them to go back and tell the others
+that it must be stopped. But, distressed as some of them undoubtedly
+were, they assured me that there was not the slightest chance for the
+amendment.
+
+"Is there not a single _man_ in the House of Commons," I cried, "one who
+will stand up for us, who will make the House see that the amendment
+must go forward?"
+
+Well, perhaps there were men there, but all save fifty-two put their
+party loyalty before their manhood, and, because Lord Castlereagh's
+proposal would have meant censure of the Government, they refused to
+support it. This did not happen, however, until Mr. Asquith had resorted
+to his usual crafty device of a promise of future action. In this
+instance he promised to make a statement on behalf of the Government on
+the following Tuesday.
+
+The next morning the suffrage prisoners were arraigned in police court.
+Or rather, they were kept waiting outside the court room while Mr.
+Muskett, who prosecuted on behalf of the Chief Commissioner of Police,
+explained to the astounded magistrate that he had received orders from
+the Home Secretary that the prisoners should all be discharged. Mr.
+Churchill it was declared, had had the matter under careful
+consideration, and had decided that "no public advantage would be gained
+by proceeding with the prosecution, and accordingly no evidence would
+be given against the prisoners."
+
+Subdued laughter and, according to the newspapers, some contemptuous
+booing were raised in the court, and when order was restored the
+prisoners were brought in in batches and told that they were discharged.
+
+On the following Tuesday the W. S. P. U. held another meeting of the
+Women's Parliament in Caxton Hall to hear the news from the House of
+Commons. Mr. Asquith said: "The Government will, if they are still in
+power, give facilities in the next Parliament for effectively proceeding
+with a franchise bill which is so framed as to admit of free amendment."
+He would not promise that this would be done during the first year of
+Parliament.
+
+We had demanded facilities for the Conciliation Bill, and Mr. Asquith's
+promise was too vague and too ambiguous to please us. The Parliament now
+about to be dissolved had lasted a scant ten months. The next one might
+not last longer. Therefore, Mr. Asquith's promise, as usual, meant
+nothing at all. I said to the women, "I am going to Downing Street. Come
+along, all of you." And we went.
+
+We found a small force of police in Downing Street, and we easily broke
+through their line and would have invaded the Prime Minister's residence
+had not reinforcements of police arrived on the scene. Mr. Asquith
+himself appeared unexpectedly, and as we thought, very opportunely.
+Before he could have realised what was happening he found himself
+surrounded by angry Suffragettes. He was well hooted and, it is said,
+well shaken, before he was rescued by the police. As his taxicab rushed
+away some object struck one of the windows, smashing it.
+
+Another Cabinet Minister, Mr. Birrell, unwittingly got into the midst of
+the mêlée, and I am obliged to record that he was pretty thoroughly
+hustled. But it is not true that his leg was injured by the women. His
+haste to jump into a taxicab resulted in a slightly sprained ankle.
+
+That night and the following day windows were broken in the houses of
+Sir Edward Grey, Mr. Winston Churchill, Mr. Lewis Harcourt and Mr. John
+Burns; and also in the official residences of the Premier and the
+Chancellor of the Exchequer.
+
+That week 160 Suffragettes were arrested, but all except those charged
+with window-breaking or assault were discharged. This amazing court
+action established two things: First, that when the Home Secretary
+stated that he had no responsibility for the prosecution and sentencing
+of Suffrage prisoners, he told a colossal falsehood; and second, that
+the Government fully realised that it was bad election tactics to be
+responsible for the imprisonment of women of good character who were
+struggling for citizenship.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+Almost immediately after the events chronicled in the preceding chapter
+I sailed for my second tour through the United States. I was delighted
+to find a thoroughly alive and progressive suffrage movement, where
+before had existed with most people only an academic theory in favour of
+equal political rights between men and women. My first meeting, held in
+Brooklyn, was advertised by sandwich women walking through the principal
+streets of the city, quite like our militant suffragists at home. Street
+meetings, I found, were now daily occurrences in New York. The Women's
+Political Union had adopted an election policy, and throughout the
+country as far west as I travelled, I found women awakened to the
+necessity of political action instead of mere discussion of suffrage.
+
+My second visit to America, like my first one, is clouded in my memory
+with sorrow. Very soon after my return to England a beloved sister, Mrs.
+Mary Clarke died. My sister, who was a most ardent suffragist and a
+valued worker in the Women's Social and Political Union, was one of the
+women who was shockingly maltreated in Parliament Square on Black
+Friday. She was also one of the women who, a few days later, registered
+their protest against the Government by throwing a stone through the
+window of an official residence. For this act she was sent to Holloway
+prison for a term of one month. Released on December 21st, it was plain
+to those who knew her best that her health had suffered seriously from
+the dreadful experience of Black Friday and the after experience of
+prison. She died suddenly on Christmas day, to the profound sorrow of
+all her associates. Hers was not the only life that was sacrificed as a
+result of that day. Other deaths occurred, mostly from hearts weakened
+by overstrain. Miss Henria Williams died on January 2nd, 1911, from
+heart failure. Miss Cecelia Wolseley Haig was another victim. Ill
+treatment on Black Friday resulted in her case in a painful illness
+which ended, after a year of intense suffering, in her death on December
+21st, 1911.
+
+It is not possible to publish a full list of all the women who have died
+or have been injured for life in the course of the suffrage agitation in
+England. In many cases the details have never been made public, and I do
+not feel at liberty to record them here. A very celebrated case, which
+is public property, is that of Lady Constance Lytton, sister of the Earl
+of Lytton, who acted as chairman of the Conciliation Committee. Lady
+Constance had twice in 1909 gone to prison as a result of suffrage
+activities, and on both occasions had been given special privileges on
+account of her rank and family influence. In spite of her protests and
+her earnest pleadings to be accorded the same treatment as other
+suffrage prisoners, the snobbish and cowardly authorities insisted in
+retaining Lady Constance in the hospital cells and discharging her
+before the expiration of her sentence. This was done on a plea of her
+ill health, and it was true that she suffered from a valvular disease of
+the heart.
+
+[Illustration: RIOT SCENES ON BLACK FRIDAY
+
+_November, 1910_]
+
+Smarting under the sense of the injustice done her comrades in this
+discrimination, Lady Constance Lytton did one of the most heroic deeds
+to be recorded in the history of the suffrage movement. She cut off her
+beautiful hair and otherwise disguised herself, put on cheap and ugly
+clothing, and as "Jane Warton" took part in a demonstration at
+Newcastle, again suffering arrest and imprisonment. This time the
+authorities treated her as an ordinary prisoner. Without testing her
+heart or otherwise giving her an adequate medical examination, they
+subjected her to the horrors of forcible feeding. Owing to her fragile
+constitution she suffered frightful nausea each time, and when on one
+occasion the doctor's clothing was soiled, he struck her contemptuously
+on the cheek. This treatment was continued until the identity of the
+prisoner suddenly became known. She was, of course, immediately
+released, but she never recovered from the experience, and is now a
+hopeless invalid.[2]
+
+I want to say right here, that those well-meaning friends on the outside
+who say that we have suffered these horrors of prison, of hunger strikes
+and forcible feeding, because we desired to martyrise ourselves for the
+cause, are absolutely and entirely mistaken. We never went to prison in
+order to be martyrs. We went there in order that we might obtain the
+rights of citizenship. We were willing to break laws that we might force
+men to give us the right to make laws. That is the way men have earned
+their citizenship. Truly says Mazzini that the way to reform has always
+led through prison.
+
+The result of the general election, which took place in January, 1911,
+was that the Liberal Party was again returned to power. Parliament met
+on January 31st, but the session formally opened on February 6th with
+the reading of the King's speech. The programme for the session included
+the Lords' veto measure, Home Rule, payment for members of Parliament,
+and the abolishment of plural voting. Invalid insurance was also
+mentioned and certain amendments to the old age pension bill. Women's
+suffrage was not mentioned. Nevertheless, we were singularly lucky, the
+first three places in the ballot being secured by members of the
+Conciliation Committee. Mr. Philips, an Irish member, drew the first
+place, but as the Irish party had decided not to introduce any bills
+that session, he yielded to Sir George Kemp, who announced that he would
+use his place for the purpose of taking a second reading debate on the
+new Conciliation Bill. The old bill had been entitled: "A Bill to give
+the Vote to Women Occupiers," a title that made amendment difficult. The
+new bill bore the more flexible title, "A Bill to Confer the
+Parliamentary Franchise on Women," thus doing away with one of Mr.
+Lloyd-George's most plausible objections to it. The £10 occupation
+clause was omitted, doing away with another objection, that of the
+possibility of "faggot voting," that is, of a rich man conferring the
+vote on a family of daughters by the simple expedient of making them
+tenants of slices of his own property. The Conciliation Bill now read:
+"1. Every woman possessed of a household qualification within the
+meaning of the Representation of the People Act (1884) shall be entitled
+to be registered as a voter, and when registered to vote in the county
+or borough in which the qualifying premises are situated.
+
+"2. For the purposes of this Act a woman shall not be disqualified by
+marriage for being registered as a voter, provided that a husband and
+wife shall not both be registered as voters in the same Parliamentary
+borough or county division."
+
+This bill met with even warmer approval than the first one, because it
+was believed that it would win votes from those members who felt that
+the original measure had fallen short of being truly democratic.
+Nevertheless, the Prime Minister showed from the first that he intended
+to oppose it, as he had all previous suffrage measures. He announced
+that all Fridays up to Easter and also all time on Tuesdays and
+Wednesdays usually allowed for private members' bills were to be
+occupied with consideration of Government measures. Hardly a Liberal
+voice was raised against this arbitrary ruling. The Irish members indeed
+were delighted with it, since it gave the Home Rule Bill an advantage.
+The Labour members seemed complacent, and the rest of the coalition were
+indifferent. One back bench Liberal went so far as to rise and thank the
+Prime Minister for the courtesy with which the gagging process was
+accomplished. There was some show of fight made by the Opposition, but
+Conservative indignation was tempered by the reflection that the
+precedent established might be followed to advantage when their party
+came into power.
+
+Sir George Kemp then announced that he would take May 5th for the second
+reading of the Conciliation Bill, and the supporters of the bill,
+according to their various convictions, set to work to further its
+interests. The conviction of the W. S. P. U. was that Mr. Asquith's
+Government would never allow the bill to pass until they were actually
+forced to do so, and we adopted our own methods to secure a definite
+pledge from the Government that they would give facilities to the bill.
+
+In April of that year the census was to be taken, and we organised a
+census resistance on the part of women. According to our law the census
+of the entire kingdom must be taken every ten years on a designated day.
+Our plan was to reduce the value of the census for statistical purposes
+by refusing to make the required returns. Two ways of resistance
+presented themselves. The first and most important was direct resistance
+by occupiers who should refuse to fill in the census papers. This laid
+the register open to a fine of £5 or a month's imprisonment, and thus
+required the exercise of considerable courage. The second means of
+resistance was evasion--staying away from home during the entire time
+that the enumerators were taking the census. We made the announcement of
+this plan and instantly there ensued a splendid response from women and
+a chorus of horrified disapproval from the conservative public. The
+_Times_ voiced this disapproval in a leading article, to which I
+replied, giving our reasons for the protest. "The Census," I wrote, "is
+a numbering of the people. Until women count as people for the purpose
+of representation in the councils of the nation as well as for purposes
+of taxation, we shall refuse to be numbered."
+
+On the subject of laws made by men--without the assistance of women--for
+the protection of women and children, I have a very special feeling.
+From my experience as poor law guardian and as Registrar of Births and
+Deaths, I know how ridiculously, say rather how tragically, these laws
+fall short of protection. Take for instance the vaunted "Children's
+Charter" of 1906, the measure which spread Mr. Lloyd-George's fame
+throughout the world. A volume could be filled with the mistakes and the
+cruelties of that Act, the object of which is the preservation and
+improvement of child life. A distinguishing characteristic of the Act is
+that it puts most of the responsibility for neglect of children on the
+backs of the mothers, who, under the laws of England, have no rights as
+parents. Two or three especially striking cases of this kind came into
+notice about this time, and gave the census resistance an additional
+justification.
+
+The case of Annie Woolmore was a very pitiful one. She was arrested and
+sentenced to Holloway for six weeks for neglecting her children. The
+evidence showed that the woman lived with her husband and children in a
+miserable hovel, which would have been almost impossible to keep clean
+even if there had been water in the house. As it was the poor soul, who
+was in ill health and weakened by deprivation, had to carry all the
+water she used across a great distance. The children as well as the
+house were very dirty, it was true, but the children were well nourished
+and kindly treated. The husband, a labourer, out of work much of the
+time, testified that his wife "starved herself to feed the kids." Yet
+she had violated the terms of the "Children's Charter" and she went to
+prison. I am glad to say that owing to the efforts of suffragists she
+was pardoned and provided with a better home.
+
+Another case was that of Helen Conroy, who was charged with living in
+one wretched room, with her husband and seven children, the youngest a
+month old. According to the law the mother was forbidden to have this
+infant in bed with her overnight, yet part of the charge against her was
+that the child was found sleeping in a box of damp straw. Doubtless she
+would have preferred a cradle, or even a box of dry straw. But direst
+poverty made the cradle impossible and the conditions of the tenement
+kept the straw damp. Both parents in this instance were sent to prison
+for three months at hard labour. The magistrate casually remarked that
+the house in which these poor people lived had been condemned two years
+before, but some respectable property owner was still collecting rents
+from it.
+
+Another poor mother, evicted from her home because she could not pay the
+rent, took her four children out into the open country, and when found
+was sleeping with them in a gravel pit. She was sent to prison for a
+month and the children went to the workhouse.
+
+These sorry mothers, logical results of the subjection of women, are
+enough in themselves to justify almost any defiance of a Government who
+deny the women the right to work out their destinies in freedom. No
+pledge having been secured from the Prime Minister by April 1st, we
+carried out, and most successfully, our census resistance. Many
+thousands of women all over the country refused or evaded the returns. I
+returned my census paper with the words "No vote no census" written
+across it, and other women followed that example with similar messages.
+One woman filled in the blank with full information about her one man
+servant, and added that there were many women but no more persons in her
+household. In Birmingham sixteen women of wealth packed their houses
+with women resisters. They slept on the floors, on chairs and tables,
+and even in the baths. The head of a large college threw open the
+building to 300 women. Many women in other cities held all night parties
+for friends who wished to remain away from home. In some places
+unoccupied houses were rented for the night by resisters, who lay on the
+bare boards. Some groups of women hired gipsy vans and spent the night
+on the moors.
+
+In London we gave a great concert at Queen's Hall on Census night. Many
+of us walked about Trafalgar Square until midnight and then repaired to
+Aldwich skating rink, where we amused ourselves until morning. Some
+skated while others looked on, and enjoyed the admirable musical and
+theatrical entertainment that helped to pass the hours. We had with us a
+number of the brightest stars in the theatrical world, and they were
+generous in their contributions. It being Sunday night, the chairman had
+to call on each of the artists for a "speech" instead of a song or other
+turn. An all-night restaurant near at hand did a big business, and on
+the whole the resisters had a very good time. The Scala Theatre was the
+scene of another all-night entertainment.
+
+There was a good deal of curiosity to see what the Government would
+devise in the way of a punishment for the rebellious women, but the
+Government realised the impossibility of taking punitive action, and Mr.
+John Burns, who, as head of the Local Government Board, was responsible
+for the census, announced that they had decided to treat the affair with
+magnanimity. The number of evasions, he declared, was insignificant. But
+every one knew that this was the exact reverse of the facts.
+
+[Illustration: IN THIS MANNER THOUSANDS OF WOMEN THROUGHOUT THE KINGDOM
+SLEPT IN UNOCCUPIED HOUSES OVER CENSUS NIGHT]
+
+The Conciliation Bill was debated on May 5th and passed its second
+reading by the enormous majority of 137. And now the public and a
+section of the press united in a strong demand that the Government yield
+to the undoubted will of the House and grant facilities to the bill. The
+Conciliation Committee sent a deputation of members to the Prime
+Minister to remind him of his pre-election promise that the House of
+Commons should have an opportunity of dealing with the whole question
+of woman suffrage, but they succeeded only in getting his assurance that
+he had the matter under consideration. Late in the month the
+announcement was made in the House that the Government would not grant
+facilities during that session, but, since the new bill fulfilled the
+conditions named by the Prime Minister, and was now capable of
+amendment, the Government recognised it to be their duty to grant
+facilities in some session of the present Parliament. They would be
+prepared next session, when the bill had been again read for the second
+time, either as a result of obtaining a good place in the ballot, or (if
+that did not happen) by a grant of a Government day for the purpose, to
+give a week, which they understood to be the time suggested as
+reasonable by the promoters for its further stages.
+
+This pledge was made in order to deter the W. S. P. U. from making a
+militant demonstration in connection with the coronation of the King.
+
+Keir Hardie asked if the Government would, by means of a closure or
+otherwise, make certain that the bill would go through in the week, and
+the Prime Minister replied, "No, I cannot give an assurance of that
+kind. After all, it is a problem of the very greatest magnitude."
+
+This reply seemed to make the Government's pledge practically worthless.
+The Conciliation Committee also realised the possibilities of the bill
+being talked out, and Lord Lytton wrote to Mr. Asquith and asked him for
+assurances that the facilities offered were intended not for academic
+discussion but for effective opportunity for carrying the bill. He also
+asked that the week offered should not be construed rigidly but that,
+providing the committee stage were got through in the time, additional
+days for the report and third reading stages might be forthcoming.
+Reasonable opportunity for making use of the closure was also asked. To
+Lord Lytton's letter the Prime Minister replied as follows:
+
+
+     _My dear Lytton_--In reply to your letter on the subject of the
+     Women's Enfranchisement Bill, I would refer you to some
+     observations recently made in a speech at the National Liberal Club
+     by Sir Edward Grey, which accurately expresses the intention of the
+     Government.
+
+     It follows (to answer your specific inquiries), that the "week"
+     offered will be interpreted with reasonable elasticity, that the
+     Government will interpose no reasonable obstacle to the proper use
+     of the closure, and that if (as you suggest) the bill gets through
+     committee in the time proposed, the extra days required for report
+     and third reading will not be refused.
+
+     The Government, though divided in opinion on the merits of the
+     bill, are unanimous in their determination to give effect, not only
+     in the letter but in the spirit, to the promise in regard to
+     facilities which I made on their behalf before the last general
+     election.
+                        Yours etc.,
+                                  H. H. ASQUITH.
+
+
+Sceptical up to this point, the W. S. P. U. was now convinced that the
+Government were sincere in their promise to give the bill full
+facilities in the following year. We held a joyful mass meeting in
+Queen's Hall and I again declared that warfare against the Government
+was at an end. Our new policy was the inauguration of a great holiday
+campaign, with the object of making victory in 1912 absolutely certain.
+Electors must be aroused, members of Parliament held to their
+allegiance. Women must be organised in order that questions that vitally
+affect the social welfare of the country might be placed before them. I
+chose Scotland and Wales as the scenes of my holiday labours.
+
+I may say that our confidence was fully shared by the public at large.
+The belief in Mr. Asquith's pledge was accurately reflected in a leader
+published in _The Nation_, which said: "From the moment the Prime
+Minister signed the frank and ungrudging letter to Lord Lytton which
+appeared in last Saturday's newspapers, women became, in all but the
+legal formality, voters and citizens. For at least two years, if not for
+longer, nothing has been lacking save a full and fair opportunity for
+the House of Commons to translate its convictions into the precise
+language of a statute. That opportunity has been promised for next
+session and promised in terms and under conditions which ensure
+success."
+
+The only thing, as we thought, that we had to fear were wrecking
+amendments to the bill, and in the new by-election policy which we
+adopted we worked against all candidates of every party who would refuse
+to promise, not only to support the Conciliation Committee to carry the
+bill, but also to vote against any amendment the committee thought
+dangerous. We believed that we had covered every possibility of
+disaster. But we had something yet to learn of the treachery of the
+Asquith Ministry and their capacity for cold-blooded lying.
+
+Mr. Lloyd-George from the first was an open enemy of the bill, but since
+we had no doubt of the sincerity of the Prime Minister, we could only
+conclude that Mr. Lloyd-George had detached himself from the main body
+of the Government and had become the self-constituted leader of the
+opposition. In an address to a large Liberal group Mr. Lloyd-George
+advised that Liberal members be asked to ballot for a place for a
+"democratic measure," in order that such a measure might claim the Prime
+Minister's pledge for facilities next session. In one or two other
+speeches he made vague allusions to the possibilities of introducing
+another suffrage bill. His own idea was to amend the bill to give a vote
+to wives of all electors--making married women voters in virtue of their
+husband's qualification. The inevitable effect of such an amendment
+would be to wreck the bill, since it would have enfranchised about
+6,000,000 women in addition to the million and a half who would benefit
+by the original terms of the bill. Such a wholesale addition to the
+electorate was never known in England; the number enfranchised by the
+Reform Bill of 1832 being hardly more than half a million. The Reform
+Bill of 1867 admitted a million new voters, and that of 1884 perhaps two
+millions. The absurdity of Mr. Lloyd-George's proposition was such that
+we did not regard it seriously. We did not allow his opposition to give
+us serious alarm until a day in August when a Welsh member, Mr. Leif
+Jones, asked the Prime Minister from the floor of the House, whether he
+was aware that his promise for facilities for the Conciliation Bill in
+the next session was being claimed exclusively for that bill, and asked
+further for a statement that the promised facilities would be equally
+granted to any other suffrage bill that might secure a second reading
+and was capable of amendment. Mr. Lloyd-George, speaking for the
+Government, replied that they could not undertake to give facilities to
+more than one bill on the same subject, but that any bill which,
+satisfying these tests, secured a second reading, would be treated by
+them as falling within their engagements.
+
+Astounded at this plain evasion of a sacred promise, Lord Lytton again
+wrote to the Prime Minister, reviewing the entire matter, and asking for
+another statement of the Government's intentions. The following is the
+text of Mr. Asquith's reply:
+
+
+     _My dear Lytton_--I have no hesitation in saying that the promises
+     made by, and on behalf of the Government, in regard to giving
+     facilities to the Conciliation Bill, will be strictly adhered to,
+     both in letter and in spirit.
+                                            Yours sincerely,
+                                                H. H. ASQUITH.
+     August 23, 1911.
+
+
+Again we were reassured, and our confidence in the Premier's pledge
+remained unshaken throughout the campaign, although Mr. Lloyd-George
+continued to throw out hints that the promises of facilities for the
+bill were altogether illusory. We could not believe him, and when, two
+months later, I was asked in America: "When will English women vote?" I
+replied with perfect conviction, "Next year."
+
+This was in Louisville, Kentucky, where I attended the 1911 Annual
+Convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
+
+I remember this third visit to the United States with especial
+pleasure. I was the guest in New York of Dr. and Mrs. John Winters
+Brannan, and through the courtesy of Dr. Brannan, who is at the head of
+all the city hospitals, I saw something of the penal system and the
+institutional life of America. We visited the workhouse and the
+penitentiary on Blackwell's Island, and although I am told that these
+places are not regarded as model institutions, I can assure my readers
+that they are infinitely superior to the English prisons where women are
+punished for trying to win their political freedom. In the American
+prisons, much as they lacked in some essentials, I saw no solitary
+confinement, no rule of silence, no deadly air of officialdom. The food
+was good and varied, and above all there was an air of kindness and good
+feeling between the officials and the prisoners that is almost wholly
+lacking in England.
+
+But, after all, in the United States as in other countries, the problem
+of the relations between unfranchised women and the State remains
+unsolved and unsatisfactory. One night my friends took me to that sombre
+and terrible institution, the Night Court for Women. We sat on the bench
+with the magistrate, and he very courteously explained everything to us.
+The whole business was heart-breaking. All the women, with one
+exception--an old drunkard--were charged with solicitation. Most of them
+were of high type by nature. It all seemed so hopeless, and it was clear
+that they were victims of an evil system. Their conviction was a
+foregone conclusion.
+
+The magistrate said that in most cases the reason for their coming
+there was economic. One case of a little cigar maker, who said very
+simply that she only went on the streets when out of work, and that when
+in work she earned $8 a week, was very tragic and touching. I could not
+keep the Night Court out of my speeches after that. The whole dreadful
+injustice of women's lives seemed mirrored in that place.
+
+I went as far west as the Pacific Coast on this visit, spending
+Christmas day in Seattle, and for the first time seeing a community
+where women and men existed on terms of exact equality. It was a
+delightful experience. As I wrote home to our members, the men of the
+western States seemed to my eyes eager, earnest, rough men, building a
+great community in a great hurry, but never have I seen greater respect,
+courtesy and chivalry shown to women than in that one Suffrage State it
+has been my privilege to visit.
+
+I am getting a little ahead of my story, however. It was in November,
+when I was in the city of Minneapolis, that a crushing blow descended on
+the English suffragists. I learned of this through cabled despatches in
+the newspapers and from private cables, and was so staggered that I
+could scarcely command myself sufficiently to fill my immediate
+engagements. This was the news, that the Government had broken their
+plighted word and had deliberately destroyed the Conciliation Bill. My
+first wild thought, on hearing of this act of treachery, was to cancel
+all engagements and return to England, but my final decision to remain
+afterwards proved the right one, because the women at home, without a
+moment's loss of time, struck the answering blow, guided by that
+insight which has been characteristic of every act of the members of our
+Union. I did not return to England until January 11, 1912, and by that
+time great deeds had been done. Our movement had entered upon a new and
+more vigorous stage of militancy.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[2] Lady Constance Lytton's story has been thrillingly told in her book
+"Prisons and Prisoners," Heinemann.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III
+
+THE WOMEN'S REVOLUTION
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Parliament had reassembled on October 25th, 1911, and the first move on
+the part of the Government was, to say the least of it, rather
+unpropitious. The Prime Minister submitted two motions, the first one
+empowering them to take all the time of the House during the remainder
+of the session, and the second guillotining discussion on the Insurance
+Bill so as to force the measure through before Christmas. One day only
+was allotted to the clauses relating to women in that bill. These
+clauses were notoriously unfair; they provided for sickness insurance of
+about four million women and unemployment insurance of no women at all.
+Under the provision of the bill eleven million men were ensured against
+sickness and about two and a half million against unemployment. Women
+were given lower benefits for the same premium as men, and premiums paid
+out of the family income were credited solely to the men's account. The
+bill as drafted provided no form of insurance for wives, mothers and
+daughters who spent their lives at home working for the family. It
+penalised women for staying in the home, which most men agree is women's
+only legitimate sphere of action. The amended bill grudgingly allowed
+aside from maternity benefits, a small insurance, on rather difficult
+terms, for workingmen's wives.
+
+Thus the re-elected Government's first utterance to women was one of
+contempt; and this was followed, on November 7th, by the almost
+incredible announcement that the Government intended, at the next
+session, to introduce a manhood suffrage bill. This announcement was not
+made in the House of Commons, but to a deputation of men from the
+People's Suffrage Federation, a small group of people who advocated
+universal adult suffrage. The deputation, which was very privately
+arranged for, was received by Mr. Asquith, and the then Master of
+Elibank (Chief Liberal Whip). The spokesman asked Mr. Asquith to bring
+in a Government measure for universal adult suffrage, including adult
+women. The Prime Minister replied that the Government had pledged
+facilities for the Conciliation Bill, which was as far as they were
+prepared to go in the matter of women's suffrage. But, he added, the
+Government intended in the next session to introduce and to pass through
+all its stages a genuine reform bill which would sweep away existing
+qualifications for the franchise, and substitute a single qualification
+of residence. The bill would apply to adult males only, but it would be
+so framed as to be open to a woman suffrage amendment in case the House
+of Commons desired to make that extension and amendment.
+
+This portentous announcement came like a bolt from the blue, and there
+was strong condemnation of the Government's treachery to women. Said the
+_Saturday Review_:
+
+
+     With absolutely no demand, no ghost of a demand, for more votes
+     for men, and with--beyond all cavil--a very strong demand for votes
+     for women, the Government announce their Manhood Suffrage Bill and
+     carefully evade the other question! For a naked, avowed plan of
+     gerrymandering no Government surely ever did beat this one.
+
+
+The _Daily Mail_ said that the "policy which Mr. Asquith proposes is
+absolutely indefensible." And the _Evening Standard and Globe_ said: "We
+are no friends of female suffrage, but anything more contemptible than
+the attitude assumed by the Government it is difficult to imagine."
+
+If the Government hoped to deceive any one by their dishonest reference
+to the possibility of a woman suffrage amendment, they were
+disappointed. Said the _Evening News_:
+
+
+     Mr. Asquith's bombshell will blow the Conciliation Bill to
+     smithereens, for it is impossible to have a manhood suffrage for
+     men and a property qualification for women. True, the Premier
+     consents to leave the question of women's suffrage to the House,
+     but he knows well enough what the decision of the House will be.
+     The Conciliation Bill had a chance, but the larger measure has none
+     at all.
+
+
+I have quoted these newspaper leaders to show you that our opinion of
+the Government's action was shared even by the press. Universal suffrage
+in a country where women are in a majority of one million is not likely
+to happen in the lifetime of any reader of this volume, and the
+Government's generous offer of a possible amendment was nothing more
+than a gratuitous insult to the suffragists.
+
+The truce, naturally, came to an abrupt end. The W. S. P. U. wrote to
+the Prime Minister, saying that consternation had been aroused by the
+Government's announcement, and that it had been decided accordingly to
+send a deputation representing the Women's Social and Political Union to
+wait upon himself and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, on the evening of
+November 21st. The purpose of the deputation was to demand that the
+proposed manhood suffrage bill be abandoned, and that in its place
+should be introduced a Government measure giving equal franchise rights
+to men and women. A similar letter was despatched to Mr. Lloyd-George.
+
+Six times before on occasions of crisis had the W. S. P. U. requested an
+interview with Mr. Asquith, and each time they had been refused. This
+time the Prime Minister replied that he had decided to receive a
+deputation of the various suffrage societies on November 17th,
+"including your own society, if you desire it." It was proposed that
+each society appoint four representatives as members of the deputation
+which would be received by the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the
+Exchequer.
+
+Nine suffrage societies sent representatives to the meeting, our own
+representatives being Christabel Pankhurst, Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, Miss
+Annie Kenney, Lady Constance Lytton and Miss Elizabeth Robins.
+Christabel and Mrs. Lawrence spoke for the Union, and they did not
+hesitate to accuse the two Ministers to their faces of having grossly
+tricked and falsely misled women. Mr. Asquith, in his reply to the
+deputation, resented these imputations.
+
+He had kept his pledge, he insisted, in regard to the Conciliation
+Bill. He was perfectly willing to give facilities to the Bill, if the
+women preferred that to an amendment to his reform bill. Moreover, he
+denied that he had made any new announcement. As far back as 1908 he had
+distinctly declared that the Government regarded it as a sacred duty to
+bring forward a manhood suffrage bill before that Parliament came to an
+end. It was true that the Government did not carry out that binding
+obligation, and it was also true that until the present time nothing
+more was ever said about a manhood suffrage bill, but that was not the
+Government's fault. The crisis of the Lord's veto, had momentarily
+displaced the bill. Now he merely proposed to fulfil his promise made in
+1908, and also his promise about giving facilities to the Conciliation
+Bill. He was ready to keep both promises. Well he knew that those
+promises were incompatible, that the fulfilment of both was therefore
+impossible, and Christabel told him so bluntly and fearlessly. "We are
+not satisfied," she warned him, and the Prime Minister said acidly: "I
+did not expect to satisfy _you_."
+
+The reply of the W. S. P. U. was immediate and forceful. Led by Mrs.
+Pethick Lawrence, our women went out with stones and hammers and broke
+hundreds of windows in the Home Office, the War and Foreign Offices, the
+Board of Education, the Privy Council Office, the Board of Trade, the
+Treasury, Somerset House, the National Liberal Club, several post
+offices, the Old Banqueting Hall, the London and South Western Bank, and
+a dozen other buildings, including the residence of Lord Haldane and
+Mr. John Burns. Two hundred and twenty women were arrested and about 150
+of them sent to prison for terms varying from a week to two months.
+
+One individual protest deserves mention because of its prophetic
+character. In December Miss Emily Wilding Davison was arrested for
+attempting to set fire to a letter box at Parliament Street Post Office.
+In court Miss Davison said that she did it as a protest against the
+Government's treachery, and as a demand that women's suffrage be
+included in the King's speech. "The protest was meant to be serious,"
+she said, "and so I adopted a serious course. In past agitation for
+reform the next step after window-breaking was incendiarism, in order to
+draw the attention of the private citizens to the fact that this
+question of reform was their concern as well as that of women."
+
+Miss Davison received the severe sentence of six months' imprisonment
+for her deed.
+
+To this state of affairs I returned from my American tour. I had the
+comfort of reflecting that my imprisoned comrades were being accorded
+better treatment than the early prisoners had known. Since early in 1910
+some concessions had been granted, and some acknowledgment of the
+political character of our offences had been made. During the brief
+period when these scant concessions to justice were allowed, the hunger
+strike was abandoned and prison was robbed of its worst horror, forcible
+feeding. The situation was bad enough, however, and I could see that it
+might easily become a great deal worse. We had reached a stage at which
+the mere sympathy of members of Parliament, however sincerely felt, was
+no longer of the slightest use. Reminding our members this, in the first
+speeches made after returning to England I asked them to prepare
+themselves for more action. If women's suffrage was not included in the
+next King's speech we should have to make it absolutely impossible for
+the Government to touch the question of the franchise.
+
+The King's speech, when Parliament met in February, 1912, alluded to the
+franchise question in very general terms. Proposals, it was stated,
+would be brought forward for the amendment of the law with respect to
+the franchise and the registration of electors. This might be construed
+to mean that the Government were going to introduce a manhood suffrage
+bill or a bill for the abolition of plural voting, which had been
+suggested in some quarters as a substitute for the manhood suffrage
+bill. No precise statement of the Government's intentions was made, and
+the whole franchise question was left in a cloud of uncertainty. Mr. Agg
+Gardner, a Unionist member of the Conciliation Committee, drew the third
+place in the ballot, and he announced that he should reintroduce the
+Conciliation Bill. This interested us very slightly, for knowing its
+prospect of success to have been destroyed, for we were done with the
+Conciliation Bill forever. Nothing less than a Government measure would
+henceforth satisfy the W. S. P. U., because it had been clearly
+demonstrated that only a Government measure would be allowed to pass the
+House of Commons. With sublime faith, or rather with a deplorable lack
+of political insight, the Women's Liberal Federation and the National
+Union of Women's Suffrage Societies professed full confidence in the
+proposed amendment to a manhood suffrage bill, but we knew how futile
+was that hope. We saw that the only course to take was to offer
+determined opposition to any measure of suffrage that did not include as
+an integral part, equal suffrage for men and women.
+
+On February 16th we held a large meeting of welcome to a number of
+released prisoners who had served two and three months for the window
+breaking demonstration that had taken place in the previous November. At
+this meeting we candidly surveyed the situation and agreed on a course
+of action which we believed would be sufficiently strong to prevent the
+Government from advancing their threatened franchise bill. I said on
+this occasion:
+
+"We don't want to use any weapons that are unnecessarily strong. If the
+argument of the stone, that time-honoured official political argument,
+is sufficient, then we will never use any stronger argument. And that is
+the weapon and the argument that we are going to use next time. And so I
+say to every volunteer on our demonstration, 'Be prepared to use that
+argument.' I am taking charge of the demonstration, and that is the
+argument I am going to use. I am not going to use it for any sentimental
+reason, I am going to use it because it is the easiest and the most
+readily understood. Why should women go to Parliament Square and be
+battered about and insulted, and most important of all, produce less
+effect than when we throw stones? We tried it long enough. We submitted
+for years patiently to insult and assault. Women had their health
+injured. Women lost their lives. We should not have minded if that had
+succeeded, but that did not succeed, and we have made more progress with
+less hurt to ourselves by breaking glass than ever we made when we
+allowed them to break our bodies.
+
+"After all, is not a woman's life, is not her health, are not her limbs
+more valuable than panes of glass? There is no doubt of that, but most
+important of all, does not the breaking of glass produce more effect
+upon the Government? If you are fighting a battle, that should dictate
+your choice of weapons. Well, then, we are going to try this time if
+mere stones will do it. I do not think it will ever be necessary for us
+to arm ourselves as Chinese women have done, but there are women who are
+prepared to do that if it should be necessary. In this Union we don't
+lose our heads. We only go as far as we are obliged to go in order to
+win, and we are going forward with this next protest demonstration in
+full faith that this plan of campaign, initiated by our friends whom we
+honour to-night, will on this next occasion prove effective."
+
+Ever since militancy took on the form of destruction of property the
+public generally, both at home and abroad, has expressed curiosity as to
+the logical connection between acts such as breaking windows, firing
+pillar boxes, et cetera, and the vote. Only a complete lack of
+historical knowledge excuses that curiosity. For every advance of men's
+political freedom has been marked with violence and the destruction of
+property. Usually the advance has been marked by war, which is called
+glorious. Sometimes it has been marked by riotings, which are deemed
+less glorious but are at least effective. That speech of mine, just
+quoted, will probably strike the reader as one inciting to violence and
+illegal action, things as a rule and in ordinary circumstances quite
+inexcusable. Well, I will call the reader's attention to what was, in
+this connection, a rather singular coincidence. At the very hour when I
+was making that speech, advising my audience of the political necessity
+of physical revolt, a responsible member of the Government, in another
+hall, in another city, was telling his audience precisely the same
+thing. This Cabinet Minister, the right Honourable C. E. H. Hobhouse,
+addressing a large anti-suffrage meeting in his constituency of Bristol,
+said that the suffrage movement was not a political issue because its
+adherents had failed to prove that behind this movement existed a large
+public demand. He declared that "In the case of the suffrage demand
+there has not been the kind of popular sentimental uprising which
+accounted for Nottingham Castle in 1832 or the Hyde Park railings in
+1867. There has not been a great ebullition of popular feeling."
+
+The "popular sentimental uprising" to which Mr. Hobhouse alluded was the
+burning to the ground of the castle of the anti-suffrage Duke of
+Newcastle, and of Colwick Castle, the country seat of another of the
+leaders of the opposition against the franchise bill. The militant men
+of that time did not select uninhabited buildings to be fired. They
+burned both these historic residences over their owners' heads. Indeed,
+the wife of the owner of Colwick Castle died as a result of shock and
+exposure on that occasion. No arrests were made, no men imprisoned. On
+the contrary the King sent for the Premier, and begged the Whig
+Ministers favourable to the franchise bill not to resign, and intimated
+that this was also the wish of the Lords who had thrown out the bill.
+Molesworth's History of England says:
+
+
+     These declarations were imperatively called for. The danger was
+     imminent and the Ministers knew it and did all that lay in their
+     power to tranquillise the people, and to assure them that the bill
+     was only delayed and not finally defeated.
+
+
+For a time the people believed this, but soon they lost patience, and
+seeing signs of a renewed activity on the part of the anti-suffragists,
+they became aggressive again. Bristol, the very city in which Mr.
+Hobhouse made his speech, was set on fire. The militant reformers burned
+the new gaol, the toll houses, the Bishop's Palace, both sides of
+Queen's Square, including the Mansion House, the custom house, the
+excise office, many warehouses, and other private property, the whole
+valued at over £100,000--five hundred thousand dollars. It was as a
+result of such violence, and in fear of more violence, that the reform
+bill was hurried through Parliament and became law in June, 1832.
+
+Our demonstration, so mild by comparison with English men's political
+agitation, was announced for March 4th, and the announcement created
+much public alarm. Sir William Byles gave notice that he would "ask the
+Secretary of State for the Home Department whether his attention had
+been drawn to a speech by Mrs. Pankhurst last Friday night, openly and
+emphatically inciting her hearers to violent outrage and the destruction
+of property, and threatening the use of firearms if stones did not prove
+sufficiently effective; and what steps he proposes to take to protect
+Society from this outbreak of lawlessness."
+
+The question was duly asked, and the Home Secretary replied that his
+attention had been called to the speech, but that it would not be
+desirable in the public interest to say more than this at present.
+
+Whatever preparations the police department were making to prevent the
+demonstration, they failed because, while as usual, we were able to
+calculate exactly what the police department were going to do, they were
+utterly unable to calculate what we were going to do. We had planned a
+demonstration for March 4th, and this one we announced. We planned
+another demonstration for March 1st, but this one we did not announce.
+Late in the afternoon of Friday, March 1st, I drove in a taxicab,
+accompanied by the Hon. Secretary of the Union, Mrs. Tuke and another of
+our members, to No. 10 Downing Street, the official residence of the
+Prime Minister. It was exactly half past five when we alighted from the
+cab and threw our stones, four of them, through the window panes. As we
+expected we were promptly arrested and taken to Cannon Row police
+station. The hour that followed will long be remembered in London. At
+intervals of fifteen minutes relays of women who had volunteered for the
+demonstration did their work. The first smashing of glass occurred in
+the Haymarket and Piccadilly, and greatly startled and alarmed both
+pedestrians and police. A large number of the women were arrested, and
+everybody thought that this ended the affair. But before the excited
+populace and the frustrated shop owners' first exclamation had died
+down, before the police had reached the station with their prisoners,
+the ominous crashing and splintering of plate glass began again, this
+time along both sides of Regent Street and the Strand. A furious rush of
+police and people towards the second scene of action ensued. While their
+attention was being taken up with occurrences in this quarter, the third
+relay of women began breaking the windows in Oxford Circus and Bond
+Street. The demonstration ended for the day at half past six with the
+breaking of many windows in the Strand. The _Daily Mail_ gave this
+graphic account of the demonstration:
+
+
+     From every part of the crowded and brilliantly lighted streets came
+     the crash of splintered glass. People started as a window shattered
+     at their side; suddenly there was another crash in front of them;
+     on the other side of the street; behind--everywhere. Scared shop
+     assistants came running out to the pavements; traffic stopped;
+     policemen sprang this way and that; five minutes later the streets
+     were a procession of excited groups, each surrounding a woman
+     wrecker being led in custody to the nearest police station.
+     Meanwhile the shopping quarter of London had plunged itself into a
+     sudden twilight. Shutters were hurriedly fitted; the rattle of iron
+     curtains being drawn came from every side. Guards of
+     commissionaires and shopmen were quickly mounted, and any
+     unaccompanied lady in sight, especially if she carried a hand bag,
+     became an object of menacing suspicion.
+
+
+At the hour when this demonstration was being made a conference was
+being held at Scotland Yard to determine what should be done to prevent
+the smashing of windows on the coming Monday night. But we had not
+announced the hour of our March 4th protest. I had in my speech simply
+invited women to assemble in Parliament Square on the evening of March
+4th, and they accepted the invitation. Said the _Daily Telegraph_:
+
+
+     By six o'clock the neighbourhood Houses of Parliament were in a
+     stage of siege. Shop keepers in almost every instance barricaded
+     their premises, removed goods from the windows and prepared for the
+     worst. A few minutes before six o'clock a huge force of police,
+     amounting to nearly three thousand constables, was posted in
+     Parliament Square, Whitehall, and streets adjoining, and large
+     reserves were gathered in Westminster Hall and Scotland Yard. By
+     half past eight Whitehall was packed from end to end with police
+     and public. Mounted constables rode up and down Whitehall keeping
+     the people on the move. At no time was there any sign of danger....
+
+
+The demonstration had taken place in the morning, when a hundred or more
+women walked quietly into Knightsbridge and walking singly along the
+streets demolished nearly every pane of glass they passed. Taken by
+surprise the police arrested as many as they could reach, but most of
+the women escaped.
+
+[Illustration: THE ARGUMENT OF THE BROKEN WINDOW PANE]
+
+For that two days' work something like two hundred suffragettes were
+taken to the various police stations, and for days the long procession
+of women streamed through the courts. The dismayed magistrates found
+themselves facing, not only former rebels, but many new ones, in some
+cases, women whose names, like that of Dr. Ethel Smyth, the composer,
+were famous throughout Europe. These women, when arraigned, made clear
+and lucid statements of their positions and their motives, but
+magistrates are not schooled to examine motives. They are trained to
+think only of laws and mostly of laws protecting property. Their ears
+are not tuned to listen to words like those spoken by one of the
+prisoners, who said: "We have tried every means--processions and
+meetings--which were of no avail. We have tried demonstrations, and now
+at last we have to break windows. I wish I had broken more. I am not in
+the least repentant. Our women are working in far worse condition than
+the striking miners. I have seen widows struggling to bring up their
+children. Only two out of every five are fit to be soldiers. What is the
+good of a country like ours? England is absolutely on the wane. You only
+have one point of view, and that is the men's, and while men have done
+the best they could, they cannot go far without the women and the
+women's views. We believe the whole is in a muddle too horrible to think
+of."
+
+The coal miners were at that time engaging in a terrible strike, and the
+Government, instead of arresting the leaders, were trying to come to
+terms of peace with them. I reminded the magistrate of this fact, and I
+told him that what the women had done was but a fleabite by comparison
+with the miners' violence. I said further: "I hope our demonstration
+will be enough to show the Government that the women's agitation is
+going on. If not, if you send me to prison, I will go further to show
+that women who have to help pay the salaries of Cabinet Ministers, and
+your salary too, sir, are going to have some voice in the making of the
+laws they have to obey."
+
+I was sentenced to two months' imprisonment. Others received sentences
+ranging from one week to two months, while those who were accused of
+breaking glass above five pounds in value, were committed for trial in
+higher courts. They were sent to prison on remand, and when the last of
+us were behind the grim gates, not only Holloway but three other women's
+prisons were taxed to provide for so many extra inmates.
+
+It was a stormy imprisonment for most of us. A great many of the women
+had received, in addition to their sentences, "hard labour," and this
+meant that the privileges at that time accorded to Suffragettes, as
+political offenders, were withheld. The women adopted the hunger strike
+as a protest, but as the hint was conveyed to me that the privileges
+would be restored, I advised a cessation of the strike. The remand
+prisoners demanded that I be allowed to exercise with them, and when
+this was not answered they broke the windows of their cells. The other
+suffrage prisoners, hearing the sound of shattered glass, and the
+singing of the Marseillaise, immediately broke their windows. The time
+had long gone by when the Suffragettes submitted meekly to prison
+discipline. And so passed the first days of my imprisonment.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+The panic stricken Government did not rest content with the imprisonment
+of the window breakers. They sought, in a blind and blundering fashion,
+to perform the impossible feat of wrecking at a blow the entire militant
+movement. Governments have always tried to crush reform movements, to
+destroy ideas, to kill the thing that cannot die. Without regard to
+history, which shows that no Government have ever succeeded in doing
+this, they go on trying in the old, senseless way.
+
+For days before the two demonstrations described in the last chapter our
+headquarters in Clement's Inn had been under constant observation by the
+police, and on the evening of March 5th an inspector of police and a
+large force of detectives suddenly descended on the place, with warrants
+for the arrest of Christabel Pankhurst and Mr. and Mrs. Pethick
+Lawrence, who with Mrs. Tuke and myself were charged with "conspiring to
+incite certain persons to commit malicious damage to property." When the
+officers entered they found Mr. Pethick Lawrence at work in his office,
+and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence in her flat upstairs. My daughter was not in
+the building. The Lawrences, after making brief preparations drove in a
+taxicab to Bow Street Station, where they spent the night. The police
+remained in possession of the offices, and detectives were despatched
+to find and arrest Christabel. But that arrest never took place.
+Christabel Pankhurst eluded the entire force of detectives and uniformed
+police, trained hunters of human prey.
+
+Christabel had gone home, and at first, on hearing of the arrest of Mr.
+and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, had taken her own arrest for granted. A
+little reflection however showed her the danger in which the Union would
+stand if completely deprived of its accustomed leadership, and seeing
+that it was her duty to avoid arrest, she quietly left the house. She
+spent that night with friends who, next morning, helped her to make the
+necessary arrangements and saw her safely away from London. The same
+night she reached Paris, where she has since remained. My relief, when I
+learned of her flight, was very great, because I knew that whatever
+happened to the Lawrences and myself, the movement would be wisely
+directed, this in spite of the fact that the police remained in full
+possession of headquarters.
+
+The offices in Clement's Inn were thoroughly ransacked by the police, in
+a determined effort to secure evidence of conspiracy. They went through
+every desk, file and cabinet, taking away with them two cab loads of
+books and papers, including all my private papers, photographs of my
+children in infancy, and letters sent me by my husband long ago. Some of
+these I never saw again.
+
+The police also terrorised the printer of our weekly newspaper, and
+although the paper came out as usual, about a third of its columns were
+left blank. The headlines, however, with the ensuing space mere white
+paper produced a most dramatic effect. "History Teaches" read one
+headline to a blank space, plainly indicating that the Government were
+not willing to let the public know some of the things that history
+teaches. "Women's Moderation" suggested that the destroyed paragraph
+called for comparison of the women's window breaking with men's greater
+violence in the past. Most eloquent of all was the editorial page,
+absolutely blank except for the headline, "A Challenge!" and the name at
+the foot of the last column, Christabel Pankhurst. What words could have
+breathed a prouder defiance, a more implacable resolve? Christabel was
+gone, out of the clutches of the Government, yet she remained in
+complete possession of the field. For weeks the search for her went
+relentlessly on. Police searched every railway station, every train,
+every sea port. The police of every city in the Kingdom were furnished
+with her portrait. Every amateur Sherlock Holmes in England joined with
+the police in finding her. She was reported in a dozen cities, including
+New York. But all the time she was living quietly in Paris, in daily
+communication with the workers in London, who within a few days were
+once more at their appointed tasks. My daughter has remained in France
+ever since.
+
+Meanwhile, I found myself in the anomalous position of a convicted
+offender serving two months' prison sentence, and of a prisoner on
+remand waiting to be charged with a more serious offence. I was in very
+bad health, having been placed in a damp and unwarmed third division
+cell, the result being an acute attack of bronchitis. I addressed a
+letter to the Home Secretary, telling him of my condition, and urging
+the necessity of liberty to recover my health and to prepare my case for
+trial. I asked for release on bail, the plain right of a remand
+prisoner, and I offered if bail were granted now to serve the rest of my
+two months' sentence later on. The sole concessions granted me, however,
+were removal to a better cell and the right to see my secretary and my
+solicitor, but only in the presence of a wardress and a member of the
+prison clerical staff. On March 14th Mr. and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, Mrs.
+Tuke and myself were brought up for preliminary hearing on the charge of
+having, on November 1, 1911, and on various other dates "conspired and
+combined together unlawfully and maliciously to commit damage, etc." The
+case opened on March 14th in a crowded courtroom in which I saw many
+friends. Mr. Bodkin, who appeared for the prosecution, made a very long
+address, in which he endeavoured to prove that the Women's Social and
+Political Union was a highly developed organisation of most sinister
+character. He produced much documentary evidence, some of it of such
+amusing character that the court rocked with stifled laughter, and the
+judge was obliged to conceal his smiles behind his hand. Mr. Bodkin
+cited our code book with the assistance of which we were able to
+communicate private messages. His voice sank to a scandalised half
+whisper as he stated the fact that we had presumed to include the sacred
+persons of the Government in our private code. "We find," said Mr.
+Bodkin portentously, "that public men in the service of His Majesty as
+members of the Cabinet are tabulated here under code names. We find that
+the Cabinet collectively has its code word "Trees," and individual
+members of the Cabinet are designated by the name, sometimes of trees,
+but I am also bound to say the commonest weeds as well." Here a ripple
+of laughter interrupted. Mr. Bodkin frowned heavily, and continued:
+"There is one," he said solemnly, "called Pansy; another one--more
+complimentary--Roses, another, Violets, and so on." Each of the
+defendants was designated by a code letter. Thus Mrs. Pankhurst was
+identified by the letter F; Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, D; Miss Christabel
+Pankhurst, E. Every public building, including the House of Commons, had
+its code name. The deadly possibilities of the code were illustrated by
+a telegram found in one of the files. It read: "Silk, thistle, pansy,
+duck, wool, E. Q." Translated by the aid of the code book the telegram
+read: "Will you protest Asquith's public meeting to-morrow evening but
+don't get arrested unless success depends on it. Wire back to Christabel
+Pankhurst, Clements Inn."
+
+More laughter followed these revelations, which after all proved no more
+than the business-like methods employed by the W. S. P. U. The laughter
+proved something a great deal more significant, for it was a plain
+indication that the old respect in which Cabinet Ministers had been held
+was no more. We had torn the veil from their sacro-sanct personalities
+and shown them for what they were, mean and scheming politicians. More
+serious from the point of view of prosecution was the evidence brought
+in by members of the police department in regard to the occurrences of
+March 1st and 4th. The policemen who arrested me and my two companions
+in Downing Street on March 1st, after we had broken the windows in the
+Premier's house, testified that following the arrest, we had handed him
+our reserve stock of stones, and that they were all alike, heavy flints.
+Other prisoners were found in possession of similar stones, tending to
+prove that the stones all came from one source. Other officers testified
+to the methodical manner in which the window breaking of March 1st and
+4th was carried out, how systematically it had been planned and how
+soldierly had been the behaviour of the women. By twos and threes March
+4th they had been seen to go to the headquarters at Clement's Inn,
+carrying handbags, which they deposited at headquarters, and had then
+gone on to a meeting at the Pavillion Music Hall. The police attended
+the meeting, which was the usual rally preceding a demonstration or a
+deputation. At five o'clock the meeting adjourned and the women went
+out, as if to go home. The police observed that many of them, still in
+groups of twos and threes, went to the Gardenia restaurant in Catherine
+Street, Strand, a place where many Suffragette breakfasts and teas had
+been held. The police thought that about one hundred and fifty women
+congregated there on March 4th. They remained until seven o'clock, and
+then, under the watching eyes of the police, they sauntered out and
+dispersed. A few minutes later, when there was no reason to expect such
+a thing, the noise was heard, in many streets, of wholesale window
+smashing. The police authorities made much of the fact that the women
+who had left their bags at headquarters and were afterwards arrested,
+were bailed out that night by Mr. Pethick Lawrence. The similarity of
+the stones used; the gathering of so many women in one building,
+prepared for arrest; the waiting at the Gardenia Restaurant; the
+apparent dispersal; the simultaneous destruction in many localities of
+plate glass, and the bailing of prisoners by a person connected with the
+headquarters mentioned, certainly showed a carefully worked out plan.
+Only a public trial of the defendants could establish whether or not the
+plan was a conspiracy.
+
+On the second day of the Ministerial hearing, Mrs. Tuke, who had been in
+the prison infirmary for twenty days and had to be attended in court by
+a trained nurse, was admitted to bail. Mr. Pethick Lawrence made a
+strong plea for bail for himself and his wife, pointing out that they
+had been in prison on remand for two weeks and were entitled to bail. I
+also demanded the privileges of a prisoner on remand. Both of these
+pleas were denied by the court, but a few days later the Home Secretary
+wrote to my solicitor that the remainder of my sentence of two months
+would be remitted until after the conspiracy trail at Bow Street. Mr.
+and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence had already been admitted to bail. Public
+opinion forced the Home Secretary to make these concessions, as it is
+well known that it is next to impossible to prepare a defence while
+confined in prison. Aside from the terrible effect of prison on one's
+body and nerves, there is the difficulty of consulting documents and
+securing other necessary data to be considered.
+
+On April 4th the Ministerial hearing ended in the acquittal of Mrs.
+Tuke, whose activities in the W. S. P. U. were shown to be purely
+secretarial. Mr. and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence and myself were committed for
+trial at the next session of the Central Criminal Court, beginning April
+23rd. Because of the weak state of my health the judge was with great
+difficulty prevailed upon to postpone the trial two weeks and it was,
+therefore, not until May 15th that the case was opened.
+
+The trial at Old Bailey is a thing that I shall never forget. The scene
+is clear before me as I write, the judge impressively bewigged and
+scarlet robed, dominating the crowded courtroom, the solicitors at their
+table, the jury, and looking very far away, the anxious pale faces of
+our friends who crowded the narrow galleries.
+
+By the veriest irony of fate this judge, Lord Coleridge, was the son of
+Sir Charles Coleridge who, in the year 1867, appeared with my husband,
+Dr. Pankhurst, in the famous case of Chorlton v. Lings, and sought to
+establish that women were persons, and as such were entitled to the
+Parliamentary vote. To make the irony still deeper the Attorney General,
+Sir Rufus Isaacs, who appeared as Counsel for the prosecution against
+women militants, himself had been guilty of remarkable speeches in
+corroboration of our point of view. In a speech made in 1910, in
+relation to the abolition of the Lords' veto, Sir Rufus made the
+statement that, although the agitation against privilege was being
+peacefully conducted, the indignation behind it was very intense. Said
+Sir Rufus: "Formerly when the great mass of the people were voteless
+they had to do something violent in order to show what they felt; to-day
+the elector's bullet is his ballot. Let no one be deceived, therefore,
+because in this present struggle everything is peaceful and orderly, in
+contrast to the disorderliness of other great struggles of the past." We
+wondered if the man who said these words could fail to realise that
+voteless women, deprived of every constitutional means of righting their
+grievances, were also obliged to do something violent in order to show
+how they felt. His opening address removed all doubt on that score.
+
+Sir Rufus Isaacs has a clear-cut, hawk-like face, deep eyes, and a
+somewhat world worn air. The first words he spoke were so astoundingly
+unfair that I could hardly believe that I heard them aright. He began
+his address to the jury by telling them that they must not, on any
+account, connect the act of the defendants with any political agitation.
+
+"I am very anxious to impress upon you," he said, "from the moment we
+begin to deal with the facts of this case, that all questions of whether
+a woman is entitled to the Parliamentary franchise, whether she should
+have the same right of franchise as a man, are questions which are in no
+sense involved in the trial of this issue.... Therefore, I ask you to
+discard altogether from the consideration of the matters which will be
+placed before you any viewpoint you may have on this no doubt very
+important political issue."
+
+Nevertheless Sir Rufus added in the course of his remarks that he feared
+that it would not be possible to keep out of the conduct of the case
+various references to political events, and of course the entire trial,
+from beginning to end, showed clearly that the case was what Mr. Tim
+Healey, Mrs. Pethick Lawrence's counsel, called it, a great State Trial.
+
+Proceeding, the Attorney General described the W. S. P. U., which he
+said he thought had been in existence since 1907, and had used what were
+known as militant methods. In 1911 the association had become annoyed by
+the Prime Minister because he would not make women's suffrage what was
+called a Government question. In November, 1911, the Prime Minister
+announced the introduction of a manhood suffrage bill. From that time on
+the defendants set to work to carry out a campaign which would have
+meant nothing less than anarchy. Women were to be induced to act
+together at a given time, in different given places, in such numbers
+that the police should be paralysed by the number of persons breaking
+the law, in order, to use the defendant's own words, "to bring the
+Government to its knees."
+
+After designating the respective positions held by the four defendants
+in the W. S. P. U., Sir Rufus went on to relate the events which
+resulted in the smashing of plate glass windows valued at some two
+thousand pounds, and the imprisonment of over two hundred women who
+were incited to their deeds by the conspirators in the dock. He entirely
+ignored the motive of the acts in question, and he treated the whole
+affair as if the women had been burglars. This inverted statement of the
+matter, though accurate enough as to facts, was such as might have been
+given by King John of the signing of Magna Charta.
+
+A very great number of witnesses were examined, a large number of them
+being policemen, and their testimony, and our cross examination
+disclosed the startling fact that there exists in England a special band
+of secret police entirely engaged in political work. These men,
+seventy-five in number, form what is known as the political branch of
+the Criminal Investigation Department of the Police. They go about in
+disguise, and their sole duty is to shadow Suffragettes and other
+political workers. They follow certain political workers from their
+homes to their places of business, to their social pleasures, into tea
+rooms and restaurants, even to the theatre. They pursue unsuspecting
+people in taxicabs, sit beside them in omnibuses. Above all they take
+down speeches. In fact the system is exactly like the secret police
+system of Russia.
+
+Mr. Pethick Lawrence and I spoke in our own defence, and Mr. Healey M.
+P. defended Mrs. Pethick Lawrence. I cannot give our speeches in full,
+but I should like to include as much of them as will serve to make the
+entire situation clear to the reader.
+
+Mr. Lawrence spoke first at the opening of the case. He began by giving
+an account of the suffrage movement and why he felt the enfranchisement
+of women appeared to him a question so grave that it warranted strong
+measures in its pursuit. He sketched briefly the history of the Women's
+Social and Political Union, from the time when Christabel Pankhurst and
+Annie Kenney were thrown out of Sir Edward Grey's meeting and imprisoned
+for asking a political question, to the torpedoing of the Conciliation
+Bill. "The case that I have to put before you," he said, "is that
+neither the conspiracy nor the incitement is ours; but that the
+conspiracy is a conspiracy of the Cabinet who are responsible for the
+Government of this country; and that the incitement is the incitement of
+the Ministers of the Crown." And he did this most effectually not only
+by telling of the disgraceful trickery and deceit with which the
+Government had misled the suffragists in the matter of suffrage bills,
+but by giving the plain words in which members of the Cabinet had
+advised the women that they would never get the vote until they had
+learned to fight for it as men had fought in the past.
+
+When it came my turn to speak, realising that the average man is
+profoundly ignorant of the history of the women's movement--because the
+press has never adequately or truthfully chronicled the movement--I told
+the jury, as briefly as I could, the story of the forty years' peaceful
+agitation before my daughters and I resolved that we would give our
+lives to the work of getting the vote for women, and that we should use
+whatever means of getting the vote that were necessary to success.
+
+"We founded the Women's Social and Political Union," I said, "in 1903.
+Our first intention was to try and influence the particular political
+Party, which was then coming into power, to make this question of the
+enfranchisement of women their own question and to push it. It took some
+little time to convince us--and I need not weary you with the history of
+all that has happened--but it took some little time to convince us that
+that was no use; that we could not secure things in that way. Then in
+1905 we faced the hard facts. We realised that there was a Press boycott
+against Women's Suffrage. Our speeches at public meetings were not
+reported, our letters to the editors, were not published, even if we
+implored the editors; even the things relating to Women's Suffrage in
+Parliament were not recorded. They said the subject was not of
+sufficient public interest to be reported in the Press, and they were
+not prepared to report it. Then with regard to the men politicians in
+1905: we realised how shadowy were the fine phrases about democracy,
+about human equality, used by the gentlemen who were then coming into
+power. They meant to ignore the women--there was no doubt whatever about
+that. For in the official documents coming from the Liberal party on the
+eve of the 1905 election, there were sentences like this: 'What the
+country wants is a simple measure of Manhood Suffrage.' There was no
+room for the inclusion of women. We knew perfectly well that if there
+was to be franchise reform at all, the Liberal party which was then
+coming into power did not mean Votes for Women, in spite of all the
+pledges of members; in spite of the fact that a majority of the House
+of Commons, especially on the Liberal side, were pledged to it--it did
+not mean that they were going to put it into practice. And so we found
+some way of forcing their attention to this question.
+
+"Now I come to the facts with regard to militancy. We realised that the
+plans we had in our minds would involve great sacrifice on our part,
+that it might cost us all we had. We were at that time a little
+organisation, composed in the main of working women, the wives and
+daughters of working men. And my daughters and I took a leading part,
+naturally, because we thought the thing out, and, to a certain extent,
+because we were of better social position than most of our members, and
+we felt a sense of responsibility."
+
+I described the events that marked the first days of our work, the scene
+in Free Trade Hall, Manchester, when my daughter and her companion were
+arrested for the crime of asking a question of a politician, and I
+continued:
+
+"What did they do next? (I want you to realise that no step we have
+taken forward has been taken until after some act of repression on the
+part of our enemy, the Government--because it is the Government that is
+our enemy; it is not the Members of Parliament, it is not the men in the
+country; it is the Government in power alone that can give us the vote.
+It is the Government alone that we regard as our enemy, and the whole of
+our agitation is directed to bringing just as much pressure as necessary
+upon those people who can deal with our grievance.) The next step the
+women took was to ask questions during the course of meetings, because,
+as I told you, these gentlemen gave them no opportunity of asking them
+afterwards. And then began the interjections of which we have heard, the
+interference with the right to hold public meetings, the interference
+with the right of free speech, of which we have heard, for which these
+women, these hooligan women, as they have been called--have been
+denounced. I ask you, gentlemen, to imagine the amount of courage which
+it needs for a woman to undertake that kind of work. When men come to
+interrupt women's meetings, they come in gangs, with noisy instruments,
+and sing and shout together, and stamp their feet. But when women have
+gone to Cabinet Ministers' meetings--only to interrupt Cabinet Ministers
+and nobody else--they have gone singly. And it has become increasingly
+difficult for them to get in, because as a result of the women's methods
+there has developed the system of admission by ticket and the exclusion
+of women--a thing which in my Liberal days would have been thought a
+very disgraceful thing at Liberal meetings. But this ticket system
+developed, and so the women could only get in with very great
+difficulty. Women have concealed themselves for thirty-six hours in
+dangerous positions, under the platforms, in the organs, wherever they
+could get a vantage point. They waited starving in the cold, sometimes
+on the roof exposed to a winter's night, just to get a chance of saying
+in the course of a Cabinet Minister's speech, 'When is the Liberal
+Government going to put its promises into practice?' That has been the
+form militancy took in its further development."
+
+I went over the whole matter of our peaceful deputations, and of the
+violence with which they were invariably met; of our arrests and the
+farcical police court trials, where the mere evidence of policemen's
+unsupported statements sent us to prison for long terms; of the
+falsehoods told of us in the House of Commons by responsible members of
+the Government--tales of women scratching and biting policemen and using
+hatpins--and I accused the Government of making these attacks against
+women who were powerless to defend themselves because they feared the
+women and desired to crush the agitation represented by our
+organisation.
+
+"Now it has been stated in this Court," I said, "that it is not the
+Women's Social and Political Union that is in the Court, but that it is
+certain defendants. The action of the Government, gentlemen, is
+certainly against the defendants who are before you here to-day, but it
+is also against the Women's Social and Political Union. The intention is
+to crush that organisation. And this intention apparently was arrived at
+after I had been sent to prison for two months for breaking a pane of
+glass worth, I am told, 2s. 3d., the punishment which I accepted because
+I was a leader of this movement, though it was an extraordinary
+punishment to inflict for so small an act of damages as I had committed.
+I accepted it as the punishment for a leader of an agitation
+disagreeable to the Government; and while I was there this prosecution
+started. They thought they would make a clean sweep of the people who
+they considered were the political brains of the movement. We have got
+many false friends in the Cabinet--people who by their words appear to
+be well-meaning towards the cause of Women's Suffrage. And they thought
+that if they could get the leaders of the Union out of the way, it would
+result in the indefinite postponement and settlement of the question in
+this country. Well, they have not succeeded in their design, and even if
+they had got all the so-called leaders of this movement out of their way
+they would not have succeeded even then. Now why have they not put the
+Union in the dock? We have a democratic Government, so-called. This
+Women's Social and Political Union is not a collection of hysterical and
+unimportant wild women, as has been suggested to you, but it is an
+important organisation, which numbers amongst its membership very
+important people. It is composed of women of all classes of the
+community, women who have influence in their particular organisations as
+working women; women who have influence in professional organisations as
+professional women; women of social importance; women even of Royal rank
+are amongst the members of this organisation, and so it would not pay a
+democratic Government to deal with this organisation as a whole.
+
+"They hoped that by taking away the people that they thought guided the
+political fortunes of the organisation they would break the organisation
+down. They thought that if they put out of the way the influential
+members of the organisation they, as one member of the Cabinet, I
+believe, said, would crush the movement and get it 'on the run.' Well,
+Governments have many times been mistaken, gentlemen, and I venture to
+suggest to you that Governments are mistaken again. I think the answer
+to the Government was given at the Albert Hall meeting held immediately
+after our arrest. Within a few minutes, without the eloquence of Mrs.
+Pethick Lawrence, without the appeals of the people who have been called
+the leaders of this movement, in a very few minutes £10,000 was
+subscribed for the carrying on of this movement.
+
+"Now a movement like that, supported like that, is not a wild,
+hysterical movement. It is not a movement of misguided people. It is a
+very serious movement. Women, I submit, like our members, and women, I
+venture to say, like the two women, and like the man who are in the dock
+to-day, are not people to undertake a thing like this lightly. May I
+just try to make you feel what it is that has made this movement the
+gigantic size it is from the very small beginnings it had? It is one of
+the biggest movements of modern times. A movement which is not only an
+influence, perhaps not yet recognised, in this country, but is
+influencing the women's movement all over the world. Is there anything
+more marvellous in modern times than the kind of spontaneous outburst in
+every country of this woman's movement? Even in China--and I think it
+somewhat of a disgrace to Englishmen--even in China women have won the
+vote, as an outcome of a successful revolution, with which, I dare say,
+members of his Majesty's Government sympathise--a bloody revolution.
+
+"One more word on that point. When I was in prison the second time, for
+three months as a common criminal for no greater offence than the issue
+of a handbill--less inflammatory in its terms than some of the speeches
+of members of the Government who prosecute us here--during that time,
+through the efforts of a member of Parliament, there was secured for me
+permission to have the daily paper in prison, and the first thing I read
+in the daily Press was this: that the Government was at that moment
+fêting the members of the Young Turkish Revolutionary Party, gentlemen
+who had invaded the privacy of the Sultan's home--we used to hear a
+great deal about invading the privacy of Mr. Asquith's residence when we
+ventured to ring his door bell--gentlemen who had killed and slain, and
+had been successful in their revolution, while we women had never thrown
+a stone--for none of us was imprisoned for stone throwing, but merely
+for taking the part we had then taken in this organisation. There we
+were imprisoned while these political murderers were being fêted by the
+very Government who imprisoned us, and were being congratulated on the
+success of their revolution. Now I ask you, was it to be wondered at
+that women said to themselves: 'Perhaps it is that we have not done
+enough. Perhaps it is that these gentlemen do not understand womenfolk.
+Perhaps they do not realise women's ways, and because we have not done
+the things that men have done, they may think we are not in earnest.'
+
+"And then we come down to this last business of all, when we have
+responsible statesmen like Mr. Hobhouse saying that there had never been
+any sentimental uprising, no expression of feeling like that which led
+to the burning down of Nottingham Castle. Can you wonder, then, that we
+decided we should have to nerve ourselves to do more, and can you
+understand why we cast about to find a way, as women will, that would
+not involve loss of human life and the maiming of human beings, because
+women care more about human life than men, and I think it is quite
+natural that we should, for we know what life costs. We risk our lives
+when men are born. Now, I want to say this deliberately as a leader of
+this movement. We have tried to hold it back, we have tried to keep it
+from going beyond bounds, and I have never felt a prouder woman than I
+did one night when a police constable said to me, after one of these
+demonstrations, 'Had this been a man's demonstration, there would have
+been bloodshed long ago.' Well, my lord, there has not been any
+bloodshed except on the part of the women themselves--these so-called
+militant women. Violence has been done to us, and I who stand before you
+in this dock have lost a dear sister in the course of this agitation.
+She died within three days of coming out of prison, a little more than a
+year ago. These are things which, wherever we are, we do not say very
+much about. We cannot keep cheery, we cannot keep cheerful, we cannot
+keep the right kind of spirit, which means success, if we dwell too much
+upon the hard part of our agitation. But I do say this, gentlemen, that
+whatever in future you may think of us, you will say this about us, that
+whatever our enemies may say, we have always put up an honourable
+fight, and taken no unfair means of defeating our opponents, although
+they have not always been people who have acted so honourably towards
+us.
+
+"We have assaulted no one; we have done no hurt to any one; and it was
+not until 'Black Friday'--and what happened on 'Black Friday' is that we
+had a new Home Secretary, and there appeared to be new orders given to
+the police, because the police on that occasion showed a kind of
+ferocity in dealing with the women that they had never done before, and
+the women came to us and said: 'We cannot bear this'--it was not until
+then we felt this new form of repression should compel us to take
+another step. That is the question of 'Black Friday,' and I want to say
+here and now that every effort was made after 'Black Friday' to get an
+open public judicial inquiry into the doings of 'Black Friday,' as to
+the instructions given to the police. That inquiry was refused; but an
+informal inquiry was held by a man, whose name will carry conviction as
+to his status and moral integrity on the one side of the great political
+parties, and a man of equal standing on the Liberal side. These two men
+were Lord Robert Cecil and Mr. Ellis Griffith. They held a private
+inquiry, had women before them, took their evidence, examined that
+evidence, and after hearing it said that they believed what the women
+had told them was substantially true, and that they thought there was
+good cause for that inquiry to be held. That was embodied in a report.
+To show you our difficulties, Lord Robert Cecil, in a speech at the
+Criterion Restaurant, spoke on this question. He called upon the
+Government to hold this inquiry, and not one word of that speech was
+reported in any morning paper. That is the sort of thing we have had to
+face, and I welcome standing here, if only for the purpose of getting
+these facts out, and I challenge the Attorney General to institute an
+inquiry into these proceedings--not that kind of inquiry of sending
+their inspectors to Holloway and accepting what they are told by the
+officials--but to open a public inquiry, with a jury, if he likes, to
+deal with our grievances against the Government and the methods of this
+agitation.
+
+"I say it is not the defendants who have conspired, but the Government
+who have conspired against us to crush this agitation; but however the
+matter may be decided, we are content to abide by the verdict of
+posterity. We are not the kind of people who like to brag a lot; we are
+not the kind of people who would bring ourselves into this position
+unless we were convinced that it was the only way. I have tried--all my
+life I have worked for this question--I have tried arguments, I have
+tried persuasion. I have addressed a greater number of public meetings,
+perhaps, than any person in this court, and I have never addressed one
+meeting where substantially the opinion of the meeting--not a ticket
+meeting, but an open meeting, for I have never addressed any other kind
+of a meeting--has not been that where women bear burdens and share
+responsibilities like men they should be given the privileges that men
+enjoy. I am convinced that public opinion is with us--that it has been
+stifled--wilfully stifled--so that in a public Court of Justice one is
+glad of being allowed to speak on this question."
+
+The Attorney General's summing up for the prosecution was very largely a
+defence of the Liberal Party and its course in regard to woman suffrage
+legislation. Therefore, Mr. Tim Healey, in his defence of Mrs. Pethick
+Lawrence, did well to lay stress on the political character of the
+conspiracy charge and trial. He said:
+
+"It is no doubt a very useful thing when you have political opponents to
+be able to set the law in motion against them. I have not the smallest
+doubt it would be a very convenient thing, if they had the courage to do
+it, to shut up the whole of His Majesty's Opposition while the present
+Government is in office--to lock up all the men of lustre and
+distinction in our public forum and on our public platforms--all the
+Carsons, F. E. Smiths, Bonar Laws, and so on. It would be a most
+convenient thing to end the whole thing, as it would be to end women's
+agitation in the form of the indictment. Gentlemen of the jury, whatever
+words have been spoken by mutual opponents, whatever instructions have
+been addressed, not to feeble females, but to men who boast of drilling
+and of arms, they have not had the courage to prosecute anybody, except
+women, by means of an indictment. Yet the Government of my learned
+friend have selected two dates as cardinal dates, and they ask you to
+pass judgment upon the prisoners at the bar, and to say that, without
+rhyme or reason, taking the course suggested without provocation, these
+responsible, well-bred, educated, University people, have suddenly, in
+the words of the indictment, wickedly and with malice aforethought
+engaged in these criminal designs.
+
+"Gentlemen of the jury, the first thing I would ask in that connection
+is this: What is there in the course of this demand put forward by women
+which should have excited the treatment at the hands of His Majesty's
+Ministers which this movement, according to the documents which are in
+evidence before me, has received? I should suppose that the essence of
+all government is the smooth conduct of affairs, so that those who enjoy
+high station, great emoluments, should not be parties against whom the
+accusation of provoking civic strife and breeding public turmoil should
+be brought. What do we find? We find that, in regard to the treatment of
+the demand which had always been put forward humbly, respectably,
+respectfully, in its origin, by those who have received trade unionists,
+anti-vaccinators, deceased wife's sisters, and all other forms of
+political demand, and who have received them humbly and yielded to them,
+we find that when these people advocating this particular form of civic
+reform request an audience, request admission, request even to have
+their petitions respectfully received, they have met, judicially, at all
+events, with a flat and solemn negative. That is the beginning of this
+unhappy spirit bred in the minds of persons like the defendants, persons
+like those against whom evidence has been tendered--which has led to
+your being empanelled in that box to-day. And I put it to you when you
+are considering whether it is the incitement of my clients or the
+conduct of Ministers that have led to these events--whether I cannot ask
+you to say that even a fair apportionment of blame should not rest upon
+more responsible shoulders, and whether you should go out of your way to
+say that these persons in the dock alone are guilty."
+
+In closing Mr. Healey reverted to the political character of the trial.
+"The Government have undertaken this prosecution," he declared, "to
+seclude for a considerable period their chief opponents. They hope there
+will be at public meetings which they attend no more inconvenient cries
+of 'Votes for Women.' I cannot conceive any other object which they
+could have in bringing the prosecution. I have expressed my regret at
+the loss which the shopkeepers, tradesmen and others have suffered. I
+regret it deeply. I regret that any person should bring loss or
+suffering upon innocent people. But I ask you to say that the law has
+already been sufficiently vindicated by the punishment of the immediate
+authors of the deed. What can be gained? Does justice gain?
+
+"I almost hesitate to treat this as a legal inquiry. I regard it as a
+vindictive political act. Of all the astonishing acts that have ever
+been brought into a public court against a prisoner I cannot help
+feeling the charge against Mr. Pethick Lawrence is the most astonishing.
+He ventured to attend at some police courts and gave bail for women who
+had been arrested in endeavouring, as I understand, to present petitions
+to Parliament or to have resort to violence. I do not complain of the
+way in which my learned friend has conducted the prosecution, but I do
+complain of the police methods--inquiring into the homes and the
+domestic circumstances of the prisoners, obtaining their papers, taking
+their newspaper, going into their banking account, bringing up their
+bankers here to say what is their balance; and I do say that in none of
+the prosecutions of the past have smaller methods belittled a great
+State trial, because, look at it as you will, you cannot get away from
+it that this is a great State trial. It is not the women who are on
+trial. It is the men. It is the system of Government which is upon its
+trial. It is this method of rolling the dice by fifty-four counts in an
+indictment without showing to what any bit of evidence is fairly
+attributable; the system is on its trial--a system whereby every
+innocent act in public life is sought to be enmeshed in a conspiracy."
+
+The jury was absent for more than an hour, showing that they had some
+difficulty in agreeing upon a verdict. When they returned it was plain
+from their strained countenances that they were labouring under deep
+feeling. The foreman's voice shook as he pronounced the verdict, guilty
+as charged, and he had hard work to control his emotion as he added:
+"Your Lordship, we unanimously desire to express the hope that, taking
+into consideration the undoubtedly pure motives that underlie the
+agitation that has led to this trouble, you will be pleased to exercise
+the utmost clemency and leniency in dealing with the case."
+
+A burst of applause followed this plea. Then Mr. Pethick Lawrence arose
+and asked to say a few words before sentence was pronounced. He said
+that it must be evident, aside from the jury's recommendation, that we
+had been actuated by political motives, and that we were in fact
+political offenders. It had been decided in English Courts that
+political offenders were different from ordinary offenders, and Mr.
+Lawrence cited the case of a Swiss subject whose extradition was refused
+because of the political character of his offence. The Court on that
+occasion had declared that even if the crime were murder committed with
+a political motive it was a political crime. Mr. Lawrence also reminded
+the judge of the case of the late Mr. W. T. Stead, convicted of a crime,
+yet because of the unusual motive behind the crime, was allowed first
+division treatment and full freedom to receive his family and friends.
+Last of all the case of Dr. Jameson was cited. Although his raid
+resulted in the death of twenty-one persons and the wounding of
+forty-six more, the political character of his offence was taken into
+account and he was made a first division prisoner.
+
+They were men, fighting in a man's war. We of the W. S. P. U. were
+women, fighting in a woman's war. Lord Coleridge, therefore, saw in us
+only reckless and criminal defiers of law. Lord Coleridge said: "You
+have been convicted of a crime for which the law would sanction, if I
+chose to impose it, a sentence of two years' imprisonment with hard
+labour. There are circumstances connected with your case which the jury
+have very properly brought to my attention, and I have been asked by you
+all three to treat you as first class misdemeanants. If, in the course
+of this case, I had observed any contrition or disavowal of the acts
+you have committed, or any hope that you would avoid repetition of them
+in future, I should have been very much prevailed upon by the arguments
+that have been advanced to me."
+
+No contrition having been expressed by us, the sentence of the Court was
+that we were to suffer imprisonment, in the second division, for the
+term of nine months, and that we were to pay the costs of the
+prosecution.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+The sentence of nine months astonished us beyond measure, especially in
+view of certain very recent events, one of these being the case of some
+sailors who had mutinied in order to call attention to something which
+they considered a peril to themselves and to all seafarers. They were
+tried and found technically guilty, but because of the motive behind
+their mutiny, were discharged without punishment. Perhaps more nearly
+like our case than this was the case of the labour leader, Tom Mann,
+who, shortly before, had written a pamphlet calling upon His Majesty's
+soldiers not to fire upon strikers when commanded to do so by their
+superior officers. From the Government's point of view this was a much
+more serious kind of inciting than ours, because if it had been
+responded to the authorities would have been absolutely crippled in
+maintaining order. Besides, soldiers who refuse to obey orders are
+liable to the death penalty. Tom Mann was given a sentence of six
+months, but this was received, on the part of the Liberal Press and
+Liberal politicians, with so much clamour and protest that the prisoner
+was released at the end of two months. So, even on our way to prison, we
+told one another that our sentences could not stand. Public opinion
+would never permit the Government to keep us in prison for nine months,
+or in the second division for any part of our term. We agreed to wait
+seven Parliamentary days before we began a hunger strike protest.
+
+It was very dreary waiting, those seven Parliamentary days, because we
+could not know what was happening outside, or what was being talked of
+in the House. We could know nothing of the protests and memorials that
+were pouring in, on our behalf, from Oxford and Cambridge Universities,
+from members of learned societies, and from distinguished men and women
+of all professions, not only in England but in every country of Europe,
+from the United States and Canada, and even from India. An international
+memorial asking that we be treated as political prisoners was signed by
+such great men and women as Prof. Paul Milyoukoff, leader of the
+Constitutional Democrats in the Duma; Signor Enrico Ferri, of the
+Italian Chamber of Deputies; Edward Bernstein, of the German Reichstag;
+George Brandes, Edward Westermarck, Madame Curie, Ellen Key, Maurice
+Maeterlinck, and many others. The greatest indignation was expressed in
+the House, Keir Hardie and Mr. George Lansbury leading in the demand for
+a drastic revision of our sentences and our immediate transference to
+the first division. So much pressure was brought to bear that within a
+few days the Home Secretary announced that he felt it his duty to
+examine into the circumstances of the case without delay. He explained
+that the prisoners had not at any time been forced to wear prison
+clothes. Ultimately, which in this case means shortly before the
+expiration of the seven Parliamentary days, we were all three placed in
+the first division. Mrs. Pethick Lawrence was given the cell formerly
+occupied by Dr. Jameson and I had the cell adjoining. Mr. Pethick
+Lawrence, in Brixton Gaol, was similarly accommodated. We all had the
+privilege of furnishing our cells with comfortable chairs, tables, our
+own bedding, towels, and so on. We had meals sent in from the outside;
+we wore our own clothing and had what books, newspapers and writing
+materials we required. We were not permitted to write or receive letters
+or to see our friends except in the ordinary two weeks' routine. Still
+we had gained our point that suffrage prisoners were politicals.
+
+We had gained it, but, as it turned out, only for ourselves. When we
+made the inquiry, "Are all our women now transferred to the first
+division?" the answer was that the order for transference referred only
+to Mr. and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence and myself. Needless to say, we
+immediately refused to accept this unfair advantage, and after we had
+exhausted every means in our power to induce the Home Secretary to give
+the other suffrage prisoners the same justice that we had received, we
+adopted the protest of the hunger strike. The word flew swiftly through
+Holloway, and in some mysterious way travelled to Brixton, to Aylesbury,
+and Winson Green, and at once all the other suffrage prisoners followed
+our lead. The Government then had over eighty hunger strikers on their
+hands, and, as before, had ready only the argument of force, which means
+that disgusting and cruel process of forcible feeding. Holloway became a
+place of horror and torment. Sickening scenes of violence took place
+almost every hour of the day, as the doctors went from cell to cell
+performing their hideous office. One of the men did his work in such
+brutal fashion that the very sight of him provoked cries of horror and
+anguish. I shall never while I live forget the suffering I experienced
+during the days when those cries were ringing in my ears. In her frenzy
+of pain one woman threw herself from the gallery on which her cell
+opened. A wire netting eight feet below broke her fall to the iron
+staircase beneath, else she must inevitably have been killed. As it was
+she was frightfully hurt.
+
+The wholesale hunger strike created a tremendous stir throughout
+England, and every day in the House the Ministers were harassed with
+questions. The climax was reached on the third or fourth day of the
+strike, when a stormy scene took place in the House of Commons. The
+Under Home Secretary, Mr. Ellis Griffith, had been mercilessly
+questioned as to conditions under which the forcible feeding was being
+done, and as soon as this was over one of the suffragist members made a
+moving appeal to the Prime Minister himself to order the release of all
+the prisoners. Mr. Asquith, forced against his will to take part in the
+controversy, rose and said that it was not for him to interfere with the
+actions of his colleague, Mr. McKenna, and he added, in his own suave,
+mendacious manner: "I must point out this, that there is not one single
+prisoner who cannot go out of prison this afternoon on giving the
+undertaking asked for by the Home Secretary." Meaning an undertaking to
+refrain henceforth from militancy.
+
+Instantly Mr. George Lansbury sprang to his feet and exclaimed: "You
+know they cannot! It is perfectly disgraceful that the Prime Minister of
+England should make such a statement."
+
+Mr. Asquith glanced carelessly at the indignant Lansbury, but sank into
+his seat without deigning to reply. Shocked to the depths of his soul by
+the insult thrown at our women, Mr. Lansbury strode up to the
+Ministerial bench and confronted the Prime Minister, saying again: "That
+was a disgraceful thing for you to say, Sir. You are beneath contempt,
+you and your colleagues. You call yourselves gentlemen, and you forcibly
+feed and murder women in this fashion. You ought to be driven out of
+office. Talk about protesting. It is the most disgraceful thing that
+ever happened in the history of England. You will go down to history as
+the men who tortured innocent women."
+
+By this time the House was seething, and the indignant Labour member had
+to shout at the top of his big voice in order to be heard over the din.
+Mr. Asquith's pompous order that Mr. Lansbury leave the House for the
+day was probably known to very few until it appeared in print next day.
+At all events Mr. Lansbury continued his protest for five minutes
+longer. "You murder, torture and drive women mad," he cried, "and then
+you tell them they can walk out. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
+You talk about principle--you talk about fighting in Ulster--you, too--"
+turning to the Unionist benches--"You ought to be driven out of public
+life. These women are showing you what principle is. You ought to
+honour them for standing up for their womanhood. I tell you, Commons of
+England, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves."
+
+The Speaker came to Mr. Asquith's rescue at last and adjured Mr.
+Lansbury that he must obey the Prime Minister's order to leave the
+House, saying that such disorderly conduct would cause the House to lose
+respect. "Sir," exclaimed Mr. Lansbury, in a final burst of righteous
+rage, "it has lost it already."
+
+This unprecedented explosion of wrath and scorn against the Government
+was the sensation of the hour, and it was felt on all sides that the
+release of the prisoners, or at least cessation of forcible feeding,
+which amounted to the same thing, would be ordered. Every day the
+Suffragettes marched in great crowds to Holloway, serenading the
+prisoners and holding protest meetings to immense crowds. The music and
+the cheering, faintly wafted to our straining ears, was inexpressibly
+sweet. Yet it was while listening to one of these serenades that the
+most dreadful moment of my imprisonment occurred. I was lying in bed,
+very weak from starvation, when I heard a sudden scream from Mrs.
+Lawrence's cell, then the sound of a prolonged and very violent
+struggle, and I knew that they had dared to carry their brutal business
+to our doors. I sprang out of bed and, shaking with weakness and with
+anger, I set my back against the wall and waited for what might come. In
+a few moments they had finished with Mrs. Lawrence and had flung open
+the door of my cell. On the threshold I saw the doctors, and back of
+them a large group of wardresses. "Mrs. Pankhurst," began the doctor.
+Instantly I caught up a heavy earthenware water jug from a table hard
+by, and with hands that now felt no weakness I swung the jug head high.
+
+"If any of you dares so much as to take one step inside this cell I
+shall defend myself," I cried. Nobody moved or spoke for a few seconds,
+and then the doctor confusedly muttered something about to-morrow
+morning doing as well, and they all retreated.
+
+I demanded to be admitted to Mrs. Lawrence's cell, where I found my
+companion in a desperate state. She is a strong woman, and a very
+determined one, and it had required the united strength of nine
+wardresses to overcome her. They had rushed into the cell without any
+warning, and had seized her unawares, else they might not have succeeded
+at all. As it was she resisted so violently that the doctors could not
+apply the stethoscope, and they had very great difficulty in getting the
+tube down. After the wretched affair was over Mrs. Lawrence fainted, and
+for hours afterwards was very ill.
+
+This was the last attempt made to forcibly feed either Mrs. Lawrence or
+myself, and two days later we were ordered released on medical grounds.
+The other hunger strikers were released in batches, as every day a few
+more triumphant rebels approached the point where the Government stood
+in danger of committing actual murder. Mr. Lawrence, who was forcibly
+fed twice a day for more than ten days, was released in a state of
+complete collapse on July 1st. Within a few days after that the last of
+the prisoners were at liberty.
+
+As soon as I was sufficiently recovered I went to Paris and had the joy
+of seeing again my daughter Christabel, who, during all the days of
+strife and misery, had kept her personal anxiety in the background and
+had kept staunchly at her work of leadership. The absence of Mr. and
+Mrs. Pethick Lawrence had thrown the entire responsibility of the
+editorship of our paper, _Votes for Women_, on her shoulders, but as she
+has invariably risen to meet new responsibility, she conducted the paper
+with skill and discretion.
+
+We had much to talk about and to consider, because it was evident that
+militancy, instead of being dropped, as the other suffrage societies
+were constantly suggesting, must go on very much more vigorously than
+before. The struggle had been too long drawn out. We had to seek ways to
+shorten it, to bring it to such a climax that the Government would
+acknowledge that something had to be done. We had already demonstrated
+that our forces were impregnable. We could not be conquered, we could
+not be terrified, we could not even be kept in prison. Therefore, since
+the Government had their war lost in advance, our task was merely to
+hasten the surrender.
+
+The situation in Parliament, as far as the suffrage question was
+concerned, was clean swept and barren. The third Conciliation Bill had
+failed to pass its second reading, the majority against it being
+fourteen.
+
+Many Liberal members were afraid to vote for the bill because Mr.
+Lloyd-George and Mr. Lewis Harcourt had persistently spread the rumour
+that its passage, at that time, would result in splitting the Cabinet.
+The Irish Nationalist members had become hostile to the bill because
+their leader, Mr. Redmond, was an anti-suffragist, and had refused to
+include a woman suffrage clause in the Home Rule Bill. Our erstwhile
+friends, the Labour members, were so apathetic, or so fearful for
+certain of their own measures, that most of them stayed away from the
+House on the day the bill reached its second reading. So it was lost,
+and the Militants were blamed for its loss! In June the Government
+announced that Mr. Asquith's manhood suffrage bill would soon be
+introduced, and very soon after this the bill did appear. It simplified
+the registration machinery, reduced the qualifying period of residence
+to six months, and abolished property qualifications, plural voting and
+University representation. In a word, it gave the Parliamentary
+franchise to every man above the age of twenty-one and it denied it to
+all women. Never in the history of the suffrage movement had such an
+affront been offered to women, and never in the history of England had
+such a blow been aimed at women's liberties. It is true that the Prime
+Minister had pledged himself to introduce a bill capable of being
+amended to include women's suffrage, and to permit any amendment that
+passed its second reading to become a part of the bill. But we had no
+faith in an amendment, nor in any bill that was not from its inception
+an official Government measure. Mr. Asquith had broken every pledge he
+had ever made the women, and this new pledge impressed us not at all.
+Well we knew that he had given it only to cover his treachery in
+torpedoing the Conciliation Bill, and in the hope of placating the
+suffragists, perhaps securing another truce to militancy.
+
+If this last was his hope he was most grievously disappointed. Signs
+were constantly appearing to indicate that women would no longer be
+contented with the symbolic militancy involved in window breaking. For
+example, traces were found in the Home Secretary's office at Whitehall
+of an attempt at arson. On the doorstep of another Cabinet Minister
+similar traces were found. Had the Government acted upon these warnings,
+by giving women the vote, all the serious acts of militancy that have
+occurred since would have been averted. But like the heart of Pharaoh,
+the heart of the Government hardened, and militant acts followed one
+another in rapid succession. In July the W. S. P. U. issued a manifesto
+which set forth our intentions in that regard. The manifesto read in
+part as follows:
+
+"The leaders of the Women's Social and Political Union have so often
+warned the Government that unless the vote were granted to women in
+response to the mild militancy of the past, a fiercer spirit of revolt
+would be awakened which it would be impossible to control. The
+Government have blindly disregarded the warning, and now they are
+reaping the harvest of their unstatesmanlike folly."
+
+This was issued immediately after a visit paid by Mr. Asquith to Dublin.
+The occasion had been intended to be one of great pomp and circumstance,
+a huge popular demonstration in honour of the sponsor of Home Rule, but
+the Suffragettes turned it into the most lamentable fiasco imaginable.
+From the hour of Mr. Asquith's attempted secret departure from London
+until his return he lived and moved in momentary dread of Suffragettes.
+Every time he entered or left a railway carriage or a steamer he was
+confronted by women. Every time he rose to speak he was interrupted by
+women. Every public appearance he made was turned into a riot by women.
+As he left Dublin a woman threw a hatchet into his motor car, without,
+however, doing him any injury. As a final protest against his reception
+by Irishmen, the Theatre Royal was set on fire by two women. The theatre
+was practically empty at the time, the performance having been
+completed, and the damage done was comparatively small, yet the two
+women chiefly concerned, Mrs. Leigh and Miss Evans, were given the
+barbarous sentences of five years each in prison. These were the first
+women sentenced to penal servitude in the history of our movement. Of
+course they did not serve their sentences. On entering Mountjoy Prison
+they put in the usual claim for first division treatment, and this being
+refused, they immediately adopted the hunger strike. A number of Irish
+Suffragettes were in Mountjoy at this time for a protest made against
+the exclusion of women from the Home Rule Bill. They were in the first
+division, and they were almost on the eve of their release, but such is
+the indomitable spirit of militancy that these women entered upon a
+sympathetic hunger strike. They were released, but the Government
+forbade the release of Mrs. Leigh and Miss Evans, that is, they ordered
+the authorities to retain the women as long as they could, by forcible
+feeding, be kept alive. After a struggle which, for fierceness and
+cruelty, is almost unparalleled in our annals, the two women fought
+their way out.
+
+All during that summer militancy surged up and down throughout the
+Kingdom. A series of attacks on golf links was instituted, not at all in
+a spirit of wanton mischief, but with the direct and very practical
+object of reminding the dull and self-satisfied English public that when
+the liberties of English women were being stolen from them was no time
+to think of sports. The women selected country clubs where prominent
+Liberal politicians were wont to take their week-end pleasures, and with
+acids they burned great patches of turf, rendering the golf greens
+useless for the time being. They burned the words, Votes for Women, in
+some cases, and always they left behind them reminders that women were
+warring for their freedom. On one occasion when the Court was at
+Balmoral Castle in Scotland, the Suffragettes invaded the Royal golf
+links, and when Sunday morning dawned all the marking flags were found
+to have been replaced by W. S. P. U. flags hearing inscriptions such as
+"Votes for Women means peace for Ministers," "Forcible feeding must be
+stopped," and the like. The golf links were frequently visited by
+Suffragettes in order to question recreant ministers. Two women followed
+the Prime Minister to Inverness, where he was playing golf with Mr.
+McKenna. Approaching the men one Suffragette exclaimed: "Mr. Asquith,
+you must stop forcible feeding--" She got no farther, for Mr. Asquith,
+turning pale with rage--perhaps--retreated behind the Home Secretary,
+who, quite forgetting his manners, seized the Suffragette, crying out
+that he was going to throw her into the pond. "Then we will take you
+with us," the two retorted, after which a very lively scuffle ensued,
+and the women were not thrown into the pond.
+
+[Illustration: A SUFFRAGETTE THROWING A BAG OF FLOUR AT MR. ASQUITH IN
+CHESTER]
+
+This golf green activity really aroused more hostility against us than
+all the window-breaking. The papers published appeals to us not to
+interfere with a game that helped weary politicians to think clearly,
+but our reply to this was that it had not had any such effect on the
+Prime Minister or Mr. Lloyd-George. We had undertaken to spoil their
+sport and that of a large class of comfortable men in order that they
+should be obliged to think clearly about women, and women's firm
+determination to get justice.
+
+I made my return to active work in the autumn by speaking at a great
+meeting of the W. S. P. U., held in the Albert Hall. At that meeting I
+had the announcement to make that the six years' association of Mr. and
+Mrs. Pethick Lawrence with the W. S. P. U. had ended.
+
+Since personal dissensions have never been dwelt upon in the
+W. S. P. U., have never been allowed to halt the movement or to
+interfere for an hour with its progress, I shall not here say any more
+about this important dissension than I said at our first large meeting
+in Albert Hall after the holiday, on October 17th. That day a new paper
+was sold on the streets. It was called _The Suffragette_, it was edited
+by Christabel Pankhurst, and was henceforth to be the official organ of
+the Union. Both in this new paper and in _Votes for Women_, the
+following announcement appeared:
+
+
+                    GRAVE STATEMENT BY THE LEADERS
+
+     At the first reunion of the leaders after the enforced holiday,
+     Mrs. Pankhurst and Miss Christabel Pankhurst outlined a new
+     militant policy which Mr. and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence found
+     themselves altogether unable to approve.
+
+     Mrs. Pankhurst and Miss Christabel Pankhurst indicated that they
+     were not prepared to modify their intentions, and recommended that
+     Mr. and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence should resume control of the Paper,
+     _Votes for Women_, and should leave the Women's Social and
+     Political Union.
+
+     Rather than make schism in the ranks of the Union Mr. and Mrs.
+     Pethick Lawrence consented to take this course.
+
+
+This was signed by all four. That night at the meeting I further
+explained to the members that, hard as partings from old friends and
+comrades unquestionably were, we must remember that we were fighting in
+an army, and that unity of purpose and unity of policy are absolutely
+necessary, because without them the army is hopelessly weakened. "It is
+better," I said, "that those who cannot agree, cannot see eye to eye as
+to policy, should set themselves free, should part, and should be free
+to continue their policy as they see it in their own way, unfettered by
+those with whom they can no longer agree."
+
+Continuing I said: "I give place to none in appreciation and gratitude
+to Mr. and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence for the incalculable services that they
+have rendered the militant movement for Woman Suffrage, and I firmly
+believe that the women's movement will be strengthened by their being
+free to work for woman suffrage in the future as they think best, while
+we of the Women's Social and Political Union shall continue the militant
+agitation for Woman Suffrage initiated by my daughter and myself and a
+handful of women more than six years ago."
+
+I then went on to survey the situation in which the W. S. P. U. now
+stood and to outline the new militant policy which he had decided upon.
+This policy, to begin with, was relentless opposition, not only to the
+party in power, the Liberal Party, but to all parties in the coalition.
+I reminded the women that the Government that had tricked and betrayed
+us and was now plotting to make our progress towards citizenship doubly
+difficult, was kept in office through the coalition of three parties.
+There was the Liberal Party, nominally the governing party, but they
+could not live another day without the coalition of the Nationalist and
+the Labour parties. So we should say, not only to the Liberal Party but
+to the Nationalist Party and the Labour Party, "So long as you keep in
+office an anti-suffrage Government, you are parties to their guilt, and
+from henceforth we offer you the same opposition which we give to the
+people whom you are keeping in power with your support." I said further:
+"We have summoned the Labour Party to do their duty by their own
+programme, and to go into opposition to the Government on every question
+until the Government do justice to women. They apparently are not
+willing to do that. Some of them tell us that other things are more
+important than the liberty of women--than the liberty of working women.
+We say, 'Then, gentlemen, we must teach you the value of your own
+principles, and until you are prepared to stand for the right of women
+to decide their lives and the laws under which they shall live, you,
+with Mr. Asquith and company, are equally responsible for all that has
+happened and is happening to women in this struggle for emancipation.'"
+
+Outlining further our new and stronger policy of aggression, I said:
+"There is a great deal of criticism, ladies and gentlemen, of this
+movement. It always seems to me when the anti-suffrage members of the
+Government criticise militancy in women that it is very like beasts of
+prey reproaching the gentler animals who turn in desperate resistance
+when at the point of death. Criticism from gentlemen who do not hesitate
+to order out armies to kill and slay their opponents, who do not
+hesitate to encourage party mobs to attack defenceless women in public
+meetings--criticism from them hardly rings true. Then I get letters from
+people who tell me that they are ardent suffragists but who say that
+they do not like the recent developments in the militant movement, and
+implore me to urge the members not to be reckless with human life.
+Ladies and gentlemen, the only recklessness the militant suffragists
+have shown about human life has been about their own lives and not about
+the lives of others, and I say here and now that it has never been and
+never will be the policy of the Women's Social and Political Union
+recklessly to endanger human life. We leave that to the enemy. We leave
+that to the men in their warfare. It is not the method of women. No,
+even from the point of view of public policy, militancy affecting the
+security of human life would be out of place. _There is something that
+governments care far more for than human life, and that is the security
+of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the
+enemy._ From henceforward the women who agree with me will say, 'We
+disregard your laws, gentlemen, we set the liberty and the dignity and
+the welfare of women above all such considerations, and we shall
+continue this war, as we have done in the past; and what sacrifice of
+property, or what injury to property accrues will not be our fault. It
+will be the fault of that Government who admit the justice of our
+demands, but refuses to concede them without the evidence, so they have
+told us, afforded to governments of the past, that those who asked for
+liberty were in earnest in their demands!"
+
+I called upon the women of the meeting to join me in this new militancy,
+and I reminded them anew that the women who were fighting in the
+Suffragette army had a great mission, the greatest mission the world has
+ever known--the freeing of one-half the human race, and through that
+freedom the saving of the other half. I said to them: "Be militant each
+in your own way. Those of you who can express your militancy by going to
+the House of Commons and refusing to leave without satisfaction, as we
+did in the early days--do so. Those of you who can express militancy by
+facing party mobs at Cabinet Ministers' meetings, when you remind them
+of their falseness to principle--do so. Those of you who can express
+your militancy by joining us in our anti-Government by-election
+policy--do so. Those of you who can break windows--break them. Those of
+you who can still further attack the secret idol of property, so as to
+make the Government realise that property is as greatly endangered by
+women's suffrage as it was by the Chartists of old--do so. And my last
+word is to the Government: I incite this meeting to rebellion. I say to
+the Government: You have not dared to take the leaders of Ulster for
+their incitement to rebellion. Take me if you dare, but if you dare I
+tell you this, that so long as those who incited to armed rebellion and
+the destruction of human life in Ulster are at liberty, you will not
+keep me in prison. So long as men rebels--and voters--are at liberty,
+we will not remain in prison, first division or no first division."
+
+I ask my readers, some of whom no doubt will be shocked and displeased
+at these words of mine that I have so frankly set down, to put
+themselves in the place of those women who for years had given their
+lives entirely and unstintingly to the work of securing political
+freedom for women; who had converted so great a proportion of the
+electorate that, had the House of Commons been a free body, we should
+have won that freedom years before; who had seen their freedom withheld
+from them through treachery and misuse of power. I ask you to consider
+that we had used, in our agitation, only peaceful means until we saw
+clearly that peaceful means were absolutely of no avail, and then for
+years we had used only the mildest militancy, until we were taunted by
+Cabinet Ministers, and told that we should never get the vote until we
+employed the same violence that men had used in their agitation for
+suffrage. After that we had used stronger militancy, but even that, by
+comparison with the militancy of men in labour disputes, could not
+possibly be counted as violent. Through all these stages of our
+agitation we had been punished with the greatest severity, sent to
+prison like common criminals, and of late years tortured as no criminals
+have been tortured for a century in civilised countries of the world.
+And during all these years we had seen disastrous strikes that had
+caused suffering and death, to say nothing at all of the enormous
+economic waste, and we had never seen a single strike leader punished as
+we had been. We, who had suffered sentences of nine months' imprisonment
+for inciting women to mild rebellion, had seen a labour leader who had
+done his best to incite an army to mutiny released from prison in two
+months by the Government. And now we had come to a point where we saw
+civil war threatened, where we read in the papers every day reports of
+speeches a thousand times more incendiary than anything we had ever
+said. We heard prominent members of Parliament openly declaring that if
+the Home Rule Bill was passed Ulster would fight, and Ulster would be
+right. None of these men were arrested. Instead they were applauded.
+Lord Selborne, one of our sternest critics, referring to the fact that
+Ulstermen were drilling under arms, said publicly: "The method which the
+people of Ulster are adopting to show the depths of their convictions
+and the intensity of their feelings will impress the imagination of the
+whole country." But Lord Selborne was not arrested. Neither were the
+mutinous officers who resigned their commissions when ordered to report
+for duty against the men of Ulster who were actually preparing for civil
+war.
+
+What does all this mean? Why is it that men's blood-shedding militancy
+is applauded and women's symbolic militancy punished with a prison cell
+and the forcible feeding horror? It means simply this, that men's double
+standard of sex morals, whereby the victims of their lust are counted as
+outcasts, while the men themselves escape all social censure, really
+applies to morals in all departments of life. Men make the moral code
+and they expect women to accept it. They have decided that it is
+entirely right and proper for men to fight for their liberties and their
+rights, but that it is not right and proper for women to fight for
+theirs.[3]
+
+They have decided that for men to remain silently quiescent while
+tyrannical rulers impose bonds of slavery upon them is cowardly and
+dishonourable, but that for women to do that same thing is not cowardly
+and dishonourable, but merely respectable. Well, the Suffragettes
+absolutely repudiate that double standard of morals. If it is right for
+men to fight for their freedom, and God knows what the human race would
+be like to-day if men had not, since time began, fought for their
+freedom, then it is right for women to fight for their freedom and the
+freedom of the children they bear. On this declaration of faith the
+militant women of England rest their case.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[3] There is no question that a great deal of the animus directed
+against us during 1913 and 1914 by the Government was due to sex
+bitterness stirred up by a series of articles written by Christabel
+Pankhurst and published in _The Suffragette_. These articles, a fearless
+and authoritative exposé of the evils of sexual immoralities and their
+blasting effect on innocent wives and children, have since been
+published in a book called "The Great Scourge, and how to end it,"
+issued by David Nutt, New Oxford Street, London W. C.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+I had called upon women to join me in striking at the Government through
+the only thing that governments are really very much concerned
+about--property--and the response was immediate. Within a few days the
+newspapers rang with the story of the attack made on letter boxes in
+London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol, and half a dozen other cities.
+In some cases the boxes, when opened by postmen, mysteriously burst into
+flame; in others the letters were destroyed by corrosive chemicals; in
+still others the addresses were rendered illegible by black fluids.
+Altogether it was estimated that over 5,000 letters were completely
+destroyed and many thousands more were delayed in transit.
+
+It was with a deep sense of their gravity that these letter-burning
+protests were undertaken, but we felt that something drastic must be
+done in order to destroy the apathy of the men of England who view with
+indifference the suffering of women oppressed by unjust laws. As we
+pointed out, letters, precious though they may be, are less precious
+than human bodies and souls. This fact was universally realised at the
+sinking of the _Titanic_. Letters and valuables disappeared forever, but
+their loss was forgotten in the far more terrible loss of the multitude
+of human lives. And so, in order to call attention to greater crimes
+against human beings, our letter burnings continued.
+
+In only a few cases were the offenders apprehended, and one of the few
+women arrested was a helpless cripple, a woman who could move about only
+in a wheeled chair. She received a sentence of eight months in the first
+division, and, resolutely hunger striking, was forcibly fed with unusual
+brutality, the prison doctor deliberately breaking one of her teeth in
+order to insert a gag. In spite of her disabilities and her weakness the
+crippled girl persisted in her hunger strike and her resistance to
+prison rules, and within a short time had to be released. The excessive
+sentences of the other pillar box destroyers resolved themselves into
+very short terms because of the resistance of the prisoners, every one
+of whom adopted the hunger strike.
+
+Having shown the Government that we were in deadly earnest when we
+declared that we would adopt guerrilla warfare, and also that we would
+not remain in prison, we announced a truce in order that the Government
+might have full opportunity to fulfil their pledge in regard to a woman
+suffrage amendment to the Franchise Bill. We did not, for one moment,
+believe that Mr. Asquith would willingly keep his word. We knew that he
+would break it if he could, but there was a bare chance that he would
+not find this possible. However, our principal reason for declaring the
+truce was that we believed that the Prime Minister would find a way of
+evading his promise, and we were determined that the blame should be
+placed, not on militancy, but on the shoulders of the real traitor. We
+reviewed the history of past suffrage bills: In 1908 the bill had passed
+its second reading by a majority of 179; and then Mr. Asquith had
+refused to allow it to go on; in 1910 the Conciliation Bill passed its
+second reading by a majority of 110, and again Mr. Asquith blocked its
+progress, pledging himself that if the bill were reintroduced in 1911,
+in a form rendering it capable of free amendment, it would be given full
+facilities for becoming law; these conditions were met in 1911, and we
+saw how the bill, after receiving the increased majority of 167 votes,
+was torpedoed by the introduction of a Government manhood suffrage bill.
+Mr. Asquith this time had pledged himself that the bill would be so
+framed that a woman suffrage amendment could be added, and he further
+pledged that in case such an amendment was carried through its second
+reading, he would allow it to become a part of the bill. Just exactly
+how the Government would manage to wriggle out of their promise was a
+matter of excited speculation.
+
+All sorts of rumours were flying about, some hinting at the resignation
+of the Prime Minister, some suggesting the possibility of a general
+election, others that the amended bill would carry with it a forced
+referendum on women's suffrage. It was also said that the intention of
+the Government was to delay the bill so long that, after it was passed
+in the House, it would be excluded from the benefits of the Parliament
+Acts, according to which a bill, delayed of passage beyond the first two
+years of the life of a Parliament, has no chance of being considered by
+the Lords. In order to become a law without the sanction of the House
+of Lords, a bill must pass three times through the House of Commons. The
+prospect of a woman suffrage bill doing that was practically nil.
+
+To none of the rumours would Mr. Asquith give specific denial, and in
+fact the only positive utterance he made on the subject of the Franchise
+Bill was that he considered it highly improbable that the House would
+pass a woman suffrage amendment. In order to discourage woman suffrage
+sentiment in the House, Mr. Lloyd-George and Mr. Lewis Harcourt again
+busied themselves with spreading pessimistic prophecies of a Cabinet
+split in case an amendment was carried. No other threat, they well knew,
+would so terrorize the timid back bench Liberals, who, in addition to
+their blind party loyalty, stood in fear of losing their seats in the
+general election which would follow such a split. Rather than risk their
+political jobs they would have sacrificed any principle. Of course the
+hint of a Cabinet split was pure buncombe, and it deceived few of the
+members. But it established very clearly one thing, and this was that
+Mr. Asquith's promise that the House should be left absolutely free to
+decide the suffrage issue, and that the Cabinet stood ready to bow to
+the decision of the House was never meant to be fulfilled.
+
+The Franchise Bill unamended, by its very wording, specifically denied
+the right of any woman to vote. Sir Edward Grey moved an amendment
+deleting from the bill the word male, thus leaving room for a women's
+suffrage amendment. Two such amendments were moved, one providing for
+adult suffrage for men and women, and the other providing full suffrage
+for women householders and wives of householders. The latter postponed
+the voting age of women to twenty-five years, instead of the men's
+twenty-one. On January 24th, 1913, debate on the first of the amendments
+was begun. A day and a half had been allotted to consideration of Sir
+Edward Grey's amendment, which if carried would leave the way clear for
+consideration of the other two, to each of which one-third of a day was
+allotted.
+
+We had arranged for huge meetings to be held every day during the
+debates, and on the day before they were to open we sent a deputation of
+working women, led by Mrs. Drummond and Miss Annie Kenney, to interview
+Mr. Lloyd-George and Sir Edward Grey. We had asked Mr. Asquith to
+receive the deputation, but, as usual, he refused. The deputation
+consisted of the two leaders, four cotton mill operatives from
+Lancashire, four workers in sweated trades of London, two pit brow
+lassies, two teachers, two trained nurses, one shop assistant, one
+laundress, one boot and shoe worker and one domestic worker, twenty in
+all, the exact number specified by Mr. Lloyd-George. Some hundreds of
+working women escorted the deputation to the official residence of the
+Chancellor of the Exchequer and waited anxiously in the street to hear
+the result of the audience.
+
+The result was, of course, barren. Mr. Lloyd-George glibly repeated his
+confidence in the "great opportunity" afforded by the Franchise Bill,
+and Sir Edward Grey, reminding the women of the divergence of view held
+by the members of Cabinet on the suffrage question, assured them that
+their best opportunity for success lay in an amendment to the present
+bill. The women spoke with the greatest candour to the two ministers and
+questioned them sharply as to the integrity of the Prime Minister's
+pledge to accept the amendments, if passed. To such depth of infamy had
+English politics sunk that it was possible for women openly to question
+the plighted word of the King's chief Minister! Mrs. Drummond, who
+stands in awe of no human being, in plain words invited the slippery Mr.
+Lloyd-George to clear his own character from obloquy. In the closing
+words of her speech she put the whole matter clearly up to him, saying:
+"Now, Mr. Lloyd-George, you have doggedly stuck to your old age
+pensions, and the insurance act, and secured them, and what you have
+done for these measures you can do also for the women."
+
+The House met on the following afternoon to debate Sir Edward Grey's
+permissive amendment, but no sooner had the discussion opened than a
+veritable bombshell was cast into the situation. Mr. Bonar Law arose and
+asked for a ruling on the constitutionality of a woman's suffrage
+amendment to the bill as framed. The Speaker, who, besides acting as the
+presiding officer of the House, is its official parliamentarian, replied
+that, in his opinion, such an amendment would make a huge difference in
+the bill, and that he would be obliged, at a later stage of the debates,
+to consider carefully whether, if carried, any woman suffrage amendment
+would not so materially alter the bill that it would have to be
+withdrawn. In spite of this sinister pronouncement, the House continued
+to debate the Grey amendment, which was ably supported by Lord Hugh
+Cecil, Sir John Rolleston, and others.
+
+During the intervening week-end holiday two Cabinet councils were held,
+and when the House met on Monday the Prime Minister called upon the
+Speaker for his ruling. The Speaker declared that, in his opinion, the
+passage of any one of the woman suffrage amendments would so alter the
+scope of the Franchise Bill as practically to create a new bill, because
+the measure, as it was framed, did not have for its main object the
+bestowal of the franchise on a hitherto excluded class. Had it been so
+framed a woman suffrage amendment would have been entirely proper. But
+the main object of the bill was to alter the qualification, or the basis
+of registration for a Parliamentary vote. It would increase the male
+electorate, but only as an indirect result of the changed
+qualifications. An amendment to the bill removing the sex barrier from
+the election laws was not, in the Speaker's opinion, a proper one.
+
+The Prime Minister then announced the intentions of the Cabinet, which
+were to withdraw the Franchise Bill and to refrain from introducing,
+during that session, a plural voting bill. Mr. Asquith blandly admitted
+that his pledge in regard to women's suffrage had been rendered
+incapable of fulfilment, and he said that he felt constrained to give a
+new pledge to take its place. There were only two that could be given.
+The first was that the Government should bring in a bill to enfranchise
+women, and this the Government would not do. The second was that the
+Government agree to give full facilities as to time, during the next
+session of Parliament, to a private member's bill, so drafted as to be
+capable of free amendment. This was the course that the Government had
+decided to adopt. Mr. Asquith had the effrontery to say in conclusion
+that he thought that the House would agree that he had striven and had
+succeeded in giving effect, both in letter and in spirit, to every
+undertaking which the Government had given.
+
+Two members only, Mr. Henderson and Mr. Keir Hardie had the courage to
+stand up on the floor of the House and denounce the Government's
+treachery, for treachery it unquestionably was. Mr. Asquith had pledged
+his sacred honour to introduce a bill that would be capable of an
+amendment to include women's suffrage, and he had framed a bill that
+could not be so amended. Whether he had done the thing deliberately,
+with the plain intention of selling out the women, or whether ignorance
+of Parliamentary rules accounted for the failure of the bill was
+immaterial. The bill need not have been drawn in ignorance. The fount of
+wisdom represented by Mr. Speaker could have been consulted at the time
+the bill was under construction quite as easily as when it had reached
+the debating stage. Our paper said editorially, representing and
+perfectly expressing our member's views: "Either the Government are so
+ignorant of Parliamentary procedure that they are unfit to occupy any
+position of responsibility, or else they are scoundrels of the worst
+kind."
+
+I am inclined to think that the verdict of posterity will lean towards
+the later conclusion. If Mr. Asquith had been a man of honour he would
+have reframed the Franchise Bill in such a way that it could have
+included a suffrage amendment, or else he would have made amends for his
+stupendous blunder--if it was a blunder--by introducing a Government
+measure for women's suffrage. He did neither, but disposed of the matter
+by promising facilities for a private member's bill which he knew, and
+which everybody knew, could not possibly pass.
+
+There was no chance for a private member's bill, even with facilities,
+because of a number of reasons, but principally because the torpedoing
+of the Conciliation Bill had destroyed utterly the spirit of
+conciliation in which Conservatives, Liberals and Radicals in the House
+of Commons, and militant and non-militant women throughout the Kingdom
+had set aside their differences of opinion and agreed to come together
+on a compromise measure. When the second Conciliation Bill, of 1911, was
+under discussion, Lord Lytton had said: "If this bill does not go
+through, the woman suffrage movement will not be stopped, but the spirit
+of conciliation of which this bill is an expression will be destroyed,
+and there will he war throughout the country, raging, tearing, fierce,
+bitter strife, though nobody wants it."
+
+Lord Lytton's words were prophetic. At this last brazen piece of
+trickery on the part of the Government the country blazed with bitter
+wrath. All the suffrage societies united in calling for a Government
+measure for women's suffrage to be introduced without delay. The idle
+promise of facilities for a private member's bill was rejected with
+contumely and scorn. The Liberal women's executive committee met, and a
+strong effort was made to pass a resolution threatening the withdrawal
+from party work of the entire federation, but this failed and the
+executive merely passed a feeble resolution of regret.
+
+The membership of the Women's Liberal Federation was, at that time,
+close to 200,000, and if the executive had passed the strong resolution,
+refusing to do any more work for the party until a Government measure
+had been introduced, the Government would have been forced to yield.
+They could not have faced the country without the support of the women.
+But these women, many of them, were wives of men in the service, the
+paid service of the Liberal Party. Many of them were wives of Liberal
+members. They lacked the courage, or the intelligence, or the insight,
+to declare war as a body on the Government. A large number of women, and
+also many men, did resign from the Liberal Party, but the defections
+were not serious enough to affect the Government.
+
+The militants declared, and proceeded instantly to carry out,
+unrelenting warfare. We announced that either we must have a Government
+measure, or a Cabinet split--those men in the Cabinet calling themselves
+suffragists going out--or we would take up the sword again, never to lay
+it down until the enfranchisement of the women of England was won.
+
+It was at this time, February, 1913, less than two years ago as I write
+these words, that militancy, as it is now generally understood by the
+public began--militancy in the sense of continued, destructive, guerilla
+warfare against the Government through injury to private property. Some
+property had been destroyed before this time, but the attacks were
+sporadic, and were meant to be in the nature of a warning as to what
+might become a settled policy. Now we indeed lighted the torch, and we
+did it with the absolute conviction that no other course was open to us.
+We had tried every other measure, as I am sure that I have demonstrated
+to my readers, and our years of work and suffering and sacrifice had
+taught us that the Government would not yield to right and justice, what
+the majority of members of the House of Commons admitted was right and
+justice, but that the Government would, as other governments invariably
+do, yield to expediency. Now our task was to show the Government that it
+was expedient to yield to the women's just demands. In order to do that
+we had to make England and every department of English life insecure and
+unsafe. We had to make English law a failure and the courts farce comedy
+theatres; we had to discredit the Government and Parliament in the eyes
+of the world; we had to spoil English sports, hurt business, destroy
+valuable property, demoralise the world of society, shame the churches,
+upset the whole orderly conduct of life--
+
+That is, we had to do as much of this guerilla warfare as the people of
+England would tolerate. When they came to the point of saying to the
+Government: "Stop this, in the only way it can be stopped, by giving
+the women of England representation," then we should extinguish our
+torch.
+
+Americans, of all people, ought to see the logic of our reasoning. There
+is one piece of American oratory, beloved of schoolboys, which has often
+been quoted from militant platforms. In a speech now included among the
+classics of the English language your great statesman, Patrick Henry,
+summed up the causes that led to the American Revolution. He said: "We
+have petitioned, we have remonstrated, we have supplicated, we have
+prostrated ourselves at the foot of the throne, and it has all been in
+vain. We must fight--I repeat it, sir, we must fight."
+
+Patrick Henry, remember, was advocating killing people, as well as
+destroying private property, as the proper means of securing the
+political freedom of men. The Suffragettes have not done that, and they
+never will. In fact the moving spirit of militancy is deep and abiding
+reverence for human life. In the latter course of our agitation I have
+been called upon to discuss our policies with many eminent men,
+politicians, literary men, barristers, scientists, clergymen. One of the
+last named, a high dignitary of the Church of England, told me that
+while he was a convinced suffragist, he found it impossible to justify
+our doing wrong that right might follow. I said to him: "We are not
+doing wrong--we are doing right in our use of revolutionary methods
+against private property. It is our work to restore thereby true values,
+to emphasise the value of human rights against property rights. You are
+well aware, sir, that property has assumed a value in the eyes of men,
+and in the eyes of the law, that it ought never to claim. It is placed
+above all human values. The lives and health and happiness, and even the
+virtue of women and children--that is to say, the race itself--are being
+ruthlessly sacrificed to the god of property every day of the world."
+
+To this my reverend friend agreed, and I said: "If we women are wrong in
+destroying private property in order that human values may be restored,
+then I say, in all reverence, that it was wrong for the Founder of
+Christianity to destroy private property, as He did when He lashed the
+money changers out of the Temple and when He drove the Gaderene swine
+into the sea."
+
+It was absolutely in this spirit that our women went forth to war. In
+the first month of guerilla warfare an enormous amount of property was
+damaged and destroyed. On January 31st a number of putting greens were
+burned with acids; on February 7th and 8th telegraph and telephone wires
+were cut in several places and for some hours all communication between
+London and Glasgow were suspended; a few days later windows in various
+of London's smartest clubs were broken, and the orchid houses at Kew
+were wrecked and many valuable blooms destroyed by cold. The jewel room
+at the Tower of London was invaded and a showcase broken. The residence
+of H. R. H. Prince Christian and Lambeth Palace, seat of the Archbishop
+of Canterbury, were visited and had windows broken. The refreshment
+house in Regents Park was burned to the ground on February 12th and on
+February 18th a country house which was being built at
+Walton-on-the-Hill for Mr. Lloyd-George was partially destroyed, a bomb
+having been exploded in the early morning before the arrival of the
+workmen. A hat pin and a hair pin picked up near the house--coupled with
+the fact that care had been taken not to endanger any lives--led the
+police to believe that the deed had been done by women enemies of Mr.
+Lloyd-George. Four days later I was arrested and brought up in Epsom
+police court, where I was charged with having "counselled and procured"
+the persons who did the damage. Admitted to bail for the night, I
+appeared next morning in court, where the case was fully reviewed.
+Speeches of mine were read, one speech, made at a meeting held on
+January 22nd, in which I called for volunteers to act with me in a
+particular engagement; and another, made the day after the explosion, in
+which I publicly accepted responsibility for all militant acts done in
+the past, and even for what had been done at Walton. At the conclusion
+of the hearing I was committed for trial at the May Assizes at
+Guildford. Bail would be allowed, it was stated, if I would agree to
+give the usual undertaking to refrain from all militancy or incitement
+to militancy.
+
+I asked that the case be set for speedy trial at the Assizes then in
+progress. I was entirely willing, I said, to give an undertaking for a
+short period, for a week, or even two weeks, but I could not possibly do
+so for a much longer period, looking at the fact that a new session of
+Parliament began in March, and was vitally concerned with the interests
+of women. The request was refused, and I was ordered to be taken to
+Holloway. I warned the magistrate that I should at once adopt the hunger
+strike, and I told him that if I lived at all until the summer it would
+be a dying woman who would come up for trial.
+
+Arriving at Holloway I carried out my intention, but within twenty-four
+hours I heard that the authorities had arranged that my trial should
+take place on April 1st, instead of at the end of June, and at the
+Central Criminal Court, London, instead of the Guildford Court. I then
+gave the required under-takings and was immediately released on bail.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+When I entered Old Bailey on that memorable Wednesday, April 2nd, 1913,
+to be tried for inciting to commit a felony, the court was packed with
+women. A great crowd of women who could not obtain the necessary tickets
+remained in the streets below for hours waiting news of the trial. A
+large number of detectives from Scotland Yard, and a still larger number
+of uniformed police were on duty both inside and outside the court. I
+could not imagine why it was considered necessary to have such a
+regiment of police on hand, for I had not, at that time, realised the
+state of terror into which the militant movement, in its new
+development, had thrown the authorities.
+
+Mr. Bodkin and Mr. Travers Humphreys appeared to prosecute on behalf of
+the Crown, and I conducted my own case, in consultation with my
+solicitor, Mr. Marshall. The Judge, Mr. Justice Lush, having taken his
+seat I entered the dock and listened to the reading of the indictment. I
+pled "not guilty," not because I wished to evade responsibility for the
+explosion,--I had already assumed that responsibility--but because the
+indictment accused me of having wickedly and maliciously incited women
+to crime. What I had done was not wicked of purpose, but quite the
+opposite of wicked. I could not therefore truthfully plead guilty. The
+trial having opened the Judge courteously asked me if I would like to
+sit down. I thanked him, and asked if I might also have a small table on
+which to place my papers. By orders of the Judge a table was brought me.
+
+Mr. Bodkin opened the case by explaining the "Malicious Damages to
+Property Act" of 1861, under which I was charged, and after describing
+the explosion which had damaged the Lloyd-George house at Walton, said
+that I was accused of being in the affair an accessory before the fact.
+It was not suggested, he said, that I was present when the crime was
+committed, but it was charged that I had moved and incited, counselled
+and procured women whose names were unknown to carry out that crime. It
+would be for the jury to decide, after the evidence had been presented,
+whether the facts did not point most clearly to the conclusion that
+women, probably two in number, who committed the crime were members of
+the Women's Social and Political Union, which had its office in Kingsway
+in London, and of which the defendant was the head, moving spirit and
+recognised leader.
+
+The blowing up of Mr. Lloyd-George's house was then described in detail.
+That the damage was intended as an act against Mr. Lloyd-George was
+clear, Mr. Bodkin said, from the malicious statements made against him
+by the prisoner. He produced a private letter written by me to a friend
+in which I had defended militancy, and said that not only had it become
+a duty but in the circumstances it had also become a political
+necessity. Said Mr. Bodkin:
+
+"A letter of that kind proves very clearly several things. It shows
+that she is the leader. It shows her influence over the emotional
+members of this organisation. It shows that according to her, militancy
+can be withheld for a time and let loose upon society at another time.
+And it further shows that any person or any woman who wants to indulge
+in militancy, which is only a picturesque expression for committing
+crimes against society, has to communicate with her, and with her alone,
+by word of mouth or by letter. That is the Proclamation which went out
+to the members of this organisation. The plain language of that letter
+is, 'If we don't get what we want, the Government and their members will
+be responsible, and the Government and the public will be bullied into
+giving us what we want.'"
+
+Many extracts from my speeches made in January and February were read,
+and the final speech made just before my arrest at Chelsea. But before
+they were read I said:
+
+"I wish to lodge an objection now to the police reports of my speeches.
+They have been supplied to me, and the only report I accept is that of
+the journalist of Cardiff who is one of the witnesses. He has furnished
+a fairly accurate report of what I said in that town. The police reports
+I do not accept. They are grossly inaccurate and ignorant and
+ungrammatical, and they convey an absolutely wrong impression of what I
+said in many respects."
+
+Witnesses were then examined; the carter who heard and reported the
+explosion; the foreman in charge of the damaged house, who told the
+cost of the damages, and described the explosives, etc., found on the
+premises; several police officers who told of finding hairpins and a
+woman's rubber golosh in the house, and so on. Absolutely nothing was
+brought out that tended to show that the Suffragettes had anything to do
+with the affair. The Judge noted this for he said to Mr. Bodkin:
+
+"I am not quite sure how you present this case. There are two ways of
+looking at it. Do you only ask the jury to say that the defendant
+specifically counselled the perpetration of this crime, or do you also
+say that, looking at her speeches that you read--assuming you prove that
+they were uttered--that the language used being a general incitement to
+damage property, any one who acted on this invitation and perpetrated
+this outrage would be incited by her to do it?"
+
+Mr. Bodkin replied that the latter assumption was correct.
+
+"I say that the speeches generally are incitement to all kinds of acts
+of violence against property, and that they present evidence of attacks
+against property and a particular individual, and that there is evidence
+in the speeches which have been read, and which will be proved, of
+admissions by Mrs. Pankhurst of having been connected with the
+particular outrage in a way which makes her in law an accessory before
+the fact."
+
+"But you do not confine the case to the latter way of putting it?"
+
+"No," replied Mr. Bodkin.
+
+"Even if the jury are satisfied," said the Judge, "that Mrs. Pankhurst
+was not directly connected with this outrage by counselling it, you
+still ask the jury to say that by counselling, as you say she had in the
+speeches, the destruction of property, especially that belonging to a
+particular gentleman, anybody who acted on that and committed this
+outrage would have been incited by her to do it?"
+
+"Yes, my lord."
+
+"I think, Mrs. Pankhurst, you now understand the way it is put?" asked
+the Judge.
+
+"I understand it quite well, my lord," I replied.
+
+Proceedings were resumed on the following day, and the examination of
+witnesses for the prosecution went on. At the close of the examination,
+the Judge inquired whether I desired to call any witnesses. I replied:
+
+"I do not desire to give evidence or to call any witnesses, but I desire
+to address your Lordship."
+
+I began by objecting to some of the things Mr. Bodkin had said in his
+speech which concerned me personally. He had referred to me--or at least
+his words conveyed the suggestion--that I was a woman riding about in my
+motor car inciting other women to do acts which entail imprisonment and
+great suffering, while I, perhaps indulging in some curious form of
+pleasure, was protected, or thought myself protected, from serious
+consequences. I said that Mr. Bodkin knew perfectly well that I shared
+all the dangers the other women faced, that I had been in prison three
+times, serving two of the sentences in full, and being treated like an
+ordinary felon--searched, put in prison clothes, eating prison fare,
+given solitary confinement and conforming to all the abominable rules
+imposed upon women who commit crimes in England. I thought I owed it to
+myself, especially as the same suggestions--in regard to the luxury in
+which I lived, supported by the members of the W. S. P. U.--had been
+made, not only by Mr. Bodkin in court, but by members of the Government
+in the House of Commons--I thought I owed it to myself to say that I
+owned no motor car and never had owned one. The car in which I
+occasionally rode was owned by the organisation and was used for general
+propaganda work. In that car, and in cars owned by friends I had gone
+about my work as a speaker in the Woman Suffrage movement. It was
+equally untrue, I said, that some of us were making incomes of £1,000 to
+£1,500 a year out of the suffrage movement, as had actually been alleged
+in the debates in the House in which members of Parliament were trying
+to decide how to crush militancy. No woman in our organisation was
+making any such income, or anything remotely like it. Myself, I had
+sacrificed a considerable portion of my income because I had to
+surrender a very important part of it in order to be free to do what I
+thought was my duty in the movement.
+
+Addressing myself to my defence I told the Court that it was a very
+serious condition of things when a large number of respectable and
+naturally law abiding people, people of upright lives, came to hold the
+law in contempt, came seriously to making up their minds that they were
+justified in breaking the law.
+
+"The whole of good government," I said, "rests upon acceptance of the
+law, upon respect of the law, and I say to you seriously, my lord, and
+gentlemen of the jury, that women of intelligence, women of training,
+women of upright life, have for many years ceased to respect the laws of
+this country. It is an absolute fact, and when you look at the laws of
+this country as they effect women it is not to be wondered at."
+
+At some length I went over these laws, laws that made it possible for
+the Judge to send me, if found guilty, to prison for fourteen years,
+while the maximum penalty for offences of the most revolting kind
+against little girls was only two years' imprisonment. The laws of
+inheritance, the laws of divorce, the laws of guardianship of
+children--all so scandalously unjust to women, I sketched briefly, and I
+said that not only these laws and others, but the administration of the
+laws fell so far short of adequacy that women felt that they must be
+permitted to share the work of cleaning up the entire situation. I tried
+here to tell of certain dreadful things that I had learned as the wife
+of a barrister, things about some of the men in high places who are
+entrusted with the administration of the law, of a judge of Assizes
+where many hideous crimes against women were tried, this judge himself
+being found dead one morning in a brothel, but the Court would not allow
+me to go into personalities, as he called it, with regard to
+"distinguished people," and told me that the sole question before the
+jury was whether or not I was guilty as charged. I must speak on that
+subject and on no other.
+
+After a hard fight to be allowed to tell the jury the reasons why women
+had lost respect for the law, and were making such a struggle in order
+to become law makers themselves, I closed my speech by saying:
+
+"Over one thousand women have gone to prison in the course of this
+agitation, have suffered their imprisonment, have come out of prison
+injured in health, weakened in body, but not in spirit. I come to stand
+my trial from the bedside of one of my daughters, who has come out of
+Holloway Prison, sent there for two months' hard labour for
+participating with four other people in breaking a small pane of glass.
+She has hunger-struck in prison. She submitted herself for more than
+five weeks to the horrible ordeal of feeding by force, and she has come
+out of prison having lost nearly two stone in weight. She is so weak
+that she cannot get out of her bed. And I say to you, gentlemen, that is
+the kind of punishment you are inflicting upon me or any other woman who
+may be brought before you. I ask you if you are prepared to send an
+incalculable number of women to prison--I speak to you as representing
+others in the same position--if you are prepared to go on doing that
+kind of thing indefinitely, because that is what is going to happen.
+There is absolutely no doubt about it. I think you have seen enough even
+in this present case to convince you that we are not women who are
+notoriety hunters. We could get that, heaven knows, much more cheaply if
+we sought it. We are women, rightly or wrongly, convinced that this is
+the only way in which we can win power to alter what for us are
+intolerable conditions, absolutely intolerable conditions. A London
+clergyman only the other day said that 60 per cent. of the married women
+in his parish were breadwinners, supporting their husbands as well as
+their children. When you think of the wages women earn, when you think
+of what this means to the future of the children of this country, I ask
+you to take this question very, very seriously. Only this morning I have
+had information brought to me which could be supported by sworn
+affidavits, that there is in this country, in this very city of London
+of ours, a regulated traffic, not only in women of full age, but in
+little children; that they are being purchased, that they are being
+entrapped, and that they are being trained to minister to the vicious
+pleasures of persons who ought to know better in their positions of
+life.
+
+"Well, these are the things that have made us women determined to go on,
+determined to face everything, determined to see this thing out to the
+end, let it cost us what it may. And if you convict me, gentlemen, if
+you find me guilty, I tell you quite honestly and quite frankly, that
+whether the sentence is a long sentence, whether the sentence is a short
+sentence, I shall not submit to it. I shall, the moment I leave this
+court, if I am sent to prison, whether to penal servitude or to the
+lighter form of imprisonment--because I am not sufficiently versed in
+the law to know what his lordship may decide; but whatever my sentence
+is, from the moment I leave this court I shall quite deliberately refuse
+to eat food--I shall join the women who are already in Holloway on the
+hunger strike. I shall come out of prison, dead or alive, at the
+earliest possible moment; and once out again, as soon as I am physically
+fit I shall enter into this fight again. Life is very dear to all of us.
+I am not seeking, as was said by the Home Secretary, to commit suicide.
+I do not want to commit suicide. I want to see the women of this country
+enfranchised, and I want to live until that is done. Those are the
+feelings by which we are animated. We offer ourselves as sacrifices,
+just as your forefathers did in the past, in this cause, and I would ask
+you all to put this question to yourselves:--Have you the right, as
+human beings, to condemn another human being to death--because that is
+what it amounts to? Can you throw the first stone? Have you the right to
+judge women?
+
+"You have not the right in human justice, not the right by the
+constitution of this country, if rightly interpreted, to judge me,
+because you are not my peers. You know, every one of you, that I should
+not be standing here, that I should not break one single law--if I had
+the rights that you possess, if I had a share in electing those who make
+the laws I have to obey; if I had a voice in controlling the taxes I am
+called upon to pay, I should not be standing here. And I say to you it
+is a very serious state of things. I say to you, my lord, it is a very
+serious situation, that women of upright life, women who have devoted
+the best of their years to the public weal, that women who are engaged
+in trying to undo some of the terrible mistakes that men in their
+government of the country have made, because after all, in the last
+resort, men are responsible for the present state of affairs--I put it
+to you that it is a very serious situation. You are not accustomed to
+deal with people like me in the ordinary discharge of your duties; but
+you are called upon to deal with people who break the law from selfish
+motives. I break the law from no selfish motive. I have no personal end
+to serve, neither have any of the other women who have gone through this
+court during the past few weeks, like sheep to the slaughter. Not one of
+these women would, if women were free, be law-breakers. They are women
+who seriously believe that this hard path that they are treading is the
+only path to their enfranchisement. They seriously believe that the
+welfare of humanity demands this sacrifice; they believe that the
+horrible evils which are ravaging our civilisation will never be removed
+until women get the vote. They know that the very fount of life is being
+poisoned; they know that homes are being destroyed; that because of bad
+education, because of the unequal standard of morals, even the mothers
+and children are destroyed by one of the vilest and most horrible
+diseases that ravage humanity.
+
+"There is only one way to put a stop to this agitation; there is only
+one way to break down this agitation. It is not by deporting us, it is
+not by locking us up in gaol; it is by doing us justice. And so I appeal
+to you gentlemen, in this case of mine, to give a verdict, not only on
+my case, but upon the whole of this agitation. I ask you to find me not
+guilty of malicious incitement to a breach of the law.
+
+"These are my last words. My incitement is not malicious. If I had
+power to deal with these things, I would be in absolute obedience to the
+law. I would say to women, 'You have a constitutional means of getting
+redress for your grievances; use your votes, convince your fellow-voters
+of the righteousness of your demands. That is the way to obtain
+justice.' I am not guilty of malicious incitement, and I appeal to you,
+for the welfare of the country, for the welfare of the race, to return a
+verdict of not guilty in this case that you are called upon to try."
+
+After recapitulating the charge the Judge, in summing up, said:
+
+"It is scarcely necessary for me to tell you that the topics urged by
+the defendant in her address to you with regard to provocation by the
+laws of the country and the injustice done to women because they are not
+given the vote as men are, have no bearing upon the question you have to
+decide.
+
+"The motive at the back of her mind, or at the back of the minds of
+those who actually did put the gunpowder there, would afford no defence
+to this indictment. I am quite sure you will deal with this case upon
+the evidence, and the evidence alone, without regard to any question as
+to whether you think the law is just or unjust. It has nothing to do
+with the case. I should think you will probably have no doubt that this
+defendant, if she did these things charged against her, is not actuated
+by the ordinary selfish motive that leads most of the criminals who are
+in this dock to commit the crimes that they do commit. She is none the
+less guilty if she did these things which are charged against her,
+although she believes that by means of this kind the condition of
+society will be altered."
+
+The jury retired, and soon after the afternoon session of the court
+opened they filed in, and in reply to the usual question asked by the
+clerk of arraigns, said that they had agreed upon a verdict. Said the
+clerk:
+
+"Do you find Mrs. Pankhurst guilty or not guilty?"
+
+"Guilty," said the foreman, "with a strong recommendation to mercy."
+
+I spoke once more to the Judge.
+
+"The jury have found me guilty, with a strong recommendation to mercy,
+and I do not see, since motive is not taken into account in human laws,
+that they could do otherwise after your summing up. But since motive is
+not taken into account in human laws, and since I, whose motives are not
+ordinary motives, am about to be sentenced by you to the punishment
+which is accorded to people whose motives are selfish motives, I have
+only this to say: If it was impossible for a different verdict to be
+found; if it is your duty to sentence me, as it will be presently, then
+I want to say to you, as a private citizen, and to the jury as private
+citizens, that I, standing here, found guilty by the laws of my country,
+I say to you it is your duty, as private citizens, to do what you can to
+put an end to this intolerable state of affairs. I put that duty upon
+you. And I want to say, _whatever the sentence you pass upon me, I shall
+do what is humanly possible to terminate that sentence at the earliest
+possible moment. I have no sense of guilt. I feel I have done my duty. I
+look upon myself as a prisoner of war. I am under no moral obligation
+to conform to, or in any way accept, the sentence imposed upon me._ I
+shall take the desperate remedy that other women have taken. It is
+obvious to you that the struggle will be an unequal one, but I shall
+make it--I shall make it as long as I have an ounce of strength left in
+me, or any life left in me.
+
+"I shall fight, I shall fight, I shall fight, from the moment I enter
+prison to struggle against overwhelming odds; I shall resist the doctors
+if they attempt to feed me. I was sentenced last May in this court to
+nine months' imprisonment. I remained in prison six weeks. There are
+people who have laughed at the ordeal of hunger-striking and forcible
+feeding. All I can say is, and the doctors can bear me out, that I was
+released because, had I remained there much longer, I should have been a
+dead woman.
+
+"I know what it is because I have gone through it. My own daughter[4]
+has only just left it. There are women there still facing that ordeal,
+facing it twice a day. Think of it, my lord, twice a day this fight is
+gone through. Twice a day a weak woman resisting overwhelming force,
+fights and fights as long as she has strength left; fights against women
+and even against men, resisting with her tongue, with her teeth, this
+ordeal. Last night in the House of Commons some alternative was
+discussed, or rather, some additional punishment. Is it not a strange
+thing, my lord, that laws which have sufficed to restrain men
+throughout the history of this country do not suffice now to restrain
+women--decent women, honourable women?
+
+"Well, my lord, I do want you to realise it. I am not whining about my
+punishment, I invited it. I deliberately broke the law, not hysterically
+or emotionally, but of set serious purpose, because I honestly feel it
+is the only way. Now, I put the responsibility of what is to follow upon
+you, my lord, as a private citizen, and upon the gentlemen of the jury,
+as private citizens, and upon all the men in this court--what are you,
+with your political powers, going to do to end this intolerable
+situation?
+
+"_To the women I have represented, to the women who, in response to my
+incitement, have faced these terrible consequences, have broken laws, to
+them, I want to say I am not going to fail them, but to face it as they
+face it, to go through with it, and I know that they will go on with the
+fight whether I live or whether I die._
+
+"_This movement will go on and on until we have the rights of citizens
+in this country, as women have in our Colonies, as they will have
+throughout the civilised world before this woman's war is ended._
+
+"That is all I have to say."
+
+Mr. Justice Lush, in passing sentence, said: "It is my duty, Mrs.
+Emmeline Pankhurst, and a very painful duty it is, to pass what, in my
+opinion, is a suitable and adequate sentence for the crime of which you
+have been most properly convicted, having regard to the strong
+recommendation to mercy by the jury. I quite recognise, as I have
+already said, that the motives that have actuated you in committing
+this crime are not the selfish motives that actuate most of the persons
+who stand in your position, but although you blind your eyes to it, I
+cannot help pointing out to you that the crime of which you have been
+convicted is not only a very serious one, but, in spite of your motives,
+it is, in fact, a wicked one. It is wicked because it not only leads to
+the destruction of property of persons who have done you no wrong, but
+in spite of your calculations, it may expose other people to the danger
+of being maimed or even killed. It is wicked because you are, and have
+been, luring other people--young women, it may be--to engage in such
+crimes, possibly to their own ruin; and it is wicked, because you cannot
+help being alive to it if you would only think.
+
+"You are setting an example to other persons who may have other
+grievances that they legitimately want to have put right by embarking on
+a similar scheme to yours, and trying to effect their object by
+attacking the property, if not the lives, of other people. I know,
+unfortunately--at least, I feel sure--you will pay no heed to what I
+say. I only beg of you to think of these things."
+
+"I have thought of them," I interjected.
+
+"Think, if only for one short hour, dispassionately," continued the
+majesty of law, "I can only say that, although the sentence I am going
+to pass must be a severe one, must be adequate to the crime of which you
+have been found guilty, if you would only realise the wrong you are
+doing, and the mistake you are making, and would see the error you have
+committed, and undertake to amend matters by using your influence in a
+right direction, I would be the first to use all my best endeavours to
+bring about a mitigation of the sentence I am about to pass.
+
+"I cannot, and I will not, regard your crime as a merely trivial one. It
+is not. It is a most serious one, and, whatever you may think, it is a
+wicked one. I have paid regard to the recommendation of the jury. You
+yourself have stated the maximum sentence which this particular offence
+is by the legislature thought to deserve. The least sentence I can pass
+upon you is a sentence of three years' penal servitude."
+
+As soon as the sentence was pronounced the intense silence which had
+reigned throughout the trial was broken, and an absolute pandemonium
+broke out among the spectators. At first it was merely a confused and
+angry murmur of "Shame!" "Shame!" The murmurs quickly swelled into loud
+and indignant cries, and then from gallery and court there arose a great
+chorus uttered with the utmost intensity and passion. "Shame!" "Shame!"
+The women sprang to their feet, in many instances stood on their seats,
+shouting "Shame!" "Shame!" as I was conducted out of the dock in charge
+of two wardresses. "Keep the flag flying!" shouted a woman's voice, and
+the response came in a chorus: "We will!" "Bravo!" "Three cheers for
+Mrs. Pankhurst!" That was the last I heard of the courtroom protest.
+
+Afterwards I heard that the noise and confusion was kept up for several
+minutes longer, the Judge and the police being quite powerless to
+obtain order. Then the women filed out singing the Women's
+Marseillaise--
+
+
+     "March on, march on,
+     Face to the dawn,
+     The dawn of liberty."
+
+
+The Judge flung after their retreating forms the dire threat of prison
+for any woman who dared repeat such a scene. Threat of prison--to
+Suffragettes! The women's song only swelled the louder and the corridors
+of Old Bailey reverberated with their shouts. Certainly that venerable
+building had never in its checkered history witnessed such a scene. The
+great crowd of detectives and police who were on duty seemed actually
+paralysed by the audacity of the protest, for they made no attempt to
+intervene.
+
+At three o'clock, when I left the court by a side entrance in Newgate
+Street, I found a crowd of women waiting to cheer me. With the two
+wardresses I entered a four wheeler and was driven to Holloway to begin
+my hunger strike. Scores of women followed in taxicabs, and when I
+arrived at the prison gates there was another protest of cheers for the
+cause and boos for the law. In the midst of all this intense excitement
+I passed through the grim gates into the twilight of prison, now become
+a battle-ground.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[4] Sylvia Pankhurst, who was forcibly fed for five weeks, during an
+original sentence of two months imposed for breaking one window.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+Prison had indeed been for us a battle-ground ever since the time when
+we had solemnly resolved that, as a matter of principle, we would not
+submit to the rules that bound ordinary offenders against the law. But
+when I entered Holloway on that April day in 1913, it was with full
+knowledge that I had before me a far more prolonged struggle than any
+that the militant suffragists had hitherto faced. I have described the
+hunger strike, that terrible weapon with which we had repeatedly broken
+our prison bars. The Government, at their wits' end to cope with the
+hunger strikers, and to overcome a situation which had brought the laws
+of England into such scandalous disrepute, had had recourse to a
+measure, surely the most savagely devised ever brought before a modern
+Parliament.
+
+In March of that year, while I was waiting trial on the charge of
+conspiring to destroy Mr. Lloyd-George's country house, a bill was
+introduced into the House of Commons by the Home Secretary, Mr. Reginald
+McKenna, a bill which had for its avowed object the breaking down of the
+hunger strike. This measure, now universally known as the "Cat and Mouse
+Act," provided that when a hunger striking suffrage prisoner (the law
+was frankly admitted to apply only to suffrage prisoners) was certified
+by the prison doctors to be in danger of death, she could be ordered
+released on a sort of a ticket of leave for the purpose of regaining
+strength enough to undergo the remainder of her sentence. Released, she
+was still a prisoner, the prisoner, or the patient, or the victim, as
+you may choose to call her, being kept under constant police
+surveillance. According to the terms of the bill the prisoner was
+released for a specified number of days, at the expiration of which she
+was supposed to return to prison on her own account. Says the Act:
+
+
+     "The period of temporary discharge may, if the Secretary of State
+     thinks fit, be extended on a representation of the prisoner that
+     the state of her health renders her unfit to return to prison. If
+     such representation be made, the prisoner shall submit herself, if
+     so required, for medical examination by the medical officer of the
+     above mentioned prison, or other registered medical practitioner
+     appointed by the Secretary of State.
+
+     The prisoner shall notify to the Commissioner of Police of the
+     Metropolis the place of residence to which she goes on her
+     discharge. She shall not change her residence without giving one
+     clear day's notice in writing to the Commissioner, specifying the
+     residence to which she is going and she shall not be temporarily
+     absent from her residence for more than twelve hours without giving
+     a like notice," etc.
+
+
+The idea of militant suffragists respecting a law of this order is
+almost humorous, and yet the smile dies before the pity one feels for
+the Minister whose confession of failure is embodied in such a measure.
+Here was a mighty Government weakly resolved that justice to women it
+would not grant, knowing that submission of women it could not force,
+and so was willing to compromise with a piece of class legislation
+absolutely contrary to all of its avowed principles. Said Mr. McKenna,
+pleading in the House for the advancement of his odious measure: "At the
+present time I cannot make these prisoners undergo their sentences
+without serious risk of death and I want to have power to enable me to
+compel a prisoner to undergo the sentence, and I want that power in all
+cases where the prisoner adopts the system of the hunger strike. At the
+present moment, although I have the power of release, I cannot release a
+prisoner without a pardon, and I have to discharge them for good. I want
+the power of releasing a prisoner without a pardon, with the sentence
+remaining alive.... I want to enforce the Law, and I want, if I can, to
+enforce it without forcible feeding, and without undergoing the risk of
+some one else's life."
+
+Interrogated by several members, Mr. McKenna admitted that the "Cat and
+Mouse" bill, if passed, would not inevitably do away with forcible
+feeding, but he promised that the hateful and disgusting process would
+be resorted to only when "absolutely necessary." We shall see later how
+hypocritical this representation was.
+
+Parliament, which had never had time to consider, beyond its initial
+stages, a women's suffrage measure, passed the Cat and Mouse Act through
+both houses within the limits of a few days. It was already law when I
+entered Holloway on April 3rd, 1913, and I grieve to state that many
+members of the Labour Party, pledged to support woman suffrage, helped
+to make it into law.
+
+Of course the Act was, from its inception, treated by the suffragists
+with the utmost contempt. We had not the slightest intention of
+assisting Mr. McKenna in enforcing unjust sentences against soldiers in
+the army of freedom, and when the prison doors closed behind me I
+adopted the hunger strike exactly as though I expected it to prove, as
+formerly, a means of gaining my liberty.
+
+That struggle is not a pleasant one to recall. Every possible means of
+breaking down my resolution was resorted to. The daintiest and most
+tempting food was placed in my cell. All sorts of arguments were brought
+to bear against me--the futility of resisting the Cat and Mouse Act, the
+wickedness of risking suicide--I shall not attempt to record all the
+arguments. They fell against a blank wall of consciousness, for my
+thoughts were all very far away from Holloway and all its torments. I
+knew, what afterwards I learned as a fact, that my imprisonment was
+followed by the greatest revolutionary outbreak that had been witnessed
+in England since 1832. From one end of the island to the other the
+beacons of the women's revolution blazed night and day. Many country
+houses--all unoccupied--were fired, the grand stand of Ayr race course
+was burned to the ground, a bomb was exploded in Oxted Station, London,
+blowing out walls and windows, some empty railroad carriages were blown
+up, the glass of thirteen famous paintings in the Manchester Art Gallery
+were smashed with hammers--these are simply random specimens of the
+general outbreak of secret guerilla warfare waged by women to whose
+liberties every other approach had been barricaded by the Liberal
+Government of free England. The only answer of the Government was the
+closing of the British Museum, the National Gallery, Windsor Castle, and
+other tourist resorts. As for the result on the people of England, that
+was exactly what we had anticipated. The public were thrown into a state
+of emotion of insecurity and frightened expectancy. Not yet did they
+show themselves ready to demand of the Government that the outrages be
+stopped in the only way they could be stopped--by giving votes to women.
+I knew that it would be so. Lying in my lonely cell in Holloway, racked
+with pain, oppressed with increasing weakness, depressed with the heavy
+responsibility of unknown happenings, I was sadly aware that we were but
+approaching a far goal. The end, though certain, was still distant.
+Patience, and still more patience, faith and still more faith, well, we
+had called upon these souls' help before and it was certain that they
+would not fail us at this greatest crisis of all.
+
+Thus in great anguish of mind and body passed nine terrible days, each
+one longer and more acutely miserable than the preceding. Towards the
+last, I was mercifully half unconscious of my surroundings. A curious
+indifference took possession of my over-wrought mind, and it was almost
+without emotion that I heard, on the morning of the tenth day, that I
+was to be released temporarily in order to recover my health. The
+Governor came to my cell and read me my licence, which commanded me to
+return to Holloway in fifteen days, and meanwhile to observe all the
+obsequious terms as to informing the police of my movements. With what
+strength my hands retained I tore the document in strips and dropped it
+on the floor of the cell. "I have no intention," I said, "of obeying
+this infamous law. You release me knowing perfectly well that I shall
+never voluntarily return to any of your prisons."
+
+They sent me away, sitting bolt upright in a cab, unmindful of the fact
+that I was in a dangerous condition of weakness, having lost two stone
+in weight and suffered seriously from irregularities of heart action. As
+I left the prison I was gratefully aware of groups of our women standing
+bravely at the gates, as though enduring a long vigil. As a matter of
+fact, relays of women had picketed the place night and day during the
+whole term of my imprisonment. The first pickets were arrested, but as
+others constantly arrived to fill their places the police finally gave
+in and allowed the women to march up and down before the prison carrying
+the flag.
+
+At the nursing home to which I was conveyed I learned that Annie Kenney,
+Mrs. Drummond, and our staunch friend, Mr. George Lansbury,[5] had been
+arrested during my imprisonment, and that all three had adopted the
+hunger strike. I also learned on my own account how desperately the
+Government were striving to make their Cat and Mouse Act--the last stand
+in their losing campaign--a success. Without regard to the extra expense
+laid on the unfortunate tax payers of the country, the Government
+employed a large extra force of police especially for this purpose. As
+I lay in bed, being assisted by every medical resource to return to life
+and health, these special police, colloquially termed "Cats," guarded
+the nursing home as if it were a besieged castle. In the street under my
+windows two detectives and a constable stood on guard night and day. In
+a house at right angles to my refuge three more detectives kept constant
+watch. In the mews at the rear of the house were more detectives, and
+diligently patrolling the road, as if in expectation of a rescuing
+regiment, two taxicabs, each with its quota of detectives, guarded the
+highways.
+
+All this made recovery slow and difficult. But worse was to come. On
+April 30th, just as I was beginning to rally somewhat, came the news
+that the police had swooped down on our headquarters in Kingsway and had
+arrested the entire official force. Miss Barrett, associate editor of
+_The Suffragette_; Miss Lennox, the sub-editor; Miss Lake, business
+manager; Miss Kerr, office manager, and Mrs. Sanders, financial
+secretary of the Union, were arrested, although not one of them had ever
+appeared in any militant action. Mr. E. G. Clayton, a chemist, was also
+arrested, accused of furnishing the W. S. P. U. with explosive
+materials. The offices were thoroughly searched, and, as on a former
+occasion, stripped of all books and papers. While this was being done
+another party of police, armed with a special warrant, proceeded to the
+printing office where our paper, _The Suffragette_, was published. The
+printer, Mr. Drew, was placed under arrest and the material for the
+paper, which was to appear on the following day, was seized. By one
+o'clock in the afternoon the entire plant and the headquarters of the
+Union were in the hands of the police, and to all appearances the
+militant movement--temporarily at least--was brought to a full stop. In
+my state of semi-prostration it at first seemed to me best to let the
+week's issue of the paper lapse, but on second thought I decided that
+even the appearance of surrender was not to be thought of. How we
+managed it need not here be told, but we actually did, overnight, with
+hardly any material, except Christabel's leading article, and with
+hastily summoned helpers, get out the paper as usual, and side by side
+with the morning journals which bore front page stories of the
+suppression of the Suffragette organ, our paper sellers sold _The
+Suffragette_. The front page bore, instead of the usual cartoon, the
+single word in bold faced type--
+
+
+                              "RAIDED,"
+
+the full story of the police search and the arrests being related in the
+other pages. Our headquarters, I may say in passing, remained closed
+less than forty-eight hours. We are so organised that the arrest of
+leaders does not seriously cripple us. Every one has an understudy, and
+when one leader drops out her substitute is ready instantly to take her
+place.
+
+In this emergency there appeared as chief organiser in Miss Kenney's
+place, Miss Grace Roe, one of the young Suffragettes of whom I, as
+belonging to the older generation, am so proud. Faced by difficulties
+as great as the Government could make them, Miss Roe at once showed
+herself to be equal to the situation, and to have the gift of unswerving
+loyalty combined with a strong and rapid judgment of things and people.
+Aiding her was Mrs. Dacre Fox, who surprised us all by her amazing
+ability to act as assistant editor of _The Suffragette_, manage a host
+of affairs in the office, and preside at our weekly meetings. Another
+member of the Union who came prominently to the front at the time of
+this crisis was Mrs. Mansel.
+
+In two days' time the office was open and running quite as usual, no
+outward sign showing the grief and indignation felt for our imprisoned
+comrades. Most of them refused bail and instantly hunger struck
+appearing in court for trial three days later in a pitiful state. Mrs.
+Drummond was so obviously ill and in need of medical attention that she
+was discharged and was very soon afterwards operated upon. Mr. Drew, the
+printer, was forced to sign an undertaking not to publish the paper
+again. The others were sentenced to terms varying from six to eighteen
+months. Mr. Clayton was sentenced to twenty-one months, and after
+desperate resistance, during which he was forcibly fed many times,
+escaped his prison. The others, following the same example, starved
+their way to liberty, and have ever since been pursued at intervals and
+rearrested under the Cat and Mouse Act.
+
+After my discharge, April 12th, I remained in the nursing home until
+partially restored, then, under the eyes of the police, I motored out to
+Woking, the country home of my friend, Dr. Ethel Smyth. This house,
+like the nursing home, was guarded by a small army of police. I never
+went to the window, I never took the air in the garden without being
+conscious of watching eyes. The situation became intolerable, and I
+determined to end it. On May 26th there was a great meeting at the
+London Pavillion, and I gave notice that I would attend it. Supported by
+Dr. Flora Murray, Dr. Ethel Smyth and my devoted Nurse Pine, I walked
+downstairs, to be confronted at the door by a detective, who demanded to
+know where I was going. I was in a weak state, much weaker than I had
+imagined, and in refusing the right of a man to question my movements I
+exhausted the last remnant of my strength and sank fainting in the arms
+of my friends. As soon as I recovered I got into the motor car. The
+detective instantly took his place beside me and told the chauffeur to
+drive to Bow Street Station. The chauffeur replied that he took his
+orders only from Mrs. Pankhurst, whereupon the detective summoned a
+taxicab and, placing me under arrest, took me to Bow Street.
+
+Under the Cat and Mouse Act a paroled prisoner can be thus arrested
+without the formality of a warrant, nor does the time she has spent at
+liberty, in regaining her health, count off from her prison sentence.
+The magistrate at Bow Street was therefore quite within his legal rights
+when he ordered me returned to Holloway. I felt it my duty,
+nevertheless, to point out to him the inhumanity of his act. I said to
+him: "I was released from Holloway on account of my health. Since then I
+have been treated exactly as if I were in prison. It has become
+absolutely impossible for any one to recover health under such
+conditions, and this morning I decided to make this protest against a
+state of affairs unparalleled in a civilised country."
+
+[Illustration: RE-ARREST OF MRS. PANKHURST AT WOKING
+
+_May 26, 1913_]
+
+The magistrate replied formally: "You quite understand what the position
+is. You have been arrested on this warrant and all I have to do is to
+make an order recommending you to prison."
+
+"I think" I said, "that you should do so, with a full sense of
+responsibility. If I am taken to Holloway on your warrant I shall resume
+the protest I made before which led to my release, and I shall go on
+indefinitely until I die, or until the Government decide, since they
+have taken upon themselves to employ you and other people to administer
+the laws, that they must recognise women as citizens and give them some
+control over the laws of this country."
+
+It was a five days' hunger strike this time, because the extreme
+weakness of my condition made it impossible for me to endure a longer
+term. I was released on May 30th on a seven days' licence, and in a
+half-alive state was again carried to a nursing home. Less than a week
+later, while I was still bed-ridden, a terrible event occurred, one that
+should have shaken the stolid British public into a realisation of the
+seriousness of the situation precipitated by the Government. Emily
+Wilding Davison, who had been associated with the militant movement
+since 1906, gave up her life for the women's cause by throwing herself
+in the path of the thing, next to property, held most sacred to
+Englishmen--sport. Miss Davison went to the races at Epsom, and
+breaking through the barriers which separated the vast crowds from the
+race course, rushed in the path of the galloping horses and caught the
+bridle of the King's horse, which was leading all the others. The horse
+fell, throwing his jockey and crushing Miss Davison in such shocking
+fashion that she was carried from the course in a dying condition.
+Everything possible was done to save her life. The great surgeon, Mr.
+Mansell Moullin, put everything aside and devoted himself to her case,
+but though he operated most skilfully, the injuries she had received
+were so frightful that she died four days later without once having
+recovered consciousness. Members of the Union were beside her when she
+breathed her last, on June 8th, and on June 14th they gave her a great
+public funeral in London. Crowds lined the streets as the funeral car,
+followed by thousands of women, passed slowly and sadly to St. George's
+Church, Bloomsbury, where the memorial services were held.
+
+Emily Wilding Davison was a character almost inevitably developed by a
+struggle such as ours. She was a B. A. of London University, and had
+taken first class honours at Oxford in English Language and Literature.
+Yet the women's cause made such an appeal to her reason and her
+sympathies that she put every intellectual and social appeal aside and
+devoted herself untiringly and fearlessly to the work of the Union. She
+had suffered many imprisonments, had been forcibly fed and most brutally
+treated. On one occasion when she had barricaded her cell against the
+prison doctors, a hose pipe was turned on her from the window and she
+was drenched and all but drowned in the icy water while workmen were
+breaking down her cell door. Miss Davison, after this experience,
+expressed to several of her friends the deep conviction that now, as in
+days called uncivilised, the conscience of the people would awaken only
+to the sacrifice of a human life. At one time in prison she tried to
+kill herself by throwing herself head-long from one of the upper
+galleries, but she succeeded only in sustaining cruel injuries. Ever
+after that time she clung to her conviction that one great tragedy, the
+deliberate throwing into the breach of a human life, would put an end to
+the intolerable torture of women. And so she threw herself at the King's
+horse, in full view of the King and Queen and a great multitude of their
+Majesties' subjects, offering up her life as a petition to the King,
+praying for the release of suffering women throughout England and the
+world. No one can possibly doubt that that prayer can forever remain
+unanswered, for she took it straight to the Throne of the King of all
+the worlds.
+
+The death of Miss Davison was a great shock to me and a very great grief
+as well, and although I was scarcely able to leave my bed I determined
+to risk everything to attend her funeral. This was not to be, however,
+for as I left the house I was again arrested by detectives who lay in
+waiting. Again the farce of trying to make me serve a three years'
+sentence was undertaken. But now the militant women had discovered a new
+and more terrible weapon with which to defy the unjust laws of England,
+and this weapon--the thirst strike--I turned against my gaolers with
+such effect that they were forced within three days to release me.
+
+The hunger strike I have described as a dreadful ordeal, but it is a
+mild experience compared with the thirst strike, which is from beginning
+to end simple and unmitigated torture. Hunger striking reduces a
+prisoner's weight very quickly, but thirst striking reduces weight so
+alarmingly fast that prison doctors were at first thrown into absolute
+panic of fright. Later they became somewhat hardened, but even now they
+regard the thirst strike with terror. I am not sure that I can convey to
+the reader the effect of days spent without a single drop of water taken
+into the system. The body cannot endure loss of moisture. It cries out
+in protest with every nerve. The muscles waste, the skin becomes
+shrunken and flabby, the facial appearance alters horribly, all these
+outward symptoms being eloquent of the acute suffering of the entire
+physical being. Every natural function is, of course, suspended, and the
+poisons which are unable to pass out of the body are retained and
+absorbed. The body becomes cold and shivery, there is constant headache
+and nausea, and sometimes there is fever. The mouth and tongue become
+coated and swollen, the throat thickens and the voice sinks to a thready
+whisper.
+
+When, at the end of the third day of my first thirst strike, I was sent
+home I was in a condition of jaundice from which I have never completely
+recovered. So badly was I affected that the prison authorities made no
+attempt to arrest me for nearly a month after my release. On July 13th I
+felt strong enough once more to protest against the odious Cat and Mouse
+Act, and, with Miss Annie Kenney, who was also at liberty "on medical
+grounds," I went to a meeting at the London Pavillion. At the close of
+the meeting, during which Miss Kenney's prison licence was auctioned off
+for £12, we attempted for the first time the open escape which we have
+so frequently since effected. Miss Kenney, from the platform, announced
+that we should openly leave the hall, and she forthwith walked coolly
+down into the audience. The police rushed in in overwhelming numbers,
+and after a desperate fight, succeeded in capturing her. Other
+detectives and policemen hurried to the side door of the hall to
+intercept me, but I disappointed them by leaving by the front door and
+escaping to a friend's house in a cab.
+
+The police soon traced me to the house of my friend, the distinguished
+scientist, Mrs. Hertha Ayrton, and the place straightway became a
+besieged fortress. Day and night the house was surrounded, not only by
+police, but by crowds of women sympathisers. On the Saturday following
+my appearance at the Pavillion we gave the police a bit of excitement of
+a kind they do not relish. A cab drove up to Mrs. Ayrton's door, and
+several well-known members of the Union alighted and hurried indoors. At
+once the word was circulated that a rescue was being attempted, and the
+police drew resolutely around the cab. Soon a veiled woman appeared in
+the doorway, surrounded by Suffragettes, who, when the veiled lady
+attempted to get into the cab, resisted with all their strength the
+efforts of the police to lay hands upon her. The cry went up from all
+sides: "They are arresting Mrs. Pankhurst!" Something very like a free
+fight ensued, occupying all the attention of the police who were not in
+the immediate vicinity of the cab. The men surrounding that rocking
+vehicle succeeded in tearing the veiled figure from the arms of the
+other women and piling into the cab ordered the chauffeur to drive full
+speed to Bow Street. Before they reached their destination, however, the
+veiled lady raised her veil--alas, it was not Mrs. Pankhurst, who by
+that time was speeding away in another taxicab in quite another
+direction.
+
+Our ruse infuriated the police, and they determined to arrest me at my
+first public appearance, which was at the Pavillion on the Monday
+following the episode just related. When I reached the Pavillion I found
+it literally surrounded by police, hundreds of them. I managed to slip
+past the outside cordon, but Scotland Yard had its best men inside the
+hall, and I was not permitted to reach the platform. Surrounded by plain
+clothes men, batons drawn, I could not escape, but I called out to the
+women that I was being taken, and so valiantly did they rush to the
+rescue that the police had their hands full for nearly half an hour
+before they got me into a taxicab bound for Holloway. Six women were
+arrested that day, and many more than six policemen were temporarily
+incapacitated for duty.
+
+By this time I had made up my mind that I would not only resist staying
+in prison, I would resist to the utmost of my ability going to prison.
+Therefore, when we reached Holloway I refused to get out of the cab,
+declaring to my captors that I would no longer acquiesce in the slow
+judicial murder to which the Government were subjecting women. I was
+lifted out and carried into a cell in the convicted hospital wing of the
+gaol. The wardresses who were on duty there spoke with some kindness to
+me, suggesting that, as I was very apparently exhausted and ill, I
+should do well to undress and go to bed. "No," I replied, "I shall not
+go to bed, not once while I am kept here. I am weary of this brutal
+game, and I intend to end it."
+
+Without undressing, I lay down on the outside of the bed. Later in the
+evening the prison doctor visited me, but I refused to be examined. In
+the morning he came again, and with him the Governor and the head
+wardress. As I had taken neither food nor water since the previous day
+my appearance had become altered to such an extent that the doctor was
+plainly perturbed. He begged me, "as a small concession," to allow him
+to feel my pulse, but I shook my head, and they left me alone for the
+day. That night I was so ill that I felt some alarm for my own
+condition, but I knew of nothing that could be done except to wait. On
+Wednesday morning the Governor came again and asked me with an
+assumption of carelessness if it were true that I was refusing both food
+and water. "It is true," I said, and he replied brutally: "You are very
+cheap to keep." Then, as if the thing were not a ridiculous farce, he
+announced that I was sentenced to close confinement for three days,
+with deprivation of all privileges, after which he left my cell.
+
+Twice that day the doctor visited me, but I would not allow him to touch
+me. Later came a medical officer from the Home Office, to which I had
+complained, as I had complained to the Governor and the prison doctor,
+of the pain I still suffered from the rough treatment I had received at
+the Pavillion. Both of the medical men insisted that I allow them to
+examine me, but I said: "I will not be examined by you because your
+intention is not to help me as a patient, but merely to ascertain how
+much longer it will be possible to keep me alive in prison. I am not
+prepared to assist you or the Government in any such way. I am not
+prepared to relieve you of any responsibility in this matter." I added
+that it must be quite obvious that I was very ill and unfit to be
+confined in prison. They hesitated for a moment or two, then left me.
+
+Wednesday night was a long nightmare of suffering, and by Thursday
+morning I must have presented an almost mummified appearance. From the
+faces of the Governor and the doctor when they came into my cell and
+looked at me I thought that they would at once arrange for my release.
+But the hours passed and no order for release came. I decided that I
+must force my release, and I got up from the bed where I had been lying
+and began to stagger up and down the cell. When all strength failed me
+and I could keep my feet no longer I lay down on the stone floor, and
+there, at four in the afternoon, they found me, gasping and half
+unconscious. And then they sent me away. I was in a very weakened
+condition this time, and had to be treated with saline solutions to save
+my life. I felt, however, that I had broken my prison walls for a time
+at least, and so this proved. It was on July 24th that I was released. A
+few days later I was borne in an invalid's chair to the platform of the
+London Pavillion. I could not speak, but I was there, as I had promised
+to be. My licence, which by this time I had ceased to tear up because it
+had an auction value, was sold to an American present for the sum of one
+hundred pounds. I had told the Governor on leaving that I intended to
+sell the licence and to spend the money for militant purposes, but I had
+not expected to raise such a splendid sum as one hundred pounds. I shall
+always remember the generosity of that unknown American friend.
+
+A great medical congress was being held in London in the summer of 1913,
+and on August 11th we held a large meeting at Kingsway Hall, which was
+attended by hundreds of visiting doctors. I addressed this meeting, at
+which a ringing resolution against forcible feeding was passed, and I
+was allowed to go home without police interference. It was, as a matter
+of fact, the second time during that month that I had spoken in public
+without molestation. The presence of so many distinguished medical men
+in London may have suggested to the authorities that I had better be
+left alone for the time being. At all events I was left alone, and late
+in the month I went, quite publicly, to Paris, to see my daughter
+Christabel and plan with her the campaign for the coming autumn. I
+needed rest after the struggles of the past five months, during which I
+had served, of my three years' prison sentence, not quite three weeks.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[5] Mr. Lansbury shortly before this had resigned his seat in Parliament
+and had gone to his constituents on the question of women's suffrage.
+Both the Liberal and the Conservative parties had united against him,
+with the result that a Unionist candidate was returned in his place. Mr.
+Lloyd-George publicly rejoiced in the result of this election, saying
+that Mr. Marsh, the Conservative candidate, had been his man. The Labour
+Party, in Parliament and out, meekly accepted this piece of Liberal
+chicanery without protest.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+The two months of the summer of 1913 which were spent with my daughter
+in Paris were almost the last days of peace and rest I have been
+destined since to enjoy. I spent the days, or some hours of them, in the
+initial preparation of this volume, because it seemed to me that I had a
+duty to perform in giving to the world my own plain statement of the
+events which have led up to the women's revolution in England. Other
+histories of the militant movement will undoubtedly be written; in times
+to come when in all constitutional countries of the world, women's votes
+will be as universally accepted as men's votes are now; when men and
+women occupy the world of industry on equal terms, as co-workers rather
+than as cut-throat competitors; when, in a word, all the dreadful and
+criminal discriminations which exist now between the sexes are
+abolished, as they must one day be abolished, the historian will be able
+to sit down in leisurely fashion and do full justice to the strange
+story of how the women of England took up arms against the blind and
+obstinate Government of England and fought their way to political
+freedom. I should like to live long enough to read such a history,
+calmly considered, carefully analysed, conscientiously set forth. It
+will be a better book to read than this one, written, as it were, in
+camp between battles. But perhaps this one, hastily prepared as it has
+been, will give the reader of the future a clearer impression of the
+strenuousness and the desperation of the conflict, and also something of
+the heretofore undreamed of courage and fighting strength of women, who,
+having learned the joy of battle, lose all sense of fear and continue
+their struggle up to and past the gates of death, never flinching at any
+step of the way.
+
+Every step since that meeting in October, 1912, when we definitely
+declared war on the peace of England, has been beset with danger and
+difficulty, often unexpected and undeclared. In October, 1913, I sailed
+in the French liner, _La Provence_, for my third visit to the United
+States. My intention was published in the public press of England,
+France and America. No attempt at concealment of my purpose was made,
+and in fact, my departure was witnessed by two men from Scotland Yard.
+Some hints had reached my ears that an attempt would be made by the
+Immigration Officers at the port of New York to exclude me as an
+undesirable alien, but I gave little credit to these reports. American
+friends wrote and cabled encouraging words, and so I passed my time
+aboard ship quite peacefully, working part of the time, resting also
+against the fatigue always attendant on a lecture tour.
+
+[Illustration: MRS. PANKHURST AND CHRISTABEL IN THE GARDEN OF
+CHRISTABEL'S HOME IN PARIS]
+
+We came to anchor in the harbour of New York on October 26th, and there,
+to my astonishment, the Immigration authorities notified me that I was
+ordered to Ellis Island to appear before a Board of Special Inquiry. The
+officers who served the order of detention did so with all courtesy,
+even with a certain air of reluctance. They allowed my American
+travelling companion, Mrs. Rheta Childe Dorr, to accompany me to the
+Island, but no one, not even the solicitor sent by Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont
+to defend me, was permitted to attend me before the Board of Special
+Inquiry. I went before these three men quite alone, as many a poor,
+friendless woman, without any of my resources, has had to appear. The
+moment of my entrance to the room I knew that extraordinary means had
+been employed against me, for on the desk behind which the Board sat I
+saw a complete _dossier_ of my case in English legal papers. These
+papers may have been supplied by Scotland Yard, or they may have been
+supplied by the Government. I cannot tell, of course. They sufficed to
+convince the Board of Special Inquiry that I was a person of doubtful
+character, to say the least of it, and I was informed that I should have
+to be detained until the higher authorities at Washington examined my
+case. Everything was done to make me comfortable, the rooms of the
+Commissioner of Immigration being turned over to me and my companion.
+The very men who found me guilty of moral obloquy--something of which no
+British jury has ever yet accused me--put themselves out in a number of
+ways to make my detention agreeable. I was escorted all over the Island
+and through the quarters assigned detained immigrants, whose right to
+land in the United States is in question. The huge dining-rooms, the
+spotless kitchens and the admirably varied bill of fare interested and
+impressed me. Nothing like them exists in any English institution.
+
+I remained at Ellis Island two and a half days, long enough for the
+Commissioner of Immigration at Washington to take my case to the
+President who instantly ordered my release. Whoever was responsible for
+my detention entirely overlooked the advertising value of the incident.
+My lecture tour was made much more successful for it and I embarked for
+England late in November with a very generous American contribution to
+our war chest, a contribution, alas, that I was not permitted to deliver
+in person.
+
+The night before the White Star liner _Majestic_ reached Plymouth a
+wireless message from headquarters informed me that the Government had
+decided to arrest me on my arrival. The arrest was made, under very
+dramatic conditions, the next day shortly before noon. The steamer came
+to anchor in the outer harbour, and we saw at once that the bay, usually
+so animated with passing vessels, had been cleared of all craft. Far in
+the distance the tender, which on other occasions had always met the
+steamer, rested at anchor between two huge grey warships. For a moment
+or two the scene halted, the passengers crowding to the deckrails in
+speechless curiosity to see what was to happen next. Suddenly a
+fisherman's dory, power driven, dashed across the harbour, directly
+under the noses of the grim war vessels. Two women, spray drenched,
+stood up in the boat, and as it ploughed swiftly past our steamer the
+women called out to me: "The Cats are here, Mrs. Pankhurst! They're
+close on you--" Their voices trailed away into the mist and we heard no
+more. Within a minute or two a frightened ship's boy appeared on deck
+and delivered a message from the purser asking me to step down to his
+office. I answered that I would certainly do nothing of the kind, and
+next the police swarmed out on deck and I heard, for the fifth time that
+I was arrested under the Cat and Mouse Act. They had sent five men from
+Scotland Yard, two men from Plymouth and a wardress from Holloway, a
+sufficient number, it will be allowed, to take one woman from a ship
+anchored two miles out at sea.
+
+Following my firm resolve not to assist in any way the enforcing of the
+infamous law, I refused to go with the men, who thereupon picked me up
+and carried me to the waiting police tender. We steamed some miles up
+the Cornish coast, the police refusing absolutely to tell me whither
+they were conveying me, and finally disembarked at Bull Point, a
+Government landing-stage, closed to the general public. Here a motor car
+was waiting, and accompanied by my bodyguard from Scotland Yard and
+Holloway, I was driven across Dartmoor to Exeter, where I had a not
+unendurable imprisonment and hunger strike of four days. Everyone from
+the Governor of the prison to the wardresses were openly sympathetic and
+kind, and I was told by one confidential official that they kept me only
+because they had orders to do so until after the great meeting at
+Empress Theatre, Earls Court, London, which had been arranged as a
+welcome home for me. The meeting was held on the Sunday night following
+my arrest, and the great sum of £15,000 was poured into the coffers of
+militancy. This included the £4,500 which had been collected during my
+American tour.
+
+Several days after my release from Exeter I went openly to Paris to
+confer with my daughter on matters relating to the campaign about to
+open, returning to attend a W. S. P. U. meeting on the day before my
+license expired. Nevertheless the boat train carriage in which I
+travelled with my doctor and nurse was invaded at Dover town by two
+detectives who told me to consider myself under arrest. We were making
+tea when the men entered, but this we immediately threw out of the
+window, because a hunger strike always began at the instant of arrest.
+We never compromised at all, but resisted from the very first moment of
+attack.
+
+The reason for this uncalled for arrest at Dover was the fear on the
+part of the police of the body guard of women, just then organised for
+the expressed purpose of resisting attempts to arrest me. That the
+police, as well as the Government were afraid to risk encountering women
+who were not afraid to fight we had had abundant testimony. We certainly
+had it on this occasion, for knowing that the body guard was waiting at
+Victoria Station, the authorities had cut off all approaches to the
+arrival platform and the place was guarded by battalions of police. Not
+a passenger was permitted to leave a carriage until I had been carried
+across the arrival platform between a double line of police and
+detectives and thrown into a forty horse power motor car, guarded within
+by two plain clothes men and a wardress, and without by three more
+policemen. Around this motor car were twelve taxi-cabs filled with plain
+clothes men, four to each vehicle, and three guarding the outside, not
+to mention the driver, who was also in the employ of the police
+department. Detectives on motor cycles were on guard at various points
+ready to follow any rescuing taxicab.
+
+Arrived at Holloway I was again lifted from the car and taken to the
+reception room and placed on the floor in a state of great exhaustion.
+When the doctor came in and told me curtly to stand up I was obliged to
+tell him that I could not stand. I utterly refused to be examined,
+saying that I was resolved to make the Government assume full
+responsibility for my condition. "I refuse to be examined by you or any
+prison doctor," I declared, "and I do this as a protest against my
+sentence, and against my being here at all. I no longer recognise a
+prison doctor as a medical man in the proper sense of the word. I have
+withdrawn my consent to be governed by the rules of prison; I refuse to
+recognise the authority of any prison official, and I therefore make it
+impossible for the Government to carry out the sentence they have
+imposed upon me."
+
+Wardresses were summoned, I was placed in an invalid chair and so
+carried up three flights of stairs and put into an unwarmed cell with a
+concrete floor. Refusing to leave the chair I was lifted out and placed
+on the bed, where I lay all night without removing my coat or loosening
+my garments. It was on a Saturday that the arrest had been made, and I
+was kept in prison until the following Wednesday morning. During all
+that time no food or water passed my lips, and I added to this the sleep
+strike, which means that as far as was humanly possible I refused all
+sleep and rest. For two nights I sat or lay on the concrete floor,
+resolutely refusing the oft repeated offers of medical examination. "You
+are not a doctor," I told the man. "You are a Government torturer, and
+all you want to do is to satisfy yourself that I am not quite ready to
+die." The doctor, a new man since my last imprisonment, flushed and
+looked extremely unhappy. "I suppose you do think that," he mumbled.
+
+On Tuesday morning the Governor came to look at me, and no doubt I
+presented by that time a fairly bad appearance. At least I gathered as
+much from the alarmed expression of the wardress who accompanied him. To
+the Governor I made the simple announcement that I was ready to leave
+prison and that I intended to leave very soon, dead or alive. I told him
+that from that moment I should not even rest on the concrete floor, but
+should walk my cell until I was released or until I died from
+exhaustion. All day I kept to this resolution, pacing up and down the
+narrow cell, many times stumbling and falling, until the doctor came in
+at evening to tell me that I was ordered released on the following
+morning. Then I loosened my gown and lay down, absolutely spent, and
+fell almost instantly into a death-like sleep. The next morning a motor
+ambulance took me to the Kingsway headquarters where a hospital room had
+been arranged for my reception. The two imprisonments in less than ten
+days had made terrible drafts on my strength, and the coldness of the
+Holloway cell had brought on a painful neuralgia. It was many days
+before I recovered even a tithe of my usual health.
+
+These two arrests resulted exactly as the Government should have known
+that they would result, in a great outbreak of fresh militancy. As soon
+as the news spread that I had been taken at Plymouth a huge fire broke
+out in the timber yards at Richmond Walk, Devenport, and an acre and a
+half of timber, beside a pleasure fair and a scenic railway adjacent, to
+the value of thousands of pounds was destroyed. No one ever discovered
+the cause of the fire, the greatest that ever occurred in the
+neighbourhood, but tied to one of the railings was a copy of the
+_Suffragette_ and to another railing two cards, on one of which was
+written a message to the Government: "How dare you arrest Mrs. Pankhurst
+and allow Sir Edward Carson and Mr. Bonar Law to go free?" The second
+card bore the words: "Our reply to the torture of Mrs. Pankhurst, and
+her cowardly arrest at Plymouth."
+
+Besides this fire, which waged fiercely from midnight until dawn, a
+large unoccupied house at Bristol was destroyed by fire; a fine
+residence in Scotland, also unoccupied, was badly damaged by fire; St.
+Anne's Church in a suburb of Liverpool was partly destroyed; and many
+pillar boxes in London, Edinburgh, Derby and other cities were fired. In
+churches all over the Kingdom our women created consternation by
+interpolating into the services reverently spoken prayers for prisoners
+who were suffering for conscience' sake. The reader no doubt has heard
+of these interruptions, and if so he has read of brawling, shrieking
+women, breaking into the sanctity of religious services, and creating
+riot in the House of God. I think the reader should know exactly what
+does happen when militants, who are usually religious women, interrupt
+church services. On the Sunday when I was in Holloway, following my
+arrest at Dover, certain women attending the afternoon service at
+Westminster Abbey, chanted in concert the following prayer: "God save
+Emmeline Pankhurst, help us with Thy love and strength to guard her,
+spare those who suffer for conscience' sake. Hear us when we pray to
+Thee." They had hardly finished this prayer when vergers fell upon them
+and with great violence hustled them out of the Abbey. One kneeling man,
+who happened to be near one of the women, forgot his Christian
+intercessions long enough to beat her in the face with his fists before
+the vergers came.
+
+Similar scenes have taken place in churches and cathedrals throughout
+England and Scotland, and in many instances the women have been most
+barbarously treated by vergers and members of the congregations. In
+other cases the women not only have been left unmolested, but have been
+allowed to finish their prayers amid deep and sympathetic silence. Some
+clergymen have even been brave enough to add a reverent amen to these
+prayers for women in prison, and it has happened that clergymen have
+voluntarily offered prayers for us. The Church as a whole, however, has
+undoubtedly failed to live up to its obligation to demand justice for
+women, and to protest against the torture of forcible feeding. During
+the year just closing we sent many deputations to Church authorities,
+the Bishops, one after another having been visited in this manner. Some
+of the Bishops, including the reactionary Archbishop of Canterbury,
+refused to accord the desired interview, and when that happened, the
+answer of the deputation was to sit on the doorstep of the episcopal
+residence until surrender followed--as it invariably did.
+
+As Holloway Gaol is within his diocese, the Bishop of London was visited
+by the W. S. P. U. and the demand was made that the Bishop himself
+should witness forcible feeding in order to realise the horror of the
+proceeding. He did visit two of the tortured women, but he did not see
+them forcibly fed, and when he came out he gave the public an account of
+his interview with them which was in effect the Government's version of
+the facts. The W. S. P. U. was naturally indignant, while all the
+Government's friends hailed the Bishop as a supporter of the policy of
+torture. Only those who have suffered the pain and agony, not to speak
+of the moral humiliation of forcible feeding can realise the depths of
+the iniquity which the Bishop of London was manoeuvred by the
+Government to whitewash. It may be true, as the Bishop comforted himself
+by saying, that the victims of forcible feeding suffered the more
+because they struggled under the process. But, as Mary Richardson wrote
+in the _Suffragette_, to expect a victim not to struggle was the same as
+telling her that she would suffer less if she did not jump on getting a
+cinder in her eye. "The principle," declared Miss Richardson, "is the
+same. One struggles because the pain is excruciating, and the nerves of
+the eyes, ears and face are so tortured that it would be impossible not
+to resist to the uttermost. One struggles, also, because of another
+reason--a moral reason--for forcible feeding is an immoral assault as
+well as a painful physical one, and to remain passive under it would
+give one the feeling of sin; the sin of concurrence. One's whole nature
+is revolted; resistance is therefore inevitable."
+
+I think it proper here to explain also the policy upon which we embarked
+in 1914 of taking our cause directly to the King. The reader has perhaps
+heard of Suffragette "insults" to King George and Queen Mary, and it is
+but just that he should hear a direct account of how these "insults" are
+offered. Several isolated attempts had been made to present petitions to
+the King, once when he was on his way to Westminster to open Parliament,
+and again on an occasion when he paid a visit to Bristol. On the latter
+occasion the woman who tried to present the petition was assaulted by
+one of the King's equerries, who struck her with the flat of his sword.
+
+We finally resolved on the policy of direct petition to the king because
+we had been forced to abandon all hope of successful petitioning to his
+Ministers. Tricked and betrayed at every turn by the Liberal Government,
+we announced that we would not again put even a pretence of confidence
+in them. We would carry our demand for justice to the throne of the
+Monarch. Late in December, 1913, while I was in prison for the second
+time since my return to England, a great gala performance was given at
+Covent Garden, the opera being the Jeanne d'Arc of Raymond Rôze. The
+King and Queen and the entire Court were present, and the scene was
+expected to be one of unusual brilliance. Our women took advantage of
+the occasion to make one of the most successful demonstrations of the
+year. A box was secured directly opposite the Royal Box, and this was
+occupied by three women, beautifully gowned. On entering they had
+managed, without attracting the slightest attention, to lock and
+barricade the door, and at the close of the first act, as soon as the
+orchestra had disappeared, the women stood up, and one of them, with the
+aid of a megaphone, addressed the King. Calling attention to the
+impressive scenes on the stage, the speaker told the King that women
+were to-day fighting, as Joan of Arc fought centuries ago, for human
+liberty, and that they, like the maid of Orleans, were being tortured
+and done to death, in the name of the King, in the name of the Church,
+and with the full knowledge and responsibility of established
+Government. At this very hour the leader of these fighters in the army
+of liberty was being held in prison and tortured by the King's
+authority.
+
+The vast audience was thrown into a panic of excitement and horror, and
+amid a perfect turmoil of cries and adjurations, the door of the box was
+finally broken down and the women ejected. As soon as they had left the
+house others of our women, to the number of forty or more, who had been
+sitting quietly in an upper gallery, rose to their feet and rained
+suffrage literature on the heads of the audience below. It was fully
+three quarters of an hour before the excitement subsided and the singers
+could go on with the opera.
+
+The sensation caused by this direct address to Royalty inspired us to
+make a second attempt to arouse the King's conscience, and early in
+January, as soon as Parliament re-assembled, we announced that I would
+personally lead a deputation to Buckingham Palace. The plan was welcomed
+with enthusiasm by our members and a very large number of women
+volunteered to join the deputation, which was intended to make a protest
+against three things--the continued disfranchisement of women; the
+forcible feeding and the cat and mouse torture of those who were
+fighting against this injustice; and the scandalous manner in which the
+Government, while coercing and torturing militant women, were allowing
+perfect freedom to the men opponents of Home Rule in Ireland, men who
+openly announced that they were about to carry out a policy, not merely
+of attacking property, but of destroying human life.
+
+I wrote a letter to the King, conveying to him "the respectful and loyal
+request of the Women's Social and Political Union that Your Majesty will
+give audience to a deputation of women." The letter went on: "The
+deputation desire to submit to Your Majesty in person their claim to the
+Parliamentary vote, which is the only protection against the grievous
+industrial and social wrongs that women suffer; is the symbol and
+guarantee of British citizenship; and means the recognition of women's
+equal dignity and worth, as members of our great Empire.
+
+"The Deputation will further lay before Your Majesty a complaint of the
+mediæval and barbarous methods of torture whereby Your Majesty's
+Ministers are seeking to repress women's revolt against the deprivation
+of citizen rights--a revolt as noble and glorious in its spirit and
+purpose as any of those past struggles for liberty which are the pride
+of the British race.
+
+"We have been told by the unthinking--by those who are heedless of the
+constitutional principles upon which is based our loyal request for an
+audience of Your Majesty in person--that our conversation should be with
+Your Majesty's Ministers.
+
+"We repudiate this suggestion. In the first place, it would not only be
+repugnant to our womanly sense of dignity, but it would be absurd and
+futile for us to interview the very men against whom we bring the
+accusations of betraying the Women's Cause and torturing those who fight
+for that Cause.
+
+"In the second place, we will not be referred to, and we will not
+recognise the authority of men who, in our eyes, have no legal or
+constitutional standing in the matter, because we have not been
+consulted as to their election to Parliament nor as to their appointment
+as Ministers of the Crown."
+
+I then cited as a precedent in support of our claim to be heard by the
+King in person, the case of the Deputation of Irish Catholics, which, in
+the year 1793, was received by King George III in person.
+
+I further said:
+
+"Our right as women to be heard and to be aided by Your Majesty is far
+stronger than any such right possessed by men, because it is based upon
+our lack of every other constitutional means of securing the redress of
+our grievances. We have no power to vote for Members of Parliament, and
+therefore for us there is no House of Commons. We have no voice in the
+House of Lords. But we have a King, and to him we make our appeal.
+
+"Constitutionally speaking, we are, as voteless women, living in the
+time when the power of the Monarch was unlimited. In that old time,
+which is passed for men though not for women, men who were oppressed had
+recourse to the King--the source of power, of justice, and of reform.
+
+"Precisely in the same way we now claim the right to come to the foot of
+the Throne and to make of the King in person our demand for the redress
+of the political grievance which we cannot, and will not, any longer
+tolerate.
+
+"Because women are voteless, there are in our midst to-day sweated
+workers, white slaves, outraged children, and innocent mothers and their
+babes stricken by horrible disease. It is for the sake and in the cause
+of these unhappy members of our sex, that we ask of Your Majesty the
+audience that we are confident will be granted to us."
+
+It was some days before we had the answer to this letter, and in the
+meantime some uncommonly stirring and painful occurrences attracted the
+public attention.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+For months before my return to England from my American lecture tour,
+the Ulster situation had been increasingly serious. Sir Edward Carson
+and his followers had declared that if Home Rule government should be
+created and set up in Dublin, they would--law or no law--establish a
+rival and independent Government in Ulster. It was known that arms and
+ammunition were being shipped to Ireland, and that men--and women too,
+for that matter--were drilling and otherwise getting ready for civil
+war. The W. S. P. U. approached Sir Edward Carson and asked him if the
+proposed Ulster Government would give equal voting rights to women. We
+frankly declared that in case the Ulster men alone were to have the
+vote, that we should deal with "King Carson" and his colleagues exactly
+in the same manner that we had adopted towards the British Government
+centred at Westminster. Sir Edward Carson at first promised us that the
+rebel Ulster Government, should it come into existence, would give votes
+to Ulster women. This pledge was later repudiated, and in the early
+winter months of 1914 militancy appeared in Ulster. It had been raging
+in Scotland for some time, and now the imprisoned Suffragettes in that
+country were being forcibly fed as in England. The answer to this was,
+of course, more militancy. The ancient Scottish church of Whitekirk, a
+relic of pre-Reformation days, was destroyed by fire. Several unoccupied
+country houses were also burned.
+
+It was about this time, February, 1914, that I undertook a series of
+meetings outside London, the first of which was to be held in Glasgow,
+in the St. Andrews Hall, which holds many thousands of people. In order
+that I might be free on the night of the meeting, I left London unknown
+to the police, in a motor car. In spite of all efforts to apprehend me I
+succeeded in reaching Glasgow and in getting to the platform of St.
+Andrews' where I found myself face to face with an enormous, and
+manifestly sympathetic audience.
+
+As it was suspected that the police might rush the platform, plans had
+been made to offer resistance, and the bodyguard was present in force.
+My speech was one of the shortest I have ever made. I said:
+
+"I have kept my promise, and in spite of His Majesty's Government I am
+here to-night. Very few people in this audience, very few people in this
+country, know how much of the nation's money is being spent to silence
+women. But the wit and ingenuity of women is overcoming the power and
+money of the British Government. It is well that we should have this
+meeting to-night, because to-day is a memorable day in the annals of the
+United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. To-day in the House of
+Commons has been witnessed the triumph of militancy--men's
+militancy--and to-night I hope to make it clear to the people in this
+meeting that if there is any distinction to be drawn at all between
+militancy in Ulster and the militancy of women, it is all to the
+advantage of the women. Our greatest task in this women's movement is to
+prove that we are human beings like men, and every stage of our fight is
+forcing home that very difficult lesson into the minds of men, and
+especially into the minds of politicians. I propose to-night at this
+political meeting to have a text. Texts are usually given from pulpits,
+but perhaps you will forgive me if I have a text to-night. My text is:
+'Equal justice for men and women, equal political justice, equal legal
+justice, equal industrial justice, and equal social justice.' I want as
+clearly and briefly as I can to make it clear to you to-night that if it
+is justifiable to fight for common ordinary equal justice, then women
+have ample justification, nay, have greater justification, for
+revolution and rebellion, than ever men have had in the whole history of
+the human race. Now that is a big contention to make, but I am going to
+prove it. You get the proof of the political injustice--"
+
+As I finished the word "injustice," a steward uttered a warning shout,
+there was a tramp of heavy feet, and a large body of police burst into
+the hall, and rushed up to the platform, drawing their truncheons as
+they ran. Headed by detectives from Scotland Yard, they surged in on all
+sides, but as the foremost members attempted to storm the platform, they
+were met by a fusillade of flower-pots, tables, chairs, and other
+missiles. They seized the platform railing, in order to tear it down,
+but they found that under the decorations barbed wires were concealed.
+This gave them pause for a moment.
+
+Meanwhile, more of the invading host came from other directions. The
+bodyguard and members of the audience vigorously repelled the attack,
+wielding clubs, batons, poles, planks, or anything they could seize,
+while the police laid about right and left with their batons, their
+violence being far the greater. Men and women were seen on all sides
+with blood streaming down their faces, and there were cries for a
+doctor. In the middle of the struggle, several revolver shots rang out,
+and the woman who was firing the revolver--which I should explain was
+loaded with blank cartridges only--was able to terrorise and keep at bay
+a whole body of police.
+
+I had been surrounded by members of the bodyguard, who hurried me
+towards the stairs from the platform. The police, however, overtook us,
+and in spite of the resistance of the bodyguard, they seized me and
+dragged me down the narrow stair at the back of the hall. There a cab
+was waiting. I was pushed violently into it, and thrown on the floor,
+the seats being occupied by as many constables as could crowd inside.
+
+The meeting was left in a state of tremendous turmoil, and the people of
+Glasgow who were present expressed their sense of outrage at the
+behavior of the police, who, acting under the Government's instructions,
+had so disgraced the city. General Drummond, who was present on the
+platform, took hold of the situation and delivered a rousing speech, in
+which she exhorted the audience to make the Government feel the force of
+their indignation.
+
+I was kept in the Glasgow police-cells all night, and the next morning
+was taken, a hunger and thirst striking prisoner, to Holloway, where I
+remained for five memorable days. This was the seventh attempt the
+Government had made to make me serve a three years' term of penal
+servitude on a conspiracy charge, in connection with the blowing up of
+Mr. Lloyd-George's country house. In the eleven and a half months since
+I had received that sentence I had spent just thirty days in prison. On
+March 14th I was again released, still suffering severely, not only from
+the hunger and thirst strike, but from injuries received at the time of
+my brutal arrest in Glasgow.
+
+The answer to that arrest had been swift and strong. In Bristol, the
+scene of great riots and destruction when men were fighting for votes, a
+large timber-yard was burnt. In Scotland a mansion was destroyed by
+fire. A milder protest consisted of a raid upon the house of the Home
+Secretary, in the course of which eighteen windows were broken.
+
+The greatest and most startling of all protests hitherto made was the
+attack at this time on the Rokeby "Venus" in the National Gallery. Mary
+Richardson, the young woman who carried out this protest, is possessed
+of a very fine artistic sense, and nothing but the most compelling sense
+of duty would have moved her to the deed. Miss Richardson being placed
+on trial, made a moving address to the Court, in the course of which she
+said that her act was premeditated, and that she had thought it over
+very seriously before it was undertaken. She added: "I have been a
+student of art, and I suppose care as much for art as any one who was in
+the gallery when I made my protest. But I care more for justice than I
+do for art, and I firmly believe than when a nation shuts its eyes to
+justice, and prefers to have women who are fighting for justice
+ill-treated, mal-treated, and tortured, that such action as mine should
+be understandable; I don't say excusable, but it should be understood.
+
+"I should like to point out that the outrage which the Government has
+committed upon Mrs. Pankhurst is an ultimatum of outrages. It is murder,
+slow murder, and premeditated murder. That is how I have looked at
+it....
+
+"How you can hold women up to ridicule and contempt, and put them in
+prison, and yet say nothing to the Government for murdering people, I
+cannot understand....
+
+"The fact is that the nation is either dead or asleep. In my opinion
+there is undoubted evidence that the nation is dead, because women have
+knocked in vain at the door of administrators, archbishops, and even the
+King himself. The Government have closed all doors to us. And remember
+this--a state of death in a nation, as well as in an individual, leads
+to one thing, and that is dissolution. I do not hesitate to say that if
+the men of the country do not at this eleventh hour put their hand out
+and save Mrs. Pankhurst, before a few more years are passed they will
+stretch out their hand in vain to save the Empire."
+
+In sentencing Miss Richardson to six month's imprisonment the
+Magistrate said regretfully that if she had smashed a window instead of
+an art treasure he could have given her a maximum sentence of eighteen
+months, which illustrates, I think, one more queer anomaly of English
+law.
+
+A few weeks later another famous painting, the Sargent portrait of Henry
+James, was attacked by a Suffragette, who, like Miss Richardson, was
+sent through the farce of a trial and a prison sentence which she did
+not serve. By this time practically all the picture galleries and other
+public galleries and museums had been closed to the public. The
+Suffragettes had succeeded in large measure in making England
+unattractive to tourists, and hence unprofitable to the world of
+business. As we had anticipated, the reaction against the Liberal
+Government began to manifest itself. Questions were asked daily, in the
+press, in the House of Commons, everywhere, as to the responsibility of
+the Government in the Suffragette activities. People began to place that
+responsibility where it belonged, at the doors of the Government, rather
+than at our own.
+
+Especially did the public begin to contrast the treatment meted out to
+the rebel women with that accorded to the rebel men of Ulster. For a
+whole year the Government had been attacking the women's right of free
+speech, by their refusal to allow the W. S. P. U. to hold public
+meetings in Hyde Park. The excuse given for this was that we advocated
+and defended a militant policy. But the Government permitted the Ulster
+militants to advocate their war policy in Hyde Park, and we determined
+that, with or without the Government's permission, we should, on the
+day of the Ulster meeting, hold a suffrage meeting in Hyde Park. General
+Drummond was announced as the chief speaker at this meeting, and when
+the day came, militant Ulster men and militant women assembled in Hyde
+Park. The militant men were allowed to speak in defence of bloodshed;
+but General Drummond was arrested before she had uttered more than a few
+words.
+
+Another proof that the Government had a law of leniency for militant men
+and a law of persecution for militant women was shown at this time by
+the case of Miss Dorothy Evans, our organiser in Ulster. She and another
+Suffragette, Miss Maud Muir, were arrested in Belfast charged with
+having in their possession a quantity of explosives. It was well known
+that there were houses in Belfast that secreted tons of gunpowder and
+ammunition for the use of the rebels against Home Rule, but none of
+those houses were entered and searched by the police. The authorities
+reserved their energies in this direction for the headquarters of the
+militant women. Naturally enough the two suffrage prisoners, on being
+arraigned in court, refused to be tried unless the Government proceeded
+also against the men rebels. The prisoners throughout the proceedings
+kept up such a disturbance that the trial could not properly go on. When
+the case was called Miss Evans rose and protested loudly, saying: "I
+deny your jurisdiction entirely until there are in the dock beside us
+men who are well known leaders of the Ulster militant movement." Miss
+Muir joined Miss Evans in her protest and both women were dragged from
+the court. After an hour's adjournment the trial was resumed, but the
+women again began to speak, and the case was hurried through in the
+midst of indescribable din and commotion. The women were sent to prison
+on remand, and after a four days' hunger and thirst strike were released
+unconditionally.
+
+The result of this case was a severe outbreak of militancy, three fires
+destroying Belfast mansions within a few days. Fires blazed almost daily
+throughout England, a very important instance being the destruction of
+the Bath Hotel at Felixstowe, valued at £35,000. The two women
+responsible for this were afterwards arrested, and as their trials were
+delayed, they were, although unconvicted prisoners, tortured by forcible
+feeding for several months. This occurred in April, a few weeks before
+the day appointed for our deputation to the King.
+
+I had appointed May 21st for the deputation, in spite of the fact that
+the King had, through his Ministers, refused to receive us. Replying to
+this I had written, again directly to the King, that we utterly denied
+the constitutional right of Ministers, who not being elected by women
+were not responsible to them, to stand between ourselves and the Throne,
+and to prevent us from having an audience of His Majesty. I declared
+further that we would, on the date announced, present ourselves at the
+gates of Buckingham Palace to demand an interview.
+
+Following the despatch of this letter my life was made as uncomfortable
+and as insecure as the Government, through their police department,
+could contrive. I was not allowed to make a public appearance, but I
+addressed several huge meetings from the balcony of houses where I had
+taken refuge. These were all publicly announced, and each time the
+police, mingling with crowds, made strenuous efforts to arrest me. By
+strategy, and through the valiant efforts of the bodyguard, I was able
+each time to make my speech and afterwards to escape from the house. All
+of these occasions were marked by fierce opposition from the police and
+splendid courage and resistance on the part of the women.
+
+The deputation to the King was, of course, marked by the Government as
+an occasion on which I could be arrested, and when, on the day
+appointed, I led the great deputation of women to the gates of
+Buckingham Palace, an army of several thousand police were sent out
+against us. The conduct of the police showed plainly that they had been
+instructed to repeat the tactics of Black Friday, described in an
+earlier chapter. Indeed, the violence, brutality and insult of Black
+Friday were excelled on this day, and at the gates of the King of
+England. I myself did not suffer so greatly as others, because I had
+advanced towards the Palace unnoticed by the police, who were looking
+for me at a more distant point. When I arrived at the gates I was
+recognised by an Inspector, who at once seized me bodily, and conveyed
+me to Holloway.
+
+[Illustration: © _International News Service_
+
+"ARRESTED AT THE KING'S GATE!" _May, 1914_]
+
+Before the Deputation had gone forth, I had made a short speech to them,
+warning them of what might happen, and my final message was: "Whatever
+happens, do not turn back." They did not, and in spite of all the
+violence inflicted upon them, they went forward, resolved, so long as
+they were free, not to give up the attempt to reach the Palace. Many
+arrests were made, and of those arrested many were sent to prison.
+Although for the majority, this was the first imprisonment, these brave
+women adopted the hunger strike, and passed seven or eight days without
+food and water before they were released, weak and ill as may be
+supposed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+In the weeks following the disgraceful events before Buckingham Palace
+the Government made several last, desperate efforts to crush the
+W. S. P. U., to remove all the leaders and to destroy our paper, the
+_Suffragette_. They issued summonses against Mrs. Drummond, Mrs. Dacre
+Fox and Miss Grace Roe; they raided our headquarters at Lincolns Inn
+House; twice they raided other headquarters temporarily in use, not to
+speak of raids made upon private dwellings where the new leaders, who
+had risen to take the places of those arrested, were at their work for
+the organisation. But with each successive raid the disturbances which
+the Government were able to make in our affairs became less, because we
+were better able, each time, to provide against them. Every effort made
+by the Government to suppress the _Suffragette_ failed, and it continued
+to come out regularly every week. Although the paper was issued
+regularly, we had to use almost super-human energy to get it
+distributed. The Government sent to all the great wholesale news agents
+a letter which was designed to terrorise and bully them into refusing to
+handle the paper or to sell it to the retail news agents. Temporarily,
+at any rate, the letter produced in many cases the desired effect, but
+we overcame the emergency by taking immediate steps to build up a
+system of distribution which was worked by women themselves,
+independently of the newspaper trade. We also opened a "Suffragette
+Defence Fund," to meet the extra expense of publishing and distributing
+the paper.
+
+Twice more the Government attempted to force me to serve the three
+years' term of penal servitude, one arrest being made when I was being
+carried to a meeting in an ambulance. Wholesale arrests and hunger
+strikes occurred at the same time, but our women continued their work of
+militancy, and money flowed into our Protest and Defence Fund. At one
+great meeting in July the fund was increased by nearly £16,000.
+
+But now unmistakable signs began to appear that our long and bitter
+struggle was drawing to a close. The last resort of the Government of
+inciting the street mobs against us had been little successful, and we
+could see in the temper of the public abundant hope that the reaction
+against the Government, long hoped for by us, had actually begun.
+
+Every day of the militant movement was so extraordinarily full of events
+and changes that it is difficult to choose a point at which this
+narrative should be brought to a close. I think, however, that an
+account of a recent debate which took place in the House of Commons will
+give the reader the best idea of the complete breakdown of the
+Government in their effort to crush the women's fight for liberty.
+
+On June 11th, when the House of Commons had gone into a Committee of
+Supply, Lord Robert Cecil moved a reduction of 100 pounds on the Home
+Office vote, thus precipitating a discussion of militancy. Lord Robert
+said that he had read with some surprise that the Government were not
+dissatisfied with the measures which they had taken to deal with the
+violent suffragists, and he added with some asperity that the Government
+took a much more sanguine view of the matter than anybody else in the
+United Kingdom. The House, Lord Robert went on to declare, would not be
+in a position to deal with the case satisfactorily unless they realised
+the devotion of the followers to their leaders, who were almost fully
+responsible for what was going on. Ministerial cheers greeted this
+utterance, but they ceased suddenly when the speaker went on to say that
+these leaders could never have induced their followers to enter upon a
+career of crime but for the serious mistakes which had been made over
+and over again by the Government. Among these mistakes Lord Robert cited
+the shameful treatment of the women on Black Friday, the policy of
+forcible feeding and the scandal of the different treatment accorded
+Lady Constance Lytton and "Jane Warton." There were Opposition cheers at
+this, and they were again raised when Lord Robert deplored the terrible
+waste of energy, and "admirable material" involved in the militant
+movement. Although Lord Robert Cecil deemed it unjust as well as futile
+for Suffragist Members to withhold their support from the woman suffrage
+movement on account of militancy he himself was in favor of deportation
+for Suffragettes. At this there were cries of "Where to?" and "Ulster!"
+
+Mr. McKenna replied by first calling attention to the fact that in the
+militant movement they had a phenomenon "absolutely without precedent in
+our history." Women in numbers were committing crimes, beginning with
+window breaking, and proceeding to arson, not with the motives of
+ordinary criminals, but with the intention of advertising a political
+cause and of forcing the public to grant their demands. Mr. McKenna
+continuing said:
+
+"The number of women who commit crimes of that kind is extremely small,
+but the number of those who sympathise with them is extremely large. One
+of the difficulties which the police have in detecting this form of
+crime and in bringing home the offence to the criminal is that the
+criminals find so many sympathisers among the well-to-do and thoroughly
+respectable classes that the ordinary administration of the law is
+rendered comparatively impossible. Let me give the House some figures
+showing the number of women who have been committed to prison for
+offences since the beginning of the militant agitation in 1906. In that
+year the total number of commitments to prison was 31, all the persons
+charged being women. In 1909 the figure rose to 156; in 1911 to 188 (182
+women and six men); and in 1912 to 290 (288 women and two men). In 1913
+the number dropped to 183, and so far this year it has dropped to 108.
+These figures include all commitments to prison and rearrests under the
+Cat and Mouse Act. What is the obvious lesson to be drawn? Up to 1912
+the number of offences committed for which imprisonment was the
+punishment was steadily increasing, but since the beginning of last
+year--that is to say, since the new Act came into force--the number of
+individual offences has been very greatly reduced. On the other hand, we
+see that the seriousness of the offences is much greater."
+
+This statement, that the number of imprisonments had decreased since the
+adoption of the Cat and Mouse Act, was of course, incorrect, or at best
+misleading. The fact was that the number of imprisonments decreased
+because, where formerly the militants went willingly to prison for their
+acts, they now escaped prison wherever possible. A comparatively small
+number of "mice" were ever rearrested by the police.
+
+Mr. McKenna went on to say that he realised fully the growing sense of
+indignation against the militant suffragists and he added, "Their one
+hope is, rightly or wrongly, that the well advertised indignation of the
+public will recoil on the head of the Government."
+
+"And so it will," interpolated a voice.
+
+"My honourable friend," replied Mr. McKenna, "says so it will. I believe
+that he is mistaken." But he gave no reasons for so believing. Referring
+to what he called the "recent grave rudenesses which have been committed
+against the King," Mr. McKenna said: "It is true that all subjects have
+the right of petitioning His Majesty, providing the petition is couched
+in respectful terms, but there is no right on the part of the subjects
+generally to personal audience for the purpose of the presentation of
+the petition or otherwise. It is the duty of the Home Secretary to
+present all such petitions to the King, and further to advise His
+Majesty what action should be taken. It was therefore ridiculous for any
+Suffragist to assert that there had been any breach of constitutional
+propriety on the part of the King in refusing, on the advice of the Home
+Secretary to receive the deputation."
+
+Also, said Mr. McKenna, in view of the fact that the petition for an
+audience was sent by a person under sentence of penal
+servitude--myself--it was the plain duty of the Home Secretary to advise
+the King not to grant it. He referred to the incident, he said, only
+because it was illustrative of the militant's methods of advertising
+their cause. He gave them credit, he was bound to say, for a certain
+degree of intelligence in adopting their methods. "No action has been so
+fruitful of advertisement as the recent absurdities which they have
+perpetrated in relation to the King."
+
+Coming down to the question of methods of meeting and overcoming
+militancy, Mr. McKenna said that he had received an almost unlimited
+correspondence on the subject from every section of the public. "Four
+methods were suggested," said he. "The first is to let them die. (Hear,
+hear.) That is, I should say, at the present moment, the most popular
+(laughter), judging by the number of letters I have received. The second
+is to deport them. (Hear, hear.) The third is to treat them as lunatics.
+(Hear, hear.) And the fourth is to give them the franchise. (Hear, hear,
+and laughter.) I think that is an exhaustive list. I notice each one of
+them is received with a certain very moderate amount of applause in this
+House. I hope to give reason why at the present time I think we should
+not adopt any one of them."
+
+The first suggestion was usually, not always, based on the assumption
+that the women would take their food if they knew that the alternative
+was death. Mr. McKenna read to the House in opposition to that view "the
+opinion of a great medical expert who had had intimate knowledge of the
+Suffragettes from the first." "We have to face the fact, therefore, that
+they would die," continued Mr. McKenna.
+
+"Let me say, also, with actual experience of dealing with suffragists,
+in many cases they have got in their refusal of food and water beyond
+the point when they could help themselves, and they have clearly done
+all that they could do to show their readiness to die.... There are
+those who hold another assumption. They think that after one or two
+deaths in prison militancy would cease. In my judgment there was never a
+greater delusion. I readily admit that this is the issue upon which I
+stand and upon which I feel I would fight to the end those who would
+adopt as their policy to let the prisoners die. So far from putting an
+end to militancy, I believe it would be the greatest incentive to
+militancy which could ever happen. For every woman who dies, there would
+be scores of women who would come forward for the honour, as they would
+deem it, of earning the crown of martyrdom."
+
+"How do you know?" called out an Opposition member.
+
+"How do I know?" retorted the Home Secretary. "I have had more to do
+with these women than the honourable member, much more. Those who hold
+that opinion leave out of account all recognition of the nature of these
+women. I do not speak in admiration of them. They are hysterical
+fanatics, but, coupled with their hysterical fanaticism, they have a
+courage, part of their fanaticism, which undoubtedly stands at nothing,
+and the honourable member who thinks that they would not come forward,
+not merely to risk death, but to undergo it, for what they deem the
+greatest cause on earth is making, in my judgment, a profound
+mistake.... They would seek death, and I am sure that however strong
+public opinion outside might be to-day in favour of allowing them to
+die, when there were twenty, thirty, forty, or more deaths in prison,
+you would have a violent reaction of public opinion, and the honourable
+gentleman who now so glibly says 'Let them die' would be among the first
+to blame the Government for what he would describe as the inhuman
+attitude they had adopted.
+
+"That policy," continued Mr. McKenna, "could not be adopted without an
+Act of Parliament. For the reason I have given I have not asked
+Parliament to remove from prison officials the responsibility under
+which they now rest for doing their best to keep those committed to
+their charge alive. But, supposing this legal responsibility were
+removed from the prison officials, let honourable members for a moment
+transport themselves in imagination to a prison cell and conceive of a
+prison doctor, a humane man, standing by watching a woman slowly being
+done to death by starvation and thirst, knowing that he could help her
+and that he could keep her alive. Did they think that any doctor would
+go on with such action, or that we should be able to retain medical men
+under such conditions in our service? I do not believe it.
+
+"The doctor would think, as I should think if I saw a woman lying there,
+'What has been this woman's offence?' It may have been obstructing the
+police, coupled with the obstinacy derived from fanaticism which leads
+her to refuse food and water. Obstructing the police and she is to die!
+I could not distinguish, and no Home Secretary could ever say, that this
+woman should be left to die and that that woman should not. Once we were
+committed to a policy of allowing them to die if they did not take their
+food we should have to go on with it, and we should have woman after
+woman whose only offence may have been obstructing the police, breaking
+a window, or even burning down an empty house, dying because she was
+obstinate. I do not believe that that is a policy which on consideration
+will ever recommend itself to the British people, and I am bound to say
+for myself I could never take a hand in carrying that policy out."
+(Cheers.)
+
+Lord Robert Cecil's favourite remedy of deportation Mr. McKenna
+dismissed on the grounds that this would be merely removing the
+difficulty to some other country than Great Britain. If the suggested
+distant island were treated as a prison the women would hunger strike
+there as they did in English prisons. If the island were not treated as
+a prison, the Suffragettes' rich friends would come and rescue them in
+yachts.
+
+The suggestion that the militants be treated as lunatics was also
+dismissed as impossible. Admitting that he had tried to get them
+certified as lunatics and had failed because the medical profession
+would not consent to such a course, Mr. McKenna said that he could not,
+contrary to the advice of the doctors, get certification by Act of
+Parliament. "There remains," said Mr. McKenna, "the last proposal, that
+we should give them the franchise."
+
+"That is the right one," exclaimed Mr. William Redmond, but the Home
+Secretary replied:
+
+"Whatever may be said as to the merits or demerits of that proposal, it
+is clearly not one I can discuss now in Committee of Supply. I am not
+responsible, as Home Secretary, for the state of the law on the
+franchise, nor is there any occasion for me to express or conceal my own
+opinions on the point; but I certainly do not think, and I am sure the
+Committee will agree with me, that that could be seriously treated as a
+remedy for the existing state of lawlessness."
+
+Coming at last to the constructive part of his speech Mr. McKenna told
+the House of Commons that the Government had one last resort, which was
+to take legal proceedings against subscribers to the funds of the
+W. S. P. U. The funds of the society, he said, were undoubtedly beyond
+the arm of the British law. But the Government were in hopes of stopping
+future subscriptions. "We are now not without hope," he concluded, "that
+we have evidence which will enable us to proceed against the
+subscribers" (loud cheers) "in civil action, and if we succeed the
+subscribers will become personally liable for all the damage done."
+(Cheers.) "It is a question of evidence.... I have further directed that
+the question should be considered whether the subscribers could not be
+proceeded against criminally as well as by civil action." (Cheers.) "We
+have only been able to obtain this evidence by our now not infrequent
+raids upon the offices, and such property as we can get at of the
+society.... A year ago a raid was made on the offices of the society,
+but we obtained no such evidence. If we succeed in making the
+subscribers personally responsible individually for the whole damage
+done I have no doubt that the insurance companies will quickly follow
+the example set them by the Government, and in turn bring actions to
+recover the cost which has been thrown upon them. If that is done I have
+no doubt the days of militancy are over.
+
+"The militants live only by the subscriptions of rich women" (cheers)
+"who themselves enjoy all the advantages of wealth secured for them by
+the labour of others" (cheers) "and use their wealth against the
+interests of society, paying their unfortunate victims to undergo all
+the horrors of a hunger and thirst strike in the commission of a crime.
+Whatever feelings we may have against the wretched women who for 30s.
+and £2 a week go about the country burning and destroying, what must our
+feelings be for the women who give their money to induce the
+perpetration of these crimes and leave their sisters to undergo the
+punishment while they live in luxury?" (Cheers.) "If we can succeed
+against them we will spare no pains. If the action is successful in the
+total destruction of the means of revenue of the Women's Social and
+Political Union I think we shall see the last of the power of Mrs.
+Pankhurst and her friends." (Cheers.)
+
+In the general debate which followed the Government were obliged to
+listen to very severe criticisms of their past and present policy
+towards the militant women. Mr. Keir Hardie said in part:
+
+"We may not to-day discuss the question of the franchise, but surely it
+was possible for the Home Secretary, without any transgression on the
+rules of the House, to have held out just a ray of hope for the future
+as to the intentions of the Government in regard to this most urgent
+question. On that point, may I say that I am not one of those who
+believe that a right thing should be withheld because some of the
+advocates of it resort to weapons of which we do not approve. That note
+has been sounded more than once, and if it be true, and it is true, that
+a section of the public outside are strongly opposed to this conduct, it
+is equally true that the bulk of the people look with a very calm and
+indifferent eye upon what is happening so long as the vote is withheld
+from women."
+
+Mr. Hardie concluded by regretting that the House, instead of discussing
+Woman Suffrage, was discussing methods of penalising militant women.
+
+Mr. Rupert Gwynne said: "Nobody is in a more ridiculous position than
+the members on the Treasury Bench. They cannot address a meeting, or go
+to a railway station, or even get into a taxicab, without having
+detectives with them. Even if they like it, we, the public do not,
+because we have to pay for it. It is not worth the expense that it costs
+to have a detective staff following Cabinet Ministers wherever they go,
+whether in a private or a public capacity.
+
+"Further," said Mr. Gwynne, "if the Home Secretary is correct in saying
+that these women are prepared to die, and invite death, in order to
+advertise their devotion to their cause, does he really think they are
+going to mind if their funds are attached?"
+
+Another friend of the Suffragists, Mr. Wedgwood said: "We are dealing
+with a problem which is a very serious one indeed. To my mind, when you
+find a large body of public opinion, and a large number of people
+capable of going to these lengths, there is only one thing for a
+respectable House of Commons to do, and that is to consider very closely
+and clearly whether the complaints of those who complain are or are not
+justified. We are not justified in acting in panic. What it is our duty
+to do is to consider the rights and wrongs of these people who have
+acted in this way. I attribute myself no value to the vote, but I do
+think that when we seriously consider the question of Woman Suffrage,
+which has not been done by this House up to the present, we should
+remember that when you see people capable of this amount of
+self-sacrifice, that the one duty of the House of Commons is not to
+stamp the iron heel upon them, but to see how far their cause is just,
+and to act according to justice."
+
+When such a debate as this was possible in the House of Commons, it must
+be plain to every disinterested reader that militancy never set the
+cause of suffrage back, but on the contrary, set it forward at least
+half a century. When I remember how that same House of Commons, a few
+years ago, treated the mention of woman suffrage with scorn and
+contempt, how they permitted the most insulting things to be said of the
+women who were begging for their political freedom, how, with indecent
+laughter and coarse jokes they allowed suffrage bills to be talked out,
+I cannot but marvel at the change our militancy so quickly brought
+about. Mr. McKenna's speech was in itself a token of the complete
+surrender of the Government.
+
+Of course the promise of the Home Secretary that subscribers to our
+funds should, if possible, be held legally responsible for damage done
+to private property by the Suffragettes, was never meant to be adhered
+to. It was, in fact, a perfectly absurd promise, and I think that very
+few Members of Parliament were deceived by it. Our subscribers can
+always remain anonymous if they choose, and if it should ever be
+possible to attack them for our deeds, they would naturally take refuge
+behind that privilege.
+
+Our battles are practically over, we confidently believe. For the
+present at least our arms are grounded, for directly the threat of
+foreign war descended on our nation we declared a complete truce from
+militancy. What will come out of this European war--so terrible in its
+effects on the women who had no voice in averting it--so baneful in the
+suffering it must necessarily bring on innocent children--no human being
+can calculate. But one thing is reasonably certain, and that is that the
+Cabinet changes which will necessarily result from warfare will make
+future militancy on the part of women unnecessary. No future Government
+will repeat the mistakes and the brutality of the Asquith Ministry. None
+will be willing to undertake the impossible task of crushing or even
+delaying the march of women towards their rightful heritage of political
+liberty and social and industrial freedom.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of My Own Story, by Emmeline Pankhurst
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY OWN STORY ***
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+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Mrs. Pankhurst's Own Story, by Emmeline Pankhurst.
+    </title>
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+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of My Own Story, by Emmeline Pankhurst
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: My Own Story
+
+Author: Emmeline Pankhurst
+
+Release Date: January 6, 2011 [EBook #34856]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY OWN STORY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif, Martin Pettit, University of
+Toronto Libraries and the Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<p class="bold2">MRS. PANKHURST'S OWN STORY</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<div class="center"><img src="images/ill-001.jpg" width='442' height='700' alt="E. Pankhurst" /></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h1><span>MY OWN STORY</span><br /><span id="id1">BY</span> <span>EMMELINE PANKHURST</span></h1>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="center"><img src="images/ill-002.jpg" width='92' height='100' alt="Logo" /></div>
+
+<p class="center">ILLUSTRATED</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center">LONDON<br />EVELEIGH NASH<br />1914</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p class="center">Copyright, 1914, by<br />
+<span class="smcap">Hearsts's International Library Co., Inc.</span><br />
+<br /><i>All rights reserved, including the translation into foreign<br />
+languages, including the Scandinavian.</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p class="bold2">CONTENTS</p>
+
+<p class="bold"><a href="#BOOK_I">BOOK I</a></p>
+
+<p class="bold"><span class="smcap">The Making of a Militant</span></p>
+
+<table summary="CONTENTS book 1">
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left">CHAPTER</td>
+    <td>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;PAGE</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>I</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>II</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_18">18</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>III</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_37">37</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>IV</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_57">57</a></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p class="bold"><a href="#BOOK_II">BOOK II</a></p>
+
+<p class="bold"><span class="smcap">Four Years of Peaceful Militancy</span></p>
+
+<table summary="CONTENTS book 2">
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left">CHAPTER</td>
+    <td>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;PAGE</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>I</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_81">81</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>II</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_97">97</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>III</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_116">116</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>IV</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_131">131</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>V</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_149">149</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>VI</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_160">160</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>VII</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_166">166</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>VIII</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_185">185</a></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p class="bold"><a href="#BOOK_III">BOOK III</a></p>
+
+<p class="bold"><span class="smcap">The Women's Revolution</span></p>
+
+<table summary="CONTENTS book 3">
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left">CHAPTER</td>
+    <td>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;PAGE</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>I</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_205">205</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>II</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_221">221</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>III</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_249">249</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>IV</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_270">270</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>V</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_285">285</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>VI</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_303">303</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>VII</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_323">323</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>VIII</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_339">339</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>IX</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_350">350</a></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p class="bold2">ILLUSTRATIONS</p>
+
+<table summary="ILLUSTRATIONS">
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left">Portrait of Mrs. Pankhurst</td>
+    <td><a href="#Page_205"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left"></td>
+    <td>FACING<br />PAGE</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left">Mrs. Pankhurst addressing a by-election crowd</td>
+    <td><a href="#ill-074.jpg">74</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left">Mrs. Pankhurst and Christabel hiding from the police<br />
+on the roof garden at Clements Inn, October, 1908</td>
+    <td style="vertical-align: bottom"><a href="#ill-120.jpg">120</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left">Christabel, Mrs. Drummond and Mrs. Pankhurst in the<br />
+dock, First Conspiracy Trial, October, 1908</td>
+    <td style="vertical-align: bottom"><a href="#ill-126.jpg">126</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left">Mrs. Pankhurst and Miss Christabel Pankhurst in prison<br />
+dress</td>
+    <td style="vertical-align: bottom"><a href="#ill-132.jpg">132</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left">Inspector Wells conducting Mrs. Pankhurst to the<br />
+House of Commons, June, 1908</td>
+    <td style="vertical-align: bottom"><a href="#ill-140.jpg">140</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left">Over 1,000 women had been in prison&mdash;Broad arrows in<br />
+the 1910 parade</td>
+    <td style="vertical-align: bottom"><a href="#ill-170.jpg">170</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left">The head of the deputation on Black Friday, November,<br />
+1910</td>
+    <td style="vertical-align: bottom"><a href="#ill-178.jpg">178</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left">For hours scenes like this were enacted on Black Friday,<br />
+November, 1910</td>
+    <td style="vertical-align: bottom"><a href="#ill-180.jpg">180</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left">Riot scenes on Black Friday, November, 1910</td>
+    <td style="vertical-align: bottom"><a href="#ill-186.jpg">186</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left">In this manner thousands of women throughout the<br />
+Kingdom slept in unoccupied houses over census<br />night</td>
+    <td style="vertical-align: bottom"><a href="#ill-194.jpg">194</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left">The argument of the broken window pane</td>
+    <td style="vertical-align: bottom"><a href="#ill-218.jpg">218</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left">A suffragette throwing a bag of flour at Mr. Asquith<br />
+in Chester</td>
+    <td style="vertical-align: bottom"><a href="#ill-260.jpg">260</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left">Re-Arrest of Mrs. Pankhurst at Woking, May 26,<br />
+1913</td>
+    <td style="vertical-align: bottom"><a href="#ill-312.jpg">312</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left">Mrs. Pankhurst and Christabel in the garden of<br />
+Christabel's home in Paris</td>
+    <td style="vertical-align: bottom"><a href="#ill-324.jpg">324</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="left">"Arrested at the King's gate!" May, 1914</td>
+    <td style="vertical-align: bottom"><a href="#ill-348.jpg">348</a></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p class="bold2">ACKNOWLEDGMENT</p>
+
+<p>The author wishes to express her deep obligation to Rheta Childe Dorr
+for invaluable editorial services performed in the preparation of this
+volume, especially the American edition.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p class="bold2">FOREWORD</p>
+
+<p>The closing paragraphs of this book were written in the late summer of
+1914, when the armies of every great power in Europe were being
+mobilised for savage, unsparing, barbarous warfare&mdash;against one another,
+against small and unaggressive nations, against helpless women and
+children, against civilisation itself. How mild, by comparison with the
+despatches in the daily newspapers, will seem this chronicle of women's
+militant struggle against political and social injustice in one small
+corner of Europe. Yet let it stand as it was written, with
+peace&mdash;so-called, and civilisation, and orderly government as the
+background for heroism such as the world has seldom witnessed. The
+militancy of men, through all the centuries, has drenched the world with
+blood, and for these deeds of horror and destruction men have been
+rewarded with monuments, with great songs and epics. The militancy of
+women has harmed no human life save the lives of those who fought the
+battle of righteousness. Time alone will reveal what reward will be
+allotted to the women.</p>
+
+<p>This we know, that in the black hour that has just struck in Europe, the
+men are turning to their women and calling on them to take up the work
+of keeping civilisation alive. Through all the harvest fields, in
+orchards and vineyards, women are garnering food for the men who fight,
+as well as for the children left fatherless by war. In the cities the
+women are keeping open the shops, they are driving trucks and trams, and
+are altogether attending to a multitude of business.</p>
+
+<p>When the remnants of the armies return, when the commerce of Europe is
+resumed by men, will they forget the part the women so nobly played?
+Will they forget in England how women in all ranks of life put aside
+their own interests and organised, not only to nurse the wounded, care
+for the destitute, comfort the sick and lonely, but actually to maintain
+the existence of the nation? Thus far, it must be admitted, there are
+few indications that the English Government are mindful of the unselfish
+devotion manifested by the women. Thus far all Government schemes for
+overcoming unemployment have been directed towards the unemployment of
+men. The work of women, making garments, etc., has in some cases been taken away.</p>
+
+<p>At the first alarm of war the militants proclaimed a truce, which was
+answered half-heartedly by the announcement that the Government would
+release all suffrage prisoners who would give an undertaking "not to
+commit further crimes or outrages." Since the truce had already been
+proclaimed, no suffrage prisoner deigned to reply to the Home
+Secretary's provision. A few days later, no doubt influenced by
+representations made to the Government by men and women of every
+political faith&mdash;many of them never having been supporters of
+revolutionary tactics&mdash;Mr. McKenna announced in the House of Commons
+that it was the intention of the Government, within a few days, to
+release unconditionally, all suffrage prisoners. So ends, for the
+present, the war of women against men. As of old, the women become the
+nurturing mothers of men, their sisters and uncomplaining helpmates. The
+future lies far ahead, but let this preface and this volume close with
+the assurance that the struggle for the full enfranchisement of women
+has not been abandoned; it has simply, for the moment, been placed in
+abeyance. When the clash of arms ceases, when normal, peaceful, rational
+society resumes its functions, the demand will again be made. If it is
+not quickly granted, then once more the women will take up the arms they
+to-day generously lay down. There can be no real peace in the world
+until woman, the mother half of the human family, is given liberty in
+the councils of the world.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h2><span><a name="BOOK_I" id="BOOK_I">BOOK I</a></span></h2>
+
+<p class="bold2">THE MAKING OF A MILITANT</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="bold2">Mrs. Pankhurst's Own Story</p>
+
+<h2><span>CHAPTER I</span></h2>
+
+<p>Those men and women are fortunate who are born at a time when a great
+struggle for human freedom is in progress. It is an added good fortune
+to have parents who take a personal part in the great movements of their
+time. I am glad and thankful that this was my case.</p>
+
+<p>One of my earliest recollections is of a great bazaar which was held in
+my native city of Manchester, the object of the bazaar being to raise
+money to relieve the poverty of the newly emancipated negro slaves in
+the United States. My mother took an active part in this effort, and I,
+as a small child, was entrusted with a lucky bag by means of which I
+helped to collect money.</p>
+
+<p>Young as I was&mdash;I could not have been older than five years&mdash;I knew
+perfectly well the meaning of the words slavery and emancipation. From
+infancy I had been accustomed to hear pro and con discussions of slavery
+and the American Civil War. Although the British government finally
+decided not to recognise the Confederacy, public opinion in England was
+sharply divided on the questions both of slavery and of secession.
+Broadly speaking, the propertied classes were pro-slavery, but there
+were many <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span>exceptions to the rule. Most of those who formed the circle
+of our family friends were opposed to slavery, and my father, Robert
+Goulden, was always a most ardent abolitionist. He was prominent enough
+in the movement to be appointed on a committee to meet and welcome Henry
+Ward Beecher when he arrived in England for a lecture tour. Mrs. Harriet
+Beecher Stowe's novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," was so great a favourite
+with my mother that she used it continually as a source of bedtime
+stories for our fascinated ears. Those stories, told almost fifty years
+ago, are as fresh in my mind to-day as events detailed in the morning's
+papers. Indeed they are more vivid, because they made a much deeper
+impression on my consciousness. I can still definitely recall the thrill
+I experienced every time my mother related the tale of Eliza's race for
+freedom over the broken ice of the Ohio River, the agonizing pursuit,
+and the final rescue at the hands of the determined old Quaker. Another
+thrilling tale was the story of a negro boy's flight from the plantation
+of his cruel master. The boy had never seen a railroad train, and when,
+staggering along the unfamiliar railroad track, he heard the roar of an
+approaching train, the clattering car-wheels seemed to his strained
+imagination to be repeating over and over again the awful words, "Catch
+a nigger&mdash;catch a nigger&mdash;catch a nigger&mdash;" This was a terrible story,
+and throughout my childhood, whenever I rode in a train, I thought of
+that poor runaway slave escaping from the pursuing monster.</p>
+
+<p>These stories, with the bazaars and the relief funds and subscriptions
+of which I heard so much talk, I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span> am sure made a permanent impression on
+my brain and my character. They awakened in me the two sets of
+sensations to which all my life I have most readily responded: first,
+admiration for that spirit of fighting and heroic sacrifice by which
+alone the soul of civilisation is saved; and next after that,
+appreciation of the gentler spirit which is moved to mend and repair the
+ravages of war.</p>
+
+<p>I do not remember a time when I could not read, nor any time when
+reading was not a joy and a solace. As far back as my memory runs I
+loved tales, especially those of a romantic and idealistic character.
+"Pilgrim's Progress" was an early favourite, as well as another of
+Bunyan's visionary romances, which does not seem to be as well known,
+his "Holy War." At nine I discovered the Odyssey and very soon after
+that another classic which has remained all my life a source of
+inspiration. This was Carlyle's "French Revolution," and I received it
+with much the same emotion that Keats experienced when he read Chapman's
+translation of Homer&mdash;" ... like some watcher of the skies, When a new
+planet swims into his ken."</p>
+
+<p>I never lost that first impression, and it strongly affected my attitude
+toward events which were occurring around my childhood. Manchester is a
+city which has witnessed a great many stirring episodes, especially of a
+political character. Generally speaking, its citizens have been liberal
+in their sentiments, defenders of free speech and liberty of opinion. In
+the late sixties there occurred in Manchester one of those dreadful
+events that prove an exception to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> rule. This was in connection with
+the Fenian Revolt in Ireland. There was a Fenian riot, and the police
+arrested the leaders. These men were being taken to the jail in a prison
+van. On the way the van was stopped and an attempt was made to rescue
+the prisoners. A man fired a pistol, endeavouring to break the lock of
+the van door. A policeman fell, mortally wounded, and several men were
+arrested and were charged with murder. I distinctly remember the riot,
+which I did not witness, but which I heard vividly described by my older
+brother. I had been spending the afternoon with a young playmate, and my
+brother had come after tea to escort me home. As we walked through the
+deepening November twilight he talked excitedly of the riot, the fatal
+pistol shot, and the slain policeman. I could almost see the man
+bleeding on the ground, while the crowd swayed and groaned around him.</p>
+
+<p>The rest of the story reveals one of those ghastly blunders which
+justice not infrequently makes. Although the shooting was done without
+any intent to kill, the men were tried for murder and three of them were
+found guilty and hanged. Their execution, which greatly excited the
+citizens of Manchester, was almost the last, if not the last, public
+execution permitted to take place in the city. At the time I was a
+boarding-pupil in a school near Manchester, and I spent my week-ends at
+home. A certain Saturday afternoon stands out in my memory, as on my way
+home from school I passed the prison where I knew the men had been
+confined. I saw that a part of the prison wall had been torn away, and
+in the great gap<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> that remained were evidences of a gallows recently
+removed. I was transfixed with horror, and over me there swept the
+sudden conviction that that hanging was a mistake&mdash;worse, a crime. It
+was my awakening to one of the most terrible facts of life&mdash;that justice
+and judgment lie often a world apart.</p>
+
+<p>I relate this incident of my formative years to illustrate the fact that
+the impressions of childhood often have more to do with character and
+future conduct than heredity or education. I tell it also to show that
+my development into an advocate of militancy was largely a sympathetic
+process. I have not personally suffered from the deprivations, the
+bitterness and sorrow which bring so many men and women to a realisation
+of social injustice. My childhood was protected by love and a
+comfortable home. Yet, while still a very young child, I began
+instinctively to feel that there was something lacking, even in my own
+home, some false conception of family relations, some incomplete ideal.</p>
+
+<p>This vague feeling of mine began to shape itself into conviction about
+the time my brothers and I were sent to school. The education of the
+English boy, then as now, was considered a much more serious matter than
+the education of the English boy's sister. My parents, especially my
+father, discussed the question of my brothers' education as a matter of
+real importance. My education and that of my sister were scarcely
+discussed at all. Of course we went to a carefully selected girls'
+school, but beyond the facts that the head mistress was a gentlewoman
+and that all the pupils were girls of my own class, nobody<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> seemed
+concerned. A girl's education at that time seemed to have for its prime
+object the art of "making home attractive"&mdash;presumably to migratory male
+relatives. It used to puzzle me to understand why I was under such a
+particular obligation to make home attractive to my brothers. We were on
+excellent terms of friendship, but it was never suggested to them as a
+duty that they make home attractive to me. Why not? Nobody seemed to know.</p>
+
+<p>The answer to these puzzling questions came to me unexpectedly one night
+when I lay in my little bed waiting for sleep to overtake me. It was a
+custom of my father and mother to make the round of our bedrooms every
+night before going themselves to bed. When they entered my room that
+night I was still awake, but for some reason I chose to feign slumber.
+My father bent over me, shielding the candle flame with his big hand. I
+cannot know exactly what thought was in his mind as he gazed down at me,
+but I heard him say, somewhat sadly, "What a pity she wasn't born a lad."</p>
+
+<p>My first hot impulse was to sit up in bed and protest that I didn't want
+to be a boy, but I lay still and heard my parents' footsteps pass on
+toward the next child's bed. I thought about my father's remark for many
+days afterward, but I think I never decided that I regretted my sex.
+However, it was made quite clear that men considered themselves superior
+to women, and that women apparently acquiesced in that belief.</p>
+
+<p>I found this view of things difficult to reconcile with the fact that
+both my father and my mother were <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span>advocates of equal suffrage. I was
+very young when the Reform Act of 1866 was passed, but I very well
+remember the agitation caused by certain circumstances attending it.
+This Reform Act, known as the Household Franchise Bill, marked the first
+popular extension of the ballot in England since 1832. Under its terms,
+householders paying a minimum of ten pounds a year rental were given the
+Parliamentary vote. While it was still under discussion in the House of
+Commons, John Stuart Mill moved an amendment to the bill to include
+women householders as well as men. The amendment was defeated, but in
+the act as passed the word "man," instead of the usual "male person,"
+was used. Now, under another act of Parliament it had been decided that
+the word "man" always included "woman" unless otherwise specifically
+stated. For example, in certain acts containing rate-paying clauses, the
+masculine noun and pronoun are used throughout, but the provisions apply
+to women rate-payers as well as to men. So when the Reform Bill with the
+word "man" in it became law, many women believed that the right of
+suffrage had actually been bestowed upon them. A tremendous amount of
+discussion ensued, and the matter was finally tested by a large number
+of women seeking to have their names placed upon the register as voters.
+In my city of Manchester 3,924 women, out of a total of 4,215 possible
+women voters, claimed their votes, and their claim was defended in the
+law courts by eminent lawyers, including my future husband, Dr.
+Pankhurst. Of course the women's claim was settled adversely in the
+courts, but the agitation resulted in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> a strengthening of the
+woman-suffrage agitation all over the country.</p>
+
+<p>I was too young to understand the precise nature of the affair, but I
+shared in the general excitement. From reading newspapers aloud to my
+father I had developed a genuine interest in politics, and the Reform
+Bill presented itself to my young intelligence as something that was
+going to do the most wonderful good to the country. The first election
+after the bill became law was naturally a memorable occasion. It is
+chiefly memorable to me because it was the first one in which I ever
+participated. My sister and I had just been presented with new winter
+frocks, green in colour, and made alike, after the custom of proper
+British families. Every girl child in those days wore a red flannel
+petticoat, and when we first put on our new frocks I was struck with the
+fact that we were wearing red and green&mdash;the colours of the Liberal
+party. Since our father was a Liberal, of course the Liberal party ought
+to carry the election, and I conceived a brilliant scheme for helping
+its progress. With my small sister trotting after me, I walked the
+better part of a mile to the nearest polling-booth. It happened to be in
+a rather rough factory district, but we did not notice that. Arrived
+there, we two children picked up our green skirts to show our scarlet
+petticoats, and brimful of importance, walked up and down before the
+assembled crowds to encourage the Liberal vote. From this eminence we
+were shortly snatched by outraged authority in the form of a
+nursery-maid. I believe we were sent to bed into the bargain, but I am
+not entirely clear on this point.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p><p>I was fourteen years old when I went to my first suffrage meeting.
+Returning from school one day, I met my mother just setting out for the
+meeting, and I begged her to let me go along. She consented, and without
+stopping to lay my books down I scampered away in my mother's wake. The
+speeches interested and excited me, especially the address of the great
+Miss Lydia Becker, who was the Susan B. Anthony of the English movement,
+a splendid character and a truly eloquent speaker. She was the secretary
+of the Manchester committee, and I had learned to admire her as the
+editor of the <i>Women's Suffrage Journal</i>, which came to my mother every
+week. I left the meeting a conscious and confirmed suffragist.</p>
+
+<p>I suppose I had always been an unconscious suffragist. With my
+temperament and my surroundings I could scarcely have been otherwise.
+The movement was very much alive in the early seventies, nowhere more so
+than in Manchester, where it was organised by a group of extraordinary
+men and women. Among them were Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Bright, who were
+always ready to champion the struggling cause. Mr. Jacob Bright, a
+brother of John Bright, was for many years member of Parliament for
+Manchester, and to the day of his death was an active supporter of woman
+suffrage. Two especially gifted women, besides Miss Becker, were members
+of the committee. These were Mrs. Alice Cliff Scatcherd and Miss
+Wolstentholm, now the venerable Mrs. Wolstentholm-Elmy. One of the
+principal founders of the committee was the man<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> whose wife, in later
+years, I was destined to become, Dr. Richard Marsden Pankhurst.</p>
+
+<p>When I was fifteen years old I went to Paris, where I was entered as a
+pupil in one of the pioneer institutions in Europe for the higher
+education of girls. This school, one of the founders of which was Madame
+Edmond Adam, who was and is still a distinguished literary figure, was
+situated in a fine old house in the Avenue de Neuilly. It was under the
+direction of Mlle. Marchef-Girard, a woman distinguished in education,
+and who afterward was appointed government inspector of schools in
+France. Mlle. Marchef-Girard believed that girls' education should be
+quite as thorough and even more practical than the education boys were
+receiving at that time. She included chemistry and other sciences in her
+courses, and in addition to embroidery she had her girls taught
+bookkeeping. Many other advanced ideas prevailed in this school, and the
+moral discipline which the pupils received was, to my mind, as valuable
+as the intellectual training. Mlle. Marchef-Girard held that women
+should be given the highest ideals of honour. Her pupils were kept to
+the strictest principles of truth-telling and candour. Myself she
+understood and greatly benefited by an implicit trust which I am sure I
+could not have betrayed, even had I felt for her less real affection.</p>
+
+<p>My roommate in this delightful school was an interesting young girl of
+my own age, Noemie Rochefort, daughter of that great Republican,
+Communist, journalist, and swordsman, Henri Rochefort. This was very
+shortly after the Franco-Prussian War, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> memories of the Empire's
+fall and of the bloody and disastrous Commune were very keen in Paris.
+Indeed my roommate's illustrious father and many others were then in
+exile in New Caledonia for participation in the Commune. My friend
+Noemie was torn with anxiety for her father. She talked of him
+constantly, and many were the blood-curdling accounts of daring and of
+patriotism to which I listened. Henri Rochefort was, in fact, one of the
+moving spirits of the Republican movement in France, and after his
+amazing escape in an open boat from New Caledonia, he lived through many
+years of political adventures of the most lively and picturesque
+character. His daughter and I remained warm friends long after our
+school-days ended, and my association with her strengthened all the
+liberal ideas I had previously acquired.</p>
+
+<p>I was between eighteen and nineteen when I finally returned from school
+in Paris and took my place in my father's home as a finished young lady.
+I sympathised with and worked for the woman-suffrage movement, and came
+to know Dr. Pankhurst, whose work for woman suffrage had never ceased.
+It was Dr. Pankhurst who drafted the first enfranchisement bill, known
+as the Women's Disabilities Removal Bill, and introduced into the House
+of Commons in 1870 by Mr. Jacob Bright. The bill advanced to its second
+reading by a majority vote of thirty-three, but it was killed in
+committee by Mr. Gladstone's peremptory orders. Dr. Pankhurst, as I have
+already said, with another distinguished barrister, Lord Coleridge,
+acted as counsel for the Manchester women,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> who tried in 1868 to be
+placed on the register as voters. He also drafted the bill giving
+married women absolute control over their property and earnings, a bill
+which became law in 1882.</p>
+
+<p>My marriage with Dr. Pankhurst took place in 1879.</p>
+
+<p>I think we cannot be too grateful to the group of men and women who,
+like Dr. Pankhurst, in those early days lent the weight of their
+honoured names to the suffrage movement in the trials of its struggling
+youth. These men did not wait until the movement became popular, nor did
+they hesitate until it was plain that women were roused to the point of
+revolt. They worked all their lives with those who were organising,
+educating, and preparing for the revolt which was one day to come.
+Unquestionably those pioneer men suffered in popularity for their
+feminist views. Some of them suffered financially, some politically. Yet
+they never wavered.</p>
+
+<p>My married life lasted through nineteen happy years. Often I have heard
+the taunt that suffragists are women who have failed to find any normal
+outlet for their emotions, and are therefore soured and disappointed
+beings. This is probably not true of any suffragist, and it is most
+certainly not true of me. My home life and relations have been as nearly
+ideal as possible in this imperfect world. About a year after my
+marriage my daughter Christabel was born, and in another eighteen months
+my second daughter Sylvia came. Two other children followed, and for
+some years I was rather deeply immersed in my domestic affairs.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span></p><p>I was never so absorbed with home and children, however, that I lost
+interest in community affairs. Dr. Pankhurst did not desire that I
+should turn myself into a household machine. It was his firm belief that
+society as well as the family stands in need of women's services. So
+while my children were still in their cradles I was serving on the
+executive committee of the Women's Suffrage Society, and also on the
+executive board of the committee which was working to secure the Married
+Women's Property Act. This act having passed in 1882, I threw myself
+into the suffrage work with renewed energy. A new Reform Act, known as
+the County Franchise Bill, extending the suffrage to farm labourers, was
+under discussion, and we believed that our years of educational
+propaganda work had prepared the country to support us in a demand for a
+women's suffrage amendment to the bill. For several years we had been
+holding the most splendid meetings in cities all over the kingdom. The
+crowds, the enthusiasm, the generous response to appeals for support,
+all these seemed to justify us in our belief that women's suffrage was
+near. In fact, in 1884, when the County Franchise Bill came before the
+country, we had an actual majority in favour of suffrage in the House of Commons.</p>
+
+<p>But a favourable majority in the House of Commons by no means insures
+the success of any measure. I shall explain this at length when I come
+to our work of opposing candidates who have avowed themselves
+suffragists, a course which has greatly puzzled our American friends.
+The Liberal party was in power<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> in 1884, and a great memorial was sent
+to the Prime Minister, the Right Honourable William E. Gladstone, asking
+that a women's suffrage amendment to the County Franchise Bill be
+submitted to the free and unbiased consideration of the House. Mr.
+Gladstone curtly refused, declaring that if a women's suffrage amendment
+should be carried, the Government would disclaim responsibility for the
+bill. The amendment was submitted nevertheless, but Mr. Gladstone would
+not allow it to be freely discussed, and he ordered Liberal members to
+vote against it. What we call a whip was sent out against it, a note
+virtually commanding party members to be on hand at a certain hour to
+vote against the women's amendment. Undismayed, the women tried to have
+an independent suffrage bill introduced, but Mr. Gladstone so arranged
+Parliamentary business that the bill never even came up for discussion.</p>
+
+<p>I am not going to write a history of the woman suffrage movement in
+England prior to 1903, when the Women's Social and Political Union was
+organised. That history is full of repetitions of just such stories as
+the one I have related. Gladstone was an implacable foe of woman
+suffrage. He believed that women's work and politics lay in service to
+men's parties. One of the shrewdest acts of Mr. Gladstone's career was
+his disruption of the suffrage organisation in England. He accomplished
+this by substituting "something just as good," that something being
+Women's Liberal Associations. Beginning in 1881 in Bristol, these
+associations spread rapidly through the country and, in 1887, became a
+National<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> Women's Liberal Federation. The promise of the Federation was
+that by allying themselves with men in party politics, women would soon
+earn the right to vote. The avidity with which the women swallowed this
+promise, left off working for themselves, and threw themselves into the
+men's work was amazing.</p>
+
+<p>The Women's Liberal Federation is an organisation of women who believe
+in the principles of the Liberal party. (The somewhat older Primrose
+League is a similar organisation of women who adhere to Conservative
+party principles.) Neither of these organisations have woman suffrage
+for their object. They came into existence to uphold party ideas and to
+work for the election of party candidates.</p>
+
+<p>I am told that women in America have recently allied themselves with
+political parties, believing, just as we did, that such action would
+break down opposition to suffrage by showing the men that women possess
+political ability, and that politics is work for women as well as men.
+Let them not be deceived. I can assure the American women that our long
+alliance with the great parties, our devotion to party programmes, our
+faithful work at elections, never advanced the suffrage cause one step.
+The men accepted the services of the women, but they never offered any
+kind of payment.</p>
+
+<p>As far as I am concerned, I did not delude myself with any false hopes
+in the matter. I was present when the Women's Liberal Federation came
+into existence. Mrs. Gladstone presided, offering the meeting many
+consolatory words for the absence of "our great leader," Mr. Gladstone,
+who of course had no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> time to waste on a gathering of women. At Mrs.
+Jacob Bright's request I joined the Federation. At this stage of my
+development I was a member of the Fabian Society, and I had considerable
+faith in the permeating powers of its mild socialism. But I was already
+fairly convinced of the futility of trusting to political parties. Even
+as a child I had begun to wonder at the <i>na&iuml;ve</i> faith of party members
+in the promises of their leaders. I well remember my father returning
+home from political meetings, his face aglow with enthusiasm. "What
+happened, father?" I would ask, and he would reply triumphantly, "Ah! We
+passed the resolution."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you'll get your measure through the next session," I predicted.</p>
+
+<p>"I won't say that," was the usual reply. "Things don't always move as
+quickly as that. But we passed the resolution."</p>
+
+<p>Well, the suffragists, when they were admitted into the Women's Liberal
+Federation must have felt that they had passed their resolution. They
+settled down to work for the party and to prove that they were as
+capable of voting as the recently enfranchised farm labourers. Of course
+a few women remained loyal to suffrage. They began again on the old
+educational lines to work for the cause. Not one woman took counsel with
+herself as to how and why the agricultural labourers had won their
+franchise. They had won it, as a matter of fact, by burning hay-ricks,
+rioting, and otherwise demonstrating their strength in the only way that
+English politicians can understand. The threat to march a hundred
+thousand men<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> to the House of Commons unless the bill was passed played
+its part also in securing the agricultural labourer his political
+freedom. But no woman suffragist noticed that. As for myself, I was too
+young politically to learn the lesson then. I had to go through years of
+public work before I acquired the experience and the wisdom to know how
+to wring concessions from the English Government. I had to hold public
+office. I had to go behind the scenes in the government schools, in the
+workhouses and other charitable institutions; I had to get a close-hand
+view of the misery and unhappiness of a man-made world, before I reached
+the point where I could successfully revolt against it. It was almost
+immediately after the collapse of the woman suffrage movement in 1884
+that I entered upon this new phase of my career.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>CHAPTER II</span></h2>
+
+<p>In 1885, a year after the failure of the third women's suffrage bill, my
+husband, Dr. Pankhurst, stood as the Liberal candidate for Parliament in
+Rotherline, a riverside constituency of London. I went through the
+campaign with him, speaking and canvassing to the best of my ability.
+Dr. Pankhurst was a popular candidate, and unquestionably would have
+been returned but for the opposition of the Home-Rulers. Parnell was in
+command, and his settled policy was opposition to all Government
+candidates. So, in spite of the fact that Dr. Pankhurst was a staunch
+upholder of home rule, the Parnell forces were solidly opposed to him,
+and he was defeated. I remember expressing considerable indignation, but
+my husband pointed out to me that Parnell's policy was absolutely right.
+With his small party he could never hope to win home rule from a hostile
+majority, but by constant obstruction he could in time wear out the
+Government, and force it to surrender. That was a valuable political
+lesson, one that years later I was destined to put into practice.</p>
+
+<p>The following year found us living in London, and, as usual, interesting
+ourselves with labour matters and other social movements. This year was
+memorable for a great strike of women working in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> Bryant and May
+match factories. I threw myself into this strike with enthusiasm,
+working with the girls and with some women of prominence, among these
+the celebrated Mrs. Annie Besant. The strike was a successful one, the
+girls winning substantial improvements in their working conditions.</p>
+
+<p>It was a time of tremendous unrest, of labour agitations, of strikes and
+lockouts. It was a time also when a most stupid reactionary spirit
+seemed to take possession of the Government and the authorities. The
+Salvation Army, the Socialists, the trade-unionists&mdash;in fact, all bodies
+holding outdoor meetings&mdash;were made special objects of attack. As a
+protest against this policy a Law and Liberty League was formed in
+London, and an immense Free Speech meeting was held in Trafalgar Square,
+John Burns and Cunningham Graham being the principal speakers. I was
+present at this meeting, which resulted in a bloody riot between the
+police and the populace. The Trafalgar Square Riot is historic, and to
+it Mr. John Burns owes, in large part, his subsequent rise to political
+eminence. Both John Burns and Cunningham Graham served prison sentences
+for the part they played in the riot, but they gained fame, and they did
+much to establish the right of free speech for English men. English
+women are still contending for that right.</p>
+
+<p>In 1890 my last child was born in London. I now had a family of five
+young children, and for a time I was less active in public work. On the
+retirement of Mrs. Annie Besant from the London School Board I had been
+asked to stand as candidate for the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> vacancy, but although I should have
+enjoyed the work, I decided not to accept this invitation. The next
+year, however, a new suffrage association, the Women's Franchise League,
+was formed, and I felt it my duty to become affiliated with it The
+League was preparing a new suffrage bill, the provisions of which I
+could not possibly approve, and I joined with old friends, among whom
+were Mrs. Jacob Bright, Mrs. Wolstentholm-Elmy, who was a member of the
+London School Board, and Mrs. Stanton Blatch, then resident in England,
+in an effort to substitute the original bill drafted by Dr. Pankhurst.
+As a matter of fact, neither of the bills was introduced into Parliament
+that year. Mr. (now Lord) Haldane, who had the measure in charge,
+introduced one of his own drafting. It was a truly startling bill,
+royally inclusive in its terms. It not only enfranchised all women,
+married and unmarried, of the householding classes, but it made them
+eligible to all offices under the Crown. The bill was never taken
+seriously by the Government, and indeed it was never intended that it
+should be, as we were later made to understand. I remember going with
+Mrs. Stanton Blatch to the law courts to see Mr. Haldane, and to protest
+against the introduction of a measure that had not the remotest chance of passing.</p>
+
+<p>"All, that bill," said Haldane, "is for the future."</p>
+
+<p>All their woman suffrage bills are intended for the future, a future so
+remote as to be imperceptible. We were beginning to understand this even
+in 1891. However, as long as there was a bill, we determined to support
+it. Accordingly, we canvassed the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>members, distributed a great deal of
+literature, and organised and addressed meetings. We not only made
+speeches ourselves, but we induced friendly members of Parliament to go
+on our platforms. One of these meetings, held in an East End Radical
+club, was addressed by Mr. Haldane and a young man who accompanied him.
+This young man, Sir Edward Grey, then in the beginning of his career,
+made an eloquent plea for woman's suffrage. That Sir Edward Grey should,
+later in life, become a bitter foe of woman's suffrage need astonish no
+one. I have known many young Englishmen who began their political life
+as suffrage speakers and who later became anti-suffragists or traitorous
+"friends" of the cause. These young and aspiring statesmen have to
+attract attention in some fashion, and the espousal of advanced causes,
+such as labour or women's suffrage, seems an easy way to accomplish that end.</p>
+
+<p>Well, our speeches and our agitation did nothing at all to assist Mr.
+Haldane's impossible bill. It never advanced beyond the first reading.</p>
+
+<p>Our London residence came to an end in 1893. In that year we returned to
+our Manchester home, and I again took up the work of the Suffrage
+Society. At my suggestion the members began to organise their first
+out-of-door meetings, and we continued these until we succeeded in
+working up a great meeting that filled Free Trade Hall, and overflowed
+into and crowded a smaller hall near at hand. This marked the beginning
+of a campaign of propaganda among working people, an object which I had
+long desired to bring about.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span></p><p>And now began a new and, as I look back on it, an absorbingly
+interesting stage of my career. I have told how our leaders in the
+Liberal Party had advised the women to prove their fitness for the
+Parliamentary franchise by serving in municipal offices, especially the
+unsalaried offices. A large number of women had availed themselves of
+this advice, and were serving on Boards of Guardians, on school boards,
+and in other capacities. My children now being old enough for me to
+leave them with competent nurses, I was free to join these ranks. A year
+after my return to Manchester I became a candidate for the Board of Poor
+Law Guardians. Several weeks before, I had contested unsuccessfully for
+a place on the school board. This time, however, I was elected, heading
+the poll by a very large majority.</p>
+
+<p>For the benefit of American readers I shall explain something of the
+operation of our English Poor Law. The duty of the law is to administer
+an act of Queen Elizabeth, one of the greatest reforms effected by that
+wise and humane monarch. When Elizabeth came to the throne she found
+England, the Merrie England of contemporary poets, in a state of
+appalling poverty. Hordes of people were literally starving to death, in
+wretched hovels, in the streets, and at the very gates of the palace.
+The cause of all this misery was the religious reformation under Henry
+VIII, and the secession from Rome of the English Church. King Henry, it
+is known, seized all the Church lands, the abbeys and the convents, and
+gave them as rewards to those nobles and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>favourites who had supported
+his policies. But in taking over the Church's property the Protestant
+nobles by no means assumed the Church's ancient responsibilities of
+lodging wayfarers, giving alms, nursing the sick, educating youths, and
+caring for the young and the superannuated. When the monks and the nuns
+were turned out of their convents these duties devolved on no one. The
+result, after the brief reign of Edward VI and the bloody one of Queen
+Mary, was the social anarchy inherited by Elizabeth.</p>
+
+<p>This great queen and great woman, perceiving that the responsibility for
+the poor and the helpless rightfully rests on the community, caused an
+act to be passed creating in the parishes public bodies to deal with
+local conditions of poverty. The Board of Poor Law Guardians disburses
+for the poor the money coming from the Poor Rates (taxes), and some
+additional moneys allowed by the local government board, the president
+of which is a cabinet minister. Mr. John Burns is the present incumbent
+of the office. The Board of Guardians has control of the institution we
+call the workhouse. You have, I believe, almshouses, or poorhouses, but
+they are not quite so extensive as our workhouses, which are all kinds
+of institutions in one. We had, in my workhouse, a hospital with nine
+hundred beds, a school with several hundred children, a farm, and many workshops.</p>
+
+<p>When I came into office I found that the law in our district, Chorlton,
+was being very harshly administered. The old board had been made up of
+the kind of men who are known as rate savers. They<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> were guardians, not
+of the poor but of the rates, and, as I soon discovered, not very astute
+guardians even of money. For instance, although the inmates were being
+very poorly fed, a frightful waste of food was apparent. Each inmate was
+given each day a certain weight of food, and bread formed so much of the
+ration that hardly anyone consumed all of his portion. In the farm
+department pigs were kept on purpose to consume this surplus of bread,
+and as pigs do not thrive on a solid diet of stale bread the animals
+fetched in the market a much lower price than properly fed farm pigs. I
+suggested that, instead of giving a solid weight of bread in one lump,
+the loaf be cut in slices and buttered with margarine, each person being
+allowed all that he cared to eat. The rest of the board objected, saying
+that our poor charges were very jealous of their rights, and would
+suspect in such an innovation an attempt to deprive them of a part of
+their ration. This was easily overcome by the suggestion that we consult
+the inmates before we made the change. Of course the poor people
+consented, and with the bread that we saved we made puddings with milk
+and currants, to be fed to the old people of the workhouse. These old
+folks I found sitting on backless forms, or benches. They had no
+privacy, no possessions, not even a locker. The old women were without
+pockets in their gowns, so they were obliged to keep any poor little
+treasures they had in their bosoms. Soon after I took office we gave the
+old people comfortable Windsor chairs to sit in, and in a number of ways
+we managed to make their existence more endurable.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span></p><p>These, after all, were minor benefits. But it does gratify me when I
+look back and remember what we were able to do for the children of the
+Manchester workhouse. The first time I went into the place I was
+horrified to see little girls seven and eight years old on their knees
+scrubbing the cold stones of the long corridors. These little girls were
+clad, summer and winter, in thin cotton frocks, low in the neck and
+short sleeved. At night they wore nothing at all, night dresses being
+considered too good for paupers. The fact that bronchitis was epidemic
+among them most of the time had not suggested to the guardians any
+change in the fashion of their clothes. There was a school for the
+children, but the teaching was of the poorest order. They were forlorn
+enough, these poor innocents, when I first met them. In five years' time
+we had changed the face of the earth for them. We had bought land in the
+country and had built a cottage system home for the children, and we had
+established for them a modern school with trained teachers. We had even
+secured for them a gymnasium and a swimming-bath. I may say that I was
+on the building committee of the board, the only woman member.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever may be urged against the English Poor Law system, I maintain
+that under it no stigma of pauperism need be applied to workhouse
+children. If they are treated like paupers of course they will be
+paupers, and they will grow up paupers, permanent burdens on society;
+but if they are regarded merely as children under the guardianship of
+the state, they assume quite another character. Rich<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> children are not
+pauperized by being sent to one or another of the free public schools
+with which England is blest. Yet a great many of those schools, now
+exclusively used for the education of upper middle-class boys, were
+founded by legacies left to educate the poor&mdash;girls as well as boys. The
+English Poor Law, properly administered, ought to give back to the
+children of the destitute what the upper classes have taken from them, a
+good education on a self-respecting basis.</p>
+
+<p>The trouble is, as I soon perceived after taking office, the law cannot,
+in existing circumstances, do all the work, even for children, that it
+was intended to do. We shall have to have new laws, and it soon became
+apparent to me that we can never hope to get them until women have the
+vote. During the time I served on the board, and for years since then,
+women guardians all over the country have striven in vain to have the
+law reformed in order to ameliorate conditions which break the hearts of
+women to see, but which apparently affect men very little. I have spoken
+of the little girls I found scrubbing the workhouse floors. There were
+others at the hateful labour who aroused my keenest pity. I found that
+there were pregnant women in that workhouse, scrubbing floors, doing the
+hardest kind of work, almost until their babies came into the world.
+Many of them were unmarried women, very, very young, mere girls. These
+poor mothers were allowed to stay in the hospital after confinement for
+a short two weeks. Then they had to make a choice of staying in the
+workhouse and earning their living by scrubbing and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> other work, in
+which case they were separated from their babies; or of taking their
+discharges. They could stay and be paupers, or they could leave&mdash;leave
+with a two-weeks-old baby in their arms, without hope, without home,
+without money, without anywhere to go. What became of those girls, and
+what became of their hapless infants? That question was at the basis of
+the women guardians' demand for a reform of one part of the Poor Law.</p>
+
+<p>That section deals with the little children who are boarded out, not by
+the workhouse, but by the parents, that parent being almost always the
+mother. It is from that class of workhouse mothers&mdash;mostly young servant
+girls&mdash;which thoughtless people say all working girls ought to be; it is
+from that class more than from any other that cases of illegitimacy
+come. Those poor little servant girls, who can get out perhaps only in
+the evening, whose minds are not very cultivated, and who find all the
+sentiment of their lives in cheap novelettes, fall an easy prey to those
+who have designs against them. These are the people by whom the babies
+are mostly put out to nurse, and the mothers have to pay for their keep.
+Of course the babies are very badly protected. The Poor Law Guardians
+are supposed to protect them by appointing inspectors to visit the homes
+where the babies are boarded. But, under the law, if a man who ruins a
+girl pays down a lump sum of twenty pounds, less than a hundred dollars,
+the boarding home is immune from inspection. As long as a baby-farmer
+takes only one child at a time, the twenty pounds being paid, the
+inspectors cannot <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>inspect the house. Of course the babies die with
+hideous promptness, often long before the twenty pounds have been spent,
+and then the baby-farmers are free to solicit another victim. For years,
+as I have said, women have tried in vain to get that one small reform of
+the Poor Law, to reach and protect all illegitimate children, and to
+make it impossible for any rich scoundrel to escape future liability for
+his child because of the lump sum he has paid down. Over and over again
+it has been tried, but it has always failed, because the ones who really
+care about the thing are mere women.</p>
+
+<p>I thought I had been a suffragist before I became a Poor Law Guardian,
+but now I began to think about the vote in women's hands not only as a
+right but as a desperate necessity. These poor, unprotected mothers and
+their babies I am sure were potent factors in my education as a
+militant. In fact, all the women I came in contact with in the workhouse
+contributed to that education. Very soon after I went on the board I saw
+that the class of old women who came into the workhouse were in many
+ways superior to the kind of old men who came into the workhouse. One
+could not help noticing it. They were, to begin with, more industrious.
+In fact, it was quite touching to see their industry and patience. Old
+women, over sixty and seventy years of age, did most of the work of that
+place, most of the sewing, most of the things that kept the house clean
+and which supplied the inmates with clothing. I found that the old men
+were different. One could not get very much work out of them. They liked
+to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> stop in the oakum picking-room, where they were allowed to smoke;
+but as to real work, very little was done by our old men.</p>
+
+<p>I began to make inquiries about these old women. I found that the
+majority of them were not women who had been dissolute, who had been
+criminal, but women who had lead perfectly respectable lives, either as
+wives and mothers, or as single women earning their own living. A great
+many were of the domestic-servant class, who had not married, who had
+lost their employment, and had reached a time of life when it was
+impossible to get more employment. It was through no fault of their own,
+but simply because they had never earned enough to save. The average
+wage of working women in England is less than two dollars a week. On
+this pittance it is difficult enough to keep alive, and of course it is
+impossible to save. Every one who knows anything about conditions under
+which our working women live knows that few of them can ever hope to put
+by enough to keep them in old age. Besides, the average working woman
+has to support others than herself. How can she save?</p>
+
+<p>Some of our old women were married. Many of them, I found, were widows
+of skilled artisans who had had pensions from their unions, but the
+pensions had died with the men. These women, who had given up the power
+to work for themselves, and had devoted themselves to working for their
+husbands and children, were left penniless. There was nothing for them
+to do but to go into the workhouse. Many of them were widows of men who
+had served<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> their country in the army or the navy. The men had had
+pensions from the government, but the pensions had died with them, and
+so the women were in the workhouse.</p>
+
+<p>We shall not in future, I hope, find so many respectable old women in
+English workhouses. We have an old-age pension law now, which allows old
+women as well as old men the sum of five shillings&mdash;$1.20&mdash;a week;
+hardly enough to live on, but enough to enable the poor to keep their
+old fathers and mothers out of the workhouse without starving themselves
+or their children. But when I was a Poor Law Guardian there was simply
+nothing to do with a woman when her life of toil ceased except make a
+pauper of her.</p>
+
+<p>I wish I had space to tell you of other tragedies of women I witnessed
+while I was on that board. In our out-relief department, which exists
+chiefly for able-bodied poor and dependent persons, I was brought into
+contact with widows who were struggling desperately to keep their homes
+and families together. The law allowed these women relief of a certain
+very inadequate kind, but for herself and one child it offered no relief
+except the workhouse. Even if the woman had a baby at her breast she was
+regarded, under the law, as an able-bodied man. Women, we are told,
+should stay at home and take care of their children. I used to astound
+my men colleagues by saying to them: "When women have the vote they will
+see that mothers <i>can</i> stay at home and care for their children. You men
+have made it impossible for these mothers to do that."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span></p><p>I am convinced that the enfranchised woman will find many ways in which
+to lessen, at least, the curse of poverty. Women have more practical
+ideas about relief, and especially of prevention of dire poverty, than
+men display. I was struck with this whenever I attended the District
+Conferences and the annual Poor Law Union Meetings. In our discussions
+the women showed themselves much more capable, much more resourceful,
+than the men. I remember two papers which I prepared and which caused
+considerable discussion. One of these was on the Duties of Guardians in
+Times of Unemployment, in which I pointed out that the government had
+one reserve of employment for men which could always be used. We have,
+on our northwest coast, a constant washing away of the fore shore. Every
+once in a while the question of coast reclamation comes up for
+discussion, but I had never heard any man suggest coast reclamation as a
+means of giving the unemployed relief.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>In 1898 I suffered an irreparable loss in the death of my husband. His
+death occurred suddenly and left me with the heavy responsibility of
+caring for a family of children, the eldest only seventeen years of age.
+I resigned my place on the Board of Guardians, and was almost
+immediately appointed to the salaried office of Registrar of Births and
+Deaths in Manchester. We have registrars of births, deaths and marriages
+in England, but since the act establishing the last named contains the
+words "male person," a woman may not be appointed a registrar of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>
+marriages. The head of this department of the government is the
+registrar-general, with offices at Somerset House, London, where all
+vital statistics are returned and all records filed.</p>
+
+<p>It was my duty as registrar of births and deaths to act as chief census
+officer of my district; I was obliged to receive all returns of births
+and deaths, record them, and send my books quarterly to the office of
+the registrar-general. My district was in a working-class quarter, and
+on this account I instituted evening office hours twice a week. It was
+touching to observe how glad the women were to have a woman registrar to
+go to. They used to tell me their stories, dreadful stories some of
+them, and all of them pathetic with that patient and uncomplaining
+pathos of poverty. Even after my experience on the Board of Guardians, I
+was shocked to be reminded over and over again of the little respect
+there was in the world for women and children. I have had little girls
+of thirteen come to my office to register the births of their babies,
+illegitimate, of course. In many of these cases I found that the child's
+own father or some near male relative was responsible for her state.
+There was nothing that could be done in most cases. The age of consent
+in England is sixteen years, but a man can always claim that he thought
+the girl was over sixteen. During my term of office a very young mother
+of an illegitimate child exposed her baby, and it died. The girl was
+tried for murder and was sentenced to death. This was afterwards
+commuted, it is true, but the unhappy child had the horrible experience
+of the trial and the sentence "to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> be hanged by the neck, until you are
+dead." The wretch who was, from the point of view of justice, the real
+murderer of the baby, received no punishment at all.</p>
+
+<p>I needed only one more experience after this one, only one more contact
+with the life of my time and the position of women, to convince me that
+if civilisation is to advance at all in the future, it must be through
+the help of women, women freed of their political shackles, women with
+full power to work their will in society. In 1900 I was asked to stand
+as a candidate for the Manchester School Board. The schools were then
+under the old law, and the school boards were very active bodies. They
+administered the Elementary Education Act, bought school sites, erected
+buildings, employed and paid teachers. The school code and the
+curriculum were framed by the Board of Education, which is part of the
+central government. Of course this was absurd. A body of men in London
+could not possibly realise all the needs of boys and girls in remote
+parts of England. But so it was.</p>
+
+<p>As a member of the school board I very soon found that the teachers,
+working people of the higher grade, were in exactly the same position as
+the working people of the lower grades. That is, the men had all the
+advantage. Teachers had a representative in the school board councils.
+Of course that representative was a man teacher, and equally of course,
+he gave preference to the interests of the men teachers. Men teachers
+received much higher salaries than the women, although many of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>
+women, in addition to their regular class work, had to teach sewing and
+domestic science into the bargain. They received no extra pay for their
+extra work. In spite of this added burden, and in spite of the lower
+salaries received, I found that the women cared a great deal more about
+their work, and a great deal more about the children than the men. It
+was a winter when there was a great deal of poverty and unemployment in
+Manchester. I found that the women teachers were spending their slender
+salaries to provide regular dinners for destitute children, and were
+giving up their time to waiting on them and seeing that they were
+nourished. They said to me, quite simply: "You see, the little things
+are too badly off to study their lessons. We have to feed them before we
+can teach them."</p>
+
+<p>Well, instead of seeing that women care more for schools and school
+children than men do and should therefore have more power in education,
+the Parliament of 1900 actually passed a law which took education in
+England entirely out of the hands of women. This law abolished the
+school board altogether and placed the administration of schools in the
+hands of the municipalities. Certain corporations had formerly made
+certain grants to technical education&mdash;Manchester had built a
+magnificent technical college&mdash;and now the corporations had full control
+of both elementary and secondary education.</p>
+
+<p>The law did indeed provide that the corporations should co-opt at least
+one woman on their education boards. Manchester co-opted four women, and
+at the strong recommendation of the Labour Party, I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> was one of the
+women chosen. At their urgent solicitation I was appointed to the
+Committee on Technical Instruction, the one woman admitted to this
+committee. I learned that the Manchester Technical College, called the
+second best in Europe, spending thousands of pounds annually for
+technical training, had practically no provision for training women.
+Even in classes where they might easily have been admitted, bakery and
+confectionery classes and the like, the girls were kept out because the
+men's trades unions objected to their being educated for such skilled
+work. It was rapidly becoming clear to my mind that men regarded women
+as a servant class in the community, and that women were going to remain
+in the servant class until they lifted themselves out of it. I asked
+myself many times in those days what was to be done. I had joined the
+Labour Party, thinking that through its councils something vital might
+come, some such demand for the women's enfranchisement that the
+politicians could not possibly ignore. Nothing came.</p>
+
+<p>All these years my daughters had been growing up. All their lives they
+had been interested in women's suffrage. Christabel and Sylvia, as
+little girls, had cried to be taken to meetings. They had helped in our
+drawing-room meetings in every way that children can help. As they grew
+older we used to talk together about the suffrage, and I was sometimes
+rather frightened by their youthful confidence in the prospect, which
+they considered certain, of the success of the movement. One day
+Christabel startled me with the remark: "How long you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> women have been
+trying for the vote. For my part, I mean to get it."</p>
+
+<p>Was there, I reflected, any difference between trying for the vote and
+getting it? There is an old French proverb, "If youth could know; if age
+could do." It occurred to me that if the older suffrage workers could in
+some way join hands with the young, unwearied and resourceful
+suffragists, the movement might wake up to new life and new
+possibilities. After that I and my daughters together sought a way to
+bring about that union of young and old which would find new methods,
+blaze new trails. At length we thought we had found a way.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>CHAPTER III</span></h2>
+
+
+<p>In the summer of 1902&mdash;I think it was 1902&mdash;Susan B. Anthony paid a
+visit to Manchester, and that visit was one of the contributory causes
+that led to the founding of our militant suffrage organisation, the
+Women's Social and Political Union. During Miss Anthony's visit my
+daughter Christabel, who was very deeply impressed, wrote an article for
+the Manchester papers on the life and works of the venerable reformer.
+After her departure Christabel spoke often of her, and always with
+sorrow and indignation that such a splendid worker for humanity was
+destined to die without seeing the hopes of her lifetime realised. "It
+is unendurable," declared my daughter, "to think of another generation
+of women wasting their lives begging for the vote. We must not lose any
+more time. We must act."</p>
+
+<p>By this time the Labour Party, of which I was still a member, had
+returned Mr. Keir Hardie to Parliament, and we decided that the first
+step in a campaign of action was to make the Labour Party responsible
+for a new suffrage bill. At a recent annual conference of the party I
+had moved a resolution calling upon the members to instruct their own
+member of Parliament to introduce a bill for the enfranchisement of
+women. The resolution was passed, and we determined to organise a
+society of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> women to demand immediate enfranchisement, not by means of
+any outworn missionary methods, but through political action.</p>
+
+<p>It was in October, 1903, that I invited a number of women to my house in
+Nelson street, Manchester, for purposes of organisation. We voted to
+call our new society the Women's Social and Political Union, partly to
+emphasise its democracy, and partly to define its object as political
+rather than propagandist. We resolved to limit our membership
+exclusively to women, to keep ourselves absolutely free from any party
+affiliation, and to be satisfied with nothing but action on our
+question. Deeds, not words, was to be our permanent motto.</p>
+
+<p>To such a pass had the women's suffrage cause come in my country that
+the old leaders, who had done such fine educational work in the past,
+were now seemingly content with expressions of sympathy and regret on
+the part of hypocritical politicians. This fact was thrust upon me anew
+by an incident that occurred almost at the moment of the founding of the
+Women's Social and Political Union. In our Parliament no bill has a
+chance of becoming a law unless it is made a Government measure. Private
+members are at liberty to introduce measures of their own, but these
+rarely reach the second reading, or debatable stage. So much time is
+given to discussion of Government measures that very little time can be
+given to any private bills. About one day in a week is given over to
+consideration of private measures, to which, as we say, the Government
+give facilities; and since there are a limited number of weeks in a
+session,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> the members, on the opening days of Parliament, meet and draw
+lots to determine who shall have a place in the debates. Only these
+successful men have a chance to speak to their bills, and only those who
+have drawn early chances have any prospect of getting much discussion on their measures.</p>
+
+<p>Now, the old suffragists had long since given up hope of obtaining a
+Government suffrage bill, but they clung to a hope that a private
+member's bill would some time obtain consideration. Every year, on the
+opening day of Parliament, the association sent a deputation of women to
+the House of Commons, to meet so-called friendly members and consider
+the position of the women's suffrage cause. The ceremony was of a most
+conventional, not to say farcical character. The ladies made their
+speeches and the members made theirs. The ladies thanked the friendly
+members for their sympathy, and the members renewed their assurances
+that they believed in women's suffrage and would vote for it when they
+had an opportunity to do so. Then the deputation, a trifle sad but
+entirely tranquil, took its departure, and the members resumed the real
+business of life, which was support of their party's policies.</p>
+
+<p>Such a ceremony as this I attended soon after the founding of the
+W. S. P. U. Sir Charles M'Laren was the friendly member who presided
+over the gathering, and he did his full duty in the matter of formally
+endorsing the cause of women's suffrage. He assured the delegation of
+his deep regret, as well as the regret of numbers of his colleagues,
+that women so intelligent, so devoted, etc., should remain
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>unenfranchised. Other members did likewise. The ceremonies drew to a
+close, but I, who had not been asked to speak, determined to add
+something to the occasion.</p>
+
+<p>"Sir Charles M'Laren," I began abruptly, "has told us that numbers of
+his colleagues desire the success of the women's suffrage cause. Now
+every one of us knows that at this moment the members of the House of
+Commons are balloting for a place in the debates. Will Sir Charles
+M'Laren tell us if any member is preparing to introduce a bill for
+women's suffrage? Will he tell us what he and the other members will
+pledge themselves to <i>do</i> for the reform they so warmly endorse?"</p>
+
+<p>Of course, the embarrassed Sir Charles was not prepared to tell us
+anything of the kind, and the deputation departed in confusion and
+wrath. I was told that I was an interloper, an impertinent intruder. Who
+asked me to say anything? And what right had I to step in and ruin the
+good impression they had made? No one could tell how many friendly
+members I had alienated by my unfortunate remarks.</p>
+
+<p>I went back to Manchester and with renewed energy continued the work of
+organising for the W. S. P. U.</p>
+
+<p>In the spring of 1904 I went to the annual conference of the Independent
+Labour Party, determined if possible to induce the members to prepare a
+suffrage bill to be laid before Parliament in the approaching session.
+Although I was a member of the National Administrative Council and
+presumably a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> person holding some influence in the party, I knew that my
+plan would be bitterly opposed by a strong minority, who held that the
+Labour Party should direct all its efforts toward securing universal
+adult suffrage for both men and women. Theoretically, of course, a
+Labour party could not be satisfied with anything less than universal
+adult suffrage, but it was clear that no such sweeping reform could be
+effected at that time, unless indeed the Government made it one of their
+measures. Besides, while a large majority of members of the House of
+Commons were pledged to support a bill giving women equal franchise
+rights with men, it was doubtful whether a majority could be relied upon
+to support a bill giving adult suffrage, even to men. Such a bill, even
+if it were a Government measure, would probably be difficult of passage.</p>
+
+<p>After considerable discussion, the National Council decided to adopt the
+original Women's Enfranchisement Bill, drafted by Dr. Pankhurst, and
+advanced in 1870 to its second reading in the House of Commons. The
+Council's decision was approved by an overwhelming majority of the conference.</p>
+
+<p>The new session of Parliament, so eagerly looked forward to, met on
+February 13, 1905. I went down from Manchester, and with my daughter
+Sylvia, then a student at the Royal College of Art, South Kensington,
+spent eight days in the Strangers' Lobby of the House of Commons,
+working for the suffrage bill. We interviewed every one of the members
+who had pledged themselves to support a suffrage bill when it should be
+introduced, but we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> found not one single member who would agree that his
+chance in the ballot, if he drew such a chance, should be given to
+introducing the bill. Every man had some other measure he was anxious to
+further. Mr. Keir Hardie had previously given us his pledge, but his
+name, as we had feared, was not drawn in the ballot. We next set out to
+interview all the men whose names had been drawn, and we finally induced
+Mr. Bamford Slack, who held the fourteenth place, to introduce our bill.
+The fourteenth place was not a good one, but it served, and the second
+reading of our bill was set down for Friday, May 12th, the second order of the day.</p>
+
+<p>This being the first suffrage bill in eight years, a thrill of
+excitement animated not only our ranks but all the old suffrage
+societies. Meetings were held, and a large number of petitions
+circulated. When the day came for consideration on our bill, the
+Strangers' Lobby could not hold the enormous gathering of women of all
+classes, rich and poor, who flocked to the House of Commons. It was
+pitiful to see the look of hope and joy that shone on the faces of many
+of these women. We knew that our poor little measure had the very
+slightest chance of being passed. The bill that occupied the first order
+of the day was one providing that carts travelling along public roads at
+night should carry a light behind as well as before. We had tried to
+induce the promoters of this unimportant little measure to withdraw it
+in the interests of our bill, but they refused. We had tried also to
+persuade the Conservative Government to give our bill facilities for
+full discussion, but they also<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> refused. So, as we fully anticipated,
+the promoters of the Roadway Lighting Bill were allowed to "talk out"
+our bill. They did this by spinning out the debate with silly stories
+and foolish jokes. The members listened to the insulting performance
+with laughter and applause.</p>
+
+<p>When news of what was happening reached the women who waited in the
+Strangers' Lobby, a feeling of wild excitement and indignation took
+possession of the throng. Seeing their temper, I felt that the moment
+had come for a demonstration such as no old-fashioned suffragist had
+ever attempted. I called upon the women to follow me outside for a
+meeting of protest against the government. We swarmed out into the open,
+and Mrs. Wolstenholm-Elmy, one of the oldest suffrage workers in
+England, began to speak. Instantly the police rushed into the crowd of
+women, pushing them about and ordering them to disperse. We moved on as
+far as the great statue of Richard C&oelig;ur de Lion that guards the
+entrance to the House of Lords, but again the police intervened. Finally
+the police agreed to let us hold a meeting in Broad Sanctuary, very near
+the gates of Westminster Abbey. Here we made speeches and adopted a
+resolution condemning the Government's action in allowing a small
+minority to talk out our bill. This was the first militant act of the
+W. S. P. U. It caused comment and even some alarm, but the police
+contented themselves with taking our names.</p>
+
+<p>The ensuing summer was spent in outdoor work. By this time the Women's
+Social and Political Union<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> had acquired some valuable accessions, and
+money began to come to us. Among our new members was one who was
+destined to play an important r&ocirc;le in the unfolding drama of the
+militant movement. At the close of one of our meetings at Oldham a young
+girl introduced herself to me as Annie Kenney, a mill-worker, and a
+strong suffrage sympathiser. She wanted to know more of our society and
+its objects, and I invited her and her sister Jenny, a Board School
+teacher, to tea the next day. They came and joined our Union, a step
+that definitely changed the whole course of Miss Kenney's life, and gave
+us one of our most distinguished leaders and organisers. With her help
+we began to carry our propaganda to an entirely new public.</p>
+
+<p>In Lancashire there is an institution known as the Wakes, a sort of
+travelling fair where they have merry-go-rounds, Aunt-Sallies, and other
+festive games, side-shows of various kinds, and booths where all kinds
+of things are sold. Every little village has its Wakes-week during the
+summer and autumn, and it is the custom for the inhabitants of the
+villages to spend the Sunday before the opening of the Wakes walking
+among the booths in anticipation of tomorrow's joys. On these occasions
+the Salvation Army, temperance orators, venders of quack medicines,
+pedlars, and others, take advantage of the ready-made audience to
+advance their propaganda. At Annie Kenney's suggestion we went from one
+village to the other, following the Wakes and making suffrage speeches.
+We soon rivalled in popularity the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>Salvation Army, and even the
+tooth-drawers and patent-medicine pedlars.</p>
+
+<p>The Women's Social and Political Union had been in existence two years
+before any opportunity was presented for work on a national scale. The
+autumn of 1905 brought a political situation which seemed to us to
+promise bright hopes for women's enfranchisement. The life of the old
+Parliament, dominated for nearly twenty years by the Conservative Party,
+was drawing to an end, and the country was on the eve of a general
+election in which the Liberals hoped to be returned to power. Quite
+naturally the Liberal candidates went to the country with perfervid
+promises of reform in every possible direction. They appealed to the
+voters to return them, as advocates and upholders of true democracy, and
+they promised that there should be a Government united in favour of
+people's rights against the powers of a privileged aristocracy.</p>
+
+<p>Now repeated experiences had taught us that the only way to attain
+women's suffrage was to commit a Government to it. In other words,
+pledges of support from candidates were plainly useless. They were not
+worth having. The only object worth trying for was pledges from
+responsible leaders that the new Government would make women's suffrage
+a part of the official programme. We determined to address ourselves to
+those men who were likely to be in the Liberal Cabinet, demanding to
+know whether their reforms were going to include justice to women.</p>
+
+<p>We laid our plans to begin this work at a great<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> meeting to be held in
+Free Trade Hall, Manchester, with Sir Edward Grey as the principal
+speaker. We intended to get seats in the gallery, directly facing the
+platform and we made for the occasion a large banner with the words:
+"Will the Liberal Party Give Votes for Women?" We were to let this
+banner down over the gallery rails at the moment when our speaker rose
+to put the question to Sir Edward Grey. At the last moment, however, we
+had to alter the plan because it was impossible to get the gallery seats
+we wanted. There was no way in which we could use our large banner, so,
+late in the afternoon on the day of the meeting, we cut out and made a
+small banner with the three-word inscription: "Votes for Women." Thus,
+quite accidentally, there came into existence the present slogan of the
+suffrage movement around the world.</p>
+
+<p>Annie Kenney and my daughter Christabel were charged with the mission of
+questioning Sir Edward Grey. They sat quietly through the meeting, at
+the close of which questions were invited. Several questions were asked
+by men and were courteously answered. Then Annie Kenney arose and asked:
+"If the Liberal party is returned to power, will they take steps to give
+votes for women?" At the same time Christabel held aloft the little
+banner that every one in the hall might understand the nature of the
+question. Sir Edward Grey returned no answer to Annie's question, and
+the men sitting near her forced her rudely into her seat, while a
+steward of the meeting pressed his hat over her face. A<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> babel of
+shouts, cries and catcalls sounded from all over the hall.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as order was restored Christabel stood up and repeated the
+question: "Will the Liberal Government, if returned, give votes to
+women?" Again Sir Edward Grey ignored the question, and again a perfect
+tumult of shouts and angry cries arose. Mr. William Peacock, chief
+constable of Manchester, left the platform and came down to the women,
+asking them to write their question, which he promised to hand to the
+speaker. They wrote: "Will the Liberal Government give votes to
+working-women? Signed, on behalf of the Women's Social and Political
+Union, Annie Kenney, member of the Oldham committee of the card-and
+blowing-room operatives." They added a line to say that, as one of
+96,000 organised women textile-workers, Annie Kenney earnestly desired
+an answer to the question.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peacock kept his word and handed the question to Sir Edward Grey,
+who read it, smiled, and passed it to the others on the platform. They
+also read it with smiles, but no answer to the question was made. Only
+one lady who was sitting on the platform tried to say something, but the
+chairman interrupted by asking Lord Durham to move a vote of thanks to
+the speaker. Mr. Winston Churchill seconded the motion, Sir Edward Grey
+replied briefly, and the meeting began to break up. Annie Kenney stood
+up in her chair and cried out over the noise of shuffling feet and
+murmurs of conversation: "Will the Liberal Government give votes to
+women?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> Then the audience became a mob. They howled, they shouted and
+roared, shaking their fists fiercely at the woman who dared to intrude
+her question into a man's meeting. Hands were lifted to drag her out of
+her chair, but Christabel threw one arm about her as she stood, and with
+the other arm warded off the mob, who struck and scratched at her until
+her sleeve was red with blood. Still the girls held together and shouted
+over and over: "The question! The question! Answer the question!"</p>
+
+<p>Six men, stewards of the meeting, seized Christabel and dragged her down
+the aisle, past the platform, other men following with Annie Kenney,
+both girls still calling for an answer to their question. On the
+platform the Liberal leaders sat silent and unmoved while this
+disgraceful scene was taking place, and the mob were shouting and
+shrieking from the floor.</p>
+
+<p>Flung into the streets, the two girls staggered to their feet and began
+to address the crowds, and to tell them what had taken place in a
+Liberal meeting. Within five minutes they were arrested on a charge of
+obstruction and, in Christabel's case, of assaulting the police. Both
+were summonsed to appear next morning in a police court, where, after a
+trial which was a mere farce, Annie Kenney was sentenced to pay a fine
+of five shillings, with an alternative of three days in prison, and
+Christabel Pankhurst was given a fine of ten shillings or a jail
+sentence of one week.</p>
+
+<p>Both girls promptly chose the prison sentence. As soon as they left the
+court-room I hurried around<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> to the room where they were waiting, and I
+said to my daughter: "You have done everything you could be expected to
+do in this matter. I think you should let me pay your fines and take you
+home." Without waiting for Annie Kenney to speak, my daughter exclaimed:
+"Mother, if you pay my fine I will never go home." Before going to the
+meeting she had said, "We will get our question answered or sleep in
+prison to-night." I now knew her courage remained unshaken.</p>
+
+<p>Of course the affair created a tremendous sensation, not only in
+Manchester, where my husband had been so well known and where I had so
+long held public office, but all over England. The comments of the press
+were almost unanimously bitter. Ignoring the perfectly well-established
+fact that men in every political meeting ask questions and demand
+answers of the speakers, the newspapers treated the action of the two
+girls as something quite unprecedented and outrageous. They generally
+agreed that great leniency had been shown them. Fines and jail-sentences
+were too good for such unsexed creatures. "The discipline of the
+nursery" would have been far more appropriate. One Birmingham paper
+declared that "if any argument were required against giving ladies
+political status and power it had been furnished in Manchester."
+Newspapers which had heretofore ignored the whole subject now hinted
+that while they had formerly been in favour of women's suffrage, they
+could no longer countenance it. The Manchester incident, it was said,
+had set the cause back, perhaps irrevocably.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span></p><p>This is how it set the cause back. Scores of people wrote to the
+newspapers expressing sympathy with the women. The wife of Sir Edward
+Grey told her friends that she considered them quite justified in the
+means they had taken. It was stated that Winston Churchill, nervous
+about his own candidacy in Manchester, visited Strangeways Gaol, where
+the two girls were imprisoned, and vainly begged the governor to allow
+him to pay their fines. On October 20, when the prisoners were released,
+they were given an immense demonstration in Free-Trade Hall, the very
+hall from which they had been ejected the week before. The Women's
+Social and Political Union received a large number of new members. Above
+all, the question of women's suffrage became at once a live topic of
+comment from one end of Great Britain to the other.</p>
+
+<p>We determined that from that time on the little "Votes For Women"
+banners should appear wherever a prospective member of the Liberal
+Government rose to speak, and that there should be no more peace until
+the women's question was answered. We clearly perceived that the new
+Government, calling themselves Liberal, were reactionary so far as women
+were concerned, that they were hostile to women's suffrage, and would
+have to be fought until they were conquered, or else driven from office.</p>
+
+<p>We did not begin to fight, however, until we had given the new
+Government every chance to give us the pledge we wanted. Early in
+December the Conservative Government had gone out, and Sir Henry
+Campbell-Bannerman, the Liberal leader, had formed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> a new Cabinet. On
+December 21 a great meeting was held in Royal Albert Hall, London, where
+Sir Henry, surrounded by his cabinet, made his first utterance as Prime
+Minister. Previous to the meeting we wrote to Sir Henry and asked him,
+in the name of the Women's Social and Political Union, whether the
+Liberal Government would give women the vote. We added that our
+representatives would be present at the meeting, and we hoped that the
+Prime Minister would publicly answer the question. Otherwise we should
+be obliged publicly to protest against his silence.</p>
+
+<p>Of course Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman returned no reply, nor did his
+speech contain any allusion to women's suffrage. So, at the conclusion,
+Annie Kenney, whom we had smuggled into the hall in disguise, whipped
+out her little white calico banner, and called out in her clear, sweet
+voice: "Will the Liberal Government give women the vote?"</p>
+
+<p>At the same moment Theresa Billington let drop from a seat directly
+above the platform a huge banner with the words: "Will the Liberal
+Government give justice to working-women?" Just for a moment there was a
+gasping silence, the people waiting to see what the Cabinet Ministers
+would do. They did nothing. Then, in the midst of uproar and conflicting
+shouts, the women were seized and flung out of the hall.</p>
+
+<p>This was the beginning of a campaign the like of which was never known
+in England, or, for that matter, in any other country. If we had been
+strong enough we should have opposed the election of every<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> Liberal
+candidate, but being limited both in funds and in members we
+concentrated on one member of the Government, Mr. Winston Churchill. Not
+that we had any animus against Mr. Churchill. We chose him simply
+because he was the only important candidate standing for constituencies
+within reach of our headquarters. We attended every meeting addressed by
+Mr. Churchill. We heckled him unmercifully; we spoiled his best points
+by flinging back such obvious retorts that the crowds roared with
+laughter. We lifted out little white banners from unexpected corners of
+the hall, exactly at the moment when an interruption was least desired.
+Sometimes our banners were torn from our hands and trodden under foot.
+Sometimes, again, the crowds were with us, and we actually broke up the
+meeting. We did not succeed in defeating Mr. Churchill, but he was
+returned by a very small majority, the smallest of any of the Manchester
+Liberal candidates.</p>
+
+<p>We did not confine our efforts to heckling Mr. Churchill. Throughout the
+campaign we kept up the work of questioning Cabinet Ministers at
+meetings all over England and Scotland. At Sun Hall, Liverpool,
+addressed by the Prime Minister, nine women in succession asked the
+important question, and were thrown out of the hall; this in the face of
+the fact that Sir Campbell-Bannerman was an avowed suffragist. But we
+were not questioning him as to his private opinions on the suffrage; we
+were asking him what his Government were willing to do about suffrage.
+We questioned Mr. Asquith in Sheffield, Mr. Lloyd-George in Altrincham,
+Cheshire, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> Prime Minister again in Glasgow, and we interrupted a
+great many other meetings as well. Always we were violently thrown out
+and insulted. Often we were painfully bruised and hurt.</p>
+
+<p>What good did it do? We have often been asked that question, even by the
+women our actions spurred into an activity they had never before thought
+themselves capable of. For one thing, our heckling campaign made women's
+suffrage a matter of news&mdash;it had never been that before. Now the
+newspapers were full of us. For another thing, we woke up the old
+suffrage associations. During the general election various groups of
+non-militant suffragists came back to life and organised a gigantic
+manifesto in favour of action from the Liberal Government. Among others,
+the manifesto was signed by the Women's Co-operative Guild with nearly
+21,000 members; the Women's Liberal Federation, with 76,000 members; the
+Scottish Women's Liberal Federation, with 15,000 members; the
+North-of-England Weavers' Association, with 100,000 members; the British
+Women's Temperance Association, with nearly 110,000 members; and the
+Independent Labour Party with 20,000 members. Surely it was something to
+have inspired all this activity.</p>
+
+<p>We decided that the next step must be to carry the fight to London, and
+Annie Kenney was chosen to be organiser there. With only two pounds,
+less than ten dollars, in her pocket the intrepid girl set forth on her
+mission. In about a fortnight I left my official work as registrar in
+the hands of a deputy and went down to London to see what had been
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>accomplished. To my astonishment I found that Annie, working with my
+daughter Sylvia, had organised a procession of women and a demonstration
+to be held on the opening day of Parliament. The confident young things
+had actually engaged Caxton Hall, Westminster; they had had printed a
+large number of handbills to announce the meeting, and they were busily
+engaged in working up the demonstration. Mrs. Drummond, who had joined
+the Union shortly after the imprisonment of Annie Kenney and Christabel,
+sent word from Manchester that she was coming to help us. She had to
+borrow the money for her railroad-fare, but she came, and, as ever
+before and since, her help was invaluable.</p>
+
+<p>How we worked, distributing handbills, chalking announcements of the
+meeting on pavements, calling on every person we knew and on a great
+many more we knew only by name, canvassing from door to door!</p>
+
+<p>At length the opening day of Parliament arrived. On February 19, 1906,
+occurred the first suffrage procession in London. I think there were
+between three and four hundred women in that procession, poor
+working-women from the East End, for the most part, leading the way in
+which numberless women of every rank were afterward to follow. My eyes
+were misty with tears as I saw them, standing in line, holding the
+simple banners which my daughter Sylvia had decorated, waiting for the
+word of command. Of course our procession attracted a large crowd of
+intensely amused spectators. The police, however, made no attempt to
+disperse our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> ranks, but merely ordered us to furl our banners. There
+was no reason why we should not have carried banners but the fact that
+we were women, and therefore could be bullied. So, bannerless, the
+procession entered Caxton Hall. To my amazement it was filled with
+women, most of whom I had never seen at any suffrage gathering before.</p>
+
+<p>Our meeting was most enthusiastic, and while Annie Kenney was speaking,
+to frequent applause, the news came to me that the King's speech (which
+is not the King's at all, but the formally announced Government
+programme for the session) had been read, and that there was in it no
+mention of the women's suffrage question. As Annie took her seat I arose
+and made this announcement, and I moved a resolution that the meeting
+should at once proceed to the House of Commons to urge the members to
+introduce a suffrage measure. The resolution was carried, and we rushed
+out in a body and hurried toward the Strangers' Entrance. It was pouring
+rain and bitterly cold, yet no one turned back, even when we learned at
+the entrance that for the first time in memory the doors of the House of
+Commons were barred to women. We sent in our cards to members who were
+personal friends, and some of them came out and urged our admittance.
+The police, however, were obdurate. They had their orders. The Liberal
+government, advocates of the people's rights, had given orders that
+women should no longer set foot in their stronghold.</p>
+
+<p>Pressure from members proved too great, and the government relented to
+the extent of allowing twenty<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> women at a time to enter the lobby.
+Through all the rain and cold those hundreds of women waited for hours
+their turn to enter. Some never got in, and for those of us who did
+there was small satisfaction. Not a member could be persuaded to take up our cause.</p>
+
+<p>Out of the disappointment and dejection of that experience I yet reaped
+a richer harvest of happiness than I had ever known before. Those women
+had followed me to the House of Commons. They had defied the police.
+They were awake at last. They were prepared to do something that women
+had never done before&mdash;fight for themselves. Women had always fought for
+men, and for their children. Now they were ready to fight for their own
+human rights. Our militant movement was established.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>CHAPTER IV</span></h2>
+
+<p>To account for the phenomenal growth of the Women's Social and Political
+Union after it was established in London, to explain why it made such an
+instant appeal to women hitherto indifferent, I shall have to point out
+exactly wherein our society differs from all other suffrage
+associations. In the first place, our members are absolutely single
+minded; they concentrate all their forces on one object, political
+equality with men. No member of the W. S. P. U. divides her attention
+between suffrage and other social reforms. We hold that both reason and
+justice dictate that women shall have a share in reforming the evils
+that afflict society, especially those evils bearing directly on women
+themselves. Therefore, we demand, before any other legislation whatever,
+the elementary justice of votes for women.</p>
+
+<p>There is not the slightest doubt that the women of Great Britain would
+have been enfranchised years ago had all the suffragists adopted this
+simple principle. They never did, and even to-day many English women
+refuse to adopt it. They are party members first and suffragists
+afterward; or they are suffragists part of the time and social theorists
+the rest of the time. We further differ from other suffrage
+associations, or from others existing in 1906, in that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> we clearly
+perceived the political situation that solidly interposed between us and
+our enfranchisement.</p>
+
+<p>For seven years we had had a majority in the House of Commons pledged to
+vote favourably on a suffrage bill. The year before, they had voted
+favourably on one, yet that bill did not become law. Why? Because even
+an overwhelming majority of private members are powerless to enact law
+in the face of a hostile Government of eleven cabinet ministers. The
+private member of Parliament was once possessed of individual power and
+responsibility, but Parliamentary usage and a changed conception of
+statesmanship have gradually lessened the functions of members. At the
+present time their powers, for all practical purposes, are limited to
+helping to enact such measures as the Government introduces or, in rare
+instances, private measures approved by the Government. It is true that
+the House can revolt, can, by voting a lack of confidence in the
+Government, force them to resign. But that almost never happens, and it
+is less likely now than formerly to happen. Figureheads don't revolt.</p>
+
+<p>This, then, was our situation: the Government all-powerful and
+consistently hostile; the rank and file of legislators impotent; the
+country apathetic; the women divided in their interests. The Women's
+Social and Political Union was established to meet this situation, and
+to overcome it. Moreover we had a policy which, if persisted in long
+enough, could not possibly fail to overcome it. Do you wonder that we
+gained new members at every meeting we held?</p>
+
+<p>There was little formality about joining the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>Union. Any woman could
+become a member by paying a shilling, but at the same time she was
+required to sign a declaration of loyal adherence to our policy and a
+pledge not to work for any political party until the women's vote was
+won. This is still our inflexible custom. Moreover, if at any time a
+member, or a group of members, loses faith in our policy; if any one
+begins to suggest, that some other policy ought to be substituted, or if
+she tries to confuse the issue by adding other policies, she ceases at
+once to be a member. Autocratic? Quite so. But, you may object, a
+suffrage organisation ought to be democratic. Well the members of the
+W. S. P. U. do not agree with you. We do not believe in the
+effectiveness of the ordinary suffrage organisation. The W. S. P. U. is
+not hampered by a complexity of rules. We have no constitution and
+by-laws; nothing to be amended or tinkered with or quarrelled over at an
+annual meeting. In fact, we have no annual meeting, no business
+sessions, no elections of officers. The W. S. P. U. is simply a suffrage
+army in the field. It is purely a volunteer army, and no one is obliged
+to remain in it. Indeed we don't want anybody to remain in it who does
+not ardently believe in the policy of the army.</p>
+
+<p>The foundation of our policy is opposition to a Government who refuse
+votes to women. To support by word or deed a Government hostile to woman
+suffrage is simply to invite them to go on being hostile. We oppose the
+Liberal party because it is in power. We would oppose a Unionist
+government if it were in power and were opposed to woman <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>suffrage. We
+say to women that as long as they remain in the ranks of the Liberal
+party they give their tacit approval to the Government's anti-suffrage
+policy. We say to members of Parliament that as long as they support any
+of the Government's policies they give their tacit approval to the
+anti-suffrage policy. We call upon all sincere suffragists to leave the
+Liberal party until women are given votes on equal terms with men. We
+call upon all voters to vote against Liberal candidates until the
+Liberal Government does justice to women.</p>
+
+<p>We did not invent this policy. It was most successfully pursued by Mr.
+Parnell in his Home Rule struggle more than thirty-five years ago. Any
+one who is old enough to remember the stirring days of Parnell may
+recall how, in 1885, the Home Rulers, by persistently voting against the
+Government in the House of Commons, forced the resignation of Mr.
+Gladstone and his Cabinet. In the general election which followed, the
+Liberal party was again returned to power, but by the slender majority
+of eighty-four, the Home Rulers having fought every Liberal candidate,
+even those, who, like my husband, were enthusiastic believers in Home
+Rule. In order to control the House and keep his leadership, Mr.
+Gladstone was obliged to bring in a Government Home Rule Bill. The
+downfall, through private intrigue, and the subsequent death of Parnell
+prevented the bill from becoming law. For many years afterward the Irish
+Nationalists had no leader strong enough to carry on Parnell's
+anti-government policy, but within late years it was resumed by Mr.
+James <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>Redmond, with the result that the Commons passed a Home Rule
+Bill.</p>
+
+<p>The contention of the old-fashioned suffragists, and of the politicians
+as well, has always been that an educated public opinion will ultimately
+give votes to women without any great force being exerted in behalf of
+the reform. We agree that public opinion must be educated, but we
+contend that even an educated public opinion is useless unless it is
+vigorously utilised. The keenest weapon is powerless unless it is
+courageously wielded. In the year 1906 there was an immensely large
+public opinion in favour of woman suffrage. But what good did that do
+the cause? We called upon the public for a great deal more than
+sympathy. We called upon it to demand of the Government to yield to
+public opinion and give women votes. And we declared that we would wage
+war, not only on all anti-suffrage forces, but on all neutral and
+non-active forces. Every man with a vote was considered a foe to woman
+suffrage unless he was prepared to be actively a friend.</p>
+
+<p>Not that we believed that the campaign of education ought to be given
+up. On the contrary, we knew that education must go on, and in much more
+vigorous fashion than ever before. The first thing we did was to enter
+upon a sensational campaign to arouse the public to the importance of
+woman suffrage, and to interest it in our plans for forcing the
+Government's hands. I think we can claim that our success in this regard
+was instant, and that it has proved permanent. From the very first, in
+those early London days, when we were few in numbers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> and very poor in
+purse, we made the public aware of the woman suffrage movement as it had
+never been before. We adopted Salvation Army methods and went out into
+the highways and the byways after converts. We threw away all our
+conventional notions of what was "ladylike" and "good form," and we
+applied to our methods the one test question, Will it help? Just as the
+Booths and their followers took religion to the street crowds in such
+fashion that the church people were horrified, so we took suffrage to
+the general public in a manner that amazed and scandalised the other suffragists.</p>
+
+<p>We had a lot of suffrage literature printed, and day by day our members
+went forth and held street meetings. Selecting a favourable spot, with a
+chair for a rostrum, one of us would ring a bell until people began to
+stop to see what was going to happen. What happened, of course, was a
+lively suffrage speech, and the distribution of literature. Soon after
+our campaign had started, the sound of the bell was a signal for a crowd
+to spring up as if by magic. All over the neighbourhood you heard the
+cry: "Here are the Suffragettes! Come on!" We covered London in this
+way; we never lacked an audience, and best of all, an audience to which
+the woman-suffrage doctrine was new. We were increasing our favourable
+public as well as waking it up. Besides these street meetings, we held
+many hall and drawing-room meetings, and we got a great deal of press
+publicity, which was something never accorded the older suffrage methods.</p>
+
+<p>Our plans included the introduction of a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>Government suffrage bill at
+the earliest possible moment, and in the spring of 1906 we sent a
+deputation of about thirty of our members to interview the Prime
+Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. The Prime Minister, it was
+stated, was not at home; so in a few days we sent another deputation.
+This time the servant agreed to carry our request to the Prime Minister.
+The women waited patiently on the doorstep of the official residence,
+No. 10 Downing Street, for nearly an hour. Then the door opened and two
+men appeared. One of the men addressed the leader of the deputation,
+roughly ordering her and the others to leave. "We have sent a message to
+the Prime Minister," she replied, "and we are waiting for the answer."
+"There will be no answer," was the stern rejoinder, and the door closed.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, there will be an answer," exclaimed the leader, and she seized the
+door-knocker and banged it sharply. Instantly the men reappeared, and
+one of them called to a policeman standing near, "Take this woman in
+charge." The order was obeyed, and the peaceful deputation saw its
+leader taken off to Canon Row Station.</p>
+
+<p>Instantly the women protested vigorously. Annie Kenney began to address
+the crowd that had gathered, and Mrs. Drummond actually forced her way
+past the doorkeeper into the sacred residence of the Prime Minister of
+the British Empire! Her arrest and Annie's followed. The three women
+were detained at the police station for about an hour, long enough, the
+Prime Minister probably thought, to frighten them thoroughly and teach
+them not to do<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> such dreadful things again. Then he sent them word that
+he had decided not to prosecute them, but would, on the contrary,
+receive a deputation from the W. S. P. U., and, if they cared to attend,
+from other suffrage societies as well.</p>
+
+<p>All the suffrage organisations at once began making preparations for the
+great event. At the same time two hundred members of Parliament sent a
+petition to the Prime Minister, asking him to receive their committee
+that they might urge upon him the necessity of a Government measure for
+woman suffrage. Sir Henry fixed May 19th as the day on which he would
+receive a joint deputation from Parliament and from the women's suffrage organisations.</p>
+
+<p>The W. S. P. U. determined to make the occasion as public as possible,
+and began preparations for a procession and a demonstration. When the
+day came we assembled at the foot of the beautiful monument to the
+warrior-queen, Boadicea, that guards the entrance to Westminster Bridge,
+and from there we marched to the Foreign Office. At the meeting eight
+women spoke in behalf of an immediate suffrage measure, and Mr. Keir
+Hardie presented the argument for the suffrage members of Parliament. I
+spoke for the W. S. P. U., and I tried to make the Prime Minister see
+that no business could be more pressing than ours. I told him that the
+group of women organised in our Union felt so strongly the necessity for
+women enfranchisement that they were prepared to sacrifice for it
+everything they possessed, their means of livelihood, their very<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> lives,
+if necessary. I begged him to make such a sacrifice needless by doing us justice now.</p>
+
+<p>What answer do you think Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman made us? He
+assured us of his sympathy with our cause, his belief in its justice,
+and his confidence in our fitness to vote. And then he told us to have
+patience and wait; he could do nothing for us because some of his
+Cabinet were opposed to us. After a few more words the usual vote of
+thanks was moved, and the deputation was dismissed. I had not expected
+anything better, but it wrung my heart to see the bitter disappointment
+of the W. S. P. U. women who had waited in the street to hear from the
+leaders the result of the deputation. We held a great meeting of protest
+that afternoon, and determined to carry on our agitation with increased vigor.</p>
+
+<p>Now that it had been made plain that the Government were resolved not to
+bring in a suffrage bill, there was nothing to do but to continue our
+policy of waking up the country, not only by public speeches and
+demonstrations, but by a constant heckling of Cabinet Ministers. Since
+the memorable occasion when Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney were
+thrown out of Sir Edward Grey's meeting in Manchester, and afterward
+imprisoned for the crime of asking a courteous question, we had not lost
+an opportunity of addressing the same question to every Cabinet Minister
+we could manage to encounter. For this we have been unmercifully
+criticised, and in a large number of cases most brutally handled.</p>
+
+<p>In almost every one of my American meetings I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> was asked the question,
+"What good do you expect to accomplish by interrupting meetings?" Is it
+possible that the time-honoured, almost sacred English privilege of
+interrupting is unknown in America? I cannot imagine a political meeting
+from which "the Voice" was entirely absent. In England it is invariably
+present. It is considered the inalienable right of the opposition to
+heckle the speaker and to hurl questions at him which are calculated to
+spoil his arguments. For instance, when Liberals attend a Conservative
+gathering they go prepared to shatter by witticisms and pointed
+questions all the best effects of the Conservative orators. The next day
+you will read in Liberal newspapers headlines like these: "The Voice in
+Fine Form," "Short Shrift for Tory Twaddle," "Awkward Answers from the
+Enemy's Platform." In the body of the article you will learn that "Lord
+X found that the Liberals at his meeting were more than a match for
+him," that "there was continued interruption during Sir So-and-so's
+speech," that "Lord M fared badly last night in his encounter with the
+Voice," or that "Captain Z had the greatest difficulty in making himself heard."</p>
+
+<p>In accordance with this custom we heckle Cabinet Ministers. Mr. Winston
+Churchill, for example, is speaking. "One great question," he exclaims,
+"remains to be settled."</p>
+
+<p>"And that is woman suffrage," shouts a voice from the gallery.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Churchill struggles on with his speech: "The men have been
+complaining of me&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"The women have been complaining of you, too,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> Mr. Churchill," comes
+back promptly from the back of the hall.</p>
+
+<p>"In the circumstances what can we do but&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Give votes to women."</p>
+
+<p>Our object, of course, is to keep woman suffrage in the foreground of
+interest and to insist on every possible occasion that no other reform
+advocated is of such immediate importance.</p>
+
+<p>From the first the women's interruptions have been resented with
+unreasoning anger. I remember hearing Mr. Lloyd-George saying once of a
+man who interrupted him:</p>
+
+<p>"Let him remain. I like interruptions. They show that people holding
+different opinions to mine are present, giving me a chance to convert
+them." But when suffragists interrupt Mr. Lloyd-George he says something
+polite like this: "Pay no attention to those cats mewing."</p>
+
+<p>Some of the ministers are more well bred in their expressions, but all
+are disdainful and resentful. All see with approval the brutal ejection
+of the women by the Liberal stewards.</p>
+
+<p>At one meeting where Mr. Lloyd-George was speaking, we interrupted with
+a question, and he claimed the sympathy of the audience on the score
+that he was a friend to woman suffrage. "Then why don't you do something
+to give votes to women?" was the obvious retort. But Mr. Lloyd-George
+evaded this by the counter query: "Why don't they go for their enemies?
+Why don't they go for their greatest enemy?" Instantly, all over the
+hall, voices shouted, "Asquith! Asquith!" For even at that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> early day it
+was known that the then Chancellor of the Exchequer was a stern foe of
+women's independence.</p>
+
+<p>In the summer of 1906, together with other members of the W. S. P. U., I
+went to Northampton, where Mr. Asquith was holding a large meeting in
+behalf of the Government's education bills. We organised a number of
+outdoor meetings, and of course prepared to attend Mr. Asquith's
+meeting. In conversation with the president of the local Women's Liberal
+Association, I mentioned the fact that we expected to be put out, and
+she indignantly declared that such a thing could not happen in
+Northampton, where the women had done so much for the Liberal party. I
+told her that I hoped she would be at the meeting.</p>
+
+<p>I had not intended to go myself, my plans being to hold a meeting of my
+own outside the door. But our members, before Mr. Asquith began to
+speak, attempted to question him, and were thrown out with violence. So
+then, turning my meeting over to them, I slipped quietly into the hall
+and sat down in the front row of a division set apart for wives and
+women friends of the Liberal leaders. I sat there in silence, hearing
+men interrupt the speaker and get answers to their questions. At the
+close of the speech I stood up and, addressing the chairman, said: "I
+should like to ask Mr. Asquith a question about education." The chairman
+turned inquiringly to Mr. Asquith, who frowningly shook his head. But
+without waiting for the chairman to say a word, I continued: "Mr.
+Asquith has said that the parents of children have a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> right to be
+consulted in the matter of their children's education, especially upon
+such questions as the kind of religious instruction they should receive.
+Women are parents. Does not Mr. Asquith think that women should have the
+right to control their children's education, as men do, through the
+vote?" At this point the stewards seized me by the arms and shoulders
+and rushed me, or rather dragged me, for I soon lost my footing, to the
+door and threw me out of the building.</p>
+
+<p>The effect on the president of the Northampton Women's Liberal
+Association was most salutary. She resigned her office and became a
+member of the W. S. P. U. Perhaps her action was influenced further by
+the press reports of the incident. Mr. Asquith was reported as saying,
+after my ejection, that it was difficult to enter into the minds of
+people who thought they could serve a cause which professed to appeal to
+the reason of the electors of the country by disturbing public meetings.
+Apparently he could enter into the minds of the men who disturbed public meetings.</p>
+
+<p>To our custom of public heckling of the responsible members of the
+hostile Government we added the practice of sending deputations to them
+for the purpose of presenting orderly arguments in favour of our cause.
+After Mr. Asquith had shown himself so uninformed as to the objects of
+the suffragists, we decided to ask him to receive a deputation from the
+W. S. P. U. To our polite letter Mr. Asquith returned a cold refusal to
+be interviewed on any subject not connected with his particular office.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>Whereupon we wrote again, reminding Mr. Asquith that as a member of the
+Government he was concerned with all questions likely to be dealt with
+by Parliament. We said that we urgently desired to put our question
+before him, and that we would send a deputation to his house hoping that
+he would feel it his duty to receive us.</p>
+
+<p>Our first deputation was told that Mr. Asquith was not at home. He had,
+in fact, escaped from the house through the back door, and had sped away
+in a fast motor-car. Two days later we sent a larger deputation, of
+about thirty women, to his house in Cavendish Square. To be accurate,
+the deputation got as near the house as the entrance to Cavendish
+Square; there the women met a strong force of police, who told them that
+they would not be permitted to go farther.</p>
+
+<p>Many of the women were carrying little "Votes for Women" banners, and
+these the police tore from them, in some cases with blows and insults.
+Seeing this, the leader of the deputation cried out: "We will go
+forward. You have no right to strike women like that." The reply, from a
+policeman near her, was a blow in the face. She screamed with pain and
+indignation, whereupon the man grasped her by the throat and choked her
+against the park railings until she was blue in the face. The young
+woman struggled and fought back, and for this she was arrested on a
+charge of assaulting the police. Three other women were arrested, one
+because, in spite of the police, she succeeded in ringing Mr. Asquith's
+door-bell and another because she protested against the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> laughter of
+some ladies who watched the affair from a drawing-room window. She was a
+poor working-woman, and it seemed to her a terrible thing that rich and
+protected women should ridicule a cause that to her was so profoundly
+serious. The fourth woman was taken in charge, because after she had
+been pushed off the pavement, she dared to step back. Charged with
+disorderly conduct, these women were sentenced to six weeks in the
+Second Division. They were given the option of a fine, it is true, but
+the payment of a fine would have been an acknowledgment of guilt, which
+made such a course impossible. The leader of the deputation was given a
+two months' sentence, with the option of a fine of ten pounds. She, too,
+refused to pay, and was sent to prison; but some unknown friend paid the
+fine secretly, and she was released before the expiration of her sentence.</p>
+
+<p>About the time these things were happening in London, similar violence
+was offered our women in Manchester, where John Burns, Lloyd-George, and
+Winston Churchill, all three Cabinet Ministers, were addressing a great
+Liberal demonstration. The women were there, as usual, to ask government
+support for our measure. There, too, they were thrown out of the
+meeting, and three of them were sent to prison.</p>
+
+<p>There are people in England, plenty of them, who will tell you that the
+Suffragettes were sent to prison for destroying property. The fact is
+that hundreds of women were arrested for exactly such offences as I have
+described before it ever occurred to any of us to destroy property. We
+were determined, at the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> beginning of our movement, that we would make
+ourselves heard, that we would force the Government to take up our
+question and answer it by action in Parliament. Perhaps you will see
+some parallel to our case in the stand taken in Massachusetts by the
+early Abolitionists, Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison. They,
+too, had to fight bitterly, to face insult and arrest, because they
+insisted on being heard. And they were heard; and so, in time, were we.</p>
+
+<p>I think we began to be noticed in earnest after our first success in
+opposing a Liberal candidate. This was in a by-election held at
+Cockermouth in August, 1906. I shall have to explain that a by-election
+is a local election to fill a vacancy in Parliament caused by a death or
+a resignation. The verdict of a by-election is considered as either an
+indorsement or a censure of the manner in which the Government have
+fulfilled their pre-election pledges. So we went to Cockermouth and told
+the voters how the Liberal party had fulfilled its pledges of democracy
+and lived up to its avowed belief in the rights of all the people. We
+told them of the arrests in London and Manchester, of the shameful
+treatment of women in Liberal meetings, and we asked them to censure the
+Government who had answered so brutally our demand for a vote. We told
+them that the only rebuke that the politicians would notice was a lost
+seat in Parliament, and that on that ground we asked them to defeat the
+Liberal candidate.</p>
+
+<p>How we were ridiculed! With what scorn the newspapers declared that
+"those wild women" could<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> never turn a single vote. Yet when the
+election was over it was found that the Liberal candidate had lost the
+seat, which, at the general election a little more than a year before,
+had been won by a majority of 655. This time the Unionist candidate was
+returned by a majority of 609. Tremendously elated, we hurried our
+forces off to another by-election.</p>
+
+<p>Now the ridicule was turned to stormy abuse. Mind you, the Liberal
+Government still refused to notice the women's question; they declared
+through the Liberal press that the defeat at Cockermouth was
+insignificant, and that anyhow it wasn't caused by the Suffragettes; yet
+the Liberal leaders were furiously angry with the W. S. P. U. Many of
+our members had been Liberals, and it was considered by the men that
+these women were little better than traitors. They were very foolish and
+ill-advised, into the bargain, the Liberals said, because the vote, if
+won at all, must be gained from the Liberal party; and how did the women
+suppose the Liberal party would ever give the vote to open and avowed
+enemies? This sage argument was used also by the women Liberals and the
+constitutional suffragists. They advised us that the proper way was to
+work for the party. We retorted that we had done that unsuccessfully for
+too many years already, and persisted with the opposite method of persuasion.</p>
+
+<p>Throughout the summer and autumn we devoted ourselves to the by-election
+work, sometimes actually defeating the Liberal candidate, sometimes
+reducing the Liberal majority, and always raising a tremendous sensation
+and gaining hundreds of new <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>members to the Union. In almost every
+neighbourhood we visited we left the nucleus of a local union, so that
+before the year was out we had branches all over England and many in
+Scotland and Wales. I especially remember a by-election in Wales at
+which Mr. Samuel Evans, who had accepted an officership under the Crown,
+had to stand for re-election. Unfortunately no candidate had been
+brought out against him. So there was nothing for my companions and me
+to do but make his campaign as lively as possible. Mr.&mdash;now Sir
+Samuel&mdash;Evans was the man who had incensed women by talking out a
+suffrage resolution introduced into the House by Keir Hardie. So we went
+to two of his meetings and literally talked him out, breaking up the
+gatherings amid the laughter and cheers of delighted crowds.</p>
+
+<p>On October 23d Parliament met for its autumn session, and we led a
+deputation to the House of Commons in another effort to induce the
+Government to take action on woman suffrage. In accordance with orders
+given the police, only twenty of us were admitted to the Strangers'
+Lobby. We sent in for the chief Liberal whip, and asked him to take a
+message to the Prime Minister, the message being the usual request to
+grant women the vote that session. We also asked the Prime Minister if
+he intended to include the registration of qualified women voters in the
+provisions of the plural voting bill, then under consideration. The
+Liberal whip came back with the reply that nothing could be done for
+women that session.</p>
+
+<div class="center"><a name="ill-074.jpg" id="ill-074.jpg"></a><img src="images/ill-074.jpg" width='700' height='523' alt="MRS. PANKHURST ADDRESSING A BY-ELECTION CROWD" /></div>
+
+<p class="bold">MRS. PANKHURST ADDRESSING A BY-ELECTION CROWD</p>
+
+<p>"Does the Prime Minister," I asked, "hold out any<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> hope for the women
+for any session during this Parliament, or at any future time?" The
+Prime Minister, you will remember, called himself a suffragist.</p>
+
+<p>The Liberal whip replied, "No, Mrs. Pankhurst, the Prime Minister does not."</p>
+
+<p>What would a deputation of unenfranchised men have done in these
+circumstances&mdash;men who knew themselves to be qualified to exercise the
+franchise, who desperately needed the protection of the franchise, and
+who had a majority of legislators in favour of giving them the
+franchise? I hope they would have done at least as much as we did, which
+was to start a meeting of protest on the spot. The newspapers described
+our action as creating a disgraceful scene in the lobby of the House of
+Commons, but I think that history will otherwise describe it. One of the
+women sprang up on a settee and began to address the crowd. In less than
+a minute she was pulled down, but instantly another woman took her
+place; and after she had been dragged down, still another sprang to her
+place, and following her another and another, until the order came to
+clear the lobby, and we were all forced outside.</p>
+
+<p>In the m&ecirc;l&eacute;e I was thrown to the floor and painfully hurt. The women,
+thinking me seriously injured, crowded around me and refused to move
+until I was able to regain myself. This angered the police, who were
+still more incensed when they found that the demonstration was continued
+outside. Eleven women were arrested, including Mrs. Pethick Lawrence,
+our treasurer, Mrs. Cobden Sanderson, Annie Kenney and three more of our
+organisers; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> they were all sent to Holloway for two months. But the
+strength of our movement was proved by the number of volunteers who
+immediately came forward to carry on the work. Mrs. Tuke, now Hon.
+Secretary of the W. S. P. U., joined the Union at this time. It had not
+occurred to the authorities that their action would have this effect.
+They thought to crush the Union at a blow, but they gave it the greatest
+impetus it had yet received. The leaders of the older suffrage
+organisations for the time forgot their disapproval of our methods, and
+joined with women writers, physicians, actresses, artists, and other
+prominent women in denouncing the affair as barbarous.</p>
+
+<p>One more thing the authorities failed to take into account. The
+condition of English prisons was known to be very bad, but when two of
+our women were made so ill in Holloway that they had to be released
+within a few days, the politicians began to tremble for their prestige.
+Questions were asked in Parliament concerning the advisability of
+treating the Suffragettes not as common criminals but as political
+offenders with the right to confinement in the First Division. Mr.
+Herbert Gladstone, the Home Secretary, replied to these questions that
+he had no power to interfere with the magistrates' decisions, and could
+do nothing in the matter of the suffragettes' punishment. I shall ask
+you to remember this statement of Mr. Herbert Gladstone's, as later we
+were able to prove it a deliberate falsehood&mdash;although really the
+falsehood proved itself when the women, by Government order, were
+released from prison when they had served just half their sentences.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>
+The reason for this was that an important by-election was being held in
+the north of England, and we had distributed broadcast throughout the
+constituency hand bills telling the electors that nine women, including
+the daughter of Richard Cobden, were being held as common criminals by
+the Liberal Government who were asking for their votes.</p>
+
+<p>I took a group of the released prisoners to Huddersfield, and they told
+prison stories to such effect that the Liberal majority was reduced by
+540 votes. As usual the Liberal leaders denied that our work had
+anything to do with the slender majority by which the party retained the
+seat, but among our souvenirs is a handbill, one of thousands given out
+from Liberal headquarters:</p>
+
+<div class="center"><img src="images/ill-077.jpg" width='363' height='205' alt="handbill" /></div>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, other demonstrations had taken place before the House of
+Commons, and at Christmas time twenty-one suffragettes were in Holloway
+Prison, though they had committed no crime. The Government professed
+themselves unmoved, and members of Parliament spoke with sneers of the
+"self-made martyrs." However, a considerable group of members, strongly
+moved by the passion and unquenchable ardor of this new order of
+suffragists, met<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> during the last week of the year and formed a
+committee whose object it was to press upon the government the necessity
+of giving the franchise to women during that Parliament. The committee
+resolved that its members would work to educate a wider public opinion
+on the question, and especially to advocate suffrage when addressing
+meetings in their constituencies, to take Parliamentary action on every
+possible occasion, and to induce as many members of Parliament as
+possible to ballot for the introduction of a suffrage bill or motion next session.</p>
+
+<p>Our first year in London had borne wonderful fruits. We had grown from a
+mere handful of women, a "family party" the newspapers had derisively
+called us, to a strong organisation with branches all over the country,
+permanent headquarters in Clements Inn, Strand; we had found good
+financial backing, and above all, we had created a suffrage committee in
+the House of Commons.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span><a name="BOOK_II" id="BOOK_II">BOOK II</a></span></h2>
+
+<p class="bold2">FOUR YEARS OF PEACEFUL MILITANCY</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>CHAPTER I</span></h2>
+
+<p>The campaign of 1907 began with a Women's Parliament, called together on
+February 13th in Caxton Hall, to consider the provisions of the King's
+speech, which had been read in the national Parliament on the opening
+day of the session, February 12th. The King's speech, as I have
+explained, is the official announcement of the Government's programme
+for the session. When our Women's Parliament met at three o'clock on the
+afternoon of the thirteenth we knew that the Government meant to do
+nothing for women during the session ahead.</p>
+
+<p>I presided over the women's meeting, which was marked with a fervency
+and a determination of spirit at that time altogether unprecedented. A
+resolution expressing indignation that woman suffrage should have been
+omitted from the King's speech, and calling upon the House of Commons to
+give immediate facilities to such a measure, was moved and carried. A
+motion to send the resolution from the hall to the Prime Minister was
+also carried. The slogan, "Rise up, women," was cried from the platform,
+the answering shout coming back as from one woman, "Now!" With copies of
+the resolution in their hands, the chosen deputation hurried forth into
+the February dusk, ready for Parliament or prison, as the fates decreed.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span></p><p>Fate did not leave them very long in doubt. The Government, it
+appeared, had decided that not again should their sacred halls of
+Parliament be desecrated by women asking for the vote, and orders had
+been given that would henceforth prevent women from reaching even the
+outer precincts of the House of Commons. So when our deputation of women
+arrived in the neighbourhood of Westminster Abbey they found themselves
+opposed by a solid line of police, who, at a sharp order from their
+chief, began to stride through and through the ranks of the procession,
+trying to turn the women back. Bravely the women rallied and pressed
+forward a little farther. Suddenly a body of mounted police came riding
+up at a smart trot, and for the next five hours or more, a struggle,
+quite indescribable for brutality and ruthlessness, went on.</p>
+
+<p>The horsemen rode directly into the procession, scattering the women
+right and left. But still the women would not turn back. Again and again
+they returned, only to fly again and again from the merciless hoofs.
+Some of the women left the streets for the pavements, but even there the
+horsemen pursued them, pressing them so close to walls and railings that
+they were obliged to retreat temporarily to avoid being crushed. Other
+strategists took refuge in doorways, but they were dragged out by the
+foot police and were thrown directly in front of the horses. Still the
+women fought to reach the House of Commons with their resolution. They
+fought until their clothes were torn, their bodies bruised, and the last
+ounce of their strength exhausted. Fifteen of them<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> did actually fight
+their way through those hundreds on hundreds of police, foot and
+mounted, as far as the Strangers' Lobby of the House. Here they
+attempted to hold a meeting, and were arrested. Outside, many more women
+were taken into custody. It was ten o'clock before the last arrest was
+made, and the square cleared of the crowds. After that the mounted men
+continued to guard the approaches to the House of Commons until the
+House rose at midnight.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning fifty-seven women and two men were arraigned, two and
+three at a time, in Westminster police court. Christabel Pankhurst was
+the first to be placed in the dock. She tried to explain to the
+magistrate that the deputation of the day before was a perfectly
+peaceful attempt to present a resolution, which, sooner or later, would
+be presented and acted upon. She assured him that the deputation was but
+the beginning of a campaign that would not cease until the Government
+yielded to the women's demand. "There can be no going back for us," she
+declared, "and more will happen if we do not get justice."</p>
+
+<p>The magistrate, Mr. Curtis Bennett, who was destined later to try women
+for that "more," rebuked my daughter sternly, telling her that the
+Government had nothing to do with causing the disorders of the day
+before, that the women were entirely responsible for what had occurred,
+and finally, that these disgraceful scenes in the street must
+cease&mdash;just as King Canute told the ocean that it must roll out instead
+of in. "The scenes can be stopped in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> only one way," replied the
+prisoner. His sole reply to that was, "Twenty shillings or fourteen
+days," Christabel chose the prison sentence, and so did all the other
+prisoners. Mrs. Despard, who headed the deputation, and Sylvia
+Pankhurst, who was with her, were given three weeks in prison.</p>
+
+<p>Of course the raid, as it was called, gave the Women's Social and
+Political Union an enormous amount of publicity, on the whole,
+favourable publicity. The newspapers were almost unanimous in condemning
+the Government for sending mounted troops out against unarmed women.
+Angry questions were asked in Parliament, and our ranks once more
+increased in size and ardour. The old-fashioned suffragists, men as well
+as women, cried out that we had alienated all our friends in Parliament;
+but this proved to be untrue. Indeed, it was found that a Liberal
+member, Mr. Dickinson, had won the first place in the ballot, and had
+announced that he intended to use it to introduce a women's suffrage
+bill. More than this, the prime minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman,
+promised to give the bill his support. For a time, a very short time, it
+is true, we felt that the hour of our freedom might be at hand, that our
+prisoners had perhaps already won us our precious symbol&mdash;the vote.</p>
+
+<p>Soon, however, a number of professed suffragists in the House began to
+complain that Mr. Dickinson's bill, practically the original bill, was
+not "democratic" enough, that it would enfranchise only the women of the
+upper classes&mdash;to which, by the way, most of them belonged. That this
+was not true had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> been proved again and again from the municipal
+registers, which showed a majority of working women's names as qualified
+householders. The contention was but a shallow excuse, and we knew it.
+Therefore we were not surprised when Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman
+departed from his pledge of support, and allowed the bill to be talked out.</p>
+
+<p>Following this event, the second Women's Parliament assembled, on the
+afternoon of March 20, 1907. As before, we adopted a resolution calling
+upon the Government to introduce an official suffrage measure, and again
+we voted to send the resolution from the hall to the Prime Minister.
+Lady Harberton was chosen to lead the deputation, and instantly hundreds
+of women sprang up and volunteered to accompany her. This time the
+police met the women at the door of the hall, and another useless,
+disgraceful scene of barbarous, brute-force opposition took place.
+Something like one thousand police had been sent out to guard the House
+of Commons from the peaceful invasion of a few hundred women. All
+afternoon and evening we kept Caxton Hall open, the women returning
+every now and again, singly and in small groups, to have their bruises
+bathed, or their torn clothing repaired. As night fell the crowds in the
+street grew denser, and the struggle between the women and the police
+became more desperate. Lady Harberton, we heard, had succeeded in
+reaching the entrance to the House of Commons, nay, had actually managed
+to press past the sentries into the lobby, but her resolution had not
+been presented to the Prime Minister. She and many others were <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>arrested
+before the police at last succeeded in clearing the streets, and the
+dreadful affair was over.</p>
+
+<p>The next day, in Westminster police court, the magistrate meted out
+sentences varying from twenty shillings or fourteen days to forty
+shillings or one month's imprisonment. Two of the women, Miss Woodlock
+and Mrs. Chatterton, who had left Holloway only a week before, were, as
+"old offenders," given thirty days without the option of a fine. Another
+woman, Mary Leigh, was given thirty days because she offended the
+magistrate's dignity by hanging a "Votes for Women" banner over the edge
+of the dock. Those of my readers who are unable to connect the word
+"militancy" with anything milder than arson are invited to reflect that
+within the first two months of the year 1907 the English Government sent
+to prison one hundred and thirty women whose "militancy" consisted
+merely of trying to carry a resolution from a hall to the Prime Minister
+in the House of Commons. Our crime was called obstructing the police. It
+will be seen that it was the police who did the obstructing.</p>
+
+<p>It may be asked why neither of these deputations was led by me
+personally. The reason was that I was needed in another capacity, that
+of leader and supervisor of the suffrage forces in the field to defeat
+Government candidates at by-elections. On the night of the second
+"riot," while our women were still struggling in the streets, I left
+London for Hexham in Northumberland, where by our work the majority of
+the Liberal candidate was reduced by a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> thousand votes. Seven more
+by-elections followed in rapid succession.</p>
+
+<p>Our by-election work was such a new thing in English politics that we
+attracted an enormous amount of attention wherever we went. It was our
+custom to begin work the very hour we entered a town. If, on our way
+from the station to the hotel, we encountered a group of men, say, in
+the market-place, we either stopped and held a meeting on the spot, or
+else we stayed long enough to tell them when and where our meetings were
+to be held, and to urge them to attend. The usual first step, after
+securing lodgings, was to hire a vacant shop, fill the windows with
+suffrage literature, and fling out our purple, green, and white flag.
+Meanwhile, some of us were busy hiring the best available hall. If we
+got possession of the battle-ground before the men, we sometimes
+"cornered" all the good halls and left the candidate nothing but
+schoolhouses for his indoor meetings. Truth to tell, our meetings were
+so much more popular than theirs that we really needed the larger halls.
+Often, a candidate with the Suffragettes for rivals spoke to almost
+empty benches. The crowds were away listening to the women.</p>
+
+<p>Naturally, this greatly displeased the politicians, and it scandalised
+many of the old-fashioned Liberal partisans. In one place, I think it
+was Colne Valley in Yorkshire, an amusing instance of masculine
+hostility occurred. We had arrived on a day when both Conservative and
+Liberal committees were choosing their candidates, and we thought it a
+good<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> opportunity to hold a series of outdoor meetings. We tried to get
+a lorry for a rostrum, but the only man in town who had these big vans
+to let disapproved of Suffragettes so violently that he wouldn't let us
+have one. So we borrowed a chair from a woman shopkeeper, and went at
+it. Soon we had a large crowd and an interested audience. We also got
+the attention of a number of small boys with pea-shooters, and had to
+make our speeches under a blistering fire of dried peas.</p>
+
+<p>While I was speaking the fire ceased, to my relief&mdash;for dried peas
+sting. I continued my speech with renewed vigor, only to have one of my
+best points spoiled by roars of laughter from the crowd. I finished
+somehow, and sat down; and then it was explained to me that the
+pea-shooters had been financed by one of the prominent Liberals of the
+town, another man who disapproved of our policy of opposing the
+Government. As soon as the ammunition gave out this man furnished the
+boys with a choice supply of rotten oranges. These were not so easily
+handled, it appeared, for the very first one went wild, and struck the
+chivalrous gentleman violently in the neck. This it was that had caused
+the laughter, and stopped the attack on the women.</p>
+
+<p>We met with some pretty rough horse-play, and even with some brutality,
+in several by-elections, but on the whole we found the men ready, and
+the women more than ready, to listen to us. We tamed and educated a
+public that had always been used to violence at elections. We even tamed
+the boys, who came to the meetings on purpose to skylark. When<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> we were
+in Rutlandshire that spring three schoolboys came to see me and told me,
+shyly, that they were interested in suffrage. They had had a debate on
+the subject at their school, and although the decision had been for the
+other side, all the boys wanted to know more about it. Wouldn't I please
+have a meeting especially for them? Of course I consented, and I found
+my boy audience quite delightful. Indeed, I hope they liked me half as
+well as I did them.</p>
+
+<p>All through the spring our by-election work continued with amazing
+success, although our part in the Government losses was rarely admitted
+by the politicians. The voters knew, however. At an election in Suffolk,
+where we helped to double the Unionist vote, the successful candidate,
+speaking to the crowd from his hotel window, said, "What has been the
+cause of the great and glorious victory?" Instantly the crowd roared,
+"Votes for Women!"&mdash;"Three cheers for the Suffragettes!" This was not at
+all what the successful candidate had intended, but he waved his hand
+graciously and said, "No doubt the ladies had something to do with it."</p>
+
+<p>The newspaper correspondents were not so reluctant to acknowledge our
+influence. Even when they condemned our policy, they were unsparing in
+their admiration for our energy, and the courage and ardour of our
+workers. Said the correspondent of the London <i>Tribune</i>, a Liberal paper
+hostile to our tactics: "Their staying power, judging them by the
+standards of men, is extraordinary. By taking afternoon as well as
+evening meetings, they have worked twice as hard as the men. They are
+up<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> earlier, they retire just as late. Women against men, they are
+better speakers, more logical, better informed, better phrased, with a
+surer insight for the telling argument."</p>
+
+<p>After a summer spent in strengthening our forces, organising new
+branches, holding meetings&mdash;something like three thousand of these
+between May and October&mdash;invading meetings of Cabinet Ministers&mdash;we
+managed to do that about once every day&mdash;electioneering, and getting up
+huge demonstrations in various cities, we arrived at the end of the
+year. In the last months of the year, I directed several hotly contested
+by-elections, at one of which I met with one of the most serious
+misadventures of my life.</p>
+
+<p>This by-election was held in the division of Mid-Devon, a stronghold of
+Liberalism. In fact, since its creation in 1885, the seat has never been
+held by any except a Liberal member. The constituency is a large one,
+divided into eight districts. The population of the towns is a rough and
+boisterous one, and its devotion, blind and unreasoning, to the Liberal
+party has always reflected the rude spirit of the voters. A Unionist
+woman told me, shortly after my arrival, that my life would be unsafe if
+I dared openly to oppose the Liberal candidate. She had never dared, she
+assured me, to wear her party colours in public. However, I did
+speak&mdash;in our headquarters at Newton Abbott, the principal town of the
+division, at Hull, and at Bovey Tracey. We held meetings twice a day,
+calling upon the voters to "beat the Government in Mid-Devon, as a
+message that women must have votes next year." Although some of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>
+meetings were turbulent, we were treated with much more consideration
+than either of the candidates, who, not infrequently, were howled down
+and put to flight. Often the air of their meetings was thick with
+decayed vegetables and dirty snowballs. We had some rather lively
+sessions, too. Once, at an outdoor meeting, some young roughs dragged
+our lorry round and round until it seemed that we must be upset, and
+several times the language hurled at us from the crowd was quite unfit
+for me to repeat. Still, we escaped actual violence until the day of the
+election, when it was announced that the Unionist candidate had won the
+seat by a majority of twelve hundred and eighty. We knew instantly that
+the deepest resentment of the Liberals would be aroused, but it did not
+occur to us that the resentment would be directed actively against us.</p>
+
+<p>After the declaration at the polls, my companion, Mrs. Martel, and I
+started to walk to our lodgings. Some of our friends stopped us, and
+drew our attention to the newly elected Unionist member of Parliament,
+who was being escorted from the polling place by a strong guard of
+police. We were warned that our safety demanded an immediate flight from
+the town. I laughingly assured our friends that I was never afraid to
+trust myself in a crowd, and we walked on. Suddenly we were confronted
+by a crowd of young men and boys, clay-cutters from the pits on the edge
+of town. These young men, who wore the red rosettes of the Liberal
+party, had just heard of their candidate's defeat, and they were mad
+with rage and humiliation. One of them pointed to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> us, crying: "They did
+it! Those women did it!" A yell went up from the crowd, and we were
+deluged with a shower of clay and rotten eggs. We were not especially
+frightened, but the eggs were unbearable, and to escape them we rushed
+into a little grocer's shop close at hand. The grocer's wife closed and
+bolted the door, but the poor grocer cried out that his place would be
+wrecked. I did not want that to happen, of course, so I asked them to
+let us out by the back door. They led us out the door, into a small back
+yard which led into a little lane, whence we expected to make our
+escape. But when we reached the yard we found that the rowdies,
+anticipating our move, had surged round the corner, and were waiting for us.</p>
+
+<p>They seized Mrs. Martel first, and began beating her over the head with
+their fists, but the brave wife of the shopkeeper, hearing the shouts
+and the oaths of the men, flung open the door and rushed to our rescue.
+Between us we managed to tear Mrs. Martel from her captors and get her
+into the house. I expected to get into the house, too, but as I reached
+the threshold a staggering blow fell on the back of my head, rough hands
+grasped the collar of my coat, and I was flung violently to the ground.
+Stunned, I must have lost consciousness for a moment, for my next
+sensation was of cold, wet mud seeping through my clothing. Sight
+returning to me, I perceived the men, silent now, but with a dreadful,
+lowering silence, closing in a ring around me. In the centre of the ring
+was an empty barrel, and the horrid thought occurred to me that they
+might intend putting me in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> it. A long time seemed to pass, while the
+ring of men slowly drew closer. I looked at them, in their drab clothes
+smeared with yellow pit-clay, and they appeared so underfed, so puny and
+sodden, that a poignant pity for them swept over me. "Poor souls," I
+thought, and then I said suddenly, "Are none of you <i>men</i>?" Then one of
+the youths darted toward me, and I knew that whatever was going to
+happen to me was about to begin.</p>
+
+<p>At that very moment came shouts, and a rush of police who had fought
+their way through hostile crowds to rescue us. Of course the mob turned
+tail and fled, and I was carried gently into the shop, which the police
+guarded for two hours, before it was deemed safe for us to leave in a
+closed motor-car. It was many months before either Mrs. Martel or I
+recovered from our injuries.</p>
+
+<p>The rowdies, foiled of their woman prey, went to the Conservative Club,
+smashed all the windows in the house, and kept the members besieged
+there through the night. The next morning the body of a man, frightfully
+bruised about the head, was found in the mill-race. Throughout all this
+disorder and probable crime, not a man was arrested. Contrast this, if
+you like, with the treatment given our women in London.</p>
+
+<p>The King opened Parliament in great state on January 29, 1908. Again his
+speech omitted all mention of woman suffrage, and again the W. S. P. U.
+issued a call for a Women's Parliament, for February 11th, 12th and
+13th. Before it was convened we heard that an excellent place in the
+ballot had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> been won by a friend of the movement, Mr. Stanger, who
+promised to introduce a suffrage bill, February 28th was the day fixed
+for the second reading, and we realised that strong pressure would have
+to be brought to bear to prevent the bill being wrecked, as the
+Dickinson bill had been the previous year. Therefore, on the first day
+of the Women's Parliament, almost every woman present volunteered for
+the deputation, which was to try to carry the resolution to the prime
+minister. Led by two well-known portrait painters, the deputation left
+Caxton Hall and proceeded in orderly ranks, four abreast, toward the
+House of Commons. The crowds in the streets were enormous, thousands of
+sympathisers coming out to help the women, thousands of police
+determined that the women should not be helped, and thousands of curious
+spectators. When the struggle was over, fifty women were locked up in
+police-court cells.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning, when the cases were tried, Mr. Muskett, who prosecuted
+for the Crown, and who was perhaps a little tired of telling the
+Suffragettes that these scenes in the streets must cease, and then
+seeing them go on exactly as if he had not spoken, made a very severe
+and terrifying address. He told the women that this time they would be
+subject to the usual maximum of two months' imprisonment, with the
+option of a fine of five pounds, but that, in case they ever offended
+again, the law had worse terrors in store for them. It was proposed to
+revive, for the benefit of the Suffragettes, an Act passed in the reign
+of Charles II, which dealt with <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>"Tumultuous Petitions, either to the
+Crown or Parliament." This Act provided that no person should dare to go
+to the King or to Parliament "with any petition, complaint,
+remonstrance, declaration or other address" accompanied with a number of
+persons above twelve. A fine of one hundred pounds, or three months'
+imprisonment, might be imposed under this law. The magistrate then
+sentenced all but two of the women to be bound over for twelve months,
+or to serve six weeks in the second division. Two other women, "old
+offenders," were given one month in the third division, or lowest class.
+All the prisoners, except two who had very ill relatives at home, chose
+the prison sentence.</p>
+
+<p>The next day's session of the Women's Parliament was one of intense
+excitement, as the women reviewed the events of the previous day, the
+trials, and especially the threat to revive the obsolete Act of Charles
+II, an act <i>which was passed to obstruct the progress of the Liberal
+party, which came into existence under the Stuarts, and under the second
+Charles was fighting for its life</i>. It was an amazing thing that the
+political descendants of these men were proposing to revive the Act to
+obstruct the advance of the women's cause, fighting for its life under
+George V and his Liberal government. At least, it was evidence that the
+Government were baffled in their attempt to crush our movement.
+Christabel Pankhurst, presiding over the second session of the Women's
+Parliament, said: "At last it is realized that women are fighting for
+freedom, as their fathers fought. If they want twelve women, aye, and
+more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> than twelve, if a hundred women are wanted to be tried under that
+act and sent to prison for three months, they can be found."</p>
+
+<p>I was not present at this session, nor had I been present at the first
+one. I was working in a by-election at South Leeds, the last of several
+important by-elections in great industrial centres, where our success
+was unquestioned, except by the Liberal press. The elections had wound
+up with a great procession, and a meeting of 100,000 people on Hounslet
+Moor. The most wonderful enthusiasm marked that meeting. I shall never
+forget what splendid order the people kept, in spite of the fact that no
+police protection was given us; how the vast crowd parted to let our
+procession through; how the throngs of mill women kept up a chorus in
+broad Yorkshire: "Shall us win? Shall us have the vote? We shall!" No
+wonder the old people shook their beads, and declared that "there had
+never been owt like it."</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>CHAPTER II</span></h2>
+
+<p>With those brave shouts in my ears, I hurried down to London for the
+concluding session of the parliament, for I had determined that I must
+be the first person to challenge the Government to carry out their
+threat to revive the old Act of Charles II. I made a long speech to the
+women that day, telling them something of my experiences of the past
+months, and how all that I had seen and heard throughout the country had
+only deepened my conviction of the necessity for women's votes. "I
+feel," I concluded, "that the time has come when I must act, and I wish
+to be one of those to carry our resolution to Parliament this afternoon.
+My experience in the country, and especially in South Leeds, has taught
+me things that Cabinet Ministers, who have not had that experience, do
+not know, and has made me feel that I must make one final attempt to see
+them, and to urge them to reconsider their position before some terrible
+disaster has occurred."</p>
+
+<p>Amid a good deal of excitement and emotion, we chose the requisite
+thirteen women, who were prepared to be arrested and tried under the
+Charles II "Tumultuous Petitions" Act. I had not entirely recovered from
+the attack made upon me at Mid-Devon, and my wrenched ankle was still
+too sensitive to make walking anything but a painful process.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> Seeing me
+begin almost at once to limp badly, Mrs. Drummond, with characteristic,
+blunt kindness, called to a man driving a dog-cart and asked him if he
+would drive me to the House of Commons. He readily agreed, and I mounted
+to the seat behind him, the other women forming in line behind the cart.
+We had not gone far when the police, who already surrounded us in great
+force, ordered me to dismount. Of course I obeyed and walked, or rather
+limped along with my companions. They would have supported me, but the
+police insisted that we should walk single-file. Presently I grew so
+faint from the pain of the ankle that I called to two of the women, who
+took hold of my arms and helped me on my way. This was our one act of
+disobedience to police orders. We moved with difficulty, for the crowd
+was of incredible size. All around, as far as eye could see, was the
+great moving, swaying, excited multitude, and surrounding us on all
+sides were regiments of uniformed police, foot and mounted. You might
+have supposed that instead of thirteen women, one of them lame, walking
+quietly along, the town was in the hands of an armed mob.</p>
+
+<p>We had progressed as far as the entrance to Parliament Square, when two
+stalwart policemen suddenly grasped my arms on either side and told me
+that I was under arrest. My two companions, because they refused to
+leave me, were also arrested, and a few minutes later Annie Kenney and
+five other women suffered arrest. That night we were released on bail,
+and the next morning we were arraigned in Westminster police court for
+trial under<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> the Charles II Act. But, as it turned out, the authorities,
+embarrassed by our readiness to test the act, announced that they had
+changed their minds, and would continue, for the present, to treat us as
+common street brawlers.</p>
+
+<p>This was my first trial, and I listened, with a suspicion that my ears
+were playing tricks with my reason, to the most astonishing perjuries
+put forth by the prosecution. I heard that we had set forth from Caxton
+Hall with noisy shouts and songs, that we had resorted to the most
+riotous and vulgar behaviour, knocking off policemen's helmets,
+assaulting the officers right and left as we marched. Our testimony, and
+that of our witnesses, was ignored. When I tried to speak in my own
+defence, I was cut short rudely, and was told briefly that I and the
+others must choose between being bound over or going to prison, in the
+second division, for six weeks.</p>
+
+<p>I remember only vaguely the long, jolting ride across London to Holloway
+Prison. We stopped at Pentonville, the men's prison, to discharge
+several men prisoners, and I remember shuddering at the thought of our
+women, many of them little past girlhood, being haled to prison in the
+same van with criminal men. Arriving at the prison, we groped our way
+through dim corridors into the reception-ward, where we were lined up
+against the wall for a superficial medical examination. After that we
+were locked up in separate cells, unfurnished, except for low, wooden stools.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed an endless time before my cell door was opened by a wardress,
+who ordered me to follow her.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> I entered a room where another wardress
+sat at a table, ready to take an inventory of my effects. Obeying an
+order to undress, I took off my gown, then paused. "Take off
+everything," was the next order. "Everything?" I faltered. It seemed
+impossible that they expected me to strip. In fact, they did allow me to
+take off my last garments in the shelter of a bath-room. I shivered
+myself into some frightful underclothing, old and patched and stained,
+some coarse, brown woollen stockings with red stripes, and the hideous
+prison dress stamped all over with the broad arrow of disgrace. I fished
+a pair of shoes out of a big basket of shoes, old and mostly mismates. A
+pair of coarse but clean sheets, a towel, a mug of cold cocoa, and a
+thick slice of brown bread were given me, and I was conducted to my cell.</p>
+
+<p>My first sensations when the door was locked upon me were not altogether
+disagreeable. I was desperately weary, for I had been working hard,
+perhaps a little too hard, for several strenuous months. The excitement
+and fatigue of the previous day, and the indignation I had suffered
+throughout the trial, had combined to bring me to the point of
+exhaustion, and I was glad to throw myself on my hard prison bed and
+close my eyes. But soon the relief of being alone, and with nothing to
+do, passed from me. Holloway Prison is a very old place, and it has the
+disadvantages of old places which have never known enough air and
+sunshine. It reeks with the odours of generations of bad ventilation,
+and it contrives to be at once the stuffiest and the draughtiest
+building I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> have ever been in. Soon I found myself sickening for fresh
+air. My head began to ache. Sleep fled. I lay all night suffering with
+cold, gasping for air, aching with fatigue, and painfully wide awake.</p>
+
+<p>The next day I was fairly ill, but I said nothing about it. One does not
+expect to be comfortable in prison. As a matter of fact, one's mental
+suffering is so much greater than any common physical distress that the
+latter is almost forgotten. The English prison system is altogether
+medi&aelig;val and outworn. In some of its details the system has improved
+since they began to send the Suffragettes to Holloway. I may say that
+we, by our public denunciation of the system, have forced these slight
+improvements. In 1907 the rules were excessively cruel. The poor
+prisoner, when she entered Holloway, dropped, as it were, into a tomb.
+No letters and no visitors were allowed for the first month of the
+sentence. Think of it&mdash;a whole month, more than four weeks, without
+sending or receiving a single word. One's nearest and dearest may have
+gone through dreadful suffering, may have been ill, may have died,
+meantime. One was given plenty of time to imagine all these things, for
+the prisoner was kept in solitary confinement in a narrow, dimly-lit
+cell, twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four. Solitary confinement is
+too terrible a punishment to inflict on any human being, no matter what
+his crime. Hardened criminals in the men's prisons, it is said, often
+beg for the lash instead. Picture what it must be to a woman who has
+committed some small offence, for most of the women who go to Holloway
+are small <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>offenders, sitting alone, day after day, in the heavy silence
+of a cell&mdash;thinking of her children at home&mdash;thinking, thinking. Some
+women go mad. Many suffer from shattered nerves for a long period after
+release. It is impossible to believe that any woman ever emerged from
+such a horror less criminal than when she entered it.</p>
+
+<p>Two days of solitary confinement, broken each day by an hour of silent
+exercise in a bitterly cold courtyard, and I was ordered to the
+hospital. There I thought I should be a little more comfortable. The bed
+was better, the food a little better, and small comforts, such as warm
+water for washing, were allowed. I slept a little the first night. About
+midnight I awoke, and sat up in bed, listening. A woman in the cell next
+mine was moaning in long, sobbing breaths of mortal pain. She ceased for
+a few minutes, then moaned again, horribly. The truth flashed over me,
+turning me sick, as I realised that a life was coming into being, there
+in that frightful prison. A woman, imprisoned by men's laws, was giving
+a child to the world. A child born in a cell! I shall never forget that
+night, nor what I suffered with the birth-pangs of that woman, who, I
+found later, was simply waiting trial on a charge which was found to be baseless.</p>
+
+<p>The days passed very slowly, the nights more slowly still. Being in
+hospital, I was deprived of chapel, and also of work. Desperate, at last
+I begged the wardress for some sewing, and she kindly gave me a skirt of
+her own to hem, and later some coarse knitting to do. Prisoners were
+allowed a few<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> books, mostly of the "Sunday-school" kind. One day I
+asked the chaplain if there were not some French or German books in the
+library, and he brought me a treasure, "<i>Autour de mon Jardin</i>," by
+Jules Janin. For a few days I was quite happy, reading my book and
+translating it on the absurd little slate they gave us in lieu of paper
+and pencil. That slate was, after all, a great comfort. I did all kinds
+of things with it. I kept a calendar, I wrote all the French poetry I
+could remember on it, I even recorded old school chorals and old English
+exercises. It helped wonderfully to pass the endless hours until my
+release. I even forgot the cold, which was the harder to bear because of
+the fur coat, which I knew was put away, ticketed with my name. I begged
+them for the coat, but they wouldn't let me have it.</p>
+
+<p>At last the time came when they gave me back all my things, and let me
+go free. At the door the Governor spoke to me, and asked me if I had any
+complaints to make. "Not of you," I replied, "nor of any of the
+wardresses. Only of this prison, and all of men's prisons. We shall raze
+them to the ground."</p>
+
+<p>Back in my comfortable home, surrounded by loving friends, I would have
+rested quietly for a few days, but there was a great meeting that night
+at Albert Hall, to mark the close of a week of self-denial to raise
+money for the year's campaign. Women had sold papers, flowers, toys,
+swept crossings, and sung in the streets for the cause. Many women, well
+known in the world of art and letters, did these things. I felt that I
+should be doing little if I merely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> attended the meeting. So I went. My
+release was not expected until the following morning, and no one thought
+of my appearing at the meeting. My chairman's seat was decorated with a
+large placard with the inscription, "Mrs. Pankhurst's Chair." After all
+the others were seated, the speakers, and hundreds of ex-prisoners. I
+walked quietly onto the stage, took the placard out of the chair and sat
+down. A great cry went up from the women as they sprang from their seats
+and stretched their hands toward me. It was some time before I could see
+them for my tears, or speak to them for the emotion that shook me like a storm.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning I, with the other released prisoners, drove off to
+Peckham, a constituency of London, where the W. S. P. U. members were
+fighting a vigorous by-election. In open brakes we paraded the streets,
+dressed in our prison clothes, or exact reproductions of them.
+Naturally, we attracted a great deal of attention and sympathy, and our
+daily meetings on Peckham Rye, as their common is known, drew enormous
+crowds. When polling day came our members were stationed at every
+polling booth, and many men as they came to the booths told us that they
+were, for the first time, voting "for the women," by which they meant
+against the Government. That night, amid great excitement, it was made
+known that the Liberal majority of 2,339 at the last general election
+had been turned into a Conservative majority of 2,494. Letters poured
+into the newspapers, declaring that the loss of this important Liberal
+seat was due almost entirely to the work of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> the Suffragettes, and many
+prominent Liberals called upon party leaders to start doing something
+for women before the next general election. The Liberal leaders, with
+the usual perspicacity of politicians, responded not at all. Instead
+they beheld with approval the rise to highest power the arch-enemy of
+the suffragists, Mr. Asquith.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Asquith became prime minister about Easter time, 1908, on the
+resignation, on account of ill health, of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman.
+Mr. Asquith was chosen, not because of any remarkable record of
+statesmanship, nor yet because of great personal popularity&mdash;for he
+possessed neither&mdash;but simply because no better man seemed available
+just then. He was known as a clever, astute, and somewhat unscrupulous
+lawyer. He had filled several high offices to the satisfaction of his
+party, and under Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had been Chancellor of the
+Exchequer, a post which is generally regarded as a stepping-stone to the
+Premiership. The best thing the Liberal press found to say of the new
+Premier was that he was a "strong" man. Generally in politics this term
+is used to describe an obstinate man, and this we already knew Mr.
+Asquith to be. He was a bluntly outspoken opponent of woman suffrage,
+and it was sufficiently plain to us that no methods of education or
+persuasion would ever prove successful where he was concerned. Therefore
+the necessity of action on our part was greater than ever.</p>
+
+<p>Such an opportunity presented itself at once through changes that took
+place in the new Cabinet.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> According to English law, all new comers into
+the Cabinet are obliged to resign their seats in Parliament and offer
+themselves to their constituencies for re-election. Besides these
+vacancies there were several others, on account of death or elevations
+to the peerage. This made necessary a number of by-elections, and the
+Women's Social and Political Union once more went into the field against
+the Liberal candidates. I shall deal no further with these by-elections
+than is necessary to show the effect of our work on the Government, and
+its subsequent effect on our movement&mdash;which was to force us into more
+and more militancy. I shall leave it to the honest judgment of my
+readers to place where it ought rightly to be placed the responsibility
+for those first broken windows.</p>
+
+<p>We selected as our first candidate for defeat Mr. Winston Churchill, who
+was about to appeal to his constituency of North West Manchester to
+sanction his appointment as president of the Board of Trade. My daughter
+Christabel took charge of this election, and the work of herself and her
+forces was so successful that Mr. Churchill lost his seat by 420 votes.
+All the newspapers acknowledged that it was the Suffragettes who had
+defeated Mr. Churchill, and one Liberal newspaper, the London <i>Daily
+News</i>, called upon the party to put a stop to an intolerable state of
+affairs by granting the women's demand for votes.</p>
+
+<p>Another seat was immediately secured for Mr. Churchill, that of Dundee,
+then strongly&mdash;in the merely party sense&mdash;Liberal, and therefore safe.
+Nevertheless, we determined to fight Mr. Churchill<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> there, to defeat him
+if possible, and to bring down the Liberal majority in any case. I took
+personal charge of the campaign, holding a very large meeting in
+Kinnaird Hall on the evening before Mr. Churchill's arrival. Although he
+felt absolutely sure of election in this Scottish constituency, Mr.
+Churchill dreaded the effect of our presence on the Liberal women. The
+second meeting he addressed in Dundee was held for women only, and
+instead of asking for support of the various measures actually on the
+government's programme, the politician's usual method, he talked about
+the certainty of securing, within a short time, the Parliamentary
+franchise for women. "No one," he declared, "can be blind to the fact
+that at the next general election woman suffrage will be a real,
+practical issue; and the next Parliament, I think, ought to see the
+gratification of the women's claims. I do not exclude the possibility of
+the suffrage being dealt with in this Parliament." Mr. Churchill
+earnestly reiterated his claim to be considered a true friend of the
+women's cause; but when pressed for a pledge that his Government would
+take action, he urged his inability to speak for his colleagues.</p>
+
+<p>This specious promise, or rather, prophecy of woman suffrage at some
+indefinite time, won over a great many of the Liberal women, who
+forthwith went staunchly to work for Mr. Churchill's election. Dundee
+has a large population of extremely poor people, workers in the jute
+mills and the marmalade factories. Some concessions in the matter of the
+sugar tax, timely made, and the announcement that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> the new Government
+meant to establish old age pensions, created an immense wave of Liberal
+enthusiasm that swept Mr. Churchill into office in spite of our work,
+which was untiring. We held something like two hundred meetings, and on
+election eve, five huge demonstrations&mdash;four of them in the open air and
+one which filled a large drill hall. Polling day, May 9th, was very
+exciting. For every Suffragette at the polling-booths there were half a
+dozen Liberal men and women, handing out bills with such legends as
+"Vote for Churchill, and never mind the women," and "Put Churchill in
+and keep the women out." Yet for all their efforts, Mr. Churchill polled
+2200 votes less than his Liberal predecessor had polled at the general election.</p>
+
+<p>In the first seven by-elections following Mr. Asquith's elevation to the
+premiership, we succeeded in pulling down the Liberal vote by 6663. Then
+something happened to check our progress. Mr. Asquith received a
+deputation of Liberal members of Parliament, who urged him to allow the
+Stanger suffrage bill, which had passed its second reading by a large
+majority, to be carried into law. Mr. Asquith replied that he himself
+did not wish to see women enfranchised, and that it would not be
+possible for the Government to give the required facilities to Mr.
+Stanger's bill. He added that he was fully alive to the many defects of
+the electoral system, and that the Government intended, "barring
+accidents," to bring in a reform bill before the close of that
+Parliament. Woman suffrage would have no place in it, but it would be so
+worded that a woman-suffrage<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> amendment might be added if any member
+chose to move one. In that case, said Mr. Asquith, he should not
+consider it the duty of the Government to oppose the amendment if it
+were approved by a majority of the House of Commons&mdash;<i>provided</i> that the
+amendment was on democratic lines, and that it had back of it the
+support, the strong and undoubted support, of the women of the country
+as well as the present electorate.</p>
+
+<p>One would not suppose that such an evasive utterance as this would be
+regarded in any quarter as a promise that woman suffrage would be given
+any real chances of success under the Asquith Government. That it was,
+by many, taken quite seriously is but another proof of the gullibility
+of the party-blinded public. The Liberal press lauded Mr. Asquith's
+"promise," and called for a truce of militancy in order that the
+Government might have every opportunity to act. Said the <i>Star</i>, in a
+leader typical of many others: "The meaning of Mr. Asquith's pledge is
+plain. Woman's suffrage will be passed through the House of Commons
+before the present Government goes to the country."</p>
+
+<p>As for the women's Liberal Associations, they were quite delirious with
+joy. In a conference called for the purpose of passing resolutions of
+gratitude, Lady Carlisle said: "This is a glorious day of rejoicing. Our
+great Prime Minister, all honour to him, has opened a way to us by which
+we can enter into that inheritance from which we have been too long debarred."</p>
+
+<p>At the two following by-elections, the last of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> series, enormous
+posters were exhibited, "Premier's Great Reform Bill: Votes for Women."
+We tried to tell the electors that the pledge was false on the face of
+it; that the specious proviso that the amendment be "democratic" left no
+doubt that the Government would cause the rejection of any practical
+amendment that might be moved. Our words fell on deaf ears, and the
+Liberal majorities soared.</p>
+
+<p>Just a week later Mr. Asquith was questioned in the House of Commons by
+a slightly alarmed anti-suffragist member. The member asked Mr. Asquith
+whether he considered himself pledged to introduce the reform hill
+during that Parliament, whether he meant to allow such a bill to carry a
+woman-suffrage amendment, if such were moved, and whether, in that case,
+the suffrage amendment would become part of the Government policy.
+Evasive as ever, the Prime Minister, after some sparring, replied, "My
+honourable friend has asked me a question with regard to a remote and
+speculative future." Thus was our interpretation of Mr. Asquith's
+"promise" justified from his own lips. Yet the Liberal women still clung
+to the hope of Government action, and the Liberal press pretended to
+cling to it. As for the Women's Social and Political Union, we prepared
+for more work. We had to strike out along a new line, since it was
+evident that the Government could, for a time at least, neutralise our
+by-election work by more false promises. Consistent with our policy, of
+never going further than the Government compelled us to go, we made our
+first action a perfectly peaceable one.</p>
+
+<p>On the day when the Stanger bill had reached its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> second reading in the
+House, and several days after I had gone to Holloway for the first time,
+Mr. Herbert Gladstone, the Home Secretary, made a speech which greatly
+interested the Suffragettes. He professed himself a suffragist, and
+declared that he intended to vote for the bill. Nevertheless, he was
+confident that it could not pass, because of the division in the
+Cabinet, and because it had no political party united either for or
+against it. Woman suffrage, said Mr. Gladstone, must advance to victory
+through all the stages that are required for great reforms to mature.
+First academic discussion, then effective action, was the history of
+men's suffrage; it must be the same with women's suffrage. "Men,"
+declared Mr. Gladstone, "have learned this lesson and know the necessity
+for demonstrating the greatness of their movement, and for establishing
+that <i>force majeure</i> which actuates and arms a Government for effective
+work. That is the task before the supporters of this great movement.
+Looking back at the great political crises in the thirties, the sixties
+and the eighties, it will be found that the people did not go about in
+small crowds, nor were they content with enthusiastic meetings in large
+halls; they assembled in their tens of thousands all over the country.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course," added Mr. Gladstone, "it is not to be expected that women
+can assemble in such masses, but power belongs to masses, and through
+this power a Government can be influenced into more effective action
+than a Government will be likely to take under present conditions."</p>
+
+<p>The Women's Social and Political Union <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>determined to answer this
+challenge. If assembling in great masses was all that was necessary to
+convince the Government that woman suffrage had passed the academic
+stage and now demanded political action, we thought we could undertake
+to satisfy the most skeptical member of the Cabinet. We knew that we
+could organise a demonstration that would out-rival any of the great
+franchise demonstrations held by men in the thirties, sixties, and
+eighties. The largest number of people ever gathered in Hyde Park was
+said to have approximated 72,000. We determined to organise a Hyde Park
+demonstration of at least 250,000 people. Sunday, June 21, 1908, was
+fixed for the date of this demonstration, and for many months we worked
+to make it a day notable in the history of the movement. Our example was
+emulated by the non-militant suffragists, who organised a fine
+procession of their own, about a week before our demonstration. Thirteen
+thousand women, it was said, marched in that procession.</p>
+
+<p>On our demonstration we spent, for advertising alone, over a thousand
+pounds, or five thousand dollars. We covered the hoardings of London and
+of all the principal provincial cities with great posters bearing
+portraits of the women who were to preside at the twenty platforms from
+which speeches were to be made; a map of London, showing the routes by
+which the seven processions were to advance, and a plan of the Hyde Park
+meeting-place were also shown. London, of course, was thoroughly
+organised. For weeks a small army of women was busy chalking
+announcements on sidewalks, distributing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> handbills, canvassing from
+house to house, advertising the demonstration by posters and sandwich
+boards carried through the streets. We invited everybody to be present,
+including both Houses of Parliament. A few days before the demonstration
+Mrs. Drummond and a number of other women hired and decorated a launch
+and sailed up the Thames to the Houses of Parliament, arriving at the
+hour when members entertain their women friends at tea on the terrace.
+Everyone left the tables and crowded to the water's edge as the boat
+stopped, and Mrs. Drummond's strong, clear voice pealed out her
+invitation to the Cabinet and the members of Parliament to join the
+women's demonstration in Hyde Park. "Come to the park on Sunday," she
+cried. "You shall have police protection, and there will be no arrests,
+we promise you." An alarmed someone telephoned for the police boats, but
+as they appeared, the women's boat steamed away.</p>
+
+<p>What a day was Sunday, June 21st&mdash;clear, radiant, filled with golden
+sunshine! As I advanced, leading, with the venerable Mrs.
+Wolstenholm-Elmy, the first of the seven processions, it seemed to me
+that all London had turned out to witness our demonstration. And a
+goodly part of London followed the processions. When I mounted my
+platform in Hyde Park, and surveyed the mighty throngs that waited there
+and the endless crowds that were still pouring into the park from all
+directions, I was filled with amazement not unmixed with awe. Never had
+I imagined that so many people could be gathered together to share in a
+political demonstration. It was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> a gay and beautiful as well as an
+awe-inspiring spectacle, for the white gowns and flower-trimmed hats of
+the women, against the background of ancient trees, gave the park the
+appearance of a vast garden in full bloom.</p>
+
+<p>The bugles sounded, and the speakers at each of the twenty platforms
+began their addresses, which could not have been heard by more than half
+or a third of the vast audience. Notwithstanding this, they remained to
+the end. At five o'clock the bugles sounded again, the speaking ceased,
+and the resolution calling upon the Government to bring in an official
+woman-suffrage bill without delay was carried at every platform, often
+without a dissenting vote. Then, with a three-times-repeated cry of
+"Votes for Women!" from the assembled multitude, the great meeting dispersed.</p>
+
+<p>The London <i>Times</i> said next day: "Its organisers had counted on an
+audience of 250,000. That expectation was certainly fulfilled, and
+probably it was doubled, and it would be difficult to contradict any one
+who asserted that it was trebled. Like the distances and the number of
+the stars, the facts were beyond the threshold of perception."</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Daily Express</i> said: "It is probable that so many people never
+before stood in one square mass anywhere in England. Men who saw the
+great Gladstone meeting years ago said that compared with yesterday's
+multitude it was as nothing."</p>
+
+<p>We felt that we had answered the challenge in Mr. Gladstone's
+declaration that "power belongs to the masses," and that through this
+power the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span>Government could be influenced; so it was with real hope that
+we despatched a copy of the resolution to the Prime Minister, asking him
+what answer the Government would make to that unparalleled gathering of
+men and women. Mr. Asquith replied formally that he had nothing to add
+to his previous statement&mdash;that the Government intended, at some
+indefinite time, to bring in a general reform bill which <i>might</i> be
+amended to include woman suffrage. Our wonderful demonstration, it
+appeared, had made no impression whatever upon him.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>CHAPTER III</span></h2>
+
+<p>Now we had reached a point where we had to choose between two
+alternatives. We had exhausted argument. Therefore either we had to give
+up our agitation altogether, as the suffragists of the eighties
+virtually had done, or else we must act, and go on acting, until the
+selfishness and the obstinacy of the Government was broken down, or the
+Government themselves destroyed. Until forced to do so, the Government,
+we perceived, would never give women the vote.</p>
+
+<p>We realised the truth of John Bright's words, spoken while the reform
+bill of 1867 was being agitated. Parliament, John Bright then declared,
+had never been hearty for any reform. The Reform Act of 1832 had been
+wrested by force from the Government of that day, and now before
+another, he said, could be carried, the agitators would have to fill the
+streets with people from Charing Cross to Westminster Abbey. Acting on
+John Bright's advice, we issued a call to the public to join us in
+holding a huge demonstration, on June 30th outside the House of Commons.
+We wanted to be sure that the Government saw as well as read of our
+immense following. A public proclamation from the Commissioner of
+Police, warning the public not to assemble in Parliament Square and
+declaring that the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>approaches to the Houses of Parliament must be kept
+open, was at once issued.</p>
+
+<p>We persisted in announcing that the demonstration would take place, and
+I wrote a letter to Mr. Asquith telling him that a deputation would wait
+upon him at half-past four on the afternoon of June 30th. We held the
+usual Women's Parliament in Caxton Hall, after which Mrs. Pethick
+Lawrence, eleven other women, and myself, set forth. We met with no
+opposition from the police, but marched through cheering crowds of
+spectators to the Strangers' Entrance to the House of Commons. Here we
+were met by a large group of uniformed men commanded by Inspector
+Scantlebury, of the police. The inspector, whom I knew personally,
+stepped forward and demanded officially, "Are you Mrs. Pankhurst, and is
+this your deputation?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," I replied.</p>
+
+<p>"My orders are to exclude you from the House of Commons."</p>
+
+<p>"Has Mr. Asquith received my letter?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>For answer the inspector drew my letter from his pocket and handed it to me.</p>
+
+<p>"Did Mr. Asquith return no message, no kind of reply?" I inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"No," replied the inspector.</p>
+
+<p>We turned and walked back to Caxton Hall, to tell the waiting audience
+what had occurred. We resolved that there was nothing to do but wait
+patiently until evening, and see how well the public would respond to
+our call to meet in Parliament Square. Already we knew that the streets
+were filled<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> with people, and early as it was the crowds were increasing
+rapidly. At eight we went out in groups from Caxton Hall, to find
+Parliament Square packed with a throng, estimated next day at least
+100,000. From the steps of public buildings, from stone copings, from
+the iron railings of the Palace Yard, to which they clung precariously,
+our women made speeches until the police pulled them down and flung them
+into the moving, swaying, excited crowds. Some of the women were
+arrested, others were merely ordered to move on. Mingled cheers and
+jeers rose from the spectators. Some of the men were roughs who had come
+out to amuse themselves. Others were genuinely sympathetic, and tried
+valiantly to help us to reach the House of Commons. Again and again the
+police lines were broken, and it was only as the result of repeated
+charges by mounted police that the people's attacks were repelled. Many
+members of Parliament, including Mr. Lloyd-George, Mr. Winston
+Churchill, and Mr. Herbert Gladstone, came out to witness the struggle,
+which lasted until midnight and resulted in the arrest of twenty-nine
+women. Two of these women were arrested after they had each thrown a
+stone through a window of Mr. Asquith's official residence in Downing
+Street, the value of the windows being about $2.40.</p>
+
+<p>This was the first window-breaking in our history. Mrs. Mary Leigh and
+Miss Edith New, who had thrown the stones, sent word to me from the
+police court that, having acted without orders, they would not resent
+repudiation from headquarters. Far from repudiating them, I went at once
+to see them in their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> cells, and assured them of my approval of their
+act. The smashing of windows is a time-honoured method of showing
+displeasure in a political situation. As one of the newspapers,
+commenting on the affair, truly said, "When the King and Queen dine at
+Apsley on the 13th inst. they will be entertained in rooms the windows
+of which the Duke of Wellington was obliged to protect with iron
+shutters from the fury of his political opponents."</p>
+
+<p>In Winchester a few years ago, to give but one instance, a great riot
+took place as a protest against the removal of a historic gun from one
+part of the town to another. In the course of this riot windows were
+broken and other property of various kinds was destroyed, very serious
+damage being done. No punishment was administered in respect of this
+riot and the authorities, bowing to public opinion thus riotously
+expressed, restored the gun to its original situation.</p>
+
+<p>Window-breaking, when Englishmen do it, is regarded as honest expression
+of political opinion. Window-breaking, when Englishwomen do it, is
+treated as a crime. In sentencing Mrs. Leigh and Miss New to two months
+in the first division, the magistrate used very severe language, and
+declared that such a thing must never happen again. Of course the women
+assured him that it would happen again. Said Mrs. Leigh: "We have no
+other course but to rebel against oppression, and if necessary to resort
+to stronger measures. This fight is going on."</p>
+
+<p>The summer of 1908 is remembered as one of the most oppressively hot
+seasons the country had known<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> for years. Our prisoners in Holloway
+suffered intensely, some being made desperately ill from the heat, the
+bad air, and the miserable food. We who spent the summer campaigning
+suffered also, but in less degree. It was a tremendous relief when the
+cool days of autumn set in, and it was with renewed vigour that we
+prepared for the opening day of Parliament, which was October 12th.
+Again we resolved to send a deputation to the Prime Minister, and again
+we invited the general public to take part in the demonstration. We had
+printed thousands of little handbills bearing this inscription: "Men and
+Women, Help the Suffragettes to Rush the House of Commons, on Tuesday
+Evening, October 13th, at 7:30."</p>
+
+<div class="center"><a name="ill-120.jpg" id="ill-120.jpg"></a><img src="images/ill-120.jpg" width='538' height='700' alt="MRS. PANKHURST AND CHRISTABEL HIDING FROM THE POLICE ON
+THE ROOF GARDEN AT CLEMENTS INN October, 1908" /></div>
+
+<p class="bold">MRS. PANKHURST AND CHRISTABEL HIDING FROM THE POLICE<br />ON
+THE ROOF GARDEN AT CLEMENTS INN</p>
+
+<p class="bold"><i>October, 1908</i></p>
+
+<p>On Sunday, October 11th, we held a large meeting in Trafalgar Square, my
+daughter Christabel, Mrs. Drummond and I speaking from the plinth of the
+Nelson monument. Mr. Lloyd-George, as we afterward learned, was a member
+of the audience. The police were there, taking ample notes of our
+speeches. We had not failed to notice that they were watching us daily,
+dogging our footsteps, and showing in numerous ways that they were under
+orders to keep track of all our movements. The climax came at noon on
+October 12th, when Christabel, Mrs. Drummond and I were each served with
+an imposing legal document which read, "Information has been laid this
+day by the Commissioner of Police that you, in the month of October, in
+the year 1908, were guilty of conduct likely to provoke a breach of the
+peace by initiating and causing to be initiated, by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> publishing and
+causing to be published, a certain handbill, calling upon and inciting
+the public to do a certain wrongful and illegal act, viz., to rush the
+House of Commons at 7:30 <span class="smaller">P.M.</span> on October 13th inst."</p>
+
+<p>The last paragraph was a summons to appear at Bow Street police station
+that same afternoon at three o'clock. We did not go to Bow Street police
+station. We went instead to a crowded "At Home" at Queen's Hall, where
+it can be imagined that our news created great excitement. The place was
+surrounded by constables, and the police reporters were on hand to take
+stenographic reports of everything that was said from the platform. Once
+an excited cry was raised that a police inspector was coming in to
+arrest us. But the officer merely brought a message that the summons had
+been adjourned until the following morning.</p>
+
+<p>It did not suit our convenience to obey the adjourned summons quite so
+early, so I wrote a polite note to the police, saying that we would be
+in our headquarters, No. 4 Clements Inn, the next evening at six
+o'clock, and would then be at his disposal. Warrants for our arrests
+were quickly issued, and Inspector Jarvis was instructed to execute them
+at once. This he found impossible to do, for Mrs. Drummond was spending
+her last day of liberty on private business, while my daughter and I had
+retreated to another part of Clements Inn, which is a big, rambling
+building. There, in the roof-garden of the Pethick Lawrence's private
+flat, we remained all day, busy, under the soft blue of the autumn sky,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>
+with our work and our preparations for a long absence. At six we walked
+downstairs, dressed for the street. Mrs. Drummond arrived promptly, the
+waiting officers read the warrants, and we all proceeded to Bow Street
+in cabs. It was too late for the trial to be held. We asked for bail,
+but the authorities had no mind to allow us to take part in the "rush"
+which we had incited, so we were obliged to spend the night in the
+police station. All night I lay awake, thinking of the scenes which were
+going on in the streets.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning, in a courtroom crowded to its utmost capacity, my
+daughter rose to conduct her first case at law. She had earned the right
+to an LL.B. after her name, but as women are not permitted to practise
+law in England, she had never appeared at the bar in any capacity except
+that of defendant. Now she proposed to combine the two r&ocirc;les of
+defendant and lawyer, and conduct the case for the three of us. She
+began by asking the magistrate not to try the case in that court, but to
+send it for trial before a judge and jury. We had long desired to take
+the Suffragettes' cases before bodies of private citizens, because we
+had every reason to suspect that the police-court officials acted under
+the direct commands of the very persons against whom our agitation was
+directed. Jury trial was denied us; but after the preliminary
+examination was over the magistrate, Mr. Curtis Bennett, allowed a
+week's adjournment for preparation of the case.</p>
+
+<p>On October 21st the trial was resumed, with the courtroom as full as
+before and the press table even more crowded, for it had been widely
+published that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> we had actually subp&oelig;naed two members of the
+Government, who had witnessed the scenes on the night of October 13th.
+The first witness to enter the box was Mr. Lloyd-George. Christabel
+examined him at some length as to the meaning and merits of the word
+rush, and succeeded in making him very uncomfortable&mdash;and the charge
+against ourselves look very flimsy. She then questioned him about the
+speeches he had heard at Trafalgar Square, and as to whether there had
+been any suggestion that property be destroyed or personal violence
+used. He admitted that the speeches were temperate and the crowds
+orderly. Then Christabel suddenly asked, "There were no words used so
+likely to incite to violence as the advice you gave at Swansea, that the
+women should be ruthlessly flung out of your meeting?" Mr. Lloyd-George
+looked black, and answered nothing. The magistrate hastened to the
+protection of Mr. Lloyd-George. "This is quite irrelevant," he said.
+"That was a private meeting." It was a public meeting, and Christabel
+said so. "It was a private meeting <i>in a sense</i>," insisted the magistrate.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lloyd-George assumed an air of pompous indignation when Christabel
+asked him, "Have we not received encouragement from you, and if not from
+you from your colleagues, to take action of this kind?" Mr. Lloyd-George
+rolled his eyes upward as he replied, "I should be very much surprised
+to hear that, Miss Pankhurst."</p>
+
+<p>"Is it not a fact," asked Christabel, "that you yourself have set us an
+example of revolt?" "I never<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> incited a crowd to violence," exclaimed
+the witness. "Not in the Welsh graveyard case?" she asked. "No!" he
+cried angrily. "You did not tell them to break down a wall and disinter
+a body?" pursued Christabel. He could not deny this but, "I gave advice
+which was found by the Court of Appeal to be sound legal advice," he
+snapped, and turned his back as far as he could in the narrow witness-box.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Herbert Gladstone had asked to be allowed to testify early, as he
+was being detained from important public duties. Christabel asked to
+question one witness before Mr. Gladstone entered the box. The witness
+was Miss Georgiana Brackenbury, who had recently suffered six weeks'
+imprisonment for the cause, and had since met and had a talk with Mr.
+Horace Smith, the magistrate, who had made to her a most important and
+damaging admission of the government's interference in suffragists'
+trials. Christabel asked her one question. "Did Mr. Horace Smith tell
+you in sentencing you that he was doing what he had been told to do?"
+"You must not put that question!" exclaimed the magistrate. But the
+witness had already answered "Yes." There was an excited stir in the
+courtroom. It had been recorded under oath that a magistrate had
+admitted that Suffragettes were being sentenced not by himself,
+according to the evidence and according to law, but by the Government,
+for no one could possibly doubt where Mr. Horace Smith's orders came from.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Gladstone, plump, bald, and ruddy, in no way resembles his
+illustrious father. He entered the witness-box smiling and confident,
+but his complacence<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> vanished when Christabel asked him outright if the
+Government had not ordered the Commissioner of Police to take this
+action against us. Of course the magistrate intervened, and Mr.
+Gladstone did not answer the question. Christabel tried again. "Did you
+instruct Mr. Horace Smith to decide against Miss Brackenbury, and to
+send her to prison for six weeks?" That too was objected to, as were all
+questions on the subject.</p>
+
+<p>All through the examination the magistrate constantly intervened to save
+the Cabinet Minister from embarrassment, but Christabel finally
+succeeded in making Mr. Gladstone admit, point by point, that he had
+said that women could never get the vote because they could not fight
+for it as men had fought.</p>
+
+<p>A large number of witnesses testified to the orderly nature of the
+demonstration on the 13th, and then Christabel rose to plead. She began
+by declaring that these proceedings had been taken, as the legal saying
+is, "in malice and vexation," in order to lame a political enemy. She
+declared that, under the law, the charge which might properly be brought
+against us was that of illegal assembly, but the Government had not
+charged us with this offence, because the Government desired to keep the
+case in a police court.</p>
+
+<p>"The authorities dare not see this case come before a jury," she
+declared, "because they know perfectly well that if it were heard before
+a jury of our countrymen we should be acquitted, just as John Burns was
+acquitted years ago for taking action far more dangerous to the public
+peace than we have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> taken. We are deprived of trial by jury. We are also
+deprived of the right to appeal against the magistrate's decision. Very
+carefully has this procedure been thought out."</p>
+
+<p>Of the handbill she said: "We do not deny that we issued this bill; none
+of us three has wished to deny responsibility. We did issue the bill; we
+did cause it to be circulated; we did put upon it the words 'Come and
+help the suffragettes rush the House of Commons.' For these words we do
+not apologise. It is very well known that we took this action in order
+to press forward a claim, which, according to the British constitution,
+we are well entitled to make."</p>
+
+<div class="center"><a name="ill-126.jpg" id="ill-126.jpg"></a><img src="images/ill-126.jpg" width='700' height='487' alt="CHRISTABEL, MRS. DRUMMOND AND MRS. PANKHURST IN THE DOCK,
+FIRST CONSPIRACY TRIAL October, 1908" /></div>
+
+<p class="bold">CHRISTABEL, MRS. DRUMMOND AND MRS. PANKHURST IN THE DOCK,<br />
+FIRST CONSPIRACY TRIAL</p>
+
+<p class="bold"><i>October, 1908</i></p>
+
+<p>In all that the Suffragettes had done, in all that they might ever do,
+declared my daughter, they would only be following in the footsteps of
+men now in Parliament. "Mr. Herbert Gladstone has told us in the speech
+I read to him that the victory of argument alone is not enough. As we
+cannot hope to win by force of argument alone, it is necessary to
+overcome by other means the savage resistance of the Government to our
+claim for citizenship. He says, 'Go on, fight as the men did.' And then,
+when we show our power and get the people to help us, he takes
+proceedings against us in a manner that would have been disgraceful even
+in the old days of coercion. Then there is Mr. Lloyd-George, who, if any
+man has done so, has set us an example. His whole career has been a
+series of revolts. He has said that if we do not get the vote&mdash;mark
+these words&mdash;we should be justified in adopting the methods the men had
+to adopt, namely, pulling down the Hyde Park<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> railings." She quoted Lord
+Morley as saying of the Indian unrest: "'We are in India in the presence
+of a living movement, and a movement for what? For objects which we
+ourselves have taught them to think are desirable objects; and unless we
+can somehow reconcile order with satisfaction of those ideals and
+aspirations, the fault will not be theirs, it will be ours&mdash;it will mark
+the breakdown of British statesmanship.'&mdash;Apply those words to our case," she continued.</p>
+
+<p>"Remember that we are demanding of Liberal statesmen that which is for
+us the greatest boon and the most essential right&mdash;and if the present
+Government cannot reconcile order with our demand for the vote without
+delay, it will mark the breakdown of their statesmanship. Yes, their
+statesmanship has broken down already. They are disgraced. It is only in
+this court that they have the smallest hope of being supported."</p>
+
+<p>My daughter had spoken with passion and fervour, and her righteous
+indignation had moved her to words that caused the magistrate's face to
+turn an angry crimson. When I rose to address the Court I began by
+assuming an appearance of calmness which I did not altogether feel. I
+endorsed all that Christabel had said of the unfairness of our trial and
+the malice of the Government; I protested against the trial of political
+offenders in a common police court, and I said that we were not women
+who would come into the court as ordinary law-breakers. I described Mrs.
+Drummond's worthy career as a wife, a mother, and a self-sustaining
+business woman. I said, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>"Before you decide what is to be done with us,
+I should like you to hear from me a statement of what has brought me
+into the dock this morning." And then I told of my life and experiences,
+many of which I have related in these pages of what I had seen and known
+as a Poor Law Guardian and a registrar of births and deaths; of how I
+had learned the burning necessity of changing the status of women, of
+altering the laws under which they and their children live, and of the
+essential justice of making women self-governing citizens.</p>
+
+<p>"I have seen," I said, "that men are encouraged by law to take advantage
+of the helplessness of women. Many women have thought as I have, and for
+many, many years have tried, by that influence of which we have been so
+often reminded, to alter these laws, but we find that influence counts
+for nothing. When we went to the House of Commons we used to be told,
+when we were persistent, that members of Parliament were not responsible
+to women, they were responsible only to voters, and that their time was
+too fully occupied to reform those laws, although they agreed that they needed reforming.</p>
+
+<p>"We women have presented larger petitions in support of our
+enfranchisement than were ever presented for any other reform; we have
+succeeded in holding greater public meetings than men have ever held for
+any reform, in spite of the difficulty which women have in throwing off
+their natural diffidence, that desire to escape publicity which we have
+inherited from generations of our foremothers. We<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> have broken through
+that. We have faced hostile mobs at street corners, because we were told
+that we could not have that representation for our taxes that men have
+won unless we converted the whole of the country to our side. Because we
+have done this, we have been misrepresented, we have been ridiculed, we
+have had contempt poured upon us, and the ignorant mob have been incited
+to offer us violence, which we have faced unarmed and unprotected by the
+safeguards which Cabinet Ministers enjoy. We have been driven to do
+this; we are determined to go on with this agitation because we feel in
+honour bound. Just as it was the duty of your forefathers, it is our
+duty to make the world a better place for women than it is to-day.</p>
+
+<p>"Lastly, I want to call attention to the self-restraint which was shown
+by our followers on the night of the 13th, after we had been arrested.
+Our rule has always been to be patient, exercise self-restraint, show
+our so-called superiors that we are not hysterical; to use no violence,
+but rather to offer ourselves to the violence of others.</p>
+
+<p>"That is all I have to say to you, sir. We are here, not because we are
+law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers."</p>
+
+<p>The burly policemen, the reporters, and most of the spectators were in
+tears as I finished. But the magistrate, who had listened part of the
+time with his hand concealing his face, still held that we were properly
+charged in a common police court as inciters to riot. Since we refused
+to be bound over to keep the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> peace, he sentenced Mrs. Drummond and
+myself to three months' imprisonment, and Christabel to ten weeks'
+imprisonment. It was destined to be a kind of imprisonment the
+authorities had never yet been called upon to deal with.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>CHAPTER IV</span></h2>
+
+<p>My first act on reaching Holloway was to demand that the Governor be
+sent for. When he came I told him that the Suffragettes had resolved
+that they would no longer submit to being treated as ordinary
+law-breakers. In the course of our trial two Cabinet Ministers had
+admitted that we were political offenders, and therefore we should
+henceforth refuse to be searched or to undress in the presence of the
+wardresses. For myself I claimed the right, and I hoped the others would
+do likewise, to speak to my friends during exercise, or whenever I came
+in contact with them. The Governor, after reflection, yielded to the
+first two demands, but said that he would have to consult the Home
+Office before permitting us to break the rule of silence. We were
+accordingly allowed to change our clothing privately, and, as a further
+concession, were placed in adjoining cells. This was little advantage to
+me, however, since within a few days I was removed to a hospital cell,
+suffering from the illness which prison life always inflicts on me. Here
+the Governor visited me with the unwelcome news that the Home Secretary
+had refused to allow me the privilege of speech with my fellow
+prisoners. I asked him if I might, when I was strong enough to walk,
+take exercise with my friends. To this he assented, and I soon had the
+joy of seeing my daughter and the other brave <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>comrades, and walking
+with them in the dismal courtyard of the prison. Single file we walked,
+at a distance of three or four feet from one another, back and forth
+under the stony eyes of the wardresses. The rough flags of the pavement
+hurt our feet, shod in heavy, shapeless prison boots. The autumn days
+were cold and cheerless, and we shivered violently under our scanty
+cloaks. But of all our hardships the ceaseless silence of our lives was worst.</p>
+
+<div class="center"><a name="ill-132.jpg" id="ill-132.jpg"></a><img src="images/ill-132.jpg" width='502' height='700' alt="MRS. PANKHURST AND MISS CHRISTABEL PANKHURST IN PRISON
+DRESS" /></div>
+
+<p class="bold">MRS. PANKHURST AND MISS CHRISTABEL PANKHURST<br />IN PRISON DRESS</p>
+
+<p>At the end of the second week I decided I would no longer endure it.
+That afternoon at exercise I suddenly called my daughter by name and
+bade her stand still until I came up to her. Of course she stopped, and
+when I reached her side we linked arms and began to talk in low tones. A
+wardress ran up to us, saying: "I shall listen to everything you say." I
+replied: "You are welcome to do that, but I shall insist on my right to
+speak to my daughter." Another wardress had hastily left the yard, and
+now she returned with a large number of wardresses. They seized me and
+quickly removed me to my cell, while the other suffrage prisoners
+cheered my action at the top of their voices. For their "mutiny" they
+got three days' solitary confinement, and I, for mine, a much more
+severe punishment. Unrepentant, I told the Governor that, in spite of
+any punishment he might impose on me, I would never again submit to the
+silence rule. To forbid a mother to speak to her daughter was infamous.
+For this I was characterised as a "dangerous criminal" and was sent into
+solitary confinement, without exercise or chapel,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> while a wardress was
+stationed constantly at my cell door to see that I communicated with no one.</p>
+
+<p>It was two weeks before I saw any of my friends again, and meantime the
+health of Mrs. Drummond had been so seriously impaired that she was
+released for hospital treatment. My daughter also, I learned, was ill,
+and in desperation I made application to the Board of Visiting
+Magistrates to be allowed to see her. After a long conference, during
+which I was made to wait outside in the corridor, the magistrates
+returned a refusal, saying that I might renew my application in a month.
+The answer then, they said, would depend on my conduct. A month! My girl
+might be dead by that time. My anxiety sent me to bed ill again, but,
+although I did not know it, relief was already on its way. I had told
+the visiting magistrates that I would wait until public opinion got
+within those walls, and this happened sooner than I had dared to hope.
+Mrs. Drummond, as soon as she was able to appear in public, and the
+other suffrage prisoners, as they were released, spread broadcast the
+story of our mutiny, and of a subsequent one led by Miss Wallace Dunlop,
+which sent a large number of women into solitary confinement. The
+Suffragettes marched by thousands to Holloway, thronging the approaches
+to the prison street. Round and round the prison they marched, singing
+the Women's Marseillaise and cheering. Faintly the sound came to our
+ears, infinitely lightening our burden of pain and loneliness. The
+following week they came again, so we afterwards learned, but this time
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> police turned them back long before they reached the confines of
+the prison.</p>
+
+<p>The demonstrations, together with a volley of questions asked in the
+House of Commons, told at last. Orders came from the Home Office that I
+was to see my daughter, and that we were to be allowed to exercise and
+to talk together for one hour each day. In addition, we were to be
+permitted the rare privilege of reading a daily newspaper. Then, on
+December 8th, the day of Christabel's release, orders came that I, too,
+should be discharged, two weeks before the expiration of my sentence.</p>
+
+<p>At the welcome breakfast given us, as released prisoners, at Lincoln's
+Inn Hotel, I told our members that henceforth we should all insist on
+refusing to abide by ordinary prison rules. We did not propose to break
+laws and then shirk punishment. We simply meant to assert our right to
+be recognised as political prisoners. We reached this point after due
+reflection. We first set ourselves not to complain of prison, not to say
+anything about it, to avoid it, to keep away from all side issues, to
+keep along the straight path of political reform, to get the vote;
+because we knew that when we had won it we could reform prisons and a
+great many other abuses as well. But now that we had had in the witness
+box the admission of Cabinet Ministers that we are political offenders,
+we should in future demand the treatment given to men political
+offenders in all civilised countries. "If nations," I said, "are still
+so governed that they make political offenders, then Great <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>Britain is
+going to treat her political offenders as well as political offenders
+are treated by other nations. If it were the custom to treat political
+offenders as ordinary offenders against the well-being of society are
+treated, we should not have complained if we were treated like that; but
+it is not the international custom to do it, and so, for the dignity of
+the women of the country, and for the sake of the consciences of the men
+of the country, and for the sake of our nation amongst the nations of
+the earth, we are not going to allow the Liberal government to treat us
+like ordinary law-breakers in future."</p>
+
+<p>I said the same thing that night in a great meeting held in Queen's Hall
+to welcome the released prisoners, and, although we all knew that our
+determination involved a bitter struggle, our women endorsed it without
+a moment's hesitation. Had they been able to look forward to the events
+which were even then overshadowing us, could they have foreseen the new
+forms of suffering and danger that lay in waiting, I am certain that
+they would still have done the same thing, for our experiences had
+taught us to dispense with fear. Whatever of timidity, of shrinking from
+pain or hardship any of us had originally possessed, it had all
+vanished. There were no terrors that we were not now ready to face.</p>
+
+<p>The year 1909 marks an important point in our struggle, partly because
+of this decision of ours, never again to submit to be classed with
+criminals; and partly because in this year we forced the Liberal
+Government to go on record, publicly, in regard to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> the oldest of
+popular rights, the right of petition. We had long contemplated this
+step, and now the time seemed ripe for taking it.</p>
+
+<p>In the closing days of 1908 Mr. Asquith, speaking on the policy to be
+carried out in 1909, commented on the various deputations he was obliged
+at that time to receive. They called on him, he said, "from all quarters
+and in all causes, on an average of something like two hours on three
+days in every week." The deputations all asked for different things,
+and, although all of the things could not possibly be included in the
+King's speech, Mr. Asquith was inclined to agree that many of them ought
+to be included. This declaration from the Prime Minister that he was
+constantly receiving deputations of men, and listening favourably to
+their suggestions of what policies to pursue, aroused in the
+Suffragettes feelings of deep indignation. This in part they expressed
+on January 25th, when the first meeting of the Cabinet Council took
+place. A small deputation from the W. S. P. U. proceeded to Downing
+Street to claim the right to be heard, as men were heard. For knocking
+at the door of the official residence four of the women, including my
+sister, Mrs. Clark, were arrested and sent to prison for one month.</p>
+
+<p>A month later the seventh of our Women's Parliaments was called against
+this and against the fact that no mention of women had been included in
+the King's speech. Led by Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, Lady Constance Lytton
+and Miss Daisy Solomon, a deputation of women endeavoured to carry the
+resolution to the House of Commons. They were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> promptly arrested and,
+next day, were sent to prison on sentences of from one to two months.
+The time was rapidly approaching when the legality of these arrests
+would have to be tested. In June of the year 1909 the test was made.</p>
+
+<p>It will be remembered that we had endeavoured to force the authorities
+to make good their threat to charge us under the obsolete Charles II
+"Tumultuous Petitions Act," which prescribes severe penalties for
+persons proceeding to Parliament in groups of more than twelve for the
+purpose of presenting petitions. It had been stated that if we were
+charged under that act our case would be given a hearing before a judge
+and jury instead of a police magistrate. Since this was exactly what we
+desired to have happen we had sent deputation after deputation of more
+than twelve persons, but always they were tried in police courts, and
+were sent to prison often for periods as long as that prescribed in the
+Charles II Act. Now we determined to do something still more ambitious;
+we resolved to test, not the Charles II Act, but the constitutional
+right of the subject to petition the Prime Minister as the seat of power.</p>
+
+<p>The right of petition, which has existed in England since the earliest
+known period, was written into the Bill of Rights which became law in
+1689 on the accession of William and Mary. It was, in fact, one of the
+conditions attaching to the accession of the joint monarchs. According
+to the Bill of Rights, "It is the right of subjects to petition the King
+and all commitments, and prosecutions for such petitionings are
+illegal." The power of the King having<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> passed almost completely into
+the hands of Parliament, the Prime Minister now stands where the King's
+majesty stood in former times. Clearly, then, the right of the subject
+to petition the Prime Minister cannot be legally denied. Thus were we
+advised, and in order to keep within the strict letter of the law, we
+accepted the limitations of the right of petition laid down in the
+Charles II Act, and decided that our petition should be carried to the
+House of Commons by small groups of women.</p>
+
+<p>Again I called together, on the evening of June 29th, a Parliament of
+women. Previously I had written to Mr. Asquith stating that a deputation
+of women would wait on him at the House of Commons at eight o'clock in
+the evening. I wrote him further that we were not to be refused, as we
+insisted upon our constitutional right to be received. To my note the
+Prime Minister returned a formal note declining to receive us.
+Nevertheless we continued our preparations, because we knew that the
+Prime Minister would continue to decline, but that in the end he would
+be forced to receive us.</p>
+
+<p>An incident which occurred a week before the date of the deputation was
+destined to have important consequences. Miss Wallace Dunlop went to St.
+Stephen's Hall in the House of Commons, and marked with printer's ink on
+the stone work of the Hall an extract from the Bill of Rights. The first
+time she made the attempt she was interrupted by a policeman, but two
+days later she succeeded in stamping on the ancient walls the reminder
+to Parliament that women as well as men possess <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span>constitutional rights,
+and that they were proposing to exercise those rights. She was arrested
+and sentenced to prison for one month, in the third division. The option
+of a heavy fine was given her, which of course she refused. Miss Wallace
+Dunlop's prison term began on June 22d. Perhaps her deed had something
+to do with the unusual interest taken in the approaching deputation, an
+interest which was shown not only by the public but by many members of
+Parliament. In the House of Commons a strong feeling that the women
+ought this time to be received manifested itself in many questions put
+to the Government. One member even asked leave to move the adjournment
+of the House on a matter of urgent public importance, namely the danger
+to the public peace, owing to the refusal of the Prime Minister to
+receive the deputation. This was denied, however, and the Government
+mendaciously disclaimed all responsibility for what action the police
+might take toward the deputation. The Home Secretary, Mr. Gladstone,
+when asked by Mr. Kier Hardie to give instructions that the deputation,
+if orderly, should be admitted to St. Stephen's, replied: "I cannot say
+what action the police ought to take in the matter." Our Women's
+Parliament met at half past seven on the evening of June 29th, and the
+petition to the Prime Minister was read and adopted. Then our deputation
+set forth. Accompanying me as leader were two highly respectable women
+of advanced years, Mrs. Saul Solomon, whose husband had been Prime
+Minister at the Cape, and Miss Neligan, one of the foremost of the
+pioneer educators of England.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> We three and five other women were
+preceded by Miss Elsie Howey, who, riding fast, went on horse-back to
+announce our coming to the enormous crowds that filled the streets. She,
+we afterward learned, progressed as far as the approaches to the House
+of Commons before being turned back by the police. As for the
+deputation, it pressed on through the crowd as far as St. Margaret's
+Church, Westminster, where we found a long line of police blocking the
+road. We paused for a moment, gathering strength for the ordeal of
+trying to push through the lines, when an unexpected thing happened. An
+order was given from some one, and instantly the police lines parted,
+leaving a clear space through which we walked towards the House. We were
+escorted on our way by Inspector Wells, and as we passed the crowd broke
+into vociferous cheering, firmly believing that we were after all to be
+received. As for myself I did little speculating as to what was about to
+happen. I simply led my deputation on as far as the entrance to St.
+Stephen's Hall. There we encountered another strong force of police
+commanded by our old acquaintance, Inspector Scantlebury, who stepped
+forward and handed me a letter. I opened it and read in aloud to the
+women. "The Prime Minister, for the reasons which he has already given
+in a written reply to their request, regrets that he is unable to
+receive the proposed deputation."</p>
+
+<p>I dropped the note to the ground and said: "I stand upon my rights, as a
+subject of the King, to petition the Prime Minister, and I am firmly
+resolved to stand here until I am received."</p>
+
+<div class="center"><a name="ill-140.jpg" id="ill-140.jpg"></a><img src="images/ill-140.jpg" width='464' height='700' alt="INSPECTOR WELLS CONDUCTING MRS. PANKHURST TO THE HOUSE OF
+COMMONS June, 1908" /></div>
+
+<p class="bold">INSPECTOR WELLS CONDUCTING MRS. PANKHURST TO THE<br />HOUSE OF
+COMMONS</p>
+
+<p class="bold"><i>June, 1908</i></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span></p><p>Inspector Scantlebury turned away and walked rapidly towards the door
+of the Strangers' Entrance. I turned to Inspector Jarvis, who remained,
+to several members of Parliament and some newspaper men who stood
+looking on, and begged them to take my message to the Prime Minister,
+but no one responded, and the Inspector, seizing my arm, began to push
+me away. I now knew that the deputation would not be received and that
+the old miserable business of refusing to leave, of being forced
+backward, and returning again and again until arrested, would have to be
+re-enacted. I had to take into account that I was accompanied by two
+fragile old ladies, who, brave as they were to be there at all, could
+not possibly endure what I knew must follow. I quickly decided that I
+should have to force an immediate arrest, so I committed an act of
+technical assault on the person of Inspector Jarvis, striking him very
+lightly on the cheek. He said instantly, "I understand why you did
+that," and I supposed then that we would instantly be taken. But the
+other police apparently did not grasp the situation, for they began
+pushing and jostling our women. I said to the inspector: "Shall I have
+to do it again?" and he said "Yes." So I struck him lightly a second
+time, and then he ordered the police to make the arrests.</p>
+
+<p>The matter did not end with the arrest of our deputation of eight women.
+In recurring deputations of twelve the Suffragettes again and again
+pressed forward in vain endeavour to reach the House of Commons. In
+spite of the fact that the crowds<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> were friendly and did everything they
+could to aid the women, their deputations were broken up by the police
+and many of the women arrested. By nine o'clock Parliament Square was
+empty, an enormous force of mounted police having beaten the people back
+into Victoria Street and across Westminster Bridge. For a short time all
+looked tranquil, but soon little groups of women, seven or eight at a
+time, kept appearing mysteriously and making spirited dashes toward the
+House. This extraordinary procedure greatly exasperated the police, who
+could not unravel the mystery of where the women came from. As a matter
+of bygone history the explanation is that the W. S. P. U. had hired
+thirty offices in the neighborhood, in the shelter of which the women
+waited until it was time for them to sally forth. It was a striking
+demonstration of the ingenuity of women opposing the physical force of
+men, but it served still another purpose. It diverted the attention of
+the police from another demonstration which was going on. Other
+Suffragettes had gone to the official residence of the First Lord of the
+Admiralty, to the Home Office, the Treasury and Privy Council Offices,
+and had registered their contempt for the Government's refusal to
+receive the deputation by the time-honoured method of breaking a window in each place.</p>
+
+<p>One hundred and eight women were arrested that night, but instead of
+submitting to arrests and trial, the Women's Social and Political Union
+announced that they were prepared to prove that the Government and not
+the women had broken the law in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span>refusing to receive the petition. My
+case, coupled with that of the Hon. Mrs. Haverfield, was selected as a
+test case for all the others, and Lord Robert Cecil was retained for the
+defence. Mr. Muskett, who conducted the case for the prosecution, tried
+to prove that our women had not gone to the House of Commons to present
+a petition, but this was easily demonstrated to be an unwarranted claim.
+The speeches of the leader, the official articles published in our
+newspaper, <i>Votes for Women</i>, and the letters sent to Mr. Asquith, not
+to speak of the indisputable facts that every member of the deputation
+carried a copy of the petition in her hand, furnished evidence enough of
+the nature of our errand. The whole case of the subject's right of
+petition was then brought forward for discussion. Mr. Muskett spoke
+first, then our council, Mr. Henle, then Lord Robert Cecil. Last of all
+I spoke, describing the events of June 29th. I told the magistrate that
+should he decide that we and not the Government had been guilty of an
+infraction of the law, we should refuse to be bound over, but should all
+choose to go to prison. In that case we should not submit to being
+treated like criminals. "There are one hundred and eight of us here
+to-day," I said, pointing to the benches where my fellow-prisoners sat,
+"and just as we have thought it is our duty to defy the police in the
+street, so when we get into prison, as we are political prisoners, we
+shall do our best to bring back into the twentieth century the treatment
+of political prisoners which was thought right in the case of William
+Cobbett, and other political offenders of his time."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span></p><p>The magistrate, Sir Albert de Rutzen, an elderly, amiable man, rather
+bewildered by this unprecedented situation, then gave his decision. He
+agreed with Mr. Henle and Lord Robert Cecil that the right of petition
+was clearly guaranteed to every subject, but he thought that when the
+women were refused permission to enter the House of Commons, and when
+Mr. Asquith had said that he would not receive them, the women acted
+wrongly to persist in their demands. He should, therefore, fine them
+five pounds each, or sentence them to prison for one month in the second
+division. The sentence would be suspended for the present until learned
+counsel could obtain a decision from a higher court on the legal point
+of the right of petition.</p>
+
+<p>I then put in a claim for all the prisoners, and asked that all their
+cases might be held over until the test case was decided, and this was
+agreed to, except in regard to fourteen women charged with
+window-breaking. They were tried separately and sent to prison on
+sentences varying from six weeks to two months. Of them later.</p>
+
+<p>The appeal against Sir Albert de Rutzen's decision was tried in a
+Divisional Court early in December of that year. Lord Robert Cecil again
+appeared for the defence, and in a masterly piece of argumentation,
+contended that in England there was and always had been the right of
+petition, and that the right had always been considered a necessary
+condition of a free country and a civilised Government. The right of
+petition, he pointed out, had three characteristics: In the first place,
+it was the right to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>petition the actual repositories of power; in the
+second place, it was the right to petition in person; and in the third
+place, the right must be exercised reasonably. A long list of historical
+precedents were offered in support of the right to petition in person,
+but Lord Robert argued that even if these did not exist, the right was
+admitted in the Charles II "Tumultuous Petitions Act," which provides
+"That no person or persons whatsoever shall repair to His Majesty or
+both or either Houses of Parliament upon pretence of presenting or
+delivering any petition, complaint, remonstrance, or declaration or
+other address, accompanied with excessive number of people ..." etc. The
+Bill of Rights had specially confirmed the right of petition in so far
+as the King personally was concerned. "The women," pursued Lord Robert,
+"had gone to Parliament Square on June 29th in the exercise of a plain
+constitutional right, and that in going there with a petition they had
+acted according to the only constitutional method they possessed, being
+voteless, for the redress of their grievances."</p>
+
+<p>If then it were true, as contended, the subject not only possessed the
+right to petition, but to petition in person, the only point to be
+considered was whether the right had been exercised reasonably. If
+persons desired to interview the Prime Minister, it was surely
+reasonable to go to the House of Commons, and to present themselves at
+the Strangers' Entrance. Mrs. Pankhurst, Mrs. Haverfield and the others
+had, as the evidence showed, proceeded along the public highway and had
+been escorted to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> the door of the House of Commons by an officer of the
+police, and could not therefore, up to that point, have been acting in
+an unlawful manner. The police had kept clear a large open space
+opposite the House of Commons, the crowd being kept at a certain
+distance away. Within the open space there were only persons having
+business in the House of Commons, members of the police force and the
+eight women who formed the deputation. It could not possibly be
+contended that these eight women had caused an obstruction. It was true
+that a police officer told them that the Prime Minister was not in the
+House of Commons, but when one desired an interview with a Member of
+Parliament one did not make his request of a casual policeman in the
+street. Moreover, the police did not possess any authority to stop
+anyone from going into the House of Commons.</p>
+
+<p>The letter given the women, in which the Prime Minister said that he
+could not or would not see them, had been cited. Now, had the Prime
+Minister, in his letter, said that he could not or would not see the
+women at that time, that the time was not convenient; but that he would
+at some future time, at a more convenient time, receive them, that would
+have been a sufficient answer. The women would not have been justified
+in refusing to accept such an answer, because the right to petition must
+be exercised reasonably. But the letter contained an unqualified
+refusal, and that, if we allow the right of petition to exist, was no
+answer at all. Last of all Lord Robert argued that if there is a right
+to petition a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>Member of Parliament, then it must be incumbent on the
+part of a Member of Parliament to receive the petition, and that no one
+has a right to interfere with the petitioner. If the eight women were
+legally justified in presenting their petition, then they were also
+justified in refusing to obey the orders of the police to leave the place.</p>
+
+<p>In an address full of bias, and revealing plainly that he had no
+accurate knowledge of any of the events that had led up to the case in
+hand, the Lord Chief Justice delivered judgment. He said that he
+entirely agreed with Lord Robert Cecil as to the right to present a
+petition to the Prime Minister, either as Prime Minister or as a Member
+of Parliament; and he agreed also that petitions to the King should be
+presented to the Prime Minister. But the claim of the women, he said,
+was not merely to present a petition, but to be received in a
+deputation. He did not think it likely that Mr. Asquith would have
+refused to receive a petition from the women, but his refusal to receive
+the deputation was not unnatural, "in consequence of what we know did
+happen on previous occasions."<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p>
+
+<p>Referring to the Metropolitan Police Act of 1839, which provides that it
+shall be lawful for the Commissioner of Police to make regulations and
+to give instructions to the constable for keeping order, and for
+preventing any obstruction of thoroughfares in the immediate
+neighbourhood of the House of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> Commons, and the Sessional Order
+empowering the police to keep clear the approaches to the House of
+Commons, the Lord Chief Justice decided that I and the other women were
+guilty of an infraction of the law when we insisted on a right to enter
+the House of Commons. The Lord Chief Justice therefore ruled that our
+conviction in the lower court had been proper, and our appeal was
+dismissed with costs.</p>
+
+<p>Thus was destroyed in England the ancient constitutional right of
+petition, secured to the people by the Bill of Rights, and cherished by
+uncounted generations of Englishmen. I say the right was destroyed, for
+of how much value is a petition which cannot be presented in person? The
+decision of the high court was appalling to the members of the
+W. S. P. U., as it closed the last approach, by constitutional means, to
+our enfranchisement. Far from discouraging or disheartening us, it
+simply spurred us on to new and more aggressive forms of militancy.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTE:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Mr. Asquith had never, since becoming Prime Minister,
+received a deputation of women, nor had he ever received a deputation of
+the W. S. P. U. So it was absurd of the Lord Chief Justice to speak of
+"what did happen, on previous occasions."</p></div></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>CHAPTER V</span></h2>
+
+<p>Between the time of the arrest in June and the handing down of the
+absurd decision of the Lord Chief Justice that although we, as subjects,
+possessed the right of petition, yet we had committed an offence in
+exercising that right, nearly six months had passed. In that interval
+certain grave developments had lifted the militant movement onto a new
+and more heroic plane. It will be remembered that a week before our
+deputation to test the Charles II Act, Miss Wallace Dunlop had been sent
+to prison for one month for stamping an extract from the Bill of Rights
+on the stone walls of St. Stephen's Hall. On arriving at Holloway on
+Friday evening, July 2nd, she sent for the Governor and demanded of him
+that she be treated as a political offender. The Governor replied that
+he had no power to alter the sentence of the magistrate, whereupon Miss
+Wallace Dunlop informed him that it was the unalterable resolution of
+the Suffragettes never again to submit to the prison treatment given to
+ordinary offenders against the law. Therefore she should, if placed in
+the second division as a common criminal, refuse to touch food until the
+Government yielded her point. It is hardly likely that the Government or
+the prison authorities realised the seriousness of Miss Wallace Dunlop's
+action, or the heroic mould of the Suffragettes' <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>character. At all
+events the Home Secretary paid no attention to the letter sent him by
+the prisoner, in which she explained simply but clearly her motives for
+her desperate act, and the prison authorities did nothing except seek
+means of breaking down her resistance. The ordinary prison diet was
+replaced by the most tempting food, and this instead of being brought to
+her cell at intervals, was kept there night and day, but always
+untouched. Several times daily the doctor came to feel her pulse and
+observe her growing weakness. The doctor, as well as the Governor and
+the wardresses argued, coaxed and threatened, but without effect. The
+week passed without any sign of surrender on the part of the prisoner.
+On Friday the doctor reported that she was rapidly reaching a point at
+which death might at any time supervene. Hurried conferences were
+carried on between the prison and the Home Office, and that evening,
+June 8th, Miss Wallace Dunlop was sent home, having served one-fourth of
+her sentence, and having ignored completely all the terms of her imprisonment.</p>
+
+<p>On the day of her release the fourteen women who had been convicted of
+window breaking received their sentences, and learning of Miss Wallace
+Dunlop's act, they, as they were being taken to Holloway in the prison
+van, held a consultation and agreed to follow her example. Arrived at
+Holloway they at once informed the officials that they would not give up
+any of their belongings, neither would they put on prison clothing,
+perform prison labour, eat prison food or keep the rule of silence.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span></p><p>The Governor agreed for the moment to allow them to retain their
+property and to wear their own clothing, but he told them that they had
+committed an act of mutiny and that he would have to so charge them at
+the next visit of the magistrates. The women then addressed petitions to
+the Home Secretary, demanding that they be given the prison treatment
+universally allowed political offenders. They decided to postpone the
+hunger strike until the Home Secretary had had time to reply. Meanwhile,
+after a vain appeal for more fresh air, for the weather was stiflingly
+hot, the women committed one more act of mutiny, they broke the windows of their cells.</p>
+
+<p>We learned this from the prisoners themselves. Several days after they
+had gone to prison, my daughter Christabel and Mrs. Tuke, filled with
+anxiety for their fate, gained admission to an upper story room of a
+house overlooking the prison. Calling at the top of their voices and
+waving a flag of the Union, they succeeded in attracting the prisoners'
+attention. The women thrust their arms through the broken panes, waving
+handkerchiefs, Votes for Women badges, anything they could get hold of,
+and in a few shouted words told their tale. That same day the visiting
+magistrates arrived, and the mutineers were sentenced to terms of seven
+to ten days of solitary confinement in the punishment cells. In these
+frightful cells, dark, unclean, dripping with moisture, the prisoners
+resolutely hunger struck. At the end of five days one of the women was
+reduced to such a condition that the Home Secretary ordered her
+released. The next day several more were released, and before<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> the end
+of the week the last of the fourteen had gained their liberty.</p>
+
+<p>The affair excited the greatest sympathy all over England, sympathy
+which Mr. Gladstone tried to divert by charging two of the prisoners
+with kicking and biting the wardresses. In spite of their vigorous
+denials these two women were sentenced, on these charges, one to ten
+days and the other to a month in prison. Although still very weak from
+the previous hunger strike, they at once entered upon a second hunger
+strike, and in three days had to be released.</p>
+
+<p>After this each succeeding batch of Suffragette prisoners, unless
+otherwise directed, followed the example of these heroic rebels. The
+prison officials, seeing their authority vanish, were panic stricken.
+Holloway and other women's prisons throughout the Kingdom became perfect
+dens of violence and brutality. Hear the account given by Lucy Burns of her experience:</p>
+
+<p>"We remained quite still when ordered to undress, and when they told us
+to proceed to our cells we linked arms and stood with our backs to the
+wall. The Governor blew his whistle and a great crowd of wardresses
+appeared, falling upon us, forcing us apart and dragging us towards the
+cells. I think I had twelve wardresses for my share, and among them they
+managed to trip me so that I fell helplessly to the floor. One of the
+wardresses grasped me by my hair, wound the long braid around her wrist
+and literally dragged me along the ground. In the cell they fairly
+ripped the clothing from my back, forcing on me one coarse<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> cotton
+garment and throwing others on the bed for me to put on myself. Left
+alone exhausted by the dreadful experience I lay for a time gasping and
+shivering on the floor. By and by a wardress came to the door and threw
+me a blanket. This I wrapped around me, for I was chilled to the bone by
+this time. The single cotton garment and the rough blanket were all the
+clothes I wore during my stay in prison. Most of the prisoners refused
+everything but the blanket. According to agreement we all broke our
+windows and were immediately dragged off to the punishment cells. There
+we hunger struck, and after enduring great misery for nearly a week, we
+were one by one released."</p>
+
+<p>How simply they tell it. "After enduring great misery&mdash;" But no one who
+has not gone through the awful experience of the hunger strike can have
+any idea of how great that misery is. In an ordinary cell it is great
+enough. In the unspeakable squalor of the punishment cells it is worse.
+The actual hunger pangs last only about twenty-four hours with most
+prisoners. I generally suffer most on the second day. After that there
+is no very desperate craving for food. Weakness and mental depression
+take its place. Great disturbances of digestion divert the desire for
+food to a longing for relief from pain. Often there is intense headache,
+with fits of dizziness, or slight delirium. Complete exhaustion and a
+feeling of isolation from earth mark the final stages of the ordeal.
+Recovery is often protracted, and entire recovery of normal health is
+sometimes discouragingly slow.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span></p><p>The first hunger strike occurred in early July. In the two months that
+followed scores of women adopted the same form of protest against a
+Government who would not recognise the political character of their
+offences. In some cases the hunger strikers were treated with unexampled
+cruelty. Delicate women were sentenced, not only to solitary
+confinement, but to wear handcuffs for twenty-four hours at a stretch.
+One woman on refusing prison clothes was put into a straightwaistcoat.</p>
+
+<p>The irony of all this appears the greater when it is considered that, at
+this precise time, the leaders of the Liberal Party in the House of
+Commons were in the midst of their first campaign against the veto power
+of the Lords.</p>
+
+<p>On September 17th a great meeting was held in Birmingham, on which
+occasion Mr. Asquith was to throw down his challenge to the Lords, and
+to announce that their veto was to be abolished, leaving the people's
+will paramount in England. Of course the Suffragettes seized this
+opportunity for a demonstration. This course was perfectly logical.
+Denied the right of petition, shut out now from every Cabinet Minister's
+meeting, the women were forced to take whatever means that remained to
+urge their cause upon the Government. Mrs. Mary Leigh and a group of
+Birmingham members addressed a warning to the public not to attend Mr.
+Asquith's meeting as disturbances were likely to happen. From the time
+that the Prime Minister and his Cabinet left the House of Commons until
+the train drew in to the station at Birmingham they were completely
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>surrounded with detectives and policemen. The precautions taken to
+guard Mr. Asquith have never been equalled except in the case of the
+Tsar during outbreaks of revolution in Russia. From the station he was
+taken by an underground passage a quarter of a mile in length to his
+hotel, where he dined in solitary state, after having been carried
+upstairs in a luggage lift. Escorted to the Bingley Hall by a strong
+guard of mounted police, he was so fearful of encountering the
+Suffragettes that he entered by a side door. The hall was guarded as for
+a siege. Over the glass roof a thick tarpaulin had been stretched. Tall
+ladders were placed on either side of the building, and firemen's hose
+were laid in readiness&mdash;not to extinguish fires, but to play upon the
+Suffragettes should they appear at an inaccessible spot on the roof. The
+streets on every hand were barricaded, and police, in regiments, were
+drawn up to defend the barricades against the onslaughts of the women.
+Nobody was allowed to pass the barricades without showing his entrance
+tickets to long files of police, and then the ticket holders were
+squeezed through the narrow doors one by one.</p>
+
+<p>Their precautions were in vain, for the determined Suffragettes found
+more than one way in which to turn Mr. Asquith's triumph into a fiasco.
+Although no women gained access to the hall, there were plenty of men
+sympathisers present, and before the meeting had proceeded far thirteen
+men had been violently thrown out for reminding the Prime Minister that
+"the people" whose right to govern he was professing to uphold, included
+women as well as men. Outside,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> mingling in the vast crowds, bands of
+women attacked the barricades, the outer barricades being thrown down in
+spite of the thousands of police. From the roof of a neighbouring house
+Mrs. Leigh and Charlotte Marsh tore up dozens of slates and threw them
+on the roof of Bingley Hall and in the streets below, taking care,
+however, to strike no one. As Mr. Asquith drove away the women hurled
+slates at the guarded motor car. The fire hose was brought forth and the
+firemen were ordered to turn the water on the women. They refused, to
+their credit be it said, but the police, infuriated by their failure to
+keep the peace, did not scruple to play the cold water on the women as
+they crouched and clung to the dangerous slope of the roof. Roughs in
+the streets flung bricks at them, drawing blood. Eventually the women
+were dragged down by the police and in their dripping garments marched
+through the streets to the police station.</p>
+
+<p>The Suffragettes who had rushed the barricades and flung stones at Mr.
+Asquith's departing train received sentences from a fortnight to one
+month, but Miss Marsh and Mrs. Leigh were sent to prison for three and
+four months respectively. All of the prisoners adopted the hunger
+strike, as we knew they would.</p>
+
+<p>Several days later we were horrified to read in the newspapers that
+these prisoners were being forcibly fed by means of a rubber tube thrust
+into the stomach. Members of the Union applied at once both at the
+prison and at the Home Office to learn the truth of the report, but all
+information was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span>refused. On the following Monday at our request, Mr.
+Keir Hardie, at question time in the House, insisted on information from
+the Government. Mr. Masterman, speaking for the Home Secretary,
+reluctantly admitted that, in order to preserve the dignity of the
+Government and at the same time save the lives of the prisoners,
+"hospital treatment" was being administered. "Hospital treatment" was
+the term used to draw attention from one of the most disgusting and
+brutal expedients ever resorted to by prison authorities. No law allows
+it except in the case of persons certified to be insane, and even then
+when the operation is performed by skilled nursing attendants under the
+direction of skilled medical men, it cannot be called safe. In fact, the
+asylum cases usually die after a short time. <i>The Lancet</i>, perhaps the
+best known medical journal in the language, published a long list of
+opinions from distinguished physicians and surgeons who condemned the
+practice as applied to the suffrage prisoners as unworthy of
+civilisation. One physician told of a case which had come under his
+observation in which death had occurred almost as soon as the tube had
+been inserted. Another cited a case where the tongue, twisted behind the
+feeding tube, had, in the struggle, been almost bitten off. Cases where
+food had been injected into the lungs were not unknown. Mr. C.
+Mansell-Moullin, M.D., F.R.C.S., wrote to <i>The Times</i> that as a hospital
+surgeon of more than thirty years' experience he desired indignantly to
+protest against the Government's term "Hospital treatment" in connection
+with the forcible feeding of women. It was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> a foul libel, he declared,
+for violence and brutality have no place in hospitals. A memorial signed
+by 116 well-known physicians was addressed to the Prime Minister
+protesting against the practice of forcible feeding, and pointing out to
+him in detail the grave dangers attaching to it.</p>
+
+<p>So much for medical testimony against a form of brutality which
+continued and still continues in our English prisons, as a punishment
+for women who are there for consciences' sake. As for the testimony of
+the victims, it makes a volume of most revolting sort. Mrs. Leigh, the
+first victim, is a woman of sturdy constitution, else she could scarcely
+have survived the experience. Thrown into Birmingham prison after the
+Asquith demonstration, she had broken the windows of her cell, and as a
+punishment was sent to a dark and cold punishment cell. Her hands were
+handcuffed, behind her during the day, and at night in front of her body
+<i>with the palms out</i>. She refused to touch the food that was brought to
+her, and three days after her arrival she was taken to the doctor's
+room. What she saw was enough to terrify the bravest. In the centre of
+the room was a stout chair resting on a cotton sheet. Against the wall,
+as if ready for action stood four wardresses. The junior doctor was also
+on hand. The senior doctor spoke, saying: "Listen carefully to what I
+have to say. I have orders from my superior officers that you are not to
+be released even on medical grounds. If you still refrain from food I
+must take other measures to compel you to take it." Mrs. Leigh replied
+that she did still refuse, and she said further that she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> knew that she
+could not legally be forcibly fed because an operation could not be
+performed without the consent of the patient if sane. The doctor
+repeated that he had his orders and would carry them out. A number of
+wardresses then fell upon Mrs. Leigh, held her down and tilted her chair
+backward. She was so taken by surprise that she could not resist
+successfully that time. They managed to make her swallow a little food
+from a feeding cup. Later two doctors and the wardresses appeared in her
+cell, forced Mrs. Leigh down to the bed and held her there. To her
+horror the doctors produced a rubber tube, two yards in length, and this
+he began to stuff up her nostril. The pain was so dreadful that she
+shrieked again and again. Three of the wardresses burst into tears and
+the junior doctor begged the other to desist. Having had his orders from
+the Government, the doctor persisted and the tube was pushed down into
+the stomach. One of the doctors, standing on a chair and holding the
+tube high poured liquid food through a funnel almost suffocating the
+poor victim. "The drums of my ears," she said afterwards, "seemed to be
+bursting. I could feel the pain to the end of the breast bone. When at
+last the tube was withdrawn it felt as if the back of my nose and throat
+were being torn out with it."</p>
+
+<p>In an almost fainting condition Mrs. Leigh was taken back to the
+punishment cell and laid on her plank bed. The ordeal was renewed day
+after day. The other prisoners suffered similar experiences.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>CHAPTER VI</span></h2>
+
+<p>The militant movement was at this point when, in October, 1909, I made
+my first visit to the United States. I shall never forget the excitement
+of my landing, the first meeting with the American "reporter," an
+experience dreaded by all Europeans. In fact the first few days seemed a
+bewildering whirl of reporters and receptions, all leading up to my
+first lecture at Carnegie Hall on October 25th. The huge hall was
+entirely filled, and an enormous crowd of people thronged the streets
+outside for blocks. With me on the stage were several women whom I had
+met in Europe, and in the chair was an old friend, Mrs. Stanton Blatch,
+whose early married life had been spent in England. The great crowd
+before me, however, was made up of strangers, and I could not know how
+they would respond to my story. When I rose to speak a deep hush fell,
+but at my first words: "I am what you call a hooligan&mdash;" a great shout
+of warm and sympathetic laughter shook the walls. Then I knew that I had
+found friends in America. And this all the rest of the tour
+demonstrated. In Boston the committee met me with a big grey automobile
+decorated in the colours of our Union, and that night at Tremont Temple
+I spoke to an audience of 2,500 people all most generous in their
+responsiveness. In <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>Baltimore professors, and students from Johns
+Hopkins University acted as stewards of the meeting. I greatly enjoyed
+my visit to Bryn Mawr College and to Rosemary Hall, a wonderful school
+for girls in Connecticut. In Chicago, I met, among other notable people,
+Miss Jane Addams and Mrs. Ella Flagg Young, superintendent of schools.
+My visit to Canada will always be remembered, especially Toronto, where
+the mayor, dressed in the chains of his office, welcomed me. I met too
+the venerable Goldwin Smith, since dead.</p>
+
+<p>Everywhere I found the Americans kind and keen, and I cannot say too
+much for the wonderful hospitality they showed me. The women I found
+were remarkably interested in social welfare. The work of the women's
+clubs struck me very favourably, and I thought these institutions a
+perfect basis for a suffrage movement. But at that time, 1909, the
+suffrage movement in the United States was in a curious state of
+quiescence. A large number of women with whom I came in contact appeared
+to think it only just that they should have a vote, but few seemed to
+realise any actual need of it. Some, it is true, were beginning to
+connect the vote with the reforms for which they were working so
+unselfishly and so devotedly. It was when talking with the younger women
+that I came to feel that under the surface of things in America, a
+strong suffrage movement was stirring. Those young women, leaving their
+splendid colleges to begin life were realising in a very intelligent
+fashion that they needed and would be obliged to secure for themselves a
+political status.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span></p><p>On December 1st I sailed on the <i>Mauretania</i> for England, and on
+arriving I learned that the prison sentence which hung over me while the
+petitions case had been argued, was discharged, some unknown friend
+having paid my fine while I was on the ocean.</p>
+
+<p>The year 1910 began with a general election, precipitated by the House
+of Lords' rejection of Mr. Lloyd-George's 1909 budget. The Liberal Party
+went to the country with promises of taxes on land values. They promised
+also abolition of the veto power of the Lords, Irish Home Rule,
+disestablishment of the Church of Wales, and other reforms. Woman
+suffrage was not directly promised, but Mr. Asquith pledged that, if
+retained in office, he would introduce an electoral reform bill which
+could be amended to include woman suffrage. The Unionists under the
+leadership of Mr. Balfour, had tariff reform for their programme, and
+they offered not even a vague promise of a possible suffrage measure.
+Yet we, as usual, went into the constituencies and opposed the Liberal
+Party. We had no faith in Mr. Asquith's pledge, and besides, if we had
+failed to oppose the party in power we should but have invited Mr.
+Asquith and Mr. Balfour to enter into an agreement not to deal with the
+suffrage, with the view of keeping the cause permanently outside
+practical politics. We were in something of the same position as the
+Irish Nationalists in 1885, when neither the Liberal nor the
+Conservative leaders would include home rule in their programme. The
+Irish opposed the Liberal Party, with the result that it was returned by
+such a narrow majority that the Liberal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> Government was dependent on the
+Irish vote in Parliament in order to remain in office. On this account
+they were obliged to bring in a Home Rule Bill.</p>
+
+<p>The other suffrage societies and many of the Liberal women begged us not
+to oppose the Liberal party at this election. We were implored to waive
+our claim "just this once" in view of the importance of the struggle
+between the Commons and the House of Lords over the budget. We replied
+that the same plea had been made in 1906 when we were implored to waive
+our claim "just this once" on account of the fiscal issue. For women
+there was only one political issue, we said, and that was the issue of
+their own enfranchisement. The dispute between the Lords and the Commons
+was far less vital than the claims of the people&mdash;represented in this
+case by women&mdash;to be admitted to citizenship. From our point of view
+both Houses of Parliament were unrepresentative until women had a voice
+in choosing legislators and influencing law making.</p>
+
+<p>We opposed Liberal candidates in forty constituencies, and in almost
+every one of these the Liberal majorities were reduced and no less than
+eighteen seats were wrested from the Liberal candidates. It really was a
+terrible election for the Government. Mr. Asquith travelled from one
+constituency to another accompanied by a body guard of detectives, and
+official "chuckers out," whose sole duty was to eject women, and men as
+well, who interrupted his meetings on the question of Votes for Women.
+The halls where he spoke had the windows boarded up or the glass covered
+with strong wire netting.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> Every thoroughfare leading to the halls was
+barricaded, traffic was suspended, and large forces of police were on
+guard. The most extraordinary precautions were taken to protect the
+Prime Minister. At one place he went to his meeting strongly guarded and
+by way of a secret pathway that led through gooseberry bushes and a
+cabbage patch to a back door. After the meeting he escaped through the
+same door and was solemnly guided along a path heavily laid with sawdust
+to deaden his footsteps, to a concealed motor car, where he sat until
+the crowd had all dispersed.</p>
+
+<p>The other ministers had to resort to similar precautions. They lived
+under the constant protection of body-guards. Their meetings were
+policed in a manner without precedent. Of course no women were admitted
+to their meetings, but they got in just the same. Two women hid for
+twenty-five hours in the rafters of a hall in Louth where Mr.
+Lloyd-George spoke. They were arrested, but not until after they had
+made their demonstration. Two others hid under a platform for twenty-two
+hours in order to question the Prime Minister. I could continue this
+record almost indefinitely.</p>
+
+<p>We had printed a wonderful poster showing the process of forcible
+feeding, and we used it on hoardings everywhere. We told the electors
+that the "Liberal Party," the people's friend, had imprisoned 450 women
+for the crime of asking for a vote. They were torturing women at that
+time in Holloway. It was splendid ammunition and it told. The Liberal
+Party was returned to power, but with their majority<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> over all sections
+of the House of Commons swept away. The Asquith Government were
+dependent now for their very existence on the votes of the Labour Party
+and the Irish Nationalists.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>CHAPTER VII</span></h2>
+
+<p>The first months of 1910 were occupied by the re-elected Government in a
+struggle to keep control of affairs. A coalition with the Irish party,
+the leaders of which agreed, if the Home Rule bill were advanced, to
+stand by the budget. No publicly announced coalition with the Labour
+Party was made at that time, Keir Hardie, at the annual conference of
+the party, announcing that they would continue to be independent of the
+Government. This was important to us because it meant that the Labour
+Party, instead of entering into an agreement to give general support to
+all Government measures, would be free to oppose the Government in the
+event of the continued withholding of a franchise bill. Other things
+combined to make us hopeful that the tide had turned in our favour. It
+was hinted to us that the Government were weary of our opposition and
+were ready to end the struggle in the only possible way, providing they
+could do so without appearing to yield to coercion. We therefore, early
+in February, declared a truce to all militancy.</p>
+
+<p>Parliament met on February 15th and the King's speech was read on
+February 21st. No mention of women's suffrage was made in the speech nor
+was any private member successful in winning a place in the ballot for a
+suffrage bill. However, since the situation, on account of the proposed
+abolition of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> Lord's power of veto, was strained and abnormal, we
+decided to wait patiently for a while. It was confidently expected that
+another general election would have to be held before the contentions
+between the two Houses of Parliament were settled, and this event
+unquestionably would have occurred, not later than June, but for the
+unexpected death of King Edward VII. This interrupted the strained
+situation. The passing of the King served as an occasion for the
+temporary softening of animosities and produced a general disposition to
+compromise on all troubled issues. The question of women's
+enfranchisement was taken up again in this spirit, and in a manner
+altogether creditable to the members with whom the movement originated.</p>
+
+<p>A strictly non-party committee on women's suffrage had been established
+in the House of Commons in 1887, mainly through the efforts of Miss
+Lydia Becker, whom I have mentioned before as the Susan B. Anthony of
+the English suffrage movement. In 1906, for reasons not necessary to
+enumerate, the original committee had been allowed to lapse, the Liberal
+supporters of women's suffrage forming a committee of their own. Now, in
+this period of good feeling, at the suggestion of certain members, led
+by Mr. H. N. Brailsford, not himself a member of Parliament, formed
+another non-party body which they called the Conciliation Committee. Its
+object was declared to be the bringing together of the full strength of
+suffragists of the House of Commons, regardless of party affiliation,
+and of framing a suffrage measure that could be passed by their united<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>
+effort. The Earl of Lytton accepted the chairmanship of the committee
+and Mr. Brailsford was made its secretary. The committee consisted of
+twenty-five Liberals, seventeen Conservatives, six Irish Nationalists,
+and six members of the Labour Party. Under difficulties which I can
+hardly hope to make clear to American readers the committee laboured to
+frame a bill which should win the support of all sections of the House.
+The Conservatives insisted on a moderate bill, whilst the Liberals were
+concerned lest the terms of the bill should add to the power of the
+propertied classes. The original suffrage bill, drafted by my husband.
+Dr. Pankhurst, giving the vote to women on equal terms with men, was
+abandoned, and a bill was drawn up along the lines of the existing
+municipal franchise law. The basis of the municipal franchise is
+occupation, and the Conciliation Bill, as first drafted, proposed to
+extend the Parliamentary vote to women householders, and to women
+occupiers of business premises paying ten pounds rental and upwards. It
+was estimated that about ninety-five per cent. of the women who would be
+enfranchised under the bill were householders. This, in England, does
+not mean a person occupying a whole house. Any one who inhabits even a
+single room over which he or she exercises full control is a householder.</p>
+
+<p>The text of the Conciliation Bill was submitted to all the suffrage
+societies and other women's organisations, and it was accepted by every
+one of them. Our official newspaper said editorially: "We of the Women's
+Social and Political Union are prepared to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> share in this united and
+peaceful action. The new bill does not give us all that we want, but we
+are for it if others are also for it."</p>
+
+<p>It seemed certain that an overwhelming majority of the House of Commons
+were for the bill, and were prepared to vote it into law. Although we
+knew that it could not possibly pass unless the Government agreed that
+it should, we hoped that the leaders of all parties and the majority of
+their followers would unite in an agreement that the bill should pass.
+This settlement by consent is rare in the English Parliament, but some
+extremely important and hard fought measures have been carried thus. The
+extension of the franchise in 1867 is a case in point.</p>
+
+<p>The Conciliation Bill was introduced into the House of Commons on June
+14th, 1910, by Mr. D. J. Shackleton, and was received with the most
+extraordinary enthusiasm. The newspapers remarked on the feeling of
+reality which marked the attitude of the House towards the bill. It was
+plain that the members realised that here was no academic question upon
+which they were merely to debate and to register their opinions, but a
+measure which was intended to be carried through all its stages and to
+be written into English law. The enthusiasm of the House swept all over
+the Kingdom. The medical profession sent in a memorial in its favour,
+signed by more than three hundred of the most distinguished men and
+women in the profession. Memorials from writers, clergymen, social
+workers, artists, actors, musicians, were also sent. The Women's Liberal
+Federation met and unanimously resolved to ask the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> Prime Minister to
+give full facilities to the bill. Some advanced spirits in the
+Federation actually proposed to send then and there a deputation to the
+House of Commons with the resolution, but this proposal was rejected as
+savouring too much of militancy. A request for an interview was sent to
+Mr. Asquith, and he replied promising to receive, at an early day,
+representatives of both the Liberal Women's Federation and of the
+National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies.</p>
+
+<p>The joint deputation was received by Mr. Asquith on June 21st, and Lady
+M'Laren, as a representative of the Women's Liberal Federation, spoke
+very directly to her party's leader. She said in part: "If you refuse
+our request we shall have to go to the country and say you, who are
+against the veto of the House of Lords, are placing a veto on the House
+of Commons by refusing to allow a second reading of this bill."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Asquith replied warily that he could not decide alone on such a
+serious matter, but would have to consult his Cabinet, the majority of
+whom, he admitted, were suffragists. Their decision, he said, would be
+given in the House of Commons.</p>
+
+<div class="center"><a name="ill-170.jpg" id="ill-170.jpg"></a><img src="images/ill-170.jpg" width='700' height='508' alt="OVER 1,000 WOMEN HAD BEEN IN PRISON&mdash;BROAD ARROWS IN THE
+1910 PARADE" /></div>
+
+<p class="bold">OVER 1,000 WOMEN HAD BEEN IN PRISON&mdash;BROAD ARROWS IN THE
+1910 PARADE</p>
+
+<p>The Women's Social and Political Union arranged a demonstration in
+support of the Conciliation Bill, the greatest that had, up to that
+time, been made. It was a national, indeed an inter-national affair in
+which all the suffrage groups took part, and its massed ranks were so
+great that the procession required an hour and a half to pass a given
+point. At the head marched six hundred and seventeen women,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> white clad
+and holding long silver staves tipped with the broad arrow. These were
+the women who had suffered imprisonment for the cause, and all along the
+line of march they received a tribute of cheers from the public. The
+immense Albert Hall, the largest hall in England, although it was packed
+from orchestra to the highest gallery, was not large enough to hold all
+the marchers. Amid great joy and enthusiasm Lord Lytton delivered a
+stirring address in which he confidently predicted the speedy advance of
+the bill. The women, he declared, had every reason to believe that their
+enfranchisement was actually at hand.</p>
+
+<p>It was true that the time for passing a suffrage bill was ripe. Not in
+fifty years had the way been so clear, because the momentary absence of
+ordinary legislation left the field open for an electoral reform bill.
+Yet when the Prime Minister was asked in the House of Commons whether he
+would give the members an early opportunity for discussion, the answer
+was not encouraging. The Government, said Mr. Asquith, were prepared to
+give time before the close of the session for full debate and division
+on second reading, but they could not allow any further facilities. He
+stated frankly that he personally did not want the bill to pass, but the
+Government realised that the House of Commons ought to have an
+opportunity, if that was their deliberate desire, for effectively
+dealing with the whole question.</p>
+
+<p>This cryptic utterance was taken by the majority of the suffragists, by
+the press and by the public generally to mean that the Government were
+preparing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> gracefully to yield to the undoubted desire of the House of
+Commons to pass the bill. But the Women's Social and Political Union
+were doubtful. Mr. Asquith's remark was ambiguous, and was capable of
+being interpreted in several ways. It could mean that he was prepared to
+accept the verdict of the majority and let the bill pass through all its
+stages. That of course would be the only way to allow the House
+opportunity effectively to deal with the whole question. On the other
+hand Mr. Asquith might be intending to let the bill pass through its
+debating stages and be afterwards smothered in committee. We feared
+treachery, but in view of the announcement that the Government had set
+apart July 11 and 12 for debate on the second reading, we preserved a
+spirit of waiting calm. July 26th had been fixed as the day for the
+adjournment of Parliament, and if the bill was voted on favourably on
+the 12th there would be ample time to take it through its final stages.
+When a bill passes its second reading it is normally sent upstairs to a
+Grand Committee which sits while the House of Commons is transacting
+other business, and thus the committee stage can proceed without special
+facilities. The bill does not go back to the House until the report
+stage is reached, at which time the third and last reading occurs. After
+that the bill goes to the House of Lords. A week at most is all that is
+required for this procedure. A bill may be referred to the Whole House,
+and in this case it cannot be brought up for its committee stage unless
+it is given special facilities. In our paper and in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> many public
+speeches we urged that the members vote to send the bill to a Grand Committee.</p>
+
+<p>Some days before the bill reached its second reading it was rumoured
+that Mr. Lloyd-George was going to speak against it, but we refused to
+credit this. Unfair to women as Mr. Lloyd-George had shown himself in
+various ways, he had consistently posed as a staunch friend of women's
+suffrage, and we could not believe that he would turn against us at the
+eleventh hour. Mr. Winston Churchill, whose speech to the women of
+Dundee I quoted in a previous chapter, the promoters of the Bill also
+counted upon, as it was known that he had more than once expressed
+sympathy with its objects. But when the debates began we found both of
+these ardent suffragists arrayed against the bill. Mr. Churchill, after
+making a conventional anti-suffrage speech, in which he said that women
+did not need the ballot, and that they really had no grievances,
+attacked the Conciliation Bill because the class of women who would be
+enfranchised under it did not suit him. Some women, he conceded, ought
+to be enfranchised, and he thought the best plan would be to select
+"some of the best women of all classes" on considerations of property,
+education and earning capacity. These special franchises would be
+carefully balanced, "so as not on the whole to give undue advantage to
+the property vote against the wage earning vote." A more fantastic
+proposal and one less likely to find favour in the House of Commons
+could not possibly be imagined. Mr. Churchill's second objection to the
+bill was that it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> was anti-democratic! It seemed to us that anything was
+more democratic than his proposed "fancy" franchises.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lloyd-George said that he agreed with everything Mr. Churchill had
+said "both relevant and irrelevant." He made the amazing assertion that
+the Conciliation Committee that had drafted the bill was a "committee of
+women meeting outside the House." And that this committee said to the
+House of Commons not only that they must vote for a women's suffrage
+bill but "You must vote for the particular form upon which we agree, and
+we will not even allow you to deliberate upon any other form."</p>
+
+<p>Of course these statements were wholly false. The Conciliation Bill was
+drafted by men, and it was introduced because the Government had refused
+to bring in a party measure. The suffragists would have been only too
+glad to have had the Government deliberate on a broader form of
+suffrage. Because they refused to deliberate on any form, this private
+bill was introduced.</p>
+
+<p>This fact was brought forward in the course of Mr. Lloyd-George's
+speech. It had been urged, said he, that this bill was better than none
+at all, but why should that be the alternative? "What is the other?"
+called out a member, but Mr. Lloyd-George dodged the question with a
+careless "Well, I cannot say for the present."</p>
+
+<p>Later on he said: "If the promoters of this bill say that they regard
+the second reading merely as an affirmation of the principle of women's
+suffrage, and if they promise that when they re-introduce the bill<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> it
+will be in a form which will enable the House of Commons to move any
+amendment either for restriction or extension I shall be happy to vote for this bill."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Philip Snowden, replying to this, said: "We will withdraw this bill
+if the Right Honourable gentleman, on behalf of the Government, or the
+Prime Minister himself will undertake to give to this House the
+opportunity of discussing and carrying through its various stages
+another form of franchise bill. If we cannot get that, then we shall
+prosecute this bill."</p>
+
+<p>The Government made no reply at all to this, and the debate proceeded.
+Thirty-nine speeches were made, the Prime Minister showing plainly in
+his speech that he intended to use all his power to prevent the bill
+becoming law. He began by saying that a franchise measure ought never to
+be sent to a Grand Committee, but to one of the Whole House. He said
+also that his conditions, that the majority of women should show beyond
+any doubt that they desired the franchise, and that the bill be
+democratic in its terms, had not been complied with.</p>
+
+<p>When the division was taken it was seen that the Conciliation Bill had
+passed its second reading by a majority of 109, a larger majority than
+the Government's far famed budget or the House of Lords Resolution had
+received. In fact no measure during that Parliament had received so
+great a majority&mdash;299 members voted for it as against 190 opposed. Then
+the question arose as to which committee should deal with the bill. Mr.
+Asquith had said that all franchise bills should go to a Committee of
+the Whole<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> House, so that in the division his words moved many sincere
+friends of the bill to send it there. Others understood that this was a
+mischievous course, but were afraid of incurring the anger of the Prime
+Minister. Of course all the anti-suffragists voted the same way, and
+thus the bill went to the Whole House.</p>
+
+<p>Even then the bill could have been advanced to its final reading. The
+House had time on their hands, as virtually all important legislative
+work was halted because of the deadlock between the Lords and the
+Commons. Following the death of the King a conference of leaders of the
+Conservative and the Liberal Parties had been arranged to adjust the
+matters at issue, and this conference had not yet reported. Hence
+Parliament had little business on hand. The strongest possible pressure
+was brought to bear upon the Government to give facilities to the
+Conciliation Bill. A number of meetings were held in support of the
+bill. The Men's Political Union for Women's Enfranchisement, the Men's
+League for Women's Suffrage and the Conciliation Committee held a joint
+meeting in Hyde Park. Some of the old school of suffragists held another
+large meeting in Trafalgar Square. The Women's Social and Political
+Union, on July 23rd, which was the anniversary of the day in 1867 on
+which working men, agitating for their vote, had pulled down the Hyde
+Park railings, held another enormous demonstration there. A space of
+half a square mile was cleared, forty platforms erected, and two great
+processions marched from east and west to the meeting. Many other
+suffrage <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>societies co-operated with us on this occasion. On the very
+day of that meeting Mr. Asquith wrote to Lord Lytton refusing to allow
+any more time for the bill during that session.</p>
+
+<p>Those who still had faith that the Government could be induced to do
+justice to women set their hopes on the autumn session of Parliament.
+Resolutions urging the Government to give the bill facilities during the
+autumn were sent, not only by the suffrage associations but from many
+organisations of men. The Corporations of thirty-eight cities, including
+Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, Dublin and Cork, sent resolutions to
+this effect. Cabinet Ministers were besieged with requests to receive
+deputations of women, and since the country was on the verge of a
+general election, and the Liberal Party wanted the services of women,
+their requests could not altogether be ignored. Mr. Asquith, early in
+October, received a deputation of women from his own constituency of
+East Fife, but all he had to tell them was that the bill could not be
+advanced that year. "What about next year?" They asked, and he replied
+shortly: "Wait and see."</p>
+
+<p>It had been exceedingly difficult, during these troublous days, to hold
+all the members of the W. S. P. U. to the truce, and when it became
+perfectly apparent that the Conciliation Bill was doomed, war was again
+declared. At a great meeting held in Albert Hall on November 10th, I
+myself threw down the gage of battle. I said, because I wanted the whole
+matter to be clearly understood by the public as well as by our members:
+"This is the last <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>constitutional effort of the Women's Social and
+Political Union to secure the passage of the bill into law. If the Bill,
+in spite of our efforts, is killed by the Government, then first of all,
+I have to say there is an end of the truce. If we are met by the
+statement that there is no power to secure on the floor of the House of
+Commons time for our measure, then our first step is to say, 'We take it
+out of your hands, since you fail to help us, and we resume the
+direction of the campaign ourselves.'"</p>
+
+<p>Another deputation, I declared, must go to the House of Commons to carry
+a petition to the Prime Minister. I myself would lead, and if no one
+cared to follow me I would go alone. Instantly, all over the hall, women
+sprang to their feet crying out, "Mrs. Pankhurst, I will go with you!"
+"I will go!" "I will go!" And I knew that our brave women were as ever
+ready to give themselves, their very lives, if need be, for the cause of freedom.</p>
+
+<p>The autumn session convened on Friday, November 18th, and Mr. Asquith
+announced that Parliament would be adjourned on November 28th. While his
+speech was in progress, 450 women, in small groups, to keep within the
+strict letter of the law, were marching from Caxton Hall and from the
+headquarters of the Union.</p>
+
+<div class="center"><a name="ill-178.jpg" id="ill-178.jpg"></a><img src="images/ill-178.jpg" width='700' height='506' alt="THE HEAD OF THE DEPUTATION ON BLACK FRIDAY" /></div>
+
+<p class="bold">THE HEAD OF THE DEPUTATION ON BLACK FRIDAY</p>
+
+<p class="bold"><i>November, 1910</i></p>
+
+<p>How to tell the story of that dreadful day, Black Friday, as it lives in
+our memory&mdash;how to describe what happened to English women at the behest
+of an English Government, is a difficult task. I will try to tell it as
+simply and as accurately as possible. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> plain facts, baldly stated, I
+am aware will strain credulity.</p>
+
+<p>Remember that the country was on the eve of a general election, and that
+the Liberal Party needed the help of Liberal women. This fact made the
+wholesale arrest and imprisonment of great numbers of women, who were
+demanding the passage of the Conciliation Bill, extremely undesirable
+from the Government's point of view. The Women's Liberal Federations
+also wanted the passage of the Conciliation Bill, although they were not
+ready to fight for it. What the Government feared, was that the Liberal
+women would be stirred by our sufferings into refraining from doing
+election work for the party. So the Government conceived a plan whereby
+the Suffragettes were to be punished, were to be turned back and
+defeated in their purpose of reaching the House, but would not be
+arrested. Orders were evidently given that the police were to be present
+in the streets, and that the women were to be thrown from one uniformed
+or ununiformed policeman to another, that they were to be so rudely
+treated that sheer terror would cause them to turn back. I say orders
+were given and as one proof of this I can first point out that on all
+previous occasions the police had first tried to turn back the
+deputations and when the women persisted in going forward, had arrested
+them. At times individual policemen had behaved with cruelty and malice
+toward us, but never anything like the unanimous and wholesale brutality
+that was shown on Black Friday.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span></p><p>The Government very likely hoped that the violence of the police
+towards the women would be emulated by the crowds, but instead the
+crowds proved remarkably friendly. They pushed and struggled to make a
+clear pathway for us, and in spite of the efforts of the police my small
+deputation actually succeeded in reaching the door of the Strangers'
+Entrance. We mounted the steps to the enthusiastic cheers of the
+multitudes that filled the streets, and we stood there for hours gazing
+down on a scene which I hope never to look upon again.</p>
+
+<div class="center"><a name="ill-180.jpg" id="ill-180.jpg"></a><img src="images/ill-180.jpg" width='700' height='409' alt="FOR HOURS SCENES LIKE THIS WERE ENACTED ON BLACK FRIDAY" /></div>
+
+<p class="bold">FOR HOURS SCENES LIKE THIS WERE ENACTED ON BLACK FRIDAY</p>
+
+<p class="bold"><i>November, 1910</i></p>
+
+<p>At intervals of two or three minutes small groups of women appeared in
+the square, trying to join us at the Strangers' Entrance. They carried
+little banners inscribed with various mottoes, "Asquith Has Vetoed Our
+Bill," "Where There's a Bill There's a Way," "Women's Will Beats
+Asquith's Won't," and the like. These banners the police seized and tore
+in pieces. Then they laid hands on the women and literally threw them
+from one man to another. Some of the police used their fists, striking
+the women in their faces, their breasts, their shoulders. One woman I
+saw thrown down with violence three or four times in rapid succession,
+until at last she lay only half conscious against the curb, and in a
+serious condition was carried away by kindly strangers. Every moment the
+struggle grew fiercer, as more and more women arrived on the scene.
+Women, many of them eminent in art, in medicine and science, women of
+European reputation, subjected to treatment that would not have been
+meted out to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>criminals, and all for the offence of insisting upon the
+right of peaceful petition.</p>
+
+<p>This struggle lasted for about an hour, more and more women successfully
+pushing their way past the police and gaining the steps of the House.
+Then the mounted police were summoned to turn the women back. But,
+desperately determined, the women, fearing not the hoofs of the horses
+or the crushing violence of the police, did not swerve from their
+purpose. And now the crowds began to murmur. People began to demand why
+the women were being knocked about; why, if they were breaking the law,
+they were not arrested; why, if they were not breaking the law, they
+were not permitted to go on unmolested. For a long time, nearly five
+hours, the police continued to hustle and beat the women, the crowds
+becoming more and more turbulent in their defence. Then, at last the
+police were obliged to make arrests. One hundred and fifteen women and
+four men, most of them bruised and choked and otherwise injured, were arrested.</p>
+
+<p>While all this was going on outside the House of Commons, the Prime
+Minister was obstinately refusing to listen to the counsels of some of
+the saner and more justice-loving members of the House. Keir Hardie, Sir
+Alfred Mondell and others urged Mr. Asquith to receive the deputation,
+and Lord Castlereagh went so far as to move as an amendment to a
+Government proposal, another proposal which would have compelled the
+Government to provide immediate facilities to the Conciliation Bill. We<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span>
+heard of what was going on, and I sent in for one and another friendly
+member and made every possible effort to influence them in favour of
+Lord Castlereagh's amendment. I pointed to the brutal struggle that was
+going on in the square, and I begged them to go back and tell the others
+that it must be stopped. But, distressed as some of them undoubtedly
+were, they assured me that there was not the slightest chance for the amendment.</p>
+
+<p>"Is there not a single <i>man</i> in the House of Commons," I cried, "one who
+will stand up for us, who will make the House see that the amendment must go forward?"</p>
+
+<p>Well, perhaps there were men there, but all save fifty-two put their
+party loyalty before their manhood, and, because Lord Castlereagh's
+proposal would have meant censure of the Government, they refused to
+support it. This did not happen, however, until Mr. Asquith had resorted
+to his usual crafty device of a promise of future action. In this
+instance he promised to make a statement on behalf of the Government on
+the following Tuesday.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning the suffrage prisoners were arraigned in police court.
+Or rather, they were kept waiting outside the court room while Mr.
+Muskett, who prosecuted on behalf of the Chief Commissioner of Police,
+explained to the astounded magistrate that he had received orders from
+the Home Secretary that the prisoners should all be discharged. Mr.
+Churchill it was declared, had had the matter under careful
+consideration, and had decided that "no public advantage would be gained
+by proceeding with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> the prosecution, and accordingly no evidence would
+be given against the prisoners."</p>
+
+<p>Subdued laughter and, according to the newspapers, some contemptuous
+booing were raised in the court, and when order was restored the
+prisoners were brought in in batches and told that they were discharged.</p>
+
+<p>On the following Tuesday the W. S. P. U. held another meeting of the
+Women's Parliament in Caxton Hall to hear the news from the House of
+Commons. Mr. Asquith said: "The Government will, if they are still in
+power, give facilities in the next Parliament for effectively proceeding
+with a franchise bill which is so framed as to admit of free amendment."
+He would not promise that this would be done during the first year of Parliament.</p>
+
+<p>We had demanded facilities for the Conciliation Bill, and Mr. Asquith's
+promise was too vague and too ambiguous to please us. The Parliament now
+about to be dissolved had lasted a scant ten months. The next one might
+not last longer. Therefore, Mr. Asquith's promise, as usual, meant
+nothing at all. I said to the women, "I am going to Downing Street. Come
+along, all of you." And we went.</p>
+
+<p>We found a small force of police in Downing Street, and we easily broke
+through their line and would have invaded the Prime Minister's residence
+had not reinforcements of police arrived on the scene. Mr. Asquith
+himself appeared unexpectedly, and as we thought, very opportunely.
+Before he could have realised what was happening he found himself
+surrounded by angry Suffragettes. He was well<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> hooted and, it is said,
+well shaken, before he was rescued by the police. As his taxicab rushed
+away some object struck one of the windows, smashing it.</p>
+
+<p>Another Cabinet Minister, Mr. Birrell, unwittingly got into the midst of
+the m&ecirc;l&eacute;e, and I am obliged to record that he was pretty thoroughly
+hustled. But it is not true that his leg was injured by the women. His
+haste to jump into a taxicab resulted in a slightly sprained ankle.</p>
+
+<p>That night and the following day windows were broken in the houses of
+Sir Edward Grey, Mr. Winston Churchill, Mr. Lewis Harcourt and Mr. John
+Burns; and also in the official residences of the Premier and the
+Chancellor of the Exchequer.</p>
+
+<p>That week 160 Suffragettes were arrested, but all except those charged
+with window-breaking or assault were discharged. This amazing court
+action established two things: First, that when the Home Secretary
+stated that he had no responsibility for the prosecution and sentencing
+of Suffrage prisoners, he told a colossal falsehood; and second, that
+the Government fully realised that it was bad election tactics to be
+responsible for the imprisonment of women of good character who were
+struggling for citizenship.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>CHAPTER VIII</span></h2>
+
+<p>Almost immediately after the events chronicled in the preceding chapter
+I sailed for my second tour through the United States. I was delighted
+to find a thoroughly alive and progressive suffrage movement, where
+before had existed with most people only an academic theory in favour of
+equal political rights between men and women. My first meeting, held in
+Brooklyn, was advertised by sandwich women walking through the principal
+streets of the city, quite like our militant suffragists at home. Street
+meetings, I found, were now daily occurrences in New York. The Women's
+Political Union had adopted an election policy, and throughout the
+country as far west as I travelled, I found women awakened to the
+necessity of political action instead of mere discussion of suffrage.</p>
+
+<p>My second visit to America, like my first one, is clouded in my memory
+with sorrow. Very soon after my return to England a beloved sister, Mrs.
+Mary Clarke died. My sister, who was a most ardent suffragist and a
+valued worker in the Women's Social and Political Union, was one of the
+women who was shockingly maltreated in Parliament Square on Black
+Friday. She was also one of the women who, a few days later, registered
+their protest against the Government by throwing a stone through the
+window of an official residence. For<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> this act she was sent to Holloway
+prison for a term of one month. Released on December 21st, it was plain
+to those who knew her best that her health had suffered seriously from
+the dreadful experience of Black Friday and the after experience of
+prison. She died suddenly on Christmas day, to the profound sorrow of
+all her associates. Hers was not the only life that was sacrificed as a
+result of that day. Other deaths occurred, mostly from hearts weakened
+by overstrain. Miss Henria Williams died on January 2nd, 1911, from
+heart failure. Miss Cecelia Wolseley Haig was another victim. Ill
+treatment on Black Friday resulted in her case in a painful illness
+which ended, after a year of intense suffering, in her death on December 21st, 1911.</p>
+
+<div class="center"><a name="ill-186.jpg" id="ill-186.jpg"></a><img src="images/ill-186.jpg" width='453' height='700' alt="RIOT SCENES ON BLACK FRIDAY" /></div>
+
+<p class="bold">RIOT SCENES ON BLACK FRIDAY</p>
+
+<p class="bold"><i>November, 1910</i></p>
+
+<p>It is not possible to publish a full list of all the women who have died
+or have been injured for life in the course of the suffrage agitation in
+England. In many cases the details have never been made public, and I do
+not feel at liberty to record them here. A very celebrated case, which
+is public property, is that of Lady Constance Lytton, sister of the Earl
+of Lytton, who acted as chairman of the Conciliation Committee. Lady
+Constance had twice in 1909 gone to prison as a result of suffrage
+activities, and on both occasions had been given special privileges on
+account of her rank and family influence. In spite of her protests and
+her earnest pleadings to be accorded the same treatment as other
+suffrage prisoners, the snobbish and cowardly authorities insisted in
+retaining Lady Constance in the hospital cells and discharging her
+before the expiration of her sentence.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> This was done on a plea of her
+ill health, and it was true that she suffered from a valvular disease of the heart.</p>
+
+<p>Smarting under the sense of the injustice done her comrades in this
+discrimination, Lady Constance Lytton did one of the most heroic deeds
+to be recorded in the history of the suffrage movement. She cut off her
+beautiful hair and otherwise disguised herself, put on cheap and ugly
+clothing, and as "Jane Warton" took part in a demonstration at
+Newcastle, again suffering arrest and imprisonment. This time the
+authorities treated her as an ordinary prisoner. Without testing her
+heart or otherwise giving her an adequate medical examination, they
+subjected her to the horrors of forcible feeding. Owing to her fragile
+constitution she suffered frightful nausea each time, and when on one
+occasion the doctor's clothing was soiled, he struck her contemptuously
+on the cheek. This treatment was continued until the identity of the
+prisoner suddenly became known. She was, of course, immediately
+released, but she never recovered from the experience, and is now a
+hopeless invalid.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></p>
+
+<p>I want to say right here, that those well-meaning friends on the outside
+who say that we have suffered these horrors of prison, of hunger strikes
+and forcible feeding, because we desired to martyrise ourselves for the
+cause, are absolutely and entirely mistaken. We never went to prison in
+order to be martyrs. We went there in order that we might obtain the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>
+rights of citizenship. We were willing to break laws that we might force
+men to give us the right to make laws. That is the way men have earned
+their citizenship. Truly says Mazzini that the way to reform has always
+led through prison.</p>
+
+<p>The result of the general election, which took place in January, 1911,
+was that the Liberal Party was again returned to power. Parliament met
+on January 31st, but the session formally opened on February 6th with
+the reading of the King's speech. The programme for the session included
+the Lords' veto measure, Home Rule, payment for members of Parliament,
+and the abolishment of plural voting. Invalid insurance was also
+mentioned and certain amendments to the old age pension bill. Women's
+suffrage was not mentioned. Nevertheless, we were singularly lucky, the
+first three places in the ballot being secured by members of the
+Conciliation Committee. Mr. Philips, an Irish member, drew the first
+place, but as the Irish party had decided not to introduce any bills
+that session, he yielded to Sir George Kemp, who announced that he would
+use his place for the purpose of taking a second reading debate on the
+new Conciliation Bill. The old bill had been entitled: "A Bill to give
+the Vote to Women Occupiers," a title that made amendment difficult. The
+new bill bore the more flexible title, "A Bill to Confer the
+Parliamentary Franchise on Women," thus doing away with one of Mr.
+Lloyd-George's most plausible objections to it. The &pound;10 occupation
+clause was omitted, doing away with another objection, that of the
+possibility of "faggot<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> voting," that is, of a rich man conferring the
+vote on a family of daughters by the simple expedient of making them
+tenants of slices of his own property. The Conciliation Bill now read:
+"1. Every woman possessed of a household qualification within the
+meaning of the Representation of the People Act (1884) shall be entitled
+to be registered as a voter, and when registered to vote in the county
+or borough in which the qualifying premises are situated.</p>
+
+<p>"2. For the purposes of this Act a woman shall not be disqualified by
+marriage for being registered as a voter, provided that a husband and
+wife shall not both be registered as voters in the same Parliamentary
+borough or county division."</p>
+
+<p>This bill met with even warmer approval than the first one, because it
+was believed that it would win votes from those members who felt that
+the original measure had fallen short of being truly democratic.
+Nevertheless, the Prime Minister showed from the first that he intended
+to oppose it, as he had all previous suffrage measures. He announced
+that all Fridays up to Easter and also all time on Tuesdays and
+Wednesdays usually allowed for private members' bills were to be
+occupied with consideration of Government measures. Hardly a Liberal
+voice was raised against this arbitrary ruling. The Irish members indeed
+were delighted with it, since it gave the Home Rule Bill an advantage.
+The Labour members seemed complacent, and the rest of the coalition were
+indifferent. One back bench Liberal went so far as to rise and thank the
+Prime Minister for the courtesy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> with which the gagging process was
+accomplished. There was some show of fight made by the Opposition, but
+Conservative indignation was tempered by the reflection that the
+precedent established might be followed to advantage when their party
+came into power.</p>
+
+<p>Sir George Kemp then announced that he would take May 5th for the second
+reading of the Conciliation Bill, and the supporters of the bill,
+according to their various convictions, set to work to further its
+interests. The conviction of the W. S. P. U. was that Mr. Asquith's
+Government would never allow the bill to pass until they were actually
+forced to do so, and we adopted our own methods to secure a definite
+pledge from the Government that they would give facilities to the bill.</p>
+
+<p>In April of that year the census was to be taken, and we organised a
+census resistance on the part of women. According to our law the census
+of the entire kingdom must be taken every ten years on a designated day.
+Our plan was to reduce the value of the census for statistical purposes
+by refusing to make the required returns. Two ways of resistance
+presented themselves. The first and most important was direct resistance
+by occupiers who should refuse to fill in the census papers. This laid
+the register open to a fine of &pound;5 or a month's imprisonment, and thus
+required the exercise of considerable courage. The second means of
+resistance was evasion&mdash;staying away from home during the entire time
+that the enumerators were taking the census. We made the announcement of
+this plan and instantly there ensued<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> a splendid response from women and
+a chorus of horrified disapproval from the conservative public. The
+<i>Times</i> voiced this disapproval in a leading article, to which I
+replied, giving our reasons for the protest. "The Census," I wrote, "is
+a numbering of the people. Until women count as people for the purpose
+of representation in the councils of the nation as well as for purposes
+of taxation, we shall refuse to be numbered."</p>
+
+<p>On the subject of laws made by men&mdash;without the assistance of women&mdash;for
+the protection of women and children, I have a very special feeling.
+From my experience as poor law guardian and as Registrar of Births and
+Deaths, I know how ridiculously, say rather how tragically, these laws
+fall short of protection. Take for instance the vaunted "Children's
+Charter" of 1906, the measure which spread Mr. Lloyd-George's fame
+throughout the world. A volume could be filled with the mistakes and the
+cruelties of that Act, the object of which is the preservation and
+improvement of child life. A distinguishing characteristic of the Act is
+that it puts most of the responsibility for neglect of children on the
+backs of the mothers, who, under the laws of England, have no rights as
+parents. Two or three especially striking cases of this kind came into
+notice about this time, and gave the census resistance an additional justification.</p>
+
+<p>The case of Annie Woolmore was a very pitiful one. She was arrested and
+sentenced to Holloway for six weeks for neglecting her children. The
+evidence showed that the woman lived with her husband<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> and children in a
+miserable hovel, which would have been almost impossible to keep clean
+even if there had been water in the house. As it was the poor soul, who
+was in ill health and weakened by deprivation, had to carry all the
+water she used across a great distance. The children as well as the
+house were very dirty, it was true, but the children were well nourished
+and kindly treated. The husband, a labourer, out of work much of the
+time, testified that his wife "starved herself to feed the kids." Yet
+she had violated the terms of the "Children's Charter" and she went to
+prison. I am glad to say that owing to the efforts of suffragists she
+was pardoned and provided with a better home.</p>
+
+<p>Another case was that of Helen Conroy, who was charged with living in
+one wretched room, with her husband and seven children, the youngest a
+month old. According to the law the mother was forbidden to have this
+infant in bed with her overnight, yet part of the charge against her was
+that the child was found sleeping in a box of damp straw. Doubtless she
+would have preferred a cradle, or even a box of dry straw. But direst
+poverty made the cradle impossible and the conditions of the tenement
+kept the straw damp. Both parents in this instance were sent to prison
+for three months at hard labour. The magistrate casually remarked that
+the house in which these poor people lived had been condemned two years
+before, but some respectable property owner was still collecting rents from it.</p>
+
+<p>Another poor mother, evicted from her home because she could not pay the
+rent, took her four <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>children out into the open country, and when found
+was sleeping with them in a gravel pit. She was sent to prison for a
+month and the children went to the workhouse.</p>
+
+<p>These sorry mothers, logical results of the subjection of women, are
+enough in themselves to justify almost any defiance of a Government who
+deny the women the right to work out their destinies in freedom. No
+pledge having been secured from the Prime Minister by April 1st, we
+carried out, and most successfully, our census resistance. Many
+thousands of women all over the country refused or evaded the returns. I
+returned my census paper with the words "No vote no census" written
+across it, and other women followed that example with similar messages.
+One woman filled in the blank with full information about her one man
+servant, and added that there were many women but no more persons in her
+household. In Birmingham sixteen women of wealth packed their houses
+with women resisters. They slept on the floors, on chairs and tables,
+and even in the baths. The head of a large college threw open the
+building to 300 women. Many women in other cities held all night parties
+for friends who wished to remain away from home. In some places
+unoccupied houses were rented for the night by resisters, who lay on the
+bare boards. Some groups of women hired gipsy vans and spent the night on the moors.</p>
+
+<p>In London we gave a great concert at Queen's Hall on Census night. Many
+of us walked about Trafalgar Square until midnight and then repaired<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> to
+Aldwich skating rink, where we amused ourselves until morning. Some
+skated while others looked on, and enjoyed the admirable musical and
+theatrical entertainment that helped to pass the hours. We had with us a
+number of the brightest stars in the theatrical world, and they were
+generous in their contributions. It being Sunday night, the chairman had
+to call on each of the artists for a "speech" instead of a song or other
+turn. An all-night restaurant near at hand did a big business, and on
+the whole the resisters had a very good time. The Scala Theatre was the
+scene of another all-night entertainment.</p>
+
+<p>There was a good deal of curiosity to see what the Government would
+devise in the way of a punishment for the rebellious women, but the
+Government realised the impossibility of taking punitive action, and Mr.
+John Burns, who, as head of the Local Government Board, was responsible
+for the census, announced that they had decided to treat the affair with
+magnanimity. The number of evasions, he declared, was insignificant. But
+every one knew that this was the exact reverse of the facts.</p>
+
+<div class="center"><a name="ill-194.jpg" id="ill-194.jpg"></a><img src="images/ill-194.jpg" width='700' height='518' alt="IN THIS MANNER THOUSANDS OF WOMEN THROUGHOUT THE KINGDOM
+SLEPT IN UNOCCUPIED HOUSES OVER CENSUS NIGHT" /></div>
+
+<p class="bold">IN THIS MANNER THOUSANDS OF WOMEN THROUGHOUT THE KINGDOM
+SLEPT IN<br />UNOCCUPIED HOUSES OVER CENSUS NIGHT</p>
+
+<p>The Conciliation Bill was debated on May 5th and passed its second
+reading by the enormous majority of 137. And now the public and a
+section of the press united in a strong demand that the Government yield
+to the undoubted will of the House and grant facilities to the bill. The
+Conciliation Committee sent a deputation of members to the Prime
+Minister to remind him of his pre-election promise that the House of
+Commons should have an opportunity of dealing with the whole question<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span>
+of woman suffrage, but they succeeded only in getting his assurance that
+he had the matter under consideration. Late in the month the
+announcement was made in the House that the Government would not grant
+facilities during that session, but, since the new bill fulfilled the
+conditions named by the Prime Minister, and was now capable of
+amendment, the Government recognised it to be their duty to grant
+facilities in some session of the present Parliament. They would be
+prepared next session, when the bill had been again read for the second
+time, either as a result of obtaining a good place in the ballot, or (if
+that did not happen) by a grant of a Government day for the purpose, to
+give a week, which they understood to be the time suggested as
+reasonable by the promoters for its further stages.</p>
+
+<p>This pledge was made in order to deter the W. S. P. U. from making a
+militant demonstration in connection with the coronation of the King.</p>
+
+<p>Keir Hardie asked if the Government would, by means of a closure or
+otherwise, make certain that the bill would go through in the week, and
+the Prime Minister replied, "No, I cannot give an assurance of that
+kind. After all, it is a problem of the very greatest magnitude."</p>
+
+<p>This reply seemed to make the Government's pledge practically worthless.
+The Conciliation Committee also realised the possibilities of the bill
+being talked out, and Lord Lytton wrote to Mr. Asquith and asked him for
+assurances that the facilities offered were intended not for academic
+discussion but for effective opportunity for carrying the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span>bill. He also
+asked that the week offered should not be construed rigidly but that,
+providing the committee stage were got through in the time, additional
+days for the report and third reading stages might be forthcoming.
+Reasonable opportunity for making use of the closure was also asked. To
+Lord Lytton's letter the Prime Minister replied as follows:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p><i>My dear Lytton</i>&mdash;In reply to your letter on the subject of the
+Women's Enfranchisement Bill, I would refer you to some
+observations recently made in a speech at the National Liberal Club
+by Sir Edward Grey, which accurately expresses the intention of the
+Government.</p>
+
+<p>It follows (to answer your specific inquiries), that the "week"
+offered will be interpreted with reasonable elasticity, that the
+Government will interpose no reasonable obstacle to the proper use
+of the closure, and that if (as you suggest) the bill gets through
+committee in the time proposed, the extra days required for report
+and third reading will not be refused.</p>
+
+<p>The Government, though divided in opinion on the merits of the
+bill, are unanimous in their determination to give effect, not only
+in the letter but in the spirit, to the promise in regard to
+facilities which I made on their behalf before the last general
+election.</p>
+
+<p class="center">Yours etc.,</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">H. H. Asquith</span>.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Sceptical up to this point, the W. S. P. U. was now convinced that the
+Government were sincere in their promise to give the bill full
+facilities in the following year. We held a joyful mass meeting in
+Queen's Hall and I again declared that warfare against the Government
+was at an end. Our new policy was the inauguration of a great holiday
+campaign, with the object of making victory in 1912 absolutely certain.
+Electors must be aroused, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>members of Parliament held to their
+allegiance. Women must be organised in order that questions that vitally
+affect the social welfare of the country might be placed before them. I
+chose Scotland and Wales as the scenes of my holiday labours.</p>
+
+<p>I may say that our confidence was fully shared by the public at large.
+The belief in Mr. Asquith's pledge was accurately reflected in a leader
+published in <i>The Nation</i>, which said: "From the moment the Prime
+Minister signed the frank and ungrudging letter to Lord Lytton which
+appeared in last Saturday's newspapers, women became, in all but the
+legal formality, voters and citizens. For at least two years, if not for
+longer, nothing has been lacking save a full and fair opportunity for
+the House of Commons to translate its convictions into the precise
+language of a statute. That opportunity has been promised for next
+session and promised in terms and under conditions which ensure success."</p>
+
+<p>The only thing, as we thought, that we had to fear were wrecking
+amendments to the bill, and in the new by-election policy which we
+adopted we worked against all candidates of every party who would refuse
+to promise, not only to support the Conciliation Committee to carry the
+bill, but also to vote against any amendment the committee thought
+dangerous. We believed that we had covered every possibility of
+disaster. But we had something yet to learn of the treachery of the
+Asquith Ministry and their capacity for cold-blooded lying.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lloyd-George from the first was an open enemy of the bill, but since
+we had no doubt of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> sincerity of the Prime Minister, we could only
+conclude that Mr. Lloyd-George had detached himself from the main body
+of the Government and had become the self-constituted leader of the
+opposition. In an address to a large Liberal group Mr. Lloyd-George
+advised that Liberal members be asked to ballot for a place for a
+"democratic measure," in order that such a measure might claim the Prime
+Minister's pledge for facilities next session. In one or two other
+speeches he made vague allusions to the possibilities of introducing
+another suffrage bill. His own idea was to amend the bill to give a vote
+to wives of all electors&mdash;making married women voters in virtue of their
+husband's qualification. The inevitable effect of such an amendment
+would be to wreck the bill, since it would have enfranchised about
+6,000,000 women in addition to the million and a half who would benefit
+by the original terms of the bill. Such a wholesale addition to the
+electorate was never known in England; the number enfranchised by the
+Reform Bill of 1832 being hardly more than half a million. The Reform
+Bill of 1867 admitted a million new voters, and that of 1884 perhaps two
+millions. The absurdity of Mr. Lloyd-George's proposition was such that
+we did not regard it seriously. We did not allow his opposition to give
+us serious alarm until a day in August when a Welsh member, Mr. Leif
+Jones, asked the Prime Minister from the floor of the House, whether he
+was aware that his promise for facilities for the Conciliation Bill in
+the next session was being claimed exclusively for that bill, and asked
+further for a statement that the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> promised facilities would be equally
+granted to any other suffrage bill that might secure a second reading
+and was capable of amendment. Mr. Lloyd-George, speaking for the
+Government, replied that they could not undertake to give facilities to
+more than one bill on the same subject, but that any bill which,
+satisfying these tests, secured a second reading, would be treated by
+them as falling within their engagements.</p>
+
+<p>Astounded at this plain evasion of a sacred promise, Lord Lytton again
+wrote to the Prime Minister, reviewing the entire matter, and asking for
+another statement of the Government's intentions. The following is the
+text of Mr. Asquith's reply:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p><i>My dear Lytton</i>&mdash;I have no hesitation in saying that the promises
+made by, and on behalf of the Government, in regard to giving
+facilities to the Conciliation Bill, will be strictly adhered to,
+both in letter and in spirit.</p>
+
+<p class="center">Yours sincerely,</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">H. H. Asquith</span>.</p>
+
+<p>August 23, 1911.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Again we were reassured, and our confidence in the Premier's pledge
+remained unshaken throughout the campaign, although Mr. Lloyd-George
+continued to throw out hints that the promises of facilities for the
+bill were altogether illusory. We could not believe him, and when, two
+months later, I was asked in America: "When will English women vote?" I
+replied with perfect conviction, "Next year."</p>
+
+<p>This was in Louisville, Kentucky, where I attended the 1911 Annual
+Convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span></p><p>I remember this third visit to the United States with especial
+pleasure. I was the guest in New York of Dr. and Mrs. John Winters
+Brannan, and through the courtesy of Dr. Brannan, who is at the head of
+all the city hospitals, I saw something of the penal system and the
+institutional life of America. We visited the workhouse and the
+penitentiary on Blackwell's Island, and although I am told that these
+places are not regarded as model institutions, I can assure my readers
+that they are infinitely superior to the English prisons where women are
+punished for trying to win their political freedom. In the American
+prisons, much as they lacked in some essentials, I saw no solitary
+confinement, no rule of silence, no deadly air of officialdom. The food
+was good and varied, and above all there was an air of kindness and good
+feeling between the officials and the prisoners that is almost wholly
+lacking in England.</p>
+
+<p>But, after all, in the United States as in other countries, the problem
+of the relations between unfranchised women and the State remains
+unsolved and unsatisfactory. One night my friends took me to that sombre
+and terrible institution, the Night Court for Women. We sat on the bench
+with the magistrate, and he very courteously explained everything to us.
+The whole business was heart-breaking. All the women, with one
+exception&mdash;an old drunkard&mdash;were charged with solicitation. Most of them
+were of high type by nature. It all seemed so hopeless, and it was clear
+that they were victims of an evil system. Their conviction was a
+foregone conclusion.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span></p><p>The magistrate said that in most cases the reason for their coming
+there was economic. One case of a little cigar maker, who said very
+simply that she only went on the streets when out of work, and that when
+in work she earned $8 a week, was very tragic and touching. I could not
+keep the Night Court out of my speeches after that. The whole dreadful
+injustice of women's lives seemed mirrored in that place.</p>
+
+<p>I went as far west as the Pacific Coast on this visit, spending
+Christmas day in Seattle, and for the first time seeing a community
+where women and men existed on terms of exact equality. It was a
+delightful experience. As I wrote home to our members, the men of the
+western States seemed to my eyes eager, earnest, rough men, building a
+great community in a great hurry, but never have I seen greater respect,
+courtesy and chivalry shown to women than in that one Suffrage State it
+has been my privilege to visit.</p>
+
+<p>I am getting a little ahead of my story, however. It was in November,
+when I was in the city of Minneapolis, that a crushing blow descended on
+the English suffragists. I learned of this through cabled despatches in
+the newspapers and from private cables, and was so staggered that I
+could scarcely command myself sufficiently to fill my immediate
+engagements. This was the news, that the Government had broken their
+plighted word and had deliberately destroyed the Conciliation Bill. My
+first wild thought, on hearing of this act of treachery, was to cancel
+all engagements and return to England, but my final decision to remain
+afterwards proved the right one, because the women at home, without a
+moment's loss<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> of time, struck the answering blow, guided by that
+insight which has been characteristic of every act of the members of our
+Union. I did not return to England until January 11, 1912, and by that
+time great deeds had been done. Our movement had entered upon a new and
+more vigorous stage of militancy.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTE:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Lady Constance Lytton's story has been thrillingly told in
+her book "Prisons and Prisoners," Heinemann.</p></div></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span><a name="BOOK_III" id="BOOK_III">BOOK III</a></span></h2>
+
+<p class="bold2">THE WOMEN'S REVOLUTION</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>CHAPTER I</span></h2>
+
+<p>Parliament had reassembled on October 25th, 1911, and the first move on
+the part of the Government was, to say the least of it, rather
+unpropitious. The Prime Minister submitted two motions, the first one
+empowering them to take all the time of the House during the remainder
+of the session, and the second guillotining discussion on the Insurance
+Bill so as to force the measure through before Christmas. One day only
+was allotted to the clauses relating to women in that bill. These
+clauses were notoriously unfair; they provided for sickness insurance of
+about four million women and unemployment insurance of no women at all.
+Under the provision of the bill eleven million men were ensured against
+sickness and about two and a half million against unemployment. Women
+were given lower benefits for the same premium as men, and premiums paid
+out of the family income were credited solely to the men's account. The
+bill as drafted provided no form of insurance for wives, mothers and
+daughters who spent their lives at home working for the family. It
+penalised women for staying in the home, which most men agree is women's
+only legitimate sphere of action. The amended bill grudgingly allowed
+aside from maternity benefits, a small insurance, on rather difficult
+terms, for workingmen's wives.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span></p><p>Thus the re-elected Government's first utterance to women was one of
+contempt; and this was followed, on November 7th, by the almost
+incredible announcement that the Government intended, at the next
+session, to introduce a manhood suffrage bill. This announcement was not
+made in the House of Commons, but to a deputation of men from the
+People's Suffrage Federation, a small group of people who advocated
+universal adult suffrage. The deputation, which was very privately
+arranged for, was received by Mr. Asquith, and the then Master of
+Elibank (Chief Liberal Whip). The spokesman asked Mr. Asquith to bring
+in a Government measure for universal adult suffrage, including adult
+women. The Prime Minister replied that the Government had pledged
+facilities for the Conciliation Bill, which was as far as they were
+prepared to go in the matter of women's suffrage. But, he added, the
+Government intended in the next session to introduce and to pass through
+all its stages a genuine reform bill which would sweep away existing
+qualifications for the franchise, and substitute a single qualification
+of residence. The bill would apply to adult males only, but it would be
+so framed as to be open to a woman suffrage amendment in case the House
+of Commons desired to make that extension and amendment.</p>
+
+<p>This portentous announcement came like a bolt from the blue, and there
+was strong condemnation of the Government's treachery to women. Said the
+<i>Saturday Review</i>:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span></p><blockquote><p>With absolutely no demand, no ghost of a demand, for more votes
+for men, and with&mdash;beyond all cavil&mdash;a very strong demand for votes
+for women, the Government announce their Manhood Suffrage Bill and
+carefully evade the other question! For a naked, avowed plan of
+gerrymandering no Government surely ever did beat this one.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>The <i>Daily Mail</i> said that the "policy which Mr. Asquith proposes is
+absolutely indefensible." And the <i>Evening Standard and Globe</i> said: "We
+are no friends of female suffrage, but anything more contemptible than
+the attitude assumed by the Government it is difficult to imagine."</p>
+
+<p>If the Government hoped to deceive any one by their dishonest reference
+to the possibility of a woman suffrage amendment, they were
+disappointed. Said the <i>Evening News</i>:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Mr. Asquith's bombshell will blow the Conciliation Bill to
+smithereens, for it is impossible to have a manhood suffrage for
+men and a property qualification for women. True, the Premier
+consents to leave the question of women's suffrage to the House,
+but he knows well enough what the decision of the House will be.
+The Conciliation Bill had a chance, but the larger measure has none at all.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>I have quoted these newspaper leaders to show you that our opinion of
+the Government's action was shared even by the press. Universal suffrage
+in a country where women are in a majority of one million is not likely
+to happen in the lifetime of any reader of this volume, and the
+Government's generous offer of a possible amendment was nothing more
+than a gratuitous insult to the suffragists.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span></p><p>The truce, naturally, came to an abrupt end. The W. S. P. U. wrote to
+the Prime Minister, saying that consternation had been aroused by the
+Government's announcement, and that it had been decided accordingly to
+send a deputation representing the Women's Social and Political Union to
+wait upon himself and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, on the evening of
+November 21st. The purpose of the deputation was to demand that the
+proposed manhood suffrage bill be abandoned, and that in its place
+should be introduced a Government measure giving equal franchise rights
+to men and women. A similar letter was despatched to Mr. Lloyd-George.</p>
+
+<p>Six times before on occasions of crisis had the W. S. P. U. requested an
+interview with Mr. Asquith, and each time they had been refused. This
+time the Prime Minister replied that he had decided to receive a
+deputation of the various suffrage societies on November 17th,
+"including your own society, if you desire it." It was proposed that
+each society appoint four representatives as members of the deputation
+which would be received by the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer.</p>
+
+<p>Nine suffrage societies sent representatives to the meeting, our own
+representatives being Christabel Pankhurst, Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, Miss
+Annie Kenney, Lady Constance Lytton and Miss Elizabeth Robins.
+Christabel and Mrs. Lawrence spoke for the Union, and they did not
+hesitate to accuse the two Ministers to their faces of having grossly
+tricked and falsely misled women. Mr. Asquith, in his reply to the
+deputation, resented these imputations.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span></p><p>He had kept his pledge, he insisted, in regard to the Conciliation
+Bill. He was perfectly willing to give facilities to the Bill, if the
+women preferred that to an amendment to his reform bill. Moreover, he
+denied that he had made any new announcement. As far back as 1908 he had
+distinctly declared that the Government regarded it as a sacred duty to
+bring forward a manhood suffrage bill before that Parliament came to an
+end. It was true that the Government did not carry out that binding
+obligation, and it was also true that until the present time nothing
+more was ever said about a manhood suffrage bill, but that was not the
+Government's fault. The crisis of the Lord's veto, had momentarily
+displaced the bill. Now he merely proposed to fulfil his promise made in
+1908, and also his promise about giving facilities to the Conciliation
+Bill. He was ready to keep both promises. Well he knew that those
+promises were incompatible, that the fulfilment of both was therefore
+impossible, and Christabel told him so bluntly and fearlessly. "We are
+not satisfied," she warned him, and the Prime Minister said acidly: "I
+did not expect to satisfy <i>you</i>."</p>
+
+<p>The reply of the W. S. P. U. was immediate and forceful. Led by Mrs.
+Pethick Lawrence, our women went out with stones and hammers and broke
+hundreds of windows in the Home Office, the War and Foreign Offices, the
+Board of Education, the Privy Council Office, the Board of Trade, the
+Treasury, Somerset House, the National Liberal Club, several post
+offices, the Old Banqueting Hall, the London and South Western Bank, and
+a dozen other<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> buildings, including the residence of Lord Haldane and
+Mr. John Burns. Two hundred and twenty women were arrested and about 150
+of them sent to prison for terms varying from a week to two months.</p>
+
+<p>One individual protest deserves mention because of its prophetic
+character. In December Miss Emily Wilding Davison was arrested for
+attempting to set fire to a letter box at Parliament Street Post Office.
+In court Miss Davison said that she did it as a protest against the
+Government's treachery, and as a demand that women's suffrage be
+included in the King's speech. "The protest was meant to be serious,"
+she said, "and so I adopted a serious course. In past agitation for
+reform the next step after window-breaking was incendiarism, in order to
+draw the attention of the private citizens to the fact that this
+question of reform was their concern as well as that of women."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Davison received the severe sentence of six months' imprisonment
+for her deed.</p>
+
+<p>To this state of affairs I returned from my American tour. I had the
+comfort of reflecting that my imprisoned comrades were being accorded
+better treatment than the early prisoners had known. Since early in 1910
+some concessions had been granted, and some acknowledgment of the
+political character of our offences had been made. During the brief
+period when these scant concessions to justice were allowed, the hunger
+strike was abandoned and prison was robbed of its worst horror, forcible
+feeding. The situation was bad enough, however, and I could see that it
+might easily become a great deal worse.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> We had reached a stage at which
+the mere sympathy of members of Parliament, however sincerely felt, was
+no longer of the slightest use. Reminding our members this, in the first
+speeches made after returning to England I asked them to prepare
+themselves for more action. If women's suffrage was not included in the
+next King's speech we should have to make it absolutely impossible for
+the Government to touch the question of the franchise.</p>
+
+<p>The King's speech, when Parliament met in February, 1912, alluded to the
+franchise question in very general terms. Proposals, it was stated,
+would be brought forward for the amendment of the law with respect to
+the franchise and the registration of electors. This might be construed
+to mean that the Government were going to introduce a manhood suffrage
+bill or a bill for the abolition of plural voting, which had been
+suggested in some quarters as a substitute for the manhood suffrage
+bill. No precise statement of the Government's intentions was made, and
+the whole franchise question was left in a cloud of uncertainty. Mr. Agg
+Gardner, a Unionist member of the Conciliation Committee, drew the third
+place in the ballot, and he announced that he should reintroduce the
+Conciliation Bill. This interested us very slightly, for knowing its
+prospect of success to have been destroyed, for we were done with the
+Conciliation Bill forever. Nothing less than a Government measure would
+henceforth satisfy the W. S. P. U., because it had been clearly
+demonstrated that only a Government measure would be allowed to pass the
+House of Commons. With sublime faith, or rather<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> with a deplorable lack
+of political insight, the Women's Liberal Federation and the National
+Union of Women's Suffrage Societies professed full confidence in the
+proposed amendment to a manhood suffrage bill, but we knew how futile
+was that hope. We saw that the only course to take was to offer
+determined opposition to any measure of suffrage that did not include as
+an integral part, equal suffrage for men and women.</p>
+
+<p>On February 16th we held a large meeting of welcome to a number of
+released prisoners who had served two and three months for the window
+breaking demonstration that had taken place in the previous November. At
+this meeting we candidly surveyed the situation and agreed on a course
+of action which we believed would be sufficiently strong to prevent the
+Government from advancing their threatened franchise bill. I said on this occasion:</p>
+
+<p>"We don't want to use any weapons that are unnecessarily strong. If the
+argument of the stone, that time-honoured official political argument,
+is sufficient, then we will never use any stronger argument. And that is
+the weapon and the argument that we are going to use next time. And so I
+say to every volunteer on our demonstration, 'Be prepared to use that
+argument.' I am taking charge of the demonstration, and that is the
+argument I am going to use. I am not going to use it for any sentimental
+reason, I am going to use it because it is the easiest and the most
+readily understood. Why should women go to Parliament Square and be
+battered about and insulted, and most important of all,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> produce less
+effect than when we throw stones? We tried it long enough. We submitted
+for years patiently to insult and assault. Women had their health
+injured. Women lost their lives. We should not have minded if that had
+succeeded, but that did not succeed, and we have made more progress with
+less hurt to ourselves by breaking glass than ever we made when we
+allowed them to break our bodies.</p>
+
+<p>"After all, is not a woman's life, is not her health, are not her limbs
+more valuable than panes of glass? There is no doubt of that, but most
+important of all, does not the breaking of glass produce more effect
+upon the Government? If you are fighting a battle, that should dictate
+your choice of weapons. Well, then, we are going to try this time if
+mere stones will do it. I do not think it will ever be necessary for us
+to arm ourselves as Chinese women have done, but there are women who are
+prepared to do that if it should be necessary. In this Union we don't
+lose our heads. We only go as far as we are obliged to go in order to
+win, and we are going forward with this next protest demonstration in
+full faith that this plan of campaign, initiated by our friends whom we
+honour to-night, will on this next occasion prove effective."</p>
+
+<p>Ever since militancy took on the form of destruction of property the
+public generally, both at home and abroad, has expressed curiosity as to
+the logical connection between acts such as breaking windows, firing
+pillar boxes, et cetera, and the vote. Only a complete lack of
+historical knowledge excuses that curiosity. For every advance of men's
+political freedom has been marked with violence and the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span>destruction of
+property. Usually the advance has been marked by war, which is called
+glorious. Sometimes it has been marked by riotings, which are deemed
+less glorious but are at least effective. That speech of mine, just
+quoted, will probably strike the reader as one inciting to violence and
+illegal action, things as a rule and in ordinary circumstances quite
+inexcusable. Well, I will call the reader's attention to what was, in
+this connection, a rather singular coincidence. At the very hour when I
+was making that speech, advising my audience of the political necessity
+of physical revolt, a responsible member of the Government, in another
+hall, in another city, was telling his audience precisely the same
+thing. This Cabinet Minister, the right Honourable C. E. H. Hobhouse,
+addressing a large anti-suffrage meeting in his constituency of Bristol,
+said that the suffrage movement was not a political issue because its
+adherents had failed to prove that behind this movement existed a large
+public demand. He declared that "In the case of the suffrage demand
+there has not been the kind of popular sentimental uprising which
+accounted for Nottingham Castle in 1832 or the Hyde Park railings in
+1867. There has not been a great ebullition of popular feeling."</p>
+
+<p>The "popular sentimental uprising" to which Mr. Hobhouse alluded was the
+burning to the ground of the castle of the anti-suffrage Duke of
+Newcastle, and of Colwick Castle, the country seat of another of the
+leaders of the opposition against the franchise bill. The militant men
+of that time did not select uninhabited buildings to be fired. They
+burned both<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> these historic residences over their owners' heads. Indeed,
+the wife of the owner of Colwick Castle died as a result of shock and
+exposure on that occasion. No arrests were made, no men imprisoned. On
+the contrary the King sent for the Premier, and begged the Whig
+Ministers favourable to the franchise bill not to resign, and intimated
+that this was also the wish of the Lords who had thrown out the bill.
+Molesworth's History of England says:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>These declarations were imperatively called for. The danger was
+imminent and the Ministers knew it and did all that lay in their
+power to tranquillise the people, and to assure them that the bill
+was only delayed and not finally defeated.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>For a time the people believed this, but soon they lost patience, and
+seeing signs of a renewed activity on the part of the anti-suffragists,
+they became aggressive again. Bristol, the very city in which Mr.
+Hobhouse made his speech, was set on fire. The militant reformers burned
+the new gaol, the toll houses, the Bishop's Palace, both sides of
+Queen's Square, including the Mansion House, the custom house, the
+excise office, many warehouses, and other private property, the whole
+valued at over &pound;100,000&mdash;five hundred thousand dollars. It was as a
+result of such violence, and in fear of more violence, that the reform
+bill was hurried through Parliament and became law in June, 1832.</p>
+
+<p>Our demonstration, so mild by comparison with English men's political
+agitation, was announced for March 4th, and the announcement created
+much public alarm. Sir William Byles gave notice that he would "ask the
+Secretary of State for the Home<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> Department whether his attention had
+been drawn to a speech by Mrs. Pankhurst last Friday night, openly and
+emphatically inciting her hearers to violent outrage and the destruction
+of property, and threatening the use of firearms if stones did not prove
+sufficiently effective; and what steps he proposes to take to protect
+Society from this outbreak of lawlessness."</p>
+
+<p>The question was duly asked, and the Home Secretary replied that his
+attention had been called to the speech, but that it would not be
+desirable in the public interest to say more than this at present.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever preparations the police department were making to prevent the
+demonstration, they failed because, while as usual, we were able to
+calculate exactly what the police department were going to do, they were
+utterly unable to calculate what we were going to do. We had planned a
+demonstration for March 4th, and this one we announced. We planned
+another demonstration for March 1st, but this one we did not announce.
+Late in the afternoon of Friday, March 1st, I drove in a taxicab,
+accompanied by the Hon. Secretary of the Union, Mrs. Tuke and another of
+our members, to No. 10 Downing Street, the official residence of the
+Prime Minister. It was exactly half past five when we alighted from the
+cab and threw our stones, four of them, through the window panes. As we
+expected we were promptly arrested and taken to Cannon Row police
+station. The hour that followed will long be remembered in London. At
+intervals of fifteen minutes relays of women who had volunteered for the
+demonstration did their work. The first smashing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> of glass occurred in
+the Haymarket and Piccadilly, and greatly startled and alarmed both
+pedestrians and police. A large number of the women were arrested, and
+everybody thought that this ended the affair. But before the excited
+populace and the frustrated shop owners' first exclamation had died
+down, before the police had reached the station with their prisoners,
+the ominous crashing and splintering of plate glass began again, this
+time along both sides of Regent Street and the Strand. A furious rush of
+police and people towards the second scene of action ensued. While their
+attention was being taken up with occurrences in this quarter, the third
+relay of women began breaking the windows in Oxford Circus and Bond
+Street. The demonstration ended for the day at half past six with the
+breaking of many windows in the Strand. The <i>Daily Mail</i> gave this
+graphic account of the demonstration:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>From every part of the crowded and brilliantly lighted streets came
+the crash of splintered glass. People started as a window shattered
+at their side; suddenly there was another crash in front of them;
+on the other side of the street; behind&mdash;everywhere. Scared shop
+assistants came running out to the pavements; traffic stopped;
+policemen sprang this way and that; five minutes later the streets
+were a procession of excited groups, each surrounding a woman
+wrecker being led in custody to the nearest police station.
+Meanwhile the shopping quarter of London had plunged itself into a
+sudden twilight. Shutters were hurriedly fitted; the rattle of iron
+curtains being drawn came from every side. Guards of
+commissionaires and shopmen were quickly mounted, and any
+unaccompanied lady in sight, especially if she carried a hand bag,
+became an object of menacing suspicion.</p></blockquote>
+
+<div class="center"><a name="ill-218.jpg" id="ill-218.jpg"></a><img src="images/ill-218.jpg" width='700' height='532' alt="THE ARGUMENT OF THE BROKEN WINDOW PANE" /></div>
+
+<p class="bold">THE ARGUMENT OF THE BROKEN WINDOW PANE</p>
+
+<p>At the hour when this demonstration was being<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> made a conference was
+being held at Scotland Yard to determine what should be done to prevent
+the smashing of windows on the coming Monday night. But we had not
+announced the hour of our March 4th protest. I had in my speech simply
+invited women to assemble in Parliament Square on the evening of March
+4th, and they accepted the invitation. Said the <i>Daily Telegraph</i>:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>By six o'clock the neighbourhood Houses of Parliament were in a
+stage of siege. Shop keepers in almost every instance barricaded
+their premises, removed goods from the windows and prepared for the
+worst. A few minutes before six o'clock a huge force of police,
+amounting to nearly three thousand constables, was posted in
+Parliament Square, Whitehall, and streets adjoining, and large
+reserves were gathered in Westminster Hall and Scotland Yard. By
+half past eight Whitehall was packed from end to end with police
+and public. Mounted constables rode up and down Whitehall keeping
+the people on the move. At no time was there any sign of danger....</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>The demonstration had taken place in the morning, when a hundred or more
+women walked quietly into Knightsbridge and walking singly along the
+streets demolished nearly every pane of glass they passed. Taken by
+surprise the police arrested as many as they could reach, but most of the women escaped.</p>
+
+<p>For that two days' work something like two hundred suffragettes were
+taken to the various police stations, and for days the long procession
+of women streamed through the courts. The dismayed magistrates found
+themselves facing, not only former rebels, but many new ones, in some
+cases, women<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> whose names, like that of Dr. Ethel Smyth, the composer,
+were famous throughout Europe. These women, when arraigned, made clear
+and lucid statements of their positions and their motives, but
+magistrates are not schooled to examine motives. They are trained to
+think only of laws and mostly of laws protecting property. Their ears
+are not tuned to listen to words like those spoken by one of the
+prisoners, who said: "We have tried every means&mdash;processions and
+meetings&mdash;which were of no avail. We have tried demonstrations, and now
+at last we have to break windows. I wish I had broken more. I am not in
+the least repentant. Our women are working in far worse condition than
+the striking miners. I have seen widows struggling to bring up their
+children. Only two out of every five are fit to be soldiers. What is the
+good of a country like ours? England is absolutely on the wane. You only
+have one point of view, and that is the men's, and while men have done
+the best they could, they cannot go far without the women and the
+women's views. We believe the whole is in a muddle too horrible to think of."</p>
+
+<p>The coal miners were at that time engaging in a terrible strike, and the
+Government, instead of arresting the leaders, were trying to come to
+terms of peace with them. I reminded the magistrate of this fact, and I
+told him that what the women had done was but a fleabite by comparison
+with the miners' violence. I said further: "I hope our demonstration
+will be enough to show the Government that the women's agitation is
+going on. If not, if you send<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> me to prison, I will go further to show
+that women who have to help pay the salaries of Cabinet Ministers, and
+your salary too, sir, are going to have some voice in the making of the
+laws they have to obey."</p>
+
+<p>I was sentenced to two months' imprisonment. Others received sentences
+ranging from one week to two months, while those who were accused of
+breaking glass above five pounds in value, were committed for trial in
+higher courts. They were sent to prison on remand, and when the last of
+us were behind the grim gates, not only Holloway but three other women's
+prisons were taxed to provide for so many extra inmates.</p>
+
+<p>It was a stormy imprisonment for most of us. A great many of the women
+had received, in addition to their sentences, "hard labour," and this
+meant that the privileges at that time accorded to Suffragettes, as
+political offenders, were withheld. The women adopted the hunger strike
+as a protest, but as the hint was conveyed to me that the privileges
+would be restored, I advised a cessation of the strike. The remand
+prisoners demanded that I be allowed to exercise with them, and when
+this was not answered they broke the windows of their cells. The other
+suffrage prisoners, hearing the sound of shattered glass, and the
+singing of the Marseillaise, immediately broke their windows. The time
+had long gone by when the Suffragettes submitted meekly to prison
+discipline. And so passed the first days of my imprisonment.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>CHAPTER II</span></h2>
+
+<p>The panic stricken Government did not rest content with the imprisonment
+of the window breakers. They sought, in a blind and blundering fashion,
+to perform the impossible feat of wrecking at a blow the entire militant
+movement. Governments have always tried to crush reform movements, to
+destroy ideas, to kill the thing that cannot die. Without regard to
+history, which shows that no Government have ever succeeded in doing
+this, they go on trying in the old, senseless way.</p>
+
+<p>For days before the two demonstrations described in the last chapter our
+headquarters in Clement's Inn had been under constant observation by the
+police, and on the evening of March 5th an inspector of police and a
+large force of detectives suddenly descended on the place, with warrants
+for the arrest of Christabel Pankhurst and Mr. and Mrs. Pethick
+Lawrence, who with Mrs. Tuke and myself were charged with "conspiring to
+incite certain persons to commit malicious damage to property." When the
+officers entered they found Mr. Pethick Lawrence at work in his office,
+and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence in her flat upstairs. My daughter was not in
+the building. The Lawrences, after making brief preparations drove in a
+taxicab to Bow Street Station, where they spent the night. The police
+remained in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>possession of the offices, and detectives were despatched
+to find and arrest Christabel. But that arrest never took place.
+Christabel Pankhurst eluded the entire force of detectives and uniformed
+police, trained hunters of human prey.</p>
+
+<p>Christabel had gone home, and at first, on hearing of the arrest of Mr.
+and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, had taken her own arrest for granted. A
+little reflection however showed her the danger in which the Union would
+stand if completely deprived of its accustomed leadership, and seeing
+that it was her duty to avoid arrest, she quietly left the house. She
+spent that night with friends who, next morning, helped her to make the
+necessary arrangements and saw her safely away from London. The same
+night she reached Paris, where she has since remained. My relief, when I
+learned of her flight, was very great, because I knew that whatever
+happened to the Lawrences and myself, the movement would be wisely
+directed, this in spite of the fact that the police remained in full
+possession of headquarters.</p>
+
+<p>The offices in Clement's Inn were thoroughly ransacked by the police, in
+a determined effort to secure evidence of conspiracy. They went through
+every desk, file and cabinet, taking away with them two cab loads of
+books and papers, including all my private papers, photographs of my
+children in infancy, and letters sent me by my husband long ago. Some of
+these I never saw again.</p>
+
+<p>The police also terrorised the printer of our weekly newspaper, and
+although the paper came out as usual, about a third of its columns were
+left blank. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> headlines, however, with the ensuing space mere white
+paper produced a most dramatic effect. "History Teaches" read one
+headline to a blank space, plainly indicating that the Government were
+not willing to let the public know some of the things that history
+teaches. "Women's Moderation" suggested that the destroyed paragraph
+called for comparison of the women's window breaking with men's greater
+violence in the past. Most eloquent of all was the editorial page,
+absolutely blank except for the headline, "A Challenge!" and the name at
+the foot of the last column, Christabel Pankhurst. What words could have
+breathed a prouder defiance, a more implacable resolve? Christabel was
+gone, out of the clutches of the Government, yet she remained in
+complete possession of the field. For weeks the search for her went
+relentlessly on. Police searched every railway station, every train,
+every sea port. The police of every city in the Kingdom were furnished
+with her portrait. Every amateur Sherlock Holmes in England joined with
+the police in finding her. She was reported in a dozen cities, including
+New York. But all the time she was living quietly in Paris, in daily
+communication with the workers in London, who within a few days were
+once more at their appointed tasks. My daughter has remained in France ever since.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, I found myself in the anomalous position of a convicted
+offender serving two months' prison sentence, and of a prisoner on
+remand waiting to be charged with a more serious offence. I was in very
+bad health, having been placed in a damp<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> and unwarmed third division
+cell, the result being an acute attack of bronchitis. I addressed a
+letter to the Home Secretary, telling him of my condition, and urging
+the necessity of liberty to recover my health and to prepare my case for
+trial. I asked for release on bail, the plain right of a remand
+prisoner, and I offered if bail were granted now to serve the rest of my
+two months' sentence later on. The sole concessions granted me, however,
+were removal to a better cell and the right to see my secretary and my
+solicitor, but only in the presence of a wardress and a member of the
+prison clerical staff. On March 14th Mr. and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, Mrs.
+Tuke and myself were brought up for preliminary hearing on the charge of
+having, on November 1, 1911, and on various other dates "conspired and
+combined together unlawfully and maliciously to commit damage, etc." The
+case opened on March 14th in a crowded courtroom in which I saw many
+friends. Mr. Bodkin, who appeared for the prosecution, made a very long
+address, in which he endeavoured to prove that the Women's Social and
+Political Union was a highly developed organisation of most sinister
+character. He produced much documentary evidence, some of it of such
+amusing character that the court rocked with stifled laughter, and the
+judge was obliged to conceal his smiles behind his hand. Mr. Bodkin
+cited our code book with the assistance of which we were able to
+communicate private messages. His voice sank to a scandalised half
+whisper as he stated the fact that we had presumed to include the sacred
+persons of the Government in our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span> private code. "We find," said Mr.
+Bodkin portentously, "that public men in the service of His Majesty as
+members of the Cabinet are tabulated here under code names. We find that
+the Cabinet collectively has its code word "Trees," and individual
+members of the Cabinet are designated by the name, sometimes of trees,
+but I am also bound to say the commonest weeds as well." Here a ripple
+of laughter interrupted. Mr. Bodkin frowned heavily, and continued:
+"There is one," he said solemnly, "called Pansy; another one&mdash;more
+complimentary&mdash;Roses, another, Violets, and so on." Each of the
+defendants was designated by a code letter. Thus Mrs. Pankhurst was
+identified by the letter F; Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, D; Miss Christabel
+Pankhurst, E. Every public building, including the House of Commons, had
+its code name. The deadly possibilities of the code were illustrated by
+a telegram found in one of the files. It read: "Silk, thistle, pansy,
+duck, wool, E. Q." Translated by the aid of the code book the telegram
+read: "Will you protest Asquith's public meeting to-morrow evening but
+don't get arrested unless success depends on it. Wire back to Christabel
+Pankhurst, Clements Inn."</p>
+
+<p>More laughter followed these revelations, which after all proved no more
+than the business-like methods employed by the W. S. P. U. The laughter
+proved something a great deal more significant, for it was a plain
+indication that the old respect in which Cabinet Ministers had been held
+was no more. We had torn the veil from their sacro-sanct personalities
+and shown them for what they were, mean and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span>scheming politicians. More
+serious from the point of view of prosecution was the evidence brought
+in by members of the police department in regard to the occurrences of
+March 1st and 4th. The policemen who arrested me and my two companions
+in Downing Street on March 1st, after we had broken the windows in the
+Premier's house, testified that following the arrest, we had handed him
+our reserve stock of stones, and that they were all alike, heavy flints.
+Other prisoners were found in possession of similar stones, tending to
+prove that the stones all came from one source. Other officers testified
+to the methodical manner in which the window breaking of March 1st and
+4th was carried out, how systematically it had been planned and how
+soldierly had been the behaviour of the women. By twos and threes March
+4th they had been seen to go to the headquarters at Clement's Inn,
+carrying handbags, which they deposited at headquarters, and had then
+gone on to a meeting at the Pavillion Music Hall. The police attended
+the meeting, which was the usual rally preceding a demonstration or a
+deputation. At five o'clock the meeting adjourned and the women went
+out, as if to go home. The police observed that many of them, still in
+groups of twos and threes, went to the Gardenia restaurant in Catherine
+Street, Strand, a place where many Suffragette breakfasts and teas had
+been held. The police thought that about one hundred and fifty women
+congregated there on March 4th. They remained until seven o'clock, and
+then, under the watching eyes of the police, they sauntered out and
+dispersed. A few<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> minutes later, when there was no reason to expect such
+a thing, the noise was heard, in many streets, of wholesale window
+smashing. The police authorities made much of the fact that the women
+who had left their bags at headquarters and were afterwards arrested,
+were bailed out that night by Mr. Pethick Lawrence. The similarity of
+the stones used; the gathering of so many women in one building,
+prepared for arrest; the waiting at the Gardenia Restaurant; the
+apparent dispersal; the simultaneous destruction in many localities of
+plate glass, and the bailing of prisoners by a person connected with the
+headquarters mentioned, certainly showed a carefully worked out plan.
+Only a public trial of the defendants could establish whether or not the
+plan was a conspiracy.</p>
+
+<p>On the second day of the Ministerial hearing, Mrs. Tuke, who had been in
+the prison infirmary for twenty days and had to be attended in court by
+a trained nurse, was admitted to bail. Mr. Pethick Lawrence made a
+strong plea for bail for himself and his wife, pointing out that they
+had been in prison on remand for two weeks and were entitled to bail. I
+also demanded the privileges of a prisoner on remand. Both of these
+pleas were denied by the court, but a few days later the Home Secretary
+wrote to my solicitor that the remainder of my sentence of two months
+would be remitted until after the conspiracy trail at Bow Street. Mr.
+and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence had already been admitted to bail. Public
+opinion forced the Home Secretary to make these concessions, as it is
+well known that it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> is next to impossible to prepare a defence while
+confined in prison. Aside from the terrible effect of prison on one's
+body and nerves, there is the difficulty of consulting documents and
+securing other necessary data to be considered.</p>
+
+<p>On April 4th the Ministerial hearing ended in the acquittal of Mrs.
+Tuke, whose activities in the W. S. P. U. were shown to be purely
+secretarial. Mr. and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence and myself were committed for
+trial at the next session of the Central Criminal Court, beginning April
+23rd. Because of the weak state of my health the judge was with great
+difficulty prevailed upon to postpone the trial two weeks and it was,
+therefore, not until May 15th that the case was opened.</p>
+
+<p>The trial at Old Bailey is a thing that I shall never forget. The scene
+is clear before me as I write, the judge impressively bewigged and
+scarlet robed, dominating the crowded courtroom, the solicitors at their
+table, the jury, and looking very far away, the anxious pale faces of
+our friends who crowded the narrow galleries.</p>
+
+<p>By the veriest irony of fate this judge, Lord Coleridge, was the son of
+Sir Charles Coleridge who, in the year 1867, appeared with my husband,
+Dr. Pankhurst, in the famous case of Chorlton v. Lings, and sought to
+establish that women were persons, and as such were entitled to the
+Parliamentary vote. To make the irony still deeper the Attorney General,
+Sir Rufus Isaacs, who appeared as Counsel for the prosecution against
+women militants, himself had been guilty of remarkable speeches in
+corroboration<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> of our point of view. In a speech made in 1910, in
+relation to the abolition of the Lords' veto, Sir Rufus made the
+statement that, although the agitation against privilege was being
+peacefully conducted, the indignation behind it was very intense. Said
+Sir Rufus: "Formerly when the great mass of the people were voteless
+they had to do something violent in order to show what they felt; to-day
+the elector's bullet is his ballot. Let no one be deceived, therefore,
+because in this present struggle everything is peaceful and orderly, in
+contrast to the disorderliness of other great struggles of the past." We
+wondered if the man who said these words could fail to realise that
+voteless women, deprived of every constitutional means of righting their
+grievances, were also obliged to do something violent in order to show
+how they felt. His opening address removed all doubt on that score.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Rufus Isaacs has a clear-cut, hawk-like face, deep eyes, and a
+somewhat world worn air. The first words he spoke were so astoundingly
+unfair that I could hardly believe that I heard them aright. He began
+his address to the jury by telling them that they must not, on any
+account, connect the act of the defendants with any political agitation.</p>
+
+<p>"I am very anxious to impress upon you," he said, "from the moment we
+begin to deal with the facts of this case, that all questions of whether
+a woman is entitled to the Parliamentary franchise, whether she should
+have the same right of franchise as a man, are questions which are in no
+sense involved in the trial of this issue.... Therefore, I ask you to
+discard<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> altogether from the consideration of the matters which will be
+placed before you any viewpoint you may have on this no doubt very
+important political issue."</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless Sir Rufus added in the course of his remarks that he feared
+that it would not be possible to keep out of the conduct of the case
+various references to political events, and of course the entire trial,
+from beginning to end, showed clearly that the case was what Mr. Tim
+Healey, Mrs. Pethick Lawrence's counsel, called it, a great State Trial.</p>
+
+<p>Proceeding, the Attorney General described the W. S. P. U., which he
+said he thought had been in existence since 1907, and had used what were
+known as militant methods. In 1911 the association had become annoyed by
+the Prime Minister because he would not make women's suffrage what was
+called a Government question. In November, 1911, the Prime Minister
+announced the introduction of a manhood suffrage bill. From that time on
+the defendants set to work to carry out a campaign which would have
+meant nothing less than anarchy. Women were to be induced to act
+together at a given time, in different given places, in such numbers
+that the police should be paralysed by the number of persons breaking
+the law, in order, to use the defendant's own words, "to bring the
+Government to its knees."</p>
+
+<p>After designating the respective positions held by the four defendants
+in the W. S. P. U., Sir Rufus went on to relate the events which
+resulted in the smashing of plate glass windows valued at some two
+thousand pounds, and the imprisonment of over two<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> hundred women who
+were incited to their deeds by the conspirators in the dock. He entirely
+ignored the motive of the acts in question, and he treated the whole
+affair as if the women had been burglars. This inverted statement of the
+matter, though accurate enough as to facts, was such as might have been
+given by King John of the signing of Magna Charta.</p>
+
+<p>A very great number of witnesses were examined, a large number of them
+being policemen, and their testimony, and our cross examination
+disclosed the startling fact that there exists in England a special band
+of secret police entirely engaged in political work. These men,
+seventy-five in number, form what is known as the political branch of
+the Criminal Investigation Department of the Police. They go about in
+disguise, and their sole duty is to shadow Suffragettes and other
+political workers. They follow certain political workers from their
+homes to their places of business, to their social pleasures, into tea
+rooms and restaurants, even to the theatre. They pursue unsuspecting
+people in taxicabs, sit beside them in omnibuses. Above all they take
+down speeches. In fact the system is exactly like the secret police
+system of Russia.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Pethick Lawrence and I spoke in our own defence, and Mr. Healey M.
+P. defended Mrs. Pethick Lawrence. I cannot give our speeches in full,
+but I should like to include as much of them as will serve to make the
+entire situation clear to the reader.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lawrence spoke first at the opening of the case. He began by giving
+an account of the suffrage <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>movement and why he felt the enfranchisement
+of women appeared to him a question so grave that it warranted strong
+measures in its pursuit. He sketched briefly the history of the Women's
+Social and Political Union, from the time when Christabel Pankhurst and
+Annie Kenney were thrown out of Sir Edward Grey's meeting and imprisoned
+for asking a political question, to the torpedoing of the Conciliation
+Bill. "The case that I have to put before you," he said, "is that
+neither the conspiracy nor the incitement is ours; but that the
+conspiracy is a conspiracy of the Cabinet who are responsible for the
+Government of this country; and that the incitement is the incitement of
+the Ministers of the Crown." And he did this most effectually not only
+by telling of the disgraceful trickery and deceit with which the
+Government had misled the suffragists in the matter of suffrage bills,
+but by giving the plain words in which members of the Cabinet had
+advised the women that they would never get the vote until they had
+learned to fight for it as men had fought in the past.</p>
+
+<p>When it came my turn to speak, realising that the average man is
+profoundly ignorant of the history of the women's movement&mdash;because the
+press has never adequately or truthfully chronicled the movement&mdash;I told
+the jury, as briefly as I could, the story of the forty years' peaceful
+agitation before my daughters and I resolved that we would give our
+lives to the work of getting the vote for women, and that we should use
+whatever means of getting the vote that were necessary to success.</p>
+
+<p>"We founded the Women's Social and Political<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> Union," I said, "in 1903.
+Our first intention was to try and influence the particular political
+Party, which was then coming into power, to make this question of the
+enfranchisement of women their own question and to push it. It took some
+little time to convince us&mdash;and I need not weary you with the history of
+all that has happened&mdash;but it took some little time to convince us that
+that was no use; that we could not secure things in that way. Then in
+1905 we faced the hard facts. We realised that there was a Press boycott
+against Women's Suffrage. Our speeches at public meetings were not
+reported, our letters to the editors, were not published, even if we
+implored the editors; even the things relating to Women's Suffrage in
+Parliament were not recorded. They said the subject was not of
+sufficient public interest to be reported in the Press, and they were
+not prepared to report it. Then with regard to the men politicians in
+1905: we realised how shadowy were the fine phrases about democracy,
+about human equality, used by the gentlemen who were then coming into
+power. They meant to ignore the women&mdash;there was no doubt whatever about
+that. For in the official documents coming from the Liberal party on the
+eve of the 1905 election, there were sentences like this: 'What the
+country wants is a simple measure of Manhood Suffrage.' There was no
+room for the inclusion of women. We knew perfectly well that if there
+was to be franchise reform at all, the Liberal party which was then
+coming into power did not mean Votes for Women, in spite of all the
+pledges of members; in spite of the fact that a majority of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> the House
+of Commons, especially on the Liberal side, were pledged to it&mdash;it did
+not mean that they were going to put it into practice. And so we found
+some way of forcing their attention to this question.</p>
+
+<p>"Now I come to the facts with regard to militancy. We realised that the
+plans we had in our minds would involve great sacrifice on our part,
+that it might cost us all we had. We were at that time a little
+organisation, composed in the main of working women, the wives and
+daughters of working men. And my daughters and I took a leading part,
+naturally, because we thought the thing out, and, to a certain extent,
+because we were of better social position than most of our members, and
+we felt a sense of responsibility."</p>
+
+<p>I described the events that marked the first days of our work, the scene
+in Free Trade Hall, Manchester, when my daughter and her companion were
+arrested for the crime of asking a question of a politician, and I continued:</p>
+
+<p>"What did they do next? (I want you to realise that no step we have
+taken forward has been taken until after some act of repression on the
+part of our enemy, the Government&mdash;because it is the Government that is
+our enemy; it is not the Members of Parliament, it is not the men in the
+country; it is the Government in power alone that can give us the vote.
+It is the Government alone that we regard as our enemy, and the whole of
+our agitation is directed to bringing just as much pressure as necessary
+upon those people who can deal with our grievance.) The next step the
+women took was to ask questions<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> during the course of meetings, because,
+as I told you, these gentlemen gave them no opportunity of asking them
+afterwards. And then began the interjections of which we have heard, the
+interference with the right to hold public meetings, the interference
+with the right of free speech, of which we have heard, for which these
+women, these hooligan women, as they have been called&mdash;have been
+denounced. I ask you, gentlemen, to imagine the amount of courage which
+it needs for a woman to undertake that kind of work. When men come to
+interrupt women's meetings, they come in gangs, with noisy instruments,
+and sing and shout together, and stamp their feet. But when women have
+gone to Cabinet Ministers' meetings&mdash;only to interrupt Cabinet Ministers
+and nobody else&mdash;they have gone singly. And it has become increasingly
+difficult for them to get in, because as a result of the women's methods
+there has developed the system of admission by ticket and the exclusion
+of women&mdash;a thing which in my Liberal days would have been thought a
+very disgraceful thing at Liberal meetings. But this ticket system
+developed, and so the women could only get in with very great
+difficulty. Women have concealed themselves for thirty-six hours in
+dangerous positions, under the platforms, in the organs, wherever they
+could get a vantage point. They waited starving in the cold, sometimes
+on the roof exposed to a winter's night, just to get a chance of saying
+in the course of a Cabinet Minister's speech, 'When is the Liberal
+Government going to put its promises into practice?' That has been the
+form militancy took in its further development."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span></p><p>I went over the whole matter of our peaceful deputations, and of the
+violence with which they were invariably met; of our arrests and the
+farcical police court trials, where the mere evidence of policemen's
+unsupported statements sent us to prison for long terms; of the
+falsehoods told of us in the House of Commons by responsible members of
+the Government&mdash;tales of women scratching and biting policemen and using
+hatpins&mdash;and I accused the Government of making these attacks against
+women who were powerless to defend themselves because they feared the
+women and desired to crush the agitation represented by our organisation.</p>
+
+<p>"Now it has been stated in this Court," I said, "that it is not the
+Women's Social and Political Union that is in the Court, but that it is
+certain defendants. The action of the Government, gentlemen, is
+certainly against the defendants who are before you here to-day, but it
+is also against the Women's Social and Political Union. The intention is
+to crush that organisation. And this intention apparently was arrived at
+after I had been sent to prison for two months for breaking a pane of
+glass worth, I am told, 2s. 3d., the punishment which I accepted because
+I was a leader of this movement, though it was an extraordinary
+punishment to inflict for so small an act of damages as I had committed.
+I accepted it as the punishment for a leader of an agitation
+disagreeable to the Government; and while I was there this prosecution
+started. They thought they would make a clean sweep of the people who
+they considered were the political brains of the movement. We have got<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span>
+many false friends in the Cabinet&mdash;people who by their words appear to
+be well-meaning towards the cause of Women's Suffrage. And they thought
+that if they could get the leaders of the Union out of the way, it would
+result in the indefinite postponement and settlement of the question in
+this country. Well, they have not succeeded in their design, and even if
+they had got all the so-called leaders of this movement out of their way
+they would not have succeeded even then. Now why have they not put the
+Union in the dock? We have a democratic Government, so-called. This
+Women's Social and Political Union is not a collection of hysterical and
+unimportant wild women, as has been suggested to you, but it is an
+important organisation, which numbers amongst its membership very
+important people. It is composed of women of all classes of the
+community, women who have influence in their particular organisations as
+working women; women who have influence in professional organisations as
+professional women; women of social importance; women even of Royal rank
+are amongst the members of this organisation, and so it would not pay a
+democratic Government to deal with this organisation as a whole.</p>
+
+<p>"They hoped that by taking away the people that they thought guided the
+political fortunes of the organisation they would break the organisation
+down. They thought that if they put out of the way the influential
+members of the organisation they, as one member of the Cabinet, I
+believe, said, would crush the movement and get it 'on the run.' Well,
+Governments have many times been mistaken, gentlemen,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> and I venture to
+suggest to you that Governments are mistaken again. I think the answer
+to the Government was given at the Albert Hall meeting held immediately
+after our arrest. Within a few minutes, without the eloquence of Mrs.
+Pethick Lawrence, without the appeals of the people who have been called
+the leaders of this movement, in a very few minutes &pound;10,000 was
+subscribed for the carrying on of this movement.</p>
+
+<p>"Now a movement like that, supported like that, is not a wild,
+hysterical movement. It is not a movement of misguided people. It is a
+very serious movement. Women, I submit, like our members, and women, I
+venture to say, like the two women, and like the man who are in the dock
+to-day, are not people to undertake a thing like this lightly. May I
+just try to make you feel what it is that has made this movement the
+gigantic size it is from the very small beginnings it had? It is one of
+the biggest movements of modern times. A movement which is not only an
+influence, perhaps not yet recognised, in this country, but is
+influencing the women's movement all over the world. Is there anything
+more marvellous in modern times than the kind of spontaneous outburst in
+every country of this woman's movement? Even in China&mdash;and I think it
+somewhat of a disgrace to Englishmen&mdash;even in China women have won the
+vote, as an outcome of a successful revolution, with which, I dare say,
+members of his Majesty's Government sympathise&mdash;a bloody revolution.</p>
+
+<p>"One more word on that point. When I was in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> prison the second time, for
+three months as a common criminal for no greater offence than the issue
+of a handbill&mdash;less inflammatory in its terms than some of the speeches
+of members of the Government who prosecute us here&mdash;during that time,
+through the efforts of a member of Parliament, there was secured for me
+permission to have the daily paper in prison, and the first thing I read
+in the daily Press was this: that the Government was at that moment
+f&ecirc;ting the members of the Young Turkish Revolutionary Party, gentlemen
+who had invaded the privacy of the Sultan's home&mdash;we used to hear a
+great deal about invading the privacy of Mr. Asquith's residence when we
+ventured to ring his door bell&mdash;gentlemen who had killed and slain, and
+had been successful in their revolution, while we women had never thrown
+a stone&mdash;for none of us was imprisoned for stone throwing, but merely
+for taking the part we had then taken in this organisation. There we
+were imprisoned while these political murderers were being f&ecirc;ted by the
+very Government who imprisoned us, and were being congratulated on the
+success of their revolution. Now I ask you, was it to be wondered at
+that women said to themselves: 'Perhaps it is that we have not done
+enough. Perhaps it is that these gentlemen do not understand womenfolk.
+Perhaps they do not realise women's ways, and because we have not done
+the things that men have done, they may think we are not in earnest.'</p>
+
+<p>"And then we come down to this last business of all, when we have
+responsible statesmen like Mr. Hobhouse saying that there had never been
+any <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>sentimental uprising, no expression of feeling like that which led
+to the burning down of Nottingham Castle. Can you wonder, then, that we
+decided we should have to nerve ourselves to do more, and can you
+understand why we cast about to find a way, as women will, that would
+not involve loss of human life and the maiming of human beings, because
+women care more about human life than men, and I think it is quite
+natural that we should, for we know what life costs. We risk our lives
+when men are born. Now, I want to say this deliberately as a leader of
+this movement. We have tried to hold it back, we have tried to keep it
+from going beyond bounds, and I have never felt a prouder woman than I
+did one night when a police constable said to me, after one of these
+demonstrations, 'Had this been a man's demonstration, there would have
+been bloodshed long ago.' Well, my lord, there has not been any
+bloodshed except on the part of the women themselves&mdash;these so-called
+militant women. Violence has been done to us, and I who stand before you
+in this dock have lost a dear sister in the course of this agitation.
+She died within three days of coming out of prison, a little more than a
+year ago. These are things which, wherever we are, we do not say very
+much about. We cannot keep cheery, we cannot keep cheerful, we cannot
+keep the right kind of spirit, which means success, if we dwell too much
+upon the hard part of our agitation. But I do say this, gentlemen, that
+whatever in future you may think of us, you will say this about us, that
+whatever our enemies may say, we have always put up an honourable
+fight,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> and taken no unfair means of defeating our opponents, although
+they have not always been people who have acted so honourably towards us.</p>
+
+<p>"We have assaulted no one; we have done no hurt to any one; and it was
+not until 'Black Friday'&mdash;and what happened on 'Black Friday' is that we
+had a new Home Secretary, and there appeared to be new orders given to
+the police, because the police on that occasion showed a kind of
+ferocity in dealing with the women that they had never done before, and
+the women came to us and said: 'We cannot bear this'&mdash;it was not until
+then we felt this new form of repression should compel us to take
+another step. That is the question of 'Black Friday,' and I want to say
+here and now that every effort was made after 'Black Friday' to get an
+open public judicial inquiry into the doings of 'Black Friday,' as to
+the instructions given to the police. That inquiry was refused; but an
+informal inquiry was held by a man, whose name will carry conviction as
+to his status and moral integrity on the one side of the great political
+parties, and a man of equal standing on the Liberal side. These two men
+were Lord Robert Cecil and Mr. Ellis Griffith. They held a private
+inquiry, had women before them, took their evidence, examined that
+evidence, and after hearing it said that they believed what the women
+had told them was substantially true, and that they thought there was
+good cause for that inquiry to be held. That was embodied in a report.
+To show you our difficulties, Lord Robert Cecil, in a speech at the
+Criterion Restaurant, spoke on this question. He called upon the
+Government to hold<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> this inquiry, and not one word of that speech was
+reported in any morning paper. That is the sort of thing we have had to
+face, and I welcome standing here, if only for the purpose of getting
+these facts out, and I challenge the Attorney General to institute an
+inquiry into these proceedings&mdash;not that kind of inquiry of sending
+their inspectors to Holloway and accepting what they are told by the
+officials&mdash;but to open a public inquiry, with a jury, if he likes, to
+deal with our grievances against the Government and the methods of this agitation.</p>
+
+<p>"I say it is not the defendants who have conspired, but the Government
+who have conspired against us to crush this agitation; but however the
+matter may be decided, we are content to abide by the verdict of
+posterity. We are not the kind of people who like to brag a lot; we are
+not the kind of people who would bring ourselves into this position
+unless we were convinced that it was the only way. I have tried&mdash;all my
+life I have worked for this question&mdash;I have tried arguments, I have
+tried persuasion. I have addressed a greater number of public meetings,
+perhaps, than any person in this court, and I have never addressed one
+meeting where substantially the opinion of the meeting&mdash;not a ticket
+meeting, but an open meeting, for I have never addressed any other kind
+of a meeting&mdash;has not been that where women bear burdens and share
+responsibilities like men they should be given the privileges that men
+enjoy. I am convinced that public opinion is with us&mdash;that it has been
+stifled&mdash;wilfully stifled&mdash;so that in a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> public Court of Justice one is
+glad of being allowed to speak on this question."</p>
+
+<p>The Attorney General's summing up for the prosecution was very largely a
+defence of the Liberal Party and its course in regard to woman suffrage
+legislation. Therefore, Mr. Tim Healey, in his defence of Mrs. Pethick
+Lawrence, did well to lay stress on the political character of the
+conspiracy charge and trial. He said:</p>
+
+<p>"It is no doubt a very useful thing when you have political opponents to
+be able to set the law in motion against them. I have not the smallest
+doubt it would be a very convenient thing, if they had the courage to do
+it, to shut up the whole of His Majesty's Opposition while the present
+Government is in office&mdash;to lock up all the men of lustre and
+distinction in our public forum and on our public platforms&mdash;all the
+Carsons, F. E. Smiths, Bonar Laws, and so on. It would be a most
+convenient thing to end the whole thing, as it would be to end women's
+agitation in the form of the indictment. Gentlemen of the jury, whatever
+words have been spoken by mutual opponents, whatever instructions have
+been addressed, not to feeble females, but to men who boast of drilling
+and of arms, they have not had the courage to prosecute anybody, except
+women, by means of an indictment. Yet the Government of my learned
+friend have selected two dates as cardinal dates, and they ask you to
+pass judgment upon the prisoners at the bar, and to say that, without
+rhyme or reason, taking the course suggested without <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span>provocation, these
+responsible, well-bred, educated, University people, have suddenly, in
+the words of the indictment, wickedly and with malice aforethought
+engaged in these criminal designs.</p>
+
+<p>"Gentlemen of the jury, the first thing I would ask in that connection
+is this: What is there in the course of this demand put forward by women
+which should have excited the treatment at the hands of His Majesty's
+Ministers which this movement, according to the documents which are in
+evidence before me, has received? I should suppose that the essence of
+all government is the smooth conduct of affairs, so that those who enjoy
+high station, great emoluments, should not be parties against whom the
+accusation of provoking civic strife and breeding public turmoil should
+be brought. What do we find? We find that, in regard to the treatment of
+the demand which had always been put forward humbly, respectably,
+respectfully, in its origin, by those who have received trade unionists,
+anti-vaccinators, deceased wife's sisters, and all other forms of
+political demand, and who have received them humbly and yielded to them,
+we find that when these people advocating this particular form of civic
+reform request an audience, request admission, request even to have
+their petitions respectfully received, they have met, judicially, at all
+events, with a flat and solemn negative. That is the beginning of this
+unhappy spirit bred in the minds of persons like the defendants, persons
+like those against whom evidence has been tendered&mdash;which has led to
+your being empanelled in that box to-day. And I put it to you when you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span>
+are considering whether it is the incitement of my clients or the
+conduct of Ministers that have led to these events&mdash;whether I cannot ask
+you to say that even a fair apportionment of blame should not rest upon
+more responsible shoulders, and whether you should go out of your way to
+say that these persons in the dock alone are guilty."</p>
+
+<p>In closing Mr. Healey reverted to the political character of the trial.
+"The Government have undertaken this prosecution," he declared, "to
+seclude for a considerable period their chief opponents. They hope there
+will be at public meetings which they attend no more inconvenient cries
+of 'Votes for Women.' I cannot conceive any other object which they
+could have in bringing the prosecution. I have expressed my regret at
+the loss which the shopkeepers, tradesmen and others have suffered. I
+regret it deeply. I regret that any person should bring loss or
+suffering upon innocent people. But I ask you to say that the law has
+already been sufficiently vindicated by the punishment of the immediate
+authors of the deed. What can be gained? Does justice gain?</p>
+
+<p>"I almost hesitate to treat this as a legal inquiry. I regard it as a
+vindictive political act. Of all the astonishing acts that have ever
+been brought into a public court against a prisoner I cannot help
+feeling the charge against Mr. Pethick Lawrence is the most astonishing.
+He ventured to attend at some police courts and gave bail for women who
+had been arrested in endeavouring, as I understand, to present petitions
+to Parliament or to have resort to violence. I do not complain of the
+way in which my learned<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> friend has conducted the prosecution, but I do
+complain of the police methods&mdash;inquiring into the homes and the
+domestic circumstances of the prisoners, obtaining their papers, taking
+their newspaper, going into their banking account, bringing up their
+bankers here to say what is their balance; and I do say that in none of
+the prosecutions of the past have smaller methods belittled a great
+State trial, because, look at it as you will, you cannot get away from
+it that this is a great State trial. It is not the women who are on
+trial. It is the men. It is the system of Government which is upon its
+trial. It is this method of rolling the dice by fifty-four counts in an
+indictment without showing to what any bit of evidence is fairly
+attributable; the system is on its trial&mdash;a system whereby every
+innocent act in public life is sought to be enmeshed in a conspiracy."</p>
+
+<p>The jury was absent for more than an hour, showing that they had some
+difficulty in agreeing upon a verdict. When they returned it was plain
+from their strained countenances that they were labouring under deep
+feeling. The foreman's voice shook as he pronounced the verdict, guilty
+as charged, and he had hard work to control his emotion as he added:
+"Your Lordship, we unanimously desire to express the hope that, taking
+into consideration the undoubtedly pure motives that underlie the
+agitation that has led to this trouble, you will be pleased to exercise
+the utmost clemency and leniency in dealing with the case."</p>
+
+<p>A burst of applause followed this plea. Then Mr. Pethick Lawrence arose
+and asked to say a few<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> words before sentence was pronounced. He said
+that it must be evident, aside from the jury's recommendation, that we
+had been actuated by political motives, and that we were in fact
+political offenders. It had been decided in English Courts that
+political offenders were different from ordinary offenders, and Mr.
+Lawrence cited the case of a Swiss subject whose extradition was refused
+because of the political character of his offence. The Court on that
+occasion had declared that even if the crime were murder committed with
+a political motive it was a political crime. Mr. Lawrence also reminded
+the judge of the case of the late Mr. W. T. Stead, convicted of a crime,
+yet because of the unusual motive behind the crime, was allowed first
+division treatment and full freedom to receive his family and friends.
+Last of all the case of Dr. Jameson was cited. Although his raid
+resulted in the death of twenty-one persons and the wounding of
+forty-six more, the political character of his offence was taken into
+account and he was made a first division prisoner.</p>
+
+<p>They were men, fighting in a man's war. We of the W. S. P. U. were
+women, fighting in a woman's war. Lord Coleridge, therefore, saw in us
+only reckless and criminal defiers of law. Lord Coleridge said: "You
+have been convicted of a crime for which the law would sanction, if I
+chose to impose it, a sentence of two years' imprisonment with hard
+labour. There are circumstances connected with your case which the jury
+have very properly brought to my attention, and I have been asked by you
+all three to treat you as first class misdemeanants. If, in the course
+of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> this case, I had observed any contrition or disavowal of the acts
+you have committed, or any hope that you would avoid repetition of them
+in future, I should have been very much prevailed upon by the arguments
+that have been advanced to me."</p>
+
+<p>No contrition having been expressed by us, the sentence of the Court was
+that we were to suffer imprisonment, in the second division, for the
+term of nine months, and that we were to pay the costs of the prosecution.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>CHAPTER III</span></h2>
+
+<p>The sentence of nine months astonished us beyond measure, especially in
+view of certain very recent events, one of these being the case of some
+sailors who had mutinied in order to call attention to something which
+they considered a peril to themselves and to all seafarers. They were
+tried and found technically guilty, but because of the motive behind
+their mutiny, were discharged without punishment. Perhaps more nearly
+like our case than this was the case of the labour leader, Tom Mann,
+who, shortly before, had written a pamphlet calling upon His Majesty's
+soldiers not to fire upon strikers when commanded to do so by their
+superior officers. From the Government's point of view this was a much
+more serious kind of inciting than ours, because if it had been
+responded to the authorities would have been absolutely crippled in
+maintaining order. Besides, soldiers who refuse to obey orders are
+liable to the death penalty. Tom Mann was given a sentence of six
+months, but this was received, on the part of the Liberal Press and
+Liberal politicians, with so much clamour and protest that the prisoner
+was released at the end of two months. So, even on our way to prison, we
+told one another that our sentences could not stand. Public opinion
+would never permit the Government to keep us in prison for nine months,
+or in the second division for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> any part of our term. We agreed to wait
+seven Parliamentary days before we began a hunger strike protest.</p>
+
+<p>It was very dreary waiting, those seven Parliamentary days, because we
+could not know what was happening outside, or what was being talked of
+in the House. We could know nothing of the protests and memorials that
+were pouring in, on our behalf, from Oxford and Cambridge Universities,
+from members of learned societies, and from distinguished men and women
+of all professions, not only in England but in every country of Europe,
+from the United States and Canada, and even from India. An international
+memorial asking that we be treated as political prisoners was signed by
+such great men and women as Prof. Paul Milyoukoff, leader of the
+Constitutional Democrats in the Duma; Signor Enrico Ferri, of the
+Italian Chamber of Deputies; Edward Bernstein, of the German Reichstag;
+George Brandes, Edward Westermarck, Madame Curie, Ellen Key, Maurice
+Maeterlinck, and many others. The greatest indignation was expressed in
+the House, Keir Hardie and Mr. George Lansbury leading in the demand for
+a drastic revision of our sentences and our immediate transference to
+the first division. So much pressure was brought to bear that within a
+few days the Home Secretary announced that he felt it his duty to
+examine into the circumstances of the case without delay. He explained
+that the prisoners had not at any time been forced to wear prison
+clothes. Ultimately, which in this case means shortly before the
+expiration of the seven Parliamentary<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> days, we were all three placed in
+the first division. Mrs. Pethick Lawrence was given the cell formerly
+occupied by Dr. Jameson and I had the cell adjoining. Mr. Pethick
+Lawrence, in Brixton Gaol, was similarly accommodated. We all had the
+privilege of furnishing our cells with comfortable chairs, tables, our
+own bedding, towels, and so on. We had meals sent in from the outside;
+we wore our own clothing and had what books, newspapers and writing
+materials we required. We were not permitted to write or receive letters
+or to see our friends except in the ordinary two weeks' routine. Still
+we had gained our point that suffrage prisoners were politicals.</p>
+
+<p>We had gained it, but, as it turned out, only for ourselves. When we
+made the inquiry, "Are all our women now transferred to the first
+division?" the answer was that the order for transference referred only
+to Mr. and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence and myself. Needless to say, we
+immediately refused to accept this unfair advantage, and after we had
+exhausted every means in our power to induce the Home Secretary to give
+the other suffrage prisoners the same justice that we had received, we
+adopted the protest of the hunger strike. The word flew swiftly through
+Holloway, and in some mysterious way travelled to Brixton, to Aylesbury,
+and Winson Green, and at once all the other suffrage prisoners followed
+our lead. The Government then had over eighty hunger strikers on their
+hands, and, as before, had ready only the argument of force, which means
+that disgusting and cruel process of forcible feeding. Holloway became a
+place of horror and torment. Sickening scenes of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> violence took place
+almost every hour of the day, as the doctors went from cell to cell
+performing their hideous office. One of the men did his work in such
+brutal fashion that the very sight of him provoked cries of horror and
+anguish. I shall never while I live forget the suffering I experienced
+during the days when those cries were ringing in my ears. In her frenzy
+of pain one woman threw herself from the gallery on which her cell
+opened. A wire netting eight feet below broke her fall to the iron
+staircase beneath, else she must inevitably have been killed. As it was
+she was frightfully hurt.</p>
+
+<p>The wholesale hunger strike created a tremendous stir throughout
+England, and every day in the House the Ministers were harassed with
+questions. The climax was reached on the third or fourth day of the
+strike, when a stormy scene took place in the House of Commons. The
+Under Home Secretary, Mr. Ellis Griffith, had been mercilessly
+questioned as to conditions under which the forcible feeding was being
+done, and as soon as this was over one of the suffragist members made a
+moving appeal to the Prime Minister himself to order the release of all
+the prisoners. Mr. Asquith, forced against his will to take part in the
+controversy, rose and said that it was not for him to interfere with the
+actions of his colleague, Mr. McKenna, and he added, in his own suave,
+mendacious manner: "I must point out this, that there is not one single
+prisoner who cannot go out of prison this afternoon on giving the
+undertaking asked for by the Home Secretary." Meaning an undertaking to
+refrain henceforth from militancy.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span></p><p>Instantly Mr. George Lansbury sprang to his feet and exclaimed: "You
+know they cannot! It is perfectly disgraceful that the Prime Minister of
+England should make such a statement."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Asquith glanced carelessly at the indignant Lansbury, but sank into
+his seat without deigning to reply. Shocked to the depths of his soul by
+the insult thrown at our women, Mr. Lansbury strode up to the
+Ministerial bench and confronted the Prime Minister, saying again: "That
+was a disgraceful thing for you to say, Sir. You are beneath contempt,
+you and your colleagues. You call yourselves gentlemen, and you forcibly
+feed and murder women in this fashion. You ought to be driven out of
+office. Talk about protesting. It is the most disgraceful thing that
+ever happened in the history of England. You will go down to history as
+the men who tortured innocent women."</p>
+
+<p>By this time the House was seething, and the indignant Labour member had
+to shout at the top of his big voice in order to be heard over the din.
+Mr. Asquith's pompous order that Mr. Lansbury leave the House for the
+day was probably known to very few until it appeared in print next day.
+At all events Mr. Lansbury continued his protest for five minutes
+longer. "You murder, torture and drive women mad," he cried, "and then
+you tell them they can walk out. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
+You talk about principle&mdash;you talk about fighting in Ulster&mdash;you, too&mdash;"
+turning to the Unionist benches&mdash;"You ought to be driven out of public
+life. These women are showing you what<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> principle is. You ought to
+honour them for standing up for their womanhood. I tell you, Commons of
+England, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves."</p>
+
+<p>The Speaker came to Mr. Asquith's rescue at last and adjured Mr.
+Lansbury that he must obey the Prime Minister's order to leave the
+House, saying that such disorderly conduct would cause the House to lose
+respect. "Sir," exclaimed Mr. Lansbury, in a final burst of righteous
+rage, "it has lost it already."</p>
+
+<p>This unprecedented explosion of wrath and scorn against the Government
+was the sensation of the hour, and it was felt on all sides that the
+release of the prisoners, or at least cessation of forcible feeding,
+which amounted to the same thing, would be ordered. Every day the
+Suffragettes marched in great crowds to Holloway, serenading the
+prisoners and holding protest meetings to immense crowds. The music and
+the cheering, faintly wafted to our straining ears, was inexpressibly
+sweet. Yet it was while listening to one of these serenades that the
+most dreadful moment of my imprisonment occurred. I was lying in bed,
+very weak from starvation, when I heard a sudden scream from Mrs.
+Lawrence's cell, then the sound of a prolonged and very violent
+struggle, and I knew that they had dared to carry their brutal business
+to our doors. I sprang out of bed and, shaking with weakness and with
+anger, I set my back against the wall and waited for what might come. In
+a few moments they had finished with Mrs. Lawrence and had flung open
+the door of my cell. On the threshold I saw the doctors, and back of
+them a large group of wardresses. "Mrs. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span>Pankhurst," began the doctor.
+Instantly I caught up a heavy earthenware water jug from a table hard
+by, and with hands that now felt no weakness I swung the jug head high.</p>
+
+<p>"If any of you dares so much as to take one step inside this cell I
+shall defend myself," I cried. Nobody moved or spoke for a few seconds,
+and then the doctor confusedly muttered something about to-morrow
+morning doing as well, and they all retreated.</p>
+
+<p>I demanded to be admitted to Mrs. Lawrence's cell, where I found my
+companion in a desperate state. She is a strong woman, and a very
+determined one, and it had required the united strength of nine
+wardresses to overcome her. They had rushed into the cell without any
+warning, and had seized her unawares, else they might not have succeeded
+at all. As it was she resisted so violently that the doctors could not
+apply the stethoscope, and they had very great difficulty in getting the
+tube down. After the wretched affair was over Mrs. Lawrence fainted, and
+for hours afterwards was very ill.</p>
+
+<p>This was the last attempt made to forcibly feed either Mrs. Lawrence or
+myself, and two days later we were ordered released on medical grounds.
+The other hunger strikers were released in batches, as every day a few
+more triumphant rebels approached the point where the Government stood
+in danger of committing actual murder. Mr. Lawrence, who was forcibly
+fed twice a day for more than ten days, was released in a state of
+complete collapse on July 1st. Within a few days after that the last of
+the prisoners were at liberty.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span></p><p>As soon as I was sufficiently recovered I went to Paris and had the joy
+of seeing again my daughter Christabel, who, during all the days of
+strife and misery, had kept her personal anxiety in the background and
+had kept staunchly at her work of leadership. The absence of Mr. and
+Mrs. Pethick Lawrence had thrown the entire responsibility of the
+editorship of our paper, <i>Votes for Women</i>, on her shoulders, but as she
+has invariably risen to meet new responsibility, she conducted the paper
+with skill and discretion.</p>
+
+<p>We had much to talk about and to consider, because it was evident that
+militancy, instead of being dropped, as the other suffrage societies
+were constantly suggesting, must go on very much more vigorously than
+before. The struggle had been too long drawn out. We had to seek ways to
+shorten it, to bring it to such a climax that the Government would
+acknowledge that something had to be done. We had already demonstrated
+that our forces were impregnable. We could not be conquered, we could
+not be terrified, we could not even be kept in prison. Therefore, since
+the Government had their war lost in advance, our task was merely to
+hasten the surrender.</p>
+
+<p>The situation in Parliament, as far as the suffrage question was
+concerned, was clean swept and barren. The third Conciliation Bill had
+failed to pass its second reading, the majority against it being fourteen.</p>
+
+<p>Many Liberal members were afraid to vote for the bill because Mr.
+Lloyd-George and Mr. Lewis Harcourt had persistently spread the rumour
+that its passage, at that time, would result in splitting the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> Cabinet.
+The Irish Nationalist members had become hostile to the bill because
+their leader, Mr. Redmond, was an anti-suffragist, and had refused to
+include a woman suffrage clause in the Home Rule Bill. Our erstwhile
+friends, the Labour members, were so apathetic, or so fearful for
+certain of their own measures, that most of them stayed away from the
+House on the day the bill reached its second reading. So it was lost,
+and the Militants were blamed for its loss! In June the Government
+announced that Mr. Asquith's manhood suffrage bill would soon be
+introduced, and very soon after this the bill did appear. It simplified
+the registration machinery, reduced the qualifying period of residence
+to six months, and abolished property qualifications, plural voting and
+University representation. In a word, it gave the Parliamentary
+franchise to every man above the age of twenty-one and it denied it to
+all women. Never in the history of the suffrage movement had such an
+affront been offered to women, and never in the history of England had
+such a blow been aimed at women's liberties. It is true that the Prime
+Minister had pledged himself to introduce a bill capable of being
+amended to include women's suffrage, and to permit any amendment that
+passed its second reading to become a part of the bill. But we had no
+faith in an amendment, nor in any bill that was not from its inception
+an official Government measure. Mr. Asquith had broken every pledge he
+had ever made the women, and this new pledge impressed us not at all.
+Well we knew that he had given it only to cover his treachery in
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span>torpedoing the Conciliation Bill, and in the hope of placating the
+suffragists, perhaps securing another truce to militancy.</p>
+
+<p>If this last was his hope he was most grievously disappointed. Signs
+were constantly appearing to indicate that women would no longer be
+contented with the symbolic militancy involved in window breaking. For
+example, traces were found in the Home Secretary's office at Whitehall
+of an attempt at arson. On the doorstep of another Cabinet Minister
+similar traces were found. Had the Government acted upon these warnings,
+by giving women the vote, all the serious acts of militancy that have
+occurred since would have been averted. But like the heart of Pharaoh,
+the heart of the Government hardened, and militant acts followed one
+another in rapid succession. In July the W. S. P. U. issued a manifesto
+which set forth our intentions in that regard. The manifesto read in part as follows:</p>
+
+<p>"The leaders of the Women's Social and Political Union have so often
+warned the Government that unless the vote were granted to women in
+response to the mild militancy of the past, a fiercer spirit of revolt
+would be awakened which it would be impossible to control. The
+Government have blindly disregarded the warning, and now they are
+reaping the harvest of their unstatesmanlike folly."</p>
+
+<p>This was issued immediately after a visit paid by Mr. Asquith to Dublin.
+The occasion had been intended to be one of great pomp and circumstance,
+a huge popular demonstration in honour of the sponsor of Home Rule, but
+the Suffragettes turned it into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> the most lamentable fiasco imaginable.
+From the hour of Mr. Asquith's attempted secret departure from London
+until his return he lived and moved in momentary dread of Suffragettes.
+Every time he entered or left a railway carriage or a steamer he was
+confronted by women. Every time he rose to speak he was interrupted by
+women. Every public appearance he made was turned into a riot by women.
+As he left Dublin a woman threw a hatchet into his motor car, without,
+however, doing him any injury. As a final protest against his reception
+by Irishmen, the Theatre Royal was set on fire by two women. The theatre
+was practically empty at the time, the performance having been
+completed, and the damage done was comparatively small, yet the two
+women chiefly concerned, Mrs. Leigh and Miss Evans, were given the
+barbarous sentences of five years each in prison. These were the first
+women sentenced to penal servitude in the history of our movement. Of
+course they did not serve their sentences. On entering Mountjoy Prison
+they put in the usual claim for first division treatment, and this being
+refused, they immediately adopted the hunger strike. A number of Irish
+Suffragettes were in Mountjoy at this time for a protest made against
+the exclusion of women from the Home Rule Bill. They were in the first
+division, and they were almost on the eve of their release, but such is
+the indomitable spirit of militancy that these women entered upon a
+sympathetic hunger strike. They were released, but the Government
+forbade the release of Mrs. Leigh and Miss Evans, that is, they ordered
+the authorities to retain<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> the women as long as they could, by forcible
+feeding, be kept alive. After a struggle which, for fierceness and
+cruelty, is almost unparalleled in our annals, the two women fought their way out.</p>
+
+<div class="center"><a name="ill-260.jpg" id="ill-260.jpg"></a><img src="images/ill-260.jpg" width='505' height='700' alt="A SUFFRAGETTE THROWING A BAG OF FLOUR AT MR. ASQUITH IN
+CHESTER" /></div>
+
+<p class="bold">A SUFFRAGETTE THROWING A BAG OF FLOUR AT MR. ASQUITH IN CHESTER</p>
+
+<p>All during that summer militancy surged up and down throughout the
+Kingdom. A series of attacks on golf links was instituted, not at all in
+a spirit of wanton mischief, but with the direct and very practical
+object of reminding the dull and self-satisfied English public that when
+the liberties of English women were being stolen from them was no time
+to think of sports. The women selected country clubs where prominent
+Liberal politicians were wont to take their week-end pleasures, and with
+acids they burned great patches of turf, rendering the golf greens
+useless for the time being. They burned the words, Votes for Women, in
+some cases, and always they left behind them reminders that women were
+warring for their freedom. On one occasion when the Court was at
+Balmoral Castle in Scotland, the Suffragettes invaded the Royal golf
+links, and when Sunday morning dawned all the marking flags were found
+to have been replaced by W. S. P. U. flags hearing inscriptions such as
+"Votes for Women means peace for Ministers," "Forcible feeding must be
+stopped," and the like. The golf links were frequently visited by
+Suffragettes in order to question recreant ministers. Two women followed
+the Prime Minister to Inverness, where he was playing golf with Mr.
+McKenna. Approaching the men one Suffragette exclaimed: "Mr. Asquith,
+you must stop forcible feeding&mdash;" She got no farther, for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> Mr. Asquith,
+turning pale with rage&mdash;perhaps&mdash;retreated behind the Home Secretary,
+who, quite forgetting his manners, seized the Suffragette, crying out
+that he was going to throw her into the pond. "Then we will take you
+with us," the two retorted, after which a very lively scuffle ensued,
+and the women were not thrown into the pond.</p>
+
+<p>This golf green activity really aroused more hostility against us than
+all the window-breaking. The papers published appeals to us not to
+interfere with a game that helped weary politicians to think clearly,
+but our reply to this was that it had not had any such effect on the
+Prime Minister or Mr. Lloyd-George. We had undertaken to spoil their
+sport and that of a large class of comfortable men in order that they
+should be obliged to think clearly about women, and women's firm
+determination to get justice.</p>
+
+<p>I made my return to active work in the autumn by speaking at a great
+meeting of the W. S. P. U., held in the Albert Hall. At that meeting I
+had the announcement to make that the six years' association of Mr. and
+Mrs. Pethick Lawrence with the W. S. P. U. had ended.</p>
+
+<p>Since personal dissensions have never been dwelt upon in the
+W. S. P. U., have never been allowed to halt the movement or to
+interfere for an hour with its progress, I shall not here say any more
+about this important dissension than I said at our first large meeting
+in Albert Hall after the holiday, on October 17th. That day a new paper
+was sold on the streets. It was called <i>The Suffragette</i>, it was edited
+by Christabel Pankhurst, and was henceforth to be the official<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> organ of
+the Union. Both in this new paper and in <i>Votes for Women</i>, the
+following announcement appeared:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p class="center">GRAVE STATEMENT BY THE LEADERS</p>
+
+<p>At the first reunion of the leaders after the enforced holiday,
+Mrs. Pankhurst and Miss Christabel Pankhurst outlined a new
+militant policy which Mr. and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence found
+themselves altogether unable to approve.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Pankhurst and Miss Christabel Pankhurst indicated that they
+were not prepared to modify their intentions, and recommended that
+Mr. and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence should resume control of the Paper,
+<i>Votes for Women</i>, and should leave the Women's Social and
+Political Union.</p>
+
+<p>Rather than make schism in the ranks of the Union Mr. and Mrs.
+Pethick Lawrence consented to take this course.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>This was signed by all four. That night at the meeting I further
+explained to the members that, hard as partings from old friends and
+comrades unquestionably were, we must remember that we were fighting in
+an army, and that unity of purpose and unity of policy are absolutely
+necessary, because without them the army is hopelessly weakened. "It is
+better," I said, "that those who cannot agree, cannot see eye to eye as
+to policy, should set themselves free, should part, and should be free
+to continue their policy as they see it in their own way, unfettered by
+those with whom they can no longer agree."</p>
+
+<p>Continuing I said: "I give place to none in appreciation and gratitude
+to Mr. and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence for the incalculable services that they
+have rendered the militant movement for Woman <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span>Suffrage, and I firmly
+believe that the women's movement will be strengthened by their being
+free to work for woman suffrage in the future as they think best, while
+we of the Women's Social and Political Union shall continue the militant
+agitation for Woman Suffrage initiated by my daughter and myself and a
+handful of women more than six years ago."</p>
+
+<p>I then went on to survey the situation in which the W. S. P. U. now
+stood and to outline the new militant policy which he had decided upon.
+This policy, to begin with, was relentless opposition, not only to the
+party in power, the Liberal Party, but to all parties in the coalition.
+I reminded the women that the Government that had tricked and betrayed
+us and was now plotting to make our progress towards citizenship doubly
+difficult, was kept in office through the coalition of three parties.
+There was the Liberal Party, nominally the governing party, but they
+could not live another day without the coalition of the Nationalist and
+the Labour parties. So we should say, not only to the Liberal Party but
+to the Nationalist Party and the Labour Party, "So long as you keep in
+office an anti-suffrage Government, you are parties to their guilt, and
+from henceforth we offer you the same opposition which we give to the
+people whom you are keeping in power with your support." I said further:
+"We have summoned the Labour Party to do their duty by their own
+programme, and to go into opposition to the Government on every question
+until the Government do justice to women. They apparently are not
+willing to do that. Some of them tell us that other<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> things are more
+important than the liberty of women&mdash;than the liberty of working women.
+We say, 'Then, gentlemen, we must teach you the value of your own
+principles, and until you are prepared to stand for the right of women
+to decide their lives and the laws under which they shall live, you,
+with Mr. Asquith and company, are equally responsible for all that has
+happened and is happening to women in this struggle for emancipation.'"</p>
+
+<p>Outlining further our new and stronger policy of aggression, I said:
+"There is a great deal of criticism, ladies and gentlemen, of this
+movement. It always seems to me when the anti-suffrage members of the
+Government criticise militancy in women that it is very like beasts of
+prey reproaching the gentler animals who turn in desperate resistance
+when at the point of death. Criticism from gentlemen who do not hesitate
+to order out armies to kill and slay their opponents, who do not
+hesitate to encourage party mobs to attack defenceless women in public
+meetings&mdash;criticism from them hardly rings true. Then I get letters from
+people who tell me that they are ardent suffragists but who say that
+they do not like the recent developments in the militant movement, and
+implore me to urge the members not to be reckless with human life.
+Ladies and gentlemen, the only recklessness the militant suffragists
+have shown about human life has been about their own lives and not about
+the lives of others, and I say here and now that it has never been and
+never will be the policy of the Women's Social and Political Union
+recklessly to endanger human life. We leave that to the enemy.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> We leave
+that to the men in their warfare. It is not the method of women. No,
+even from the point of view of public policy, militancy affecting the
+security of human life would be out of place. <i>There is something that
+governments care far more for than human life, and that is the security
+of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the
+enemy.</i> From henceforward the women who agree with me will say, 'We
+disregard your laws, gentlemen, we set the liberty and the dignity and
+the welfare of women above all such considerations, and we shall
+continue this war, as we have done in the past; and what sacrifice of
+property, or what injury to property accrues will not be our fault. It
+will be the fault of that Government who admit the justice of our
+demands, but refuses to concede them without the evidence, so they have
+told us, afforded to governments of the past, that those who asked for
+liberty were in earnest in their demands!"</p>
+
+<p>I called upon the women of the meeting to join me in this new militancy,
+and I reminded them anew that the women who were fighting in the
+Suffragette army had a great mission, the greatest mission the world has
+ever known&mdash;the freeing of one-half the human race, and through that
+freedom the saving of the other half. I said to them: "Be militant each
+in your own way. Those of you who can express your militancy by going to
+the House of Commons and refusing to leave without satisfaction, as we
+did in the early days&mdash;do so. Those of you who can express militancy by
+facing party mobs at Cabinet Ministers' meetings, when you remind them
+of their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> falseness to principle&mdash;do so. Those of you who can express
+your militancy by joining us in our anti-Government by-election
+policy&mdash;do so. Those of you who can break windows&mdash;break them. Those of
+you who can still further attack the secret idol of property, so as to
+make the Government realise that property is as greatly endangered by
+women's suffrage as it was by the Chartists of old&mdash;do so. And my last
+word is to the Government: I incite this meeting to rebellion. I say to
+the Government: You have not dared to take the leaders of Ulster for
+their incitement to rebellion. Take me if you dare, but if you dare I
+tell you this, that so long as those who incited to armed rebellion and
+the destruction of human life in Ulster are at liberty, you will not
+keep me in prison. So long as men rebels&mdash;and voters&mdash;are at liberty,
+we will not remain in prison, first division or no first division."</p>
+
+<p>I ask my readers, some of whom no doubt will be shocked and displeased
+at these words of mine that I have so frankly set down, to put
+themselves in the place of those women who for years had given their
+lives entirely and unstintingly to the work of securing political
+freedom for women; who had converted so great a proportion of the
+electorate that, had the House of Commons been a free body, we should
+have won that freedom years before; who had seen their freedom withheld
+from them through treachery and misuse of power. I ask you to consider
+that we had used, in our agitation, only peaceful means until we saw
+clearly that peaceful means were absolutely of no avail, and then for
+years we had used only the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> mildest militancy, until we were taunted by
+Cabinet Ministers, and told that we should never get the vote until we
+employed the same violence that men had used in their agitation for
+suffrage. After that we had used stronger militancy, but even that, by
+comparison with the militancy of men in labour disputes, could not
+possibly be counted as violent. Through all these stages of our
+agitation we had been punished with the greatest severity, sent to
+prison like common criminals, and of late years tortured as no criminals
+have been tortured for a century in civilised countries of the world.
+And during all these years we had seen disastrous strikes that had
+caused suffering and death, to say nothing at all of the enormous
+economic waste, and we had never seen a single strike leader punished as
+we had been. We, who had suffered sentences of nine months' imprisonment
+for inciting women to mild rebellion, had seen a labour leader who had
+done his best to incite an army to mutiny released from prison in two
+months by the Government. And now we had come to a point where we saw
+civil war threatened, where we read in the papers every day reports of
+speeches a thousand times more incendiary than anything we had ever
+said. We heard prominent members of Parliament openly declaring that if
+the Home Rule Bill was passed Ulster would fight, and Ulster would be
+right. None of these men were arrested. Instead they were applauded.
+Lord Selborne, one of our sternest critics, referring to the fact that
+Ulstermen were drilling under arms, said publicly: "The method which the
+people of Ulster are adopting to show the depths of their convictions
+and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span> the intensity of their feelings will impress the imagination of the
+whole country." But Lord Selborne was not arrested. Neither were the
+mutinous officers who resigned their commissions when ordered to report
+for duty against the men of Ulster who were actually preparing for civil war.</p>
+
+<p>What does all this mean? Why is it that men's blood-shedding militancy
+is applauded and women's symbolic militancy punished with a prison cell
+and the forcible feeding horror? It means simply this, that men's double
+standard of sex morals, whereby the victims of their lust are counted as
+outcasts, while the men themselves escape all social censure, really
+applies to morals in all departments of life. Men make the moral code
+and they expect women to accept it. They have decided that it is
+entirely right and proper for men to fight for their liberties and their
+rights, but that it is not right and proper for women to fight for
+theirs.<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></p>
+
+<p>They have decided that for men to remain silently quiescent while
+tyrannical rulers impose bonds of slavery upon them is cowardly and
+dishonourable, but that for women to do that same thing is not cowardly
+and dishonourable, but merely respectable. Well, the Suffragettes
+absolutely repudiate that double standard of morals. If it is right for
+men<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> to fight for their freedom, and God knows what the human race would
+be like to-day if men had not, since time began, fought for their
+freedom, then it is right for women to fight for their freedom and the
+freedom of the children they bear. On this declaration of faith the
+militant women of England rest their case.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTE:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> There is no question that a great deal of the animus
+directed against us during 1913 and 1914 by the Government was due to
+sex bitterness stirred up by a series of articles written by Christabel
+Pankhurst and published in <i>The Suffragette</i>. These articles, a fearless
+and authoritative expos&eacute; of the evils of sexual immoralities and their
+blasting effect on innocent wives and children, have since been
+published in a book called "The Great Scourge, and how to end it,"
+issued by David Nutt, New Oxford Street, London W. C.</p></div></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>CHAPTER IV</span></h2>
+
+<p>I had called upon women to join me in striking at the Government through
+the only thing that governments are really very much concerned
+about&mdash;property&mdash;and the response was immediate. Within a few days the
+newspapers rang with the story of the attack made on letter boxes in
+London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol, and half a dozen other cities.
+In some cases the boxes, when opened by postmen, mysteriously burst into
+flame; in others the letters were destroyed by corrosive chemicals; in
+still others the addresses were rendered illegible by black fluids.
+Altogether it was estimated that over 5,000 letters were completely
+destroyed and many thousands more were delayed in transit.</p>
+
+<p>It was with a deep sense of their gravity that these letter-burning
+protests were undertaken, but we felt that something drastic must be
+done in order to destroy the apathy of the men of England who view with
+indifference the suffering of women oppressed by unjust laws. As we
+pointed out, letters, precious though they may be, are less precious
+than human bodies and souls. This fact was universally realised at the
+sinking of the <i>Titanic</i>. Letters and valuables disappeared forever, but
+their loss was forgotten in the far more terrible loss of the multitude
+of human lives. And so, in order to call attention to greater<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span> crimes
+against human beings, our letter burnings continued.</p>
+
+<p>In only a few cases were the offenders apprehended, and one of the few
+women arrested was a helpless cripple, a woman who could move about only
+in a wheeled chair. She received a sentence of eight months in the first
+division, and, resolutely hunger striking, was forcibly fed with unusual
+brutality, the prison doctor deliberately breaking one of her teeth in
+order to insert a gag. In spite of her disabilities and her weakness the
+crippled girl persisted in her hunger strike and her resistance to
+prison rules, and within a short time had to be released. The excessive
+sentences of the other pillar box destroyers resolved themselves into
+very short terms because of the resistance of the prisoners, every one
+of whom adopted the hunger strike.</p>
+
+<p>Having shown the Government that we were in deadly earnest when we
+declared that we would adopt guerrilla warfare, and also that we would
+not remain in prison, we announced a truce in order that the Government
+might have full opportunity to fulfil their pledge in regard to a woman
+suffrage amendment to the Franchise Bill. We did not, for one moment,
+believe that Mr. Asquith would willingly keep his word. We knew that he
+would break it if he could, but there was a bare chance that he would
+not find this possible. However, our principal reason for declaring the
+truce was that we believed that the Prime Minister would find a way of
+evading his promise, and we were determined that the blame should be
+placed, not on militancy, but on the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span>shoulders of the real traitor. We
+reviewed the history of past suffrage bills: In 1908 the bill had passed
+its second reading by a majority of 179; and then Mr. Asquith had
+refused to allow it to go on; in 1910 the Conciliation Bill passed its
+second reading by a majority of 110, and again Mr. Asquith blocked its
+progress, pledging himself that if the bill were reintroduced in 1911,
+in a form rendering it capable of free amendment, it would be given full
+facilities for becoming law; these conditions were met in 1911, and we
+saw how the bill, after receiving the increased majority of 167 votes,
+was torpedoed by the introduction of a Government manhood suffrage bill.
+Mr. Asquith this time had pledged himself that the bill would be so
+framed that a woman suffrage amendment could be added, and he further
+pledged that in case such an amendment was carried through its second
+reading, he would allow it to become a part of the bill. Just exactly
+how the Government would manage to wriggle out of their promise was a
+matter of excited speculation.</p>
+
+<p>All sorts of rumours were flying about, some hinting at the resignation
+of the Prime Minister, some suggesting the possibility of a general
+election, others that the amended bill would carry with it a forced
+referendum on women's suffrage. It was also said that the intention of
+the Government was to delay the bill so long that, after it was passed
+in the House, it would be excluded from the benefits of the Parliament
+Acts, according to which a bill, delayed of passage beyond the first two
+years of the life of a Parliament, has no chance of being considered by
+the Lords.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span> In order to become a law without the sanction of the House
+of Lords, a bill must pass three times through the House of Commons. The
+prospect of a woman suffrage bill doing that was practically nil.</p>
+
+<p>To none of the rumours would Mr. Asquith give specific denial, and in
+fact the only positive utterance he made on the subject of the Franchise
+Bill was that he considered it highly improbable that the House would
+pass a woman suffrage amendment. In order to discourage woman suffrage
+sentiment in the House, Mr. Lloyd-George and Mr. Lewis Harcourt again
+busied themselves with spreading pessimistic prophecies of a Cabinet
+split in case an amendment was carried. No other threat, they well knew,
+would so terrorize the timid back bench Liberals, who, in addition to
+their blind party loyalty, stood in fear of losing their seats in the
+general election which would follow such a split. Rather than risk their
+political jobs they would have sacrificed any principle. Of course the
+hint of a Cabinet split was pure buncombe, and it deceived few of the
+members. But it established very clearly one thing, and this was that
+Mr. Asquith's promise that the House should be left absolutely free to
+decide the suffrage issue, and that the Cabinet stood ready to bow to
+the decision of the House was never meant to be fulfilled.</p>
+
+<p>The Franchise Bill unamended, by its very wording, specifically denied
+the right of any woman to vote. Sir Edward Grey moved an amendment
+deleting from the bill the word male, thus leaving room for a women's
+suffrage amendment. Two such amendments were moved, one providing for
+adult<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span> suffrage for men and women, and the other providing full suffrage
+for women householders and wives of householders. The latter postponed
+the voting age of women to twenty-five years, instead of the men's
+twenty-one. On January 24th, 1913, debate on the first of the amendments
+was begun. A day and a half had been allotted to consideration of Sir
+Edward Grey's amendment, which if carried would leave the way clear for
+consideration of the other two, to each of which one-third of a day was allotted.</p>
+
+<p>We had arranged for huge meetings to be held every day during the
+debates, and on the day before they were to open we sent a deputation of
+working women, led by Mrs. Drummond and Miss Annie Kenney, to interview
+Mr. Lloyd-George and Sir Edward Grey. We had asked Mr. Asquith to
+receive the deputation, but, as usual, he refused. The deputation
+consisted of the two leaders, four cotton mill operatives from
+Lancashire, four workers in sweated trades of London, two pit brow
+lassies, two teachers, two trained nurses, one shop assistant, one
+laundress, one boot and shoe worker and one domestic worker, twenty in
+all, the exact number specified by Mr. Lloyd-George. Some hundreds of
+working women escorted the deputation to the official residence of the
+Chancellor of the Exchequer and waited anxiously in the street to hear
+the result of the audience.</p>
+
+<p>The result was, of course, barren. Mr. Lloyd-George glibly repeated his
+confidence in the "great opportunity" afforded by the Franchise Bill,
+and Sir Edward Grey, reminding the women of the divergence of view held
+by the members of Cabinet on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> the suffrage question, assured them that
+their best opportunity for success lay in an amendment to the present
+bill. The women spoke with the greatest candour to the two ministers and
+questioned them sharply as to the integrity of the Prime Minister's
+pledge to accept the amendments, if passed. To such depth of infamy had
+English politics sunk that it was possible for women openly to question
+the plighted word of the King's chief Minister! Mrs. Drummond, who
+stands in awe of no human being, in plain words invited the slippery Mr.
+Lloyd-George to clear his own character from obloquy. In the closing
+words of her speech she put the whole matter clearly up to him, saying:
+"Now, Mr. Lloyd-George, you have doggedly stuck to your old age
+pensions, and the insurance act, and secured them, and what you have
+done for these measures you can do also for the women."</p>
+
+<p>The House met on the following afternoon to debate Sir Edward Grey's
+permissive amendment, but no sooner had the discussion opened than a
+veritable bombshell was cast into the situation. Mr. Bonar Law arose and
+asked for a ruling on the constitutionality of a woman's suffrage
+amendment to the bill as framed. The Speaker, who, besides acting as the
+presiding officer of the House, is its official parliamentarian, replied
+that, in his opinion, such an amendment would make a huge difference in
+the bill, and that he would be obliged, at a later stage of the debates,
+to consider carefully whether, if carried, any woman suffrage amendment
+would not so materially alter the bill that it would have to be
+withdrawn. In<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> spite of this sinister pronouncement, the House continued
+to debate the Grey amendment, which was ably supported by Lord Hugh
+Cecil, Sir John Rolleston, and others.</p>
+
+<p>During the intervening week-end holiday two Cabinet councils were held,
+and when the House met on Monday the Prime Minister called upon the
+Speaker for his ruling. The Speaker declared that, in his opinion, the
+passage of any one of the woman suffrage amendments would so alter the
+scope of the Franchise Bill as practically to create a new bill, because
+the measure, as it was framed, did not have for its main object the
+bestowal of the franchise on a hitherto excluded class. Had it been so
+framed a woman suffrage amendment would have been entirely proper. But
+the main object of the bill was to alter the qualification, or the basis
+of registration for a Parliamentary vote. It would increase the male
+electorate, but only as an indirect result of the changed
+qualifications. An amendment to the bill removing the sex barrier from
+the election laws was not, in the Speaker's opinion, a proper one.</p>
+
+<p>The Prime Minister then announced the intentions of the Cabinet, which
+were to withdraw the Franchise Bill and to refrain from introducing,
+during that session, a plural voting bill. Mr. Asquith blandly admitted
+that his pledge in regard to women's suffrage had been rendered
+incapable of fulfilment, and he said that he felt constrained to give a
+new pledge to take its place. There were only two that could be given.
+The first was that the Government should bring in a bill to enfranchise
+women, and this the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span> Government would not do. The second was that the
+Government agree to give full facilities as to time, during the next
+session of Parliament, to a private member's bill, so drafted as to be
+capable of free amendment. This was the course that the Government had
+decided to adopt. Mr. Asquith had the effrontery to say in conclusion
+that he thought that the House would agree that he had striven and had
+succeeded in giving effect, both in letter and in spirit, to every
+undertaking which the Government had given.</p>
+
+<p>Two members only, Mr. Henderson and Mr. Keir Hardie had the courage to
+stand up on the floor of the House and denounce the Government's
+treachery, for treachery it unquestionably was. Mr. Asquith had pledged
+his sacred honour to introduce a bill that would be capable of an
+amendment to include women's suffrage, and he had framed a bill that
+could not be so amended. Whether he had done the thing deliberately,
+with the plain intention of selling out the women, or whether ignorance
+of Parliamentary rules accounted for the failure of the bill was
+immaterial. The bill need not have been drawn in ignorance. The fount of
+wisdom represented by Mr. Speaker could have been consulted at the time
+the bill was under construction quite as easily as when it had reached
+the debating stage. Our paper said editorially, representing and
+perfectly expressing our member's views: "Either the Government are so
+ignorant of Parliamentary procedure that they are unfit to occupy any
+position of responsibility, or else they are scoundrels of the worst kind."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span></p><p>I am inclined to think that the verdict of posterity will lean towards
+the later conclusion. If Mr. Asquith had been a man of honour he would
+have reframed the Franchise Bill in such a way that it could have
+included a suffrage amendment, or else he would have made amends for his
+stupendous blunder&mdash;if it was a blunder&mdash;by introducing a Government
+measure for women's suffrage. He did neither, but disposed of the matter
+by promising facilities for a private member's bill which he knew, and
+which everybody knew, could not possibly pass.</p>
+
+<p>There was no chance for a private member's bill, even with facilities,
+because of a number of reasons, but principally because the torpedoing
+of the Conciliation Bill had destroyed utterly the spirit of
+conciliation in which Conservatives, Liberals and Radicals in the House
+of Commons, and militant and non-militant women throughout the Kingdom
+had set aside their differences of opinion and agreed to come together
+on a compromise measure. When the second Conciliation Bill, of 1911, was
+under discussion, Lord Lytton had said: "If this bill does not go
+through, the woman suffrage movement will not be stopped, but the spirit
+of conciliation of which this bill is an expression will be destroyed,
+and there will he war throughout the country, raging, tearing, fierce,
+bitter strife, though nobody wants it."</p>
+
+<p>Lord Lytton's words were prophetic. At this last brazen piece of
+trickery on the part of the Government the country blazed with bitter
+wrath. All the suffrage societies united in calling for a Government
+measure for women's suffrage to be introduced<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span> without delay. The idle
+promise of facilities for a private member's bill was rejected with
+contumely and scorn. The Liberal women's executive committee met, and a
+strong effort was made to pass a resolution threatening the withdrawal
+from party work of the entire federation, but this failed and the
+executive merely passed a feeble resolution of regret.</p>
+
+<p>The membership of the Women's Liberal Federation was, at that time,
+close to 200,000, and if the executive had passed the strong resolution,
+refusing to do any more work for the party until a Government measure
+had been introduced, the Government would have been forced to yield.
+They could not have faced the country without the support of the women.
+But these women, many of them, were wives of men in the service, the
+paid service of the Liberal Party. Many of them were wives of Liberal
+members. They lacked the courage, or the intelligence, or the insight,
+to declare war as a body on the Government. A large number of women, and
+also many men, did resign from the Liberal Party, but the defections
+were not serious enough to affect the Government.</p>
+
+<p>The militants declared, and proceeded instantly to carry out,
+unrelenting warfare. We announced that either we must have a Government
+measure, or a Cabinet split&mdash;those men in the Cabinet calling themselves
+suffragists going out&mdash;or we would take up the sword again, never to lay
+it down until the enfranchisement of the women of England was won.</p>
+
+<p>It was at this time, February, 1913, less than two years ago as I write
+these words, that militancy, as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> it is now generally understood by the
+public began&mdash;militancy in the sense of continued, destructive, guerilla
+warfare against the Government through injury to private property. Some
+property had been destroyed before this time, but the attacks were
+sporadic, and were meant to be in the nature of a warning as to what
+might become a settled policy. Now we indeed lighted the torch, and we
+did it with the absolute conviction that no other course was open to us.
+We had tried every other measure, as I am sure that I have demonstrated
+to my readers, and our years of work and suffering and sacrifice had
+taught us that the Government would not yield to right and justice, what
+the majority of members of the House of Commons admitted was right and
+justice, but that the Government would, as other governments invariably
+do, yield to expediency. Now our task was to show the Government that it
+was expedient to yield to the women's just demands. In order to do that
+we had to make England and every department of English life insecure and
+unsafe. We had to make English law a failure and the courts farce comedy
+theatres; we had to discredit the Government and Parliament in the eyes
+of the world; we had to spoil English sports, hurt business, destroy
+valuable property, demoralise the world of society, shame the churches,
+upset the whole orderly conduct of life&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>That is, we had to do as much of this guerilla warfare as the people of
+England would tolerate. When they came to the point of saying to the
+Government: "Stop this, in the only way it can be stopped, by <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span>giving
+the women of England representation," then we should extinguish our torch.</p>
+
+<p>Americans, of all people, ought to see the logic of our reasoning. There
+is one piece of American oratory, beloved of schoolboys, which has often
+been quoted from militant platforms. In a speech now included among the
+classics of the English language your great statesman, Patrick Henry,
+summed up the causes that led to the American Revolution. He said: "We
+have petitioned, we have remonstrated, we have supplicated, we have
+prostrated ourselves at the foot of the throne, and it has all been in
+vain. We must fight&mdash;I repeat it, sir, we must fight."</p>
+
+<p>Patrick Henry, remember, was advocating killing people, as well as
+destroying private property, as the proper means of securing the
+political freedom of men. The Suffragettes have not done that, and they
+never will. In fact the moving spirit of militancy is deep and abiding
+reverence for human life. In the latter course of our agitation I have
+been called upon to discuss our policies with many eminent men,
+politicians, literary men, barristers, scientists, clergymen. One of the
+last named, a high dignitary of the Church of England, told me that
+while he was a convinced suffragist, he found it impossible to justify
+our doing wrong that right might follow. I said to him: "We are not
+doing wrong&mdash;we are doing right in our use of revolutionary methods
+against private property. It is our work to restore thereby true values,
+to emphasise the value of human rights against property rights. You are
+well aware, sir, that property has assumed a value in the eyes of men,
+and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> in the eyes of the law, that it ought never to claim. It is placed
+above all human values. The lives and health and happiness, and even the
+virtue of women and children&mdash;that is to say, the race itself&mdash;are being
+ruthlessly sacrificed to the god of property every day of the world."</p>
+
+<p>To this my reverend friend agreed, and I said: "If we women are wrong in
+destroying private property in order that human values may be restored,
+then I say, in all reverence, that it was wrong for the Founder of
+Christianity to destroy private property, as He did when He lashed the
+money changers out of the Temple and when He drove the Gaderene swine into the sea."</p>
+
+<p>It was absolutely in this spirit that our women went forth to war. In
+the first month of guerilla warfare an enormous amount of property was
+damaged and destroyed. On January 31st a number of putting greens were
+burned with acids; on February 7th and 8th telegraph and telephone wires
+were cut in several places and for some hours all communication between
+London and Glasgow were suspended; a few days later windows in various
+of London's smartest clubs were broken, and the orchid houses at Kew
+were wrecked and many valuable blooms destroyed by cold. The jewel room
+at the Tower of London was invaded and a showcase broken. The residence
+of H. R. H. Prince Christian and Lambeth Palace, seat of the Archbishop
+of Canterbury, were visited and had windows broken. The refreshment
+house in Regents Park was burned to the ground on February 12th and on
+February 18th a country house<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span> which was being built at
+Walton-on-the-Hill for Mr. Lloyd-George was partially destroyed, a bomb
+having been exploded in the early morning before the arrival of the
+workmen. A hat pin and a hair pin picked up near the house&mdash;coupled with
+the fact that care had been taken not to endanger any lives&mdash;led the
+police to believe that the deed had been done by women enemies of Mr.
+Lloyd-George. Four days later I was arrested and brought up in Epsom
+police court, where I was charged with having "counselled and procured"
+the persons who did the damage. Admitted to bail for the night, I
+appeared next morning in court, where the case was fully reviewed.
+Speeches of mine were read, one speech, made at a meeting held on
+January 22nd, in which I called for volunteers to act with me in a
+particular engagement; and another, made the day after the explosion, in
+which I publicly accepted responsibility for all militant acts done in
+the past, and even for what had been done at Walton. At the conclusion
+of the hearing I was committed for trial at the May Assizes at
+Guildford. Bail would be allowed, it was stated, if I would agree to
+give the usual undertaking to refrain from all militancy or incitement to militancy.</p>
+
+<p>I asked that the case be set for speedy trial at the Assizes then in
+progress. I was entirely willing, I said, to give an undertaking for a
+short period, for a week, or even two weeks, but I could not possibly do
+so for a much longer period, looking at the fact that a new session of
+Parliament began in March, and was vitally concerned with the interests
+of women.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> The request was refused, and I was ordered to be taken to
+Holloway. I warned the magistrate that I should at once adopt the hunger
+strike, and I told him that if I lived at all until the summer it would
+be a dying woman who would come up for trial.</p>
+
+<p>Arriving at Holloway I carried out my intention, but within twenty-four
+hours I heard that the authorities had arranged that my trial should
+take place on April 1st, instead of at the end of June, and at the
+Central Criminal Court, London, instead of the Guildford Court. I then
+gave the required under-takings and was immediately released on bail.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>CHAPTER V</span></h2>
+
+<p>When I entered Old Bailey on that memorable Wednesday, April 2nd, 1913,
+to be tried for inciting to commit a felony, the court was packed with
+women. A great crowd of women who could not obtain the necessary tickets
+remained in the streets below for hours waiting news of the trial. A
+large number of detectives from Scotland Yard, and a still larger number
+of uniformed police were on duty both inside and outside the court. I
+could not imagine why it was considered necessary to have such a
+regiment of police on hand, for I had not, at that time, realised the
+state of terror into which the militant movement, in its new
+development, had thrown the authorities.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bodkin and Mr. Travers Humphreys appeared to prosecute on behalf of
+the Crown, and I conducted my own case, in consultation with my
+solicitor, Mr. Marshall. The Judge, Mr. Justice Lush, having taken his
+seat I entered the dock and listened to the reading of the indictment. I
+pled "not guilty," not because I wished to evade responsibility for the
+explosion,&mdash;I had already assumed that responsibility&mdash;but because the
+indictment accused me of having wickedly and maliciously incited women
+to crime. What I had done was not wicked of purpose, but quite the
+opposite of wicked. I could not therefore truthfully plead guilty. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span>
+trial having opened the Judge courteously asked me if I would like to
+sit down. I thanked him, and asked if I might also have a small table on
+which to place my papers. By orders of the Judge a table was brought me.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bodkin opened the case by explaining the "Malicious Damages to
+Property Act" of 1861, under which I was charged, and after describing
+the explosion which had damaged the Lloyd-George house at Walton, said
+that I was accused of being in the affair an accessory before the fact.
+It was not suggested, he said, that I was present when the crime was
+committed, but it was charged that I had moved and incited, counselled
+and procured women whose names were unknown to carry out that crime. It
+would be for the jury to decide, after the evidence had been presented,
+whether the facts did not point most clearly to the conclusion that
+women, probably two in number, who committed the crime were members of
+the Women's Social and Political Union, which had its office in Kingsway
+in London, and of which the defendant was the head, moving spirit and
+recognised leader.</p>
+
+<p>The blowing up of Mr. Lloyd-George's house was then described in detail.
+That the damage was intended as an act against Mr. Lloyd-George was
+clear, Mr. Bodkin said, from the malicious statements made against him
+by the prisoner. He produced a private letter written by me to a friend
+in which I had defended militancy, and said that not only had it become
+a duty but in the circumstances it had also become a political
+necessity. Said Mr. Bodkin:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span></p><p>"A letter of that kind proves very clearly several things. It shows
+that she is the leader. It shows her influence over the emotional
+members of this organisation. It shows that according to her, militancy
+can be withheld for a time and let loose upon society at another time.
+And it further shows that any person or any woman who wants to indulge
+in militancy, which is only a picturesque expression for committing
+crimes against society, has to communicate with her, and with her alone,
+by word of mouth or by letter. That is the Proclamation which went out
+to the members of this organisation. The plain language of that letter
+is, 'If we don't get what we want, the Government and their members will
+be responsible, and the Government and the public will be bullied into
+giving us what we want.'"</p>
+
+<p>Many extracts from my speeches made in January and February were read,
+and the final speech made just before my arrest at Chelsea. But before
+they were read I said:</p>
+
+<p>"I wish to lodge an objection now to the police reports of my speeches.
+They have been supplied to me, and the only report I accept is that of
+the journalist of Cardiff who is one of the witnesses. He has furnished
+a fairly accurate report of what I said in that town. The police reports
+I do not accept. They are grossly inaccurate and ignorant and
+ungrammatical, and they convey an absolutely wrong impression of what I
+said in many respects."</p>
+
+<p>Witnesses were then examined; the carter who heard and reported the
+explosion; the foreman in charge of the damaged house, who told the
+cost<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> of the damages, and described the explosives, etc., found on the
+premises; several police officers who told of finding hairpins and a
+woman's rubber golosh in the house, and so on. Absolutely nothing was
+brought out that tended to show that the Suffragettes had anything to do
+with the affair. The Judge noted this for he said to Mr. Bodkin:</p>
+
+<p>"I am not quite sure how you present this case. There are two ways of
+looking at it. Do you only ask the jury to say that the defendant
+specifically counselled the perpetration of this crime, or do you also
+say that, looking at her speeches that you read&mdash;assuming you prove that
+they were uttered&mdash;that the language used being a general incitement to
+damage property, any one who acted on this invitation and perpetrated
+this outrage would be incited by her to do it?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bodkin replied that the latter assumption was correct.</p>
+
+<p>"I say that the speeches generally are incitement to all kinds of acts
+of violence against property, and that they present evidence of attacks
+against property and a particular individual, and that there is evidence
+in the speeches which have been read, and which will be proved, of
+admissions by Mrs. Pankhurst of having been connected with the
+particular outrage in a way which makes her in law an accessory before the fact."</p>
+
+<p>"But you do not confine the case to the latter way of putting it?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," replied Mr. Bodkin.</p>
+
+<p>"Even if the jury are satisfied," said the Judge,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> "that Mrs. Pankhurst
+was not directly connected with this outrage by counselling it, you
+still ask the jury to say that by counselling, as you say she had in the
+speeches, the destruction of property, especially that belonging to a
+particular gentleman, anybody who acted on that and committed this
+outrage would have been incited by her to do it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, my lord."</p>
+
+<p>"I think, Mrs. Pankhurst, you now understand the way it is put?" asked the Judge.</p>
+
+<p>"I understand it quite well, my lord," I replied.</p>
+
+<p>Proceedings were resumed on the following day, and the examination of
+witnesses for the prosecution went on. At the close of the examination,
+the Judge inquired whether I desired to call any witnesses. I replied:</p>
+
+<p>"I do not desire to give evidence or to call any witnesses, but I desire
+to address your Lordship."</p>
+
+<p>I began by objecting to some of the things Mr. Bodkin had said in his
+speech which concerned me personally. He had referred to me&mdash;or at least
+his words conveyed the suggestion&mdash;that I was a woman riding about in my
+motor car inciting other women to do acts which entail imprisonment and
+great suffering, while I, perhaps indulging in some curious form of
+pleasure, was protected, or thought myself protected, from serious
+consequences. I said that Mr. Bodkin knew perfectly well that I shared
+all the dangers the other women faced, that I had been in prison three
+times, serving two of the sentences in full, and being treated like an
+ordinary felon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span>&mdash;searched, put in prison clothes, eating prison fare,
+given solitary confinement and conforming to all the abominable rules
+imposed upon women who commit crimes in England. I thought I owed it to
+myself, especially as the same suggestions&mdash;in regard to the luxury in
+which I lived, supported by the members of the W. S. P. U.&mdash;had been
+made, not only by Mr. Bodkin in court, but by members of the Government
+in the House of Commons&mdash;I thought I owed it to myself to say that I
+owned no motor car and never had owned one. The car in which I
+occasionally rode was owned by the organisation and was used for general
+propaganda work. In that car, and in cars owned by friends I had gone
+about my work as a speaker in the Woman Suffrage movement. It was
+equally untrue, I said, that some of us were making incomes of &pound;1,000 to
+&pound;1,500 a year out of the suffrage movement, as had actually been alleged
+in the debates in the House in which members of Parliament were trying
+to decide how to crush militancy. No woman in our organisation was
+making any such income, or anything remotely like it. Myself, I had
+sacrificed a considerable portion of my income because I had to
+surrender a very important part of it in order to be free to do what I
+thought was my duty in the movement.</p>
+
+<p>Addressing myself to my defence I told the Court that it was a very
+serious condition of things when a large number of respectable and
+naturally law abiding people, people of upright lives, came to hold the
+law in contempt, came seriously to making up their minds that they were
+justified in breaking the law.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span></p><p>"The whole of good government," I said, "rests upon acceptance of the
+law, upon respect of the law, and I say to you seriously, my lord, and
+gentlemen of the jury, that women of intelligence, women of training,
+women of upright life, have for many years ceased to respect the laws of
+this country. It is an absolute fact, and when you look at the laws of
+this country as they effect women it is not to be wondered at."</p>
+
+<p>At some length I went over these laws, laws that made it possible for
+the Judge to send me, if found guilty, to prison for fourteen years,
+while the maximum penalty for offences of the most revolting kind
+against little girls was only two years' imprisonment. The laws of
+inheritance, the laws of divorce, the laws of guardianship of
+children&mdash;all so scandalously unjust to women, I sketched briefly, and I
+said that not only these laws and others, but the administration of the
+laws fell so far short of adequacy that women felt that they must be
+permitted to share the work of cleaning up the entire situation. I tried
+here to tell of certain dreadful things that I had learned as the wife
+of a barrister, things about some of the men in high places who are
+entrusted with the administration of the law, of a judge of Assizes
+where many hideous crimes against women were tried, this judge himself
+being found dead one morning in a brothel, but the Court would not allow
+me to go into personalities, as he called it, with regard to
+"distinguished people," and told me that the sole question before the
+jury was whether or not I was guilty as charged. I must speak on that
+subject and on no other.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span></p><p>After a hard fight to be allowed to tell the jury the reasons why women
+had lost respect for the law, and were making such a struggle in order
+to become law makers themselves, I closed my speech by saying:</p>
+
+<p>"Over one thousand women have gone to prison in the course of this
+agitation, have suffered their imprisonment, have come out of prison
+injured in health, weakened in body, but not in spirit. I come to stand
+my trial from the bedside of one of my daughters, who has come out of
+Holloway Prison, sent there for two months' hard labour for
+participating with four other people in breaking a small pane of glass.
+She has hunger-struck in prison. She submitted herself for more than
+five weeks to the horrible ordeal of feeding by force, and she has come
+out of prison having lost nearly two stone in weight. She is so weak
+that she cannot get out of her bed. And I say to you, gentlemen, that is
+the kind of punishment you are inflicting upon me or any other woman who
+may be brought before you. I ask you if you are prepared to send an
+incalculable number of women to prison&mdash;I speak to you as representing
+others in the same position&mdash;if you are prepared to go on doing that
+kind of thing indefinitely, because that is what is going to happen.
+There is absolutely no doubt about it. I think you have seen enough even
+in this present case to convince you that we are not women who are
+notoriety hunters. We could get that, heaven knows, much more cheaply if
+we sought it. We are women, rightly or wrongly, convinced that this is
+the only way in which we can win<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span> power to alter what for us are
+intolerable conditions, absolutely intolerable conditions. A London
+clergyman only the other day said that 60 per cent. of the married women
+in his parish were breadwinners, supporting their husbands as well as
+their children. When you think of the wages women earn, when you think
+of what this means to the future of the children of this country, I ask
+you to take this question very, very seriously. Only this morning I have
+had information brought to me which could be supported by sworn
+affidavits, that there is in this country, in this very city of London
+of ours, a regulated traffic, not only in women of full age, but in
+little children; that they are being purchased, that they are being
+entrapped, and that they are being trained to minister to the vicious
+pleasures of persons who ought to know better in their positions of life.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, these are the things that have made us women determined to go on,
+determined to face everything, determined to see this thing out to the
+end, let it cost us what it may. And if you convict me, gentlemen, if
+you find me guilty, I tell you quite honestly and quite frankly, that
+whether the sentence is a long sentence, whether the sentence is a short
+sentence, I shall not submit to it. I shall, the moment I leave this
+court, if I am sent to prison, whether to penal servitude or to the
+lighter form of imprisonment&mdash;because I am not sufficiently versed in
+the law to know what his lordship may decide; but whatever my sentence
+is, from the moment I leave this court I shall quite deliberately refuse
+to eat food&mdash;I shall join the women who are already in Holloway on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span>
+hunger strike. I shall come out of prison, dead or alive, at the
+earliest possible moment; and once out again, as soon as I am physically
+fit I shall enter into this fight again. Life is very dear to all of us.
+I am not seeking, as was said by the Home Secretary, to commit suicide.
+I do not want to commit suicide. I want to see the women of this country
+enfranchised, and I want to live until that is done. Those are the
+feelings by which we are animated. We offer ourselves as sacrifices,
+just as your forefathers did in the past, in this cause, and I would ask
+you all to put this question to yourselves:&mdash;Have you the right, as
+human beings, to condemn another human being to death&mdash;because that is
+what it amounts to? Can you throw the first stone? Have you the right to judge women?</p>
+
+<p>"You have not the right in human justice, not the right by the
+constitution of this country, if rightly interpreted, to judge me,
+because you are not my peers. You know, every one of you, that I should
+not be standing here, that I should not break one single law&mdash;if I had
+the rights that you possess, if I had a share in electing those who make
+the laws I have to obey; if I had a voice in controlling the taxes I am
+called upon to pay, I should not be standing here. And I say to you it
+is a very serious state of things. I say to you, my lord, it is a very
+serious situation, that women of upright life, women who have devoted
+the best of their years to the public weal, that women who are engaged
+in trying to undo some of the terrible mistakes that men in their
+government of the country have made, because after all, in the last
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span>resort, men are responsible for the present state of affairs&mdash;I put it
+to you that it is a very serious situation. You are not accustomed to
+deal with people like me in the ordinary discharge of your duties; but
+you are called upon to deal with people who break the law from selfish
+motives. I break the law from no selfish motive. I have no personal end
+to serve, neither have any of the other women who have gone through this
+court during the past few weeks, like sheep to the slaughter. Not one of
+these women would, if women were free, be law-breakers. They are women
+who seriously believe that this hard path that they are treading is the
+only path to their enfranchisement. They seriously believe that the
+welfare of humanity demands this sacrifice; they believe that the
+horrible evils which are ravaging our civilisation will never be removed
+until women get the vote. They know that the very fount of life is being
+poisoned; they know that homes are being destroyed; that because of bad
+education, because of the unequal standard of morals, even the mothers
+and children are destroyed by one of the vilest and most horrible
+diseases that ravage humanity.</p>
+
+<p>"There is only one way to put a stop to this agitation; there is only
+one way to break down this agitation. It is not by deporting us, it is
+not by locking us up in gaol; it is by doing us justice. And so I appeal
+to you gentlemen, in this case of mine, to give a verdict, not only on
+my case, but upon the whole of this agitation. I ask you to find me not
+guilty of malicious incitement to a breach of the law.</p>
+
+<p>"These are my last words. My incitement is not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> malicious. If I had
+power to deal with these things, I would be in absolute obedience to the
+law. I would say to women, 'You have a constitutional means of getting
+redress for your grievances; use your votes, convince your fellow-voters
+of the righteousness of your demands. That is the way to obtain
+justice.' I am not guilty of malicious incitement, and I appeal to you,
+for the welfare of the country, for the welfare of the race, to return a
+verdict of not guilty in this case that you are called upon to try."</p>
+
+<p>After recapitulating the charge the Judge, in summing up, said:</p>
+
+<p>"It is scarcely necessary for me to tell you that the topics urged by
+the defendant in her address to you with regard to provocation by the
+laws of the country and the injustice done to women because they are not
+given the vote as men are, have no bearing upon the question you have to decide.</p>
+
+<p>"The motive at the back of her mind, or at the back of the minds of
+those who actually did put the gunpowder there, would afford no defence
+to this indictment. I am quite sure you will deal with this case upon
+the evidence, and the evidence alone, without regard to any question as
+to whether you think the law is just or unjust. It has nothing to do
+with the case. I should think you will probably have no doubt that this
+defendant, if she did these things charged against her, is not actuated
+by the ordinary selfish motive that leads most of the criminals who are
+in this dock to commit the crimes that they do commit. She is none the
+less guilty if she did these things which are charged against her,
+although she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> believes that by means of this kind the condition of
+society will be altered."</p>
+
+<p>The jury retired, and soon after the afternoon session of the court
+opened they filed in, and in reply to the usual question asked by the
+clerk of arraigns, said that they had agreed upon a verdict. Said the clerk:</p>
+
+<p>"Do you find Mrs. Pankhurst guilty or not guilty?"</p>
+
+<p>"Guilty," said the foreman, "with a strong recommendation to mercy."</p>
+
+<p>I spoke once more to the Judge.</p>
+
+<p>"The jury have found me guilty, with a strong recommendation to mercy,
+and I do not see, since motive is not taken into account in human laws,
+that they could do otherwise after your summing up. But since motive is
+not taken into account in human laws, and since I, whose motives are not
+ordinary motives, am about to be sentenced by you to the punishment
+which is accorded to people whose motives are selfish motives, I have
+only this to say: If it was impossible for a different verdict to be
+found; if it is your duty to sentence me, as it will be presently, then
+I want to say to you, as a private citizen, and to the jury as private
+citizens, that I, standing here, found guilty by the laws of my country,
+I say to you it is your duty, as private citizens, to do what you can to
+put an end to this intolerable state of affairs. I put that duty upon
+you. And I want to say, <i>whatever the sentence you pass upon me, I shall
+do what is humanly possible to terminate that sentence at the earliest
+possible moment. I have no sense of guilt. I feel I have done my duty. I
+look upon myself as</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> <i>a prisoner of war. I am under no moral obligation
+to conform to, or in any way accept, the sentence imposed upon me.</i> I
+shall take the desperate remedy that other women have taken. It is
+obvious to you that the struggle will be an unequal one, but I shall
+make it&mdash;I shall make it as long as I have an ounce of strength left in
+me, or any life left in me.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall fight, I shall fight, I shall fight, from the moment I enter
+prison to struggle against overwhelming odds; I shall resist the doctors
+if they attempt to feed me. I was sentenced last May in this court to
+nine months' imprisonment. I remained in prison six weeks. There are
+people who have laughed at the ordeal of hunger-striking and forcible
+feeding. All I can say is, and the doctors can bear me out, that I was
+released because, had I remained there much longer, I should have been a dead woman.</p>
+
+<p>"I know what it is because I have gone through it. My own daughter<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a>
+has only just left it. There are women there still facing that ordeal,
+facing it twice a day. Think of it, my lord, twice a day this fight is
+gone through. Twice a day a weak woman resisting overwhelming force,
+fights and fights as long as she has strength left; fights against women
+and even against men, resisting with her tongue, with her teeth, this
+ordeal. Last night in the House of Commons some alternative was
+discussed, or rather, some additional punishment. Is it not a strange
+thing, my lord, that laws which have sufficed to restrain men<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span>
+throughout the history of this country do not suffice now to restrain
+women&mdash;decent women, honourable women?</p>
+
+<p>"Well, my lord, I do want you to realise it. I am not whining about my
+punishment, I invited it. I deliberately broke the law, not hysterically
+or emotionally, but of set serious purpose, because I honestly feel it
+is the only way. Now, I put the responsibility of what is to follow upon
+you, my lord, as a private citizen, and upon the gentlemen of the jury,
+as private citizens, and upon all the men in this court&mdash;what are you,
+with your political powers, going to do to end this intolerable situation?</p>
+
+<p>"<i>To the women I have represented, to the women who, in response to my
+incitement, have faced these terrible consequences, have broken laws, to
+them, I want to say I am not going to fail them, but to face it as they
+face it, to go through with it, and I know that they will go on with the
+fight whether I live or whether I die.</i></p>
+
+<p>"<i>This movement will go on and on until we have the rights of citizens
+in this country, as women have in our Colonies, as they will have
+throughout the civilised world before this woman's war is ended.</i></p>
+
+<p>"That is all I have to say."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Justice Lush, in passing sentence, said: "It is my duty, Mrs.
+Emmeline Pankhurst, and a very painful duty it is, to pass what, in my
+opinion, is a suitable and adequate sentence for the crime of which you
+have been most properly convicted, having regard to the strong
+recommendation to mercy by the jury. I quite recognise, as I have
+already said, that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span> the motives that have actuated you in committing
+this crime are not the selfish motives that actuate most of the persons
+who stand in your position, but although you blind your eyes to it, I
+cannot help pointing out to you that the crime of which you have been
+convicted is not only a very serious one, but, in spite of your motives,
+it is, in fact, a wicked one. It is wicked because it not only leads to
+the destruction of property of persons who have done you no wrong, but
+in spite of your calculations, it may expose other people to the danger
+of being maimed or even killed. It is wicked because you are, and have
+been, luring other people&mdash;young women, it may be&mdash;to engage in such
+crimes, possibly to their own ruin; and it is wicked, because you cannot
+help being alive to it if you would only think.</p>
+
+<p>"You are setting an example to other persons who may have other
+grievances that they legitimately want to have put right by embarking on
+a similar scheme to yours, and trying to effect their object by
+attacking the property, if not the lives, of other people. I know,
+unfortunately&mdash;at least, I feel sure&mdash;you will pay no heed to what I
+say. I only beg of you to think of these things."</p>
+
+<p>"I have thought of them," I interjected.</p>
+
+<p>"Think, if only for one short hour, dispassionately," continued the
+majesty of law, "I can only say that, although the sentence I am going
+to pass must be a severe one, must be adequate to the crime of which you
+have been found guilty, if you would only realise the wrong you are
+doing, and the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span>mistake you are making, and would see the error you have
+committed, and undertake to amend matters by using your influence in a
+right direction, I would be the first to use all my best endeavours to
+bring about a mitigation of the sentence I am about to pass.</p>
+
+<p>"I cannot, and I will not, regard your crime as a merely trivial one. It
+is not. It is a most serious one, and, whatever you may think, it is a
+wicked one. I have paid regard to the recommendation of the jury. You
+yourself have stated the maximum sentence which this particular offence
+is by the legislature thought to deserve. The least sentence I can pass
+upon you is a sentence of three years' penal servitude."</p>
+
+<p>As soon as the sentence was pronounced the intense silence which had
+reigned throughout the trial was broken, and an absolute pandemonium
+broke out among the spectators. At first it was merely a confused and
+angry murmur of "Shame!" "Shame!" The murmurs quickly swelled into loud
+and indignant cries, and then from gallery and court there arose a great
+chorus uttered with the utmost intensity and passion. "Shame!" "Shame!"
+The women sprang to their feet, in many instances stood on their seats,
+shouting "Shame!" "Shame!" as I was conducted out of the dock in charge
+of two wardresses. "Keep the flag flying!" shouted a woman's voice, and
+the response came in a chorus: "We will!" "Bravo!" "Three cheers for
+Mrs. Pankhurst!" That was the last I heard of the courtroom protest.</p>
+
+<p>Afterwards I heard that the noise and confusion was kept up for several
+minutes longer, the Judge<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span> and the police being quite powerless to
+obtain order. Then the women filed out singing the Women's
+Marseillaise&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"March on, march on,</div>
+<div>Face to the dawn,</div>
+<div>The dawn of liberty."</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The Judge flung after their retreating forms the dire threat of prison
+for any woman who dared repeat such a scene. Threat of prison&mdash;to
+Suffragettes! The women's song only swelled the louder and the corridors
+of Old Bailey reverberated with their shouts. Certainly that venerable
+building had never in its checkered history witnessed such a scene. The
+great crowd of detectives and police who were on duty seemed actually
+paralysed by the audacity of the protest, for they made no attempt to intervene.</p>
+
+<p>At three o'clock, when I left the court by a side entrance in Newgate
+Street, I found a crowd of women waiting to cheer me. With the two
+wardresses I entered a four wheeler and was driven to Holloway to begin
+my hunger strike. Scores of women followed in taxicabs, and when I
+arrived at the prison gates there was another protest of cheers for the
+cause and boos for the law. In the midst of all this intense excitement
+I passed through the grim gates into the twilight of prison, now become a battle-ground.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTE:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Sylvia Pankhurst, who was forcibly fed for five weeks,
+during an original sentence of two months imposed for breaking one window.</p></div></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>CHAPTER VI</span></h2>
+
+<p>Prison had indeed been for us a battle-ground ever since the time when
+we had solemnly resolved that, as a matter of principle, we would not
+submit to the rules that bound ordinary offenders against the law. But
+when I entered Holloway on that April day in 1913, it was with full
+knowledge that I had before me a far more prolonged struggle than any
+that the militant suffragists had hitherto faced. I have described the
+hunger strike, that terrible weapon with which we had repeatedly broken
+our prison bars. The Government, at their wits' end to cope with the
+hunger strikers, and to overcome a situation which had brought the laws
+of England into such scandalous disrepute, had had recourse to a
+measure, surely the most savagely devised ever brought before a modern Parliament.</p>
+
+<p>In March of that year, while I was waiting trial on the charge of
+conspiring to destroy Mr. Lloyd-George's country house, a bill was
+introduced into the House of Commons by the Home Secretary, Mr. Reginald
+McKenna, a bill which had for its avowed object the breaking down of the
+hunger strike. This measure, now universally known as the "Cat and Mouse
+Act," provided that when a hunger striking suffrage prisoner (the law
+was frankly admitted to apply only to suffrage prisoners) was certified
+by the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span> prison doctors to be in danger of death, she could be ordered
+released on a sort of a ticket of leave for the purpose of regaining
+strength enough to undergo the remainder of her sentence. Released, she
+was still a prisoner, the prisoner, or the patient, or the victim, as
+you may choose to call her, being kept under constant police
+surveillance. According to the terms of the bill the prisoner was
+released for a specified number of days, at the expiration of which she
+was supposed to return to prison on her own account. Says the Act:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"The period of temporary discharge may, if the Secretary of State
+thinks fit, be extended on a representation of the prisoner that
+the state of her health renders her unfit to return to prison. If
+such representation be made, the prisoner shall submit herself, if
+so required, for medical examination by the medical officer of the
+above mentioned prison, or other registered medical practitioner
+appointed by the Secretary of State.</p>
+
+<p>The prisoner shall notify to the Commissioner of Police of the
+Metropolis the place of residence to which she goes on her
+discharge. She shall not change her residence without giving one
+clear day's notice in writing to the Commissioner, specifying the
+residence to which she is going and she shall not be temporarily
+absent from her residence for more than twelve hours without giving
+a like notice," etc.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>The idea of militant suffragists respecting a law of this order is
+almost humorous, and yet the smile dies before the pity one feels for
+the Minister whose confession of failure is embodied in such a measure.
+Here was a mighty Government weakly resolved that justice to women it
+would not grant, knowing that submission of women it could not force,
+and so was willing to compromise with a piece of class legislation
+absolutely contrary to all of its avowed principles. Said Mr. McKenna,
+pleading in the House for the advancement of his odious measure: "At the
+present time I cannot make these prisoners undergo<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span> their sentences
+without serious risk of death and I want to have power to enable me to
+compel a prisoner to undergo the sentence, and I want that power in all
+cases where the prisoner adopts the system of the hunger strike. At the
+present moment, although I have the power of release, I cannot release a
+prisoner without a pardon, and I have to discharge them for good. I want
+the power of releasing a prisoner without a pardon, with the sentence
+remaining alive.... I want to enforce the Law, and I want, if I can, to
+enforce it without forcible feeding, and without undergoing the risk of
+some one else's life."</p>
+
+<p>Interrogated by several members, Mr. McKenna admitted that the "Cat and
+Mouse" bill, if passed, would not inevitably do away with forcible
+feeding, but he promised that the hateful and disgusting process would
+be resorted to only when "absolutely necessary." We shall see later how
+hypocritical this representation was.</p>
+
+<p>Parliament, which had never had time to consider, beyond its initial
+stages, a women's suffrage measure, passed the Cat and Mouse Act through
+both houses within the limits of a few days. It was already law when I
+entered Holloway on April 3rd, 1913, and I grieve to state that many
+members of the Labour Party, pledged to support woman suffrage, helped
+to make it into law.</p>
+
+<p>Of course the Act was, from its inception, treated by the suffragists
+with the utmost contempt. We had not the slightest intention of
+assisting Mr. McKenna in enforcing unjust sentences against soldiers in
+the army of freedom, and when the prison doors<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span> closed behind me I
+adopted the hunger strike exactly as though I expected it to prove, as
+formerly, a means of gaining my liberty.</p>
+
+<p>That struggle is not a pleasant one to recall. Every possible means of
+breaking down my resolution was resorted to. The daintiest and most
+tempting food was placed in my cell. All sorts of arguments were brought
+to bear against me&mdash;the futility of resisting the Cat and Mouse Act, the
+wickedness of risking suicide&mdash;I shall not attempt to record all the
+arguments. They fell against a blank wall of consciousness, for my
+thoughts were all very far away from Holloway and all its torments. I
+knew, what afterwards I learned as a fact, that my imprisonment was
+followed by the greatest revolutionary outbreak that had been witnessed
+in England since 1832. From one end of the island to the other the
+beacons of the women's revolution blazed night and day. Many country
+houses&mdash;all unoccupied&mdash;were fired, the grand stand of Ayr race course
+was burned to the ground, a bomb was exploded in Oxted Station, London,
+blowing out walls and windows, some empty railroad carriages were blown
+up, the glass of thirteen famous paintings in the Manchester Art Gallery
+were smashed with hammers&mdash;these are simply random specimens of the
+general outbreak of secret guerilla warfare waged by women to whose
+liberties every other approach had been barricaded by the Liberal
+Government of free England. The only answer of the Government was the
+closing of the British Museum, the National Gallery, Windsor Castle, and
+other tourist resorts. As for the result<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span> on the people of England, that
+was exactly what we had anticipated. The public were thrown into a state
+of emotion of insecurity and frightened expectancy. Not yet did they
+show themselves ready to demand of the Government that the outrages be
+stopped in the only way they could be stopped&mdash;by giving votes to women.
+I knew that it would be so. Lying in my lonely cell in Holloway, racked
+with pain, oppressed with increasing weakness, depressed with the heavy
+responsibility of unknown happenings, I was sadly aware that we were but
+approaching a far goal. The end, though certain, was still distant.
+Patience, and still more patience, faith and still more faith, well, we
+had called upon these souls' help before and it was certain that they
+would not fail us at this greatest crisis of all.</p>
+
+<p>Thus in great anguish of mind and body passed nine terrible days, each
+one longer and more acutely miserable than the preceding. Towards the
+last, I was mercifully half unconscious of my surroundings. A curious
+indifference took possession of my over-wrought mind, and it was almost
+without emotion that I heard, on the morning of the tenth day, that I
+was to be released temporarily in order to recover my health. The
+Governor came to my cell and read me my licence, which commanded me to
+return to Holloway in fifteen days, and meanwhile to observe all the
+obsequious terms as to informing the police of my movements. With what
+strength my hands retained I tore the document in strips and dropped it
+on the floor of the cell. "I have no intention," I said, "of obeying
+this infamous law. You release me<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span> knowing perfectly well that I shall
+never voluntarily return to any of your prisons."</p>
+
+<p>They sent me away, sitting bolt upright in a cab, unmindful of the fact
+that I was in a dangerous condition of weakness, having lost two stone
+in weight and suffered seriously from irregularities of heart action. As
+I left the prison I was gratefully aware of groups of our women standing
+bravely at the gates, as though enduring a long vigil. As a matter of
+fact, relays of women had picketed the place night and day during the
+whole term of my imprisonment. The first pickets were arrested, but as
+others constantly arrived to fill their places the police finally gave
+in and allowed the women to march up and down before the prison carrying the flag.</p>
+
+<p>At the nursing home to which I was conveyed I learned that Annie Kenney,
+Mrs. Drummond, and our staunch friend, Mr. George Lansbury,<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> had been
+arrested during my imprisonment, and that all three had adopted the
+hunger strike. I also learned on my own account how desperately the
+Government were striving to make their Cat and Mouse Act&mdash;the last stand
+in their losing campaign&mdash;a success. Without regard to the extra expense
+laid on the unfortunate tax payers of the country, the Government
+employed a large extra force of police especially for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span> this purpose. As
+I lay in bed, being assisted by every medical resource to return to life
+and health, these special police, colloquially termed "Cats," guarded
+the nursing home as if it were a besieged castle. In the street under my
+windows two detectives and a constable stood on guard night and day. In
+a house at right angles to my refuge three more detectives kept constant
+watch. In the mews at the rear of the house were more detectives, and
+diligently patrolling the road, as if in expectation of a rescuing
+regiment, two taxicabs, each with its quota of detectives, guarded the highways.</p>
+
+<p>All this made recovery slow and difficult. But worse was to come. On
+April 30th, just as I was beginning to rally somewhat, came the news
+that the police had swooped down on our headquarters in Kingsway and had
+arrested the entire official force. Miss Barrett, associate editor of
+<i>The Suffragette</i>; Miss Lennox, the sub-editor; Miss Lake, business
+manager; Miss Kerr, office manager, and Mrs. Sanders, financial
+secretary of the Union, were arrested, although not one of them had ever
+appeared in any militant action. Mr. E. G. Clayton, a chemist, was also
+arrested, accused of furnishing the W. S. P. U. with explosive
+materials. The offices were thoroughly searched, and, as on a former
+occasion, stripped of all books and papers. While this was being done
+another party of police, armed with a special warrant, proceeded to the
+printing office where our paper, <i>The Suffragette</i>, was published. The
+printer, Mr. Drew, was placed under arrest and the material for the
+paper, which was to appear on the following<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span> day, was seized. By one
+o'clock in the afternoon the entire plant and the headquarters of the
+Union were in the hands of the police, and to all appearances the
+militant movement&mdash;temporarily at least&mdash;was brought to a full stop. In
+my state of semi-prostration it at first seemed to me best to let the
+week's issue of the paper lapse, but on second thought I decided that
+even the appearance of surrender was not to be thought of. How we
+managed it need not here be told, but we actually did, overnight, with
+hardly any material, except Christabel's leading article, and with
+hastily summoned helpers, get out the paper as usual, and side by side
+with the morning journals which bore front page stories of the
+suppression of the Suffragette organ, our paper sellers sold <i>The
+Suffragette</i>. The front page bore, instead of the usual cartoon, the
+single word in bold faced type&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="bold">"RAIDED,"</p>
+
+<p>the full story of the police search and the arrests being related in the
+other pages. Our headquarters, I may say in passing, remained closed
+less than forty-eight hours. We are so organised that the arrest of
+leaders does not seriously cripple us. Every one has an understudy, and
+when one leader drops out her substitute is ready instantly to take her place.</p>
+
+<p>In this emergency there appeared as chief organiser in Miss Kenney's
+place, Miss Grace Roe, one of the young Suffragettes of whom I, as
+belonging to the older generation, am so proud. Faced by <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span>difficulties
+as great as the Government could make them, Miss Roe at once showed
+herself to be equal to the situation, and to have the gift of unswerving
+loyalty combined with a strong and rapid judgment of things and people.
+Aiding her was Mrs. Dacre Fox, who surprised us all by her amazing
+ability to act as assistant editor of <i>The Suffragette</i>, manage a host
+of affairs in the office, and preside at our weekly meetings. Another
+member of the Union who came prominently to the front at the time of
+this crisis was Mrs. Mansel.</p>
+
+<p>In two days' time the office was open and running quite as usual, no
+outward sign showing the grief and indignation felt for our imprisoned
+comrades. Most of them refused bail and instantly hunger struck
+appearing in court for trial three days later in a pitiful state. Mrs.
+Drummond was so obviously ill and in need of medical attention that she
+was discharged and was very soon afterwards operated upon. Mr. Drew, the
+printer, was forced to sign an undertaking not to publish the paper
+again. The others were sentenced to terms varying from six to eighteen
+months. Mr. Clayton was sentenced to twenty-one months, and after
+desperate resistance, during which he was forcibly fed many times,
+escaped his prison. The others, following the same example, starved
+their way to liberty, and have ever since been pursued at intervals and
+rearrested under the Cat and Mouse Act.</p>
+
+<p>After my discharge, April 12th, I remained in the nursing home until
+partially restored, then, under the eyes of the police, I motored out to
+Woking, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span> country home of my friend, Dr. Ethel Smyth. This house,
+like the nursing home, was guarded by a small army of police. I never
+went to the window, I never took the air in the garden without being
+conscious of watching eyes. The situation became intolerable, and I
+determined to end it. On May 26th there was a great meeting at the
+London Pavillion, and I gave notice that I would attend it. Supported by
+Dr. Flora Murray, Dr. Ethel Smyth and my devoted Nurse Pine, I walked
+downstairs, to be confronted at the door by a detective, who demanded to
+know where I was going. I was in a weak state, much weaker than I had
+imagined, and in refusing the right of a man to question my movements I
+exhausted the last remnant of my strength and sank fainting in the arms
+of my friends. As soon as I recovered I got into the motor car. The
+detective instantly took his place beside me and told the chauffeur to
+drive to Bow Street Station. The chauffeur replied that he took his
+orders only from Mrs. Pankhurst, whereupon the detective summoned a
+taxicab and, placing me under arrest, took me to Bow Street.</p>
+
+<div class="center"><a name="ill-312.jpg" id="ill-312.jpg"></a><img src="images/ill-312.jpg" width='518' height='700' alt="RE-ARREST OF MRS. PANKHURST AT WOKING" /></div>
+
+<p class="bold">RE-ARREST OF MRS. PANKHURST AT WOKING</p>
+
+<p class="bold"><i>May 26, 1913</i></p>
+
+<p>Under the Cat and Mouse Act a paroled prisoner can be thus arrested without the
+formality of a warrant, nor does the time she has spent at liberty, in
+regaining her health, count off from her prison sentence. The magistrate
+at Bow Street was therefore quite within his legal rights when he
+ordered me returned to Holloway. I felt it my duty, nevertheless, to
+point out to him the inhumanity of his act. I said to him: "I was
+released from Holloway on account of my health. Since then I have been
+treated exactly as if I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> were in prison. It has become absolutely
+impossible for any one to recover health under such conditions, and this
+morning I decided to make this protest against a state of affairs
+unparalleled in a civilised country."</p>
+
+<p>The magistrate replied formally: "You quite understand what the position
+is. You have been arrested on this warrant and all I have to do is to
+make an order recommending you to prison."</p>
+
+<p>"I think" I said, "that you should do so, with a full sense of
+responsibility. If I am taken to Holloway on your warrant I shall resume
+the protest I made before which led to my release, and I shall go on
+indefinitely until I die, or until the Government decide, since they
+have taken upon themselves to employ you and other people to administer
+the laws, that they must recognise women as citizens and give them some
+control over the laws of this country."</p>
+
+<p>It was a five days' hunger strike this time, because the extreme
+weakness of my condition made it impossible for me to endure a longer
+term. I was released on May 30th on a seven days' licence, and in a
+half-alive state was again carried to a nursing home. Less than a week
+later, while I was still bed-ridden, a terrible event occurred, one that
+should have shaken the stolid British public into a realisation of the
+seriousness of the situation precipitated by the Government. Emily
+Wilding Davison, who had been associated with the militant movement
+since 1906, gave up her life for the women's cause by throwing herself
+in the path of the thing, next to property, held most sacred to
+Englishmen&mdash;sport.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span> Miss Davison went to the races at Epsom, and
+breaking through the barriers which separated the vast crowds from the
+race course, rushed in the path of the galloping horses and caught the
+bridle of the King's horse, which was leading all the others. The horse
+fell, throwing his jockey and crushing Miss Davison in such shocking
+fashion that she was carried from the course in a dying condition.
+Everything possible was done to save her life. The great surgeon, Mr.
+Mansell Moullin, put everything aside and devoted himself to her case,
+but though he operated most skilfully, the injuries she had received
+were so frightful that she died four days later without once having
+recovered consciousness. Members of the Union were beside her when she
+breathed her last, on June 8th, and on June 14th they gave her a great
+public funeral in London. Crowds lined the streets as the funeral car,
+followed by thousands of women, passed slowly and sadly to St. George's
+Church, Bloomsbury, where the memorial services were held.</p>
+
+<p>Emily Wilding Davison was a character almost inevitably developed by a
+struggle such as ours. She was a B. A. of London University, and had
+taken first class honours at Oxford in English Language and Literature.
+Yet the women's cause made such an appeal to her reason and her
+sympathies that she put every intellectual and social appeal aside and
+devoted herself untiringly and fearlessly to the work of the Union. She
+had suffered many imprisonments, had been forcibly fed and most brutally
+treated. On one occasion when she had barricaded her cell against the
+prison doctors, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span> hose pipe was turned on her from the window and she
+was drenched and all but drowned in the icy water while workmen were
+breaking down her cell door. Miss Davison, after this experience,
+expressed to several of her friends the deep conviction that now, as in
+days called uncivilised, the conscience of the people would awaken only
+to the sacrifice of a human life. At one time in prison she tried to
+kill herself by throwing herself head-long from one of the upper
+galleries, but she succeeded only in sustaining cruel injuries. Ever
+after that time she clung to her conviction that one great tragedy, the
+deliberate throwing into the breach of a human life, would put an end to
+the intolerable torture of women. And so she threw herself at the King's
+horse, in full view of the King and Queen and a great multitude of their
+Majesties' subjects, offering up her life as a petition to the King,
+praying for the release of suffering women throughout England and the
+world. No one can possibly doubt that that prayer can forever remain
+unanswered, for she took it straight to the Throne of the King of all the worlds.</p>
+
+<p>The death of Miss Davison was a great shock to me and a very great grief
+as well, and although I was scarcely able to leave my bed I determined
+to risk everything to attend her funeral. This was not to be, however,
+for as I left the house I was again arrested by detectives who lay in
+waiting. Again the farce of trying to make me serve a three years'
+sentence was undertaken. But now the militant women had discovered a new
+and more terrible weapon with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span> which to defy the unjust laws of England,
+and this weapon&mdash;the thirst strike&mdash;I turned against my gaolers with
+such effect that they were forced within three days to release me.</p>
+
+<p>The hunger strike I have described as a dreadful ordeal, but it is a
+mild experience compared with the thirst strike, which is from beginning
+to end simple and unmitigated torture. Hunger striking reduces a
+prisoner's weight very quickly, but thirst striking reduces weight so
+alarmingly fast that prison doctors were at first thrown into absolute
+panic of fright. Later they became somewhat hardened, but even now they
+regard the thirst strike with terror. I am not sure that I can convey to
+the reader the effect of days spent without a single drop of water taken
+into the system. The body cannot endure loss of moisture. It cries out
+in protest with every nerve. The muscles waste, the skin becomes
+shrunken and flabby, the facial appearance alters horribly, all these
+outward symptoms being eloquent of the acute suffering of the entire
+physical being. Every natural function is, of course, suspended, and the
+poisons which are unable to pass out of the body are retained and
+absorbed. The body becomes cold and shivery, there is constant headache
+and nausea, and sometimes there is fever. The mouth and tongue become
+coated and swollen, the throat thickens and the voice sinks to a thready whisper.</p>
+
+<p>When, at the end of the third day of my first thirst strike, I was sent
+home I was in a condition of jaundice from which I have never completely
+recovered. So badly was I affected that the prison authorities<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span> made no
+attempt to arrest me for nearly a month after my release. On July 13th I
+felt strong enough once more to protest against the odious Cat and Mouse
+Act, and, with Miss Annie Kenney, who was also at liberty "on medical
+grounds," I went to a meeting at the London Pavillion. At the close of
+the meeting, during which Miss Kenney's prison licence was auctioned off
+for &pound;12, we attempted for the first time the open escape which we have
+so frequently since effected. Miss Kenney, from the platform, announced
+that we should openly leave the hall, and she forthwith walked coolly
+down into the audience. The police rushed in in overwhelming numbers,
+and after a desperate fight, succeeded in capturing her. Other
+detectives and policemen hurried to the side door of the hall to
+intercept me, but I disappointed them by leaving by the front door and
+escaping to a friend's house in a cab.</p>
+
+<p>The police soon traced me to the house of my friend, the distinguished
+scientist, Mrs. Hertha Ayrton, and the place straightway became a
+besieged fortress. Day and night the house was surrounded, not only by
+police, but by crowds of women sympathisers. On the Saturday following
+my appearance at the Pavillion we gave the police a bit of excitement of
+a kind they do not relish. A cab drove up to Mrs. Ayrton's door, and
+several well-known members of the Union alighted and hurried indoors. At
+once the word was circulated that a rescue was being attempted, and the
+police drew resolutely around the cab. Soon a veiled woman appeared in
+the doorway, surrounded by Suffragettes, who, when the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span> veiled lady
+attempted to get into the cab, resisted with all their strength the
+efforts of the police to lay hands upon her. The cry went up from all
+sides: "They are arresting Mrs. Pankhurst!" Something very like a free
+fight ensued, occupying all the attention of the police who were not in
+the immediate vicinity of the cab. The men surrounding that rocking
+vehicle succeeded in tearing the veiled figure from the arms of the
+other women and piling into the cab ordered the chauffeur to drive full
+speed to Bow Street. Before they reached their destination, however, the
+veiled lady raised her veil&mdash;alas, it was not Mrs. Pankhurst, who by
+that time was speeding away in another taxicab in quite another direction.</p>
+
+<p>Our ruse infuriated the police, and they determined to arrest me at my
+first public appearance, which was at the Pavillion on the Monday
+following the episode just related. When I reached the Pavillion I found
+it literally surrounded by police, hundreds of them. I managed to slip
+past the outside cordon, but Scotland Yard had its best men inside the
+hall, and I was not permitted to reach the platform. Surrounded by plain
+clothes men, batons drawn, I could not escape, but I called out to the
+women that I was being taken, and so valiantly did they rush to the
+rescue that the police had their hands full for nearly half an hour
+before they got me into a taxicab bound for Holloway. Six women were
+arrested that day, and many more than six policemen were temporarily
+incapacitated for duty.</p>
+
+<p>By this time I had made up my mind that I would not only resist staying
+in prison, I would resist<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span> to the utmost of my ability going to prison.
+Therefore, when we reached Holloway I refused to get out of the cab,
+declaring to my captors that I would no longer acquiesce in the slow
+judicial murder to which the Government were subjecting women. I was
+lifted out and carried into a cell in the convicted hospital wing of the
+gaol. The wardresses who were on duty there spoke with some kindness to
+me, suggesting that, as I was very apparently exhausted and ill, I
+should do well to undress and go to bed. "No," I replied, "I shall not
+go to bed, not once while I am kept here. I am weary of this brutal
+game, and I intend to end it."</p>
+
+<p>Without undressing, I lay down on the outside of the bed. Later in the
+evening the prison doctor visited me, but I refused to be examined. In
+the morning he came again, and with him the Governor and the head
+wardress. As I had taken neither food nor water since the previous day
+my appearance had become altered to such an extent that the doctor was
+plainly perturbed. He begged me, "as a small concession," to allow him
+to feel my pulse, but I shook my head, and they left me alone for the
+day. That night I was so ill that I felt some alarm for my own
+condition, but I knew of nothing that could be done except to wait. On
+Wednesday morning the Governor came again and asked me with an
+assumption of carelessness if it were true that I was refusing both food
+and water. "It is true," I said, and he replied brutally: "You are very
+cheap to keep." Then, as if the thing were not a ridiculous farce, he
+announced that I was sentenced to close confinement<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span> for three days,
+with deprivation of all privileges, after which he left my cell.</p>
+
+<p>Twice that day the doctor visited me, but I would not allow him to touch
+me. Later came a medical officer from the Home Office, to which I had
+complained, as I had complained to the Governor and the prison doctor,
+of the pain I still suffered from the rough treatment I had received at
+the Pavillion. Both of the medical men insisted that I allow them to
+examine me, but I said: "I will not be examined by you because your
+intention is not to help me as a patient, but merely to ascertain how
+much longer it will be possible to keep me alive in prison. I am not
+prepared to assist you or the Government in any such way. I am not
+prepared to relieve you of any responsibility in this matter." I added
+that it must be quite obvious that I was very ill and unfit to be
+confined in prison. They hesitated for a moment or two, then left me.</p>
+
+<p>Wednesday night was a long nightmare of suffering, and by Thursday
+morning I must have presented an almost mummified appearance. From the
+faces of the Governor and the doctor when they came into my cell and
+looked at me I thought that they would at once arrange for my release.
+But the hours passed and no order for release came. I decided that I
+must force my release, and I got up from the bed where I had been lying
+and began to stagger up and down the cell. When all strength failed me
+and I could keep my feet no longer I lay down on the stone floor, and
+there, at four in the afternoon, they found me, gasping and half
+unconscious. And then<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span> they sent me away. I was in a very weakened
+condition this time, and had to be treated with saline solutions to save
+my life. I felt, however, that I had broken my prison walls for a time
+at least, and so this proved. It was on July 24th that I was released. A
+few days later I was borne in an invalid's chair to the platform of the
+London Pavillion. I could not speak, but I was there, as I had promised
+to be. My licence, which by this time I had ceased to tear up because it
+had an auction value, was sold to an American present for the sum of one
+hundred pounds. I had told the Governor on leaving that I intended to
+sell the licence and to spend the money for militant purposes, but I had
+not expected to raise such a splendid sum as one hundred pounds. I shall
+always remember the generosity of that unknown American friend.</p>
+
+<p>A great medical congress was being held in London in the summer of 1913,
+and on August 11th we held a large meeting at Kingsway Hall, which was
+attended by hundreds of visiting doctors. I addressed this meeting, at
+which a ringing resolution against forcible feeding was passed, and I
+was allowed to go home without police interference. It was, as a matter
+of fact, the second time during that month that I had spoken in public
+without molestation. The presence of so many distinguished medical men
+in London may have suggested to the authorities that I had better be
+left alone for the time being. At all events I was left alone, and late
+in the month I went, quite publicly, to Paris, to see my daughter
+Christabel and plan with her the campaign<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span> for the coming autumn. I
+needed rest after the struggles of the past five months, during which I
+had served, of my three years' prison sentence, not quite three weeks.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTE:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> Mr. Lansbury shortly before this had resigned his seat in
+Parliament and had gone to his constituents on the question of women's
+suffrage. Both the Liberal and the Conservative parties had united
+against him, with the result that a Unionist candidate was returned in
+his place. Mr. Lloyd-George publicly rejoiced in the result of this
+election, saying that Mr. Marsh, the Conservative candidate, had been
+his man. The Labour Party, in Parliament and out, meekly accepted this
+piece of Liberal chicanery without protest.</p></div></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>CHAPTER VII</span></h2>
+
+<p>The two months of the summer of 1913 which were spent with my daughter
+in Paris were almost the last days of peace and rest I have been
+destined since to enjoy. I spent the days, or some hours of them, in the
+initial preparation of this volume, because it seemed to me that I had a
+duty to perform in giving to the world my own plain statement of the
+events which have led up to the women's revolution in England. Other
+histories of the militant movement will undoubtedly be written; in times
+to come when in all constitutional countries of the world, women's votes
+will be as universally accepted as men's votes are now; when men and
+women occupy the world of industry on equal terms, as co-workers rather
+than as cut-throat competitors; when, in a word, all the dreadful and
+criminal discriminations which exist now between the sexes are
+abolished, as they must one day be abolished, the historian will be able
+to sit down in leisurely fashion and do full justice to the strange
+story of how the women of England took up arms against the blind and
+obstinate Government of England and fought their way to political
+freedom. I should like to live long enough to read such a history,
+calmly considered, carefully analysed, conscientiously set forth. It
+will be a better book to read than this one, written, as it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span> were, in
+camp between battles. But perhaps this one, hastily prepared as it has
+been, will give the reader of the future a clearer impression of the
+strenuousness and the desperation of the conflict, and also something of
+the heretofore undreamed of courage and fighting strength of women, who,
+having learned the joy of battle, lose all sense of fear and continue
+their struggle up to and past the gates of death, never flinching at any
+step of the way.</p>
+
+<p>Every step since that meeting in October, 1912, when we definitely
+declared war on the peace of England, has been beset with danger and
+difficulty, often unexpected and undeclared. In October, 1913, I sailed
+in the French liner, <i>La Provence</i>, for my third visit to the United
+States. My intention was published in the public press of England,
+France and America. No attempt at concealment of my purpose was made,
+and in fact, my departure was witnessed by two men from Scotland Yard.
+Some hints had reached my ears that an attempt would be made by the
+Immigration Officers at the port of New York to exclude me as an
+undesirable alien, but I gave little credit to these reports. American
+friends wrote and cabled encouraging words, and so I passed my time
+aboard ship quite peacefully, working part of the time, resting also
+against the fatigue always attendant on a lecture tour.</p>
+
+<div class="center"><a name="ill-324.jpg" id="ill-324.jpg"></a><img src="images/ill-324.jpg" width='700' height='503' alt="MRS. PANKHURST AND CHRISTABEL IN THE GARDEN OF
+CHRISTABEL'S HOME IN PARIS" /></div>
+
+<p class="bold">MRS. PANKHURST AND CHRISTABEL IN THE GARDEN OF CHRISTABEL'S<br />HOME IN PARIS</p>
+
+<p>We came to anchor in the harbour of New York on October 26th, and there,
+to my astonishment, the Immigration authorities notified me that I was
+ordered to Ellis Island to appear before a Board of Special Inquiry. The
+officers who served the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span> order of detention did so with all courtesy,
+even with a certain air of reluctance. They allowed my American
+travelling companion, Mrs. Rheta Childe Dorr, to accompany me to the
+Island, but no one, not even the solicitor sent by Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont
+to defend me, was permitted to attend me before the Board of Special
+Inquiry. I went before these three men quite alone, as many a poor,
+friendless woman, without any of my resources, has had to appear. The
+moment of my entrance to the room I knew that extraordinary means had
+been employed against me, for on the desk behind which the Board sat I
+saw a complete <i>dossier</i> of my case in English legal papers. These
+papers may have been supplied by Scotland Yard, or they may have been
+supplied by the Government. I cannot tell, of course. They sufficed to
+convince the Board of Special Inquiry that I was a person of doubtful
+character, to say the least of it, and I was informed that I should have
+to be detained until the higher authorities at Washington examined my
+case. Everything was done to make me comfortable, the rooms of the
+Commissioner of Immigration being turned over to me and my companion.
+The very men who found me guilty of moral obloquy&mdash;something of which no
+British jury has ever yet accused me&mdash;put themselves out in a number of
+ways to make my detention agreeable. I was escorted all over the Island
+and through the quarters assigned detained immigrants, whose right to
+land in the United States is in question. The huge dining-rooms, the
+spotless kitchens and the admirably varied bill of fare interested and
+impressed me.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span> Nothing like them exists in any English institution.</p>
+
+<p>I remained at Ellis Island two and a half days, long enough for the
+Commissioner of Immigration at Washington to take my case to the
+President who instantly ordered my release. Whoever was responsible for
+my detention entirely overlooked the advertising value of the incident.
+My lecture tour was made much more successful for it and I embarked for
+England late in November with a very generous American contribution to
+our war chest, a contribution, alas, that I was not permitted to deliver in person.</p>
+
+<p>The night before the White Star liner <i>Majestic</i> reached Plymouth a
+wireless message from headquarters informed me that the Government had
+decided to arrest me on my arrival. The arrest was made, under very
+dramatic conditions, the next day shortly before noon. The steamer came
+to anchor in the outer harbour, and we saw at once that the bay, usually
+so animated with passing vessels, had been cleared of all craft. Far in
+the distance the tender, which on other occasions had always met the
+steamer, rested at anchor between two huge grey warships. For a moment
+or two the scene halted, the passengers crowding to the deckrails in
+speechless curiosity to see what was to happen next. Suddenly a
+fisherman's dory, power driven, dashed across the harbour, directly
+under the noses of the grim war vessels. Two women, spray drenched,
+stood up in the boat, and as it ploughed swiftly past our steamer the
+women called out to me: "The Cats are here, Mrs. Pankhurst! They're
+close on you&mdash;" Their voices<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span> trailed away into the mist and we heard no
+more. Within a minute or two a frightened ship's boy appeared on deck
+and delivered a message from the purser asking me to step down to his
+office. I answered that I would certainly do nothing of the kind, and
+next the police swarmed out on deck and I heard, for the fifth time that
+I was arrested under the Cat and Mouse Act. They had sent five men from
+Scotland Yard, two men from Plymouth and a wardress from Holloway, a
+sufficient number, it will be allowed, to take one woman from a ship
+anchored two miles out at sea.</p>
+
+<p>Following my firm resolve not to assist in any way the enforcing of the
+infamous law, I refused to go with the men, who thereupon picked me up
+and carried me to the waiting police tender. We steamed some miles up
+the Cornish coast, the police refusing absolutely to tell me whither
+they were conveying me, and finally disembarked at Bull Point, a
+Government landing-stage, closed to the general public. Here a motor car
+was waiting, and accompanied by my bodyguard from Scotland Yard and
+Holloway, I was driven across Dartmoor to Exeter, where I had a not
+unendurable imprisonment and hunger strike of four days. Everyone from
+the Governor of the prison to the wardresses were openly sympathetic and
+kind, and I was told by one confidential official that they kept me only
+because they had orders to do so until after the great meeting at
+Empress Theatre, Earls Court, London, which had been arranged as a
+welcome home for me. The meeting was held on the Sunday night following
+my arrest, and the great<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span> sum of &pound;15,000 was poured into the coffers of
+militancy. This included the &pound;4,500 which had been collected during my American tour.</p>
+
+<p>Several days after my release from Exeter I went openly to Paris to
+confer with my daughter on matters relating to the campaign about to
+open, returning to attend a W. S. P. U. meeting on the day before my
+license expired. Nevertheless the boat train carriage in which I
+travelled with my doctor and nurse was invaded at Dover town by two
+detectives who told me to consider myself under arrest. We were making
+tea when the men entered, but this we immediately threw out of the
+window, because a hunger strike always began at the instant of arrest.
+We never compromised at all, but resisted from the very first moment of attack.</p>
+
+<p>The reason for this uncalled for arrest at Dover was the fear on the
+part of the police of the body guard of women, just then organised for
+the expressed purpose of resisting attempts to arrest me. That the
+police, as well as the Government were afraid to risk encountering women
+who were not afraid to fight we had had abundant testimony. We certainly
+had it on this occasion, for knowing that the body guard was waiting at
+Victoria Station, the authorities had cut off all approaches to the
+arrival platform and the place was guarded by battalions of police. Not
+a passenger was permitted to leave a carriage until I had been carried
+across the arrival platform between a double line of police and
+detectives and thrown into a forty horse power motor car, guarded within
+by two plain clothes men and a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span>wardress, and without by three more
+policemen. Around this motor car were twelve taxi-cabs filled with plain
+clothes men, four to each vehicle, and three guarding the outside, not
+to mention the driver, who was also in the employ of the police
+department. Detectives on motor cycles were on guard at various points
+ready to follow any rescuing taxicab.</p>
+
+<p>Arrived at Holloway I was again lifted from the car and taken to the
+reception room and placed on the floor in a state of great exhaustion.
+When the doctor came in and told me curtly to stand up I was obliged to
+tell him that I could not stand. I utterly refused to be examined,
+saying that I was resolved to make the Government assume full
+responsibility for my condition. "I refuse to be examined by you or any
+prison doctor," I declared, "and I do this as a protest against my
+sentence, and against my being here at all. I no longer recognise a
+prison doctor as a medical man in the proper sense of the word. I have
+withdrawn my consent to be governed by the rules of prison; I refuse to
+recognise the authority of any prison official, and I therefore make it
+impossible for the Government to carry out the sentence they have
+imposed upon me."</p>
+
+<p>Wardresses were summoned, I was placed in an invalid chair and so
+carried up three flights of stairs and put into an unwarmed cell with a
+concrete floor. Refusing to leave the chair I was lifted out and placed
+on the bed, where I lay all night without removing my coat or loosening
+my garments. It was on a Saturday that the arrest had been made, and I
+was kept in prison until the following Wednesday<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span> morning. During all
+that time no food or water passed my lips, and I added to this the sleep
+strike, which means that as far as was humanly possible I refused all
+sleep and rest. For two nights I sat or lay on the concrete floor,
+resolutely refusing the oft repeated offers of medical examination. "You
+are not a doctor," I told the man. "You are a Government torturer, and
+all you want to do is to satisfy yourself that I am not quite ready to
+die." The doctor, a new man since my last imprisonment, flushed and
+looked extremely unhappy. "I suppose you do think that," he mumbled.</p>
+
+<p>On Tuesday morning the Governor came to look at me, and no doubt I
+presented by that time a fairly bad appearance. At least I gathered as
+much from the alarmed expression of the wardress who accompanied him. To
+the Governor I made the simple announcement that I was ready to leave
+prison and that I intended to leave very soon, dead or alive. I told him
+that from that moment I should not even rest on the concrete floor, but
+should walk my cell until I was released or until I died from
+exhaustion. All day I kept to this resolution, pacing up and down the
+narrow cell, many times stumbling and falling, until the doctor came in
+at evening to tell me that I was ordered released on the following
+morning. Then I loosened my gown and lay down, absolutely spent, and
+fell almost instantly into a death-like sleep. The next morning a motor
+ambulance took me to the Kingsway headquarters where a hospital room had
+been arranged for my reception. The two imprisonments in less than ten
+days had made terrible drafts<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span> on my strength, and the coldness of the
+Holloway cell had brought on a painful neuralgia. It was many days
+before I recovered even a tithe of my usual health.</p>
+
+<p>These two arrests resulted exactly as the Government should have known
+that they would result, in a great outbreak of fresh militancy. As soon
+as the news spread that I had been taken at Plymouth a huge fire broke
+out in the timber yards at Richmond Walk, Devenport, and an acre and a
+half of timber, beside a pleasure fair and a scenic railway adjacent, to
+the value of thousands of pounds was destroyed. No one ever discovered
+the cause of the fire, the greatest that ever occurred in the
+neighbourhood, but tied to one of the railings was a copy of the
+<i>Suffragette</i> and to another railing two cards, on one of which was
+written a message to the Government: "How dare you arrest Mrs. Pankhurst
+and allow Sir Edward Carson and Mr. Bonar Law to go free?" The second
+card bore the words: "Our reply to the torture of Mrs. Pankhurst, and
+her cowardly arrest at Plymouth."</p>
+
+<p>Besides this fire, which waged fiercely from midnight until dawn, a
+large unoccupied house at Bristol was destroyed by fire; a fine
+residence in Scotland, also unoccupied, was badly damaged by fire; St.
+Anne's Church in a suburb of Liverpool was partly destroyed; and many
+pillar boxes in London, Edinburgh, Derby and other cities were fired. In
+churches all over the Kingdom our women created consternation by
+interpolating into the services reverently spoken prayers for prisoners
+who were suffering for conscience' sake. The reader no doubt has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span> heard
+of these interruptions, and if so he has read of brawling, shrieking
+women, breaking into the sanctity of religious services, and creating
+riot in the House of God. I think the reader should know exactly what
+does happen when militants, who are usually religious women, interrupt
+church services. On the Sunday when I was in Holloway, following my
+arrest at Dover, certain women attending the afternoon service at
+Westminster Abbey, chanted in concert the following prayer: "God save
+Emmeline Pankhurst, help us with Thy love and strength to guard her,
+spare those who suffer for conscience' sake. Hear us when we pray to
+Thee." They had hardly finished this prayer when vergers fell upon them
+and with great violence hustled them out of the Abbey. One kneeling man,
+who happened to be near one of the women, forgot his Christian
+intercessions long enough to beat her in the face with his fists before
+the vergers came.</p>
+
+<p>Similar scenes have taken place in churches and cathedrals throughout
+England and Scotland, and in many instances the women have been most
+barbarously treated by vergers and members of the congregations. In
+other cases the women not only have been left unmolested, but have been
+allowed to finish their prayers amid deep and sympathetic silence. Some
+clergymen have even been brave enough to add a reverent amen to these
+prayers for women in prison, and it has happened that clergymen have
+voluntarily offered prayers for us. The Church as a whole, however, has
+undoubtedly failed to live up to its obligation to demand justice for
+women, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span> to protest against the torture of forcible feeding. During
+the year just closing we sent many deputations to Church authorities,
+the Bishops, one after another having been visited in this manner. Some
+of the Bishops, including the reactionary Archbishop of Canterbury,
+refused to accord the desired interview, and when that happened, the
+answer of the deputation was to sit on the doorstep of the episcopal
+residence until surrender followed&mdash;as it invariably did.</p>
+
+<p>As Holloway Gaol is within his diocese, the Bishop of London was visited
+by the W. S. P. U. and the demand was made that the Bishop himself
+should witness forcible feeding in order to realise the horror of the
+proceeding. He did visit two of the tortured women, but he did not see
+them forcibly fed, and when he came out he gave the public an account of
+his interview with them which was in effect the Government's version of
+the facts. The W. S. P. U. was naturally indignant, while all the
+Government's friends hailed the Bishop as a supporter of the policy of
+torture. Only those who have suffered the pain and agony, not to speak
+of the moral humiliation of forcible feeding can realise the depths of
+the iniquity which the Bishop of London was man&oelig;uvred by the
+Government to whitewash. It may be true, as the Bishop comforted himself
+by saying, that the victims of forcible feeding suffered the more
+because they struggled under the process. But, as Mary Richardson wrote
+in the <i>Suffragette</i>, to expect a victim not to struggle was the same as
+telling her that she would suffer less if she did not jump on getting a
+cinder in her eye. "The principle," declared Miss <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span>Richardson, "is the
+same. One struggles because the pain is excruciating, and the nerves of
+the eyes, ears and face are so tortured that it would be impossible not
+to resist to the uttermost. One struggles, also, because of another
+reason&mdash;a moral reason&mdash;for forcible feeding is an immoral assault as
+well as a painful physical one, and to remain passive under it would
+give one the feeling of sin; the sin of concurrence. One's whole nature
+is revolted; resistance is therefore inevitable."</p>
+
+<p>I think it proper here to explain also the policy upon which we embarked
+in 1914 of taking our cause directly to the King. The reader has perhaps
+heard of Suffragette "insults" to King George and Queen Mary, and it is
+but just that he should hear a direct account of how these "insults" are
+offered. Several isolated attempts had been made to present petitions to
+the King, once when he was on his way to Westminster to open Parliament,
+and again on an occasion when he paid a visit to Bristol. On the latter
+occasion the woman who tried to present the petition was assaulted by
+one of the King's equerries, who struck her with the flat of his sword.</p>
+
+<p>We finally resolved on the policy of direct petition to the king because
+we had been forced to abandon all hope of successful petitioning to his
+Ministers. Tricked and betrayed at every turn by the Liberal Government,
+we announced that we would not again put even a pretence of confidence
+in them. We would carry our demand for justice to the throne of the
+Monarch. Late in December, 1913, while I was in prison for the second
+time since my return to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span>England, a great gala performance was given at
+Covent Garden, the opera being the Jeanne d'Arc of Raymond R&ocirc;ze. The
+King and Queen and the entire Court were present, and the scene was
+expected to be one of unusual brilliance. Our women took advantage of
+the occasion to make one of the most successful demonstrations of the
+year. A box was secured directly opposite the Royal Box, and this was
+occupied by three women, beautifully gowned. On entering they had
+managed, without attracting the slightest attention, to lock and
+barricade the door, and at the close of the first act, as soon as the
+orchestra had disappeared, the women stood up, and one of them, with the
+aid of a megaphone, addressed the King. Calling attention to the
+impressive scenes on the stage, the speaker told the King that women
+were to-day fighting, as Joan of Arc fought centuries ago, for human
+liberty, and that they, like the maid of Orleans, were being tortured
+and done to death, in the name of the King, in the name of the Church,
+and with the full knowledge and responsibility of established
+Government. At this very hour the leader of these fighters in the army
+of liberty was being held in prison and tortured by the King's authority.</p>
+
+<p>The vast audience was thrown into a panic of excitement and horror, and
+amid a perfect turmoil of cries and adjurations, the door of the box was
+finally broken down and the women ejected. As soon as they had left the
+house others of our women, to the number of forty or more, who had been
+sitting quietly in an upper gallery, rose to their feet and rained
+suffrage literature on the heads of the audience below.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span> It was fully
+three quarters of an hour before the excitement subsided and the singers
+could go on with the opera.</p>
+
+<p>The sensation caused by this direct address to Royalty inspired us to
+make a second attempt to arouse the King's conscience, and early in
+January, as soon as Parliament re-assembled, we announced that I would
+personally lead a deputation to Buckingham Palace. The plan was welcomed
+with enthusiasm by our members and a very large number of women
+volunteered to join the deputation, which was intended to make a protest
+against three things&mdash;the continued disfranchisement of women; the
+forcible feeding and the cat and mouse torture of those who were
+fighting against this injustice; and the scandalous manner in which the
+Government, while coercing and torturing militant women, were allowing
+perfect freedom to the men opponents of Home Rule in Ireland, men who
+openly announced that they were about to carry out a policy, not merely
+of attacking property, but of destroying human life.</p>
+
+<p>I wrote a letter to the King, conveying to him "the respectful and loyal
+request of the Women's Social and Political Union that Your Majesty will
+give audience to a deputation of women." The letter went on: "The
+deputation desire to submit to Your Majesty in person their claim to the
+Parliamentary vote, which is the only protection against the grievous
+industrial and social wrongs that women suffer; is the symbol and
+guarantee of British citizenship; and means the recognition of women's
+equal dignity and worth, as members of our great Empire.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span></p><p>"The Deputation will further lay before Your Majesty a complaint of the
+medi&aelig;val and barbarous methods of torture whereby Your Majesty's
+Ministers are seeking to repress women's revolt against the deprivation
+of citizen rights&mdash;a revolt as noble and glorious in its spirit and
+purpose as any of those past struggles for liberty which are the pride
+of the British race.</p>
+
+<p>"We have been told by the unthinking&mdash;by those who are heedless of the
+constitutional principles upon which is based our loyal request for an
+audience of Your Majesty in person&mdash;that our conversation should be with
+Your Majesty's Ministers.</p>
+
+<p>"We repudiate this suggestion. In the first place, it would not only be
+repugnant to our womanly sense of dignity, but it would be absurd and
+futile for us to interview the very men against whom we bring the
+accusations of betraying the Women's Cause and torturing those who fight
+for that Cause.</p>
+
+<p>"In the second place, we will not be referred to, and we will not
+recognise the authority of men who, in our eyes, have no legal or
+constitutional standing in the matter, because we have not been
+consulted as to their election to Parliament nor as to their appointment
+as Ministers of the Crown."</p>
+
+<p>I then cited as a precedent in support of our claim to be heard by the
+King in person, the case of the Deputation of Irish Catholics, which, in
+the year 1793, was received by King George III in person.</p>
+
+<p>I further said:</p>
+
+<p>"Our right as women to be heard and to be aided by Your Majesty is far
+stronger than any such right<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span> possessed by men, because it is based upon
+our lack of every other constitutional means of securing the redress of
+our grievances. We have no power to vote for Members of Parliament, and
+therefore for us there is no House of Commons. We have no voice in the
+House of Lords. But we have a King, and to him we make our appeal.</p>
+
+<p>"Constitutionally speaking, we are, as voteless women, living in the
+time when the power of the Monarch was unlimited. In that old time,
+which is passed for men though not for women, men who were oppressed had
+recourse to the King&mdash;the source of power, of justice, and of reform.</p>
+
+<p>"Precisely in the same way we now claim the right to come to the foot of
+the Throne and to make of the King in person our demand for the redress
+of the political grievance which we cannot, and will not, any longer tolerate.</p>
+
+<p>"Because women are voteless, there are in our midst to-day sweated
+workers, white slaves, outraged children, and innocent mothers and their
+babes stricken by horrible disease. It is for the sake and in the cause
+of these unhappy members of our sex, that we ask of Your Majesty the
+audience that we are confident will be granted to us."</p>
+
+<p>It was some days before we had the answer to this letter, and in the
+meantime some uncommonly stirring and painful occurrences attracted the public attention.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>CHAPTER VIII</span></h2>
+
+<p>For months before my return to England from my American lecture tour,
+the Ulster situation had been increasingly serious. Sir Edward Carson
+and his followers had declared that if Home Rule government should be
+created and set up in Dublin, they would&mdash;law or no law&mdash;establish a
+rival and independent Government in Ulster. It was known that arms and
+ammunition were being shipped to Ireland, and that men&mdash;and women too,
+for that matter&mdash;were drilling and otherwise getting ready for civil
+war. The W. S. P. U. approached Sir Edward Carson and asked him if the
+proposed Ulster Government would give equal voting rights to women. We
+frankly declared that in case the Ulster men alone were to have the
+vote, that we should deal with "King Carson" and his colleagues exactly
+in the same manner that we had adopted towards the British Government
+centred at Westminster. Sir Edward Carson at first promised us that the
+rebel Ulster Government, should it come into existence, would give votes
+to Ulster women. This pledge was later repudiated, and in the early
+winter months of 1914 militancy appeared in Ulster. It had been raging
+in Scotland for some time, and now the imprisoned Suffragettes in that
+country were being forcibly fed as in England. The answer to this was,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span>
+of course, more militancy. The ancient Scottish church of Whitekirk, a
+relic of pre-Reformation days, was destroyed by fire. Several unoccupied
+country houses were also burned.</p>
+
+<p>It was about this time, February, 1914, that I undertook a series of
+meetings outside London, the first of which was to be held in Glasgow,
+in the St. Andrews Hall, which holds many thousands of people. In order
+that I might be free on the night of the meeting, I left London unknown
+to the police, in a motor car. In spite of all efforts to apprehend me I
+succeeded in reaching Glasgow and in getting to the platform of St.
+Andrews' where I found myself face to face with an enormous, and
+manifestly sympathetic audience.</p>
+
+<p>As it was suspected that the police might rush the platform, plans had
+been made to offer resistance, and the bodyguard was present in force.
+My speech was one of the shortest I have ever made. I said:</p>
+
+<p>"I have kept my promise, and in spite of His Majesty's Government I am
+here to-night. Very few people in this audience, very few people in this
+country, know how much of the nation's money is being spent to silence
+women. But the wit and ingenuity of women is overcoming the power and
+money of the British Government. It is well that we should have this
+meeting to-night, because to-day is a memorable day in the annals of the
+United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. To-day in the House of
+Commons has been witnessed the triumph of militancy&mdash;men's
+militancy&mdash;and to-night I hope<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span> to make it clear to the people in this
+meeting that if there is any distinction to be drawn at all between
+militancy in Ulster and the militancy of women, it is all to the
+advantage of the women. Our greatest task in this women's movement is to
+prove that we are human beings like men, and every stage of our fight is
+forcing home that very difficult lesson into the minds of men, and
+especially into the minds of politicians. I propose to-night at this
+political meeting to have a text. Texts are usually given from pulpits,
+but perhaps you will forgive me if I have a text to-night. My text is:
+'Equal justice for men and women, equal political justice, equal legal
+justice, equal industrial justice, and equal social justice.' I want as
+clearly and briefly as I can to make it clear to you to-night that if it
+is justifiable to fight for common ordinary equal justice, then women
+have ample justification, nay, have greater justification, for
+revolution and rebellion, than ever men have had in the whole history of
+the human race. Now that is a big contention to make, but I am going to
+prove it. You get the proof of the political injustice&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>As I finished the word "injustice," a steward uttered a warning shout,
+there was a tramp of heavy feet, and a large body of police burst into
+the hall, and rushed up to the platform, drawing their truncheons as
+they ran. Headed by detectives from Scotland Yard, they surged in on all
+sides, but as the foremost members attempted to storm the platform, they
+were met by a fusillade of flower-pots, tables, chairs, and other
+missiles. They seized the platform railing, in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span> order to tear it down,
+but they found that under the decorations barbed wires were concealed.
+This gave them pause for a moment.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, more of the invading host came from other directions. The
+bodyguard and members of the audience vigorously repelled the attack,
+wielding clubs, batons, poles, planks, or anything they could seize,
+while the police laid about right and left with their batons, their
+violence being far the greater. Men and women were seen on all sides
+with blood streaming down their faces, and there were cries for a
+doctor. In the middle of the struggle, several revolver shots rang out,
+and the woman who was firing the revolver&mdash;which I should explain was
+loaded with blank cartridges only&mdash;was able to terrorise and keep at bay
+a whole body of police.</p>
+
+<p>I had been surrounded by members of the bodyguard, who hurried me
+towards the stairs from the platform. The police, however, overtook us,
+and in spite of the resistance of the bodyguard, they seized me and
+dragged me down the narrow stair at the back of the hall. There a cab
+was waiting. I was pushed violently into it, and thrown on the floor,
+the seats being occupied by as many constables as could crowd inside.</p>
+
+<p>The meeting was left in a state of tremendous turmoil, and the people of
+Glasgow who were present expressed their sense of outrage at the
+behavior of the police, who, acting under the Government's instructions,
+had so disgraced the city. General Drummond, who was present on the
+platform, took hold of the situation and delivered a rousing speech, in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span>
+which she exhorted the audience to make the Government feel the force of
+their indignation.</p>
+
+<p>I was kept in the Glasgow police-cells all night, and the next morning
+was taken, a hunger and thirst striking prisoner, to Holloway, where I
+remained for five memorable days. This was the seventh attempt the
+Government had made to make me serve a three years' term of penal
+servitude on a conspiracy charge, in connection with the blowing up of
+Mr. Lloyd-George's country house. In the eleven and a half months since
+I had received that sentence I had spent just thirty days in prison. On
+March 14th I was again released, still suffering severely, not only from
+the hunger and thirst strike, but from injuries received at the time of
+my brutal arrest in Glasgow.</p>
+
+<p>The answer to that arrest had been swift and strong. In Bristol, the
+scene of great riots and destruction when men were fighting for votes, a
+large timber-yard was burnt. In Scotland a mansion was destroyed by
+fire. A milder protest consisted of a raid upon the house of the Home
+Secretary, in the course of which eighteen windows were broken.</p>
+
+<p>The greatest and most startling of all protests hitherto made was the
+attack at this time on the Rokeby "Venus" in the National Gallery. Mary
+Richardson, the young woman who carried out this protest, is possessed
+of a very fine artistic sense, and nothing but the most compelling sense
+of duty would have moved her to the deed. Miss Richardson being placed
+on trial, made a moving address to the Court, in the course of which she
+said that her act was premeditated, and that she had thought it over
+very <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span>seriously before it was undertaken. She added: "I have been a
+student of art, and I suppose care as much for art as any one who was in
+the gallery when I made my protest. But I care more for justice than I
+do for art, and I firmly believe than when a nation shuts its eyes to
+justice, and prefers to have women who are fighting for justice
+ill-treated, mal-treated, and tortured, that such action as mine should
+be understandable; I don't say excusable, but it should be understood.</p>
+
+<p>"I should like to point out that the outrage which the Government has
+committed upon Mrs. Pankhurst is an ultimatum of outrages. It is murder,
+slow murder, and premeditated murder. That is how I have looked at it....</p>
+
+<p>"How you can hold women up to ridicule and contempt, and put them in
+prison, and yet say nothing to the Government for murdering people, I
+cannot understand....</p>
+
+<p>"The fact is that the nation is either dead or asleep. In my opinion
+there is undoubted evidence that the nation is dead, because women have
+knocked in vain at the door of administrators, archbishops, and even the
+King himself. The Government have closed all doors to us. And remember
+this&mdash;a state of death in a nation, as well as in an individual, leads
+to one thing, and that is dissolution. I do not hesitate to say that if
+the men of the country do not at this eleventh hour put their hand out
+and save Mrs. Pankhurst, before a few more years are passed they will
+stretch out their hand in vain to save the Empire."</p>
+
+<p>In sentencing Miss Richardson to six month's <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span>imprisonment the
+Magistrate said regretfully that if she had smashed a window instead of
+an art treasure he could have given her a maximum sentence of eighteen
+months, which illustrates, I think, one more queer anomaly of English law.</p>
+
+<p>A few weeks later another famous painting, the Sargent portrait of Henry
+James, was attacked by a Suffragette, who, like Miss Richardson, was
+sent through the farce of a trial and a prison sentence which she did
+not serve. By this time practically all the picture galleries and other
+public galleries and museums had been closed to the public. The
+Suffragettes had succeeded in large measure in making England
+unattractive to tourists, and hence unprofitable to the world of
+business. As we had anticipated, the reaction against the Liberal
+Government began to manifest itself. Questions were asked daily, in the
+press, in the House of Commons, everywhere, as to the responsibility of
+the Government in the Suffragette activities. People began to place that
+responsibility where it belonged, at the doors of the Government, rather
+than at our own.</p>
+
+<p>Especially did the public begin to contrast the treatment meted out to
+the rebel women with that accorded to the rebel men of Ulster. For a
+whole year the Government had been attacking the women's right of free
+speech, by their refusal to allow the W. S. P. U. to hold public
+meetings in Hyde Park. The excuse given for this was that we advocated
+and defended a militant policy. But the Government permitted the Ulster
+militants to advocate their war policy in Hyde Park, and we determined
+that, with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span> or without the Government's permission, we should, on the
+day of the Ulster meeting, hold a suffrage meeting in Hyde Park. General
+Drummond was announced as the chief speaker at this meeting, and when
+the day came, militant Ulster men and militant women assembled in Hyde
+Park. The militant men were allowed to speak in defence of bloodshed;
+but General Drummond was arrested before she had uttered more than a few words.</p>
+
+<p>Another proof that the Government had a law of leniency for militant men
+and a law of persecution for militant women was shown at this time by
+the case of Miss Dorothy Evans, our organiser in Ulster. She and another
+Suffragette, Miss Maud Muir, were arrested in Belfast charged with
+having in their possession a quantity of explosives. It was well known
+that there were houses in Belfast that secreted tons of gunpowder and
+ammunition for the use of the rebels against Home Rule, but none of
+those houses were entered and searched by the police. The authorities
+reserved their energies in this direction for the headquarters of the
+militant women. Naturally enough the two suffrage prisoners, on being
+arraigned in court, refused to be tried unless the Government proceeded
+also against the men rebels. The prisoners throughout the proceedings
+kept up such a disturbance that the trial could not properly go on. When
+the case was called Miss Evans rose and protested loudly, saying: "I
+deny your jurisdiction entirely until there are in the dock beside us
+men who are well known leaders of the Ulster militant movement." Miss
+Muir joined Miss Evans in her protest and both<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span> women were dragged from
+the court. After an hour's adjournment the trial was resumed, but the
+women again began to speak, and the case was hurried through in the
+midst of indescribable din and commotion. The women were sent to prison
+on remand, and after a four days' hunger and thirst strike were released unconditionally.</p>
+
+<p>The result of this case was a severe outbreak of militancy, three fires
+destroying Belfast mansions within a few days. Fires blazed almost daily
+throughout England, a very important instance being the destruction of
+the Bath Hotel at Felixstowe, valued at &pound;35,000. The two women
+responsible for this were afterwards arrested, and as their trials were
+delayed, they were, although unconvicted prisoners, tortured by forcible
+feeding for several months. This occurred in April, a few weeks before
+the day appointed for our deputation to the King.</p>
+
+<p>I had appointed May 21st for the deputation, in spite of the fact that
+the King had, through his Ministers, refused to receive us. Replying to
+this I had written, again directly to the King, that we utterly denied
+the constitutional right of Ministers, who not being elected by women
+were not responsible to them, to stand between ourselves and the Throne,
+and to prevent us from having an audience of His Majesty. I declared
+further that we would, on the date announced, present ourselves at the
+gates of Buckingham Palace to demand an interview.</p>
+
+<p>Following the despatch of this letter my life was made as uncomfortable
+and as insecure as the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span>Government, through their police department,
+could contrive. I was not allowed to make a public appearance, but I
+addressed several huge meetings from the balcony of houses where I had
+taken refuge. These were all publicly announced, and each time the
+police, mingling with crowds, made strenuous efforts to arrest me. By
+strategy, and through the valiant efforts of the bodyguard, I was able
+each time to make my speech and afterwards to escape from the house. All
+of these occasions were marked by fierce opposition from the police and
+splendid courage and resistance on the part of the women.</p>
+
+<p>The deputation to the King was, of course, marked by the Government as
+an occasion on which I could be arrested, and when, on the day
+appointed, I led the great deputation of women to the gates of
+Buckingham Palace, an army of several thousand police were sent out
+against us. The conduct of the police showed plainly that they had been
+instructed to repeat the tactics of Black Friday, described in an
+earlier chapter. Indeed, the violence, brutality and insult of Black
+Friday were excelled on this day, and at the gates of the King of
+England. I myself did not suffer so greatly as others, because I had
+advanced towards the Palace unnoticed by the police, who were looking
+for me at a more distant point. When I arrived at the gates I was
+recognised by an Inspector, who at once seized me bodily, and conveyed me to Holloway.</p>
+
+<div class="center"><a name="ill-348.jpg" id="ill-348.jpg"></a><img src="images/ill-348.jpg" width='510' height='700' alt="ARRESTED AT THE KING'S GATE
+May, 1914" /></div>
+
+<p class="center">&copy; <i>International News Service</i></p>
+
+<p class="bold">"ARRESTED AT THE KING'S GATE!"</p>
+
+<p class="bold"><i>May, 1914</i></p>
+
+<p>Before the Deputation had gone forth, I had made a short speech to them,
+warning them of what might happen, and my final message was: "Whatever<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span>
+happens, do not turn back." They did not, and in spite of all the
+violence inflicted upon them, they went forward, resolved, so long as
+they were free, not to give up the attempt to reach the Palace. Many
+arrests were made, and of those arrested many were sent to prison.
+Although for the majority, this was the first imprisonment, these brave
+women adopted the hunger strike, and passed seven or eight days without
+food and water before they were released, weak and ill as may be supposed.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span>CHAPTER IX</span></h2>
+
+<p>In the weeks following the disgraceful events before Buckingham Palace
+the Government made several last, desperate efforts to crush the
+W. S. P. U., to remove all the leaders and to destroy our paper, the
+<i>Suffragette</i>. They issued summonses against Mrs. Drummond, Mrs. Dacre
+Fox and Miss Grace Roe; they raided our headquarters at Lincolns Inn
+House; twice they raided other headquarters temporarily in use, not to
+speak of raids made upon private dwellings where the new leaders, who
+had risen to take the places of those arrested, were at their work for
+the organisation. But with each successive raid the disturbances which
+the Government were able to make in our affairs became less, because we
+were better able, each time, to provide against them. Every effort made
+by the Government to suppress the <i>Suffragette</i> failed, and it continued
+to come out regularly every week. Although the paper was issued
+regularly, we had to use almost super-human energy to get it
+distributed. The Government sent to all the great wholesale news agents
+a letter which was designed to terrorise and bully them into refusing to
+handle the paper or to sell it to the retail news agents. Temporarily,
+at any rate, the letter produced in many cases the desired effect, but
+we overcame the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span>emergency by taking immediate steps to build up a
+system of distribution which was worked by women themselves,
+independently of the newspaper trade. We also opened a "Suffragette
+Defence Fund," to meet the extra expense of publishing and distributing the paper.</p>
+
+<p>Twice more the Government attempted to force me to serve the three
+years' term of penal servitude, one arrest being made when I was being
+carried to a meeting in an ambulance. Wholesale arrests and hunger
+strikes occurred at the same time, but our women continued their work of
+militancy, and money flowed into our Protest and Defence Fund. At one
+great meeting in July the fund was increased by nearly &pound;16,000.</p>
+
+<p>But now unmistakable signs began to appear that our long and bitter
+struggle was drawing to a close. The last resort of the Government of
+inciting the street mobs against us had been little successful, and we
+could see in the temper of the public abundant hope that the reaction
+against the Government, long hoped for by us, had actually begun.</p>
+
+<p>Every day of the militant movement was so extraordinarily full of events
+and changes that it is difficult to choose a point at which this
+narrative should be brought to a close. I think, however, that an
+account of a recent debate which took place in the House of Commons will
+give the reader the best idea of the complete breakdown of the
+Government in their effort to crush the women's fight for liberty.</p>
+
+<p>On June 11th, when the House of Commons had gone into a Committee of
+Supply, Lord Robert Cecil<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span> moved a reduction of 100 pounds on the Home
+Office vote, thus precipitating a discussion of militancy. Lord Robert
+said that he had read with some surprise that the Government were not
+dissatisfied with the measures which they had taken to deal with the
+violent suffragists, and he added with some asperity that the Government
+took a much more sanguine view of the matter than anybody else in the
+United Kingdom. The House, Lord Robert went on to declare, would not be
+in a position to deal with the case satisfactorily unless they realised
+the devotion of the followers to their leaders, who were almost fully
+responsible for what was going on. Ministerial cheers greeted this
+utterance, but they ceased suddenly when the speaker went on to say that
+these leaders could never have induced their followers to enter upon a
+career of crime but for the serious mistakes which had been made over
+and over again by the Government. Among these mistakes Lord Robert cited
+the shameful treatment of the women on Black Friday, the policy of
+forcible feeding and the scandal of the different treatment accorded
+Lady Constance Lytton and "Jane Warton." There were Opposition cheers at
+this, and they were again raised when Lord Robert deplored the terrible
+waste of energy, and "admirable material" involved in the militant
+movement. Although Lord Robert Cecil deemed it unjust as well as futile
+for Suffragist Members to withhold their support from the woman suffrage
+movement on account of militancy he himself was in favor of deportation
+for Suffragettes. At this there were cries of "Where to?" and "Ulster!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span></p><p>Mr. McKenna replied by first calling attention to the fact that in the
+militant movement they had a phenomenon "absolutely without precedent in
+our history." Women in numbers were committing crimes, beginning with
+window breaking, and proceeding to arson, not with the motives of
+ordinary criminals, but with the intention of advertising a political
+cause and of forcing the public to grant their demands. Mr. McKenna
+continuing said:</p>
+
+<p>"The number of women who commit crimes of that kind is extremely small,
+but the number of those who sympathise with them is extremely large. One
+of the difficulties which the police have in detecting this form of
+crime and in bringing home the offence to the criminal is that the
+criminals find so many sympathisers among the well-to-do and thoroughly
+respectable classes that the ordinary administration of the law is
+rendered comparatively impossible. Let me give the House some figures
+showing the number of women who have been committed to prison for
+offences since the beginning of the militant agitation in 1906. In that
+year the total number of commitments to prison was 31, all the persons
+charged being women. In 1909 the figure rose to 156; in 1911 to 188 (182
+women and six men); and in 1912 to 290 (288 women and two men). In 1913
+the number dropped to 183, and so far this year it has dropped to 108.
+These figures include all commitments to prison and rearrests under the
+Cat and Mouse Act. What is the obvious lesson to be drawn? Up to 1912
+the number of offences committed for which imprisonment was the
+punishment was steadily increasing, but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span> since the beginning of last
+year&mdash;that is to say, since the new Act came into force&mdash;the number of
+individual offences has been very greatly reduced. On the other hand, we
+see that the seriousness of the offences is much greater."</p>
+
+<p>This statement, that the number of imprisonments had decreased since the
+adoption of the Cat and Mouse Act, was of course, incorrect, or at best
+misleading. The fact was that the number of imprisonments decreased
+because, where formerly the militants went willingly to prison for their
+acts, they now escaped prison wherever possible. A comparatively small
+number of "mice" were ever rearrested by the police.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. McKenna went on to say that he realised fully the growing sense of
+indignation against the militant suffragists and he added, "Their one
+hope is, rightly or wrongly, that the well advertised indignation of the
+public will recoil on the head of the Government."</p>
+
+<p>"And so it will," interpolated a voice.</p>
+
+<p>"My honourable friend," replied Mr. McKenna, "says so it will. I believe
+that he is mistaken." But he gave no reasons for so believing. Referring
+to what he called the "recent grave rudenesses which have been committed
+against the King," Mr. McKenna said: "It is true that all subjects have
+the right of petitioning His Majesty, providing the petition is couched
+in respectful terms, but there is no right on the part of the subjects
+generally to personal audience for the purpose of the presentation of
+the petition or otherwise. It is the duty of the Home Secretary to
+present all such petitions to the King, and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span>further to advise His
+Majesty what action should be taken. It was therefore ridiculous for any
+Suffragist to assert that there had been any breach of constitutional
+propriety on the part of the King in refusing, on the advice of the Home
+Secretary to receive the deputation."</p>
+
+<p>Also, said Mr. McKenna, in view of the fact that the petition for an
+audience was sent by a person under sentence of penal
+servitude&mdash;myself&mdash;it was the plain duty of the Home Secretary to advise
+the King not to grant it. He referred to the incident, he said, only
+because it was illustrative of the militant's methods of advertising
+their cause. He gave them credit, he was bound to say, for a certain
+degree of intelligence in adopting their methods. "No action has been so
+fruitful of advertisement as the recent absurdities which they have
+perpetrated in relation to the King."</p>
+
+<p>Coming down to the question of methods of meeting and overcoming
+militancy, Mr. McKenna said that he had received an almost unlimited
+correspondence on the subject from every section of the public. "Four
+methods were suggested," said he. "The first is to let them die. (Hear,
+hear.) That is, I should say, at the present moment, the most popular
+(laughter), judging by the number of letters I have received. The second
+is to deport them. (Hear, hear.) The third is to treat them as lunatics.
+(Hear, hear.) And the fourth is to give them the franchise. (Hear, hear,
+and laughter.) I think that is an exhaustive list. I notice each one of
+them is received with a certain very moderate amount of applause in this
+House. I hope to give reason why at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span> the present time I think we should
+not adopt any one of them."</p>
+
+<p>The first suggestion was usually, not always, based on the assumption
+that the women would take their food if they knew that the alternative
+was death. Mr. McKenna read to the House in opposition to that view "the
+opinion of a great medical expert who had had intimate knowledge of the
+Suffragettes from the first." "We have to face the fact, therefore, that
+they would die," continued Mr. McKenna.</p>
+
+<p>"Let me say, also, with actual experience of dealing with suffragists,
+in many cases they have got in their refusal of food and water beyond
+the point when they could help themselves, and they have clearly done
+all that they could do to show their readiness to die.... There are
+those who hold another assumption. They think that after one or two
+deaths in prison militancy would cease. In my judgment there was never a
+greater delusion. I readily admit that this is the issue upon which I
+stand and upon which I feel I would fight to the end those who would
+adopt as their policy to let the prisoners die. So far from putting an
+end to militancy, I believe it would be the greatest incentive to
+militancy which could ever happen. For every woman who dies, there would
+be scores of women who would come forward for the honour, as they would
+deem it, of earning the crown of martyrdom."</p>
+
+<p>"How do you know?" called out an Opposition member.</p>
+
+<p>"How do I know?" retorted the Home Secretary. "I have had more to do
+with these women than the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span> honourable member, much more. Those who hold
+that opinion leave out of account all recognition of the nature of these
+women. I do not speak in admiration of them. They are hysterical
+fanatics, but, coupled with their hysterical fanaticism, they have a
+courage, part of their fanaticism, which undoubtedly stands at nothing,
+and the honourable member who thinks that they would not come forward,
+not merely to risk death, but to undergo it, for what they deem the
+greatest cause on earth is making, in my judgment, a profound
+mistake.... They would seek death, and I am sure that however strong
+public opinion outside might be to-day in favour of allowing them to
+die, when there were twenty, thirty, forty, or more deaths in prison,
+you would have a violent reaction of public opinion, and the honourable
+gentleman who now so glibly says 'Let them die' would be among the first
+to blame the Government for what he would describe as the inhuman
+attitude they had adopted.</p>
+
+<p>"That policy," continued Mr. McKenna, "could not be adopted without an
+Act of Parliament. For the reason I have given I have not asked
+Parliament to remove from prison officials the responsibility under
+which they now rest for doing their best to keep those committed to
+their charge alive. But, supposing this legal responsibility were
+removed from the prison officials, let honourable members for a moment
+transport themselves in imagination to a prison cell and conceive of a
+prison doctor, a humane man, standing by watching a woman slowly being
+done to death by starvation and thirst, knowing that he could help her
+and that he could keep her alive. Did they think that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span> any doctor would
+go on with such action, or that we should be able to retain medical men
+under such conditions in our service? I do not believe it.</p>
+
+<p>"The doctor would think, as I should think if I saw a woman lying there,
+'What has been this woman's offence?' It may have been obstructing the
+police, coupled with the obstinacy derived from fanaticism which leads
+her to refuse food and water. Obstructing the police and she is to die!
+I could not distinguish, and no Home Secretary could ever say, that this
+woman should be left to die and that that woman should not. Once we were
+committed to a policy of allowing them to die if they did not take their
+food we should have to go on with it, and we should have woman after
+woman whose only offence may have been obstructing the police, breaking
+a window, or even burning down an empty house, dying because she was
+obstinate. I do not believe that that is a policy which on consideration
+will ever recommend itself to the British people, and I am bound to say
+for myself I could never take a hand in carrying that policy out." (Cheers.)</p>
+
+<p>Lord Robert Cecil's favourite remedy of deportation Mr. McKenna
+dismissed on the grounds that this would be merely removing the
+difficulty to some other country than Great Britain. If the suggested
+distant island were treated as a prison the women would hunger strike
+there as they did in English prisons. If the island were not treated as
+a prison, the Suffragettes' rich friends would come and rescue them in yachts.</p>
+
+<p>The suggestion that the militants be treated as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span> lunatics was also
+dismissed as impossible. Admitting that he had tried to get them
+certified as lunatics and had failed because the medical profession
+would not consent to such a course, Mr. McKenna said that he could not,
+contrary to the advice of the doctors, get certification by Act of
+Parliament. "There remains," said Mr. McKenna, "the last proposal, that
+we should give them the franchise."</p>
+
+<p>"That is the right one," exclaimed Mr. William Redmond, but the Home
+Secretary replied:</p>
+
+<p>"Whatever may be said as to the merits or demerits of that proposal, it
+is clearly not one I can discuss now in Committee of Supply. I am not
+responsible, as Home Secretary, for the state of the law on the
+franchise, nor is there any occasion for me to express or conceal my own
+opinions on the point; but I certainly do not think, and I am sure the
+Committee will agree with me, that that could be seriously treated as a
+remedy for the existing state of lawlessness."</p>
+
+<p>Coming at last to the constructive part of his speech Mr. McKenna told
+the House of Commons that the Government had one last resort, which was
+to take legal proceedings against subscribers to the funds of the
+W. S. P. U. The funds of the society, he said, were undoubtedly beyond
+the arm of the British law. But the Government were in hopes of stopping
+future subscriptions. "We are now not without hope," he concluded, "that
+we have evidence which will enable us to proceed against the
+subscribers" (loud cheers) "in civil action, and if we succeed the
+subscribers will become personally liable for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span> all the damage done."
+(Cheers.) "It is a question of evidence.... I have further directed that
+the question should be considered whether the subscribers could not be
+proceeded against criminally as well as by civil action." (Cheers.) "We
+have only been able to obtain this evidence by our now not infrequent
+raids upon the offices, and such property as we can get at of the
+society.... A year ago a raid was made on the offices of the society,
+but we obtained no such evidence. If we succeed in making the
+subscribers personally responsible individually for the whole damage
+done I have no doubt that the insurance companies will quickly follow
+the example set them by the Government, and in turn bring actions to
+recover the cost which has been thrown upon them. If that is done I have
+no doubt the days of militancy are over.</p>
+
+<p>"The militants live only by the subscriptions of rich women" (cheers)
+"who themselves enjoy all the advantages of wealth secured for them by
+the labour of others" (cheers) "and use their wealth against the
+interests of society, paying their unfortunate victims to undergo all
+the horrors of a hunger and thirst strike in the commission of a crime.
+Whatever feelings we may have against the wretched women who for 30s.
+and &pound;2 a week go about the country burning and destroying, what must our
+feelings be for the women who give their money to induce the
+perpetration of these crimes and leave their sisters to undergo the
+punishment while they live in luxury?" (Cheers.) "If we can succeed
+against them we will spare no pains. If the action is <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span>successful in the
+total destruction of the means of revenue of the Women's Social and
+Political Union I think we shall see the last of the power of Mrs.
+Pankhurst and her friends." (Cheers.)</p>
+
+<p>In the general debate which followed the Government were obliged to
+listen to very severe criticisms of their past and present policy
+towards the militant women. Mr. Keir Hardie said in part:</p>
+
+<p>"We may not to-day discuss the question of the franchise, but surely it
+was possible for the Home Secretary, without any transgression on the
+rules of the House, to have held out just a ray of hope for the future
+as to the intentions of the Government in regard to this most urgent
+question. On that point, may I say that I am not one of those who
+believe that a right thing should be withheld because some of the
+advocates of it resort to weapons of which we do not approve. That note
+has been sounded more than once, and if it be true, and it is true, that
+a section of the public outside are strongly opposed to this conduct, it
+is equally true that the bulk of the people look with a very calm and
+indifferent eye upon what is happening so long as the vote is withheld from women."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hardie concluded by regretting that the House, instead of discussing
+Woman Suffrage, was discussing methods of penalising militant women.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Rupert Gwynne said: "Nobody is in a more ridiculous position than
+the members on the Treasury Bench. They cannot address a meeting, or go
+to a railway station, or even get into a taxicab, without having
+detectives with them. Even if they like it,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span> we, the public do not,
+because we have to pay for it. It is not worth the expense that it costs
+to have a detective staff following Cabinet Ministers wherever they go,
+whether in a private or a public capacity.</p>
+
+<p>"Further," said Mr. Gwynne, "if the Home Secretary is correct in saying
+that these women are prepared to die, and invite death, in order to
+advertise their devotion to their cause, does he really think they are
+going to mind if their funds are attached?"</p>
+
+<p>Another friend of the Suffragists, Mr. Wedgwood said: "We are dealing
+with a problem which is a very serious one indeed. To my mind, when you
+find a large body of public opinion, and a large number of people
+capable of going to these lengths, there is only one thing for a
+respectable House of Commons to do, and that is to consider very closely
+and clearly whether the complaints of those who complain are or are not
+justified. We are not justified in acting in panic. What it is our duty
+to do is to consider the rights and wrongs of these people who have
+acted in this way. I attribute myself no value to the vote, but I do
+think that when we seriously consider the question of Woman Suffrage,
+which has not been done by this House up to the present, we should
+remember that when you see people capable of this amount of
+self-sacrifice, that the one duty of the House of Commons is not to
+stamp the iron heel upon them, but to see how far their cause is just,
+and to act according to justice."</p>
+
+<p>When such a debate as this was possible in the House of Commons, it must
+be plain to every disinterested reader that militancy never set the
+cause of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span>suffrage back, but on the contrary, set it forward at least
+half a century. When I remember how that same House of Commons, a few
+years ago, treated the mention of woman suffrage with scorn and
+contempt, how they permitted the most insulting things to be said of the
+women who were begging for their political freedom, how, with indecent
+laughter and coarse jokes they allowed suffrage bills to be talked out,
+I cannot but marvel at the change our militancy so quickly brought
+about. Mr. McKenna's speech was in itself a token of the complete
+surrender of the Government.</p>
+
+<p>Of course the promise of the Home Secretary that subscribers to our
+funds should, if possible, be held legally responsible for damage done
+to private property by the Suffragettes, was never meant to be adhered
+to. It was, in fact, a perfectly absurd promise, and I think that very
+few Members of Parliament were deceived by it. Our subscribers can
+always remain anonymous if they choose, and if it should ever be
+possible to attack them for our deeds, they would naturally take refuge
+behind that privilege.</p>
+
+<p>Our battles are practically over, we confidently believe. For the
+present at least our arms are grounded, for directly the threat of
+foreign war descended on our nation we declared a complete truce from
+militancy. What will come out of this European war&mdash;so terrible in its
+effects on the women who had no voice in averting it&mdash;so baneful in the
+suffering it must necessarily bring on innocent children&mdash;no human being
+can calculate. But one thing is reasonably certain, and that is that the
+Cabinet changes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span> which will necessarily result from warfare will make
+future militancy on the part of women unnecessary. No future Government
+will repeat the mistakes and the brutality of the Asquith Ministry. None
+will be willing to undertake the impossible task of crushing or even
+delaying the march of women towards their rightful heritage of political
+liberty and social and industrial freedom.</p>
+
+<p class="bold">THE END</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of My Own Story, by Emmeline Pankhurst
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of My Own Story, by Emmeline Pankhurst
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: My Own Story
+
+Author: Emmeline Pankhurst
+
+Release Date: January 6, 2011 [EBook #34856]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY OWN STORY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif, Martin Pettit, University of
+Toronto Libraries and the Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+MRS. PANKHURST'S OWN STORY
+
+[Illustration: E. Pankhurst]
+
+
+MY OWN STORY
+
+BY
+EMMELINE PANKHURST
+
+[Illustration: Logo]
+
+ILLUSTRATED
+
+LONDON
+EVELEIGH NASH
+
+1914
+
+
+Copyright, 1914, by
+
+HEARSTS'S INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY CO., INC.
+
+_All rights reserved, including the translation into foreign
+languages, including the Scandinavian._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+
+THE MAKING OF A MILITANT
+
+CHAPTER                     PAGE
+      I                        1
+
+     II                       18
+
+    III                       37
+
+     IV                       57
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+
+FOUR YEARS OF PEACEFUL MILITANCY
+
+CHAPTER                     PAGE
+      I                       81
+
+     II                       97
+
+    III                      116
+
+     IV                      131
+
+      V                      149
+
+     VI                      160
+
+    VII                      166
+
+   VIII                      185
+
+
+BOOK III
+
+
+THE WOMEN'S REVOLUTION
+
+CHAPTER                     PAGE
+
+      I                      205
+
+     II                      221
+
+    III                      249
+
+     IV                      270
+
+      V                      285
+
+     VI                      303
+
+    VII                      323
+
+   VIII                      339
+
+     IX                      350
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+Portrait of Mrs. Pankhurst                       _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                         FACING
+                                                           PAGE
+
+Mrs. Pankhurst addressing a by-election crowd                74
+
+Mrs. Pankhurst and Christabel hiding from the police
+on the roof garden at Clements Inn, October, 1908           120
+
+Christabel, Mrs. Drummond and Mrs. Pankhurst in the
+dock, First Conspiracy Trial, October, 1908                 126
+
+Mrs. Pankhurst and Miss Christabel Pankhurst in prison
+dress                                                       132
+
+Inspector Wells conducting Mrs. Pankhurst to the
+House of Commons, June, 1908                                140
+
+Over 1,000 women had been in prison--Broad arrows in
+the 1910 parade                                             170
+
+The head of the deputation on Black Friday, November,
+1910                                                        178
+
+For hours scenes like this were enacted on Black Friday,
+November, 1910                                              180
+
+Riot scenes on Black Friday, November, 1910                 186
+
+In this manner thousands of women throughout the
+Kingdom slept in unoccupied houses over census night        194
+
+The argument of the broken window pane                      218
+
+A suffragette throwing a bag of flour at Mr. Asquith
+in Chester                                                  260
+
+Re-Arrest of Mrs. Pankhurst at Woking, May 26,
+1913                                                        312
+
+Mrs. Pankhurst and Christabel in the garden of
+Christabel's home in Paris                                  324
+
+"Arrested at the King's gate!" May, 1914                    348
+
+
+
+
+ACKNOWLEDGMENT
+
+
+The author wishes to express her deep obligation to Rheta Childe Dorr
+for invaluable editorial services performed in the preparation of this
+volume, especially the American edition.
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD
+
+
+The closing paragraphs of this book were written in the late summer of
+1914, when the armies of every great power in Europe were being
+mobilised for savage, unsparing, barbarous warfare--against one another,
+against small and unaggressive nations, against helpless women and
+children, against civilisation itself. How mild, by comparison with the
+despatches in the daily newspapers, will seem this chronicle of women's
+militant struggle against political and social injustice in one small
+corner of Europe. Yet let it stand as it was written, with
+peace--so-called, and civilisation, and orderly government as the
+background for heroism such as the world has seldom witnessed. The
+militancy of men, through all the centuries, has drenched the world with
+blood, and for these deeds of horror and destruction men have been
+rewarded with monuments, with great songs and epics. The militancy of
+women has harmed no human life save the lives of those who fought the
+battle of righteousness. Time alone will reveal what reward will be
+allotted to the women.
+
+This we know, that in the black hour that has just struck in Europe, the
+men are turning to their women and calling on them to take up the work
+of keeping civilisation alive. Through all the harvest fields, in
+orchards and vineyards, women are garnering food for the men who fight,
+as well as for the children left fatherless by war. In the cities the
+women are keeping open the shops, they are driving trucks and trams, and
+are altogether attending to a multitude of business.
+
+When the remnants of the armies return, when the commerce of Europe is
+resumed by men, will they forget the part the women so nobly played?
+Will they forget in England how women in all ranks of life put aside
+their own interests and organised, not only to nurse the wounded, care
+for the destitute, comfort the sick and lonely, but actually to maintain
+the existence of the nation? Thus far, it must be admitted, there are
+few indications that the English Government are mindful of the unselfish
+devotion manifested by the women. Thus far all Government schemes for
+overcoming unemployment have been directed towards the unemployment of
+men. The work of women, making garments, etc., has in some cases been
+taken away.
+
+At the first alarm of war the militants proclaimed a truce, which was
+answered half-heartedly by the announcement that the Government would
+release all suffrage prisoners who would give an undertaking "not to
+commit further crimes or outrages." Since the truce had already been
+proclaimed, no suffrage prisoner deigned to reply to the Home
+Secretary's provision. A few days later, no doubt influenced by
+representations made to the Government by men and women of every
+political faith--many of them never having been supporters of
+revolutionary tactics--Mr. McKenna announced in the House of Commons
+that it was the intention of the Government, within a few days, to
+release unconditionally, all suffrage prisoners. So ends, for the
+present, the war of women against men. As of old, the women become the
+nurturing mothers of men, their sisters and uncomplaining helpmates. The
+future lies far ahead, but let this preface and this volume close with
+the assurance that the struggle for the full enfranchisement of women
+has not been abandoned; it has simply, for the moment, been placed in
+abeyance. When the clash of arms ceases, when normal, peaceful, rational
+society resumes its functions, the demand will again be made. If it is
+not quickly granted, then once more the women will take up the arms they
+to-day generously lay down. There can be no real peace in the world
+until woman, the mother half of the human family, is given liberty in
+the councils of the world.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+THE MAKING OF A MILITANT
+
+
+Mrs. Pankhurst's Own Story
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Those men and women are fortunate who are born at a time when a great
+struggle for human freedom is in progress. It is an added good fortune
+to have parents who take a personal part in the great movements of their
+time. I am glad and thankful that this was my case.
+
+One of my earliest recollections is of a great bazaar which was held in
+my native city of Manchester, the object of the bazaar being to raise
+money to relieve the poverty of the newly emancipated negro slaves in
+the United States. My mother took an active part in this effort, and I,
+as a small child, was entrusted with a lucky bag by means of which I
+helped to collect money.
+
+Young as I was--I could not have been older than five years--I knew
+perfectly well the meaning of the words slavery and emancipation. From
+infancy I had been accustomed to hear pro and con discussions of slavery
+and the American Civil War. Although the British government finally
+decided not to recognise the Confederacy, public opinion in England was
+sharply divided on the questions both of slavery and of secession.
+Broadly speaking, the propertied classes were pro-slavery, but there
+were many exceptions to the rule. Most of those who formed the circle
+of our family friends were opposed to slavery, and my father, Robert
+Goulden, was always a most ardent abolitionist. He was prominent enough
+in the movement to be appointed on a committee to meet and welcome Henry
+Ward Beecher when he arrived in England for a lecture tour. Mrs. Harriet
+Beecher Stowe's novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," was so great a favourite
+with my mother that she used it continually as a source of bedtime
+stories for our fascinated ears. Those stories, told almost fifty years
+ago, are as fresh in my mind to-day as events detailed in the morning's
+papers. Indeed they are more vivid, because they made a much deeper
+impression on my consciousness. I can still definitely recall the thrill
+I experienced every time my mother related the tale of Eliza's race for
+freedom over the broken ice of the Ohio River, the agonizing pursuit,
+and the final rescue at the hands of the determined old Quaker. Another
+thrilling tale was the story of a negro boy's flight from the plantation
+of his cruel master. The boy had never seen a railroad train, and when,
+staggering along the unfamiliar railroad track, he heard the roar of an
+approaching train, the clattering car-wheels seemed to his strained
+imagination to be repeating over and over again the awful words, "Catch
+a nigger--catch a nigger--catch a nigger--" This was a terrible story,
+and throughout my childhood, whenever I rode in a train, I thought of
+that poor runaway slave escaping from the pursuing monster.
+
+These stories, with the bazaars and the relief funds and subscriptions
+of which I heard so much talk, I am sure made a permanent impression on
+my brain and my character. They awakened in me the two sets of
+sensations to which all my life I have most readily responded: first,
+admiration for that spirit of fighting and heroic sacrifice by which
+alone the soul of civilisation is saved; and next after that,
+appreciation of the gentler spirit which is moved to mend and repair the
+ravages of war.
+
+I do not remember a time when I could not read, nor any time when
+reading was not a joy and a solace. As far back as my memory runs I
+loved tales, especially those of a romantic and idealistic character.
+"Pilgrim's Progress" was an early favourite, as well as another of
+Bunyan's visionary romances, which does not seem to be as well known,
+his "Holy War." At nine I discovered the Odyssey and very soon after
+that another classic which has remained all my life a source of
+inspiration. This was Carlyle's "French Revolution," and I received it
+with much the same emotion that Keats experienced when he read Chapman's
+translation of Homer--" ... like some watcher of the skies, When a new
+planet swims into his ken."
+
+I never lost that first impression, and it strongly affected my attitude
+toward events which were occurring around my childhood. Manchester is a
+city which has witnessed a great many stirring episodes, especially of a
+political character. Generally speaking, its citizens have been liberal
+in their sentiments, defenders of free speech and liberty of opinion. In
+the late sixties there occurred in Manchester one of those dreadful
+events that prove an exception to the rule. This was in connection with
+the Fenian Revolt in Ireland. There was a Fenian riot, and the police
+arrested the leaders. These men were being taken to the jail in a prison
+van. On the way the van was stopped and an attempt was made to rescue
+the prisoners. A man fired a pistol, endeavouring to break the lock of
+the van door. A policeman fell, mortally wounded, and several men were
+arrested and were charged with murder. I distinctly remember the riot,
+which I did not witness, but which I heard vividly described by my older
+brother. I had been spending the afternoon with a young playmate, and my
+brother had come after tea to escort me home. As we walked through the
+deepening November twilight he talked excitedly of the riot, the fatal
+pistol shot, and the slain policeman. I could almost see the man
+bleeding on the ground, while the crowd swayed and groaned around him.
+
+The rest of the story reveals one of those ghastly blunders which
+justice not infrequently makes. Although the shooting was done without
+any intent to kill, the men were tried for murder and three of them were
+found guilty and hanged. Their execution, which greatly excited the
+citizens of Manchester, was almost the last, if not the last, public
+execution permitted to take place in the city. At the time I was a
+boarding-pupil in a school near Manchester, and I spent my week-ends at
+home. A certain Saturday afternoon stands out in my memory, as on my way
+home from school I passed the prison where I knew the men had been
+confined. I saw that a part of the prison wall had been torn away, and
+in the great gap that remained were evidences of a gallows recently
+removed. I was transfixed with horror, and over me there swept the
+sudden conviction that that hanging was a mistake--worse, a crime. It
+was my awakening to one of the most terrible facts of life--that justice
+and judgment lie often a world apart.
+
+I relate this incident of my formative years to illustrate the fact that
+the impressions of childhood often have more to do with character and
+future conduct than heredity or education. I tell it also to show that
+my development into an advocate of militancy was largely a sympathetic
+process. I have not personally suffered from the deprivations, the
+bitterness and sorrow which bring so many men and women to a realisation
+of social injustice. My childhood was protected by love and a
+comfortable home. Yet, while still a very young child, I began
+instinctively to feel that there was something lacking, even in my own
+home, some false conception of family relations, some incomplete ideal.
+
+This vague feeling of mine began to shape itself into conviction about
+the time my brothers and I were sent to school. The education of the
+English boy, then as now, was considered a much more serious matter than
+the education of the English boy's sister. My parents, especially my
+father, discussed the question of my brothers' education as a matter of
+real importance. My education and that of my sister were scarcely
+discussed at all. Of course we went to a carefully selected girls'
+school, but beyond the facts that the head mistress was a gentlewoman
+and that all the pupils were girls of my own class, nobody seemed
+concerned. A girl's education at that time seemed to have for its prime
+object the art of "making home attractive"--presumably to migratory male
+relatives. It used to puzzle me to understand why I was under such a
+particular obligation to make home attractive to my brothers. We were on
+excellent terms of friendship, but it was never suggested to them as a
+duty that they make home attractive to me. Why not? Nobody seemed to
+know.
+
+The answer to these puzzling questions came to me unexpectedly one night
+when I lay in my little bed waiting for sleep to overtake me. It was a
+custom of my father and mother to make the round of our bedrooms every
+night before going themselves to bed. When they entered my room that
+night I was still awake, but for some reason I chose to feign slumber.
+My father bent over me, shielding the candle flame with his big hand. I
+cannot know exactly what thought was in his mind as he gazed down at me,
+but I heard him say, somewhat sadly, "What a pity she wasn't born a
+lad."
+
+My first hot impulse was to sit up in bed and protest that I didn't want
+to be a boy, but I lay still and heard my parents' footsteps pass on
+toward the next child's bed. I thought about my father's remark for many
+days afterward, but I think I never decided that I regretted my sex.
+However, it was made quite clear that men considered themselves superior
+to women, and that women apparently acquiesced in that belief.
+
+I found this view of things difficult to reconcile with the fact that
+both my father and my mother were advocates of equal suffrage. I was
+very young when the Reform Act of 1866 was passed, but I very well
+remember the agitation caused by certain circumstances attending it.
+This Reform Act, known as the Household Franchise Bill, marked the first
+popular extension of the ballot in England since 1832. Under its terms,
+householders paying a minimum of ten pounds a year rental were given the
+Parliamentary vote. While it was still under discussion in the House of
+Commons, John Stuart Mill moved an amendment to the bill to include
+women householders as well as men. The amendment was defeated, but in
+the act as passed the word "man," instead of the usual "male person,"
+was used. Now, under another act of Parliament it had been decided that
+the word "man" always included "woman" unless otherwise specifically
+stated. For example, in certain acts containing rate-paying clauses, the
+masculine noun and pronoun are used throughout, but the provisions apply
+to women rate-payers as well as to men. So when the Reform Bill with the
+word "man" in it became law, many women believed that the right of
+suffrage had actually been bestowed upon them. A tremendous amount of
+discussion ensued, and the matter was finally tested by a large number
+of women seeking to have their names placed upon the register as voters.
+In my city of Manchester 3,924 women, out of a total of 4,215 possible
+women voters, claimed their votes, and their claim was defended in the
+law courts by eminent lawyers, including my future husband, Dr.
+Pankhurst. Of course the women's claim was settled adversely in the
+courts, but the agitation resulted in a strengthening of the
+woman-suffrage agitation all over the country.
+
+I was too young to understand the precise nature of the affair, but I
+shared in the general excitement. From reading newspapers aloud to my
+father I had developed a genuine interest in politics, and the Reform
+Bill presented itself to my young intelligence as something that was
+going to do the most wonderful good to the country. The first election
+after the bill became law was naturally a memorable occasion. It is
+chiefly memorable to me because it was the first one in which I ever
+participated. My sister and I had just been presented with new winter
+frocks, green in colour, and made alike, after the custom of proper
+British families. Every girl child in those days wore a red flannel
+petticoat, and when we first put on our new frocks I was struck with the
+fact that we were wearing red and green--the colours of the Liberal
+party. Since our father was a Liberal, of course the Liberal party ought
+to carry the election, and I conceived a brilliant scheme for helping
+its progress. With my small sister trotting after me, I walked the
+better part of a mile to the nearest polling-booth. It happened to be in
+a rather rough factory district, but we did not notice that. Arrived
+there, we two children picked up our green skirts to show our scarlet
+petticoats, and brimful of importance, walked up and down before the
+assembled crowds to encourage the Liberal vote. From this eminence we
+were shortly snatched by outraged authority in the form of a
+nursery-maid. I believe we were sent to bed into the bargain, but I am
+not entirely clear on this point.
+
+I was fourteen years old when I went to my first suffrage meeting.
+Returning from school one day, I met my mother just setting out for the
+meeting, and I begged her to let me go along. She consented, and without
+stopping to lay my books down I scampered away in my mother's wake. The
+speeches interested and excited me, especially the address of the great
+Miss Lydia Becker, who was the Susan B. Anthony of the English movement,
+a splendid character and a truly eloquent speaker. She was the secretary
+of the Manchester committee, and I had learned to admire her as the
+editor of the _Women's Suffrage Journal_, which came to my mother every
+week. I left the meeting a conscious and confirmed suffragist.
+
+I suppose I had always been an unconscious suffragist. With my
+temperament and my surroundings I could scarcely have been otherwise.
+The movement was very much alive in the early seventies, nowhere more so
+than in Manchester, where it was organised by a group of extraordinary
+men and women. Among them were Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Bright, who were
+always ready to champion the struggling cause. Mr. Jacob Bright, a
+brother of John Bright, was for many years member of Parliament for
+Manchester, and to the day of his death was an active supporter of woman
+suffrage. Two especially gifted women, besides Miss Becker, were members
+of the committee. These were Mrs. Alice Cliff Scatcherd and Miss
+Wolstentholm, now the venerable Mrs. Wolstentholm-Elmy. One of the
+principal founders of the committee was the man whose wife, in later
+years, I was destined to become, Dr. Richard Marsden Pankhurst.
+
+When I was fifteen years old I went to Paris, where I was entered as a
+pupil in one of the pioneer institutions in Europe for the higher
+education of girls. This school, one of the founders of which was Madame
+Edmond Adam, who was and is still a distinguished literary figure, was
+situated in a fine old house in the Avenue de Neuilly. It was under the
+direction of Mlle. Marchef-Girard, a woman distinguished in education,
+and who afterward was appointed government inspector of schools in
+France. Mlle. Marchef-Girard believed that girls' education should be
+quite as thorough and even more practical than the education boys were
+receiving at that time. She included chemistry and other sciences in her
+courses, and in addition to embroidery she had her girls taught
+bookkeeping. Many other advanced ideas prevailed in this school, and the
+moral discipline which the pupils received was, to my mind, as valuable
+as the intellectual training. Mlle. Marchef-Girard held that women
+should be given the highest ideals of honour. Her pupils were kept to
+the strictest principles of truth-telling and candour. Myself she
+understood and greatly benefited by an implicit trust which I am sure I
+could not have betrayed, even had I felt for her less real affection.
+
+My roommate in this delightful school was an interesting young girl of
+my own age, Noemie Rochefort, daughter of that great Republican,
+Communist, journalist, and swordsman, Henri Rochefort. This was very
+shortly after the Franco-Prussian War, and memories of the Empire's
+fall and of the bloody and disastrous Commune were very keen in Paris.
+Indeed my roommate's illustrious father and many others were then in
+exile in New Caledonia for participation in the Commune. My friend
+Noemie was torn with anxiety for her father. She talked of him
+constantly, and many were the blood-curdling accounts of daring and of
+patriotism to which I listened. Henri Rochefort was, in fact, one of the
+moving spirits of the Republican movement in France, and after his
+amazing escape in an open boat from New Caledonia, he lived through many
+years of political adventures of the most lively and picturesque
+character. His daughter and I remained warm friends long after our
+school-days ended, and my association with her strengthened all the
+liberal ideas I had previously acquired.
+
+I was between eighteen and nineteen when I finally returned from school
+in Paris and took my place in my father's home as a finished young lady.
+I sympathised with and worked for the woman-suffrage movement, and came
+to know Dr. Pankhurst, whose work for woman suffrage had never ceased.
+It was Dr. Pankhurst who drafted the first enfranchisement bill, known
+as the Women's Disabilities Removal Bill, and introduced into the House
+of Commons in 1870 by Mr. Jacob Bright. The bill advanced to its second
+reading by a majority vote of thirty-three, but it was killed in
+committee by Mr. Gladstone's peremptory orders. Dr. Pankhurst, as I have
+already said, with another distinguished barrister, Lord Coleridge,
+acted as counsel for the Manchester women, who tried in 1868 to be
+placed on the register as voters. He also drafted the bill giving
+married women absolute control over their property and earnings, a bill
+which became law in 1882.
+
+My marriage with Dr. Pankhurst took place in 1879.
+
+I think we cannot be too grateful to the group of men and women who,
+like Dr. Pankhurst, in those early days lent the weight of their
+honoured names to the suffrage movement in the trials of its struggling
+youth. These men did not wait until the movement became popular, nor did
+they hesitate until it was plain that women were roused to the point of
+revolt. They worked all their lives with those who were organising,
+educating, and preparing for the revolt which was one day to come.
+Unquestionably those pioneer men suffered in popularity for their
+feminist views. Some of them suffered financially, some politically. Yet
+they never wavered.
+
+My married life lasted through nineteen happy years. Often I have heard
+the taunt that suffragists are women who have failed to find any normal
+outlet for their emotions, and are therefore soured and disappointed
+beings. This is probably not true of any suffragist, and it is most
+certainly not true of me. My home life and relations have been as nearly
+ideal as possible in this imperfect world. About a year after my
+marriage my daughter Christabel was born, and in another eighteen months
+my second daughter Sylvia came. Two other children followed, and for
+some years I was rather deeply immersed in my domestic affairs.
+
+I was never so absorbed with home and children, however, that I lost
+interest in community affairs. Dr. Pankhurst did not desire that I
+should turn myself into a household machine. It was his firm belief that
+society as well as the family stands in need of women's services. So
+while my children were still in their cradles I was serving on the
+executive committee of the Women's Suffrage Society, and also on the
+executive board of the committee which was working to secure the Married
+Women's Property Act. This act having passed in 1882, I threw myself
+into the suffrage work with renewed energy. A new Reform Act, known as
+the County Franchise Bill, extending the suffrage to farm labourers, was
+under discussion, and we believed that our years of educational
+propaganda work had prepared the country to support us in a demand for a
+women's suffrage amendment to the bill. For several years we had been
+holding the most splendid meetings in cities all over the kingdom. The
+crowds, the enthusiasm, the generous response to appeals for support,
+all these seemed to justify us in our belief that women's suffrage was
+near. In fact, in 1884, when the County Franchise Bill came before the
+country, we had an actual majority in favour of suffrage in the House of
+Commons.
+
+But a favourable majority in the House of Commons by no means insures
+the success of any measure. I shall explain this at length when I come
+to our work of opposing candidates who have avowed themselves
+suffragists, a course which has greatly puzzled our American friends.
+The Liberal party was in power in 1884, and a great memorial was sent
+to the Prime Minister, the Right Honourable William E. Gladstone, asking
+that a women's suffrage amendment to the County Franchise Bill be
+submitted to the free and unbiased consideration of the House. Mr.
+Gladstone curtly refused, declaring that if a women's suffrage amendment
+should be carried, the Government would disclaim responsibility for the
+bill. The amendment was submitted nevertheless, but Mr. Gladstone would
+not allow it to be freely discussed, and he ordered Liberal members to
+vote against it. What we call a whip was sent out against it, a note
+virtually commanding party members to be on hand at a certain hour to
+vote against the women's amendment. Undismayed, the women tried to have
+an independent suffrage bill introduced, but Mr. Gladstone so arranged
+Parliamentary business that the bill never even came up for discussion.
+
+I am not going to write a history of the woman suffrage movement in
+England prior to 1903, when the Women's Social and Political Union was
+organised. That history is full of repetitions of just such stories as
+the one I have related. Gladstone was an implacable foe of woman
+suffrage. He believed that women's work and politics lay in service to
+men's parties. One of the shrewdest acts of Mr. Gladstone's career was
+his disruption of the suffrage organisation in England. He accomplished
+this by substituting "something just as good," that something being
+Women's Liberal Associations. Beginning in 1881 in Bristol, these
+associations spread rapidly through the country and, in 1887, became a
+National Women's Liberal Federation. The promise of the Federation was
+that by allying themselves with men in party politics, women would soon
+earn the right to vote. The avidity with which the women swallowed this
+promise, left off working for themselves, and threw themselves into the
+men's work was amazing.
+
+The Women's Liberal Federation is an organisation of women who believe
+in the principles of the Liberal party. (The somewhat older Primrose
+League is a similar organisation of women who adhere to Conservative
+party principles.) Neither of these organisations have woman suffrage
+for their object. They came into existence to uphold party ideas and to
+work for the election of party candidates.
+
+I am told that women in America have recently allied themselves with
+political parties, believing, just as we did, that such action would
+break down opposition to suffrage by showing the men that women possess
+political ability, and that politics is work for women as well as men.
+Let them not be deceived. I can assure the American women that our long
+alliance with the great parties, our devotion to party programmes, our
+faithful work at elections, never advanced the suffrage cause one step.
+The men accepted the services of the women, but they never offered any
+kind of payment.
+
+As far as I am concerned, I did not delude myself with any false hopes
+in the matter. I was present when the Women's Liberal Federation came
+into existence. Mrs. Gladstone presided, offering the meeting many
+consolatory words for the absence of "our great leader," Mr. Gladstone,
+who of course had no time to waste on a gathering of women. At Mrs.
+Jacob Bright's request I joined the Federation. At this stage of my
+development I was a member of the Fabian Society, and I had considerable
+faith in the permeating powers of its mild socialism. But I was already
+fairly convinced of the futility of trusting to political parties. Even
+as a child I had begun to wonder at the _naive_ faith of party members
+in the promises of their leaders. I well remember my father returning
+home from political meetings, his face aglow with enthusiasm. "What
+happened, father?" I would ask, and he would reply triumphantly, "Ah! We
+passed the resolution."
+
+"Then you'll get your measure through the next session," I predicted.
+
+"I won't say that," was the usual reply. "Things don't always move as
+quickly as that. But we passed the resolution."
+
+Well, the suffragists, when they were admitted into the Women's Liberal
+Federation must have felt that they had passed their resolution. They
+settled down to work for the party and to prove that they were as
+capable of voting as the recently enfranchised farm labourers. Of course
+a few women remained loyal to suffrage. They began again on the old
+educational lines to work for the cause. Not one woman took counsel with
+herself as to how and why the agricultural labourers had won their
+franchise. They had won it, as a matter of fact, by burning hay-ricks,
+rioting, and otherwise demonstrating their strength in the only way that
+English politicians can understand. The threat to march a hundred
+thousand men to the House of Commons unless the bill was passed played
+its part also in securing the agricultural labourer his political
+freedom. But no woman suffragist noticed that. As for myself, I was too
+young politically to learn the lesson then. I had to go through years of
+public work before I acquired the experience and the wisdom to know how
+to wring concessions from the English Government. I had to hold public
+office. I had to go behind the scenes in the government schools, in the
+workhouses and other charitable institutions; I had to get a close-hand
+view of the misery and unhappiness of a man-made world, before I reached
+the point where I could successfully revolt against it. It was almost
+immediately after the collapse of the woman suffrage movement in 1884
+that I entered upon this new phase of my career.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+In 1885, a year after the failure of the third women's suffrage bill, my
+husband, Dr. Pankhurst, stood as the Liberal candidate for Parliament in
+Rotherline, a riverside constituency of London. I went through the
+campaign with him, speaking and canvassing to the best of my ability.
+Dr. Pankhurst was a popular candidate, and unquestionably would have
+been returned but for the opposition of the Home-Rulers. Parnell was in
+command, and his settled policy was opposition to all Government
+candidates. So, in spite of the fact that Dr. Pankhurst was a staunch
+upholder of home rule, the Parnell forces were solidly opposed to him,
+and he was defeated. I remember expressing considerable indignation, but
+my husband pointed out to me that Parnell's policy was absolutely right.
+With his small party he could never hope to win home rule from a hostile
+majority, but by constant obstruction he could in time wear out the
+Government, and force it to surrender. That was a valuable political
+lesson, one that years later I was destined to put into practice.
+
+The following year found us living in London, and, as usual, interesting
+ourselves with labour matters and other social movements. This year was
+memorable for a great strike of women working in the Bryant and May
+match factories. I threw myself into this strike with enthusiasm,
+working with the girls and with some women of prominence, among these
+the celebrated Mrs. Annie Besant. The strike was a successful one, the
+girls winning substantial improvements in their working conditions.
+
+It was a time of tremendous unrest, of labour agitations, of strikes and
+lockouts. It was a time also when a most stupid reactionary spirit
+seemed to take possession of the Government and the authorities. The
+Salvation Army, the Socialists, the trade-unionists--in fact, all bodies
+holding outdoor meetings--were made special objects of attack. As a
+protest against this policy a Law and Liberty League was formed in
+London, and an immense Free Speech meeting was held in Trafalgar Square,
+John Burns and Cunningham Graham being the principal speakers. I was
+present at this meeting, which resulted in a bloody riot between the
+police and the populace. The Trafalgar Square Riot is historic, and to
+it Mr. John Burns owes, in large part, his subsequent rise to political
+eminence. Both John Burns and Cunningham Graham served prison sentences
+for the part they played in the riot, but they gained fame, and they did
+much to establish the right of free speech for English men. English
+women are still contending for that right.
+
+In 1890 my last child was born in London. I now had a family of five
+young children, and for a time I was less active in public work. On the
+retirement of Mrs. Annie Besant from the London School Board I had been
+asked to stand as candidate for the vacancy, but although I should have
+enjoyed the work, I decided not to accept this invitation. The next
+year, however, a new suffrage association, the Women's Franchise League,
+was formed, and I felt it my duty to become affiliated with it The
+League was preparing a new suffrage bill, the provisions of which I
+could not possibly approve, and I joined with old friends, among whom
+were Mrs. Jacob Bright, Mrs. Wolstentholm-Elmy, who was a member of the
+London School Board, and Mrs. Stanton Blatch, then resident in England,
+in an effort to substitute the original bill drafted by Dr. Pankhurst.
+As a matter of fact, neither of the bills was introduced into Parliament
+that year. Mr. (now Lord) Haldane, who had the measure in charge,
+introduced one of his own drafting. It was a truly startling bill,
+royally inclusive in its terms. It not only enfranchised all women,
+married and unmarried, of the householding classes, but it made them
+eligible to all offices under the Crown. The bill was never taken
+seriously by the Government, and indeed it was never intended that it
+should be, as we were later made to understand. I remember going with
+Mrs. Stanton Blatch to the law courts to see Mr. Haldane, and to protest
+against the introduction of a measure that had not the remotest chance
+of passing.
+
+"All, that bill," said Haldane, "is for the future."
+
+All their woman suffrage bills are intended for the future, a future so
+remote as to be imperceptible. We were beginning to understand this even
+in 1891. However, as long as there was a bill, we determined to support
+it. Accordingly, we canvassed the members, distributed a great deal of
+literature, and organised and addressed meetings. We not only made
+speeches ourselves, but we induced friendly members of Parliament to go
+on our platforms. One of these meetings, held in an East End Radical
+club, was addressed by Mr. Haldane and a young man who accompanied him.
+This young man, Sir Edward Grey, then in the beginning of his career,
+made an eloquent plea for woman's suffrage. That Sir Edward Grey should,
+later in life, become a bitter foe of woman's suffrage need astonish no
+one. I have known many young Englishmen who began their political life
+as suffrage speakers and who later became anti-suffragists or traitorous
+"friends" of the cause. These young and aspiring statesmen have to
+attract attention in some fashion, and the espousal of advanced causes,
+such as labour or women's suffrage, seems an easy way to accomplish that
+end.
+
+Well, our speeches and our agitation did nothing at all to assist Mr.
+Haldane's impossible bill. It never advanced beyond the first reading.
+
+Our London residence came to an end in 1893. In that year we returned to
+our Manchester home, and I again took up the work of the Suffrage
+Society. At my suggestion the members began to organise their first
+out-of-door meetings, and we continued these until we succeeded in
+working up a great meeting that filled Free Trade Hall, and overflowed
+into and crowded a smaller hall near at hand. This marked the beginning
+of a campaign of propaganda among working people, an object which I had
+long desired to bring about.
+
+And now began a new and, as I look back on it, an absorbingly
+interesting stage of my career. I have told how our leaders in the
+Liberal Party had advised the women to prove their fitness for the
+Parliamentary franchise by serving in municipal offices, especially the
+unsalaried offices. A large number of women had availed themselves of
+this advice, and were serving on Boards of Guardians, on school boards,
+and in other capacities. My children now being old enough for me to
+leave them with competent nurses, I was free to join these ranks. A year
+after my return to Manchester I became a candidate for the Board of Poor
+Law Guardians. Several weeks before, I had contested unsuccessfully for
+a place on the school board. This time, however, I was elected, heading
+the poll by a very large majority.
+
+For the benefit of American readers I shall explain something of the
+operation of our English Poor Law. The duty of the law is to administer
+an act of Queen Elizabeth, one of the greatest reforms effected by that
+wise and humane monarch. When Elizabeth came to the throne she found
+England, the Merrie England of contemporary poets, in a state of
+appalling poverty. Hordes of people were literally starving to death, in
+wretched hovels, in the streets, and at the very gates of the palace.
+The cause of all this misery was the religious reformation under Henry
+VIII, and the secession from Rome of the English Church. King Henry, it
+is known, seized all the Church lands, the abbeys and the convents, and
+gave them as rewards to those nobles and favourites who had supported
+his policies. But in taking over the Church's property the Protestant
+nobles by no means assumed the Church's ancient responsibilities of
+lodging wayfarers, giving alms, nursing the sick, educating youths, and
+caring for the young and the superannuated. When the monks and the nuns
+were turned out of their convents these duties devolved on no one. The
+result, after the brief reign of Edward VI and the bloody one of Queen
+Mary, was the social anarchy inherited by Elizabeth.
+
+This great queen and great woman, perceiving that the responsibility for
+the poor and the helpless rightfully rests on the community, caused an
+act to be passed creating in the parishes public bodies to deal with
+local conditions of poverty. The Board of Poor Law Guardians disburses
+for the poor the money coming from the Poor Rates (taxes), and some
+additional moneys allowed by the local government board, the president
+of which is a cabinet minister. Mr. John Burns is the present incumbent
+of the office. The Board of Guardians has control of the institution we
+call the workhouse. You have, I believe, almshouses, or poorhouses, but
+they are not quite so extensive as our workhouses, which are all kinds
+of institutions in one. We had, in my workhouse, a hospital with nine
+hundred beds, a school with several hundred children, a farm, and many
+workshops.
+
+When I came into office I found that the law in our district, Chorlton,
+was being very harshly administered. The old board had been made up of
+the kind of men who are known as rate savers. They were guardians, not
+of the poor but of the rates, and, as I soon discovered, not very astute
+guardians even of money. For instance, although the inmates were being
+very poorly fed, a frightful waste of food was apparent. Each inmate was
+given each day a certain weight of food, and bread formed so much of the
+ration that hardly anyone consumed all of his portion. In the farm
+department pigs were kept on purpose to consume this surplus of bread,
+and as pigs do not thrive on a solid diet of stale bread the animals
+fetched in the market a much lower price than properly fed farm pigs. I
+suggested that, instead of giving a solid weight of bread in one lump,
+the loaf be cut in slices and buttered with margarine, each person being
+allowed all that he cared to eat. The rest of the board objected, saying
+that our poor charges were very jealous of their rights, and would
+suspect in such an innovation an attempt to deprive them of a part of
+their ration. This was easily overcome by the suggestion that we consult
+the inmates before we made the change. Of course the poor people
+consented, and with the bread that we saved we made puddings with milk
+and currants, to be fed to the old people of the workhouse. These old
+folks I found sitting on backless forms, or benches. They had no
+privacy, no possessions, not even a locker. The old women were without
+pockets in their gowns, so they were obliged to keep any poor little
+treasures they had in their bosoms. Soon after I took office we gave the
+old people comfortable Windsor chairs to sit in, and in a number of ways
+we managed to make their existence more endurable.
+
+These, after all, were minor benefits. But it does gratify me when I
+look back and remember what we were able to do for the children of the
+Manchester workhouse. The first time I went into the place I was
+horrified to see little girls seven and eight years old on their knees
+scrubbing the cold stones of the long corridors. These little girls were
+clad, summer and winter, in thin cotton frocks, low in the neck and
+short sleeved. At night they wore nothing at all, night dresses being
+considered too good for paupers. The fact that bronchitis was epidemic
+among them most of the time had not suggested to the guardians any
+change in the fashion of their clothes. There was a school for the
+children, but the teaching was of the poorest order. They were forlorn
+enough, these poor innocents, when I first met them. In five years' time
+we had changed the face of the earth for them. We had bought land in the
+country and had built a cottage system home for the children, and we had
+established for them a modern school with trained teachers. We had even
+secured for them a gymnasium and a swimming-bath. I may say that I was
+on the building committee of the board, the only woman member.
+
+Whatever may be urged against the English Poor Law system, I maintain
+that under it no stigma of pauperism need be applied to workhouse
+children. If they are treated like paupers of course they will be
+paupers, and they will grow up paupers, permanent burdens on society;
+but if they are regarded merely as children under the guardianship of
+the state, they assume quite another character. Rich children are not
+pauperized by being sent to one or another of the free public schools
+with which England is blest. Yet a great many of those schools, now
+exclusively used for the education of upper middle-class boys, were
+founded by legacies left to educate the poor--girls as well as boys. The
+English Poor Law, properly administered, ought to give back to the
+children of the destitute what the upper classes have taken from them, a
+good education on a self-respecting basis.
+
+The trouble is, as I soon perceived after taking office, the law cannot,
+in existing circumstances, do all the work, even for children, that it
+was intended to do. We shall have to have new laws, and it soon became
+apparent to me that we can never hope to get them until women have the
+vote. During the time I served on the board, and for years since then,
+women guardians all over the country have striven in vain to have the
+law reformed in order to ameliorate conditions which break the hearts of
+women to see, but which apparently affect men very little. I have spoken
+of the little girls I found scrubbing the workhouse floors. There were
+others at the hateful labour who aroused my keenest pity. I found that
+there were pregnant women in that workhouse, scrubbing floors, doing the
+hardest kind of work, almost until their babies came into the world.
+Many of them were unmarried women, very, very young, mere girls. These
+poor mothers were allowed to stay in the hospital after confinement for
+a short two weeks. Then they had to make a choice of staying in the
+workhouse and earning their living by scrubbing and other work, in
+which case they were separated from their babies; or of taking their
+discharges. They could stay and be paupers, or they could leave--leave
+with a two-weeks-old baby in their arms, without hope, without home,
+without money, without anywhere to go. What became of those girls, and
+what became of their hapless infants? That question was at the basis of
+the women guardians' demand for a reform of one part of the Poor Law.
+
+That section deals with the little children who are boarded out, not by
+the workhouse, but by the parents, that parent being almost always the
+mother. It is from that class of workhouse mothers--mostly young servant
+girls--which thoughtless people say all working girls ought to be; it is
+from that class more than from any other that cases of illegitimacy
+come. Those poor little servant girls, who can get out perhaps only in
+the evening, whose minds are not very cultivated, and who find all the
+sentiment of their lives in cheap novelettes, fall an easy prey to those
+who have designs against them. These are the people by whom the babies
+are mostly put out to nurse, and the mothers have to pay for their keep.
+Of course the babies are very badly protected. The Poor Law Guardians
+are supposed to protect them by appointing inspectors to visit the homes
+where the babies are boarded. But, under the law, if a man who ruins a
+girl pays down a lump sum of twenty pounds, less than a hundred dollars,
+the boarding home is immune from inspection. As long as a baby-farmer
+takes only one child at a time, the twenty pounds being paid, the
+inspectors cannot inspect the house. Of course the babies die with
+hideous promptness, often long before the twenty pounds have been spent,
+and then the baby-farmers are free to solicit another victim. For years,
+as I have said, women have tried in vain to get that one small reform of
+the Poor Law, to reach and protect all illegitimate children, and to
+make it impossible for any rich scoundrel to escape future liability for
+his child because of the lump sum he has paid down. Over and over again
+it has been tried, but it has always failed, because the ones who really
+care about the thing are mere women.
+
+I thought I had been a suffragist before I became a Poor Law Guardian,
+but now I began to think about the vote in women's hands not only as a
+right but as a desperate necessity. These poor, unprotected mothers and
+their babies I am sure were potent factors in my education as a
+militant. In fact, all the women I came in contact with in the workhouse
+contributed to that education. Very soon after I went on the board I saw
+that the class of old women who came into the workhouse were in many
+ways superior to the kind of old men who came into the workhouse. One
+could not help noticing it. They were, to begin with, more industrious.
+In fact, it was quite touching to see their industry and patience. Old
+women, over sixty and seventy years of age, did most of the work of that
+place, most of the sewing, most of the things that kept the house clean
+and which supplied the inmates with clothing. I found that the old men
+were different. One could not get very much work out of them. They liked
+to stop in the oakum picking-room, where they were allowed to smoke;
+but as to real work, very little was done by our old men.
+
+I began to make inquiries about these old women. I found that the
+majority of them were not women who had been dissolute, who had been
+criminal, but women who had lead perfectly respectable lives, either as
+wives and mothers, or as single women earning their own living. A great
+many were of the domestic-servant class, who had not married, who had
+lost their employment, and had reached a time of life when it was
+impossible to get more employment. It was through no fault of their own,
+but simply because they had never earned enough to save. The average
+wage of working women in England is less than two dollars a week. On
+this pittance it is difficult enough to keep alive, and of course it is
+impossible to save. Every one who knows anything about conditions under
+which our working women live knows that few of them can ever hope to put
+by enough to keep them in old age. Besides, the average working woman
+has to support others than herself. How can she save?
+
+Some of our old women were married. Many of them, I found, were widows
+of skilled artisans who had had pensions from their unions, but the
+pensions had died with the men. These women, who had given up the power
+to work for themselves, and had devoted themselves to working for their
+husbands and children, were left penniless. There was nothing for them
+to do but to go into the workhouse. Many of them were widows of men who
+had served their country in the army or the navy. The men had had
+pensions from the government, but the pensions had died with them, and
+so the women were in the workhouse.
+
+We shall not in future, I hope, find so many respectable old women in
+English workhouses. We have an old-age pension law now, which allows old
+women as well as old men the sum of five shillings--$1.20--a week;
+hardly enough to live on, but enough to enable the poor to keep their
+old fathers and mothers out of the workhouse without starving themselves
+or their children. But when I was a Poor Law Guardian there was simply
+nothing to do with a woman when her life of toil ceased except make a
+pauper of her.
+
+I wish I had space to tell you of other tragedies of women I witnessed
+while I was on that board. In our out-relief department, which exists
+chiefly for able-bodied poor and dependent persons, I was brought into
+contact with widows who were struggling desperately to keep their homes
+and families together. The law allowed these women relief of a certain
+very inadequate kind, but for herself and one child it offered no relief
+except the workhouse. Even if the woman had a baby at her breast she was
+regarded, under the law, as an able-bodied man. Women, we are told,
+should stay at home and take care of their children. I used to astound
+my men colleagues by saying to them: "When women have the vote they will
+see that mothers _can_ stay at home and care for their children. You men
+have made it impossible for these mothers to do that."
+
+I am convinced that the enfranchised woman will find many ways in which
+to lessen, at least, the curse of poverty. Women have more practical
+ideas about relief, and especially of prevention of dire poverty, than
+men display. I was struck with this whenever I attended the District
+Conferences and the annual Poor Law Union Meetings. In our discussions
+the women showed themselves much more capable, much more resourceful,
+than the men. I remember two papers which I prepared and which caused
+considerable discussion. One of these was on the Duties of Guardians in
+Times of Unemployment, in which I pointed out that the government had
+one reserve of employment for men which could always be used. We have,
+on our northwest coast, a constant washing away of the fore shore. Every
+once in a while the question of coast reclamation comes up for
+discussion, but I had never heard any man suggest coast reclamation as a
+means of giving the unemployed relief.
+
+
+In 1898 I suffered an irreparable loss in the death of my husband. His
+death occurred suddenly and left me with the heavy responsibility of
+caring for a family of children, the eldest only seventeen years of age.
+I resigned my place on the Board of Guardians, and was almost
+immediately appointed to the salaried office of Registrar of Births and
+Deaths in Manchester. We have registrars of births, deaths and marriages
+in England, but since the act establishing the last named contains the
+words "male person," a woman may not be appointed a registrar of
+marriages. The head of this department of the government is the
+registrar-general, with offices at Somerset House, London, where all
+vital statistics are returned and all records filed.
+
+It was my duty as registrar of births and deaths to act as chief census
+officer of my district; I was obliged to receive all returns of births
+and deaths, record them, and send my books quarterly to the office of
+the registrar-general. My district was in a working-class quarter, and
+on this account I instituted evening office hours twice a week. It was
+touching to observe how glad the women were to have a woman registrar to
+go to. They used to tell me their stories, dreadful stories some of
+them, and all of them pathetic with that patient and uncomplaining
+pathos of poverty. Even after my experience on the Board of Guardians, I
+was shocked to be reminded over and over again of the little respect
+there was in the world for women and children. I have had little girls
+of thirteen come to my office to register the births of their babies,
+illegitimate, of course. In many of these cases I found that the child's
+own father or some near male relative was responsible for her state.
+There was nothing that could be done in most cases. The age of consent
+in England is sixteen years, but a man can always claim that he thought
+the girl was over sixteen. During my term of office a very young mother
+of an illegitimate child exposed her baby, and it died. The girl was
+tried for murder and was sentenced to death. This was afterwards
+commuted, it is true, but the unhappy child had the horrible experience
+of the trial and the sentence "to be hanged by the neck, until you are
+dead." The wretch who was, from the point of view of justice, the real
+murderer of the baby, received no punishment at all.
+
+I needed only one more experience after this one, only one more contact
+with the life of my time and the position of women, to convince me that
+if civilisation is to advance at all in the future, it must be through
+the help of women, women freed of their political shackles, women with
+full power to work their will in society. In 1900 I was asked to stand
+as a candidate for the Manchester School Board. The schools were then
+under the old law, and the school boards were very active bodies. They
+administered the Elementary Education Act, bought school sites, erected
+buildings, employed and paid teachers. The school code and the
+curriculum were framed by the Board of Education, which is part of the
+central government. Of course this was absurd. A body of men in London
+could not possibly realise all the needs of boys and girls in remote
+parts of England. But so it was.
+
+As a member of the school board I very soon found that the teachers,
+working people of the higher grade, were in exactly the same position as
+the working people of the lower grades. That is, the men had all the
+advantage. Teachers had a representative in the school board councils.
+Of course that representative was a man teacher, and equally of course,
+he gave preference to the interests of the men teachers. Men teachers
+received much higher salaries than the women, although many of the
+women, in addition to their regular class work, had to teach sewing and
+domestic science into the bargain. They received no extra pay for their
+extra work. In spite of this added burden, and in spite of the lower
+salaries received, I found that the women cared a great deal more about
+their work, and a great deal more about the children than the men. It
+was a winter when there was a great deal of poverty and unemployment in
+Manchester. I found that the women teachers were spending their slender
+salaries to provide regular dinners for destitute children, and were
+giving up their time to waiting on them and seeing that they were
+nourished. They said to me, quite simply: "You see, the little things
+are too badly off to study their lessons. We have to feed them before we
+can teach them."
+
+Well, instead of seeing that women care more for schools and school
+children than men do and should therefore have more power in education,
+the Parliament of 1900 actually passed a law which took education in
+England entirely out of the hands of women. This law abolished the
+school board altogether and placed the administration of schools in the
+hands of the municipalities. Certain corporations had formerly made
+certain grants to technical education--Manchester had built a
+magnificent technical college--and now the corporations had full control
+of both elementary and secondary education.
+
+The law did indeed provide that the corporations should co-opt at least
+one woman on their education boards. Manchester co-opted four women, and
+at the strong recommendation of the Labour Party, I was one of the
+women chosen. At their urgent solicitation I was appointed to the
+Committee on Technical Instruction, the one woman admitted to this
+committee. I learned that the Manchester Technical College, called the
+second best in Europe, spending thousands of pounds annually for
+technical training, had practically no provision for training women.
+Even in classes where they might easily have been admitted, bakery and
+confectionery classes and the like, the girls were kept out because the
+men's trades unions objected to their being educated for such skilled
+work. It was rapidly becoming clear to my mind that men regarded women
+as a servant class in the community, and that women were going to remain
+in the servant class until they lifted themselves out of it. I asked
+myself many times in those days what was to be done. I had joined the
+Labour Party, thinking that through its councils something vital might
+come, some such demand for the women's enfranchisement that the
+politicians could not possibly ignore. Nothing came.
+
+All these years my daughters had been growing up. All their lives they
+had been interested in women's suffrage. Christabel and Sylvia, as
+little girls, had cried to be taken to meetings. They had helped in our
+drawing-room meetings in every way that children can help. As they grew
+older we used to talk together about the suffrage, and I was sometimes
+rather frightened by their youthful confidence in the prospect, which
+they considered certain, of the success of the movement. One day
+Christabel startled me with the remark: "How long you women have been
+trying for the vote. For my part, I mean to get it."
+
+Was there, I reflected, any difference between trying for the vote and
+getting it? There is an old French proverb, "If youth could know; if age
+could do." It occurred to me that if the older suffrage workers could in
+some way join hands with the young, unwearied and resourceful
+suffragists, the movement might wake up to new life and new
+possibilities. After that I and my daughters together sought a way to
+bring about that union of young and old which would find new methods,
+blaze new trails. At length we thought we had found a way.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+In the summer of 1902--I think it was 1902--Susan B. Anthony paid a
+visit to Manchester, and that visit was one of the contributory causes
+that led to the founding of our militant suffrage organisation, the
+Women's Social and Political Union. During Miss Anthony's visit my
+daughter Christabel, who was very deeply impressed, wrote an article for
+the Manchester papers on the life and works of the venerable reformer.
+After her departure Christabel spoke often of her, and always with
+sorrow and indignation that such a splendid worker for humanity was
+destined to die without seeing the hopes of her lifetime realised. "It
+is unendurable," declared my daughter, "to think of another generation
+of women wasting their lives begging for the vote. We must not lose any
+more time. We must act."
+
+By this time the Labour Party, of which I was still a member, had
+returned Mr. Keir Hardie to Parliament, and we decided that the first
+step in a campaign of action was to make the Labour Party responsible
+for a new suffrage bill. At a recent annual conference of the party I
+had moved a resolution calling upon the members to instruct their own
+member of Parliament to introduce a bill for the enfranchisement of
+women. The resolution was passed, and we determined to organise a
+society of women to demand immediate enfranchisement, not by means of
+any outworn missionary methods, but through political action.
+
+It was in October, 1903, that I invited a number of women to my house in
+Nelson street, Manchester, for purposes of organisation. We voted to
+call our new society the Women's Social and Political Union, partly to
+emphasise its democracy, and partly to define its object as political
+rather than propagandist. We resolved to limit our membership
+exclusively to women, to keep ourselves absolutely free from any party
+affiliation, and to be satisfied with nothing but action on our
+question. Deeds, not words, was to be our permanent motto.
+
+To such a pass had the women's suffrage cause come in my country that
+the old leaders, who had done such fine educational work in the past,
+were now seemingly content with expressions of sympathy and regret on
+the part of hypocritical politicians. This fact was thrust upon me anew
+by an incident that occurred almost at the moment of the founding of the
+Women's Social and Political Union. In our Parliament no bill has a
+chance of becoming a law unless it is made a Government measure. Private
+members are at liberty to introduce measures of their own, but these
+rarely reach the second reading, or debatable stage. So much time is
+given to discussion of Government measures that very little time can be
+given to any private bills. About one day in a week is given over to
+consideration of private measures, to which, as we say, the Government
+give facilities; and since there are a limited number of weeks in a
+session, the members, on the opening days of Parliament, meet and draw
+lots to determine who shall have a place in the debates. Only these
+successful men have a chance to speak to their bills, and only those who
+have drawn early chances have any prospect of getting much discussion on
+their measures.
+
+Now, the old suffragists had long since given up hope of obtaining a
+Government suffrage bill, but they clung to a hope that a private
+member's bill would some time obtain consideration. Every year, on the
+opening day of Parliament, the association sent a deputation of women to
+the House of Commons, to meet so-called friendly members and consider
+the position of the women's suffrage cause. The ceremony was of a most
+conventional, not to say farcical character. The ladies made their
+speeches and the members made theirs. The ladies thanked the friendly
+members for their sympathy, and the members renewed their assurances
+that they believed in women's suffrage and would vote for it when they
+had an opportunity to do so. Then the deputation, a trifle sad but
+entirely tranquil, took its departure, and the members resumed the real
+business of life, which was support of their party's policies.
+
+Such a ceremony as this I attended soon after the founding of the
+W. S. P. U. Sir Charles M'Laren was the friendly member who presided
+over the gathering, and he did his full duty in the matter of formally
+endorsing the cause of women's suffrage. He assured the delegation of
+his deep regret, as well as the regret of numbers of his colleagues,
+that women so intelligent, so devoted, etc., should remain
+unenfranchised. Other members did likewise. The ceremonies drew to a
+close, but I, who had not been asked to speak, determined to add
+something to the occasion.
+
+"Sir Charles M'Laren," I began abruptly, "has told us that numbers of
+his colleagues desire the success of the women's suffrage cause. Now
+every one of us knows that at this moment the members of the House of
+Commons are balloting for a place in the debates. Will Sir Charles
+M'Laren tell us if any member is preparing to introduce a bill for
+women's suffrage? Will he tell us what he and the other members will
+pledge themselves to _do_ for the reform they so warmly endorse?"
+
+Of course, the embarrassed Sir Charles was not prepared to tell us
+anything of the kind, and the deputation departed in confusion and
+wrath. I was told that I was an interloper, an impertinent intruder. Who
+asked me to say anything? And what right had I to step in and ruin the
+good impression they had made? No one could tell how many friendly
+members I had alienated by my unfortunate remarks.
+
+I went back to Manchester and with renewed energy continued the work of
+organising for the W. S. P. U.
+
+In the spring of 1904 I went to the annual conference of the Independent
+Labour Party, determined if possible to induce the members to prepare a
+suffrage bill to be laid before Parliament in the approaching session.
+Although I was a member of the National Administrative Council and
+presumably a person holding some influence in the party, I knew that my
+plan would be bitterly opposed by a strong minority, who held that the
+Labour Party should direct all its efforts toward securing universal
+adult suffrage for both men and women. Theoretically, of course, a
+Labour party could not be satisfied with anything less than universal
+adult suffrage, but it was clear that no such sweeping reform could be
+effected at that time, unless indeed the Government made it one of their
+measures. Besides, while a large majority of members of the House of
+Commons were pledged to support a bill giving women equal franchise
+rights with men, it was doubtful whether a majority could be relied upon
+to support a bill giving adult suffrage, even to men. Such a bill, even
+if it were a Government measure, would probably be difficult of passage.
+
+After considerable discussion, the National Council decided to adopt the
+original Women's Enfranchisement Bill, drafted by Dr. Pankhurst, and
+advanced in 1870 to its second reading in the House of Commons. The
+Council's decision was approved by an overwhelming majority of the
+conference.
+
+The new session of Parliament, so eagerly looked forward to, met on
+February 13, 1905. I went down from Manchester, and with my daughter
+Sylvia, then a student at the Royal College of Art, South Kensington,
+spent eight days in the Strangers' Lobby of the House of Commons,
+working for the suffrage bill. We interviewed every one of the members
+who had pledged themselves to support a suffrage bill when it should be
+introduced, but we found not one single member who would agree that his
+chance in the ballot, if he drew such a chance, should be given to
+introducing the bill. Every man had some other measure he was anxious to
+further. Mr. Keir Hardie had previously given us his pledge, but his
+name, as we had feared, was not drawn in the ballot. We next set out to
+interview all the men whose names had been drawn, and we finally induced
+Mr. Bamford Slack, who held the fourteenth place, to introduce our bill.
+The fourteenth place was not a good one, but it served, and the second
+reading of our bill was set down for Friday, May 12th, the second order
+of the day.
+
+This being the first suffrage bill in eight years, a thrill of
+excitement animated not only our ranks but all the old suffrage
+societies. Meetings were held, and a large number of petitions
+circulated. When the day came for consideration on our bill, the
+Strangers' Lobby could not hold the enormous gathering of women of all
+classes, rich and poor, who flocked to the House of Commons. It was
+pitiful to see the look of hope and joy that shone on the faces of many
+of these women. We knew that our poor little measure had the very
+slightest chance of being passed. The bill that occupied the first order
+of the day was one providing that carts travelling along public roads at
+night should carry a light behind as well as before. We had tried to
+induce the promoters of this unimportant little measure to withdraw it
+in the interests of our bill, but they refused. We had tried also to
+persuade the Conservative Government to give our bill facilities for
+full discussion, but they also refused. So, as we fully anticipated,
+the promoters of the Roadway Lighting Bill were allowed to "talk out"
+our bill. They did this by spinning out the debate with silly stories
+and foolish jokes. The members listened to the insulting performance
+with laughter and applause.
+
+When news of what was happening reached the women who waited in the
+Strangers' Lobby, a feeling of wild excitement and indignation took
+possession of the throng. Seeing their temper, I felt that the moment
+had come for a demonstration such as no old-fashioned suffragist had
+ever attempted. I called upon the women to follow me outside for a
+meeting of protest against the government. We swarmed out into the open,
+and Mrs. Wolstenholm-Elmy, one of the oldest suffrage workers in
+England, began to speak. Instantly the police rushed into the crowd of
+women, pushing them about and ordering them to disperse. We moved on as
+far as the great statue of Richard Coeur de Lion that guards the
+entrance to the House of Lords, but again the police intervened. Finally
+the police agreed to let us hold a meeting in Broad Sanctuary, very near
+the gates of Westminster Abbey. Here we made speeches and adopted a
+resolution condemning the Government's action in allowing a small
+minority to talk out our bill. This was the first militant act of the
+W. S. P. U. It caused comment and even some alarm, but the police
+contented themselves with taking our names.
+
+The ensuing summer was spent in outdoor work. By this time the Women's
+Social and Political Union had acquired some valuable accessions, and
+money began to come to us. Among our new members was one who was
+destined to play an important role in the unfolding drama of the
+militant movement. At the close of one of our meetings at Oldham a young
+girl introduced herself to me as Annie Kenney, a mill-worker, and a
+strong suffrage sympathiser. She wanted to know more of our society and
+its objects, and I invited her and her sister Jenny, a Board School
+teacher, to tea the next day. They came and joined our Union, a step
+that definitely changed the whole course of Miss Kenney's life, and gave
+us one of our most distinguished leaders and organisers. With her help
+we began to carry our propaganda to an entirely new public.
+
+In Lancashire there is an institution known as the Wakes, a sort of
+travelling fair where they have merry-go-rounds, Aunt-Sallies, and other
+festive games, side-shows of various kinds, and booths where all kinds
+of things are sold. Every little village has its Wakes-week during the
+summer and autumn, and it is the custom for the inhabitants of the
+villages to spend the Sunday before the opening of the Wakes walking
+among the booths in anticipation of tomorrow's joys. On these occasions
+the Salvation Army, temperance orators, venders of quack medicines,
+pedlars, and others, take advantage of the ready-made audience to
+advance their propaganda. At Annie Kenney's suggestion we went from one
+village to the other, following the Wakes and making suffrage speeches.
+We soon rivalled in popularity the Salvation Army, and even the
+tooth-drawers and patent-medicine pedlars.
+
+The Women's Social and Political Union had been in existence two years
+before any opportunity was presented for work on a national scale. The
+autumn of 1905 brought a political situation which seemed to us to
+promise bright hopes for women's enfranchisement. The life of the old
+Parliament, dominated for nearly twenty years by the Conservative Party,
+was drawing to an end, and the country was on the eve of a general
+election in which the Liberals hoped to be returned to power. Quite
+naturally the Liberal candidates went to the country with perfervid
+promises of reform in every possible direction. They appealed to the
+voters to return them, as advocates and upholders of true democracy, and
+they promised that there should be a Government united in favour of
+people's rights against the powers of a privileged aristocracy.
+
+Now repeated experiences had taught us that the only way to attain
+women's suffrage was to commit a Government to it. In other words,
+pledges of support from candidates were plainly useless. They were not
+worth having. The only object worth trying for was pledges from
+responsible leaders that the new Government would make women's suffrage
+a part of the official programme. We determined to address ourselves to
+those men who were likely to be in the Liberal Cabinet, demanding to
+know whether their reforms were going to include justice to women.
+
+We laid our plans to begin this work at a great meeting to be held in
+Free Trade Hall, Manchester, with Sir Edward Grey as the principal
+speaker. We intended to get seats in the gallery, directly facing the
+platform and we made for the occasion a large banner with the words:
+"Will the Liberal Party Give Votes for Women?" We were to let this
+banner down over the gallery rails at the moment when our speaker rose
+to put the question to Sir Edward Grey. At the last moment, however, we
+had to alter the plan because it was impossible to get the gallery seats
+we wanted. There was no way in which we could use our large banner, so,
+late in the afternoon on the day of the meeting, we cut out and made a
+small banner with the three-word inscription: "Votes for Women." Thus,
+quite accidentally, there came into existence the present slogan of the
+suffrage movement around the world.
+
+Annie Kenney and my daughter Christabel were charged with the mission of
+questioning Sir Edward Grey. They sat quietly through the meeting, at
+the close of which questions were invited. Several questions were asked
+by men and were courteously answered. Then Annie Kenney arose and asked:
+"If the Liberal party is returned to power, will they take steps to give
+votes for women?" At the same time Christabel held aloft the little
+banner that every one in the hall might understand the nature of the
+question. Sir Edward Grey returned no answer to Annie's question, and
+the men sitting near her forced her rudely into her seat, while a
+steward of the meeting pressed his hat over her face. A babel of
+shouts, cries and catcalls sounded from all over the hall.
+
+As soon as order was restored Christabel stood up and repeated the
+question: "Will the Liberal Government, if returned, give votes to
+women?" Again Sir Edward Grey ignored the question, and again a perfect
+tumult of shouts and angry cries arose. Mr. William Peacock, chief
+constable of Manchester, left the platform and came down to the women,
+asking them to write their question, which he promised to hand to the
+speaker. They wrote: "Will the Liberal Government give votes to
+working-women? Signed, on behalf of the Women's Social and Political
+Union, Annie Kenney, member of the Oldham committee of the card-and
+blowing-room operatives." They added a line to say that, as one of
+96,000 organised women textile-workers, Annie Kenney earnestly desired
+an answer to the question.
+
+Mr. Peacock kept his word and handed the question to Sir Edward Grey,
+who read it, smiled, and passed it to the others on the platform. They
+also read it with smiles, but no answer to the question was made. Only
+one lady who was sitting on the platform tried to say something, but the
+chairman interrupted by asking Lord Durham to move a vote of thanks to
+the speaker. Mr. Winston Churchill seconded the motion, Sir Edward Grey
+replied briefly, and the meeting began to break up. Annie Kenney stood
+up in her chair and cried out over the noise of shuffling feet and
+murmurs of conversation: "Will the Liberal Government give votes to
+women?" Then the audience became a mob. They howled, they shouted and
+roared, shaking their fists fiercely at the woman who dared to intrude
+her question into a man's meeting. Hands were lifted to drag her out of
+her chair, but Christabel threw one arm about her as she stood, and with
+the other arm warded off the mob, who struck and scratched at her until
+her sleeve was red with blood. Still the girls held together and shouted
+over and over: "The question! The question! Answer the question!"
+
+Six men, stewards of the meeting, seized Christabel and dragged her down
+the aisle, past the platform, other men following with Annie Kenney,
+both girls still calling for an answer to their question. On the
+platform the Liberal leaders sat silent and unmoved while this
+disgraceful scene was taking place, and the mob were shouting and
+shrieking from the floor.
+
+Flung into the streets, the two girls staggered to their feet and began
+to address the crowds, and to tell them what had taken place in a
+Liberal meeting. Within five minutes they were arrested on a charge of
+obstruction and, in Christabel's case, of assaulting the police. Both
+were summonsed to appear next morning in a police court, where, after a
+trial which was a mere farce, Annie Kenney was sentenced to pay a fine
+of five shillings, with an alternative of three days in prison, and
+Christabel Pankhurst was given a fine of ten shillings or a jail
+sentence of one week.
+
+Both girls promptly chose the prison sentence. As soon as they left the
+court-room I hurried around to the room where they were waiting, and I
+said to my daughter: "You have done everything you could be expected to
+do in this matter. I think you should let me pay your fines and take you
+home." Without waiting for Annie Kenney to speak, my daughter exclaimed:
+"Mother, if you pay my fine I will never go home." Before going to the
+meeting she had said, "We will get our question answered or sleep in
+prison to-night." I now knew her courage remained unshaken.
+
+Of course the affair created a tremendous sensation, not only in
+Manchester, where my husband had been so well known and where I had so
+long held public office, but all over England. The comments of the press
+were almost unanimously bitter. Ignoring the perfectly well-established
+fact that men in every political meeting ask questions and demand
+answers of the speakers, the newspapers treated the action of the two
+girls as something quite unprecedented and outrageous. They generally
+agreed that great leniency had been shown them. Fines and jail-sentences
+were too good for such unsexed creatures. "The discipline of the
+nursery" would have been far more appropriate. One Birmingham paper
+declared that "if any argument were required against giving ladies
+political status and power it had been furnished in Manchester."
+Newspapers which had heretofore ignored the whole subject now hinted
+that while they had formerly been in favour of women's suffrage, they
+could no longer countenance it. The Manchester incident, it was said,
+had set the cause back, perhaps irrevocably.
+
+This is how it set the cause back. Scores of people wrote to the
+newspapers expressing sympathy with the women. The wife of Sir Edward
+Grey told her friends that she considered them quite justified in the
+means they had taken. It was stated that Winston Churchill, nervous
+about his own candidacy in Manchester, visited Strangeways Gaol, where
+the two girls were imprisoned, and vainly begged the governor to allow
+him to pay their fines. On October 20, when the prisoners were released,
+they were given an immense demonstration in Free-Trade Hall, the very
+hall from which they had been ejected the week before. The Women's
+Social and Political Union received a large number of new members. Above
+all, the question of women's suffrage became at once a live topic of
+comment from one end of Great Britain to the other.
+
+We determined that from that time on the little "Votes For Women"
+banners should appear wherever a prospective member of the Liberal
+Government rose to speak, and that there should be no more peace until
+the women's question was answered. We clearly perceived that the new
+Government, calling themselves Liberal, were reactionary so far as women
+were concerned, that they were hostile to women's suffrage, and would
+have to be fought until they were conquered, or else driven from office.
+
+We did not begin to fight, however, until we had given the new
+Government every chance to give us the pledge we wanted. Early in
+December the Conservative Government had gone out, and Sir Henry
+Campbell-Bannerman, the Liberal leader, had formed a new Cabinet. On
+December 21 a great meeting was held in Royal Albert Hall, London, where
+Sir Henry, surrounded by his cabinet, made his first utterance as Prime
+Minister. Previous to the meeting we wrote to Sir Henry and asked him,
+in the name of the Women's Social and Political Union, whether the
+Liberal Government would give women the vote. We added that our
+representatives would be present at the meeting, and we hoped that the
+Prime Minister would publicly answer the question. Otherwise we should
+be obliged publicly to protest against his silence.
+
+Of course Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman returned no reply, nor did his
+speech contain any allusion to women's suffrage. So, at the conclusion,
+Annie Kenney, whom we had smuggled into the hall in disguise, whipped
+out her little white calico banner, and called out in her clear, sweet
+voice: "Will the Liberal Government give women the vote?"
+
+At the same moment Theresa Billington let drop from a seat directly
+above the platform a huge banner with the words: "Will the Liberal
+Government give justice to working-women?" Just for a moment there was a
+gasping silence, the people waiting to see what the Cabinet Ministers
+would do. They did nothing. Then, in the midst of uproar and conflicting
+shouts, the women were seized and flung out of the hall.
+
+This was the beginning of a campaign the like of which was never known
+in England, or, for that matter, in any other country. If we had been
+strong enough we should have opposed the election of every Liberal
+candidate, but being limited both in funds and in members we
+concentrated on one member of the Government, Mr. Winston Churchill. Not
+that we had any animus against Mr. Churchill. We chose him simply
+because he was the only important candidate standing for constituencies
+within reach of our headquarters. We attended every meeting addressed by
+Mr. Churchill. We heckled him unmercifully; we spoiled his best points
+by flinging back such obvious retorts that the crowds roared with
+laughter. We lifted out little white banners from unexpected corners of
+the hall, exactly at the moment when an interruption was least desired.
+Sometimes our banners were torn from our hands and trodden under foot.
+Sometimes, again, the crowds were with us, and we actually broke up the
+meeting. We did not succeed in defeating Mr. Churchill, but he was
+returned by a very small majority, the smallest of any of the Manchester
+Liberal candidates.
+
+We did not confine our efforts to heckling Mr. Churchill. Throughout the
+campaign we kept up the work of questioning Cabinet Ministers at
+meetings all over England and Scotland. At Sun Hall, Liverpool,
+addressed by the Prime Minister, nine women in succession asked the
+important question, and were thrown out of the hall; this in the face of
+the fact that Sir Campbell-Bannerman was an avowed suffragist. But we
+were not questioning him as to his private opinions on the suffrage; we
+were asking him what his Government were willing to do about suffrage.
+We questioned Mr. Asquith in Sheffield, Mr. Lloyd-George in Altrincham,
+Cheshire, the Prime Minister again in Glasgow, and we interrupted a
+great many other meetings as well. Always we were violently thrown out
+and insulted. Often we were painfully bruised and hurt.
+
+What good did it do? We have often been asked that question, even by the
+women our actions spurred into an activity they had never before thought
+themselves capable of. For one thing, our heckling campaign made women's
+suffrage a matter of news--it had never been that before. Now the
+newspapers were full of us. For another thing, we woke up the old
+suffrage associations. During the general election various groups of
+non-militant suffragists came back to life and organised a gigantic
+manifesto in favour of action from the Liberal Government. Among others,
+the manifesto was signed by the Women's Co-operative Guild with nearly
+21,000 members; the Women's Liberal Federation, with 76,000 members; the
+Scottish Women's Liberal Federation, with 15,000 members; the
+North-of-England Weavers' Association, with 100,000 members; the British
+Women's Temperance Association, with nearly 110,000 members; and the
+Independent Labour Party with 20,000 members. Surely it was something to
+have inspired all this activity.
+
+We decided that the next step must be to carry the fight to London, and
+Annie Kenney was chosen to be organiser there. With only two pounds,
+less than ten dollars, in her pocket the intrepid girl set forth on her
+mission. In about a fortnight I left my official work as registrar in
+the hands of a deputy and went down to London to see what had been
+accomplished. To my astonishment I found that Annie, working with my
+daughter Sylvia, had organised a procession of women and a demonstration
+to be held on the opening day of Parliament. The confident young things
+had actually engaged Caxton Hall, Westminster; they had had printed a
+large number of handbills to announce the meeting, and they were busily
+engaged in working up the demonstration. Mrs. Drummond, who had joined
+the Union shortly after the imprisonment of Annie Kenney and Christabel,
+sent word from Manchester that she was coming to help us. She had to
+borrow the money for her railroad-fare, but she came, and, as ever
+before and since, her help was invaluable.
+
+How we worked, distributing handbills, chalking announcements of the
+meeting on pavements, calling on every person we knew and on a great
+many more we knew only by name, canvassing from door to door!
+
+At length the opening day of Parliament arrived. On February 19, 1906,
+occurred the first suffrage procession in London. I think there were
+between three and four hundred women in that procession, poor
+working-women from the East End, for the most part, leading the way in
+which numberless women of every rank were afterward to follow. My eyes
+were misty with tears as I saw them, standing in line, holding the
+simple banners which my daughter Sylvia had decorated, waiting for the
+word of command. Of course our procession attracted a large crowd of
+intensely amused spectators. The police, however, made no attempt to
+disperse our ranks, but merely ordered us to furl our banners. There
+was no reason why we should not have carried banners but the fact that
+we were women, and therefore could be bullied. So, bannerless, the
+procession entered Caxton Hall. To my amazement it was filled with
+women, most of whom I had never seen at any suffrage gathering before.
+
+Our meeting was most enthusiastic, and while Annie Kenney was speaking,
+to frequent applause, the news came to me that the King's speech (which
+is not the King's at all, but the formally announced Government
+programme for the session) had been read, and that there was in it no
+mention of the women's suffrage question. As Annie took her seat I arose
+and made this announcement, and I moved a resolution that the meeting
+should at once proceed to the House of Commons to urge the members to
+introduce a suffrage measure. The resolution was carried, and we rushed
+out in a body and hurried toward the Strangers' Entrance. It was pouring
+rain and bitterly cold, yet no one turned back, even when we learned at
+the entrance that for the first time in memory the doors of the House of
+Commons were barred to women. We sent in our cards to members who were
+personal friends, and some of them came out and urged our admittance.
+The police, however, were obdurate. They had their orders. The Liberal
+government, advocates of the people's rights, had given orders that
+women should no longer set foot in their stronghold.
+
+Pressure from members proved too great, and the government relented to
+the extent of allowing twenty women at a time to enter the lobby.
+Through all the rain and cold those hundreds of women waited for hours
+their turn to enter. Some never got in, and for those of us who did
+there was small satisfaction. Not a member could be persuaded to take up
+our cause.
+
+Out of the disappointment and dejection of that experience I yet reaped
+a richer harvest of happiness than I had ever known before. Those women
+had followed me to the House of Commons. They had defied the police.
+They were awake at last. They were prepared to do something that women
+had never done before--fight for themselves. Women had always fought for
+men, and for their children. Now they were ready to fight for their own
+human rights. Our militant movement was established.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+To account for the phenomenal growth of the Women's Social and Political
+Union after it was established in London, to explain why it made such an
+instant appeal to women hitherto indifferent, I shall have to point out
+exactly wherein our society differs from all other suffrage
+associations. In the first place, our members are absolutely single
+minded; they concentrate all their forces on one object, political
+equality with men. No member of the W. S. P. U. divides her attention
+between suffrage and other social reforms. We hold that both reason and
+justice dictate that women shall have a share in reforming the evils
+that afflict society, especially those evils bearing directly on women
+themselves. Therefore, we demand, before any other legislation whatever,
+the elementary justice of votes for women.
+
+There is not the slightest doubt that the women of Great Britain would
+have been enfranchised years ago had all the suffragists adopted this
+simple principle. They never did, and even to-day many English women
+refuse to adopt it. They are party members first and suffragists
+afterward; or they are suffragists part of the time and social theorists
+the rest of the time. We further differ from other suffrage
+associations, or from others existing in 1906, in that we clearly
+perceived the political situation that solidly interposed between us and
+our enfranchisement.
+
+For seven years we had had a majority in the House of Commons pledged to
+vote favourably on a suffrage bill. The year before, they had voted
+favourably on one, yet that bill did not become law. Why? Because even
+an overwhelming majority of private members are powerless to enact law
+in the face of a hostile Government of eleven cabinet ministers. The
+private member of Parliament was once possessed of individual power and
+responsibility, but Parliamentary usage and a changed conception of
+statesmanship have gradually lessened the functions of members. At the
+present time their powers, for all practical purposes, are limited to
+helping to enact such measures as the Government introduces or, in rare
+instances, private measures approved by the Government. It is true that
+the House can revolt, can, by voting a lack of confidence in the
+Government, force them to resign. But that almost never happens, and it
+is less likely now than formerly to happen. Figureheads don't revolt.
+
+This, then, was our situation: the Government all-powerful and
+consistently hostile; the rank and file of legislators impotent; the
+country apathetic; the women divided in their interests. The Women's
+Social and Political Union was established to meet this situation, and
+to overcome it. Moreover we had a policy which, if persisted in long
+enough, could not possibly fail to overcome it. Do you wonder that we
+gained new members at every meeting we held?
+
+There was little formality about joining the Union. Any woman could
+become a member by paying a shilling, but at the same time she was
+required to sign a declaration of loyal adherence to our policy and a
+pledge not to work for any political party until the women's vote was
+won. This is still our inflexible custom. Moreover, if at any time a
+member, or a group of members, loses faith in our policy; if any one
+begins to suggest, that some other policy ought to be substituted, or if
+she tries to confuse the issue by adding other policies, she ceases at
+once to be a member. Autocratic? Quite so. But, you may object, a
+suffrage organisation ought to be democratic. Well the members of the
+W. S. P. U. do not agree with you. We do not believe in the
+effectiveness of the ordinary suffrage organisation. The W. S. P. U. is
+not hampered by a complexity of rules. We have no constitution and
+by-laws; nothing to be amended or tinkered with or quarrelled over at an
+annual meeting. In fact, we have no annual meeting, no business
+sessions, no elections of officers. The W. S. P. U. is simply a suffrage
+army in the field. It is purely a volunteer army, and no one is obliged
+to remain in it. Indeed we don't want anybody to remain in it who does
+not ardently believe in the policy of the army.
+
+The foundation of our policy is opposition to a Government who refuse
+votes to women. To support by word or deed a Government hostile to woman
+suffrage is simply to invite them to go on being hostile. We oppose the
+Liberal party because it is in power. We would oppose a Unionist
+government if it were in power and were opposed to woman suffrage. We
+say to women that as long as they remain in the ranks of the Liberal
+party they give their tacit approval to the Government's anti-suffrage
+policy. We say to members of Parliament that as long as they support any
+of the Government's policies they give their tacit approval to the
+anti-suffrage policy. We call upon all sincere suffragists to leave the
+Liberal party until women are given votes on equal terms with men. We
+call upon all voters to vote against Liberal candidates until the
+Liberal Government does justice to women.
+
+We did not invent this policy. It was most successfully pursued by Mr.
+Parnell in his Home Rule struggle more than thirty-five years ago. Any
+one who is old enough to remember the stirring days of Parnell may
+recall how, in 1885, the Home Rulers, by persistently voting against the
+Government in the House of Commons, forced the resignation of Mr.
+Gladstone and his Cabinet. In the general election which followed, the
+Liberal party was again returned to power, but by the slender majority
+of eighty-four, the Home Rulers having fought every Liberal candidate,
+even those, who, like my husband, were enthusiastic believers in Home
+Rule. In order to control the House and keep his leadership, Mr.
+Gladstone was obliged to bring in a Government Home Rule Bill. The
+downfall, through private intrigue, and the subsequent death of Parnell
+prevented the bill from becoming law. For many years afterward the Irish
+Nationalists had no leader strong enough to carry on Parnell's
+anti-government policy, but within late years it was resumed by Mr.
+James Redmond, with the result that the Commons passed a Home Rule
+Bill.
+
+The contention of the old-fashioned suffragists, and of the politicians
+as well, has always been that an educated public opinion will ultimately
+give votes to women without any great force being exerted in behalf of
+the reform. We agree that public opinion must be educated, but we
+contend that even an educated public opinion is useless unless it is
+vigorously utilised. The keenest weapon is powerless unless it is
+courageously wielded. In the year 1906 there was an immensely large
+public opinion in favour of woman suffrage. But what good did that do
+the cause? We called upon the public for a great deal more than
+sympathy. We called upon it to demand of the Government to yield to
+public opinion and give women votes. And we declared that we would wage
+war, not only on all anti-suffrage forces, but on all neutral and
+non-active forces. Every man with a vote was considered a foe to woman
+suffrage unless he was prepared to be actively a friend.
+
+Not that we believed that the campaign of education ought to be given
+up. On the contrary, we knew that education must go on, and in much more
+vigorous fashion than ever before. The first thing we did was to enter
+upon a sensational campaign to arouse the public to the importance of
+woman suffrage, and to interest it in our plans for forcing the
+Government's hands. I think we can claim that our success in this regard
+was instant, and that it has proved permanent. From the very first, in
+those early London days, when we were few in numbers and very poor in
+purse, we made the public aware of the woman suffrage movement as it had
+never been before. We adopted Salvation Army methods and went out into
+the highways and the byways after converts. We threw away all our
+conventional notions of what was "ladylike" and "good form," and we
+applied to our methods the one test question, Will it help? Just as the
+Booths and their followers took religion to the street crowds in such
+fashion that the church people were horrified, so we took suffrage to
+the general public in a manner that amazed and scandalised the other
+suffragists.
+
+We had a lot of suffrage literature printed, and day by day our members
+went forth and held street meetings. Selecting a favourable spot, with a
+chair for a rostrum, one of us would ring a bell until people began to
+stop to see what was going to happen. What happened, of course, was a
+lively suffrage speech, and the distribution of literature. Soon after
+our campaign had started, the sound of the bell was a signal for a crowd
+to spring up as if by magic. All over the neighbourhood you heard the
+cry: "Here are the Suffragettes! Come on!" We covered London in this
+way; we never lacked an audience, and best of all, an audience to which
+the woman-suffrage doctrine was new. We were increasing our favourable
+public as well as waking it up. Besides these street meetings, we held
+many hall and drawing-room meetings, and we got a great deal of press
+publicity, which was something never accorded the older suffrage
+methods.
+
+Our plans included the introduction of a Government suffrage bill at
+the earliest possible moment, and in the spring of 1906 we sent a
+deputation of about thirty of our members to interview the Prime
+Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. The Prime Minister, it was
+stated, was not at home; so in a few days we sent another deputation.
+This time the servant agreed to carry our request to the Prime Minister.
+The women waited patiently on the doorstep of the official residence,
+No. 10 Downing Street, for nearly an hour. Then the door opened and two
+men appeared. One of the men addressed the leader of the deputation,
+roughly ordering her and the others to leave. "We have sent a message to
+the Prime Minister," she replied, "and we are waiting for the answer."
+"There will be no answer," was the stern rejoinder, and the door closed.
+
+"Yes, there will be an answer," exclaimed the leader, and she seized the
+door-knocker and banged it sharply. Instantly the men reappeared, and
+one of them called to a policeman standing near, "Take this woman in
+charge." The order was obeyed, and the peaceful deputation saw its
+leader taken off to Canon Row Station.
+
+Instantly the women protested vigorously. Annie Kenney began to address
+the crowd that had gathered, and Mrs. Drummond actually forced her way
+past the doorkeeper into the sacred residence of the Prime Minister of
+the British Empire! Her arrest and Annie's followed. The three women
+were detained at the police station for about an hour, long enough, the
+Prime Minister probably thought, to frighten them thoroughly and teach
+them not to do such dreadful things again. Then he sent them word that
+he had decided not to prosecute them, but would, on the contrary,
+receive a deputation from the W. S. P. U., and, if they cared to attend,
+from other suffrage societies as well.
+
+All the suffrage organisations at once began making preparations for the
+great event. At the same time two hundred members of Parliament sent a
+petition to the Prime Minister, asking him to receive their committee
+that they might urge upon him the necessity of a Government measure for
+woman suffrage. Sir Henry fixed May 19th as the day on which he would
+receive a joint deputation from Parliament and from the women's suffrage
+organisations.
+
+The W. S. P. U. determined to make the occasion as public as possible,
+and began preparations for a procession and a demonstration. When the
+day came we assembled at the foot of the beautiful monument to the
+warrior-queen, Boadicea, that guards the entrance to Westminster Bridge,
+and from there we marched to the Foreign Office. At the meeting eight
+women spoke in behalf of an immediate suffrage measure, and Mr. Keir
+Hardie presented the argument for the suffrage members of Parliament. I
+spoke for the W. S. P. U., and I tried to make the Prime Minister see
+that no business could be more pressing than ours. I told him that the
+group of women organised in our Union felt so strongly the necessity for
+women enfranchisement that they were prepared to sacrifice for it
+everything they possessed, their means of livelihood, their very lives,
+if necessary. I begged him to make such a sacrifice needless by doing us
+justice now.
+
+What answer do you think Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman made us? He
+assured us of his sympathy with our cause, his belief in its justice,
+and his confidence in our fitness to vote. And then he told us to have
+patience and wait; he could do nothing for us because some of his
+Cabinet were opposed to us. After a few more words the usual vote of
+thanks was moved, and the deputation was dismissed. I had not expected
+anything better, but it wrung my heart to see the bitter disappointment
+of the W. S. P. U. women who had waited in the street to hear from the
+leaders the result of the deputation. We held a great meeting of protest
+that afternoon, and determined to carry on our agitation with increased
+vigor.
+
+Now that it had been made plain that the Government were resolved not to
+bring in a suffrage bill, there was nothing to do but to continue our
+policy of waking up the country, not only by public speeches and
+demonstrations, but by a constant heckling of Cabinet Ministers. Since
+the memorable occasion when Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney were
+thrown out of Sir Edward Grey's meeting in Manchester, and afterward
+imprisoned for the crime of asking a courteous question, we had not lost
+an opportunity of addressing the same question to every Cabinet Minister
+we could manage to encounter. For this we have been unmercifully
+criticised, and in a large number of cases most brutally handled.
+
+In almost every one of my American meetings I was asked the question,
+"What good do you expect to accomplish by interrupting meetings?" Is it
+possible that the time-honoured, almost sacred English privilege of
+interrupting is unknown in America? I cannot imagine a political meeting
+from which "the Voice" was entirely absent. In England it is invariably
+present. It is considered the inalienable right of the opposition to
+heckle the speaker and to hurl questions at him which are calculated to
+spoil his arguments. For instance, when Liberals attend a Conservative
+gathering they go prepared to shatter by witticisms and pointed
+questions all the best effects of the Conservative orators. The next day
+you will read in Liberal newspapers headlines like these: "The Voice in
+Fine Form," "Short Shrift for Tory Twaddle," "Awkward Answers from the
+Enemy's Platform." In the body of the article you will learn that "Lord
+X found that the Liberals at his meeting were more than a match for
+him," that "there was continued interruption during Sir So-and-so's
+speech," that "Lord M fared badly last night in his encounter with the
+Voice," or that "Captain Z had the greatest difficulty in making himself
+heard."
+
+In accordance with this custom we heckle Cabinet Ministers. Mr. Winston
+Churchill, for example, is speaking. "One great question," he exclaims,
+"remains to be settled."
+
+"And that is woman suffrage," shouts a voice from the gallery.
+
+Mr. Churchill struggles on with his speech: "The men have been
+complaining of me----"
+
+"The women have been complaining of you, too, Mr. Churchill," comes
+back promptly from the back of the hall.
+
+"In the circumstances what can we do but----"
+
+"Give votes to women."
+
+Our object, of course, is to keep woman suffrage in the foreground of
+interest and to insist on every possible occasion that no other reform
+advocated is of such immediate importance.
+
+From the first the women's interruptions have been resented with
+unreasoning anger. I remember hearing Mr. Lloyd-George saying once of a
+man who interrupted him:
+
+"Let him remain. I like interruptions. They show that people holding
+different opinions to mine are present, giving me a chance to convert
+them." But when suffragists interrupt Mr. Lloyd-George he says something
+polite like this: "Pay no attention to those cats mewing."
+
+Some of the ministers are more well bred in their expressions, but all
+are disdainful and resentful. All see with approval the brutal ejection
+of the women by the Liberal stewards.
+
+At one meeting where Mr. Lloyd-George was speaking, we interrupted with
+a question, and he claimed the sympathy of the audience on the score
+that he was a friend to woman suffrage. "Then why don't you do something
+to give votes to women?" was the obvious retort. But Mr. Lloyd-George
+evaded this by the counter query: "Why don't they go for their enemies?
+Why don't they go for their greatest enemy?" Instantly, all over the
+hall, voices shouted, "Asquith! Asquith!" For even at that early day it
+was known that the then Chancellor of the Exchequer was a stern foe of
+women's independence.
+
+In the summer of 1906, together with other members of the W. S. P. U., I
+went to Northampton, where Mr. Asquith was holding a large meeting in
+behalf of the Government's education bills. We organised a number of
+outdoor meetings, and of course prepared to attend Mr. Asquith's
+meeting. In conversation with the president of the local Women's Liberal
+Association, I mentioned the fact that we expected to be put out, and
+she indignantly declared that such a thing could not happen in
+Northampton, where the women had done so much for the Liberal party. I
+told her that I hoped she would be at the meeting.
+
+I had not intended to go myself, my plans being to hold a meeting of my
+own outside the door. But our members, before Mr. Asquith began to
+speak, attempted to question him, and were thrown out with violence. So
+then, turning my meeting over to them, I slipped quietly into the hall
+and sat down in the front row of a division set apart for wives and
+women friends of the Liberal leaders. I sat there in silence, hearing
+men interrupt the speaker and get answers to their questions. At the
+close of the speech I stood up and, addressing the chairman, said: "I
+should like to ask Mr. Asquith a question about education." The chairman
+turned inquiringly to Mr. Asquith, who frowningly shook his head. But
+without waiting for the chairman to say a word, I continued: "Mr.
+Asquith has said that the parents of children have a right to be
+consulted in the matter of their children's education, especially upon
+such questions as the kind of religious instruction they should receive.
+Women are parents. Does not Mr. Asquith think that women should have the
+right to control their children's education, as men do, through the
+vote?" At this point the stewards seized me by the arms and shoulders
+and rushed me, or rather dragged me, for I soon lost my footing, to the
+door and threw me out of the building.
+
+The effect on the president of the Northampton Women's Liberal
+Association was most salutary. She resigned her office and became a
+member of the W. S. P. U. Perhaps her action was influenced further by
+the press reports of the incident. Mr. Asquith was reported as saying,
+after my ejection, that it was difficult to enter into the minds of
+people who thought they could serve a cause which professed to appeal to
+the reason of the electors of the country by disturbing public meetings.
+Apparently he could enter into the minds of the men who disturbed public
+meetings.
+
+To our custom of public heckling of the responsible members of the
+hostile Government we added the practice of sending deputations to them
+for the purpose of presenting orderly arguments in favour of our cause.
+After Mr. Asquith had shown himself so uninformed as to the objects of
+the suffragists, we decided to ask him to receive a deputation from the
+W. S. P. U. To our polite letter Mr. Asquith returned a cold refusal to
+be interviewed on any subject not connected with his particular office.
+Whereupon we wrote again, reminding Mr. Asquith that as a member of the
+Government he was concerned with all questions likely to be dealt with
+by Parliament. We said that we urgently desired to put our question
+before him, and that we would send a deputation to his house hoping that
+he would feel it his duty to receive us.
+
+Our first deputation was told that Mr. Asquith was not at home. He had,
+in fact, escaped from the house through the back door, and had sped away
+in a fast motor-car. Two days later we sent a larger deputation, of
+about thirty women, to his house in Cavendish Square. To be accurate,
+the deputation got as near the house as the entrance to Cavendish
+Square; there the women met a strong force of police, who told them that
+they would not be permitted to go farther.
+
+Many of the women were carrying little "Votes for Women" banners, and
+these the police tore from them, in some cases with blows and insults.
+Seeing this, the leader of the deputation cried out: "We will go
+forward. You have no right to strike women like that." The reply, from a
+policeman near her, was a blow in the face. She screamed with pain and
+indignation, whereupon the man grasped her by the throat and choked her
+against the park railings until she was blue in the face. The young
+woman struggled and fought back, and for this she was arrested on a
+charge of assaulting the police. Three other women were arrested, one
+because, in spite of the police, she succeeded in ringing Mr. Asquith's
+door-bell and another because she protested against the laughter of
+some ladies who watched the affair from a drawing-room window. She was a
+poor working-woman, and it seemed to her a terrible thing that rich and
+protected women should ridicule a cause that to her was so profoundly
+serious. The fourth woman was taken in charge, because after she had
+been pushed off the pavement, she dared to step back. Charged with
+disorderly conduct, these women were sentenced to six weeks in the
+Second Division. They were given the option of a fine, it is true, but
+the payment of a fine would have been an acknowledgment of guilt, which
+made such a course impossible. The leader of the deputation was given a
+two months' sentence, with the option of a fine of ten pounds. She, too,
+refused to pay, and was sent to prison; but some unknown friend paid the
+fine secretly, and she was released before the expiration of her
+sentence.
+
+About the time these things were happening in London, similar violence
+was offered our women in Manchester, where John Burns, Lloyd-George, and
+Winston Churchill, all three Cabinet Ministers, were addressing a great
+Liberal demonstration. The women were there, as usual, to ask government
+support for our measure. There, too, they were thrown out of the
+meeting, and three of them were sent to prison.
+
+There are people in England, plenty of them, who will tell you that the
+Suffragettes were sent to prison for destroying property. The fact is
+that hundreds of women were arrested for exactly such offences as I have
+described before it ever occurred to any of us to destroy property. We
+were determined, at the beginning of our movement, that we would make
+ourselves heard, that we would force the Government to take up our
+question and answer it by action in Parliament. Perhaps you will see
+some parallel to our case in the stand taken in Massachusetts by the
+early Abolitionists, Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison. They,
+too, had to fight bitterly, to face insult and arrest, because they
+insisted on being heard. And they were heard; and so, in time, were we.
+
+I think we began to be noticed in earnest after our first success in
+opposing a Liberal candidate. This was in a by-election held at
+Cockermouth in August, 1906. I shall have to explain that a by-election
+is a local election to fill a vacancy in Parliament caused by a death or
+a resignation. The verdict of a by-election is considered as either an
+indorsement or a censure of the manner in which the Government have
+fulfilled their pre-election pledges. So we went to Cockermouth and told
+the voters how the Liberal party had fulfilled its pledges of democracy
+and lived up to its avowed belief in the rights of all the people. We
+told them of the arrests in London and Manchester, of the shameful
+treatment of women in Liberal meetings, and we asked them to censure the
+Government who had answered so brutally our demand for a vote. We told
+them that the only rebuke that the politicians would notice was a lost
+seat in Parliament, and that on that ground we asked them to defeat the
+Liberal candidate.
+
+How we were ridiculed! With what scorn the newspapers declared that
+"those wild women" could never turn a single vote. Yet when the
+election was over it was found that the Liberal candidate had lost the
+seat, which, at the general election a little more than a year before,
+had been won by a majority of 655. This time the Unionist candidate was
+returned by a majority of 609. Tremendously elated, we hurried our
+forces off to another by-election.
+
+Now the ridicule was turned to stormy abuse. Mind you, the Liberal
+Government still refused to notice the women's question; they declared
+through the Liberal press that the defeat at Cockermouth was
+insignificant, and that anyhow it wasn't caused by the Suffragettes; yet
+the Liberal leaders were furiously angry with the W. S. P. U. Many of
+our members had been Liberals, and it was considered by the men that
+these women were little better than traitors. They were very foolish and
+ill-advised, into the bargain, the Liberals said, because the vote, if
+won at all, must be gained from the Liberal party; and how did the women
+suppose the Liberal party would ever give the vote to open and avowed
+enemies? This sage argument was used also by the women Liberals and the
+constitutional suffragists. They advised us that the proper way was to
+work for the party. We retorted that we had done that unsuccessfully for
+too many years already, and persisted with the opposite method of
+persuasion.
+
+Throughout the summer and autumn we devoted ourselves to the by-election
+work, sometimes actually defeating the Liberal candidate, sometimes
+reducing the Liberal majority, and always raising a tremendous sensation
+and gaining hundreds of new members to the Union. In almost every
+neighbourhood we visited we left the nucleus of a local union, so that
+before the year was out we had branches all over England and many in
+Scotland and Wales. I especially remember a by-election in Wales at
+which Mr. Samuel Evans, who had accepted an officership under the Crown,
+had to stand for re-election. Unfortunately no candidate had been
+brought out against him. So there was nothing for my companions and me
+to do but make his campaign as lively as possible. Mr.--now Sir
+Samuel--Evans was the man who had incensed women by talking out a
+suffrage resolution introduced into the House by Keir Hardie. So we went
+to two of his meetings and literally talked him out, breaking up the
+gatherings amid the laughter and cheers of delighted crowds.
+
+On October 23d Parliament met for its autumn session, and we led a
+deputation to the House of Commons in another effort to induce the
+Government to take action on woman suffrage. In accordance with orders
+given the police, only twenty of us were admitted to the Strangers'
+Lobby. We sent in for the chief Liberal whip, and asked him to take a
+message to the Prime Minister, the message being the usual request to
+grant women the vote that session. We also asked the Prime Minister if
+he intended to include the registration of qualified women voters in the
+provisions of the plural voting bill, then under consideration. The
+Liberal whip came back with the reply that nothing could be done for
+women that session.
+
+[Illustration: MRS. PANKHURST ADDRESSING A BY-ELECTION CROWD]
+
+"Does the Prime Minister," I asked, "hold out any hope for the women
+for any session during this Parliament, or at any future time?" The
+Prime Minister, you will remember, called himself a suffragist.
+
+The Liberal whip replied, "No, Mrs. Pankhurst, the Prime Minister does
+not."
+
+What would a deputation of unenfranchised men have done in these
+circumstances--men who knew themselves to be qualified to exercise the
+franchise, who desperately needed the protection of the franchise, and
+who had a majority of legislators in favour of giving them the
+franchise? I hope they would have done at least as much as we did, which
+was to start a meeting of protest on the spot. The newspapers described
+our action as creating a disgraceful scene in the lobby of the House of
+Commons, but I think that history will otherwise describe it. One of the
+women sprang up on a settee and began to address the crowd. In less than
+a minute she was pulled down, but instantly another woman took her
+place; and after she had been dragged down, still another sprang to her
+place, and following her another and another, until the order came to
+clear the lobby, and we were all forced outside.
+
+In the melee I was thrown to the floor and painfully hurt. The women,
+thinking me seriously injured, crowded around me and refused to move
+until I was able to regain myself. This angered the police, who were
+still more incensed when they found that the demonstration was continued
+outside. Eleven women were arrested, including Mrs. Pethick Lawrence,
+our treasurer, Mrs. Cobden Sanderson, Annie Kenney and three more of our
+organisers; and they were all sent to Holloway for two months. But the
+strength of our movement was proved by the number of volunteers who
+immediately came forward to carry on the work. Mrs. Tuke, now Hon.
+Secretary of the W. S. P. U., joined the Union at this time. It had not
+occurred to the authorities that their action would have this effect.
+They thought to crush the Union at a blow, but they gave it the greatest
+impetus it had yet received. The leaders of the older suffrage
+organisations for the time forgot their disapproval of our methods, and
+joined with women writers, physicians, actresses, artists, and other
+prominent women in denouncing the affair as barbarous.
+
+One more thing the authorities failed to take into account. The
+condition of English prisons was known to be very bad, but when two of
+our women were made so ill in Holloway that they had to be released
+within a few days, the politicians began to tremble for their prestige.
+Questions were asked in Parliament concerning the advisability of
+treating the Suffragettes not as common criminals but as political
+offenders with the right to confinement in the First Division. Mr.
+Herbert Gladstone, the Home Secretary, replied to these questions that
+he had no power to interfere with the magistrates' decisions, and could
+do nothing in the matter of the suffragettes' punishment. I shall ask
+you to remember this statement of Mr. Herbert Gladstone's, as later we
+were able to prove it a deliberate falsehood--although really the
+falsehood proved itself when the women, by Government order, were
+released from prison when they had served just half their sentences.
+The reason for this was that an important by-election was being held in
+the north of England, and we had distributed broadcast throughout the
+constituency hand bills telling the electors that nine women, including
+the daughter of Richard Cobden, were being held as common criminals by
+the Liberal Government who were asking for their votes.
+
+I took a group of the released prisoners to Huddersfield, and they told
+prison stories to such effect that the Liberal majority was reduced by
+540 votes. As usual the Liberal leaders denied that our work had
+anything to do with the slender majority by which the party retained the
+seat, but among our souvenirs is a handbill, one of thousands given out
+from Liberal headquarters:
+
+
+     +------------------------------+
+     |     MEN OF HUDDERSFIELD      |
+     |       DON'T BE MISLED        |
+     | BY SOCIALISTS, SUFFRAGETTES  |
+     |          OR TORIES           |
+     |      VOTE FOR SHERWELL       |
+     +------------------------------+
+
+
+Meanwhile, other demonstrations had taken place before the House of
+Commons, and at Christmas time twenty-one suffragettes were in Holloway
+Prison, though they had committed no crime. The Government professed
+themselves unmoved, and members of Parliament spoke with sneers of the
+"self-made martyrs." However, a considerable group of members, strongly
+moved by the passion and unquenchable ardor of this new order of
+suffragists, met during the last week of the year and formed a
+committee whose object it was to press upon the government the necessity
+of giving the franchise to women during that Parliament. The committee
+resolved that its members would work to educate a wider public opinion
+on the question, and especially to advocate suffrage when addressing
+meetings in their constituencies, to take Parliamentary action on every
+possible occasion, and to induce as many members of Parliament as
+possible to ballot for the introduction of a suffrage bill or motion
+next session.
+
+Our first year in London had borne wonderful fruits. We had grown from a
+mere handful of women, a "family party" the newspapers had derisively
+called us, to a strong organisation with branches all over the country,
+permanent headquarters in Clements Inn, Strand; we had found good
+financial backing, and above all, we had created a suffrage committee in
+the House of Commons.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+FOUR YEARS OF PEACEFUL MILITANCY
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+The campaign of 1907 began with a Women's Parliament, called together on
+February 13th in Caxton Hall, to consider the provisions of the King's
+speech, which had been read in the national Parliament on the opening
+day of the session, February 12th. The King's speech, as I have
+explained, is the official announcement of the Government's programme
+for the session. When our Women's Parliament met at three o'clock on the
+afternoon of the thirteenth we knew that the Government meant to do
+nothing for women during the session ahead.
+
+I presided over the women's meeting, which was marked with a fervency
+and a determination of spirit at that time altogether unprecedented. A
+resolution expressing indignation that woman suffrage should have been
+omitted from the King's speech, and calling upon the House of Commons to
+give immediate facilities to such a measure, was moved and carried. A
+motion to send the resolution from the hall to the Prime Minister was
+also carried. The slogan, "Rise up, women," was cried from the platform,
+the answering shout coming back as from one woman, "Now!" With copies of
+the resolution in their hands, the chosen deputation hurried forth into
+the February dusk, ready for Parliament or prison, as the fates decreed.
+
+Fate did not leave them very long in doubt. The Government, it
+appeared, had decided that not again should their sacred halls of
+Parliament be desecrated by women asking for the vote, and orders had
+been given that would henceforth prevent women from reaching even the
+outer precincts of the House of Commons. So when our deputation of women
+arrived in the neighbourhood of Westminster Abbey they found themselves
+opposed by a solid line of police, who, at a sharp order from their
+chief, began to stride through and through the ranks of the procession,
+trying to turn the women back. Bravely the women rallied and pressed
+forward a little farther. Suddenly a body of mounted police came riding
+up at a smart trot, and for the next five hours or more, a struggle,
+quite indescribable for brutality and ruthlessness, went on.
+
+The horsemen rode directly into the procession, scattering the women
+right and left. But still the women would not turn back. Again and again
+they returned, only to fly again and again from the merciless hoofs.
+Some of the women left the streets for the pavements, but even there the
+horsemen pursued them, pressing them so close to walls and railings that
+they were obliged to retreat temporarily to avoid being crushed. Other
+strategists took refuge in doorways, but they were dragged out by the
+foot police and were thrown directly in front of the horses. Still the
+women fought to reach the House of Commons with their resolution. They
+fought until their clothes were torn, their bodies bruised, and the last
+ounce of their strength exhausted. Fifteen of them did actually fight
+their way through those hundreds on hundreds of police, foot and
+mounted, as far as the Strangers' Lobby of the House. Here they
+attempted to hold a meeting, and were arrested. Outside, many more women
+were taken into custody. It was ten o'clock before the last arrest was
+made, and the square cleared of the crowds. After that the mounted men
+continued to guard the approaches to the House of Commons until the
+House rose at midnight.
+
+The next morning fifty-seven women and two men were arraigned, two and
+three at a time, in Westminster police court. Christabel Pankhurst was
+the first to be placed in the dock. She tried to explain to the
+magistrate that the deputation of the day before was a perfectly
+peaceful attempt to present a resolution, which, sooner or later, would
+be presented and acted upon. She assured him that the deputation was but
+the beginning of a campaign that would not cease until the Government
+yielded to the women's demand. "There can be no going back for us," she
+declared, "and more will happen if we do not get justice."
+
+The magistrate, Mr. Curtis Bennett, who was destined later to try women
+for that "more," rebuked my daughter sternly, telling her that the
+Government had nothing to do with causing the disorders of the day
+before, that the women were entirely responsible for what had occurred,
+and finally, that these disgraceful scenes in the street must
+cease--just as King Canute told the ocean that it must roll out instead
+of in. "The scenes can be stopped in only one way," replied the
+prisoner. His sole reply to that was, "Twenty shillings or fourteen
+days," Christabel chose the prison sentence, and so did all the other
+prisoners. Mrs. Despard, who headed the deputation, and Sylvia
+Pankhurst, who was with her, were given three weeks in prison.
+
+Of course the raid, as it was called, gave the Women's Social and
+Political Union an enormous amount of publicity, on the whole,
+favourable publicity. The newspapers were almost unanimous in condemning
+the Government for sending mounted troops out against unarmed women.
+Angry questions were asked in Parliament, and our ranks once more
+increased in size and ardour. The old-fashioned suffragists, men as well
+as women, cried out that we had alienated all our friends in Parliament;
+but this proved to be untrue. Indeed, it was found that a Liberal
+member, Mr. Dickinson, had won the first place in the ballot, and had
+announced that he intended to use it to introduce a women's suffrage
+bill. More than this, the prime minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman,
+promised to give the bill his support. For a time, a very short time, it
+is true, we felt that the hour of our freedom might be at hand, that our
+prisoners had perhaps already won us our precious symbol--the vote.
+
+Soon, however, a number of professed suffragists in the House began to
+complain that Mr. Dickinson's bill, practically the original bill, was
+not "democratic" enough, that it would enfranchise only the women of the
+upper classes--to which, by the way, most of them belonged. That this
+was not true had been proved again and again from the municipal
+registers, which showed a majority of working women's names as qualified
+householders. The contention was but a shallow excuse, and we knew it.
+Therefore we were not surprised when Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman
+departed from his pledge of support, and allowed the bill to be talked
+out.
+
+Following this event, the second Women's Parliament assembled, on the
+afternoon of March 20, 1907. As before, we adopted a resolution calling
+upon the Government to introduce an official suffrage measure, and again
+we voted to send the resolution from the hall to the Prime Minister.
+Lady Harberton was chosen to lead the deputation, and instantly hundreds
+of women sprang up and volunteered to accompany her. This time the
+police met the women at the door of the hall, and another useless,
+disgraceful scene of barbarous, brute-force opposition took place.
+Something like one thousand police had been sent out to guard the House
+of Commons from the peaceful invasion of a few hundred women. All
+afternoon and evening we kept Caxton Hall open, the women returning
+every now and again, singly and in small groups, to have their bruises
+bathed, or their torn clothing repaired. As night fell the crowds in the
+street grew denser, and the struggle between the women and the police
+became more desperate. Lady Harberton, we heard, had succeeded in
+reaching the entrance to the House of Commons, nay, had actually managed
+to press past the sentries into the lobby, but her resolution had not
+been presented to the Prime Minister. She and many others were arrested
+before the police at last succeeded in clearing the streets, and the
+dreadful affair was over.
+
+The next day, in Westminster police court, the magistrate meted out
+sentences varying from twenty shillings or fourteen days to forty
+shillings or one month's imprisonment. Two of the women, Miss Woodlock
+and Mrs. Chatterton, who had left Holloway only a week before, were, as
+"old offenders," given thirty days without the option of a fine. Another
+woman, Mary Leigh, was given thirty days because she offended the
+magistrate's dignity by hanging a "Votes for Women" banner over the edge
+of the dock. Those of my readers who are unable to connect the word
+"militancy" with anything milder than arson are invited to reflect that
+within the first two months of the year 1907 the English Government sent
+to prison one hundred and thirty women whose "militancy" consisted
+merely of trying to carry a resolution from a hall to the Prime Minister
+in the House of Commons. Our crime was called obstructing the police. It
+will be seen that it was the police who did the obstructing.
+
+It may be asked why neither of these deputations was led by me
+personally. The reason was that I was needed in another capacity, that
+of leader and supervisor of the suffrage forces in the field to defeat
+Government candidates at by-elections. On the night of the second
+"riot," while our women were still struggling in the streets, I left
+London for Hexham in Northumberland, where by our work the majority of
+the Liberal candidate was reduced by a thousand votes. Seven more
+by-elections followed in rapid succession.
+
+Our by-election work was such a new thing in English politics that we
+attracted an enormous amount of attention wherever we went. It was our
+custom to begin work the very hour we entered a town. If, on our way
+from the station to the hotel, we encountered a group of men, say, in
+the market-place, we either stopped and held a meeting on the spot, or
+else we stayed long enough to tell them when and where our meetings were
+to be held, and to urge them to attend. The usual first step, after
+securing lodgings, was to hire a vacant shop, fill the windows with
+suffrage literature, and fling out our purple, green, and white flag.
+Meanwhile, some of us were busy hiring the best available hall. If we
+got possession of the battle-ground before the men, we sometimes
+"cornered" all the good halls and left the candidate nothing but
+schoolhouses for his indoor meetings. Truth to tell, our meetings were
+so much more popular than theirs that we really needed the larger halls.
+Often, a candidate with the Suffragettes for rivals spoke to almost
+empty benches. The crowds were away listening to the women.
+
+Naturally, this greatly displeased the politicians, and it scandalised
+many of the old-fashioned Liberal partisans. In one place, I think it
+was Colne Valley in Yorkshire, an amusing instance of masculine
+hostility occurred. We had arrived on a day when both Conservative and
+Liberal committees were choosing their candidates, and we thought it a
+good opportunity to hold a series of outdoor meetings. We tried to get
+a lorry for a rostrum, but the only man in town who had these big vans
+to let disapproved of Suffragettes so violently that he wouldn't let us
+have one. So we borrowed a chair from a woman shopkeeper, and went at
+it. Soon we had a large crowd and an interested audience. We also got
+the attention of a number of small boys with pea-shooters, and had to
+make our speeches under a blistering fire of dried peas.
+
+While I was speaking the fire ceased, to my relief--for dried peas
+sting. I continued my speech with renewed vigor, only to have one of my
+best points spoiled by roars of laughter from the crowd. I finished
+somehow, and sat down; and then it was explained to me that the
+pea-shooters had been financed by one of the prominent Liberals of the
+town, another man who disapproved of our policy of opposing the
+Government. As soon as the ammunition gave out this man furnished the
+boys with a choice supply of rotten oranges. These were not so easily
+handled, it appeared, for the very first one went wild, and struck the
+chivalrous gentleman violently in the neck. This it was that had caused
+the laughter, and stopped the attack on the women.
+
+We met with some pretty rough horse-play, and even with some brutality,
+in several by-elections, but on the whole we found the men ready, and
+the women more than ready, to listen to us. We tamed and educated a
+public that had always been used to violence at elections. We even tamed
+the boys, who came to the meetings on purpose to skylark. When we were
+in Rutlandshire that spring three schoolboys came to see me and told me,
+shyly, that they were interested in suffrage. They had had a debate on
+the subject at their school, and although the decision had been for the
+other side, all the boys wanted to know more about it. Wouldn't I please
+have a meeting especially for them? Of course I consented, and I found
+my boy audience quite delightful. Indeed, I hope they liked me half as
+well as I did them.
+
+All through the spring our by-election work continued with amazing
+success, although our part in the Government losses was rarely admitted
+by the politicians. The voters knew, however. At an election in Suffolk,
+where we helped to double the Unionist vote, the successful candidate,
+speaking to the crowd from his hotel window, said, "What has been the
+cause of the great and glorious victory?" Instantly the crowd roared,
+"Votes for Women!"--"Three cheers for the Suffragettes!" This was not at
+all what the successful candidate had intended, but he waved his hand
+graciously and said, "No doubt the ladies had something to do with it."
+
+The newspaper correspondents were not so reluctant to acknowledge our
+influence. Even when they condemned our policy, they were unsparing in
+their admiration for our energy, and the courage and ardour of our
+workers. Said the correspondent of the London _Tribune_, a Liberal paper
+hostile to our tactics: "Their staying power, judging them by the
+standards of men, is extraordinary. By taking afternoon as well as
+evening meetings, they have worked twice as hard as the men. They are
+up earlier, they retire just as late. Women against men, they are
+better speakers, more logical, better informed, better phrased, with a
+surer insight for the telling argument."
+
+After a summer spent in strengthening our forces, organising new
+branches, holding meetings--something like three thousand of these
+between May and October--invading meetings of Cabinet Ministers--we
+managed to do that about once every day--electioneering, and getting up
+huge demonstrations in various cities, we arrived at the end of the
+year. In the last months of the year, I directed several hotly contested
+by-elections, at one of which I met with one of the most serious
+misadventures of my life.
+
+This by-election was held in the division of Mid-Devon, a stronghold of
+Liberalism. In fact, since its creation in 1885, the seat has never been
+held by any except a Liberal member. The constituency is a large one,
+divided into eight districts. The population of the towns is a rough and
+boisterous one, and its devotion, blind and unreasoning, to the Liberal
+party has always reflected the rude spirit of the voters. A Unionist
+woman told me, shortly after my arrival, that my life would be unsafe if
+I dared openly to oppose the Liberal candidate. She had never dared, she
+assured me, to wear her party colours in public. However, I did
+speak--in our headquarters at Newton Abbott, the principal town of the
+division, at Hull, and at Bovey Tracey. We held meetings twice a day,
+calling upon the voters to "beat the Government in Mid-Devon, as a
+message that women must have votes next year." Although some of the
+meetings were turbulent, we were treated with much more consideration
+than either of the candidates, who, not infrequently, were howled down
+and put to flight. Often the air of their meetings was thick with
+decayed vegetables and dirty snowballs. We had some rather lively
+sessions, too. Once, at an outdoor meeting, some young roughs dragged
+our lorry round and round until it seemed that we must be upset, and
+several times the language hurled at us from the crowd was quite unfit
+for me to repeat. Still, we escaped actual violence until the day of the
+election, when it was announced that the Unionist candidate had won the
+seat by a majority of twelve hundred and eighty. We knew instantly that
+the deepest resentment of the Liberals would be aroused, but it did not
+occur to us that the resentment would be directed actively against us.
+
+After the declaration at the polls, my companion, Mrs. Martel, and I
+started to walk to our lodgings. Some of our friends stopped us, and
+drew our attention to the newly elected Unionist member of Parliament,
+who was being escorted from the polling place by a strong guard of
+police. We were warned that our safety demanded an immediate flight from
+the town. I laughingly assured our friends that I was never afraid to
+trust myself in a crowd, and we walked on. Suddenly we were confronted
+by a crowd of young men and boys, clay-cutters from the pits on the edge
+of town. These young men, who wore the red rosettes of the Liberal
+party, had just heard of their candidate's defeat, and they were mad
+with rage and humiliation. One of them pointed to us, crying: "They did
+it! Those women did it!" A yell went up from the crowd, and we were
+deluged with a shower of clay and rotten eggs. We were not especially
+frightened, but the eggs were unbearable, and to escape them we rushed
+into a little grocer's shop close at hand. The grocer's wife closed and
+bolted the door, but the poor grocer cried out that his place would be
+wrecked. I did not want that to happen, of course, so I asked them to
+let us out by the back door. They led us out the door, into a small back
+yard which led into a little lane, whence we expected to make our
+escape. But when we reached the yard we found that the rowdies,
+anticipating our move, had surged round the corner, and were waiting for
+us.
+
+They seized Mrs. Martel first, and began beating her over the head with
+their fists, but the brave wife of the shopkeeper, hearing the shouts
+and the oaths of the men, flung open the door and rushed to our rescue.
+Between us we managed to tear Mrs. Martel from her captors and get her
+into the house. I expected to get into the house, too, but as I reached
+the threshold a staggering blow fell on the back of my head, rough hands
+grasped the collar of my coat, and I was flung violently to the ground.
+Stunned, I must have lost consciousness for a moment, for my next
+sensation was of cold, wet mud seeping through my clothing. Sight
+returning to me, I perceived the men, silent now, but with a dreadful,
+lowering silence, closing in a ring around me. In the centre of the ring
+was an empty barrel, and the horrid thought occurred to me that they
+might intend putting me in it. A long time seemed to pass, while the
+ring of men slowly drew closer. I looked at them, in their drab clothes
+smeared with yellow pit-clay, and they appeared so underfed, so puny and
+sodden, that a poignant pity for them swept over me. "Poor souls," I
+thought, and then I said suddenly, "Are none of you _men_?" Then one of
+the youths darted toward me, and I knew that whatever was going to
+happen to me was about to begin.
+
+At that very moment came shouts, and a rush of police who had fought
+their way through hostile crowds to rescue us. Of course the mob turned
+tail and fled, and I was carried gently into the shop, which the police
+guarded for two hours, before it was deemed safe for us to leave in a
+closed motor-car. It was many months before either Mrs. Martel or I
+recovered from our injuries.
+
+The rowdies, foiled of their woman prey, went to the Conservative Club,
+smashed all the windows in the house, and kept the members besieged
+there through the night. The next morning the body of a man, frightfully
+bruised about the head, was found in the mill-race. Throughout all this
+disorder and probable crime, not a man was arrested. Contrast this, if
+you like, with the treatment given our women in London.
+
+The King opened Parliament in great state on January 29, 1908. Again his
+speech omitted all mention of woman suffrage, and again the W. S. P. U.
+issued a call for a Women's Parliament, for February 11th, 12th and
+13th. Before it was convened we heard that an excellent place in the
+ballot had been won by a friend of the movement, Mr. Stanger, who
+promised to introduce a suffrage bill, February 28th was the day fixed
+for the second reading, and we realised that strong pressure would have
+to be brought to bear to prevent the bill being wrecked, as the
+Dickinson bill had been the previous year. Therefore, on the first day
+of the Women's Parliament, almost every woman present volunteered for
+the deputation, which was to try to carry the resolution to the prime
+minister. Led by two well-known portrait painters, the deputation left
+Caxton Hall and proceeded in orderly ranks, four abreast, toward the
+House of Commons. The crowds in the streets were enormous, thousands of
+sympathisers coming out to help the women, thousands of police
+determined that the women should not be helped, and thousands of curious
+spectators. When the struggle was over, fifty women were locked up in
+police-court cells.
+
+The next morning, when the cases were tried, Mr. Muskett, who prosecuted
+for the Crown, and who was perhaps a little tired of telling the
+Suffragettes that these scenes in the streets must cease, and then
+seeing them go on exactly as if he had not spoken, made a very severe
+and terrifying address. He told the women that this time they would be
+subject to the usual maximum of two months' imprisonment, with the
+option of a fine of five pounds, but that, in case they ever offended
+again, the law had worse terrors in store for them. It was proposed to
+revive, for the benefit of the Suffragettes, an Act passed in the reign
+of Charles II, which dealt with "Tumultuous Petitions, either to the
+Crown or Parliament." This Act provided that no person should dare to go
+to the King or to Parliament "with any petition, complaint,
+remonstrance, declaration or other address" accompanied with a number of
+persons above twelve. A fine of one hundred pounds, or three months'
+imprisonment, might be imposed under this law. The magistrate then
+sentenced all but two of the women to be bound over for twelve months,
+or to serve six weeks in the second division. Two other women, "old
+offenders," were given one month in the third division, or lowest class.
+All the prisoners, except two who had very ill relatives at home, chose
+the prison sentence.
+
+The next day's session of the Women's Parliament was one of intense
+excitement, as the women reviewed the events of the previous day, the
+trials, and especially the threat to revive the obsolete Act of Charles
+II, an act _which was passed to obstruct the progress of the Liberal
+party, which came into existence under the Stuarts, and under the second
+Charles was fighting for its life_. It was an amazing thing that the
+political descendants of these men were proposing to revive the Act to
+obstruct the advance of the women's cause, fighting for its life under
+George V and his Liberal government. At least, it was evidence that the
+Government were baffled in their attempt to crush our movement.
+Christabel Pankhurst, presiding over the second session of the Women's
+Parliament, said: "At last it is realized that women are fighting for
+freedom, as their fathers fought. If they want twelve women, aye, and
+more than twelve, if a hundred women are wanted to be tried under that
+act and sent to prison for three months, they can be found."
+
+I was not present at this session, nor had I been present at the first
+one. I was working in a by-election at South Leeds, the last of several
+important by-elections in great industrial centres, where our success
+was unquestioned, except by the Liberal press. The elections had wound
+up with a great procession, and a meeting of 100,000 people on Hounslet
+Moor. The most wonderful enthusiasm marked that meeting. I shall never
+forget what splendid order the people kept, in spite of the fact that no
+police protection was given us; how the vast crowd parted to let our
+procession through; how the throngs of mill women kept up a chorus in
+broad Yorkshire: "Shall us win? Shall us have the vote? We shall!" No
+wonder the old people shook their beads, and declared that "there had
+never been owt like it."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+With those brave shouts in my ears, I hurried down to London for the
+concluding session of the parliament, for I had determined that I must
+be the first person to challenge the Government to carry out their
+threat to revive the old Act of Charles II. I made a long speech to the
+women that day, telling them something of my experiences of the past
+months, and how all that I had seen and heard throughout the country had
+only deepened my conviction of the necessity for women's votes. "I
+feel," I concluded, "that the time has come when I must act, and I wish
+to be one of those to carry our resolution to Parliament this afternoon.
+My experience in the country, and especially in South Leeds, has taught
+me things that Cabinet Ministers, who have not had that experience, do
+not know, and has made me feel that I must make one final attempt to see
+them, and to urge them to reconsider their position before some terrible
+disaster has occurred."
+
+Amid a good deal of excitement and emotion, we chose the requisite
+thirteen women, who were prepared to be arrested and tried under the
+Charles II "Tumultuous Petitions" Act. I had not entirely recovered from
+the attack made upon me at Mid-Devon, and my wrenched ankle was still
+too sensitive to make walking anything but a painful process. Seeing me
+begin almost at once to limp badly, Mrs. Drummond, with characteristic,
+blunt kindness, called to a man driving a dog-cart and asked him if he
+would drive me to the House of Commons. He readily agreed, and I mounted
+to the seat behind him, the other women forming in line behind the cart.
+We had not gone far when the police, who already surrounded us in great
+force, ordered me to dismount. Of course I obeyed and walked, or rather
+limped along with my companions. They would have supported me, but the
+police insisted that we should walk single-file. Presently I grew so
+faint from the pain of the ankle that I called to two of the women, who
+took hold of my arms and helped me on my way. This was our one act of
+disobedience to police orders. We moved with difficulty, for the crowd
+was of incredible size. All around, as far as eye could see, was the
+great moving, swaying, excited multitude, and surrounding us on all
+sides were regiments of uniformed police, foot and mounted. You might
+have supposed that instead of thirteen women, one of them lame, walking
+quietly along, the town was in the hands of an armed mob.
+
+We had progressed as far as the entrance to Parliament Square, when two
+stalwart policemen suddenly grasped my arms on either side and told me
+that I was under arrest. My two companions, because they refused to
+leave me, were also arrested, and a few minutes later Annie Kenney and
+five other women suffered arrest. That night we were released on bail,
+and the next morning we were arraigned in Westminster police court for
+trial under the Charles II Act. But, as it turned out, the authorities,
+embarrassed by our readiness to test the act, announced that they had
+changed their minds, and would continue, for the present, to treat us as
+common street brawlers.
+
+This was my first trial, and I listened, with a suspicion that my ears
+were playing tricks with my reason, to the most astonishing perjuries
+put forth by the prosecution. I heard that we had set forth from Caxton
+Hall with noisy shouts and songs, that we had resorted to the most
+riotous and vulgar behaviour, knocking off policemen's helmets,
+assaulting the officers right and left as we marched. Our testimony, and
+that of our witnesses, was ignored. When I tried to speak in my own
+defence, I was cut short rudely, and was told briefly that I and the
+others must choose between being bound over or going to prison, in the
+second division, for six weeks.
+
+I remember only vaguely the long, jolting ride across London to Holloway
+Prison. We stopped at Pentonville, the men's prison, to discharge
+several men prisoners, and I remember shuddering at the thought of our
+women, many of them little past girlhood, being haled to prison in the
+same van with criminal men. Arriving at the prison, we groped our way
+through dim corridors into the reception-ward, where we were lined up
+against the wall for a superficial medical examination. After that we
+were locked up in separate cells, unfurnished, except for low, wooden
+stools.
+
+It seemed an endless time before my cell door was opened by a wardress,
+who ordered me to follow her. I entered a room where another wardress
+sat at a table, ready to take an inventory of my effects. Obeying an
+order to undress, I took off my gown, then paused. "Take off
+everything," was the next order. "Everything?" I faltered. It seemed
+impossible that they expected me to strip. In fact, they did allow me to
+take off my last garments in the shelter of a bath-room. I shivered
+myself into some frightful underclothing, old and patched and stained,
+some coarse, brown woollen stockings with red stripes, and the hideous
+prison dress stamped all over with the broad arrow of disgrace. I fished
+a pair of shoes out of a big basket of shoes, old and mostly mismates. A
+pair of coarse but clean sheets, a towel, a mug of cold cocoa, and a
+thick slice of brown bread were given me, and I was conducted to my
+cell.
+
+My first sensations when the door was locked upon me were not altogether
+disagreeable. I was desperately weary, for I had been working hard,
+perhaps a little too hard, for several strenuous months. The excitement
+and fatigue of the previous day, and the indignation I had suffered
+throughout the trial, had combined to bring me to the point of
+exhaustion, and I was glad to throw myself on my hard prison bed and
+close my eyes. But soon the relief of being alone, and with nothing to
+do, passed from me. Holloway Prison is a very old place, and it has the
+disadvantages of old places which have never known enough air and
+sunshine. It reeks with the odours of generations of bad ventilation,
+and it contrives to be at once the stuffiest and the draughtiest
+building I have ever been in. Soon I found myself sickening for fresh
+air. My head began to ache. Sleep fled. I lay all night suffering with
+cold, gasping for air, aching with fatigue, and painfully wide awake.
+
+The next day I was fairly ill, but I said nothing about it. One does not
+expect to be comfortable in prison. As a matter of fact, one's mental
+suffering is so much greater than any common physical distress that the
+latter is almost forgotten. The English prison system is altogether
+mediaeval and outworn. In some of its details the system has improved
+since they began to send the Suffragettes to Holloway. I may say that
+we, by our public denunciation of the system, have forced these slight
+improvements. In 1907 the rules were excessively cruel. The poor
+prisoner, when she entered Holloway, dropped, as it were, into a tomb.
+No letters and no visitors were allowed for the first month of the
+sentence. Think of it--a whole month, more than four weeks, without
+sending or receiving a single word. One's nearest and dearest may have
+gone through dreadful suffering, may have been ill, may have died,
+meantime. One was given plenty of time to imagine all these things, for
+the prisoner was kept in solitary confinement in a narrow, dimly-lit
+cell, twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four. Solitary confinement is
+too terrible a punishment to inflict on any human being, no matter what
+his crime. Hardened criminals in the men's prisons, it is said, often
+beg for the lash instead. Picture what it must be to a woman who has
+committed some small offence, for most of the women who go to Holloway
+are small offenders, sitting alone, day after day, in the heavy silence
+of a cell--thinking of her children at home--thinking, thinking. Some
+women go mad. Many suffer from shattered nerves for a long period after
+release. It is impossible to believe that any woman ever emerged from
+such a horror less criminal than when she entered it.
+
+Two days of solitary confinement, broken each day by an hour of silent
+exercise in a bitterly cold courtyard, and I was ordered to the
+hospital. There I thought I should be a little more comfortable. The bed
+was better, the food a little better, and small comforts, such as warm
+water for washing, were allowed. I slept a little the first night. About
+midnight I awoke, and sat up in bed, listening. A woman in the cell next
+mine was moaning in long, sobbing breaths of mortal pain. She ceased for
+a few minutes, then moaned again, horribly. The truth flashed over me,
+turning me sick, as I realised that a life was coming into being, there
+in that frightful prison. A woman, imprisoned by men's laws, was giving
+a child to the world. A child born in a cell! I shall never forget that
+night, nor what I suffered with the birth-pangs of that woman, who, I
+found later, was simply waiting trial on a charge which was found to be
+baseless.
+
+The days passed very slowly, the nights more slowly still. Being in
+hospital, I was deprived of chapel, and also of work. Desperate, at last
+I begged the wardress for some sewing, and she kindly gave me a skirt of
+her own to hem, and later some coarse knitting to do. Prisoners were
+allowed a few books, mostly of the "Sunday-school" kind. One day I
+asked the chaplain if there were not some French or German books in the
+library, and he brought me a treasure, "_Autour de mon Jardin_," by
+Jules Janin. For a few days I was quite happy, reading my book and
+translating it on the absurd little slate they gave us in lieu of paper
+and pencil. That slate was, after all, a great comfort. I did all kinds
+of things with it. I kept a calendar, I wrote all the French poetry I
+could remember on it, I even recorded old school chorals and old English
+exercises. It helped wonderfully to pass the endless hours until my
+release. I even forgot the cold, which was the harder to bear because of
+the fur coat, which I knew was put away, ticketed with my name. I begged
+them for the coat, but they wouldn't let me have it.
+
+At last the time came when they gave me back all my things, and let me
+go free. At the door the Governor spoke to me, and asked me if I had any
+complaints to make. "Not of you," I replied, "nor of any of the
+wardresses. Only of this prison, and all of men's prisons. We shall raze
+them to the ground."
+
+Back in my comfortable home, surrounded by loving friends, I would have
+rested quietly for a few days, but there was a great meeting that night
+at Albert Hall, to mark the close of a week of self-denial to raise
+money for the year's campaign. Women had sold papers, flowers, toys,
+swept crossings, and sung in the streets for the cause. Many women, well
+known in the world of art and letters, did these things. I felt that I
+should be doing little if I merely attended the meeting. So I went. My
+release was not expected until the following morning, and no one thought
+of my appearing at the meeting. My chairman's seat was decorated with a
+large placard with the inscription, "Mrs. Pankhurst's Chair." After all
+the others were seated, the speakers, and hundreds of ex-prisoners. I
+walked quietly onto the stage, took the placard out of the chair and sat
+down. A great cry went up from the women as they sprang from their seats
+and stretched their hands toward me. It was some time before I could see
+them for my tears, or speak to them for the emotion that shook me like a
+storm.
+
+The next morning I, with the other released prisoners, drove off to
+Peckham, a constituency of London, where the W. S. P. U. members were
+fighting a vigorous by-election. In open brakes we paraded the streets,
+dressed in our prison clothes, or exact reproductions of them.
+Naturally, we attracted a great deal of attention and sympathy, and our
+daily meetings on Peckham Rye, as their common is known, drew enormous
+crowds. When polling day came our members were stationed at every
+polling booth, and many men as they came to the booths told us that they
+were, for the first time, voting "for the women," by which they meant
+against the Government. That night, amid great excitement, it was made
+known that the Liberal majority of 2,339 at the last general election
+had been turned into a Conservative majority of 2,494. Letters poured
+into the newspapers, declaring that the loss of this important Liberal
+seat was due almost entirely to the work of the Suffragettes, and many
+prominent Liberals called upon party leaders to start doing something
+for women before the next general election. The Liberal leaders, with
+the usual perspicacity of politicians, responded not at all. Instead
+they beheld with approval the rise to highest power the arch-enemy of
+the suffragists, Mr. Asquith.
+
+Mr. Asquith became prime minister about Easter time, 1908, on the
+resignation, on account of ill health, of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman.
+Mr. Asquith was chosen, not because of any remarkable record of
+statesmanship, nor yet because of great personal popularity--for he
+possessed neither--but simply because no better man seemed available
+just then. He was known as a clever, astute, and somewhat unscrupulous
+lawyer. He had filled several high offices to the satisfaction of his
+party, and under Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had been Chancellor of the
+Exchequer, a post which is generally regarded as a stepping-stone to the
+Premiership. The best thing the Liberal press found to say of the new
+Premier was that he was a "strong" man. Generally in politics this term
+is used to describe an obstinate man, and this we already knew Mr.
+Asquith to be. He was a bluntly outspoken opponent of woman suffrage,
+and it was sufficiently plain to us that no methods of education or
+persuasion would ever prove successful where he was concerned. Therefore
+the necessity of action on our part was greater than ever.
+
+Such an opportunity presented itself at once through changes that took
+place in the new Cabinet. According to English law, all new comers into
+the Cabinet are obliged to resign their seats in Parliament and offer
+themselves to their constituencies for re-election. Besides these
+vacancies there were several others, on account of death or elevations
+to the peerage. This made necessary a number of by-elections, and the
+Women's Social and Political Union once more went into the field against
+the Liberal candidates. I shall deal no further with these by-elections
+than is necessary to show the effect of our work on the Government, and
+its subsequent effect on our movement--which was to force us into more
+and more militancy. I shall leave it to the honest judgment of my
+readers to place where it ought rightly to be placed the responsibility
+for those first broken windows.
+
+We selected as our first candidate for defeat Mr. Winston Churchill, who
+was about to appeal to his constituency of North West Manchester to
+sanction his appointment as president of the Board of Trade. My daughter
+Christabel took charge of this election, and the work of herself and her
+forces was so successful that Mr. Churchill lost his seat by 420 votes.
+All the newspapers acknowledged that it was the Suffragettes who had
+defeated Mr. Churchill, and one Liberal newspaper, the London _Daily
+News_, called upon the party to put a stop to an intolerable state of
+affairs by granting the women's demand for votes.
+
+Another seat was immediately secured for Mr. Churchill, that of Dundee,
+then strongly--in the merely party sense--Liberal, and therefore safe.
+Nevertheless, we determined to fight Mr. Churchill there, to defeat him
+if possible, and to bring down the Liberal majority in any case. I took
+personal charge of the campaign, holding a very large meeting in
+Kinnaird Hall on the evening before Mr. Churchill's arrival. Although he
+felt absolutely sure of election in this Scottish constituency, Mr.
+Churchill dreaded the effect of our presence on the Liberal women. The
+second meeting he addressed in Dundee was held for women only, and
+instead of asking for support of the various measures actually on the
+government's programme, the politician's usual method, he talked about
+the certainty of securing, within a short time, the Parliamentary
+franchise for women. "No one," he declared, "can be blind to the fact
+that at the next general election woman suffrage will be a real,
+practical issue; and the next Parliament, I think, ought to see the
+gratification of the women's claims. I do not exclude the possibility of
+the suffrage being dealt with in this Parliament." Mr. Churchill
+earnestly reiterated his claim to be considered a true friend of the
+women's cause; but when pressed for a pledge that his Government would
+take action, he urged his inability to speak for his colleagues.
+
+This specious promise, or rather, prophecy of woman suffrage at some
+indefinite time, won over a great many of the Liberal women, who
+forthwith went staunchly to work for Mr. Churchill's election. Dundee
+has a large population of extremely poor people, workers in the jute
+mills and the marmalade factories. Some concessions in the matter of the
+sugar tax, timely made, and the announcement that the new Government
+meant to establish old age pensions, created an immense wave of Liberal
+enthusiasm that swept Mr. Churchill into office in spite of our work,
+which was untiring. We held something like two hundred meetings, and on
+election eve, five huge demonstrations--four of them in the open air and
+one which filled a large drill hall. Polling day, May 9th, was very
+exciting. For every Suffragette at the polling-booths there were half a
+dozen Liberal men and women, handing out bills with such legends as
+"Vote for Churchill, and never mind the women," and "Put Churchill in
+and keep the women out." Yet for all their efforts, Mr. Churchill polled
+2200 votes less than his Liberal predecessor had polled at the general
+election.
+
+In the first seven by-elections following Mr. Asquith's elevation to the
+premiership, we succeeded in pulling down the Liberal vote by 6663. Then
+something happened to check our progress. Mr. Asquith received a
+deputation of Liberal members of Parliament, who urged him to allow the
+Stanger suffrage bill, which had passed its second reading by a large
+majority, to be carried into law. Mr. Asquith replied that he himself
+did not wish to see women enfranchised, and that it would not be
+possible for the Government to give the required facilities to Mr.
+Stanger's bill. He added that he was fully alive to the many defects of
+the electoral system, and that the Government intended, "barring
+accidents," to bring in a reform bill before the close of that
+Parliament. Woman suffrage would have no place in it, but it would be so
+worded that a woman-suffrage amendment might be added if any member
+chose to move one. In that case, said Mr. Asquith, he should not
+consider it the duty of the Government to oppose the amendment if it
+were approved by a majority of the House of Commons--_provided_ that the
+amendment was on democratic lines, and that it had back of it the
+support, the strong and undoubted support, of the women of the country
+as well as the present electorate.
+
+One would not suppose that such an evasive utterance as this would be
+regarded in any quarter as a promise that woman suffrage would be given
+any real chances of success under the Asquith Government. That it was,
+by many, taken quite seriously is but another proof of the gullibility
+of the party-blinded public. The Liberal press lauded Mr. Asquith's
+"promise," and called for a truce of militancy in order that the
+Government might have every opportunity to act. Said the _Star_, in a
+leader typical of many others: "The meaning of Mr. Asquith's pledge is
+plain. Woman's suffrage will be passed through the House of Commons
+before the present Government goes to the country."
+
+As for the women's Liberal Associations, they were quite delirious with
+joy. In a conference called for the purpose of passing resolutions of
+gratitude, Lady Carlisle said: "This is a glorious day of rejoicing. Our
+great Prime Minister, all honour to him, has opened a way to us by which
+we can enter into that inheritance from which we have been too long
+debarred."
+
+At the two following by-elections, the last of the series, enormous
+posters were exhibited, "Premier's Great Reform Bill: Votes for Women."
+We tried to tell the electors that the pledge was false on the face of
+it; that the specious proviso that the amendment be "democratic" left no
+doubt that the Government would cause the rejection of any practical
+amendment that might be moved. Our words fell on deaf ears, and the
+Liberal majorities soared.
+
+Just a week later Mr. Asquith was questioned in the House of Commons by
+a slightly alarmed anti-suffragist member. The member asked Mr. Asquith
+whether he considered himself pledged to introduce the reform hill
+during that Parliament, whether he meant to allow such a bill to carry a
+woman-suffrage amendment, if such were moved, and whether, in that case,
+the suffrage amendment would become part of the Government policy.
+Evasive as ever, the Prime Minister, after some sparring, replied, "My
+honourable friend has asked me a question with regard to a remote and
+speculative future." Thus was our interpretation of Mr. Asquith's
+"promise" justified from his own lips. Yet the Liberal women still clung
+to the hope of Government action, and the Liberal press pretended to
+cling to it. As for the Women's Social and Political Union, we prepared
+for more work. We had to strike out along a new line, since it was
+evident that the Government could, for a time at least, neutralise our
+by-election work by more false promises. Consistent with our policy, of
+never going further than the Government compelled us to go, we made our
+first action a perfectly peaceable one.
+
+On the day when the Stanger bill had reached its second reading in the
+House, and several days after I had gone to Holloway for the first time,
+Mr. Herbert Gladstone, the Home Secretary, made a speech which greatly
+interested the Suffragettes. He professed himself a suffragist, and
+declared that he intended to vote for the bill. Nevertheless, he was
+confident that it could not pass, because of the division in the
+Cabinet, and because it had no political party united either for or
+against it. Woman suffrage, said Mr. Gladstone, must advance to victory
+through all the stages that are required for great reforms to mature.
+First academic discussion, then effective action, was the history of
+men's suffrage; it must be the same with women's suffrage. "Men,"
+declared Mr. Gladstone, "have learned this lesson and know the necessity
+for demonstrating the greatness of their movement, and for establishing
+that _force majeure_ which actuates and arms a Government for effective
+work. That is the task before the supporters of this great movement.
+Looking back at the great political crises in the thirties, the sixties
+and the eighties, it will be found that the people did not go about in
+small crowds, nor were they content with enthusiastic meetings in large
+halls; they assembled in their tens of thousands all over the country.
+
+"Of course," added Mr. Gladstone, "it is not to be expected that women
+can assemble in such masses, but power belongs to masses, and through
+this power a Government can be influenced into more effective action
+than a Government will be likely to take under present conditions."
+
+The Women's Social and Political Union determined to answer this
+challenge. If assembling in great masses was all that was necessary to
+convince the Government that woman suffrage had passed the academic
+stage and now demanded political action, we thought we could undertake
+to satisfy the most skeptical member of the Cabinet. We knew that we
+could organise a demonstration that would out-rival any of the great
+franchise demonstrations held by men in the thirties, sixties, and
+eighties. The largest number of people ever gathered in Hyde Park was
+said to have approximated 72,000. We determined to organise a Hyde Park
+demonstration of at least 250,000 people. Sunday, June 21, 1908, was
+fixed for the date of this demonstration, and for many months we worked
+to make it a day notable in the history of the movement. Our example was
+emulated by the non-militant suffragists, who organised a fine
+procession of their own, about a week before our demonstration. Thirteen
+thousand women, it was said, marched in that procession.
+
+On our demonstration we spent, for advertising alone, over a thousand
+pounds, or five thousand dollars. We covered the hoardings of London and
+of all the principal provincial cities with great posters bearing
+portraits of the women who were to preside at the twenty platforms from
+which speeches were to be made; a map of London, showing the routes by
+which the seven processions were to advance, and a plan of the Hyde Park
+meeting-place were also shown. London, of course, was thoroughly
+organised. For weeks a small army of women was busy chalking
+announcements on sidewalks, distributing handbills, canvassing from
+house to house, advertising the demonstration by posters and sandwich
+boards carried through the streets. We invited everybody to be present,
+including both Houses of Parliament. A few days before the demonstration
+Mrs. Drummond and a number of other women hired and decorated a launch
+and sailed up the Thames to the Houses of Parliament, arriving at the
+hour when members entertain their women friends at tea on the terrace.
+Everyone left the tables and crowded to the water's edge as the boat
+stopped, and Mrs. Drummond's strong, clear voice pealed out her
+invitation to the Cabinet and the members of Parliament to join the
+women's demonstration in Hyde Park. "Come to the park on Sunday," she
+cried. "You shall have police protection, and there will be no arrests,
+we promise you." An alarmed someone telephoned for the police boats, but
+as they appeared, the women's boat steamed away.
+
+What a day was Sunday, June 21st--clear, radiant, filled with golden
+sunshine! As I advanced, leading, with the venerable Mrs.
+Wolstenholm-Elmy, the first of the seven processions, it seemed to me
+that all London had turned out to witness our demonstration. And a
+goodly part of London followed the processions. When I mounted my
+platform in Hyde Park, and surveyed the mighty throngs that waited there
+and the endless crowds that were still pouring into the park from all
+directions, I was filled with amazement not unmixed with awe. Never had
+I imagined that so many people could be gathered together to share in a
+political demonstration. It was a gay and beautiful as well as an
+awe-inspiring spectacle, for the white gowns and flower-trimmed hats of
+the women, against the background of ancient trees, gave the park the
+appearance of a vast garden in full bloom.
+
+The bugles sounded, and the speakers at each of the twenty platforms
+began their addresses, which could not have been heard by more than half
+or a third of the vast audience. Notwithstanding this, they remained to
+the end. At five o'clock the bugles sounded again, the speaking ceased,
+and the resolution calling upon the Government to bring in an official
+woman-suffrage bill without delay was carried at every platform, often
+without a dissenting vote. Then, with a three-times-repeated cry of
+"Votes for Women!" from the assembled multitude, the great meeting
+dispersed.
+
+The London _Times_ said next day: "Its organisers had counted on an
+audience of 250,000. That expectation was certainly fulfilled, and
+probably it was doubled, and it would be difficult to contradict any one
+who asserted that it was trebled. Like the distances and the number of
+the stars, the facts were beyond the threshold of perception."
+
+The _Daily Express_ said: "It is probable that so many people never
+before stood in one square mass anywhere in England. Men who saw the
+great Gladstone meeting years ago said that compared with yesterday's
+multitude it was as nothing."
+
+We felt that we had answered the challenge in Mr. Gladstone's
+declaration that "power belongs to the masses," and that through this
+power the Government could be influenced; so it was with real hope that
+we despatched a copy of the resolution to the Prime Minister, asking him
+what answer the Government would make to that unparalleled gathering of
+men and women. Mr. Asquith replied formally that he had nothing to add
+to his previous statement--that the Government intended, at some
+indefinite time, to bring in a general reform bill which _might_ be
+amended to include woman suffrage. Our wonderful demonstration, it
+appeared, had made no impression whatever upon him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Now we had reached a point where we had to choose between two
+alternatives. We had exhausted argument. Therefore either we had to give
+up our agitation altogether, as the suffragists of the eighties
+virtually had done, or else we must act, and go on acting, until the
+selfishness and the obstinacy of the Government was broken down, or the
+Government themselves destroyed. Until forced to do so, the Government,
+we perceived, would never give women the vote.
+
+We realised the truth of John Bright's words, spoken while the reform
+bill of 1867 was being agitated. Parliament, John Bright then declared,
+had never been hearty for any reform. The Reform Act of 1832 had been
+wrested by force from the Government of that day, and now before
+another, he said, could be carried, the agitators would have to fill the
+streets with people from Charing Cross to Westminster Abbey. Acting on
+John Bright's advice, we issued a call to the public to join us in
+holding a huge demonstration, on June 30th outside the House of Commons.
+We wanted to be sure that the Government saw as well as read of our
+immense following. A public proclamation from the Commissioner of
+Police, warning the public not to assemble in Parliament Square and
+declaring that the approaches to the Houses of Parliament must be kept
+open, was at once issued.
+
+We persisted in announcing that the demonstration would take place, and
+I wrote a letter to Mr. Asquith telling him that a deputation would wait
+upon him at half-past four on the afternoon of June 30th. We held the
+usual Women's Parliament in Caxton Hall, after which Mrs. Pethick
+Lawrence, eleven other women, and myself, set forth. We met with no
+opposition from the police, but marched through cheering crowds of
+spectators to the Strangers' Entrance to the House of Commons. Here we
+were met by a large group of uniformed men commanded by Inspector
+Scantlebury, of the police. The inspector, whom I knew personally,
+stepped forward and demanded officially, "Are you Mrs. Pankhurst, and is
+this your deputation?"
+
+"Yes," I replied.
+
+"My orders are to exclude you from the House of Commons."
+
+"Has Mr. Asquith received my letter?" I asked.
+
+For answer the inspector drew my letter from his pocket and handed it to
+me.
+
+"Did Mr. Asquith return no message, no kind of reply?" I inquired.
+
+"No," replied the inspector.
+
+We turned and walked back to Caxton Hall, to tell the waiting audience
+what had occurred. We resolved that there was nothing to do but wait
+patiently until evening, and see how well the public would respond to
+our call to meet in Parliament Square. Already we knew that the streets
+were filled with people, and early as it was the crowds were increasing
+rapidly. At eight we went out in groups from Caxton Hall, to find
+Parliament Square packed with a throng, estimated next day at least
+100,000. From the steps of public buildings, from stone copings, from
+the iron railings of the Palace Yard, to which they clung precariously,
+our women made speeches until the police pulled them down and flung them
+into the moving, swaying, excited crowds. Some of the women were
+arrested, others were merely ordered to move on. Mingled cheers and
+jeers rose from the spectators. Some of the men were roughs who had come
+out to amuse themselves. Others were genuinely sympathetic, and tried
+valiantly to help us to reach the House of Commons. Again and again the
+police lines were broken, and it was only as the result of repeated
+charges by mounted police that the people's attacks were repelled. Many
+members of Parliament, including Mr. Lloyd-George, Mr. Winston
+Churchill, and Mr. Herbert Gladstone, came out to witness the struggle,
+which lasted until midnight and resulted in the arrest of twenty-nine
+women. Two of these women were arrested after they had each thrown a
+stone through a window of Mr. Asquith's official residence in Downing
+Street, the value of the windows being about $2.40.
+
+This was the first window-breaking in our history. Mrs. Mary Leigh and
+Miss Edith New, who had thrown the stones, sent word to me from the
+police court that, having acted without orders, they would not resent
+repudiation from headquarters. Far from repudiating them, I went at once
+to see them in their cells, and assured them of my approval of their
+act. The smashing of windows is a time-honoured method of showing
+displeasure in a political situation. As one of the newspapers,
+commenting on the affair, truly said, "When the King and Queen dine at
+Apsley on the 13th inst. they will be entertained in rooms the windows
+of which the Duke of Wellington was obliged to protect with iron
+shutters from the fury of his political opponents."
+
+In Winchester a few years ago, to give but one instance, a great riot
+took place as a protest against the removal of a historic gun from one
+part of the town to another. In the course of this riot windows were
+broken and other property of various kinds was destroyed, very serious
+damage being done. No punishment was administered in respect of this
+riot and the authorities, bowing to public opinion thus riotously
+expressed, restored the gun to its original situation.
+
+Window-breaking, when Englishmen do it, is regarded as honest expression
+of political opinion. Window-breaking, when Englishwomen do it, is
+treated as a crime. In sentencing Mrs. Leigh and Miss New to two months
+in the first division, the magistrate used very severe language, and
+declared that such a thing must never happen again. Of course the women
+assured him that it would happen again. Said Mrs. Leigh: "We have no
+other course but to rebel against oppression, and if necessary to resort
+to stronger measures. This fight is going on."
+
+The summer of 1908 is remembered as one of the most oppressively hot
+seasons the country had known for years. Our prisoners in Holloway
+suffered intensely, some being made desperately ill from the heat, the
+bad air, and the miserable food. We who spent the summer campaigning
+suffered also, but in less degree. It was a tremendous relief when the
+cool days of autumn set in, and it was with renewed vigour that we
+prepared for the opening day of Parliament, which was October 12th.
+Again we resolved to send a deputation to the Prime Minister, and again
+we invited the general public to take part in the demonstration. We had
+printed thousands of little handbills bearing this inscription: "Men and
+Women, Help the Suffragettes to Rush the House of Commons, on Tuesday
+Evening, October 13th, at 7:30."
+
+On Sunday, October 11th, we held a large meeting in Trafalgar Square, my
+daughter Christabel, Mrs. Drummond and I speaking from the plinth of the
+Nelson monument. Mr. Lloyd-George, as we afterward learned, was a member
+of the audience. The police were there, taking ample notes of our
+speeches. We had not failed to notice that they were watching us daily,
+dogging our footsteps, and showing in numerous ways that they were under
+orders to keep track of all our movements. The climax came at noon on
+October 12th, when Christabel, Mrs. Drummond and I were each served with
+an imposing legal document which read, "Information has been laid this
+day by the Commissioner of Police that you, in the month of October, in
+the year 1908, were guilty of conduct likely to provoke a breach of the
+peace by initiating and causing to be initiated, by publishing and
+causing to be published, a certain handbill, calling upon and inciting
+the public to do a certain wrongful and illegal act, viz., to rush the
+House of Commons at 7:30 P.M. on October 13th inst."
+
+[Illustration: MRS. PANKHURST AND CHRISTABEL HIDING FROM THE POLICE ON
+THE ROOF GARDEN AT CLEMENTS INN
+
+_October, 1908_]
+
+The last paragraph was a summons to appear at Bow Street police station
+that same afternoon at three o'clock. We did not go to Bow Street police
+station. We went instead to a crowded "At Home" at Queen's Hall, where
+it can be imagined that our news created great excitement. The place was
+surrounded by constables, and the police reporters were on hand to take
+stenographic reports of everything that was said from the platform. Once
+an excited cry was raised that a police inspector was coming in to
+arrest us. But the officer merely brought a message that the summons had
+been adjourned until the following morning.
+
+It did not suit our convenience to obey the adjourned summons quite so
+early, so I wrote a polite note to the police, saying that we would be
+in our headquarters, No. 4 Clements Inn, the next evening at six
+o'clock, and would then be at his disposal. Warrants for our arrests
+were quickly issued, and Inspector Jarvis was instructed to execute them
+at once. This he found impossible to do, for Mrs. Drummond was spending
+her last day of liberty on private business, while my daughter and I had
+retreated to another part of Clements Inn, which is a big, rambling
+building. There, in the roof-garden of the Pethick Lawrence's private
+flat, we remained all day, busy, under the soft blue of the autumn sky,
+with our work and our preparations for a long absence. At six we walked
+downstairs, dressed for the street. Mrs. Drummond arrived promptly, the
+waiting officers read the warrants, and we all proceeded to Bow Street
+in cabs. It was too late for the trial to be held. We asked for bail,
+but the authorities had no mind to allow us to take part in the "rush"
+which we had incited, so we were obliged to spend the night in the
+police station. All night I lay awake, thinking of the scenes which were
+going on in the streets.
+
+The next morning, in a courtroom crowded to its utmost capacity, my
+daughter rose to conduct her first case at law. She had earned the right
+to an LL.B. after her name, but as women are not permitted to practise
+law in England, she had never appeared at the bar in any capacity except
+that of defendant. Now she proposed to combine the two roles of
+defendant and lawyer, and conduct the case for the three of us. She
+began by asking the magistrate not to try the case in that court, but to
+send it for trial before a judge and jury. We had long desired to take
+the Suffragettes' cases before bodies of private citizens, because we
+had every reason to suspect that the police-court officials acted under
+the direct commands of the very persons against whom our agitation was
+directed. Jury trial was denied us; but after the preliminary
+examination was over the magistrate, Mr. Curtis Bennett, allowed a
+week's adjournment for preparation of the case.
+
+On October 21st the trial was resumed, with the courtroom as full as
+before and the press table even more crowded, for it had been widely
+published that we had actually subpoenaed two members of the
+Government, who had witnessed the scenes on the night of October 13th.
+The first witness to enter the box was Mr. Lloyd-George. Christabel
+examined him at some length as to the meaning and merits of the word
+rush, and succeeded in making him very uncomfortable--and the charge
+against ourselves look very flimsy. She then questioned him about the
+speeches he had heard at Trafalgar Square, and as to whether there had
+been any suggestion that property be destroyed or personal violence
+used. He admitted that the speeches were temperate and the crowds
+orderly. Then Christabel suddenly asked, "There were no words used so
+likely to incite to violence as the advice you gave at Swansea, that the
+women should be ruthlessly flung out of your meeting?" Mr. Lloyd-George
+looked black, and answered nothing. The magistrate hastened to the
+protection of Mr. Lloyd-George. "This is quite irrelevant," he said.
+"That was a private meeting." It was a public meeting, and Christabel
+said so. "It was a private meeting _in a sense_," insisted the
+magistrate.
+
+Mr. Lloyd-George assumed an air of pompous indignation when Christabel
+asked him, "Have we not received encouragement from you, and if not from
+you from your colleagues, to take action of this kind?" Mr. Lloyd-George
+rolled his eyes upward as he replied, "I should be very much surprised
+to hear that, Miss Pankhurst."
+
+"Is it not a fact," asked Christabel, "that you yourself have set us an
+example of revolt?" "I never incited a crowd to violence," exclaimed
+the witness. "Not in the Welsh graveyard case?" she asked. "No!" he
+cried angrily. "You did not tell them to break down a wall and disinter
+a body?" pursued Christabel. He could not deny this but, "I gave advice
+which was found by the Court of Appeal to be sound legal advice," he
+snapped, and turned his back as far as he could in the narrow
+witness-box.
+
+Mr. Herbert Gladstone had asked to be allowed to testify early, as he
+was being detained from important public duties. Christabel asked to
+question one witness before Mr. Gladstone entered the box. The witness
+was Miss Georgiana Brackenbury, who had recently suffered six weeks'
+imprisonment for the cause, and had since met and had a talk with Mr.
+Horace Smith, the magistrate, who had made to her a most important and
+damaging admission of the government's interference in suffragists'
+trials. Christabel asked her one question. "Did Mr. Horace Smith tell
+you in sentencing you that he was doing what he had been told to do?"
+"You must not put that question!" exclaimed the magistrate. But the
+witness had already answered "Yes." There was an excited stir in the
+courtroom. It had been recorded under oath that a magistrate had
+admitted that Suffragettes were being sentenced not by himself,
+according to the evidence and according to law, but by the Government,
+for no one could possibly doubt where Mr. Horace Smith's orders came
+from.
+
+Mr. Gladstone, plump, bald, and ruddy, in no way resembles his
+illustrious father. He entered the witness-box smiling and confident,
+but his complacence vanished when Christabel asked him outright if the
+Government had not ordered the Commissioner of Police to take this
+action against us. Of course the magistrate intervened, and Mr.
+Gladstone did not answer the question. Christabel tried again. "Did you
+instruct Mr. Horace Smith to decide against Miss Brackenbury, and to
+send her to prison for six weeks?" That too was objected to, as were all
+questions on the subject.
+
+All through the examination the magistrate constantly intervened to save
+the Cabinet Minister from embarrassment, but Christabel finally
+succeeded in making Mr. Gladstone admit, point by point, that he had
+said that women could never get the vote because they could not fight
+for it as men had fought.
+
+A large number of witnesses testified to the orderly nature of the
+demonstration on the 13th, and then Christabel rose to plead. She began
+by declaring that these proceedings had been taken, as the legal saying
+is, "in malice and vexation," in order to lame a political enemy. She
+declared that, under the law, the charge which might properly be brought
+against us was that of illegal assembly, but the Government had not
+charged us with this offence, because the Government desired to keep the
+case in a police court.
+
+"The authorities dare not see this case come before a jury," she
+declared, "because they know perfectly well that if it were heard before
+a jury of our countrymen we should be acquitted, just as John Burns was
+acquitted years ago for taking action far more dangerous to the public
+peace than we have taken. We are deprived of trial by jury. We are also
+deprived of the right to appeal against the magistrate's decision. Very
+carefully has this procedure been thought out."
+
+Of the handbill she said: "We do not deny that we issued this bill; none
+of us three has wished to deny responsibility. We did issue the bill; we
+did cause it to be circulated; we did put upon it the words 'Come and
+help the suffragettes rush the House of Commons.' For these words we do
+not apologise. It is very well known that we took this action in order
+to press forward a claim, which, according to the British constitution,
+we are well entitled to make."
+
+In all that the Suffragettes had done, in all that they might ever do,
+declared my daughter, they would only be following in the footsteps of
+men now in Parliament. "Mr. Herbert Gladstone has told us in the speech
+I read to him that the victory of argument alone is not enough. As we
+cannot hope to win by force of argument alone, it is necessary to
+overcome by other means the savage resistance of the Government to our
+claim for citizenship. He says, 'Go on, fight as the men did.' And then,
+when we show our power and get the people to help us, he takes
+proceedings against us in a manner that would have been disgraceful even
+in the old days of coercion. Then there is Mr. Lloyd-George, who, if any
+man has done so, has set us an example. His whole career has been a
+series of revolts. He has said that if we do not get the vote--mark
+these words--we should be justified in adopting the methods the men had
+to adopt, namely, pulling down the Hyde Park railings." She quoted Lord
+Morley as saying of the Indian unrest: "'We are in India in the presence
+of a living movement, and a movement for what? For objects which we
+ourselves have taught them to think are desirable objects; and unless we
+can somehow reconcile order with satisfaction of those ideals and
+aspirations, the fault will not be theirs, it will be ours--it will mark
+the breakdown of British statesmanship.'--Apply those words to our
+case," she continued.
+
+[Illustration: CHRISTABEL, MRS. DRUMMOND AND MRS. PANKHURST IN THE DOCK,
+FIRST CONSPIRACY TRIAL
+
+_October, 1908_]
+
+"Remember that we are demanding of Liberal statesmen that which is for
+us the greatest boon and the most essential right--and if the present
+Government cannot reconcile order with our demand for the vote without
+delay, it will mark the breakdown of their statesmanship. Yes, their
+statesmanship has broken down already. They are disgraced. It is only in
+this court that they have the smallest hope of being supported."
+
+My daughter had spoken with passion and fervour, and her righteous
+indignation had moved her to words that caused the magistrate's face to
+turn an angry crimson. When I rose to address the Court I began by
+assuming an appearance of calmness which I did not altogether feel. I
+endorsed all that Christabel had said of the unfairness of our trial and
+the malice of the Government; I protested against the trial of political
+offenders in a common police court, and I said that we were not women
+who would come into the court as ordinary law-breakers. I described Mrs.
+Drummond's worthy career as a wife, a mother, and a self-sustaining
+business woman. I said, "Before you decide what is to be done with us,
+I should like you to hear from me a statement of what has brought me
+into the dock this morning." And then I told of my life and experiences,
+many of which I have related in these pages of what I had seen and known
+as a Poor Law Guardian and a registrar of births and deaths; of how I
+had learned the burning necessity of changing the status of women, of
+altering the laws under which they and their children live, and of the
+essential justice of making women self-governing citizens.
+
+"I have seen," I said, "that men are encouraged by law to take advantage
+of the helplessness of women. Many women have thought as I have, and for
+many, many years have tried, by that influence of which we have been so
+often reminded, to alter these laws, but we find that influence counts
+for nothing. When we went to the House of Commons we used to be told,
+when we were persistent, that members of Parliament were not responsible
+to women, they were responsible only to voters, and that their time was
+too fully occupied to reform those laws, although they agreed that they
+needed reforming.
+
+"We women have presented larger petitions in support of our
+enfranchisement than were ever presented for any other reform; we have
+succeeded in holding greater public meetings than men have ever held for
+any reform, in spite of the difficulty which women have in throwing off
+their natural diffidence, that desire to escape publicity which we have
+inherited from generations of our foremothers. We have broken through
+that. We have faced hostile mobs at street corners, because we were told
+that we could not have that representation for our taxes that men have
+won unless we converted the whole of the country to our side. Because we
+have done this, we have been misrepresented, we have been ridiculed, we
+have had contempt poured upon us, and the ignorant mob have been incited
+to offer us violence, which we have faced unarmed and unprotected by the
+safeguards which Cabinet Ministers enjoy. We have been driven to do
+this; we are determined to go on with this agitation because we feel in
+honour bound. Just as it was the duty of your forefathers, it is our
+duty to make the world a better place for women than it is to-day.
+
+"Lastly, I want to call attention to the self-restraint which was shown
+by our followers on the night of the 13th, after we had been arrested.
+Our rule has always been to be patient, exercise self-restraint, show
+our so-called superiors that we are not hysterical; to use no violence,
+but rather to offer ourselves to the violence of others.
+
+"That is all I have to say to you, sir. We are here, not because we are
+law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers."
+
+The burly policemen, the reporters, and most of the spectators were in
+tears as I finished. But the magistrate, who had listened part of the
+time with his hand concealing his face, still held that we were properly
+charged in a common police court as inciters to riot. Since we refused
+to be bound over to keep the peace, he sentenced Mrs. Drummond and
+myself to three months' imprisonment, and Christabel to ten weeks'
+imprisonment. It was destined to be a kind of imprisonment the
+authorities had never yet been called upon to deal with.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+My first act on reaching Holloway was to demand that the Governor be
+sent for. When he came I told him that the Suffragettes had resolved
+that they would no longer submit to being treated as ordinary
+law-breakers. In the course of our trial two Cabinet Ministers had
+admitted that we were political offenders, and therefore we should
+henceforth refuse to be searched or to undress in the presence of the
+wardresses. For myself I claimed the right, and I hoped the others would
+do likewise, to speak to my friends during exercise, or whenever I came
+in contact with them. The Governor, after reflection, yielded to the
+first two demands, but said that he would have to consult the Home
+Office before permitting us to break the rule of silence. We were
+accordingly allowed to change our clothing privately, and, as a further
+concession, were placed in adjoining cells. This was little advantage to
+me, however, since within a few days I was removed to a hospital cell,
+suffering from the illness which prison life always inflicts on me. Here
+the Governor visited me with the unwelcome news that the Home Secretary
+had refused to allow me the privilege of speech with my fellow
+prisoners. I asked him if I might, when I was strong enough to walk,
+take exercise with my friends. To this he assented, and I soon had the
+joy of seeing my daughter and the other brave comrades, and walking
+with them in the dismal courtyard of the prison. Single file we walked,
+at a distance of three or four feet from one another, back and forth
+under the stony eyes of the wardresses. The rough flags of the pavement
+hurt our feet, shod in heavy, shapeless prison boots. The autumn days
+were cold and cheerless, and we shivered violently under our scanty
+cloaks. But of all our hardships the ceaseless silence of our lives was
+worst.
+
+At the end of the second week I decided I would no longer endure it.
+That afternoon at exercise I suddenly called my daughter by name and
+bade her stand still until I came up to her. Of course she stopped, and
+when I reached her side we linked arms and began to talk in low tones. A
+wardress ran up to us, saying: "I shall listen to everything you say." I
+replied: "You are welcome to do that, but I shall insist on my right to
+speak to my daughter." Another wardress had hastily left the yard, and
+now she returned with a large number of wardresses. They seized me and
+quickly removed me to my cell, while the other suffrage prisoners
+cheered my action at the top of their voices. For their "mutiny" they
+got three days' solitary confinement, and I, for mine, a much more
+severe punishment. Unrepentant, I told the Governor that, in spite of
+any punishment he might impose on me, I would never again submit to the
+silence rule. To forbid a mother to speak to her daughter was infamous.
+For this I was characterised as a "dangerous criminal" and was sent into
+solitary confinement, without exercise or chapel, while a wardress was
+stationed constantly at my cell door to see that I communicated with no
+one.
+
+[Illustration: MRS. PANKHURST AND MISS CHRISTABEL PANKHURST IN PRISON
+DRESS]
+
+It was two weeks before I saw any of my friends again, and meantime the
+health of Mrs. Drummond had been so seriously impaired that she was
+released for hospital treatment. My daughter also, I learned, was ill,
+and in desperation I made application to the Board of Visiting
+Magistrates to be allowed to see her. After a long conference, during
+which I was made to wait outside in the corridor, the magistrates
+returned a refusal, saying that I might renew my application in a month.
+The answer then, they said, would depend on my conduct. A month! My girl
+might be dead by that time. My anxiety sent me to bed ill again, but,
+although I did not know it, relief was already on its way. I had told
+the visiting magistrates that I would wait until public opinion got
+within those walls, and this happened sooner than I had dared to hope.
+Mrs. Drummond, as soon as she was able to appear in public, and the
+other suffrage prisoners, as they were released, spread broadcast the
+story of our mutiny, and of a subsequent one led by Miss Wallace Dunlop,
+which sent a large number of women into solitary confinement. The
+Suffragettes marched by thousands to Holloway, thronging the approaches
+to the prison street. Round and round the prison they marched, singing
+the Women's Marseillaise and cheering. Faintly the sound came to our
+ears, infinitely lightening our burden of pain and loneliness. The
+following week they came again, so we afterwards learned, but this time
+the police turned them back long before they reached the confines of
+the prison.
+
+The demonstrations, together with a volley of questions asked in the
+House of Commons, told at last. Orders came from the Home Office that I
+was to see my daughter, and that we were to be allowed to exercise and
+to talk together for one hour each day. In addition, we were to be
+permitted the rare privilege of reading a daily newspaper. Then, on
+December 8th, the day of Christabel's release, orders came that I, too,
+should be discharged, two weeks before the expiration of my sentence.
+
+At the welcome breakfast given us, as released prisoners, at Lincoln's
+Inn Hotel, I told our members that henceforth we should all insist on
+refusing to abide by ordinary prison rules. We did not propose to break
+laws and then shirk punishment. We simply meant to assert our right to
+be recognised as political prisoners. We reached this point after due
+reflection. We first set ourselves not to complain of prison, not to say
+anything about it, to avoid it, to keep away from all side issues, to
+keep along the straight path of political reform, to get the vote;
+because we knew that when we had won it we could reform prisons and a
+great many other abuses as well. But now that we had had in the witness
+box the admission of Cabinet Ministers that we are political offenders,
+we should in future demand the treatment given to men political
+offenders in all civilised countries. "If nations," I said, "are still
+so governed that they make political offenders, then Great Britain is
+going to treat her political offenders as well as political offenders
+are treated by other nations. If it were the custom to treat political
+offenders as ordinary offenders against the well-being of society are
+treated, we should not have complained if we were treated like that; but
+it is not the international custom to do it, and so, for the dignity of
+the women of the country, and for the sake of the consciences of the men
+of the country, and for the sake of our nation amongst the nations of
+the earth, we are not going to allow the Liberal government to treat us
+like ordinary law-breakers in future."
+
+I said the same thing that night in a great meeting held in Queen's Hall
+to welcome the released prisoners, and, although we all knew that our
+determination involved a bitter struggle, our women endorsed it without
+a moment's hesitation. Had they been able to look forward to the events
+which were even then overshadowing us, could they have foreseen the new
+forms of suffering and danger that lay in waiting, I am certain that
+they would still have done the same thing, for our experiences had
+taught us to dispense with fear. Whatever of timidity, of shrinking from
+pain or hardship any of us had originally possessed, it had all
+vanished. There were no terrors that we were not now ready to face.
+
+The year 1909 marks an important point in our struggle, partly because
+of this decision of ours, never again to submit to be classed with
+criminals; and partly because in this year we forced the Liberal
+Government to go on record, publicly, in regard to the oldest of
+popular rights, the right of petition. We had long contemplated this
+step, and now the time seemed ripe for taking it.
+
+In the closing days of 1908 Mr. Asquith, speaking on the policy to be
+carried out in 1909, commented on the various deputations he was obliged
+at that time to receive. They called on him, he said, "from all quarters
+and in all causes, on an average of something like two hours on three
+days in every week." The deputations all asked for different things,
+and, although all of the things could not possibly be included in the
+King's speech, Mr. Asquith was inclined to agree that many of them ought
+to be included. This declaration from the Prime Minister that he was
+constantly receiving deputations of men, and listening favourably to
+their suggestions of what policies to pursue, aroused in the
+Suffragettes feelings of deep indignation. This in part they expressed
+on January 25th, when the first meeting of the Cabinet Council took
+place. A small deputation from the W. S. P. U. proceeded to Downing
+Street to claim the right to be heard, as men were heard. For knocking
+at the door of the official residence four of the women, including my
+sister, Mrs. Clark, were arrested and sent to prison for one month.
+
+A month later the seventh of our Women's Parliaments was called against
+this and against the fact that no mention of women had been included in
+the King's speech. Led by Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, Lady Constance Lytton
+and Miss Daisy Solomon, a deputation of women endeavoured to carry the
+resolution to the House of Commons. They were promptly arrested and,
+next day, were sent to prison on sentences of from one to two months.
+The time was rapidly approaching when the legality of these arrests
+would have to be tested. In June of the year 1909 the test was made.
+
+It will be remembered that we had endeavoured to force the authorities
+to make good their threat to charge us under the obsolete Charles II
+"Tumultuous Petitions Act," which prescribes severe penalties for
+persons proceeding to Parliament in groups of more than twelve for the
+purpose of presenting petitions. It had been stated that if we were
+charged under that act our case would be given a hearing before a judge
+and jury instead of a police magistrate. Since this was exactly what we
+desired to have happen we had sent deputation after deputation of more
+than twelve persons, but always they were tried in police courts, and
+were sent to prison often for periods as long as that prescribed in the
+Charles II Act. Now we determined to do something still more ambitious;
+we resolved to test, not the Charles II Act, but the constitutional
+right of the subject to petition the Prime Minister as the seat of
+power.
+
+The right of petition, which has existed in England since the earliest
+known period, was written into the Bill of Rights which became law in
+1689 on the accession of William and Mary. It was, in fact, one of the
+conditions attaching to the accession of the joint monarchs. According
+to the Bill of Rights, "It is the right of subjects to petition the King
+and all commitments, and prosecutions for such petitionings are
+illegal." The power of the King having passed almost completely into
+the hands of Parliament, the Prime Minister now stands where the King's
+majesty stood in former times. Clearly, then, the right of the subject
+to petition the Prime Minister cannot be legally denied. Thus were we
+advised, and in order to keep within the strict letter of the law, we
+accepted the limitations of the right of petition laid down in the
+Charles II Act, and decided that our petition should be carried to the
+House of Commons by small groups of women.
+
+Again I called together, on the evening of June 29th, a Parliament of
+women. Previously I had written to Mr. Asquith stating that a deputation
+of women would wait on him at the House of Commons at eight o'clock in
+the evening. I wrote him further that we were not to be refused, as we
+insisted upon our constitutional right to be received. To my note the
+Prime Minister returned a formal note declining to receive us.
+Nevertheless we continued our preparations, because we knew that the
+Prime Minister would continue to decline, but that in the end he would
+be forced to receive us.
+
+An incident which occurred a week before the date of the deputation was
+destined to have important consequences. Miss Wallace Dunlop went to St.
+Stephen's Hall in the House of Commons, and marked with printer's ink on
+the stone work of the Hall an extract from the Bill of Rights. The first
+time she made the attempt she was interrupted by a policeman, but two
+days later she succeeded in stamping on the ancient walls the reminder
+to Parliament that women as well as men possess constitutional rights,
+and that they were proposing to exercise those rights. She was arrested
+and sentenced to prison for one month, in the third division. The option
+of a heavy fine was given her, which of course she refused. Miss Wallace
+Dunlop's prison term began on June 22d. Perhaps her deed had something
+to do with the unusual interest taken in the approaching deputation, an
+interest which was shown not only by the public but by many members of
+Parliament. In the House of Commons a strong feeling that the women
+ought this time to be received manifested itself in many questions put
+to the Government. One member even asked leave to move the adjournment
+of the House on a matter of urgent public importance, namely the danger
+to the public peace, owing to the refusal of the Prime Minister to
+receive the deputation. This was denied, however, and the Government
+mendaciously disclaimed all responsibility for what action the police
+might take toward the deputation. The Home Secretary, Mr. Gladstone,
+when asked by Mr. Kier Hardie to give instructions that the deputation,
+if orderly, should be admitted to St. Stephen's, replied: "I cannot say
+what action the police ought to take in the matter." Our Women's
+Parliament met at half past seven on the evening of June 29th, and the
+petition to the Prime Minister was read and adopted. Then our deputation
+set forth. Accompanying me as leader were two highly respectable women
+of advanced years, Mrs. Saul Solomon, whose husband had been Prime
+Minister at the Cape, and Miss Neligan, one of the foremost of the
+pioneer educators of England. We three and five other women were
+preceded by Miss Elsie Howey, who, riding fast, went on horse-back to
+announce our coming to the enormous crowds that filled the streets. She,
+we afterward learned, progressed as far as the approaches to the House
+of Commons before being turned back by the police. As for the
+deputation, it pressed on through the crowd as far as St. Margaret's
+Church, Westminster, where we found a long line of police blocking the
+road. We paused for a moment, gathering strength for the ordeal of
+trying to push through the lines, when an unexpected thing happened. An
+order was given from some one, and instantly the police lines parted,
+leaving a clear space through which we walked towards the House. We were
+escorted on our way by Inspector Wells, and as we passed the crowd broke
+into vociferous cheering, firmly believing that we were after all to be
+received. As for myself I did little speculating as to what was about to
+happen. I simply led my deputation on as far as the entrance to St.
+Stephen's Hall. There we encountered another strong force of police
+commanded by our old acquaintance, Inspector Scantlebury, who stepped
+forward and handed me a letter. I opened it and read in aloud to the
+women. "The Prime Minister, for the reasons which he has already given
+in a written reply to their request, regrets that he is unable to
+receive the proposed deputation."
+
+I dropped the note to the ground and said: "I stand upon my rights, as a
+subject of the King, to petition the Prime Minister, and I am firmly
+resolved to stand here until I am received."
+
+[Illustration: INSPECTOR WELLS CONDUCTING MRS. PANKHURST TO THE HOUSE OF
+COMMONS
+
+_June, 1908_]
+
+Inspector Scantlebury turned away and walked rapidly towards the door
+of the Strangers' Entrance. I turned to Inspector Jarvis, who remained,
+to several members of Parliament and some newspaper men who stood
+looking on, and begged them to take my message to the Prime Minister,
+but no one responded, and the Inspector, seizing my arm, began to push
+me away. I now knew that the deputation would not be received and that
+the old miserable business of refusing to leave, of being forced
+backward, and returning again and again until arrested, would have to be
+re-enacted. I had to take into account that I was accompanied by two
+fragile old ladies, who, brave as they were to be there at all, could
+not possibly endure what I knew must follow. I quickly decided that I
+should have to force an immediate arrest, so I committed an act of
+technical assault on the person of Inspector Jarvis, striking him very
+lightly on the cheek. He said instantly, "I understand why you did
+that," and I supposed then that we would instantly be taken. But the
+other police apparently did not grasp the situation, for they began
+pushing and jostling our women. I said to the inspector: "Shall I have
+to do it again?" and he said "Yes." So I struck him lightly a second
+time, and then he ordered the police to make the arrests.
+
+The matter did not end with the arrest of our deputation of eight women.
+In recurring deputations of twelve the Suffragettes again and again
+pressed forward in vain endeavour to reach the House of Commons. In
+spite of the fact that the crowds were friendly and did everything they
+could to aid the women, their deputations were broken up by the police
+and many of the women arrested. By nine o'clock Parliament Square was
+empty, an enormous force of mounted police having beaten the people back
+into Victoria Street and across Westminster Bridge. For a short time all
+looked tranquil, but soon little groups of women, seven or eight at a
+time, kept appearing mysteriously and making spirited dashes toward the
+House. This extraordinary procedure greatly exasperated the police, who
+could not unravel the mystery of where the women came from. As a matter
+of bygone history the explanation is that the W. S. P. U. had hired
+thirty offices in the neighborhood, in the shelter of which the women
+waited until it was time for them to sally forth. It was a striking
+demonstration of the ingenuity of women opposing the physical force of
+men, but it served still another purpose. It diverted the attention of
+the police from another demonstration which was going on. Other
+Suffragettes had gone to the official residence of the First Lord of the
+Admiralty, to the Home Office, the Treasury and Privy Council Offices,
+and had registered their contempt for the Government's refusal to
+receive the deputation by the time-honoured method of breaking a window
+in each place.
+
+One hundred and eight women were arrested that night, but instead of
+submitting to arrests and trial, the Women's Social and Political Union
+announced that they were prepared to prove that the Government and not
+the women had broken the law in refusing to receive the petition. My
+case, coupled with that of the Hon. Mrs. Haverfield, was selected as a
+test case for all the others, and Lord Robert Cecil was retained for the
+defence. Mr. Muskett, who conducted the case for the prosecution, tried
+to prove that our women had not gone to the House of Commons to present
+a petition, but this was easily demonstrated to be an unwarranted claim.
+The speeches of the leader, the official articles published in our
+newspaper, _Votes for Women_, and the letters sent to Mr. Asquith, not
+to speak of the indisputable facts that every member of the deputation
+carried a copy of the petition in her hand, furnished evidence enough of
+the nature of our errand. The whole case of the subject's right of
+petition was then brought forward for discussion. Mr. Muskett spoke
+first, then our council, Mr. Henle, then Lord Robert Cecil. Last of all
+I spoke, describing the events of June 29th. I told the magistrate that
+should he decide that we and not the Government had been guilty of an
+infraction of the law, we should refuse to be bound over, but should all
+choose to go to prison. In that case we should not submit to being
+treated like criminals. "There are one hundred and eight of us here
+to-day," I said, pointing to the benches where my fellow-prisoners sat,
+"and just as we have thought it is our duty to defy the police in the
+street, so when we get into prison, as we are political prisoners, we
+shall do our best to bring back into the twentieth century the treatment
+of political prisoners which was thought right in the case of William
+Cobbett, and other political offenders of his time."
+
+The magistrate, Sir Albert de Rutzen, an elderly, amiable man, rather
+bewildered by this unprecedented situation, then gave his decision. He
+agreed with Mr. Henle and Lord Robert Cecil that the right of petition
+was clearly guaranteed to every subject, but he thought that when the
+women were refused permission to enter the House of Commons, and when
+Mr. Asquith had said that he would not receive them, the women acted
+wrongly to persist in their demands. He should, therefore, fine them
+five pounds each, or sentence them to prison for one month in the second
+division. The sentence would be suspended for the present until learned
+counsel could obtain a decision from a higher court on the legal point
+of the right of petition.
+
+I then put in a claim for all the prisoners, and asked that all their
+cases might be held over until the test case was decided, and this was
+agreed to, except in regard to fourteen women charged with
+window-breaking. They were tried separately and sent to prison on
+sentences varying from six weeks to two months. Of them later.
+
+The appeal against Sir Albert de Rutzen's decision was tried in a
+Divisional Court early in December of that year. Lord Robert Cecil again
+appeared for the defence, and in a masterly piece of argumentation,
+contended that in England there was and always had been the right of
+petition, and that the right had always been considered a necessary
+condition of a free country and a civilised Government. The right of
+petition, he pointed out, had three characteristics: In the first place,
+it was the right to petition the actual repositories of power; in the
+second place, it was the right to petition in person; and in the third
+place, the right must be exercised reasonably. A long list of historical
+precedents were offered in support of the right to petition in person,
+but Lord Robert argued that even if these did not exist, the right was
+admitted in the Charles II "Tumultuous Petitions Act," which provides
+"That no person or persons whatsoever shall repair to His Majesty or
+both or either Houses of Parliament upon pretence of presenting or
+delivering any petition, complaint, remonstrance, or declaration or
+other address, accompanied with excessive number of people ..." etc. The
+Bill of Rights had specially confirmed the right of petition in so far
+as the King personally was concerned. "The women," pursued Lord Robert,
+"had gone to Parliament Square on June 29th in the exercise of a plain
+constitutional right, and that in going there with a petition they had
+acted according to the only constitutional method they possessed, being
+voteless, for the redress of their grievances."
+
+If then it were true, as contended, the subject not only possessed the
+right to petition, but to petition in person, the only point to be
+considered was whether the right had been exercised reasonably. If
+persons desired to interview the Prime Minister, it was surely
+reasonable to go to the House of Commons, and to present themselves at
+the Strangers' Entrance. Mrs. Pankhurst, Mrs. Haverfield and the others
+had, as the evidence showed, proceeded along the public highway and had
+been escorted to the door of the House of Commons by an officer of the
+police, and could not therefore, up to that point, have been acting in
+an unlawful manner. The police had kept clear a large open space
+opposite the House of Commons, the crowd being kept at a certain
+distance away. Within the open space there were only persons having
+business in the House of Commons, members of the police force and the
+eight women who formed the deputation. It could not possibly be
+contended that these eight women had caused an obstruction. It was true
+that a police officer told them that the Prime Minister was not in the
+House of Commons, but when one desired an interview with a Member of
+Parliament one did not make his request of a casual policeman in the
+street. Moreover, the police did not possess any authority to stop
+anyone from going into the House of Commons.
+
+The letter given the women, in which the Prime Minister said that he
+could not or would not see them, had been cited. Now, had the Prime
+Minister, in his letter, said that he could not or would not see the
+women at that time, that the time was not convenient; but that he would
+at some future time, at a more convenient time, receive them, that would
+have been a sufficient answer. The women would not have been justified
+in refusing to accept such an answer, because the right to petition must
+be exercised reasonably. But the letter contained an unqualified
+refusal, and that, if we allow the right of petition to exist, was no
+answer at all. Last of all Lord Robert argued that if there is a right
+to petition a Member of Parliament, then it must be incumbent on the
+part of a Member of Parliament to receive the petition, and that no one
+has a right to interfere with the petitioner. If the eight women were
+legally justified in presenting their petition, then they were also
+justified in refusing to obey the orders of the police to leave the
+place.
+
+In an address full of bias, and revealing plainly that he had no
+accurate knowledge of any of the events that had led up to the case in
+hand, the Lord Chief Justice delivered judgment. He said that he
+entirely agreed with Lord Robert Cecil as to the right to present a
+petition to the Prime Minister, either as Prime Minister or as a Member
+of Parliament; and he agreed also that petitions to the King should be
+presented to the Prime Minister. But the claim of the women, he said,
+was not merely to present a petition, but to be received in a
+deputation. He did not think it likely that Mr. Asquith would have
+refused to receive a petition from the women, but his refusal to receive
+the deputation was not unnatural, "in consequence of what we know did
+happen on previous occasions."[1]
+
+Referring to the Metropolitan Police Act of 1839, which provides that it
+shall be lawful for the Commissioner of Police to make regulations and
+to give instructions to the constable for keeping order, and for
+preventing any obstruction of thoroughfares in the immediate
+neighbourhood of the House of Commons, and the Sessional Order
+empowering the police to keep clear the approaches to the House of
+Commons, the Lord Chief Justice decided that I and the other women were
+guilty of an infraction of the law when we insisted on a right to enter
+the House of Commons. The Lord Chief Justice therefore ruled that our
+conviction in the lower court had been proper, and our appeal was
+dismissed with costs.
+
+Thus was destroyed in England the ancient constitutional right of
+petition, secured to the people by the Bill of Rights, and cherished by
+uncounted generations of Englishmen. I say the right was destroyed, for
+of how much value is a petition which cannot be presented in person? The
+decision of the high court was appalling to the members of the
+W. S. P. U., as it closed the last approach, by constitutional means, to
+our enfranchisement. Far from discouraging or disheartening us, it
+simply spurred us on to new and more aggressive forms of militancy.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[1] Mr. Asquith had never, since becoming Prime Minister, received a
+deputation of women, nor had he ever received a deputation of the W. S.
+P. U. So it was absurd of the Lord Chief Justice to speak of "what did
+happen, on previous occasions."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Between the time of the arrest in June and the handing down of the
+absurd decision of the Lord Chief Justice that although we, as subjects,
+possessed the right of petition, yet we had committed an offence in
+exercising that right, nearly six months had passed. In that interval
+certain grave developments had lifted the militant movement onto a new
+and more heroic plane. It will be remembered that a week before our
+deputation to test the Charles II Act, Miss Wallace Dunlop had been sent
+to prison for one month for stamping an extract from the Bill of Rights
+on the stone walls of St. Stephen's Hall. On arriving at Holloway on
+Friday evening, July 2nd, she sent for the Governor and demanded of him
+that she be treated as a political offender. The Governor replied that
+he had no power to alter the sentence of the magistrate, whereupon Miss
+Wallace Dunlop informed him that it was the unalterable resolution of
+the Suffragettes never again to submit to the prison treatment given to
+ordinary offenders against the law. Therefore she should, if placed in
+the second division as a common criminal, refuse to touch food until the
+Government yielded her point. It is hardly likely that the Government or
+the prison authorities realised the seriousness of Miss Wallace Dunlop's
+action, or the heroic mould of the Suffragettes' character. At all
+events the Home Secretary paid no attention to the letter sent him by
+the prisoner, in which she explained simply but clearly her motives for
+her desperate act, and the prison authorities did nothing except seek
+means of breaking down her resistance. The ordinary prison diet was
+replaced by the most tempting food, and this instead of being brought to
+her cell at intervals, was kept there night and day, but always
+untouched. Several times daily the doctor came to feel her pulse and
+observe her growing weakness. The doctor, as well as the Governor and
+the wardresses argued, coaxed and threatened, but without effect. The
+week passed without any sign of surrender on the part of the prisoner.
+On Friday the doctor reported that she was rapidly reaching a point at
+which death might at any time supervene. Hurried conferences were
+carried on between the prison and the Home Office, and that evening,
+June 8th, Miss Wallace Dunlop was sent home, having served one-fourth of
+her sentence, and having ignored completely all the terms of her
+imprisonment.
+
+On the day of her release the fourteen women who had been convicted of
+window breaking received their sentences, and learning of Miss Wallace
+Dunlop's act, they, as they were being taken to Holloway in the prison
+van, held a consultation and agreed to follow her example. Arrived at
+Holloway they at once informed the officials that they would not give up
+any of their belongings, neither would they put on prison clothing,
+perform prison labour, eat prison food or keep the rule of silence.
+
+The Governor agreed for the moment to allow them to retain their
+property and to wear their own clothing, but he told them that they had
+committed an act of mutiny and that he would have to so charge them at
+the next visit of the magistrates. The women then addressed petitions to
+the Home Secretary, demanding that they be given the prison treatment
+universally allowed political offenders. They decided to postpone the
+hunger strike until the Home Secretary had had time to reply. Meanwhile,
+after a vain appeal for more fresh air, for the weather was stiflingly
+hot, the women committed one more act of mutiny, they broke the windows
+of their cells.
+
+We learned this from the prisoners themselves. Several days after they
+had gone to prison, my daughter Christabel and Mrs. Tuke, filled with
+anxiety for their fate, gained admission to an upper story room of a
+house overlooking the prison. Calling at the top of their voices and
+waving a flag of the Union, they succeeded in attracting the prisoners'
+attention. The women thrust their arms through the broken panes, waving
+handkerchiefs, Votes for Women badges, anything they could get hold of,
+and in a few shouted words told their tale. That same day the visiting
+magistrates arrived, and the mutineers were sentenced to terms of seven
+to ten days of solitary confinement in the punishment cells. In these
+frightful cells, dark, unclean, dripping with moisture, the prisoners
+resolutely hunger struck. At the end of five days one of the women was
+reduced to such a condition that the Home Secretary ordered her
+released. The next day several more were released, and before the end
+of the week the last of the fourteen had gained their liberty.
+
+The affair excited the greatest sympathy all over England, sympathy
+which Mr. Gladstone tried to divert by charging two of the prisoners
+with kicking and biting the wardresses. In spite of their vigorous
+denials these two women were sentenced, on these charges, one to ten
+days and the other to a month in prison. Although still very weak from
+the previous hunger strike, they at once entered upon a second hunger
+strike, and in three days had to be released.
+
+After this each succeeding batch of Suffragette prisoners, unless
+otherwise directed, followed the example of these heroic rebels. The
+prison officials, seeing their authority vanish, were panic stricken.
+Holloway and other women's prisons throughout the Kingdom became perfect
+dens of violence and brutality. Hear the account given by Lucy Burns of
+her experience:
+
+"We remained quite still when ordered to undress, and when they told us
+to proceed to our cells we linked arms and stood with our backs to the
+wall. The Governor blew his whistle and a great crowd of wardresses
+appeared, falling upon us, forcing us apart and dragging us towards the
+cells. I think I had twelve wardresses for my share, and among them they
+managed to trip me so that I fell helplessly to the floor. One of the
+wardresses grasped me by my hair, wound the long braid around her wrist
+and literally dragged me along the ground. In the cell they fairly
+ripped the clothing from my back, forcing on me one coarse cotton
+garment and throwing others on the bed for me to put on myself. Left
+alone exhausted by the dreadful experience I lay for a time gasping and
+shivering on the floor. By and by a wardress came to the door and threw
+me a blanket. This I wrapped around me, for I was chilled to the bone by
+this time. The single cotton garment and the rough blanket were all the
+clothes I wore during my stay in prison. Most of the prisoners refused
+everything but the blanket. According to agreement we all broke our
+windows and were immediately dragged off to the punishment cells. There
+we hunger struck, and after enduring great misery for nearly a week, we
+were one by one released."
+
+How simply they tell it. "After enduring great misery--" But no one who
+has not gone through the awful experience of the hunger strike can have
+any idea of how great that misery is. In an ordinary cell it is great
+enough. In the unspeakable squalor of the punishment cells it is worse.
+The actual hunger pangs last only about twenty-four hours with most
+prisoners. I generally suffer most on the second day. After that there
+is no very desperate craving for food. Weakness and mental depression
+take its place. Great disturbances of digestion divert the desire for
+food to a longing for relief from pain. Often there is intense headache,
+with fits of dizziness, or slight delirium. Complete exhaustion and a
+feeling of isolation from earth mark the final stages of the ordeal.
+Recovery is often protracted, and entire recovery of normal health is
+sometimes discouragingly slow.
+
+The first hunger strike occurred in early July. In the two months that
+followed scores of women adopted the same form of protest against a
+Government who would not recognise the political character of their
+offences. In some cases the hunger strikers were treated with unexampled
+cruelty. Delicate women were sentenced, not only to solitary
+confinement, but to wear handcuffs for twenty-four hours at a stretch.
+One woman on refusing prison clothes was put into a straightwaistcoat.
+
+The irony of all this appears the greater when it is considered that, at
+this precise time, the leaders of the Liberal Party in the House of
+Commons were in the midst of their first campaign against the veto power
+of the Lords.
+
+On September 17th a great meeting was held in Birmingham, on which
+occasion Mr. Asquith was to throw down his challenge to the Lords, and
+to announce that their veto was to be abolished, leaving the people's
+will paramount in England. Of course the Suffragettes seized this
+opportunity for a demonstration. This course was perfectly logical.
+Denied the right of petition, shut out now from every Cabinet Minister's
+meeting, the women were forced to take whatever means that remained to
+urge their cause upon the Government. Mrs. Mary Leigh and a group of
+Birmingham members addressed a warning to the public not to attend Mr.
+Asquith's meeting as disturbances were likely to happen. From the time
+that the Prime Minister and his Cabinet left the House of Commons until
+the train drew in to the station at Birmingham they were completely
+surrounded with detectives and policemen. The precautions taken to
+guard Mr. Asquith have never been equalled except in the case of the
+Tsar during outbreaks of revolution in Russia. From the station he was
+taken by an underground passage a quarter of a mile in length to his
+hotel, where he dined in solitary state, after having been carried
+upstairs in a luggage lift. Escorted to the Bingley Hall by a strong
+guard of mounted police, he was so fearful of encountering the
+Suffragettes that he entered by a side door. The hall was guarded as for
+a siege. Over the glass roof a thick tarpaulin had been stretched. Tall
+ladders were placed on either side of the building, and firemen's hose
+were laid in readiness--not to extinguish fires, but to play upon the
+Suffragettes should they appear at an inaccessible spot on the roof. The
+streets on every hand were barricaded, and police, in regiments, were
+drawn up to defend the barricades against the onslaughts of the women.
+Nobody was allowed to pass the barricades without showing his entrance
+tickets to long files of police, and then the ticket holders were
+squeezed through the narrow doors one by one.
+
+Their precautions were in vain, for the determined Suffragettes found
+more than one way in which to turn Mr. Asquith's triumph into a fiasco.
+Although no women gained access to the hall, there were plenty of men
+sympathisers present, and before the meeting had proceeded far thirteen
+men had been violently thrown out for reminding the Prime Minister that
+"the people" whose right to govern he was professing to uphold, included
+women as well as men. Outside, mingling in the vast crowds, bands of
+women attacked the barricades, the outer barricades being thrown down in
+spite of the thousands of police. From the roof of a neighbouring house
+Mrs. Leigh and Charlotte Marsh tore up dozens of slates and threw them
+on the roof of Bingley Hall and in the streets below, taking care,
+however, to strike no one. As Mr. Asquith drove away the women hurled
+slates at the guarded motor car. The fire hose was brought forth and the
+firemen were ordered to turn the water on the women. They refused, to
+their credit be it said, but the police, infuriated by their failure to
+keep the peace, did not scruple to play the cold water on the women as
+they crouched and clung to the dangerous slope of the roof. Roughs in
+the streets flung bricks at them, drawing blood. Eventually the women
+were dragged down by the police and in their dripping garments marched
+through the streets to the police station.
+
+The Suffragettes who had rushed the barricades and flung stones at Mr.
+Asquith's departing train received sentences from a fortnight to one
+month, but Miss Marsh and Mrs. Leigh were sent to prison for three and
+four months respectively. All of the prisoners adopted the hunger
+strike, as we knew they would.
+
+Several days later we were horrified to read in the newspapers that
+these prisoners were being forcibly fed by means of a rubber tube thrust
+into the stomach. Members of the Union applied at once both at the
+prison and at the Home Office to learn the truth of the report, but all
+information was refused. On the following Monday at our request, Mr.
+Keir Hardie, at question time in the House, insisted on information from
+the Government. Mr. Masterman, speaking for the Home Secretary,
+reluctantly admitted that, in order to preserve the dignity of the
+Government and at the same time save the lives of the prisoners,
+"hospital treatment" was being administered. "Hospital treatment" was
+the term used to draw attention from one of the most disgusting and
+brutal expedients ever resorted to by prison authorities. No law allows
+it except in the case of persons certified to be insane, and even then
+when the operation is performed by skilled nursing attendants under the
+direction of skilled medical men, it cannot be called safe. In fact, the
+asylum cases usually die after a short time. _The Lancet_, perhaps the
+best known medical journal in the language, published a long list of
+opinions from distinguished physicians and surgeons who condemned the
+practice as applied to the suffrage prisoners as unworthy of
+civilisation. One physician told of a case which had come under his
+observation in which death had occurred almost as soon as the tube had
+been inserted. Another cited a case where the tongue, twisted behind the
+feeding tube, had, in the struggle, been almost bitten off. Cases where
+food had been injected into the lungs were not unknown. Mr. C.
+Mansell-Moullin, M.D., F.R.C.S., wrote to _The Times_ that as a hospital
+surgeon of more than thirty years' experience he desired indignantly to
+protest against the Government's term "Hospital treatment" in connection
+with the forcible feeding of women. It was a foul libel, he declared,
+for violence and brutality have no place in hospitals. A memorial signed
+by 116 well-known physicians was addressed to the Prime Minister
+protesting against the practice of forcible feeding, and pointing out to
+him in detail the grave dangers attaching to it.
+
+So much for medical testimony against a form of brutality which
+continued and still continues in our English prisons, as a punishment
+for women who are there for consciences' sake. As for the testimony of
+the victims, it makes a volume of most revolting sort. Mrs. Leigh, the
+first victim, is a woman of sturdy constitution, else she could scarcely
+have survived the experience. Thrown into Birmingham prison after the
+Asquith demonstration, she had broken the windows of her cell, and as a
+punishment was sent to a dark and cold punishment cell. Her hands were
+handcuffed, behind her during the day, and at night in front of her body
+_with the palms out_. She refused to touch the food that was brought to
+her, and three days after her arrival she was taken to the doctor's
+room. What she saw was enough to terrify the bravest. In the centre of
+the room was a stout chair resting on a cotton sheet. Against the wall,
+as if ready for action stood four wardresses. The junior doctor was also
+on hand. The senior doctor spoke, saying: "Listen carefully to what I
+have to say. I have orders from my superior officers that you are not to
+be released even on medical grounds. If you still refrain from food I
+must take other measures to compel you to take it." Mrs. Leigh replied
+that she did still refuse, and she said further that she knew that she
+could not legally be forcibly fed because an operation could not be
+performed without the consent of the patient if sane. The doctor
+repeated that he had his orders and would carry them out. A number of
+wardresses then fell upon Mrs. Leigh, held her down and tilted her chair
+backward. She was so taken by surprise that she could not resist
+successfully that time. They managed to make her swallow a little food
+from a feeding cup. Later two doctors and the wardresses appeared in her
+cell, forced Mrs. Leigh down to the bed and held her there. To her
+horror the doctors produced a rubber tube, two yards in length, and this
+he began to stuff up her nostril. The pain was so dreadful that she
+shrieked again and again. Three of the wardresses burst into tears and
+the junior doctor begged the other to desist. Having had his orders from
+the Government, the doctor persisted and the tube was pushed down into
+the stomach. One of the doctors, standing on a chair and holding the
+tube high poured liquid food through a funnel almost suffocating the
+poor victim. "The drums of my ears," she said afterwards, "seemed to be
+bursting. I could feel the pain to the end of the breast bone. When at
+last the tube was withdrawn it felt as if the back of my nose and throat
+were being torn out with it."
+
+In an almost fainting condition Mrs. Leigh was taken back to the
+punishment cell and laid on her plank bed. The ordeal was renewed day
+after day. The other prisoners suffered similar experiences.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+The militant movement was at this point when, in October, 1909, I made
+my first visit to the United States. I shall never forget the excitement
+of my landing, the first meeting with the American "reporter," an
+experience dreaded by all Europeans. In fact the first few days seemed a
+bewildering whirl of reporters and receptions, all leading up to my
+first lecture at Carnegie Hall on October 25th. The huge hall was
+entirely filled, and an enormous crowd of people thronged the streets
+outside for blocks. With me on the stage were several women whom I had
+met in Europe, and in the chair was an old friend, Mrs. Stanton Blatch,
+whose early married life had been spent in England. The great crowd
+before me, however, was made up of strangers, and I could not know how
+they would respond to my story. When I rose to speak a deep hush fell,
+but at my first words: "I am what you call a hooligan--" a great shout
+of warm and sympathetic laughter shook the walls. Then I knew that I had
+found friends in America. And this all the rest of the tour
+demonstrated. In Boston the committee met me with a big grey automobile
+decorated in the colours of our Union, and that night at Tremont Temple
+I spoke to an audience of 2,500 people all most generous in their
+responsiveness. In Baltimore professors, and students from Johns
+Hopkins University acted as stewards of the meeting. I greatly enjoyed
+my visit to Bryn Mawr College and to Rosemary Hall, a wonderful school
+for girls in Connecticut. In Chicago, I met, among other notable people,
+Miss Jane Addams and Mrs. Ella Flagg Young, superintendent of schools.
+My visit to Canada will always be remembered, especially Toronto, where
+the mayor, dressed in the chains of his office, welcomed me. I met too
+the venerable Goldwin Smith, since dead.
+
+Everywhere I found the Americans kind and keen, and I cannot say too
+much for the wonderful hospitality they showed me. The women I found
+were remarkably interested in social welfare. The work of the women's
+clubs struck me very favourably, and I thought these institutions a
+perfect basis for a suffrage movement. But at that time, 1909, the
+suffrage movement in the United States was in a curious state of
+quiescence. A large number of women with whom I came in contact appeared
+to think it only just that they should have a vote, but few seemed to
+realise any actual need of it. Some, it is true, were beginning to
+connect the vote with the reforms for which they were working so
+unselfishly and so devotedly. It was when talking with the younger women
+that I came to feel that under the surface of things in America, a
+strong suffrage movement was stirring. Those young women, leaving their
+splendid colleges to begin life were realising in a very intelligent
+fashion that they needed and would be obliged to secure for themselves a
+political status.
+
+On December 1st I sailed on the _Mauretania_ for England, and on
+arriving I learned that the prison sentence which hung over me while the
+petitions case had been argued, was discharged, some unknown friend
+having paid my fine while I was on the ocean.
+
+The year 1910 began with a general election, precipitated by the House
+of Lords' rejection of Mr. Lloyd-George's 1909 budget. The Liberal Party
+went to the country with promises of taxes on land values. They promised
+also abolition of the veto power of the Lords, Irish Home Rule,
+disestablishment of the Church of Wales, and other reforms. Woman
+suffrage was not directly promised, but Mr. Asquith pledged that, if
+retained in office, he would introduce an electoral reform bill which
+could be amended to include woman suffrage. The Unionists under the
+leadership of Mr. Balfour, had tariff reform for their programme, and
+they offered not even a vague promise of a possible suffrage measure.
+Yet we, as usual, went into the constituencies and opposed the Liberal
+Party. We had no faith in Mr. Asquith's pledge, and besides, if we had
+failed to oppose the party in power we should but have invited Mr.
+Asquith and Mr. Balfour to enter into an agreement not to deal with the
+suffrage, with the view of keeping the cause permanently outside
+practical politics. We were in something of the same position as the
+Irish Nationalists in 1885, when neither the Liberal nor the
+Conservative leaders would include home rule in their programme. The
+Irish opposed the Liberal Party, with the result that it was returned by
+such a narrow majority that the Liberal Government was dependent on the
+Irish vote in Parliament in order to remain in office. On this account
+they were obliged to bring in a Home Rule Bill.
+
+The other suffrage societies and many of the Liberal women begged us not
+to oppose the Liberal party at this election. We were implored to waive
+our claim "just this once" in view of the importance of the struggle
+between the Commons and the House of Lords over the budget. We replied
+that the same plea had been made in 1906 when we were implored to waive
+our claim "just this once" on account of the fiscal issue. For women
+there was only one political issue, we said, and that was the issue of
+their own enfranchisement. The dispute between the Lords and the Commons
+was far less vital than the claims of the people--represented in this
+case by women--to be admitted to citizenship. From our point of view
+both Houses of Parliament were unrepresentative until women had a voice
+in choosing legislators and influencing law making.
+
+We opposed Liberal candidates in forty constituencies, and in almost
+every one of these the Liberal majorities were reduced and no less than
+eighteen seats were wrested from the Liberal candidates. It really was a
+terrible election for the Government. Mr. Asquith travelled from one
+constituency to another accompanied by a body guard of detectives, and
+official "chuckers out," whose sole duty was to eject women, and men as
+well, who interrupted his meetings on the question of Votes for Women.
+The halls where he spoke had the windows boarded up or the glass covered
+with strong wire netting. Every thoroughfare leading to the halls was
+barricaded, traffic was suspended, and large forces of police were on
+guard. The most extraordinary precautions were taken to protect the
+Prime Minister. At one place he went to his meeting strongly guarded and
+by way of a secret pathway that led through gooseberry bushes and a
+cabbage patch to a back door. After the meeting he escaped through the
+same door and was solemnly guided along a path heavily laid with sawdust
+to deaden his footsteps, to a concealed motor car, where he sat until
+the crowd had all dispersed.
+
+The other ministers had to resort to similar precautions. They lived
+under the constant protection of body-guards. Their meetings were
+policed in a manner without precedent. Of course no women were admitted
+to their meetings, but they got in just the same. Two women hid for
+twenty-five hours in the rafters of a hall in Louth where Mr.
+Lloyd-George spoke. They were arrested, but not until after they had
+made their demonstration. Two others hid under a platform for twenty-two
+hours in order to question the Prime Minister. I could continue this
+record almost indefinitely.
+
+We had printed a wonderful poster showing the process of forcible
+feeding, and we used it on hoardings everywhere. We told the electors
+that the "Liberal Party," the people's friend, had imprisoned 450 women
+for the crime of asking for a vote. They were torturing women at that
+time in Holloway. It was splendid ammunition and it told. The Liberal
+Party was returned to power, but with their majority over all sections
+of the House of Commons swept away. The Asquith Government were
+dependent now for their very existence on the votes of the Labour Party
+and the Irish Nationalists.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+The first months of 1910 were occupied by the re-elected Government in a
+struggle to keep control of affairs. A coalition with the Irish party,
+the leaders of which agreed, if the Home Rule bill were advanced, to
+stand by the budget. No publicly announced coalition with the Labour
+Party was made at that time, Keir Hardie, at the annual conference of
+the party, announcing that they would continue to be independent of the
+Government. This was important to us because it meant that the Labour
+Party, instead of entering into an agreement to give general support to
+all Government measures, would be free to oppose the Government in the
+event of the continued withholding of a franchise bill. Other things
+combined to make us hopeful that the tide had turned in our favour. It
+was hinted to us that the Government were weary of our opposition and
+were ready to end the struggle in the only possible way, providing they
+could do so without appearing to yield to coercion. We therefore, early
+in February, declared a truce to all militancy.
+
+Parliament met on February 15th and the King's speech was read on
+February 21st. No mention of women's suffrage was made in the speech nor
+was any private member successful in winning a place in the ballot for a
+suffrage bill. However, since the situation, on account of the proposed
+abolition of the Lord's power of veto, was strained and abnormal, we
+decided to wait patiently for a while. It was confidently expected that
+another general election would have to be held before the contentions
+between the two Houses of Parliament were settled, and this event
+unquestionably would have occurred, not later than June, but for the
+unexpected death of King Edward VII. This interrupted the strained
+situation. The passing of the King served as an occasion for the
+temporary softening of animosities and produced a general disposition to
+compromise on all troubled issues. The question of women's
+enfranchisement was taken up again in this spirit, and in a manner
+altogether creditable to the members with whom the movement originated.
+
+A strictly non-party committee on women's suffrage had been established
+in the House of Commons in 1887, mainly through the efforts of Miss
+Lydia Becker, whom I have mentioned before as the Susan B. Anthony of
+the English suffrage movement. In 1906, for reasons not necessary to
+enumerate, the original committee had been allowed to lapse, the Liberal
+supporters of women's suffrage forming a committee of their own. Now, in
+this period of good feeling, at the suggestion of certain members, led
+by Mr. H. N. Brailsford, not himself a member of Parliament, formed
+another non-party body which they called the Conciliation Committee. Its
+object was declared to be the bringing together of the full strength of
+suffragists of the House of Commons, regardless of party affiliation,
+and of framing a suffrage measure that could be passed by their united
+effort. The Earl of Lytton accepted the chairmanship of the committee
+and Mr. Brailsford was made its secretary. The committee consisted of
+twenty-five Liberals, seventeen Conservatives, six Irish Nationalists,
+and six members of the Labour Party. Under difficulties which I can
+hardly hope to make clear to American readers the committee laboured to
+frame a bill which should win the support of all sections of the House.
+The Conservatives insisted on a moderate bill, whilst the Liberals were
+concerned lest the terms of the bill should add to the power of the
+propertied classes. The original suffrage bill, drafted by my husband.
+Dr. Pankhurst, giving the vote to women on equal terms with men, was
+abandoned, and a bill was drawn up along the lines of the existing
+municipal franchise law. The basis of the municipal franchise is
+occupation, and the Conciliation Bill, as first drafted, proposed to
+extend the Parliamentary vote to women householders, and to women
+occupiers of business premises paying ten pounds rental and upwards. It
+was estimated that about ninety-five per cent. of the women who would be
+enfranchised under the bill were householders. This, in England, does
+not mean a person occupying a whole house. Any one who inhabits even a
+single room over which he or she exercises full control is a
+householder.
+
+The text of the Conciliation Bill was submitted to all the suffrage
+societies and other women's organisations, and it was accepted by every
+one of them. Our official newspaper said editorially: "We of the Women's
+Social and Political Union are prepared to share in this united and
+peaceful action. The new bill does not give us all that we want, but we
+are for it if others are also for it."
+
+It seemed certain that an overwhelming majority of the House of Commons
+were for the bill, and were prepared to vote it into law. Although we
+knew that it could not possibly pass unless the Government agreed that
+it should, we hoped that the leaders of all parties and the majority of
+their followers would unite in an agreement that the bill should pass.
+This settlement by consent is rare in the English Parliament, but some
+extremely important and hard fought measures have been carried thus. The
+extension of the franchise in 1867 is a case in point.
+
+The Conciliation Bill was introduced into the House of Commons on June
+14th, 1910, by Mr. D. J. Shackleton, and was received with the most
+extraordinary enthusiasm. The newspapers remarked on the feeling of
+reality which marked the attitude of the House towards the bill. It was
+plain that the members realised that here was no academic question upon
+which they were merely to debate and to register their opinions, but a
+measure which was intended to be carried through all its stages and to
+be written into English law. The enthusiasm of the House swept all over
+the Kingdom. The medical profession sent in a memorial in its favour,
+signed by more than three hundred of the most distinguished men and
+women in the profession. Memorials from writers, clergymen, social
+workers, artists, actors, musicians, were also sent. The Women's Liberal
+Federation met and unanimously resolved to ask the Prime Minister to
+give full facilities to the bill. Some advanced spirits in the
+Federation actually proposed to send then and there a deputation to the
+House of Commons with the resolution, but this proposal was rejected as
+savouring too much of militancy. A request for an interview was sent to
+Mr. Asquith, and he replied promising to receive, at an early day,
+representatives of both the Liberal Women's Federation and of the
+National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies.
+
+The joint deputation was received by Mr. Asquith on June 21st, and Lady
+M'Laren, as a representative of the Women's Liberal Federation, spoke
+very directly to her party's leader. She said in part: "If you refuse
+our request we shall have to go to the country and say you, who are
+against the veto of the House of Lords, are placing a veto on the House
+of Commons by refusing to allow a second reading of this bill."
+
+Mr. Asquith replied warily that he could not decide alone on such a
+serious matter, but would have to consult his Cabinet, the majority of
+whom, he admitted, were suffragists. Their decision, he said, would be
+given in the House of Commons.
+
+[Illustration: OVER 1,000 WOMEN HAD BEEN IN PRISON--BROAD ARROWS IN THE
+1910 PARADE]
+
+The Women's Social and Political Union arranged a demonstration in
+support of the Conciliation Bill, the greatest that had, up to that
+time, been made. It was a national, indeed an inter-national affair in
+which all the suffrage groups took part, and its massed ranks were so
+great that the procession required an hour and a half to pass a given
+point. At the head marched six hundred and seventeen women, white clad
+and holding long silver staves tipped with the broad arrow. These were
+the women who had suffered imprisonment for the cause, and all along the
+line of march they received a tribute of cheers from the public. The
+immense Albert Hall, the largest hall in England, although it was packed
+from orchestra to the highest gallery, was not large enough to hold all
+the marchers. Amid great joy and enthusiasm Lord Lytton delivered a
+stirring address in which he confidently predicted the speedy advance of
+the bill. The women, he declared, had every reason to believe that their
+enfranchisement was actually at hand.
+
+It was true that the time for passing a suffrage bill was ripe. Not in
+fifty years had the way been so clear, because the momentary absence of
+ordinary legislation left the field open for an electoral reform bill.
+Yet when the Prime Minister was asked in the House of Commons whether he
+would give the members an early opportunity for discussion, the answer
+was not encouraging. The Government, said Mr. Asquith, were prepared to
+give time before the close of the session for full debate and division
+on second reading, but they could not allow any further facilities. He
+stated frankly that he personally did not want the bill to pass, but the
+Government realised that the House of Commons ought to have an
+opportunity, if that was their deliberate desire, for effectively
+dealing with the whole question.
+
+This cryptic utterance was taken by the majority of the suffragists, by
+the press and by the public generally to mean that the Government were
+preparing gracefully to yield to the undoubted desire of the House of
+Commons to pass the bill. But the Women's Social and Political Union
+were doubtful. Mr. Asquith's remark was ambiguous, and was capable of
+being interpreted in several ways. It could mean that he was prepared to
+accept the verdict of the majority and let the bill pass through all its
+stages. That of course would be the only way to allow the House
+opportunity effectively to deal with the whole question. On the other
+hand Mr. Asquith might be intending to let the bill pass through its
+debating stages and be afterwards smothered in committee. We feared
+treachery, but in view of the announcement that the Government had set
+apart July 11 and 12 for debate on the second reading, we preserved a
+spirit of waiting calm. July 26th had been fixed as the day for the
+adjournment of Parliament, and if the bill was voted on favourably on
+the 12th there would be ample time to take it through its final stages.
+When a bill passes its second reading it is normally sent upstairs to a
+Grand Committee which sits while the House of Commons is transacting
+other business, and thus the committee stage can proceed without special
+facilities. The bill does not go back to the House until the report
+stage is reached, at which time the third and last reading occurs. After
+that the bill goes to the House of Lords. A week at most is all that is
+required for this procedure. A bill may be referred to the Whole House,
+and in this case it cannot be brought up for its committee stage unless
+it is given special facilities. In our paper and in many public
+speeches we urged that the members vote to send the bill to a Grand
+Committee.
+
+Some days before the bill reached its second reading it was rumoured
+that Mr. Lloyd-George was going to speak against it, but we refused to
+credit this. Unfair to women as Mr. Lloyd-George had shown himself in
+various ways, he had consistently posed as a staunch friend of women's
+suffrage, and we could not believe that he would turn against us at the
+eleventh hour. Mr. Winston Churchill, whose speech to the women of
+Dundee I quoted in a previous chapter, the promoters of the Bill also
+counted upon, as it was known that he had more than once expressed
+sympathy with its objects. But when the debates began we found both of
+these ardent suffragists arrayed against the bill. Mr. Churchill, after
+making a conventional anti-suffrage speech, in which he said that women
+did not need the ballot, and that they really had no grievances,
+attacked the Conciliation Bill because the class of women who would be
+enfranchised under it did not suit him. Some women, he conceded, ought
+to be enfranchised, and he thought the best plan would be to select
+"some of the best women of all classes" on considerations of property,
+education and earning capacity. These special franchises would be
+carefully balanced, "so as not on the whole to give undue advantage to
+the property vote against the wage earning vote." A more fantastic
+proposal and one less likely to find favour in the House of Commons
+could not possibly be imagined. Mr. Churchill's second objection to the
+bill was that it was anti-democratic! It seemed to us that anything was
+more democratic than his proposed "fancy" franchises.
+
+Mr. Lloyd-George said that he agreed with everything Mr. Churchill had
+said "both relevant and irrelevant." He made the amazing assertion that
+the Conciliation Committee that had drafted the bill was a "committee of
+women meeting outside the House." And that this committee said to the
+House of Commons not only that they must vote for a women's suffrage
+bill but "You must vote for the particular form upon which we agree, and
+we will not even allow you to deliberate upon any other form."
+
+Of course these statements were wholly false. The Conciliation Bill was
+drafted by men, and it was introduced because the Government had refused
+to bring in a party measure. The suffragists would have been only too
+glad to have had the Government deliberate on a broader form of
+suffrage. Because they refused to deliberate on any form, this private
+bill was introduced.
+
+This fact was brought forward in the course of Mr. Lloyd-George's
+speech. It had been urged, said he, that this bill was better than none
+at all, but why should that be the alternative? "What is the other?"
+called out a member, but Mr. Lloyd-George dodged the question with a
+careless "Well, I cannot say for the present."
+
+Later on he said: "If the promoters of this bill say that they regard
+the second reading merely as an affirmation of the principle of women's
+suffrage, and if they promise that when they re-introduce the bill it
+will be in a form which will enable the House of Commons to move any
+amendment either for restriction or extension I shall be happy to vote
+for this bill."
+
+Mr. Philip Snowden, replying to this, said: "We will withdraw this bill
+if the Right Honourable gentleman, on behalf of the Government, or the
+Prime Minister himself will undertake to give to this House the
+opportunity of discussing and carrying through its various stages
+another form of franchise bill. If we cannot get that, then we shall
+prosecute this bill."
+
+The Government made no reply at all to this, and the debate proceeded.
+Thirty-nine speeches were made, the Prime Minister showing plainly in
+his speech that he intended to use all his power to prevent the bill
+becoming law. He began by saying that a franchise measure ought never to
+be sent to a Grand Committee, but to one of the Whole House. He said
+also that his conditions, that the majority of women should show beyond
+any doubt that they desired the franchise, and that the bill be
+democratic in its terms, had not been complied with.
+
+When the division was taken it was seen that the Conciliation Bill had
+passed its second reading by a majority of 109, a larger majority than
+the Government's far famed budget or the House of Lords Resolution had
+received. In fact no measure during that Parliament had received so
+great a majority--299 members voted for it as against 190 opposed. Then
+the question arose as to which committee should deal with the bill. Mr.
+Asquith had said that all franchise bills should go to a Committee of
+the Whole House, so that in the division his words moved many sincere
+friends of the bill to send it there. Others understood that this was a
+mischievous course, but were afraid of incurring the anger of the Prime
+Minister. Of course all the anti-suffragists voted the same way, and
+thus the bill went to the Whole House.
+
+Even then the bill could have been advanced to its final reading. The
+House had time on their hands, as virtually all important legislative
+work was halted because of the deadlock between the Lords and the
+Commons. Following the death of the King a conference of leaders of the
+Conservative and the Liberal Parties had been arranged to adjust the
+matters at issue, and this conference had not yet reported. Hence
+Parliament had little business on hand. The strongest possible pressure
+was brought to bear upon the Government to give facilities to the
+Conciliation Bill. A number of meetings were held in support of the
+bill. The Men's Political Union for Women's Enfranchisement, the Men's
+League for Women's Suffrage and the Conciliation Committee held a joint
+meeting in Hyde Park. Some of the old school of suffragists held another
+large meeting in Trafalgar Square. The Women's Social and Political
+Union, on July 23rd, which was the anniversary of the day in 1867 on
+which working men, agitating for their vote, had pulled down the Hyde
+Park railings, held another enormous demonstration there. A space of
+half a square mile was cleared, forty platforms erected, and two great
+processions marched from east and west to the meeting. Many other
+suffrage societies co-operated with us on this occasion. On the very
+day of that meeting Mr. Asquith wrote to Lord Lytton refusing to allow
+any more time for the bill during that session.
+
+Those who still had faith that the Government could be induced to do
+justice to women set their hopes on the autumn session of Parliament.
+Resolutions urging the Government to give the bill facilities during the
+autumn were sent, not only by the suffrage associations but from many
+organisations of men. The Corporations of thirty-eight cities, including
+Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, Dublin and Cork, sent resolutions to
+this effect. Cabinet Ministers were besieged with requests to receive
+deputations of women, and since the country was on the verge of a
+general election, and the Liberal Party wanted the services of women,
+their requests could not altogether be ignored. Mr. Asquith, early in
+October, received a deputation of women from his own constituency of
+East Fife, but all he had to tell them was that the bill could not be
+advanced that year. "What about next year?" They asked, and he replied
+shortly: "Wait and see."
+
+It had been exceedingly difficult, during these troublous days, to hold
+all the members of the W. S. P. U. to the truce, and when it became
+perfectly apparent that the Conciliation Bill was doomed, war was again
+declared. At a great meeting held in Albert Hall on November 10th, I
+myself threw down the gage of battle. I said, because I wanted the whole
+matter to be clearly understood by the public as well as by our members:
+"This is the last constitutional effort of the Women's Social and
+Political Union to secure the passage of the bill into law. If the Bill,
+in spite of our efforts, is killed by the Government, then first of all,
+I have to say there is an end of the truce. If we are met by the
+statement that there is no power to secure on the floor of the House of
+Commons time for our measure, then our first step is to say, 'We take it
+out of your hands, since you fail to help us, and we resume the
+direction of the campaign ourselves.'"
+
+Another deputation, I declared, must go to the House of Commons to carry
+a petition to the Prime Minister. I myself would lead, and if no one
+cared to follow me I would go alone. Instantly, all over the hall, women
+sprang to their feet crying out, "Mrs. Pankhurst, I will go with you!"
+"I will go!" "I will go!" And I knew that our brave women were as ever
+ready to give themselves, their very lives, if need be, for the cause of
+freedom.
+
+The autumn session convened on Friday, November 18th, and Mr. Asquith
+announced that Parliament would be adjourned on November 28th. While his
+speech was in progress, 450 women, in small groups, to keep within the
+strict letter of the law, were marching from Caxton Hall and from the
+headquarters of the Union.
+
+[Illustration: THE HEAD OF THE DEPUTATION ON BLACK FRIDAY
+
+_November, 1910_]
+
+How to tell the story of that dreadful day, Black Friday, as it lives in
+our memory--how to describe what happened to English women at the behest
+of an English Government, is a difficult task. I will try to tell it as
+simply and as accurately as possible. The plain facts, baldly stated, I
+am aware will strain credulity.
+
+Remember that the country was on the eve of a general election, and that
+the Liberal Party needed the help of Liberal women. This fact made the
+wholesale arrest and imprisonment of great numbers of women, who were
+demanding the passage of the Conciliation Bill, extremely undesirable
+from the Government's point of view. The Women's Liberal Federations
+also wanted the passage of the Conciliation Bill, although they were not
+ready to fight for it. What the Government feared, was that the Liberal
+women would be stirred by our sufferings into refraining from doing
+election work for the party. So the Government conceived a plan whereby
+the Suffragettes were to be punished, were to be turned back and
+defeated in their purpose of reaching the House, but would not be
+arrested. Orders were evidently given that the police were to be present
+in the streets, and that the women were to be thrown from one uniformed
+or ununiformed policeman to another, that they were to be so rudely
+treated that sheer terror would cause them to turn back. I say orders
+were given and as one proof of this I can first point out that on all
+previous occasions the police had first tried to turn back the
+deputations and when the women persisted in going forward, had arrested
+them. At times individual policemen had behaved with cruelty and malice
+toward us, but never anything like the unanimous and wholesale brutality
+that was shown on Black Friday.
+
+The Government very likely hoped that the violence of the police
+towards the women would be emulated by the crowds, but instead the
+crowds proved remarkably friendly. They pushed and struggled to make a
+clear pathway for us, and in spite of the efforts of the police my small
+deputation actually succeeded in reaching the door of the Strangers'
+Entrance. We mounted the steps to the enthusiastic cheers of the
+multitudes that filled the streets, and we stood there for hours gazing
+down on a scene which I hope never to look upon again.
+
+At intervals of two or three minutes small groups of women appeared in
+the square, trying to join us at the Strangers' Entrance. They carried
+little banners inscribed with various mottoes, "Asquith Has Vetoed Our
+Bill," "Where There's a Bill There's a Way," "Women's Will Beats
+Asquith's Won't," and the like. These banners the police seized and tore
+in pieces. Then they laid hands on the women and literally threw them
+from one man to another. Some of the police used their fists, striking
+the women in their faces, their breasts, their shoulders. One woman I
+saw thrown down with violence three or four times in rapid succession,
+until at last she lay only half conscious against the curb, and in a
+serious condition was carried away by kindly strangers. Every moment the
+struggle grew fiercer, as more and more women arrived on the scene.
+Women, many of them eminent in art, in medicine and science, women of
+European reputation, subjected to treatment that would not have been
+meted out to criminals, and all for the offence of insisting upon the
+right of peaceful petition.
+
+[Illustration: FOR HOURS SCENES LIKE THIS WERE ENACTED ON BLACK FRIDAY
+
+_November, 1910_]
+
+This struggle lasted for about an hour, more and more women successfully
+pushing their way past the police and gaining the steps of the House.
+Then the mounted police were summoned to turn the women back. But,
+desperately determined, the women, fearing not the hoofs of the horses
+or the crushing violence of the police, did not swerve from their
+purpose. And now the crowds began to murmur. People began to demand why
+the women were being knocked about; why, if they were breaking the law,
+they were not arrested; why, if they were not breaking the law, they
+were not permitted to go on unmolested. For a long time, nearly five
+hours, the police continued to hustle and beat the women, the crowds
+becoming more and more turbulent in their defence. Then, at last the
+police were obliged to make arrests. One hundred and fifteen women and
+four men, most of them bruised and choked and otherwise injured, were
+arrested.
+
+While all this was going on outside the House of Commons, the Prime
+Minister was obstinately refusing to listen to the counsels of some of
+the saner and more justice-loving members of the House. Keir Hardie, Sir
+Alfred Mondell and others urged Mr. Asquith to receive the deputation,
+and Lord Castlereagh went so far as to move as an amendment to a
+Government proposal, another proposal which would have compelled the
+Government to provide immediate facilities to the Conciliation Bill. We
+heard of what was going on, and I sent in for one and another friendly
+member and made every possible effort to influence them in favour of
+Lord Castlereagh's amendment. I pointed to the brutal struggle that was
+going on in the square, and I begged them to go back and tell the others
+that it must be stopped. But, distressed as some of them undoubtedly
+were, they assured me that there was not the slightest chance for the
+amendment.
+
+"Is there not a single _man_ in the House of Commons," I cried, "one who
+will stand up for us, who will make the House see that the amendment
+must go forward?"
+
+Well, perhaps there were men there, but all save fifty-two put their
+party loyalty before their manhood, and, because Lord Castlereagh's
+proposal would have meant censure of the Government, they refused to
+support it. This did not happen, however, until Mr. Asquith had resorted
+to his usual crafty device of a promise of future action. In this
+instance he promised to make a statement on behalf of the Government on
+the following Tuesday.
+
+The next morning the suffrage prisoners were arraigned in police court.
+Or rather, they were kept waiting outside the court room while Mr.
+Muskett, who prosecuted on behalf of the Chief Commissioner of Police,
+explained to the astounded magistrate that he had received orders from
+the Home Secretary that the prisoners should all be discharged. Mr.
+Churchill it was declared, had had the matter under careful
+consideration, and had decided that "no public advantage would be gained
+by proceeding with the prosecution, and accordingly no evidence would
+be given against the prisoners."
+
+Subdued laughter and, according to the newspapers, some contemptuous
+booing were raised in the court, and when order was restored the
+prisoners were brought in in batches and told that they were discharged.
+
+On the following Tuesday the W. S. P. U. held another meeting of the
+Women's Parliament in Caxton Hall to hear the news from the House of
+Commons. Mr. Asquith said: "The Government will, if they are still in
+power, give facilities in the next Parliament for effectively proceeding
+with a franchise bill which is so framed as to admit of free amendment."
+He would not promise that this would be done during the first year of
+Parliament.
+
+We had demanded facilities for the Conciliation Bill, and Mr. Asquith's
+promise was too vague and too ambiguous to please us. The Parliament now
+about to be dissolved had lasted a scant ten months. The next one might
+not last longer. Therefore, Mr. Asquith's promise, as usual, meant
+nothing at all. I said to the women, "I am going to Downing Street. Come
+along, all of you." And we went.
+
+We found a small force of police in Downing Street, and we easily broke
+through their line and would have invaded the Prime Minister's residence
+had not reinforcements of police arrived on the scene. Mr. Asquith
+himself appeared unexpectedly, and as we thought, very opportunely.
+Before he could have realised what was happening he found himself
+surrounded by angry Suffragettes. He was well hooted and, it is said,
+well shaken, before he was rescued by the police. As his taxicab rushed
+away some object struck one of the windows, smashing it.
+
+Another Cabinet Minister, Mr. Birrell, unwittingly got into the midst of
+the melee, and I am obliged to record that he was pretty thoroughly
+hustled. But it is not true that his leg was injured by the women. His
+haste to jump into a taxicab resulted in a slightly sprained ankle.
+
+That night and the following day windows were broken in the houses of
+Sir Edward Grey, Mr. Winston Churchill, Mr. Lewis Harcourt and Mr. John
+Burns; and also in the official residences of the Premier and the
+Chancellor of the Exchequer.
+
+That week 160 Suffragettes were arrested, but all except those charged
+with window-breaking or assault were discharged. This amazing court
+action established two things: First, that when the Home Secretary
+stated that he had no responsibility for the prosecution and sentencing
+of Suffrage prisoners, he told a colossal falsehood; and second, that
+the Government fully realised that it was bad election tactics to be
+responsible for the imprisonment of women of good character who were
+struggling for citizenship.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+Almost immediately after the events chronicled in the preceding chapter
+I sailed for my second tour through the United States. I was delighted
+to find a thoroughly alive and progressive suffrage movement, where
+before had existed with most people only an academic theory in favour of
+equal political rights between men and women. My first meeting, held in
+Brooklyn, was advertised by sandwich women walking through the principal
+streets of the city, quite like our militant suffragists at home. Street
+meetings, I found, were now daily occurrences in New York. The Women's
+Political Union had adopted an election policy, and throughout the
+country as far west as I travelled, I found women awakened to the
+necessity of political action instead of mere discussion of suffrage.
+
+My second visit to America, like my first one, is clouded in my memory
+with sorrow. Very soon after my return to England a beloved sister, Mrs.
+Mary Clarke died. My sister, who was a most ardent suffragist and a
+valued worker in the Women's Social and Political Union, was one of the
+women who was shockingly maltreated in Parliament Square on Black
+Friday. She was also one of the women who, a few days later, registered
+their protest against the Government by throwing a stone through the
+window of an official residence. For this act she was sent to Holloway
+prison for a term of one month. Released on December 21st, it was plain
+to those who knew her best that her health had suffered seriously from
+the dreadful experience of Black Friday and the after experience of
+prison. She died suddenly on Christmas day, to the profound sorrow of
+all her associates. Hers was not the only life that was sacrificed as a
+result of that day. Other deaths occurred, mostly from hearts weakened
+by overstrain. Miss Henria Williams died on January 2nd, 1911, from
+heart failure. Miss Cecelia Wolseley Haig was another victim. Ill
+treatment on Black Friday resulted in her case in a painful illness
+which ended, after a year of intense suffering, in her death on December
+21st, 1911.
+
+It is not possible to publish a full list of all the women who have died
+or have been injured for life in the course of the suffrage agitation in
+England. In many cases the details have never been made public, and I do
+not feel at liberty to record them here. A very celebrated case, which
+is public property, is that of Lady Constance Lytton, sister of the Earl
+of Lytton, who acted as chairman of the Conciliation Committee. Lady
+Constance had twice in 1909 gone to prison as a result of suffrage
+activities, and on both occasions had been given special privileges on
+account of her rank and family influence. In spite of her protests and
+her earnest pleadings to be accorded the same treatment as other
+suffrage prisoners, the snobbish and cowardly authorities insisted in
+retaining Lady Constance in the hospital cells and discharging her
+before the expiration of her sentence. This was done on a plea of her
+ill health, and it was true that she suffered from a valvular disease of
+the heart.
+
+[Illustration: RIOT SCENES ON BLACK FRIDAY
+
+_November, 1910_]
+
+Smarting under the sense of the injustice done her comrades in this
+discrimination, Lady Constance Lytton did one of the most heroic deeds
+to be recorded in the history of the suffrage movement. She cut off her
+beautiful hair and otherwise disguised herself, put on cheap and ugly
+clothing, and as "Jane Warton" took part in a demonstration at
+Newcastle, again suffering arrest and imprisonment. This time the
+authorities treated her as an ordinary prisoner. Without testing her
+heart or otherwise giving her an adequate medical examination, they
+subjected her to the horrors of forcible feeding. Owing to her fragile
+constitution she suffered frightful nausea each time, and when on one
+occasion the doctor's clothing was soiled, he struck her contemptuously
+on the cheek. This treatment was continued until the identity of the
+prisoner suddenly became known. She was, of course, immediately
+released, but she never recovered from the experience, and is now a
+hopeless invalid.[2]
+
+I want to say right here, that those well-meaning friends on the outside
+who say that we have suffered these horrors of prison, of hunger strikes
+and forcible feeding, because we desired to martyrise ourselves for the
+cause, are absolutely and entirely mistaken. We never went to prison in
+order to be martyrs. We went there in order that we might obtain the
+rights of citizenship. We were willing to break laws that we might force
+men to give us the right to make laws. That is the way men have earned
+their citizenship. Truly says Mazzini that the way to reform has always
+led through prison.
+
+The result of the general election, which took place in January, 1911,
+was that the Liberal Party was again returned to power. Parliament met
+on January 31st, but the session formally opened on February 6th with
+the reading of the King's speech. The programme for the session included
+the Lords' veto measure, Home Rule, payment for members of Parliament,
+and the abolishment of plural voting. Invalid insurance was also
+mentioned and certain amendments to the old age pension bill. Women's
+suffrage was not mentioned. Nevertheless, we were singularly lucky, the
+first three places in the ballot being secured by members of the
+Conciliation Committee. Mr. Philips, an Irish member, drew the first
+place, but as the Irish party had decided not to introduce any bills
+that session, he yielded to Sir George Kemp, who announced that he would
+use his place for the purpose of taking a second reading debate on the
+new Conciliation Bill. The old bill had been entitled: "A Bill to give
+the Vote to Women Occupiers," a title that made amendment difficult. The
+new bill bore the more flexible title, "A Bill to Confer the
+Parliamentary Franchise on Women," thus doing away with one of Mr.
+Lloyd-George's most plausible objections to it. The L10 occupation
+clause was omitted, doing away with another objection, that of the
+possibility of "faggot voting," that is, of a rich man conferring the
+vote on a family of daughters by the simple expedient of making them
+tenants of slices of his own property. The Conciliation Bill now read:
+"1. Every woman possessed of a household qualification within the
+meaning of the Representation of the People Act (1884) shall be entitled
+to be registered as a voter, and when registered to vote in the county
+or borough in which the qualifying premises are situated.
+
+"2. For the purposes of this Act a woman shall not be disqualified by
+marriage for being registered as a voter, provided that a husband and
+wife shall not both be registered as voters in the same Parliamentary
+borough or county division."
+
+This bill met with even warmer approval than the first one, because it
+was believed that it would win votes from those members who felt that
+the original measure had fallen short of being truly democratic.
+Nevertheless, the Prime Minister showed from the first that he intended
+to oppose it, as he had all previous suffrage measures. He announced
+that all Fridays up to Easter and also all time on Tuesdays and
+Wednesdays usually allowed for private members' bills were to be
+occupied with consideration of Government measures. Hardly a Liberal
+voice was raised against this arbitrary ruling. The Irish members indeed
+were delighted with it, since it gave the Home Rule Bill an advantage.
+The Labour members seemed complacent, and the rest of the coalition were
+indifferent. One back bench Liberal went so far as to rise and thank the
+Prime Minister for the courtesy with which the gagging process was
+accomplished. There was some show of fight made by the Opposition, but
+Conservative indignation was tempered by the reflection that the
+precedent established might be followed to advantage when their party
+came into power.
+
+Sir George Kemp then announced that he would take May 5th for the second
+reading of the Conciliation Bill, and the supporters of the bill,
+according to their various convictions, set to work to further its
+interests. The conviction of the W. S. P. U. was that Mr. Asquith's
+Government would never allow the bill to pass until they were actually
+forced to do so, and we adopted our own methods to secure a definite
+pledge from the Government that they would give facilities to the bill.
+
+In April of that year the census was to be taken, and we organised a
+census resistance on the part of women. According to our law the census
+of the entire kingdom must be taken every ten years on a designated day.
+Our plan was to reduce the value of the census for statistical purposes
+by refusing to make the required returns. Two ways of resistance
+presented themselves. The first and most important was direct resistance
+by occupiers who should refuse to fill in the census papers. This laid
+the register open to a fine of L5 or a month's imprisonment, and thus
+required the exercise of considerable courage. The second means of
+resistance was evasion--staying away from home during the entire time
+that the enumerators were taking the census. We made the announcement of
+this plan and instantly there ensued a splendid response from women and
+a chorus of horrified disapproval from the conservative public. The
+_Times_ voiced this disapproval in a leading article, to which I
+replied, giving our reasons for the protest. "The Census," I wrote, "is
+a numbering of the people. Until women count as people for the purpose
+of representation in the councils of the nation as well as for purposes
+of taxation, we shall refuse to be numbered."
+
+On the subject of laws made by men--without the assistance of women--for
+the protection of women and children, I have a very special feeling.
+From my experience as poor law guardian and as Registrar of Births and
+Deaths, I know how ridiculously, say rather how tragically, these laws
+fall short of protection. Take for instance the vaunted "Children's
+Charter" of 1906, the measure which spread Mr. Lloyd-George's fame
+throughout the world. A volume could be filled with the mistakes and the
+cruelties of that Act, the object of which is the preservation and
+improvement of child life. A distinguishing characteristic of the Act is
+that it puts most of the responsibility for neglect of children on the
+backs of the mothers, who, under the laws of England, have no rights as
+parents. Two or three especially striking cases of this kind came into
+notice about this time, and gave the census resistance an additional
+justification.
+
+The case of Annie Woolmore was a very pitiful one. She was arrested and
+sentenced to Holloway for six weeks for neglecting her children. The
+evidence showed that the woman lived with her husband and children in a
+miserable hovel, which would have been almost impossible to keep clean
+even if there had been water in the house. As it was the poor soul, who
+was in ill health and weakened by deprivation, had to carry all the
+water she used across a great distance. The children as well as the
+house were very dirty, it was true, but the children were well nourished
+and kindly treated. The husband, a labourer, out of work much of the
+time, testified that his wife "starved herself to feed the kids." Yet
+she had violated the terms of the "Children's Charter" and she went to
+prison. I am glad to say that owing to the efforts of suffragists she
+was pardoned and provided with a better home.
+
+Another case was that of Helen Conroy, who was charged with living in
+one wretched room, with her husband and seven children, the youngest a
+month old. According to the law the mother was forbidden to have this
+infant in bed with her overnight, yet part of the charge against her was
+that the child was found sleeping in a box of damp straw. Doubtless she
+would have preferred a cradle, or even a box of dry straw. But direst
+poverty made the cradle impossible and the conditions of the tenement
+kept the straw damp. Both parents in this instance were sent to prison
+for three months at hard labour. The magistrate casually remarked that
+the house in which these poor people lived had been condemned two years
+before, but some respectable property owner was still collecting rents
+from it.
+
+Another poor mother, evicted from her home because she could not pay the
+rent, took her four children out into the open country, and when found
+was sleeping with them in a gravel pit. She was sent to prison for a
+month and the children went to the workhouse.
+
+These sorry mothers, logical results of the subjection of women, are
+enough in themselves to justify almost any defiance of a Government who
+deny the women the right to work out their destinies in freedom. No
+pledge having been secured from the Prime Minister by April 1st, we
+carried out, and most successfully, our census resistance. Many
+thousands of women all over the country refused or evaded the returns. I
+returned my census paper with the words "No vote no census" written
+across it, and other women followed that example with similar messages.
+One woman filled in the blank with full information about her one man
+servant, and added that there were many women but no more persons in her
+household. In Birmingham sixteen women of wealth packed their houses
+with women resisters. They slept on the floors, on chairs and tables,
+and even in the baths. The head of a large college threw open the
+building to 300 women. Many women in other cities held all night parties
+for friends who wished to remain away from home. In some places
+unoccupied houses were rented for the night by resisters, who lay on the
+bare boards. Some groups of women hired gipsy vans and spent the night
+on the moors.
+
+In London we gave a great concert at Queen's Hall on Census night. Many
+of us walked about Trafalgar Square until midnight and then repaired to
+Aldwich skating rink, where we amused ourselves until morning. Some
+skated while others looked on, and enjoyed the admirable musical and
+theatrical entertainment that helped to pass the hours. We had with us a
+number of the brightest stars in the theatrical world, and they were
+generous in their contributions. It being Sunday night, the chairman had
+to call on each of the artists for a "speech" instead of a song or other
+turn. An all-night restaurant near at hand did a big business, and on
+the whole the resisters had a very good time. The Scala Theatre was the
+scene of another all-night entertainment.
+
+There was a good deal of curiosity to see what the Government would
+devise in the way of a punishment for the rebellious women, but the
+Government realised the impossibility of taking punitive action, and Mr.
+John Burns, who, as head of the Local Government Board, was responsible
+for the census, announced that they had decided to treat the affair with
+magnanimity. The number of evasions, he declared, was insignificant. But
+every one knew that this was the exact reverse of the facts.
+
+[Illustration: IN THIS MANNER THOUSANDS OF WOMEN THROUGHOUT THE KINGDOM
+SLEPT IN UNOCCUPIED HOUSES OVER CENSUS NIGHT]
+
+The Conciliation Bill was debated on May 5th and passed its second
+reading by the enormous majority of 137. And now the public and a
+section of the press united in a strong demand that the Government yield
+to the undoubted will of the House and grant facilities to the bill. The
+Conciliation Committee sent a deputation of members to the Prime
+Minister to remind him of his pre-election promise that the House of
+Commons should have an opportunity of dealing with the whole question
+of woman suffrage, but they succeeded only in getting his assurance that
+he had the matter under consideration. Late in the month the
+announcement was made in the House that the Government would not grant
+facilities during that session, but, since the new bill fulfilled the
+conditions named by the Prime Minister, and was now capable of
+amendment, the Government recognised it to be their duty to grant
+facilities in some session of the present Parliament. They would be
+prepared next session, when the bill had been again read for the second
+time, either as a result of obtaining a good place in the ballot, or (if
+that did not happen) by a grant of a Government day for the purpose, to
+give a week, which they understood to be the time suggested as
+reasonable by the promoters for its further stages.
+
+This pledge was made in order to deter the W. S. P. U. from making a
+militant demonstration in connection with the coronation of the King.
+
+Keir Hardie asked if the Government would, by means of a closure or
+otherwise, make certain that the bill would go through in the week, and
+the Prime Minister replied, "No, I cannot give an assurance of that
+kind. After all, it is a problem of the very greatest magnitude."
+
+This reply seemed to make the Government's pledge practically worthless.
+The Conciliation Committee also realised the possibilities of the bill
+being talked out, and Lord Lytton wrote to Mr. Asquith and asked him for
+assurances that the facilities offered were intended not for academic
+discussion but for effective opportunity for carrying the bill. He also
+asked that the week offered should not be construed rigidly but that,
+providing the committee stage were got through in the time, additional
+days for the report and third reading stages might be forthcoming.
+Reasonable opportunity for making use of the closure was also asked. To
+Lord Lytton's letter the Prime Minister replied as follows:
+
+
+     _My dear Lytton_--In reply to your letter on the subject of the
+     Women's Enfranchisement Bill, I would refer you to some
+     observations recently made in a speech at the National Liberal Club
+     by Sir Edward Grey, which accurately expresses the intention of the
+     Government.
+
+     It follows (to answer your specific inquiries), that the "week"
+     offered will be interpreted with reasonable elasticity, that the
+     Government will interpose no reasonable obstacle to the proper use
+     of the closure, and that if (as you suggest) the bill gets through
+     committee in the time proposed, the extra days required for report
+     and third reading will not be refused.
+
+     The Government, though divided in opinion on the merits of the
+     bill, are unanimous in their determination to give effect, not only
+     in the letter but in the spirit, to the promise in regard to
+     facilities which I made on their behalf before the last general
+     election.
+                        Yours etc.,
+                                  H. H. ASQUITH.
+
+
+Sceptical up to this point, the W. S. P. U. was now convinced that the
+Government were sincere in their promise to give the bill full
+facilities in the following year. We held a joyful mass meeting in
+Queen's Hall and I again declared that warfare against the Government
+was at an end. Our new policy was the inauguration of a great holiday
+campaign, with the object of making victory in 1912 absolutely certain.
+Electors must be aroused, members of Parliament held to their
+allegiance. Women must be organised in order that questions that vitally
+affect the social welfare of the country might be placed before them. I
+chose Scotland and Wales as the scenes of my holiday labours.
+
+I may say that our confidence was fully shared by the public at large.
+The belief in Mr. Asquith's pledge was accurately reflected in a leader
+published in _The Nation_, which said: "From the moment the Prime
+Minister signed the frank and ungrudging letter to Lord Lytton which
+appeared in last Saturday's newspapers, women became, in all but the
+legal formality, voters and citizens. For at least two years, if not for
+longer, nothing has been lacking save a full and fair opportunity for
+the House of Commons to translate its convictions into the precise
+language of a statute. That opportunity has been promised for next
+session and promised in terms and under conditions which ensure
+success."
+
+The only thing, as we thought, that we had to fear were wrecking
+amendments to the bill, and in the new by-election policy which we
+adopted we worked against all candidates of every party who would refuse
+to promise, not only to support the Conciliation Committee to carry the
+bill, but also to vote against any amendment the committee thought
+dangerous. We believed that we had covered every possibility of
+disaster. But we had something yet to learn of the treachery of the
+Asquith Ministry and their capacity for cold-blooded lying.
+
+Mr. Lloyd-George from the first was an open enemy of the bill, but since
+we had no doubt of the sincerity of the Prime Minister, we could only
+conclude that Mr. Lloyd-George had detached himself from the main body
+of the Government and had become the self-constituted leader of the
+opposition. In an address to a large Liberal group Mr. Lloyd-George
+advised that Liberal members be asked to ballot for a place for a
+"democratic measure," in order that such a measure might claim the Prime
+Minister's pledge for facilities next session. In one or two other
+speeches he made vague allusions to the possibilities of introducing
+another suffrage bill. His own idea was to amend the bill to give a vote
+to wives of all electors--making married women voters in virtue of their
+husband's qualification. The inevitable effect of such an amendment
+would be to wreck the bill, since it would have enfranchised about
+6,000,000 women in addition to the million and a half who would benefit
+by the original terms of the bill. Such a wholesale addition to the
+electorate was never known in England; the number enfranchised by the
+Reform Bill of 1832 being hardly more than half a million. The Reform
+Bill of 1867 admitted a million new voters, and that of 1884 perhaps two
+millions. The absurdity of Mr. Lloyd-George's proposition was such that
+we did not regard it seriously. We did not allow his opposition to give
+us serious alarm until a day in August when a Welsh member, Mr. Leif
+Jones, asked the Prime Minister from the floor of the House, whether he
+was aware that his promise for facilities for the Conciliation Bill in
+the next session was being claimed exclusively for that bill, and asked
+further for a statement that the promised facilities would be equally
+granted to any other suffrage bill that might secure a second reading
+and was capable of amendment. Mr. Lloyd-George, speaking for the
+Government, replied that they could not undertake to give facilities to
+more than one bill on the same subject, but that any bill which,
+satisfying these tests, secured a second reading, would be treated by
+them as falling within their engagements.
+
+Astounded at this plain evasion of a sacred promise, Lord Lytton again
+wrote to the Prime Minister, reviewing the entire matter, and asking for
+another statement of the Government's intentions. The following is the
+text of Mr. Asquith's reply:
+
+
+     _My dear Lytton_--I have no hesitation in saying that the promises
+     made by, and on behalf of the Government, in regard to giving
+     facilities to the Conciliation Bill, will be strictly adhered to,
+     both in letter and in spirit.
+                                            Yours sincerely,
+                                                H. H. ASQUITH.
+     August 23, 1911.
+
+
+Again we were reassured, and our confidence in the Premier's pledge
+remained unshaken throughout the campaign, although Mr. Lloyd-George
+continued to throw out hints that the promises of facilities for the
+bill were altogether illusory. We could not believe him, and when, two
+months later, I was asked in America: "When will English women vote?" I
+replied with perfect conviction, "Next year."
+
+This was in Louisville, Kentucky, where I attended the 1911 Annual
+Convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
+
+I remember this third visit to the United States with especial
+pleasure. I was the guest in New York of Dr. and Mrs. John Winters
+Brannan, and through the courtesy of Dr. Brannan, who is at the head of
+all the city hospitals, I saw something of the penal system and the
+institutional life of America. We visited the workhouse and the
+penitentiary on Blackwell's Island, and although I am told that these
+places are not regarded as model institutions, I can assure my readers
+that they are infinitely superior to the English prisons where women are
+punished for trying to win their political freedom. In the American
+prisons, much as they lacked in some essentials, I saw no solitary
+confinement, no rule of silence, no deadly air of officialdom. The food
+was good and varied, and above all there was an air of kindness and good
+feeling between the officials and the prisoners that is almost wholly
+lacking in England.
+
+But, after all, in the United States as in other countries, the problem
+of the relations between unfranchised women and the State remains
+unsolved and unsatisfactory. One night my friends took me to that sombre
+and terrible institution, the Night Court for Women. We sat on the bench
+with the magistrate, and he very courteously explained everything to us.
+The whole business was heart-breaking. All the women, with one
+exception--an old drunkard--were charged with solicitation. Most of them
+were of high type by nature. It all seemed so hopeless, and it was clear
+that they were victims of an evil system. Their conviction was a
+foregone conclusion.
+
+The magistrate said that in most cases the reason for their coming
+there was economic. One case of a little cigar maker, who said very
+simply that she only went on the streets when out of work, and that when
+in work she earned $8 a week, was very tragic and touching. I could not
+keep the Night Court out of my speeches after that. The whole dreadful
+injustice of women's lives seemed mirrored in that place.
+
+I went as far west as the Pacific Coast on this visit, spending
+Christmas day in Seattle, and for the first time seeing a community
+where women and men existed on terms of exact equality. It was a
+delightful experience. As I wrote home to our members, the men of the
+western States seemed to my eyes eager, earnest, rough men, building a
+great community in a great hurry, but never have I seen greater respect,
+courtesy and chivalry shown to women than in that one Suffrage State it
+has been my privilege to visit.
+
+I am getting a little ahead of my story, however. It was in November,
+when I was in the city of Minneapolis, that a crushing blow descended on
+the English suffragists. I learned of this through cabled despatches in
+the newspapers and from private cables, and was so staggered that I
+could scarcely command myself sufficiently to fill my immediate
+engagements. This was the news, that the Government had broken their
+plighted word and had deliberately destroyed the Conciliation Bill. My
+first wild thought, on hearing of this act of treachery, was to cancel
+all engagements and return to England, but my final decision to remain
+afterwards proved the right one, because the women at home, without a
+moment's loss of time, struck the answering blow, guided by that
+insight which has been characteristic of every act of the members of our
+Union. I did not return to England until January 11, 1912, and by that
+time great deeds had been done. Our movement had entered upon a new and
+more vigorous stage of militancy.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[2] Lady Constance Lytton's story has been thrillingly told in her book
+"Prisons and Prisoners," Heinemann.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III
+
+THE WOMEN'S REVOLUTION
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Parliament had reassembled on October 25th, 1911, and the first move on
+the part of the Government was, to say the least of it, rather
+unpropitious. The Prime Minister submitted two motions, the first one
+empowering them to take all the time of the House during the remainder
+of the session, and the second guillotining discussion on the Insurance
+Bill so as to force the measure through before Christmas. One day only
+was allotted to the clauses relating to women in that bill. These
+clauses were notoriously unfair; they provided for sickness insurance of
+about four million women and unemployment insurance of no women at all.
+Under the provision of the bill eleven million men were ensured against
+sickness and about two and a half million against unemployment. Women
+were given lower benefits for the same premium as men, and premiums paid
+out of the family income were credited solely to the men's account. The
+bill as drafted provided no form of insurance for wives, mothers and
+daughters who spent their lives at home working for the family. It
+penalised women for staying in the home, which most men agree is women's
+only legitimate sphere of action. The amended bill grudgingly allowed
+aside from maternity benefits, a small insurance, on rather difficult
+terms, for workingmen's wives.
+
+Thus the re-elected Government's first utterance to women was one of
+contempt; and this was followed, on November 7th, by the almost
+incredible announcement that the Government intended, at the next
+session, to introduce a manhood suffrage bill. This announcement was not
+made in the House of Commons, but to a deputation of men from the
+People's Suffrage Federation, a small group of people who advocated
+universal adult suffrage. The deputation, which was very privately
+arranged for, was received by Mr. Asquith, and the then Master of
+Elibank (Chief Liberal Whip). The spokesman asked Mr. Asquith to bring
+in a Government measure for universal adult suffrage, including adult
+women. The Prime Minister replied that the Government had pledged
+facilities for the Conciliation Bill, which was as far as they were
+prepared to go in the matter of women's suffrage. But, he added, the
+Government intended in the next session to introduce and to pass through
+all its stages a genuine reform bill which would sweep away existing
+qualifications for the franchise, and substitute a single qualification
+of residence. The bill would apply to adult males only, but it would be
+so framed as to be open to a woman suffrage amendment in case the House
+of Commons desired to make that extension and amendment.
+
+This portentous announcement came like a bolt from the blue, and there
+was strong condemnation of the Government's treachery to women. Said the
+_Saturday Review_:
+
+
+     With absolutely no demand, no ghost of a demand, for more votes
+     for men, and with--beyond all cavil--a very strong demand for votes
+     for women, the Government announce their Manhood Suffrage Bill and
+     carefully evade the other question! For a naked, avowed plan of
+     gerrymandering no Government surely ever did beat this one.
+
+
+The _Daily Mail_ said that the "policy which Mr. Asquith proposes is
+absolutely indefensible." And the _Evening Standard and Globe_ said: "We
+are no friends of female suffrage, but anything more contemptible than
+the attitude assumed by the Government it is difficult to imagine."
+
+If the Government hoped to deceive any one by their dishonest reference
+to the possibility of a woman suffrage amendment, they were
+disappointed. Said the _Evening News_:
+
+
+     Mr. Asquith's bombshell will blow the Conciliation Bill to
+     smithereens, for it is impossible to have a manhood suffrage for
+     men and a property qualification for women. True, the Premier
+     consents to leave the question of women's suffrage to the House,
+     but he knows well enough what the decision of the House will be.
+     The Conciliation Bill had a chance, but the larger measure has none
+     at all.
+
+
+I have quoted these newspaper leaders to show you that our opinion of
+the Government's action was shared even by the press. Universal suffrage
+in a country where women are in a majority of one million is not likely
+to happen in the lifetime of any reader of this volume, and the
+Government's generous offer of a possible amendment was nothing more
+than a gratuitous insult to the suffragists.
+
+The truce, naturally, came to an abrupt end. The W. S. P. U. wrote to
+the Prime Minister, saying that consternation had been aroused by the
+Government's announcement, and that it had been decided accordingly to
+send a deputation representing the Women's Social and Political Union to
+wait upon himself and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, on the evening of
+November 21st. The purpose of the deputation was to demand that the
+proposed manhood suffrage bill be abandoned, and that in its place
+should be introduced a Government measure giving equal franchise rights
+to men and women. A similar letter was despatched to Mr. Lloyd-George.
+
+Six times before on occasions of crisis had the W. S. P. U. requested an
+interview with Mr. Asquith, and each time they had been refused. This
+time the Prime Minister replied that he had decided to receive a
+deputation of the various suffrage societies on November 17th,
+"including your own society, if you desire it." It was proposed that
+each society appoint four representatives as members of the deputation
+which would be received by the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the
+Exchequer.
+
+Nine suffrage societies sent representatives to the meeting, our own
+representatives being Christabel Pankhurst, Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, Miss
+Annie Kenney, Lady Constance Lytton and Miss Elizabeth Robins.
+Christabel and Mrs. Lawrence spoke for the Union, and they did not
+hesitate to accuse the two Ministers to their faces of having grossly
+tricked and falsely misled women. Mr. Asquith, in his reply to the
+deputation, resented these imputations.
+
+He had kept his pledge, he insisted, in regard to the Conciliation
+Bill. He was perfectly willing to give facilities to the Bill, if the
+women preferred that to an amendment to his reform bill. Moreover, he
+denied that he had made any new announcement. As far back as 1908 he had
+distinctly declared that the Government regarded it as a sacred duty to
+bring forward a manhood suffrage bill before that Parliament came to an
+end. It was true that the Government did not carry out that binding
+obligation, and it was also true that until the present time nothing
+more was ever said about a manhood suffrage bill, but that was not the
+Government's fault. The crisis of the Lord's veto, had momentarily
+displaced the bill. Now he merely proposed to fulfil his promise made in
+1908, and also his promise about giving facilities to the Conciliation
+Bill. He was ready to keep both promises. Well he knew that those
+promises were incompatible, that the fulfilment of both was therefore
+impossible, and Christabel told him so bluntly and fearlessly. "We are
+not satisfied," she warned him, and the Prime Minister said acidly: "I
+did not expect to satisfy _you_."
+
+The reply of the W. S. P. U. was immediate and forceful. Led by Mrs.
+Pethick Lawrence, our women went out with stones and hammers and broke
+hundreds of windows in the Home Office, the War and Foreign Offices, the
+Board of Education, the Privy Council Office, the Board of Trade, the
+Treasury, Somerset House, the National Liberal Club, several post
+offices, the Old Banqueting Hall, the London and South Western Bank, and
+a dozen other buildings, including the residence of Lord Haldane and
+Mr. John Burns. Two hundred and twenty women were arrested and about 150
+of them sent to prison for terms varying from a week to two months.
+
+One individual protest deserves mention because of its prophetic
+character. In December Miss Emily Wilding Davison was arrested for
+attempting to set fire to a letter box at Parliament Street Post Office.
+In court Miss Davison said that she did it as a protest against the
+Government's treachery, and as a demand that women's suffrage be
+included in the King's speech. "The protest was meant to be serious,"
+she said, "and so I adopted a serious course. In past agitation for
+reform the next step after window-breaking was incendiarism, in order to
+draw the attention of the private citizens to the fact that this
+question of reform was their concern as well as that of women."
+
+Miss Davison received the severe sentence of six months' imprisonment
+for her deed.
+
+To this state of affairs I returned from my American tour. I had the
+comfort of reflecting that my imprisoned comrades were being accorded
+better treatment than the early prisoners had known. Since early in 1910
+some concessions had been granted, and some acknowledgment of the
+political character of our offences had been made. During the brief
+period when these scant concessions to justice were allowed, the hunger
+strike was abandoned and prison was robbed of its worst horror, forcible
+feeding. The situation was bad enough, however, and I could see that it
+might easily become a great deal worse. We had reached a stage at which
+the mere sympathy of members of Parliament, however sincerely felt, was
+no longer of the slightest use. Reminding our members this, in the first
+speeches made after returning to England I asked them to prepare
+themselves for more action. If women's suffrage was not included in the
+next King's speech we should have to make it absolutely impossible for
+the Government to touch the question of the franchise.
+
+The King's speech, when Parliament met in February, 1912, alluded to the
+franchise question in very general terms. Proposals, it was stated,
+would be brought forward for the amendment of the law with respect to
+the franchise and the registration of electors. This might be construed
+to mean that the Government were going to introduce a manhood suffrage
+bill or a bill for the abolition of plural voting, which had been
+suggested in some quarters as a substitute for the manhood suffrage
+bill. No precise statement of the Government's intentions was made, and
+the whole franchise question was left in a cloud of uncertainty. Mr. Agg
+Gardner, a Unionist member of the Conciliation Committee, drew the third
+place in the ballot, and he announced that he should reintroduce the
+Conciliation Bill. This interested us very slightly, for knowing its
+prospect of success to have been destroyed, for we were done with the
+Conciliation Bill forever. Nothing less than a Government measure would
+henceforth satisfy the W. S. P. U., because it had been clearly
+demonstrated that only a Government measure would be allowed to pass the
+House of Commons. With sublime faith, or rather with a deplorable lack
+of political insight, the Women's Liberal Federation and the National
+Union of Women's Suffrage Societies professed full confidence in the
+proposed amendment to a manhood suffrage bill, but we knew how futile
+was that hope. We saw that the only course to take was to offer
+determined opposition to any measure of suffrage that did not include as
+an integral part, equal suffrage for men and women.
+
+On February 16th we held a large meeting of welcome to a number of
+released prisoners who had served two and three months for the window
+breaking demonstration that had taken place in the previous November. At
+this meeting we candidly surveyed the situation and agreed on a course
+of action which we believed would be sufficiently strong to prevent the
+Government from advancing their threatened franchise bill. I said on
+this occasion:
+
+"We don't want to use any weapons that are unnecessarily strong. If the
+argument of the stone, that time-honoured official political argument,
+is sufficient, then we will never use any stronger argument. And that is
+the weapon and the argument that we are going to use next time. And so I
+say to every volunteer on our demonstration, 'Be prepared to use that
+argument.' I am taking charge of the demonstration, and that is the
+argument I am going to use. I am not going to use it for any sentimental
+reason, I am going to use it because it is the easiest and the most
+readily understood. Why should women go to Parliament Square and be
+battered about and insulted, and most important of all, produce less
+effect than when we throw stones? We tried it long enough. We submitted
+for years patiently to insult and assault. Women had their health
+injured. Women lost their lives. We should not have minded if that had
+succeeded, but that did not succeed, and we have made more progress with
+less hurt to ourselves by breaking glass than ever we made when we
+allowed them to break our bodies.
+
+"After all, is not a woman's life, is not her health, are not her limbs
+more valuable than panes of glass? There is no doubt of that, but most
+important of all, does not the breaking of glass produce more effect
+upon the Government? If you are fighting a battle, that should dictate
+your choice of weapons. Well, then, we are going to try this time if
+mere stones will do it. I do not think it will ever be necessary for us
+to arm ourselves as Chinese women have done, but there are women who are
+prepared to do that if it should be necessary. In this Union we don't
+lose our heads. We only go as far as we are obliged to go in order to
+win, and we are going forward with this next protest demonstration in
+full faith that this plan of campaign, initiated by our friends whom we
+honour to-night, will on this next occasion prove effective."
+
+Ever since militancy took on the form of destruction of property the
+public generally, both at home and abroad, has expressed curiosity as to
+the logical connection between acts such as breaking windows, firing
+pillar boxes, et cetera, and the vote. Only a complete lack of
+historical knowledge excuses that curiosity. For every advance of men's
+political freedom has been marked with violence and the destruction of
+property. Usually the advance has been marked by war, which is called
+glorious. Sometimes it has been marked by riotings, which are deemed
+less glorious but are at least effective. That speech of mine, just
+quoted, will probably strike the reader as one inciting to violence and
+illegal action, things as a rule and in ordinary circumstances quite
+inexcusable. Well, I will call the reader's attention to what was, in
+this connection, a rather singular coincidence. At the very hour when I
+was making that speech, advising my audience of the political necessity
+of physical revolt, a responsible member of the Government, in another
+hall, in another city, was telling his audience precisely the same
+thing. This Cabinet Minister, the right Honourable C. E. H. Hobhouse,
+addressing a large anti-suffrage meeting in his constituency of Bristol,
+said that the suffrage movement was not a political issue because its
+adherents had failed to prove that behind this movement existed a large
+public demand. He declared that "In the case of the suffrage demand
+there has not been the kind of popular sentimental uprising which
+accounted for Nottingham Castle in 1832 or the Hyde Park railings in
+1867. There has not been a great ebullition of popular feeling."
+
+The "popular sentimental uprising" to which Mr. Hobhouse alluded was the
+burning to the ground of the castle of the anti-suffrage Duke of
+Newcastle, and of Colwick Castle, the country seat of another of the
+leaders of the opposition against the franchise bill. The militant men
+of that time did not select uninhabited buildings to be fired. They
+burned both these historic residences over their owners' heads. Indeed,
+the wife of the owner of Colwick Castle died as a result of shock and
+exposure on that occasion. No arrests were made, no men imprisoned. On
+the contrary the King sent for the Premier, and begged the Whig
+Ministers favourable to the franchise bill not to resign, and intimated
+that this was also the wish of the Lords who had thrown out the bill.
+Molesworth's History of England says:
+
+
+     These declarations were imperatively called for. The danger was
+     imminent and the Ministers knew it and did all that lay in their
+     power to tranquillise the people, and to assure them that the bill
+     was only delayed and not finally defeated.
+
+
+For a time the people believed this, but soon they lost patience, and
+seeing signs of a renewed activity on the part of the anti-suffragists,
+they became aggressive again. Bristol, the very city in which Mr.
+Hobhouse made his speech, was set on fire. The militant reformers burned
+the new gaol, the toll houses, the Bishop's Palace, both sides of
+Queen's Square, including the Mansion House, the custom house, the
+excise office, many warehouses, and other private property, the whole
+valued at over L100,000--five hundred thousand dollars. It was as a
+result of such violence, and in fear of more violence, that the reform
+bill was hurried through Parliament and became law in June, 1832.
+
+Our demonstration, so mild by comparison with English men's political
+agitation, was announced for March 4th, and the announcement created
+much public alarm. Sir William Byles gave notice that he would "ask the
+Secretary of State for the Home Department whether his attention had
+been drawn to a speech by Mrs. Pankhurst last Friday night, openly and
+emphatically inciting her hearers to violent outrage and the destruction
+of property, and threatening the use of firearms if stones did not prove
+sufficiently effective; and what steps he proposes to take to protect
+Society from this outbreak of lawlessness."
+
+The question was duly asked, and the Home Secretary replied that his
+attention had been called to the speech, but that it would not be
+desirable in the public interest to say more than this at present.
+
+Whatever preparations the police department were making to prevent the
+demonstration, they failed because, while as usual, we were able to
+calculate exactly what the police department were going to do, they were
+utterly unable to calculate what we were going to do. We had planned a
+demonstration for March 4th, and this one we announced. We planned
+another demonstration for March 1st, but this one we did not announce.
+Late in the afternoon of Friday, March 1st, I drove in a taxicab,
+accompanied by the Hon. Secretary of the Union, Mrs. Tuke and another of
+our members, to No. 10 Downing Street, the official residence of the
+Prime Minister. It was exactly half past five when we alighted from the
+cab and threw our stones, four of them, through the window panes. As we
+expected we were promptly arrested and taken to Cannon Row police
+station. The hour that followed will long be remembered in London. At
+intervals of fifteen minutes relays of women who had volunteered for the
+demonstration did their work. The first smashing of glass occurred in
+the Haymarket and Piccadilly, and greatly startled and alarmed both
+pedestrians and police. A large number of the women were arrested, and
+everybody thought that this ended the affair. But before the excited
+populace and the frustrated shop owners' first exclamation had died
+down, before the police had reached the station with their prisoners,
+the ominous crashing and splintering of plate glass began again, this
+time along both sides of Regent Street and the Strand. A furious rush of
+police and people towards the second scene of action ensued. While their
+attention was being taken up with occurrences in this quarter, the third
+relay of women began breaking the windows in Oxford Circus and Bond
+Street. The demonstration ended for the day at half past six with the
+breaking of many windows in the Strand. The _Daily Mail_ gave this
+graphic account of the demonstration:
+
+
+     From every part of the crowded and brilliantly lighted streets came
+     the crash of splintered glass. People started as a window shattered
+     at their side; suddenly there was another crash in front of them;
+     on the other side of the street; behind--everywhere. Scared shop
+     assistants came running out to the pavements; traffic stopped;
+     policemen sprang this way and that; five minutes later the streets
+     were a procession of excited groups, each surrounding a woman
+     wrecker being led in custody to the nearest police station.
+     Meanwhile the shopping quarter of London had plunged itself into a
+     sudden twilight. Shutters were hurriedly fitted; the rattle of iron
+     curtains being drawn came from every side. Guards of
+     commissionaires and shopmen were quickly mounted, and any
+     unaccompanied lady in sight, especially if she carried a hand bag,
+     became an object of menacing suspicion.
+
+
+At the hour when this demonstration was being made a conference was
+being held at Scotland Yard to determine what should be done to prevent
+the smashing of windows on the coming Monday night. But we had not
+announced the hour of our March 4th protest. I had in my speech simply
+invited women to assemble in Parliament Square on the evening of March
+4th, and they accepted the invitation. Said the _Daily Telegraph_:
+
+
+     By six o'clock the neighbourhood Houses of Parliament were in a
+     stage of siege. Shop keepers in almost every instance barricaded
+     their premises, removed goods from the windows and prepared for the
+     worst. A few minutes before six o'clock a huge force of police,
+     amounting to nearly three thousand constables, was posted in
+     Parliament Square, Whitehall, and streets adjoining, and large
+     reserves were gathered in Westminster Hall and Scotland Yard. By
+     half past eight Whitehall was packed from end to end with police
+     and public. Mounted constables rode up and down Whitehall keeping
+     the people on the move. At no time was there any sign of danger....
+
+
+The demonstration had taken place in the morning, when a hundred or more
+women walked quietly into Knightsbridge and walking singly along the
+streets demolished nearly every pane of glass they passed. Taken by
+surprise the police arrested as many as they could reach, but most of
+the women escaped.
+
+[Illustration: THE ARGUMENT OF THE BROKEN WINDOW PANE]
+
+For that two days' work something like two hundred suffragettes were
+taken to the various police stations, and for days the long procession
+of women streamed through the courts. The dismayed magistrates found
+themselves facing, not only former rebels, but many new ones, in some
+cases, women whose names, like that of Dr. Ethel Smyth, the composer,
+were famous throughout Europe. These women, when arraigned, made clear
+and lucid statements of their positions and their motives, but
+magistrates are not schooled to examine motives. They are trained to
+think only of laws and mostly of laws protecting property. Their ears
+are not tuned to listen to words like those spoken by one of the
+prisoners, who said: "We have tried every means--processions and
+meetings--which were of no avail. We have tried demonstrations, and now
+at last we have to break windows. I wish I had broken more. I am not in
+the least repentant. Our women are working in far worse condition than
+the striking miners. I have seen widows struggling to bring up their
+children. Only two out of every five are fit to be soldiers. What is the
+good of a country like ours? England is absolutely on the wane. You only
+have one point of view, and that is the men's, and while men have done
+the best they could, they cannot go far without the women and the
+women's views. We believe the whole is in a muddle too horrible to think
+of."
+
+The coal miners were at that time engaging in a terrible strike, and the
+Government, instead of arresting the leaders, were trying to come to
+terms of peace with them. I reminded the magistrate of this fact, and I
+told him that what the women had done was but a fleabite by comparison
+with the miners' violence. I said further: "I hope our demonstration
+will be enough to show the Government that the women's agitation is
+going on. If not, if you send me to prison, I will go further to show
+that women who have to help pay the salaries of Cabinet Ministers, and
+your salary too, sir, are going to have some voice in the making of the
+laws they have to obey."
+
+I was sentenced to two months' imprisonment. Others received sentences
+ranging from one week to two months, while those who were accused of
+breaking glass above five pounds in value, were committed for trial in
+higher courts. They were sent to prison on remand, and when the last of
+us were behind the grim gates, not only Holloway but three other women's
+prisons were taxed to provide for so many extra inmates.
+
+It was a stormy imprisonment for most of us. A great many of the women
+had received, in addition to their sentences, "hard labour," and this
+meant that the privileges at that time accorded to Suffragettes, as
+political offenders, were withheld. The women adopted the hunger strike
+as a protest, but as the hint was conveyed to me that the privileges
+would be restored, I advised a cessation of the strike. The remand
+prisoners demanded that I be allowed to exercise with them, and when
+this was not answered they broke the windows of their cells. The other
+suffrage prisoners, hearing the sound of shattered glass, and the
+singing of the Marseillaise, immediately broke their windows. The time
+had long gone by when the Suffragettes submitted meekly to prison
+discipline. And so passed the first days of my imprisonment.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+The panic stricken Government did not rest content with the imprisonment
+of the window breakers. They sought, in a blind and blundering fashion,
+to perform the impossible feat of wrecking at a blow the entire militant
+movement. Governments have always tried to crush reform movements, to
+destroy ideas, to kill the thing that cannot die. Without regard to
+history, which shows that no Government have ever succeeded in doing
+this, they go on trying in the old, senseless way.
+
+For days before the two demonstrations described in the last chapter our
+headquarters in Clement's Inn had been under constant observation by the
+police, and on the evening of March 5th an inspector of police and a
+large force of detectives suddenly descended on the place, with warrants
+for the arrest of Christabel Pankhurst and Mr. and Mrs. Pethick
+Lawrence, who with Mrs. Tuke and myself were charged with "conspiring to
+incite certain persons to commit malicious damage to property." When the
+officers entered they found Mr. Pethick Lawrence at work in his office,
+and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence in her flat upstairs. My daughter was not in
+the building. The Lawrences, after making brief preparations drove in a
+taxicab to Bow Street Station, where they spent the night. The police
+remained in possession of the offices, and detectives were despatched
+to find and arrest Christabel. But that arrest never took place.
+Christabel Pankhurst eluded the entire force of detectives and uniformed
+police, trained hunters of human prey.
+
+Christabel had gone home, and at first, on hearing of the arrest of Mr.
+and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, had taken her own arrest for granted. A
+little reflection however showed her the danger in which the Union would
+stand if completely deprived of its accustomed leadership, and seeing
+that it was her duty to avoid arrest, she quietly left the house. She
+spent that night with friends who, next morning, helped her to make the
+necessary arrangements and saw her safely away from London. The same
+night she reached Paris, where she has since remained. My relief, when I
+learned of her flight, was very great, because I knew that whatever
+happened to the Lawrences and myself, the movement would be wisely
+directed, this in spite of the fact that the police remained in full
+possession of headquarters.
+
+The offices in Clement's Inn were thoroughly ransacked by the police, in
+a determined effort to secure evidence of conspiracy. They went through
+every desk, file and cabinet, taking away with them two cab loads of
+books and papers, including all my private papers, photographs of my
+children in infancy, and letters sent me by my husband long ago. Some of
+these I never saw again.
+
+The police also terrorised the printer of our weekly newspaper, and
+although the paper came out as usual, about a third of its columns were
+left blank. The headlines, however, with the ensuing space mere white
+paper produced a most dramatic effect. "History Teaches" read one
+headline to a blank space, plainly indicating that the Government were
+not willing to let the public know some of the things that history
+teaches. "Women's Moderation" suggested that the destroyed paragraph
+called for comparison of the women's window breaking with men's greater
+violence in the past. Most eloquent of all was the editorial page,
+absolutely blank except for the headline, "A Challenge!" and the name at
+the foot of the last column, Christabel Pankhurst. What words could have
+breathed a prouder defiance, a more implacable resolve? Christabel was
+gone, out of the clutches of the Government, yet she remained in
+complete possession of the field. For weeks the search for her went
+relentlessly on. Police searched every railway station, every train,
+every sea port. The police of every city in the Kingdom were furnished
+with her portrait. Every amateur Sherlock Holmes in England joined with
+the police in finding her. She was reported in a dozen cities, including
+New York. But all the time she was living quietly in Paris, in daily
+communication with the workers in London, who within a few days were
+once more at their appointed tasks. My daughter has remained in France
+ever since.
+
+Meanwhile, I found myself in the anomalous position of a convicted
+offender serving two months' prison sentence, and of a prisoner on
+remand waiting to be charged with a more serious offence. I was in very
+bad health, having been placed in a damp and unwarmed third division
+cell, the result being an acute attack of bronchitis. I addressed a
+letter to the Home Secretary, telling him of my condition, and urging
+the necessity of liberty to recover my health and to prepare my case for
+trial. I asked for release on bail, the plain right of a remand
+prisoner, and I offered if bail were granted now to serve the rest of my
+two months' sentence later on. The sole concessions granted me, however,
+were removal to a better cell and the right to see my secretary and my
+solicitor, but only in the presence of a wardress and a member of the
+prison clerical staff. On March 14th Mr. and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, Mrs.
+Tuke and myself were brought up for preliminary hearing on the charge of
+having, on November 1, 1911, and on various other dates "conspired and
+combined together unlawfully and maliciously to commit damage, etc." The
+case opened on March 14th in a crowded courtroom in which I saw many
+friends. Mr. Bodkin, who appeared for the prosecution, made a very long
+address, in which he endeavoured to prove that the Women's Social and
+Political Union was a highly developed organisation of most sinister
+character. He produced much documentary evidence, some of it of such
+amusing character that the court rocked with stifled laughter, and the
+judge was obliged to conceal his smiles behind his hand. Mr. Bodkin
+cited our code book with the assistance of which we were able to
+communicate private messages. His voice sank to a scandalised half
+whisper as he stated the fact that we had presumed to include the sacred
+persons of the Government in our private code. "We find," said Mr.
+Bodkin portentously, "that public men in the service of His Majesty as
+members of the Cabinet are tabulated here under code names. We find that
+the Cabinet collectively has its code word "Trees," and individual
+members of the Cabinet are designated by the name, sometimes of trees,
+but I am also bound to say the commonest weeds as well." Here a ripple
+of laughter interrupted. Mr. Bodkin frowned heavily, and continued:
+"There is one," he said solemnly, "called Pansy; another one--more
+complimentary--Roses, another, Violets, and so on." Each of the
+defendants was designated by a code letter. Thus Mrs. Pankhurst was
+identified by the letter F; Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, D; Miss Christabel
+Pankhurst, E. Every public building, including the House of Commons, had
+its code name. The deadly possibilities of the code were illustrated by
+a telegram found in one of the files. It read: "Silk, thistle, pansy,
+duck, wool, E. Q." Translated by the aid of the code book the telegram
+read: "Will you protest Asquith's public meeting to-morrow evening but
+don't get arrested unless success depends on it. Wire back to Christabel
+Pankhurst, Clements Inn."
+
+More laughter followed these revelations, which after all proved no more
+than the business-like methods employed by the W. S. P. U. The laughter
+proved something a great deal more significant, for it was a plain
+indication that the old respect in which Cabinet Ministers had been held
+was no more. We had torn the veil from their sacro-sanct personalities
+and shown them for what they were, mean and scheming politicians. More
+serious from the point of view of prosecution was the evidence brought
+in by members of the police department in regard to the occurrences of
+March 1st and 4th. The policemen who arrested me and my two companions
+in Downing Street on March 1st, after we had broken the windows in the
+Premier's house, testified that following the arrest, we had handed him
+our reserve stock of stones, and that they were all alike, heavy flints.
+Other prisoners were found in possession of similar stones, tending to
+prove that the stones all came from one source. Other officers testified
+to the methodical manner in which the window breaking of March 1st and
+4th was carried out, how systematically it had been planned and how
+soldierly had been the behaviour of the women. By twos and threes March
+4th they had been seen to go to the headquarters at Clement's Inn,
+carrying handbags, which they deposited at headquarters, and had then
+gone on to a meeting at the Pavillion Music Hall. The police attended
+the meeting, which was the usual rally preceding a demonstration or a
+deputation. At five o'clock the meeting adjourned and the women went
+out, as if to go home. The police observed that many of them, still in
+groups of twos and threes, went to the Gardenia restaurant in Catherine
+Street, Strand, a place where many Suffragette breakfasts and teas had
+been held. The police thought that about one hundred and fifty women
+congregated there on March 4th. They remained until seven o'clock, and
+then, under the watching eyes of the police, they sauntered out and
+dispersed. A few minutes later, when there was no reason to expect such
+a thing, the noise was heard, in many streets, of wholesale window
+smashing. The police authorities made much of the fact that the women
+who had left their bags at headquarters and were afterwards arrested,
+were bailed out that night by Mr. Pethick Lawrence. The similarity of
+the stones used; the gathering of so many women in one building,
+prepared for arrest; the waiting at the Gardenia Restaurant; the
+apparent dispersal; the simultaneous destruction in many localities of
+plate glass, and the bailing of prisoners by a person connected with the
+headquarters mentioned, certainly showed a carefully worked out plan.
+Only a public trial of the defendants could establish whether or not the
+plan was a conspiracy.
+
+On the second day of the Ministerial hearing, Mrs. Tuke, who had been in
+the prison infirmary for twenty days and had to be attended in court by
+a trained nurse, was admitted to bail. Mr. Pethick Lawrence made a
+strong plea for bail for himself and his wife, pointing out that they
+had been in prison on remand for two weeks and were entitled to bail. I
+also demanded the privileges of a prisoner on remand. Both of these
+pleas were denied by the court, but a few days later the Home Secretary
+wrote to my solicitor that the remainder of my sentence of two months
+would be remitted until after the conspiracy trail at Bow Street. Mr.
+and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence had already been admitted to bail. Public
+opinion forced the Home Secretary to make these concessions, as it is
+well known that it is next to impossible to prepare a defence while
+confined in prison. Aside from the terrible effect of prison on one's
+body and nerves, there is the difficulty of consulting documents and
+securing other necessary data to be considered.
+
+On April 4th the Ministerial hearing ended in the acquittal of Mrs.
+Tuke, whose activities in the W. S. P. U. were shown to be purely
+secretarial. Mr. and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence and myself were committed for
+trial at the next session of the Central Criminal Court, beginning April
+23rd. Because of the weak state of my health the judge was with great
+difficulty prevailed upon to postpone the trial two weeks and it was,
+therefore, not until May 15th that the case was opened.
+
+The trial at Old Bailey is a thing that I shall never forget. The scene
+is clear before me as I write, the judge impressively bewigged and
+scarlet robed, dominating the crowded courtroom, the solicitors at their
+table, the jury, and looking very far away, the anxious pale faces of
+our friends who crowded the narrow galleries.
+
+By the veriest irony of fate this judge, Lord Coleridge, was the son of
+Sir Charles Coleridge who, in the year 1867, appeared with my husband,
+Dr. Pankhurst, in the famous case of Chorlton v. Lings, and sought to
+establish that women were persons, and as such were entitled to the
+Parliamentary vote. To make the irony still deeper the Attorney General,
+Sir Rufus Isaacs, who appeared as Counsel for the prosecution against
+women militants, himself had been guilty of remarkable speeches in
+corroboration of our point of view. In a speech made in 1910, in
+relation to the abolition of the Lords' veto, Sir Rufus made the
+statement that, although the agitation against privilege was being
+peacefully conducted, the indignation behind it was very intense. Said
+Sir Rufus: "Formerly when the great mass of the people were voteless
+they had to do something violent in order to show what they felt; to-day
+the elector's bullet is his ballot. Let no one be deceived, therefore,
+because in this present struggle everything is peaceful and orderly, in
+contrast to the disorderliness of other great struggles of the past." We
+wondered if the man who said these words could fail to realise that
+voteless women, deprived of every constitutional means of righting their
+grievances, were also obliged to do something violent in order to show
+how they felt. His opening address removed all doubt on that score.
+
+Sir Rufus Isaacs has a clear-cut, hawk-like face, deep eyes, and a
+somewhat world worn air. The first words he spoke were so astoundingly
+unfair that I could hardly believe that I heard them aright. He began
+his address to the jury by telling them that they must not, on any
+account, connect the act of the defendants with any political agitation.
+
+"I am very anxious to impress upon you," he said, "from the moment we
+begin to deal with the facts of this case, that all questions of whether
+a woman is entitled to the Parliamentary franchise, whether she should
+have the same right of franchise as a man, are questions which are in no
+sense involved in the trial of this issue.... Therefore, I ask you to
+discard altogether from the consideration of the matters which will be
+placed before you any viewpoint you may have on this no doubt very
+important political issue."
+
+Nevertheless Sir Rufus added in the course of his remarks that he feared
+that it would not be possible to keep out of the conduct of the case
+various references to political events, and of course the entire trial,
+from beginning to end, showed clearly that the case was what Mr. Tim
+Healey, Mrs. Pethick Lawrence's counsel, called it, a great State Trial.
+
+Proceeding, the Attorney General described the W. S. P. U., which he
+said he thought had been in existence since 1907, and had used what were
+known as militant methods. In 1911 the association had become annoyed by
+the Prime Minister because he would not make women's suffrage what was
+called a Government question. In November, 1911, the Prime Minister
+announced the introduction of a manhood suffrage bill. From that time on
+the defendants set to work to carry out a campaign which would have
+meant nothing less than anarchy. Women were to be induced to act
+together at a given time, in different given places, in such numbers
+that the police should be paralysed by the number of persons breaking
+the law, in order, to use the defendant's own words, "to bring the
+Government to its knees."
+
+After designating the respective positions held by the four defendants
+in the W. S. P. U., Sir Rufus went on to relate the events which
+resulted in the smashing of plate glass windows valued at some two
+thousand pounds, and the imprisonment of over two hundred women who
+were incited to their deeds by the conspirators in the dock. He entirely
+ignored the motive of the acts in question, and he treated the whole
+affair as if the women had been burglars. This inverted statement of the
+matter, though accurate enough as to facts, was such as might have been
+given by King John of the signing of Magna Charta.
+
+A very great number of witnesses were examined, a large number of them
+being policemen, and their testimony, and our cross examination
+disclosed the startling fact that there exists in England a special band
+of secret police entirely engaged in political work. These men,
+seventy-five in number, form what is known as the political branch of
+the Criminal Investigation Department of the Police. They go about in
+disguise, and their sole duty is to shadow Suffragettes and other
+political workers. They follow certain political workers from their
+homes to their places of business, to their social pleasures, into tea
+rooms and restaurants, even to the theatre. They pursue unsuspecting
+people in taxicabs, sit beside them in omnibuses. Above all they take
+down speeches. In fact the system is exactly like the secret police
+system of Russia.
+
+Mr. Pethick Lawrence and I spoke in our own defence, and Mr. Healey M.
+P. defended Mrs. Pethick Lawrence. I cannot give our speeches in full,
+but I should like to include as much of them as will serve to make the
+entire situation clear to the reader.
+
+Mr. Lawrence spoke first at the opening of the case. He began by giving
+an account of the suffrage movement and why he felt the enfranchisement
+of women appeared to him a question so grave that it warranted strong
+measures in its pursuit. He sketched briefly the history of the Women's
+Social and Political Union, from the time when Christabel Pankhurst and
+Annie Kenney were thrown out of Sir Edward Grey's meeting and imprisoned
+for asking a political question, to the torpedoing of the Conciliation
+Bill. "The case that I have to put before you," he said, "is that
+neither the conspiracy nor the incitement is ours; but that the
+conspiracy is a conspiracy of the Cabinet who are responsible for the
+Government of this country; and that the incitement is the incitement of
+the Ministers of the Crown." And he did this most effectually not only
+by telling of the disgraceful trickery and deceit with which the
+Government had misled the suffragists in the matter of suffrage bills,
+but by giving the plain words in which members of the Cabinet had
+advised the women that they would never get the vote until they had
+learned to fight for it as men had fought in the past.
+
+When it came my turn to speak, realising that the average man is
+profoundly ignorant of the history of the women's movement--because the
+press has never adequately or truthfully chronicled the movement--I told
+the jury, as briefly as I could, the story of the forty years' peaceful
+agitation before my daughters and I resolved that we would give our
+lives to the work of getting the vote for women, and that we should use
+whatever means of getting the vote that were necessary to success.
+
+"We founded the Women's Social and Political Union," I said, "in 1903.
+Our first intention was to try and influence the particular political
+Party, which was then coming into power, to make this question of the
+enfranchisement of women their own question and to push it. It took some
+little time to convince us--and I need not weary you with the history of
+all that has happened--but it took some little time to convince us that
+that was no use; that we could not secure things in that way. Then in
+1905 we faced the hard facts. We realised that there was a Press boycott
+against Women's Suffrage. Our speeches at public meetings were not
+reported, our letters to the editors, were not published, even if we
+implored the editors; even the things relating to Women's Suffrage in
+Parliament were not recorded. They said the subject was not of
+sufficient public interest to be reported in the Press, and they were
+not prepared to report it. Then with regard to the men politicians in
+1905: we realised how shadowy were the fine phrases about democracy,
+about human equality, used by the gentlemen who were then coming into
+power. They meant to ignore the women--there was no doubt whatever about
+that. For in the official documents coming from the Liberal party on the
+eve of the 1905 election, there were sentences like this: 'What the
+country wants is a simple measure of Manhood Suffrage.' There was no
+room for the inclusion of women. We knew perfectly well that if there
+was to be franchise reform at all, the Liberal party which was then
+coming into power did not mean Votes for Women, in spite of all the
+pledges of members; in spite of the fact that a majority of the House
+of Commons, especially on the Liberal side, were pledged to it--it did
+not mean that they were going to put it into practice. And so we found
+some way of forcing their attention to this question.
+
+"Now I come to the facts with regard to militancy. We realised that the
+plans we had in our minds would involve great sacrifice on our part,
+that it might cost us all we had. We were at that time a little
+organisation, composed in the main of working women, the wives and
+daughters of working men. And my daughters and I took a leading part,
+naturally, because we thought the thing out, and, to a certain extent,
+because we were of better social position than most of our members, and
+we felt a sense of responsibility."
+
+I described the events that marked the first days of our work, the scene
+in Free Trade Hall, Manchester, when my daughter and her companion were
+arrested for the crime of asking a question of a politician, and I
+continued:
+
+"What did they do next? (I want you to realise that no step we have
+taken forward has been taken until after some act of repression on the
+part of our enemy, the Government--because it is the Government that is
+our enemy; it is not the Members of Parliament, it is not the men in the
+country; it is the Government in power alone that can give us the vote.
+It is the Government alone that we regard as our enemy, and the whole of
+our agitation is directed to bringing just as much pressure as necessary
+upon those people who can deal with our grievance.) The next step the
+women took was to ask questions during the course of meetings, because,
+as I told you, these gentlemen gave them no opportunity of asking them
+afterwards. And then began the interjections of which we have heard, the
+interference with the right to hold public meetings, the interference
+with the right of free speech, of which we have heard, for which these
+women, these hooligan women, as they have been called--have been
+denounced. I ask you, gentlemen, to imagine the amount of courage which
+it needs for a woman to undertake that kind of work. When men come to
+interrupt women's meetings, they come in gangs, with noisy instruments,
+and sing and shout together, and stamp their feet. But when women have
+gone to Cabinet Ministers' meetings--only to interrupt Cabinet Ministers
+and nobody else--they have gone singly. And it has become increasingly
+difficult for them to get in, because as a result of the women's methods
+there has developed the system of admission by ticket and the exclusion
+of women--a thing which in my Liberal days would have been thought a
+very disgraceful thing at Liberal meetings. But this ticket system
+developed, and so the women could only get in with very great
+difficulty. Women have concealed themselves for thirty-six hours in
+dangerous positions, under the platforms, in the organs, wherever they
+could get a vantage point. They waited starving in the cold, sometimes
+on the roof exposed to a winter's night, just to get a chance of saying
+in the course of a Cabinet Minister's speech, 'When is the Liberal
+Government going to put its promises into practice?' That has been the
+form militancy took in its further development."
+
+I went over the whole matter of our peaceful deputations, and of the
+violence with which they were invariably met; of our arrests and the
+farcical police court trials, where the mere evidence of policemen's
+unsupported statements sent us to prison for long terms; of the
+falsehoods told of us in the House of Commons by responsible members of
+the Government--tales of women scratching and biting policemen and using
+hatpins--and I accused the Government of making these attacks against
+women who were powerless to defend themselves because they feared the
+women and desired to crush the agitation represented by our
+organisation.
+
+"Now it has been stated in this Court," I said, "that it is not the
+Women's Social and Political Union that is in the Court, but that it is
+certain defendants. The action of the Government, gentlemen, is
+certainly against the defendants who are before you here to-day, but it
+is also against the Women's Social and Political Union. The intention is
+to crush that organisation. And this intention apparently was arrived at
+after I had been sent to prison for two months for breaking a pane of
+glass worth, I am told, 2s. 3d., the punishment which I accepted because
+I was a leader of this movement, though it was an extraordinary
+punishment to inflict for so small an act of damages as I had committed.
+I accepted it as the punishment for a leader of an agitation
+disagreeable to the Government; and while I was there this prosecution
+started. They thought they would make a clean sweep of the people who
+they considered were the political brains of the movement. We have got
+many false friends in the Cabinet--people who by their words appear to
+be well-meaning towards the cause of Women's Suffrage. And they thought
+that if they could get the leaders of the Union out of the way, it would
+result in the indefinite postponement and settlement of the question in
+this country. Well, they have not succeeded in their design, and even if
+they had got all the so-called leaders of this movement out of their way
+they would not have succeeded even then. Now why have they not put the
+Union in the dock? We have a democratic Government, so-called. This
+Women's Social and Political Union is not a collection of hysterical and
+unimportant wild women, as has been suggested to you, but it is an
+important organisation, which numbers amongst its membership very
+important people. It is composed of women of all classes of the
+community, women who have influence in their particular organisations as
+working women; women who have influence in professional organisations as
+professional women; women of social importance; women even of Royal rank
+are amongst the members of this organisation, and so it would not pay a
+democratic Government to deal with this organisation as a whole.
+
+"They hoped that by taking away the people that they thought guided the
+political fortunes of the organisation they would break the organisation
+down. They thought that if they put out of the way the influential
+members of the organisation they, as one member of the Cabinet, I
+believe, said, would crush the movement and get it 'on the run.' Well,
+Governments have many times been mistaken, gentlemen, and I venture to
+suggest to you that Governments are mistaken again. I think the answer
+to the Government was given at the Albert Hall meeting held immediately
+after our arrest. Within a few minutes, without the eloquence of Mrs.
+Pethick Lawrence, without the appeals of the people who have been called
+the leaders of this movement, in a very few minutes L10,000 was
+subscribed for the carrying on of this movement.
+
+"Now a movement like that, supported like that, is not a wild,
+hysterical movement. It is not a movement of misguided people. It is a
+very serious movement. Women, I submit, like our members, and women, I
+venture to say, like the two women, and like the man who are in the dock
+to-day, are not people to undertake a thing like this lightly. May I
+just try to make you feel what it is that has made this movement the
+gigantic size it is from the very small beginnings it had? It is one of
+the biggest movements of modern times. A movement which is not only an
+influence, perhaps not yet recognised, in this country, but is
+influencing the women's movement all over the world. Is there anything
+more marvellous in modern times than the kind of spontaneous outburst in
+every country of this woman's movement? Even in China--and I think it
+somewhat of a disgrace to Englishmen--even in China women have won the
+vote, as an outcome of a successful revolution, with which, I dare say,
+members of his Majesty's Government sympathise--a bloody revolution.
+
+"One more word on that point. When I was in prison the second time, for
+three months as a common criminal for no greater offence than the issue
+of a handbill--less inflammatory in its terms than some of the speeches
+of members of the Government who prosecute us here--during that time,
+through the efforts of a member of Parliament, there was secured for me
+permission to have the daily paper in prison, and the first thing I read
+in the daily Press was this: that the Government was at that moment
+feting the members of the Young Turkish Revolutionary Party, gentlemen
+who had invaded the privacy of the Sultan's home--we used to hear a
+great deal about invading the privacy of Mr. Asquith's residence when we
+ventured to ring his door bell--gentlemen who had killed and slain, and
+had been successful in their revolution, while we women had never thrown
+a stone--for none of us was imprisoned for stone throwing, but merely
+for taking the part we had then taken in this organisation. There we
+were imprisoned while these political murderers were being feted by the
+very Government who imprisoned us, and were being congratulated on the
+success of their revolution. Now I ask you, was it to be wondered at
+that women said to themselves: 'Perhaps it is that we have not done
+enough. Perhaps it is that these gentlemen do not understand womenfolk.
+Perhaps they do not realise women's ways, and because we have not done
+the things that men have done, they may think we are not in earnest.'
+
+"And then we come down to this last business of all, when we have
+responsible statesmen like Mr. Hobhouse saying that there had never been
+any sentimental uprising, no expression of feeling like that which led
+to the burning down of Nottingham Castle. Can you wonder, then, that we
+decided we should have to nerve ourselves to do more, and can you
+understand why we cast about to find a way, as women will, that would
+not involve loss of human life and the maiming of human beings, because
+women care more about human life than men, and I think it is quite
+natural that we should, for we know what life costs. We risk our lives
+when men are born. Now, I want to say this deliberately as a leader of
+this movement. We have tried to hold it back, we have tried to keep it
+from going beyond bounds, and I have never felt a prouder woman than I
+did one night when a police constable said to me, after one of these
+demonstrations, 'Had this been a man's demonstration, there would have
+been bloodshed long ago.' Well, my lord, there has not been any
+bloodshed except on the part of the women themselves--these so-called
+militant women. Violence has been done to us, and I who stand before you
+in this dock have lost a dear sister in the course of this agitation.
+She died within three days of coming out of prison, a little more than a
+year ago. These are things which, wherever we are, we do not say very
+much about. We cannot keep cheery, we cannot keep cheerful, we cannot
+keep the right kind of spirit, which means success, if we dwell too much
+upon the hard part of our agitation. But I do say this, gentlemen, that
+whatever in future you may think of us, you will say this about us, that
+whatever our enemies may say, we have always put up an honourable
+fight, and taken no unfair means of defeating our opponents, although
+they have not always been people who have acted so honourably towards
+us.
+
+"We have assaulted no one; we have done no hurt to any one; and it was
+not until 'Black Friday'--and what happened on 'Black Friday' is that we
+had a new Home Secretary, and there appeared to be new orders given to
+the police, because the police on that occasion showed a kind of
+ferocity in dealing with the women that they had never done before, and
+the women came to us and said: 'We cannot bear this'--it was not until
+then we felt this new form of repression should compel us to take
+another step. That is the question of 'Black Friday,' and I want to say
+here and now that every effort was made after 'Black Friday' to get an
+open public judicial inquiry into the doings of 'Black Friday,' as to
+the instructions given to the police. That inquiry was refused; but an
+informal inquiry was held by a man, whose name will carry conviction as
+to his status and moral integrity on the one side of the great political
+parties, and a man of equal standing on the Liberal side. These two men
+were Lord Robert Cecil and Mr. Ellis Griffith. They held a private
+inquiry, had women before them, took their evidence, examined that
+evidence, and after hearing it said that they believed what the women
+had told them was substantially true, and that they thought there was
+good cause for that inquiry to be held. That was embodied in a report.
+To show you our difficulties, Lord Robert Cecil, in a speech at the
+Criterion Restaurant, spoke on this question. He called upon the
+Government to hold this inquiry, and not one word of that speech was
+reported in any morning paper. That is the sort of thing we have had to
+face, and I welcome standing here, if only for the purpose of getting
+these facts out, and I challenge the Attorney General to institute an
+inquiry into these proceedings--not that kind of inquiry of sending
+their inspectors to Holloway and accepting what they are told by the
+officials--but to open a public inquiry, with a jury, if he likes, to
+deal with our grievances against the Government and the methods of this
+agitation.
+
+"I say it is not the defendants who have conspired, but the Government
+who have conspired against us to crush this agitation; but however the
+matter may be decided, we are content to abide by the verdict of
+posterity. We are not the kind of people who like to brag a lot; we are
+not the kind of people who would bring ourselves into this position
+unless we were convinced that it was the only way. I have tried--all my
+life I have worked for this question--I have tried arguments, I have
+tried persuasion. I have addressed a greater number of public meetings,
+perhaps, than any person in this court, and I have never addressed one
+meeting where substantially the opinion of the meeting--not a ticket
+meeting, but an open meeting, for I have never addressed any other kind
+of a meeting--has not been that where women bear burdens and share
+responsibilities like men they should be given the privileges that men
+enjoy. I am convinced that public opinion is with us--that it has been
+stifled--wilfully stifled--so that in a public Court of Justice one is
+glad of being allowed to speak on this question."
+
+The Attorney General's summing up for the prosecution was very largely a
+defence of the Liberal Party and its course in regard to woman suffrage
+legislation. Therefore, Mr. Tim Healey, in his defence of Mrs. Pethick
+Lawrence, did well to lay stress on the political character of the
+conspiracy charge and trial. He said:
+
+"It is no doubt a very useful thing when you have political opponents to
+be able to set the law in motion against them. I have not the smallest
+doubt it would be a very convenient thing, if they had the courage to do
+it, to shut up the whole of His Majesty's Opposition while the present
+Government is in office--to lock up all the men of lustre and
+distinction in our public forum and on our public platforms--all the
+Carsons, F. E. Smiths, Bonar Laws, and so on. It would be a most
+convenient thing to end the whole thing, as it would be to end women's
+agitation in the form of the indictment. Gentlemen of the jury, whatever
+words have been spoken by mutual opponents, whatever instructions have
+been addressed, not to feeble females, but to men who boast of drilling
+and of arms, they have not had the courage to prosecute anybody, except
+women, by means of an indictment. Yet the Government of my learned
+friend have selected two dates as cardinal dates, and they ask you to
+pass judgment upon the prisoners at the bar, and to say that, without
+rhyme or reason, taking the course suggested without provocation, these
+responsible, well-bred, educated, University people, have suddenly, in
+the words of the indictment, wickedly and with malice aforethought
+engaged in these criminal designs.
+
+"Gentlemen of the jury, the first thing I would ask in that connection
+is this: What is there in the course of this demand put forward by women
+which should have excited the treatment at the hands of His Majesty's
+Ministers which this movement, according to the documents which are in
+evidence before me, has received? I should suppose that the essence of
+all government is the smooth conduct of affairs, so that those who enjoy
+high station, great emoluments, should not be parties against whom the
+accusation of provoking civic strife and breeding public turmoil should
+be brought. What do we find? We find that, in regard to the treatment of
+the demand which had always been put forward humbly, respectably,
+respectfully, in its origin, by those who have received trade unionists,
+anti-vaccinators, deceased wife's sisters, and all other forms of
+political demand, and who have received them humbly and yielded to them,
+we find that when these people advocating this particular form of civic
+reform request an audience, request admission, request even to have
+their petitions respectfully received, they have met, judicially, at all
+events, with a flat and solemn negative. That is the beginning of this
+unhappy spirit bred in the minds of persons like the defendants, persons
+like those against whom evidence has been tendered--which has led to
+your being empanelled in that box to-day. And I put it to you when you
+are considering whether it is the incitement of my clients or the
+conduct of Ministers that have led to these events--whether I cannot ask
+you to say that even a fair apportionment of blame should not rest upon
+more responsible shoulders, and whether you should go out of your way to
+say that these persons in the dock alone are guilty."
+
+In closing Mr. Healey reverted to the political character of the trial.
+"The Government have undertaken this prosecution," he declared, "to
+seclude for a considerable period their chief opponents. They hope there
+will be at public meetings which they attend no more inconvenient cries
+of 'Votes for Women.' I cannot conceive any other object which they
+could have in bringing the prosecution. I have expressed my regret at
+the loss which the shopkeepers, tradesmen and others have suffered. I
+regret it deeply. I regret that any person should bring loss or
+suffering upon innocent people. But I ask you to say that the law has
+already been sufficiently vindicated by the punishment of the immediate
+authors of the deed. What can be gained? Does justice gain?
+
+"I almost hesitate to treat this as a legal inquiry. I regard it as a
+vindictive political act. Of all the astonishing acts that have ever
+been brought into a public court against a prisoner I cannot help
+feeling the charge against Mr. Pethick Lawrence is the most astonishing.
+He ventured to attend at some police courts and gave bail for women who
+had been arrested in endeavouring, as I understand, to present petitions
+to Parliament or to have resort to violence. I do not complain of the
+way in which my learned friend has conducted the prosecution, but I do
+complain of the police methods--inquiring into the homes and the
+domestic circumstances of the prisoners, obtaining their papers, taking
+their newspaper, going into their banking account, bringing up their
+bankers here to say what is their balance; and I do say that in none of
+the prosecutions of the past have smaller methods belittled a great
+State trial, because, look at it as you will, you cannot get away from
+it that this is a great State trial. It is not the women who are on
+trial. It is the men. It is the system of Government which is upon its
+trial. It is this method of rolling the dice by fifty-four counts in an
+indictment without showing to what any bit of evidence is fairly
+attributable; the system is on its trial--a system whereby every
+innocent act in public life is sought to be enmeshed in a conspiracy."
+
+The jury was absent for more than an hour, showing that they had some
+difficulty in agreeing upon a verdict. When they returned it was plain
+from their strained countenances that they were labouring under deep
+feeling. The foreman's voice shook as he pronounced the verdict, guilty
+as charged, and he had hard work to control his emotion as he added:
+"Your Lordship, we unanimously desire to express the hope that, taking
+into consideration the undoubtedly pure motives that underlie the
+agitation that has led to this trouble, you will be pleased to exercise
+the utmost clemency and leniency in dealing with the case."
+
+A burst of applause followed this plea. Then Mr. Pethick Lawrence arose
+and asked to say a few words before sentence was pronounced. He said
+that it must be evident, aside from the jury's recommendation, that we
+had been actuated by political motives, and that we were in fact
+political offenders. It had been decided in English Courts that
+political offenders were different from ordinary offenders, and Mr.
+Lawrence cited the case of a Swiss subject whose extradition was refused
+because of the political character of his offence. The Court on that
+occasion had declared that even if the crime were murder committed with
+a political motive it was a political crime. Mr. Lawrence also reminded
+the judge of the case of the late Mr. W. T. Stead, convicted of a crime,
+yet because of the unusual motive behind the crime, was allowed first
+division treatment and full freedom to receive his family and friends.
+Last of all the case of Dr. Jameson was cited. Although his raid
+resulted in the death of twenty-one persons and the wounding of
+forty-six more, the political character of his offence was taken into
+account and he was made a first division prisoner.
+
+They were men, fighting in a man's war. We of the W. S. P. U. were
+women, fighting in a woman's war. Lord Coleridge, therefore, saw in us
+only reckless and criminal defiers of law. Lord Coleridge said: "You
+have been convicted of a crime for which the law would sanction, if I
+chose to impose it, a sentence of two years' imprisonment with hard
+labour. There are circumstances connected with your case which the jury
+have very properly brought to my attention, and I have been asked by you
+all three to treat you as first class misdemeanants. If, in the course
+of this case, I had observed any contrition or disavowal of the acts
+you have committed, or any hope that you would avoid repetition of them
+in future, I should have been very much prevailed upon by the arguments
+that have been advanced to me."
+
+No contrition having been expressed by us, the sentence of the Court was
+that we were to suffer imprisonment, in the second division, for the
+term of nine months, and that we were to pay the costs of the
+prosecution.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+The sentence of nine months astonished us beyond measure, especially in
+view of certain very recent events, one of these being the case of some
+sailors who had mutinied in order to call attention to something which
+they considered a peril to themselves and to all seafarers. They were
+tried and found technically guilty, but because of the motive behind
+their mutiny, were discharged without punishment. Perhaps more nearly
+like our case than this was the case of the labour leader, Tom Mann,
+who, shortly before, had written a pamphlet calling upon His Majesty's
+soldiers not to fire upon strikers when commanded to do so by their
+superior officers. From the Government's point of view this was a much
+more serious kind of inciting than ours, because if it had been
+responded to the authorities would have been absolutely crippled in
+maintaining order. Besides, soldiers who refuse to obey orders are
+liable to the death penalty. Tom Mann was given a sentence of six
+months, but this was received, on the part of the Liberal Press and
+Liberal politicians, with so much clamour and protest that the prisoner
+was released at the end of two months. So, even on our way to prison, we
+told one another that our sentences could not stand. Public opinion
+would never permit the Government to keep us in prison for nine months,
+or in the second division for any part of our term. We agreed to wait
+seven Parliamentary days before we began a hunger strike protest.
+
+It was very dreary waiting, those seven Parliamentary days, because we
+could not know what was happening outside, or what was being talked of
+in the House. We could know nothing of the protests and memorials that
+were pouring in, on our behalf, from Oxford and Cambridge Universities,
+from members of learned societies, and from distinguished men and women
+of all professions, not only in England but in every country of Europe,
+from the United States and Canada, and even from India. An international
+memorial asking that we be treated as political prisoners was signed by
+such great men and women as Prof. Paul Milyoukoff, leader of the
+Constitutional Democrats in the Duma; Signor Enrico Ferri, of the
+Italian Chamber of Deputies; Edward Bernstein, of the German Reichstag;
+George Brandes, Edward Westermarck, Madame Curie, Ellen Key, Maurice
+Maeterlinck, and many others. The greatest indignation was expressed in
+the House, Keir Hardie and Mr. George Lansbury leading in the demand for
+a drastic revision of our sentences and our immediate transference to
+the first division. So much pressure was brought to bear that within a
+few days the Home Secretary announced that he felt it his duty to
+examine into the circumstances of the case without delay. He explained
+that the prisoners had not at any time been forced to wear prison
+clothes. Ultimately, which in this case means shortly before the
+expiration of the seven Parliamentary days, we were all three placed in
+the first division. Mrs. Pethick Lawrence was given the cell formerly
+occupied by Dr. Jameson and I had the cell adjoining. Mr. Pethick
+Lawrence, in Brixton Gaol, was similarly accommodated. We all had the
+privilege of furnishing our cells with comfortable chairs, tables, our
+own bedding, towels, and so on. We had meals sent in from the outside;
+we wore our own clothing and had what books, newspapers and writing
+materials we required. We were not permitted to write or receive letters
+or to see our friends except in the ordinary two weeks' routine. Still
+we had gained our point that suffrage prisoners were politicals.
+
+We had gained it, but, as it turned out, only for ourselves. When we
+made the inquiry, "Are all our women now transferred to the first
+division?" the answer was that the order for transference referred only
+to Mr. and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence and myself. Needless to say, we
+immediately refused to accept this unfair advantage, and after we had
+exhausted every means in our power to induce the Home Secretary to give
+the other suffrage prisoners the same justice that we had received, we
+adopted the protest of the hunger strike. The word flew swiftly through
+Holloway, and in some mysterious way travelled to Brixton, to Aylesbury,
+and Winson Green, and at once all the other suffrage prisoners followed
+our lead. The Government then had over eighty hunger strikers on their
+hands, and, as before, had ready only the argument of force, which means
+that disgusting and cruel process of forcible feeding. Holloway became a
+place of horror and torment. Sickening scenes of violence took place
+almost every hour of the day, as the doctors went from cell to cell
+performing their hideous office. One of the men did his work in such
+brutal fashion that the very sight of him provoked cries of horror and
+anguish. I shall never while I live forget the suffering I experienced
+during the days when those cries were ringing in my ears. In her frenzy
+of pain one woman threw herself from the gallery on which her cell
+opened. A wire netting eight feet below broke her fall to the iron
+staircase beneath, else she must inevitably have been killed. As it was
+she was frightfully hurt.
+
+The wholesale hunger strike created a tremendous stir throughout
+England, and every day in the House the Ministers were harassed with
+questions. The climax was reached on the third or fourth day of the
+strike, when a stormy scene took place in the House of Commons. The
+Under Home Secretary, Mr. Ellis Griffith, had been mercilessly
+questioned as to conditions under which the forcible feeding was being
+done, and as soon as this was over one of the suffragist members made a
+moving appeal to the Prime Minister himself to order the release of all
+the prisoners. Mr. Asquith, forced against his will to take part in the
+controversy, rose and said that it was not for him to interfere with the
+actions of his colleague, Mr. McKenna, and he added, in his own suave,
+mendacious manner: "I must point out this, that there is not one single
+prisoner who cannot go out of prison this afternoon on giving the
+undertaking asked for by the Home Secretary." Meaning an undertaking to
+refrain henceforth from militancy.
+
+Instantly Mr. George Lansbury sprang to his feet and exclaimed: "You
+know they cannot! It is perfectly disgraceful that the Prime Minister of
+England should make such a statement."
+
+Mr. Asquith glanced carelessly at the indignant Lansbury, but sank into
+his seat without deigning to reply. Shocked to the depths of his soul by
+the insult thrown at our women, Mr. Lansbury strode up to the
+Ministerial bench and confronted the Prime Minister, saying again: "That
+was a disgraceful thing for you to say, Sir. You are beneath contempt,
+you and your colleagues. You call yourselves gentlemen, and you forcibly
+feed and murder women in this fashion. You ought to be driven out of
+office. Talk about protesting. It is the most disgraceful thing that
+ever happened in the history of England. You will go down to history as
+the men who tortured innocent women."
+
+By this time the House was seething, and the indignant Labour member had
+to shout at the top of his big voice in order to be heard over the din.
+Mr. Asquith's pompous order that Mr. Lansbury leave the House for the
+day was probably known to very few until it appeared in print next day.
+At all events Mr. Lansbury continued his protest for five minutes
+longer. "You murder, torture and drive women mad," he cried, "and then
+you tell them they can walk out. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
+You talk about principle--you talk about fighting in Ulster--you, too--"
+turning to the Unionist benches--"You ought to be driven out of public
+life. These women are showing you what principle is. You ought to
+honour them for standing up for their womanhood. I tell you, Commons of
+England, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves."
+
+The Speaker came to Mr. Asquith's rescue at last and adjured Mr.
+Lansbury that he must obey the Prime Minister's order to leave the
+House, saying that such disorderly conduct would cause the House to lose
+respect. "Sir," exclaimed Mr. Lansbury, in a final burst of righteous
+rage, "it has lost it already."
+
+This unprecedented explosion of wrath and scorn against the Government
+was the sensation of the hour, and it was felt on all sides that the
+release of the prisoners, or at least cessation of forcible feeding,
+which amounted to the same thing, would be ordered. Every day the
+Suffragettes marched in great crowds to Holloway, serenading the
+prisoners and holding protest meetings to immense crowds. The music and
+the cheering, faintly wafted to our straining ears, was inexpressibly
+sweet. Yet it was while listening to one of these serenades that the
+most dreadful moment of my imprisonment occurred. I was lying in bed,
+very weak from starvation, when I heard a sudden scream from Mrs.
+Lawrence's cell, then the sound of a prolonged and very violent
+struggle, and I knew that they had dared to carry their brutal business
+to our doors. I sprang out of bed and, shaking with weakness and with
+anger, I set my back against the wall and waited for what might come. In
+a few moments they had finished with Mrs. Lawrence and had flung open
+the door of my cell. On the threshold I saw the doctors, and back of
+them a large group of wardresses. "Mrs. Pankhurst," began the doctor.
+Instantly I caught up a heavy earthenware water jug from a table hard
+by, and with hands that now felt no weakness I swung the jug head high.
+
+"If any of you dares so much as to take one step inside this cell I
+shall defend myself," I cried. Nobody moved or spoke for a few seconds,
+and then the doctor confusedly muttered something about to-morrow
+morning doing as well, and they all retreated.
+
+I demanded to be admitted to Mrs. Lawrence's cell, where I found my
+companion in a desperate state. She is a strong woman, and a very
+determined one, and it had required the united strength of nine
+wardresses to overcome her. They had rushed into the cell without any
+warning, and had seized her unawares, else they might not have succeeded
+at all. As it was she resisted so violently that the doctors could not
+apply the stethoscope, and they had very great difficulty in getting the
+tube down. After the wretched affair was over Mrs. Lawrence fainted, and
+for hours afterwards was very ill.
+
+This was the last attempt made to forcibly feed either Mrs. Lawrence or
+myself, and two days later we were ordered released on medical grounds.
+The other hunger strikers were released in batches, as every day a few
+more triumphant rebels approached the point where the Government stood
+in danger of committing actual murder. Mr. Lawrence, who was forcibly
+fed twice a day for more than ten days, was released in a state of
+complete collapse on July 1st. Within a few days after that the last of
+the prisoners were at liberty.
+
+As soon as I was sufficiently recovered I went to Paris and had the joy
+of seeing again my daughter Christabel, who, during all the days of
+strife and misery, had kept her personal anxiety in the background and
+had kept staunchly at her work of leadership. The absence of Mr. and
+Mrs. Pethick Lawrence had thrown the entire responsibility of the
+editorship of our paper, _Votes for Women_, on her shoulders, but as she
+has invariably risen to meet new responsibility, she conducted the paper
+with skill and discretion.
+
+We had much to talk about and to consider, because it was evident that
+militancy, instead of being dropped, as the other suffrage societies
+were constantly suggesting, must go on very much more vigorously than
+before. The struggle had been too long drawn out. We had to seek ways to
+shorten it, to bring it to such a climax that the Government would
+acknowledge that something had to be done. We had already demonstrated
+that our forces were impregnable. We could not be conquered, we could
+not be terrified, we could not even be kept in prison. Therefore, since
+the Government had their war lost in advance, our task was merely to
+hasten the surrender.
+
+The situation in Parliament, as far as the suffrage question was
+concerned, was clean swept and barren. The third Conciliation Bill had
+failed to pass its second reading, the majority against it being
+fourteen.
+
+Many Liberal members were afraid to vote for the bill because Mr.
+Lloyd-George and Mr. Lewis Harcourt had persistently spread the rumour
+that its passage, at that time, would result in splitting the Cabinet.
+The Irish Nationalist members had become hostile to the bill because
+their leader, Mr. Redmond, was an anti-suffragist, and had refused to
+include a woman suffrage clause in the Home Rule Bill. Our erstwhile
+friends, the Labour members, were so apathetic, or so fearful for
+certain of their own measures, that most of them stayed away from the
+House on the day the bill reached its second reading. So it was lost,
+and the Militants were blamed for its loss! In June the Government
+announced that Mr. Asquith's manhood suffrage bill would soon be
+introduced, and very soon after this the bill did appear. It simplified
+the registration machinery, reduced the qualifying period of residence
+to six months, and abolished property qualifications, plural voting and
+University representation. In a word, it gave the Parliamentary
+franchise to every man above the age of twenty-one and it denied it to
+all women. Never in the history of the suffrage movement had such an
+affront been offered to women, and never in the history of England had
+such a blow been aimed at women's liberties. It is true that the Prime
+Minister had pledged himself to introduce a bill capable of being
+amended to include women's suffrage, and to permit any amendment that
+passed its second reading to become a part of the bill. But we had no
+faith in an amendment, nor in any bill that was not from its inception
+an official Government measure. Mr. Asquith had broken every pledge he
+had ever made the women, and this new pledge impressed us not at all.
+Well we knew that he had given it only to cover his treachery in
+torpedoing the Conciliation Bill, and in the hope of placating the
+suffragists, perhaps securing another truce to militancy.
+
+If this last was his hope he was most grievously disappointed. Signs
+were constantly appearing to indicate that women would no longer be
+contented with the symbolic militancy involved in window breaking. For
+example, traces were found in the Home Secretary's office at Whitehall
+of an attempt at arson. On the doorstep of another Cabinet Minister
+similar traces were found. Had the Government acted upon these warnings,
+by giving women the vote, all the serious acts of militancy that have
+occurred since would have been averted. But like the heart of Pharaoh,
+the heart of the Government hardened, and militant acts followed one
+another in rapid succession. In July the W. S. P. U. issued a manifesto
+which set forth our intentions in that regard. The manifesto read in
+part as follows:
+
+"The leaders of the Women's Social and Political Union have so often
+warned the Government that unless the vote were granted to women in
+response to the mild militancy of the past, a fiercer spirit of revolt
+would be awakened which it would be impossible to control. The
+Government have blindly disregarded the warning, and now they are
+reaping the harvest of their unstatesmanlike folly."
+
+This was issued immediately after a visit paid by Mr. Asquith to Dublin.
+The occasion had been intended to be one of great pomp and circumstance,
+a huge popular demonstration in honour of the sponsor of Home Rule, but
+the Suffragettes turned it into the most lamentable fiasco imaginable.
+From the hour of Mr. Asquith's attempted secret departure from London
+until his return he lived and moved in momentary dread of Suffragettes.
+Every time he entered or left a railway carriage or a steamer he was
+confronted by women. Every time he rose to speak he was interrupted by
+women. Every public appearance he made was turned into a riot by women.
+As he left Dublin a woman threw a hatchet into his motor car, without,
+however, doing him any injury. As a final protest against his reception
+by Irishmen, the Theatre Royal was set on fire by two women. The theatre
+was practically empty at the time, the performance having been
+completed, and the damage done was comparatively small, yet the two
+women chiefly concerned, Mrs. Leigh and Miss Evans, were given the
+barbarous sentences of five years each in prison. These were the first
+women sentenced to penal servitude in the history of our movement. Of
+course they did not serve their sentences. On entering Mountjoy Prison
+they put in the usual claim for first division treatment, and this being
+refused, they immediately adopted the hunger strike. A number of Irish
+Suffragettes were in Mountjoy at this time for a protest made against
+the exclusion of women from the Home Rule Bill. They were in the first
+division, and they were almost on the eve of their release, but such is
+the indomitable spirit of militancy that these women entered upon a
+sympathetic hunger strike. They were released, but the Government
+forbade the release of Mrs. Leigh and Miss Evans, that is, they ordered
+the authorities to retain the women as long as they could, by forcible
+feeding, be kept alive. After a struggle which, for fierceness and
+cruelty, is almost unparalleled in our annals, the two women fought
+their way out.
+
+All during that summer militancy surged up and down throughout the
+Kingdom. A series of attacks on golf links was instituted, not at all in
+a spirit of wanton mischief, but with the direct and very practical
+object of reminding the dull and self-satisfied English public that when
+the liberties of English women were being stolen from them was no time
+to think of sports. The women selected country clubs where prominent
+Liberal politicians were wont to take their week-end pleasures, and with
+acids they burned great patches of turf, rendering the golf greens
+useless for the time being. They burned the words, Votes for Women, in
+some cases, and always they left behind them reminders that women were
+warring for their freedom. On one occasion when the Court was at
+Balmoral Castle in Scotland, the Suffragettes invaded the Royal golf
+links, and when Sunday morning dawned all the marking flags were found
+to have been replaced by W. S. P. U. flags hearing inscriptions such as
+"Votes for Women means peace for Ministers," "Forcible feeding must be
+stopped," and the like. The golf links were frequently visited by
+Suffragettes in order to question recreant ministers. Two women followed
+the Prime Minister to Inverness, where he was playing golf with Mr.
+McKenna. Approaching the men one Suffragette exclaimed: "Mr. Asquith,
+you must stop forcible feeding--" She got no farther, for Mr. Asquith,
+turning pale with rage--perhaps--retreated behind the Home Secretary,
+who, quite forgetting his manners, seized the Suffragette, crying out
+that he was going to throw her into the pond. "Then we will take you
+with us," the two retorted, after which a very lively scuffle ensued,
+and the women were not thrown into the pond.
+
+[Illustration: A SUFFRAGETTE THROWING A BAG OF FLOUR AT MR. ASQUITH IN
+CHESTER]
+
+This golf green activity really aroused more hostility against us than
+all the window-breaking. The papers published appeals to us not to
+interfere with a game that helped weary politicians to think clearly,
+but our reply to this was that it had not had any such effect on the
+Prime Minister or Mr. Lloyd-George. We had undertaken to spoil their
+sport and that of a large class of comfortable men in order that they
+should be obliged to think clearly about women, and women's firm
+determination to get justice.
+
+I made my return to active work in the autumn by speaking at a great
+meeting of the W. S. P. U., held in the Albert Hall. At that meeting I
+had the announcement to make that the six years' association of Mr. and
+Mrs. Pethick Lawrence with the W. S. P. U. had ended.
+
+Since personal dissensions have never been dwelt upon in the
+W. S. P. U., have never been allowed to halt the movement or to
+interfere for an hour with its progress, I shall not here say any more
+about this important dissension than I said at our first large meeting
+in Albert Hall after the holiday, on October 17th. That day a new paper
+was sold on the streets. It was called _The Suffragette_, it was edited
+by Christabel Pankhurst, and was henceforth to be the official organ of
+the Union. Both in this new paper and in _Votes for Women_, the
+following announcement appeared:
+
+
+                    GRAVE STATEMENT BY THE LEADERS
+
+     At the first reunion of the leaders after the enforced holiday,
+     Mrs. Pankhurst and Miss Christabel Pankhurst outlined a new
+     militant policy which Mr. and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence found
+     themselves altogether unable to approve.
+
+     Mrs. Pankhurst and Miss Christabel Pankhurst indicated that they
+     were not prepared to modify their intentions, and recommended that
+     Mr. and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence should resume control of the Paper,
+     _Votes for Women_, and should leave the Women's Social and
+     Political Union.
+
+     Rather than make schism in the ranks of the Union Mr. and Mrs.
+     Pethick Lawrence consented to take this course.
+
+
+This was signed by all four. That night at the meeting I further
+explained to the members that, hard as partings from old friends and
+comrades unquestionably were, we must remember that we were fighting in
+an army, and that unity of purpose and unity of policy are absolutely
+necessary, because without them the army is hopelessly weakened. "It is
+better," I said, "that those who cannot agree, cannot see eye to eye as
+to policy, should set themselves free, should part, and should be free
+to continue their policy as they see it in their own way, unfettered by
+those with whom they can no longer agree."
+
+Continuing I said: "I give place to none in appreciation and gratitude
+to Mr. and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence for the incalculable services that they
+have rendered the militant movement for Woman Suffrage, and I firmly
+believe that the women's movement will be strengthened by their being
+free to work for woman suffrage in the future as they think best, while
+we of the Women's Social and Political Union shall continue the militant
+agitation for Woman Suffrage initiated by my daughter and myself and a
+handful of women more than six years ago."
+
+I then went on to survey the situation in which the W. S. P. U. now
+stood and to outline the new militant policy which he had decided upon.
+This policy, to begin with, was relentless opposition, not only to the
+party in power, the Liberal Party, but to all parties in the coalition.
+I reminded the women that the Government that had tricked and betrayed
+us and was now plotting to make our progress towards citizenship doubly
+difficult, was kept in office through the coalition of three parties.
+There was the Liberal Party, nominally the governing party, but they
+could not live another day without the coalition of the Nationalist and
+the Labour parties. So we should say, not only to the Liberal Party but
+to the Nationalist Party and the Labour Party, "So long as you keep in
+office an anti-suffrage Government, you are parties to their guilt, and
+from henceforth we offer you the same opposition which we give to the
+people whom you are keeping in power with your support." I said further:
+"We have summoned the Labour Party to do their duty by their own
+programme, and to go into opposition to the Government on every question
+until the Government do justice to women. They apparently are not
+willing to do that. Some of them tell us that other things are more
+important than the liberty of women--than the liberty of working women.
+We say, 'Then, gentlemen, we must teach you the value of your own
+principles, and until you are prepared to stand for the right of women
+to decide their lives and the laws under which they shall live, you,
+with Mr. Asquith and company, are equally responsible for all that has
+happened and is happening to women in this struggle for emancipation.'"
+
+Outlining further our new and stronger policy of aggression, I said:
+"There is a great deal of criticism, ladies and gentlemen, of this
+movement. It always seems to me when the anti-suffrage members of the
+Government criticise militancy in women that it is very like beasts of
+prey reproaching the gentler animals who turn in desperate resistance
+when at the point of death. Criticism from gentlemen who do not hesitate
+to order out armies to kill and slay their opponents, who do not
+hesitate to encourage party mobs to attack defenceless women in public
+meetings--criticism from them hardly rings true. Then I get letters from
+people who tell me that they are ardent suffragists but who say that
+they do not like the recent developments in the militant movement, and
+implore me to urge the members not to be reckless with human life.
+Ladies and gentlemen, the only recklessness the militant suffragists
+have shown about human life has been about their own lives and not about
+the lives of others, and I say here and now that it has never been and
+never will be the policy of the Women's Social and Political Union
+recklessly to endanger human life. We leave that to the enemy. We leave
+that to the men in their warfare. It is not the method of women. No,
+even from the point of view of public policy, militancy affecting the
+security of human life would be out of place. _There is something that
+governments care far more for than human life, and that is the security
+of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the
+enemy._ From henceforward the women who agree with me will say, 'We
+disregard your laws, gentlemen, we set the liberty and the dignity and
+the welfare of women above all such considerations, and we shall
+continue this war, as we have done in the past; and what sacrifice of
+property, or what injury to property accrues will not be our fault. It
+will be the fault of that Government who admit the justice of our
+demands, but refuses to concede them without the evidence, so they have
+told us, afforded to governments of the past, that those who asked for
+liberty were in earnest in their demands!"
+
+I called upon the women of the meeting to join me in this new militancy,
+and I reminded them anew that the women who were fighting in the
+Suffragette army had a great mission, the greatest mission the world has
+ever known--the freeing of one-half the human race, and through that
+freedom the saving of the other half. I said to them: "Be militant each
+in your own way. Those of you who can express your militancy by going to
+the House of Commons and refusing to leave without satisfaction, as we
+did in the early days--do so. Those of you who can express militancy by
+facing party mobs at Cabinet Ministers' meetings, when you remind them
+of their falseness to principle--do so. Those of you who can express
+your militancy by joining us in our anti-Government by-election
+policy--do so. Those of you who can break windows--break them. Those of
+you who can still further attack the secret idol of property, so as to
+make the Government realise that property is as greatly endangered by
+women's suffrage as it was by the Chartists of old--do so. And my last
+word is to the Government: I incite this meeting to rebellion. I say to
+the Government: You have not dared to take the leaders of Ulster for
+their incitement to rebellion. Take me if you dare, but if you dare I
+tell you this, that so long as those who incited to armed rebellion and
+the destruction of human life in Ulster are at liberty, you will not
+keep me in prison. So long as men rebels--and voters--are at liberty,
+we will not remain in prison, first division or no first division."
+
+I ask my readers, some of whom no doubt will be shocked and displeased
+at these words of mine that I have so frankly set down, to put
+themselves in the place of those women who for years had given their
+lives entirely and unstintingly to the work of securing political
+freedom for women; who had converted so great a proportion of the
+electorate that, had the House of Commons been a free body, we should
+have won that freedom years before; who had seen their freedom withheld
+from them through treachery and misuse of power. I ask you to consider
+that we had used, in our agitation, only peaceful means until we saw
+clearly that peaceful means were absolutely of no avail, and then for
+years we had used only the mildest militancy, until we were taunted by
+Cabinet Ministers, and told that we should never get the vote until we
+employed the same violence that men had used in their agitation for
+suffrage. After that we had used stronger militancy, but even that, by
+comparison with the militancy of men in labour disputes, could not
+possibly be counted as violent. Through all these stages of our
+agitation we had been punished with the greatest severity, sent to
+prison like common criminals, and of late years tortured as no criminals
+have been tortured for a century in civilised countries of the world.
+And during all these years we had seen disastrous strikes that had
+caused suffering and death, to say nothing at all of the enormous
+economic waste, and we had never seen a single strike leader punished as
+we had been. We, who had suffered sentences of nine months' imprisonment
+for inciting women to mild rebellion, had seen a labour leader who had
+done his best to incite an army to mutiny released from prison in two
+months by the Government. And now we had come to a point where we saw
+civil war threatened, where we read in the papers every day reports of
+speeches a thousand times more incendiary than anything we had ever
+said. We heard prominent members of Parliament openly declaring that if
+the Home Rule Bill was passed Ulster would fight, and Ulster would be
+right. None of these men were arrested. Instead they were applauded.
+Lord Selborne, one of our sternest critics, referring to the fact that
+Ulstermen were drilling under arms, said publicly: "The method which the
+people of Ulster are adopting to show the depths of their convictions
+and the intensity of their feelings will impress the imagination of the
+whole country." But Lord Selborne was not arrested. Neither were the
+mutinous officers who resigned their commissions when ordered to report
+for duty against the men of Ulster who were actually preparing for civil
+war.
+
+What does all this mean? Why is it that men's blood-shedding militancy
+is applauded and women's symbolic militancy punished with a prison cell
+and the forcible feeding horror? It means simply this, that men's double
+standard of sex morals, whereby the victims of their lust are counted as
+outcasts, while the men themselves escape all social censure, really
+applies to morals in all departments of life. Men make the moral code
+and they expect women to accept it. They have decided that it is
+entirely right and proper for men to fight for their liberties and their
+rights, but that it is not right and proper for women to fight for
+theirs.[3]
+
+They have decided that for men to remain silently quiescent while
+tyrannical rulers impose bonds of slavery upon them is cowardly and
+dishonourable, but that for women to do that same thing is not cowardly
+and dishonourable, but merely respectable. Well, the Suffragettes
+absolutely repudiate that double standard of morals. If it is right for
+men to fight for their freedom, and God knows what the human race would
+be like to-day if men had not, since time began, fought for their
+freedom, then it is right for women to fight for their freedom and the
+freedom of the children they bear. On this declaration of faith the
+militant women of England rest their case.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[3] There is no question that a great deal of the animus directed
+against us during 1913 and 1914 by the Government was due to sex
+bitterness stirred up by a series of articles written by Christabel
+Pankhurst and published in _The Suffragette_. These articles, a fearless
+and authoritative expose of the evils of sexual immoralities and their
+blasting effect on innocent wives and children, have since been
+published in a book called "The Great Scourge, and how to end it,"
+issued by David Nutt, New Oxford Street, London W. C.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+I had called upon women to join me in striking at the Government through
+the only thing that governments are really very much concerned
+about--property--and the response was immediate. Within a few days the
+newspapers rang with the story of the attack made on letter boxes in
+London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol, and half a dozen other cities.
+In some cases the boxes, when opened by postmen, mysteriously burst into
+flame; in others the letters were destroyed by corrosive chemicals; in
+still others the addresses were rendered illegible by black fluids.
+Altogether it was estimated that over 5,000 letters were completely
+destroyed and many thousands more were delayed in transit.
+
+It was with a deep sense of their gravity that these letter-burning
+protests were undertaken, but we felt that something drastic must be
+done in order to destroy the apathy of the men of England who view with
+indifference the suffering of women oppressed by unjust laws. As we
+pointed out, letters, precious though they may be, are less precious
+than human bodies and souls. This fact was universally realised at the
+sinking of the _Titanic_. Letters and valuables disappeared forever, but
+their loss was forgotten in the far more terrible loss of the multitude
+of human lives. And so, in order to call attention to greater crimes
+against human beings, our letter burnings continued.
+
+In only a few cases were the offenders apprehended, and one of the few
+women arrested was a helpless cripple, a woman who could move about only
+in a wheeled chair. She received a sentence of eight months in the first
+division, and, resolutely hunger striking, was forcibly fed with unusual
+brutality, the prison doctor deliberately breaking one of her teeth in
+order to insert a gag. In spite of her disabilities and her weakness the
+crippled girl persisted in her hunger strike and her resistance to
+prison rules, and within a short time had to be released. The excessive
+sentences of the other pillar box destroyers resolved themselves into
+very short terms because of the resistance of the prisoners, every one
+of whom adopted the hunger strike.
+
+Having shown the Government that we were in deadly earnest when we
+declared that we would adopt guerrilla warfare, and also that we would
+not remain in prison, we announced a truce in order that the Government
+might have full opportunity to fulfil their pledge in regard to a woman
+suffrage amendment to the Franchise Bill. We did not, for one moment,
+believe that Mr. Asquith would willingly keep his word. We knew that he
+would break it if he could, but there was a bare chance that he would
+not find this possible. However, our principal reason for declaring the
+truce was that we believed that the Prime Minister would find a way of
+evading his promise, and we were determined that the blame should be
+placed, not on militancy, but on the shoulders of the real traitor. We
+reviewed the history of past suffrage bills: In 1908 the bill had passed
+its second reading by a majority of 179; and then Mr. Asquith had
+refused to allow it to go on; in 1910 the Conciliation Bill passed its
+second reading by a majority of 110, and again Mr. Asquith blocked its
+progress, pledging himself that if the bill were reintroduced in 1911,
+in a form rendering it capable of free amendment, it would be given full
+facilities for becoming law; these conditions were met in 1911, and we
+saw how the bill, after receiving the increased majority of 167 votes,
+was torpedoed by the introduction of a Government manhood suffrage bill.
+Mr. Asquith this time had pledged himself that the bill would be so
+framed that a woman suffrage amendment could be added, and he further
+pledged that in case such an amendment was carried through its second
+reading, he would allow it to become a part of the bill. Just exactly
+how the Government would manage to wriggle out of their promise was a
+matter of excited speculation.
+
+All sorts of rumours were flying about, some hinting at the resignation
+of the Prime Minister, some suggesting the possibility of a general
+election, others that the amended bill would carry with it a forced
+referendum on women's suffrage. It was also said that the intention of
+the Government was to delay the bill so long that, after it was passed
+in the House, it would be excluded from the benefits of the Parliament
+Acts, according to which a bill, delayed of passage beyond the first two
+years of the life of a Parliament, has no chance of being considered by
+the Lords. In order to become a law without the sanction of the House
+of Lords, a bill must pass three times through the House of Commons. The
+prospect of a woman suffrage bill doing that was practically nil.
+
+To none of the rumours would Mr. Asquith give specific denial, and in
+fact the only positive utterance he made on the subject of the Franchise
+Bill was that he considered it highly improbable that the House would
+pass a woman suffrage amendment. In order to discourage woman suffrage
+sentiment in the House, Mr. Lloyd-George and Mr. Lewis Harcourt again
+busied themselves with spreading pessimistic prophecies of a Cabinet
+split in case an amendment was carried. No other threat, they well knew,
+would so terrorize the timid back bench Liberals, who, in addition to
+their blind party loyalty, stood in fear of losing their seats in the
+general election which would follow such a split. Rather than risk their
+political jobs they would have sacrificed any principle. Of course the
+hint of a Cabinet split was pure buncombe, and it deceived few of the
+members. But it established very clearly one thing, and this was that
+Mr. Asquith's promise that the House should be left absolutely free to
+decide the suffrage issue, and that the Cabinet stood ready to bow to
+the decision of the House was never meant to be fulfilled.
+
+The Franchise Bill unamended, by its very wording, specifically denied
+the right of any woman to vote. Sir Edward Grey moved an amendment
+deleting from the bill the word male, thus leaving room for a women's
+suffrage amendment. Two such amendments were moved, one providing for
+adult suffrage for men and women, and the other providing full suffrage
+for women householders and wives of householders. The latter postponed
+the voting age of women to twenty-five years, instead of the men's
+twenty-one. On January 24th, 1913, debate on the first of the amendments
+was begun. A day and a half had been allotted to consideration of Sir
+Edward Grey's amendment, which if carried would leave the way clear for
+consideration of the other two, to each of which one-third of a day was
+allotted.
+
+We had arranged for huge meetings to be held every day during the
+debates, and on the day before they were to open we sent a deputation of
+working women, led by Mrs. Drummond and Miss Annie Kenney, to interview
+Mr. Lloyd-George and Sir Edward Grey. We had asked Mr. Asquith to
+receive the deputation, but, as usual, he refused. The deputation
+consisted of the two leaders, four cotton mill operatives from
+Lancashire, four workers in sweated trades of London, two pit brow
+lassies, two teachers, two trained nurses, one shop assistant, one
+laundress, one boot and shoe worker and one domestic worker, twenty in
+all, the exact number specified by Mr. Lloyd-George. Some hundreds of
+working women escorted the deputation to the official residence of the
+Chancellor of the Exchequer and waited anxiously in the street to hear
+the result of the audience.
+
+The result was, of course, barren. Mr. Lloyd-George glibly repeated his
+confidence in the "great opportunity" afforded by the Franchise Bill,
+and Sir Edward Grey, reminding the women of the divergence of view held
+by the members of Cabinet on the suffrage question, assured them that
+their best opportunity for success lay in an amendment to the present
+bill. The women spoke with the greatest candour to the two ministers and
+questioned them sharply as to the integrity of the Prime Minister's
+pledge to accept the amendments, if passed. To such depth of infamy had
+English politics sunk that it was possible for women openly to question
+the plighted word of the King's chief Minister! Mrs. Drummond, who
+stands in awe of no human being, in plain words invited the slippery Mr.
+Lloyd-George to clear his own character from obloquy. In the closing
+words of her speech she put the whole matter clearly up to him, saying:
+"Now, Mr. Lloyd-George, you have doggedly stuck to your old age
+pensions, and the insurance act, and secured them, and what you have
+done for these measures you can do also for the women."
+
+The House met on the following afternoon to debate Sir Edward Grey's
+permissive amendment, but no sooner had the discussion opened than a
+veritable bombshell was cast into the situation. Mr. Bonar Law arose and
+asked for a ruling on the constitutionality of a woman's suffrage
+amendment to the bill as framed. The Speaker, who, besides acting as the
+presiding officer of the House, is its official parliamentarian, replied
+that, in his opinion, such an amendment would make a huge difference in
+the bill, and that he would be obliged, at a later stage of the debates,
+to consider carefully whether, if carried, any woman suffrage amendment
+would not so materially alter the bill that it would have to be
+withdrawn. In spite of this sinister pronouncement, the House continued
+to debate the Grey amendment, which was ably supported by Lord Hugh
+Cecil, Sir John Rolleston, and others.
+
+During the intervening week-end holiday two Cabinet councils were held,
+and when the House met on Monday the Prime Minister called upon the
+Speaker for his ruling. The Speaker declared that, in his opinion, the
+passage of any one of the woman suffrage amendments would so alter the
+scope of the Franchise Bill as practically to create a new bill, because
+the measure, as it was framed, did not have for its main object the
+bestowal of the franchise on a hitherto excluded class. Had it been so
+framed a woman suffrage amendment would have been entirely proper. But
+the main object of the bill was to alter the qualification, or the basis
+of registration for a Parliamentary vote. It would increase the male
+electorate, but only as an indirect result of the changed
+qualifications. An amendment to the bill removing the sex barrier from
+the election laws was not, in the Speaker's opinion, a proper one.
+
+The Prime Minister then announced the intentions of the Cabinet, which
+were to withdraw the Franchise Bill and to refrain from introducing,
+during that session, a plural voting bill. Mr. Asquith blandly admitted
+that his pledge in regard to women's suffrage had been rendered
+incapable of fulfilment, and he said that he felt constrained to give a
+new pledge to take its place. There were only two that could be given.
+The first was that the Government should bring in a bill to enfranchise
+women, and this the Government would not do. The second was that the
+Government agree to give full facilities as to time, during the next
+session of Parliament, to a private member's bill, so drafted as to be
+capable of free amendment. This was the course that the Government had
+decided to adopt. Mr. Asquith had the effrontery to say in conclusion
+that he thought that the House would agree that he had striven and had
+succeeded in giving effect, both in letter and in spirit, to every
+undertaking which the Government had given.
+
+Two members only, Mr. Henderson and Mr. Keir Hardie had the courage to
+stand up on the floor of the House and denounce the Government's
+treachery, for treachery it unquestionably was. Mr. Asquith had pledged
+his sacred honour to introduce a bill that would be capable of an
+amendment to include women's suffrage, and he had framed a bill that
+could not be so amended. Whether he had done the thing deliberately,
+with the plain intention of selling out the women, or whether ignorance
+of Parliamentary rules accounted for the failure of the bill was
+immaterial. The bill need not have been drawn in ignorance. The fount of
+wisdom represented by Mr. Speaker could have been consulted at the time
+the bill was under construction quite as easily as when it had reached
+the debating stage. Our paper said editorially, representing and
+perfectly expressing our member's views: "Either the Government are so
+ignorant of Parliamentary procedure that they are unfit to occupy any
+position of responsibility, or else they are scoundrels of the worst
+kind."
+
+I am inclined to think that the verdict of posterity will lean towards
+the later conclusion. If Mr. Asquith had been a man of honour he would
+have reframed the Franchise Bill in such a way that it could have
+included a suffrage amendment, or else he would have made amends for his
+stupendous blunder--if it was a blunder--by introducing a Government
+measure for women's suffrage. He did neither, but disposed of the matter
+by promising facilities for a private member's bill which he knew, and
+which everybody knew, could not possibly pass.
+
+There was no chance for a private member's bill, even with facilities,
+because of a number of reasons, but principally because the torpedoing
+of the Conciliation Bill had destroyed utterly the spirit of
+conciliation in which Conservatives, Liberals and Radicals in the House
+of Commons, and militant and non-militant women throughout the Kingdom
+had set aside their differences of opinion and agreed to come together
+on a compromise measure. When the second Conciliation Bill, of 1911, was
+under discussion, Lord Lytton had said: "If this bill does not go
+through, the woman suffrage movement will not be stopped, but the spirit
+of conciliation of which this bill is an expression will be destroyed,
+and there will he war throughout the country, raging, tearing, fierce,
+bitter strife, though nobody wants it."
+
+Lord Lytton's words were prophetic. At this last brazen piece of
+trickery on the part of the Government the country blazed with bitter
+wrath. All the suffrage societies united in calling for a Government
+measure for women's suffrage to be introduced without delay. The idle
+promise of facilities for a private member's bill was rejected with
+contumely and scorn. The Liberal women's executive committee met, and a
+strong effort was made to pass a resolution threatening the withdrawal
+from party work of the entire federation, but this failed and the
+executive merely passed a feeble resolution of regret.
+
+The membership of the Women's Liberal Federation was, at that time,
+close to 200,000, and if the executive had passed the strong resolution,
+refusing to do any more work for the party until a Government measure
+had been introduced, the Government would have been forced to yield.
+They could not have faced the country without the support of the women.
+But these women, many of them, were wives of men in the service, the
+paid service of the Liberal Party. Many of them were wives of Liberal
+members. They lacked the courage, or the intelligence, or the insight,
+to declare war as a body on the Government. A large number of women, and
+also many men, did resign from the Liberal Party, but the defections
+were not serious enough to affect the Government.
+
+The militants declared, and proceeded instantly to carry out,
+unrelenting warfare. We announced that either we must have a Government
+measure, or a Cabinet split--those men in the Cabinet calling themselves
+suffragists going out--or we would take up the sword again, never to lay
+it down until the enfranchisement of the women of England was won.
+
+It was at this time, February, 1913, less than two years ago as I write
+these words, that militancy, as it is now generally understood by the
+public began--militancy in the sense of continued, destructive, guerilla
+warfare against the Government through injury to private property. Some
+property had been destroyed before this time, but the attacks were
+sporadic, and were meant to be in the nature of a warning as to what
+might become a settled policy. Now we indeed lighted the torch, and we
+did it with the absolute conviction that no other course was open to us.
+We had tried every other measure, as I am sure that I have demonstrated
+to my readers, and our years of work and suffering and sacrifice had
+taught us that the Government would not yield to right and justice, what
+the majority of members of the House of Commons admitted was right and
+justice, but that the Government would, as other governments invariably
+do, yield to expediency. Now our task was to show the Government that it
+was expedient to yield to the women's just demands. In order to do that
+we had to make England and every department of English life insecure and
+unsafe. We had to make English law a failure and the courts farce comedy
+theatres; we had to discredit the Government and Parliament in the eyes
+of the world; we had to spoil English sports, hurt business, destroy
+valuable property, demoralise the world of society, shame the churches,
+upset the whole orderly conduct of life--
+
+That is, we had to do as much of this guerilla warfare as the people of
+England would tolerate. When they came to the point of saying to the
+Government: "Stop this, in the only way it can be stopped, by giving
+the women of England representation," then we should extinguish our
+torch.
+
+Americans, of all people, ought to see the logic of our reasoning. There
+is one piece of American oratory, beloved of schoolboys, which has often
+been quoted from militant platforms. In a speech now included among the
+classics of the English language your great statesman, Patrick Henry,
+summed up the causes that led to the American Revolution. He said: "We
+have petitioned, we have remonstrated, we have supplicated, we have
+prostrated ourselves at the foot of the throne, and it has all been in
+vain. We must fight--I repeat it, sir, we must fight."
+
+Patrick Henry, remember, was advocating killing people, as well as
+destroying private property, as the proper means of securing the
+political freedom of men. The Suffragettes have not done that, and they
+never will. In fact the moving spirit of militancy is deep and abiding
+reverence for human life. In the latter course of our agitation I have
+been called upon to discuss our policies with many eminent men,
+politicians, literary men, barristers, scientists, clergymen. One of the
+last named, a high dignitary of the Church of England, told me that
+while he was a convinced suffragist, he found it impossible to justify
+our doing wrong that right might follow. I said to him: "We are not
+doing wrong--we are doing right in our use of revolutionary methods
+against private property. It is our work to restore thereby true values,
+to emphasise the value of human rights against property rights. You are
+well aware, sir, that property has assumed a value in the eyes of men,
+and in the eyes of the law, that it ought never to claim. It is placed
+above all human values. The lives and health and happiness, and even the
+virtue of women and children--that is to say, the race itself--are being
+ruthlessly sacrificed to the god of property every day of the world."
+
+To this my reverend friend agreed, and I said: "If we women are wrong in
+destroying private property in order that human values may be restored,
+then I say, in all reverence, that it was wrong for the Founder of
+Christianity to destroy private property, as He did when He lashed the
+money changers out of the Temple and when He drove the Gaderene swine
+into the sea."
+
+It was absolutely in this spirit that our women went forth to war. In
+the first month of guerilla warfare an enormous amount of property was
+damaged and destroyed. On January 31st a number of putting greens were
+burned with acids; on February 7th and 8th telegraph and telephone wires
+were cut in several places and for some hours all communication between
+London and Glasgow were suspended; a few days later windows in various
+of London's smartest clubs were broken, and the orchid houses at Kew
+were wrecked and many valuable blooms destroyed by cold. The jewel room
+at the Tower of London was invaded and a showcase broken. The residence
+of H. R. H. Prince Christian and Lambeth Palace, seat of the Archbishop
+of Canterbury, were visited and had windows broken. The refreshment
+house in Regents Park was burned to the ground on February 12th and on
+February 18th a country house which was being built at
+Walton-on-the-Hill for Mr. Lloyd-George was partially destroyed, a bomb
+having been exploded in the early morning before the arrival of the
+workmen. A hat pin and a hair pin picked up near the house--coupled with
+the fact that care had been taken not to endanger any lives--led the
+police to believe that the deed had been done by women enemies of Mr.
+Lloyd-George. Four days later I was arrested and brought up in Epsom
+police court, where I was charged with having "counselled and procured"
+the persons who did the damage. Admitted to bail for the night, I
+appeared next morning in court, where the case was fully reviewed.
+Speeches of mine were read, one speech, made at a meeting held on
+January 22nd, in which I called for volunteers to act with me in a
+particular engagement; and another, made the day after the explosion, in
+which I publicly accepted responsibility for all militant acts done in
+the past, and even for what had been done at Walton. At the conclusion
+of the hearing I was committed for trial at the May Assizes at
+Guildford. Bail would be allowed, it was stated, if I would agree to
+give the usual undertaking to refrain from all militancy or incitement
+to militancy.
+
+I asked that the case be set for speedy trial at the Assizes then in
+progress. I was entirely willing, I said, to give an undertaking for a
+short period, for a week, or even two weeks, but I could not possibly do
+so for a much longer period, looking at the fact that a new session of
+Parliament began in March, and was vitally concerned with the interests
+of women. The request was refused, and I was ordered to be taken to
+Holloway. I warned the magistrate that I should at once adopt the hunger
+strike, and I told him that if I lived at all until the summer it would
+be a dying woman who would come up for trial.
+
+Arriving at Holloway I carried out my intention, but within twenty-four
+hours I heard that the authorities had arranged that my trial should
+take place on April 1st, instead of at the end of June, and at the
+Central Criminal Court, London, instead of the Guildford Court. I then
+gave the required under-takings and was immediately released on bail.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+When I entered Old Bailey on that memorable Wednesday, April 2nd, 1913,
+to be tried for inciting to commit a felony, the court was packed with
+women. A great crowd of women who could not obtain the necessary tickets
+remained in the streets below for hours waiting news of the trial. A
+large number of detectives from Scotland Yard, and a still larger number
+of uniformed police were on duty both inside and outside the court. I
+could not imagine why it was considered necessary to have such a
+regiment of police on hand, for I had not, at that time, realised the
+state of terror into which the militant movement, in its new
+development, had thrown the authorities.
+
+Mr. Bodkin and Mr. Travers Humphreys appeared to prosecute on behalf of
+the Crown, and I conducted my own case, in consultation with my
+solicitor, Mr. Marshall. The Judge, Mr. Justice Lush, having taken his
+seat I entered the dock and listened to the reading of the indictment. I
+pled "not guilty," not because I wished to evade responsibility for the
+explosion,--I had already assumed that responsibility--but because the
+indictment accused me of having wickedly and maliciously incited women
+to crime. What I had done was not wicked of purpose, but quite the
+opposite of wicked. I could not therefore truthfully plead guilty. The
+trial having opened the Judge courteously asked me if I would like to
+sit down. I thanked him, and asked if I might also have a small table on
+which to place my papers. By orders of the Judge a table was brought me.
+
+Mr. Bodkin opened the case by explaining the "Malicious Damages to
+Property Act" of 1861, under which I was charged, and after describing
+the explosion which had damaged the Lloyd-George house at Walton, said
+that I was accused of being in the affair an accessory before the fact.
+It was not suggested, he said, that I was present when the crime was
+committed, but it was charged that I had moved and incited, counselled
+and procured women whose names were unknown to carry out that crime. It
+would be for the jury to decide, after the evidence had been presented,
+whether the facts did not point most clearly to the conclusion that
+women, probably two in number, who committed the crime were members of
+the Women's Social and Political Union, which had its office in Kingsway
+in London, and of which the defendant was the head, moving spirit and
+recognised leader.
+
+The blowing up of Mr. Lloyd-George's house was then described in detail.
+That the damage was intended as an act against Mr. Lloyd-George was
+clear, Mr. Bodkin said, from the malicious statements made against him
+by the prisoner. He produced a private letter written by me to a friend
+in which I had defended militancy, and said that not only had it become
+a duty but in the circumstances it had also become a political
+necessity. Said Mr. Bodkin:
+
+"A letter of that kind proves very clearly several things. It shows
+that she is the leader. It shows her influence over the emotional
+members of this organisation. It shows that according to her, militancy
+can be withheld for a time and let loose upon society at another time.
+And it further shows that any person or any woman who wants to indulge
+in militancy, which is only a picturesque expression for committing
+crimes against society, has to communicate with her, and with her alone,
+by word of mouth or by letter. That is the Proclamation which went out
+to the members of this organisation. The plain language of that letter
+is, 'If we don't get what we want, the Government and their members will
+be responsible, and the Government and the public will be bullied into
+giving us what we want.'"
+
+Many extracts from my speeches made in January and February were read,
+and the final speech made just before my arrest at Chelsea. But before
+they were read I said:
+
+"I wish to lodge an objection now to the police reports of my speeches.
+They have been supplied to me, and the only report I accept is that of
+the journalist of Cardiff who is one of the witnesses. He has furnished
+a fairly accurate report of what I said in that town. The police reports
+I do not accept. They are grossly inaccurate and ignorant and
+ungrammatical, and they convey an absolutely wrong impression of what I
+said in many respects."
+
+Witnesses were then examined; the carter who heard and reported the
+explosion; the foreman in charge of the damaged house, who told the
+cost of the damages, and described the explosives, etc., found on the
+premises; several police officers who told of finding hairpins and a
+woman's rubber golosh in the house, and so on. Absolutely nothing was
+brought out that tended to show that the Suffragettes had anything to do
+with the affair. The Judge noted this for he said to Mr. Bodkin:
+
+"I am not quite sure how you present this case. There are two ways of
+looking at it. Do you only ask the jury to say that the defendant
+specifically counselled the perpetration of this crime, or do you also
+say that, looking at her speeches that you read--assuming you prove that
+they were uttered--that the language used being a general incitement to
+damage property, any one who acted on this invitation and perpetrated
+this outrage would be incited by her to do it?"
+
+Mr. Bodkin replied that the latter assumption was correct.
+
+"I say that the speeches generally are incitement to all kinds of acts
+of violence against property, and that they present evidence of attacks
+against property and a particular individual, and that there is evidence
+in the speeches which have been read, and which will be proved, of
+admissions by Mrs. Pankhurst of having been connected with the
+particular outrage in a way which makes her in law an accessory before
+the fact."
+
+"But you do not confine the case to the latter way of putting it?"
+
+"No," replied Mr. Bodkin.
+
+"Even if the jury are satisfied," said the Judge, "that Mrs. Pankhurst
+was not directly connected with this outrage by counselling it, you
+still ask the jury to say that by counselling, as you say she had in the
+speeches, the destruction of property, especially that belonging to a
+particular gentleman, anybody who acted on that and committed this
+outrage would have been incited by her to do it?"
+
+"Yes, my lord."
+
+"I think, Mrs. Pankhurst, you now understand the way it is put?" asked
+the Judge.
+
+"I understand it quite well, my lord," I replied.
+
+Proceedings were resumed on the following day, and the examination of
+witnesses for the prosecution went on. At the close of the examination,
+the Judge inquired whether I desired to call any witnesses. I replied:
+
+"I do not desire to give evidence or to call any witnesses, but I desire
+to address your Lordship."
+
+I began by objecting to some of the things Mr. Bodkin had said in his
+speech which concerned me personally. He had referred to me--or at least
+his words conveyed the suggestion--that I was a woman riding about in my
+motor car inciting other women to do acts which entail imprisonment and
+great suffering, while I, perhaps indulging in some curious form of
+pleasure, was protected, or thought myself protected, from serious
+consequences. I said that Mr. Bodkin knew perfectly well that I shared
+all the dangers the other women faced, that I had been in prison three
+times, serving two of the sentences in full, and being treated like an
+ordinary felon--searched, put in prison clothes, eating prison fare,
+given solitary confinement and conforming to all the abominable rules
+imposed upon women who commit crimes in England. I thought I owed it to
+myself, especially as the same suggestions--in regard to the luxury in
+which I lived, supported by the members of the W. S. P. U.--had been
+made, not only by Mr. Bodkin in court, but by members of the Government
+in the House of Commons--I thought I owed it to myself to say that I
+owned no motor car and never had owned one. The car in which I
+occasionally rode was owned by the organisation and was used for general
+propaganda work. In that car, and in cars owned by friends I had gone
+about my work as a speaker in the Woman Suffrage movement. It was
+equally untrue, I said, that some of us were making incomes of L1,000 to
+L1,500 a year out of the suffrage movement, as had actually been alleged
+in the debates in the House in which members of Parliament were trying
+to decide how to crush militancy. No woman in our organisation was
+making any such income, or anything remotely like it. Myself, I had
+sacrificed a considerable portion of my income because I had to
+surrender a very important part of it in order to be free to do what I
+thought was my duty in the movement.
+
+Addressing myself to my defence I told the Court that it was a very
+serious condition of things when a large number of respectable and
+naturally law abiding people, people of upright lives, came to hold the
+law in contempt, came seriously to making up their minds that they were
+justified in breaking the law.
+
+"The whole of good government," I said, "rests upon acceptance of the
+law, upon respect of the law, and I say to you seriously, my lord, and
+gentlemen of the jury, that women of intelligence, women of training,
+women of upright life, have for many years ceased to respect the laws of
+this country. It is an absolute fact, and when you look at the laws of
+this country as they effect women it is not to be wondered at."
+
+At some length I went over these laws, laws that made it possible for
+the Judge to send me, if found guilty, to prison for fourteen years,
+while the maximum penalty for offences of the most revolting kind
+against little girls was only two years' imprisonment. The laws of
+inheritance, the laws of divorce, the laws of guardianship of
+children--all so scandalously unjust to women, I sketched briefly, and I
+said that not only these laws and others, but the administration of the
+laws fell so far short of adequacy that women felt that they must be
+permitted to share the work of cleaning up the entire situation. I tried
+here to tell of certain dreadful things that I had learned as the wife
+of a barrister, things about some of the men in high places who are
+entrusted with the administration of the law, of a judge of Assizes
+where many hideous crimes against women were tried, this judge himself
+being found dead one morning in a brothel, but the Court would not allow
+me to go into personalities, as he called it, with regard to
+"distinguished people," and told me that the sole question before the
+jury was whether or not I was guilty as charged. I must speak on that
+subject and on no other.
+
+After a hard fight to be allowed to tell the jury the reasons why women
+had lost respect for the law, and were making such a struggle in order
+to become law makers themselves, I closed my speech by saying:
+
+"Over one thousand women have gone to prison in the course of this
+agitation, have suffered their imprisonment, have come out of prison
+injured in health, weakened in body, but not in spirit. I come to stand
+my trial from the bedside of one of my daughters, who has come out of
+Holloway Prison, sent there for two months' hard labour for
+participating with four other people in breaking a small pane of glass.
+She has hunger-struck in prison. She submitted herself for more than
+five weeks to the horrible ordeal of feeding by force, and she has come
+out of prison having lost nearly two stone in weight. She is so weak
+that she cannot get out of her bed. And I say to you, gentlemen, that is
+the kind of punishment you are inflicting upon me or any other woman who
+may be brought before you. I ask you if you are prepared to send an
+incalculable number of women to prison--I speak to you as representing
+others in the same position--if you are prepared to go on doing that
+kind of thing indefinitely, because that is what is going to happen.
+There is absolutely no doubt about it. I think you have seen enough even
+in this present case to convince you that we are not women who are
+notoriety hunters. We could get that, heaven knows, much more cheaply if
+we sought it. We are women, rightly or wrongly, convinced that this is
+the only way in which we can win power to alter what for us are
+intolerable conditions, absolutely intolerable conditions. A London
+clergyman only the other day said that 60 per cent. of the married women
+in his parish were breadwinners, supporting their husbands as well as
+their children. When you think of the wages women earn, when you think
+of what this means to the future of the children of this country, I ask
+you to take this question very, very seriously. Only this morning I have
+had information brought to me which could be supported by sworn
+affidavits, that there is in this country, in this very city of London
+of ours, a regulated traffic, not only in women of full age, but in
+little children; that they are being purchased, that they are being
+entrapped, and that they are being trained to minister to the vicious
+pleasures of persons who ought to know better in their positions of
+life.
+
+"Well, these are the things that have made us women determined to go on,
+determined to face everything, determined to see this thing out to the
+end, let it cost us what it may. And if you convict me, gentlemen, if
+you find me guilty, I tell you quite honestly and quite frankly, that
+whether the sentence is a long sentence, whether the sentence is a short
+sentence, I shall not submit to it. I shall, the moment I leave this
+court, if I am sent to prison, whether to penal servitude or to the
+lighter form of imprisonment--because I am not sufficiently versed in
+the law to know what his lordship may decide; but whatever my sentence
+is, from the moment I leave this court I shall quite deliberately refuse
+to eat food--I shall join the women who are already in Holloway on the
+hunger strike. I shall come out of prison, dead or alive, at the
+earliest possible moment; and once out again, as soon as I am physically
+fit I shall enter into this fight again. Life is very dear to all of us.
+I am not seeking, as was said by the Home Secretary, to commit suicide.
+I do not want to commit suicide. I want to see the women of this country
+enfranchised, and I want to live until that is done. Those are the
+feelings by which we are animated. We offer ourselves as sacrifices,
+just as your forefathers did in the past, in this cause, and I would ask
+you all to put this question to yourselves:--Have you the right, as
+human beings, to condemn another human being to death--because that is
+what it amounts to? Can you throw the first stone? Have you the right to
+judge women?
+
+"You have not the right in human justice, not the right by the
+constitution of this country, if rightly interpreted, to judge me,
+because you are not my peers. You know, every one of you, that I should
+not be standing here, that I should not break one single law--if I had
+the rights that you possess, if I had a share in electing those who make
+the laws I have to obey; if I had a voice in controlling the taxes I am
+called upon to pay, I should not be standing here. And I say to you it
+is a very serious state of things. I say to you, my lord, it is a very
+serious situation, that women of upright life, women who have devoted
+the best of their years to the public weal, that women who are engaged
+in trying to undo some of the terrible mistakes that men in their
+government of the country have made, because after all, in the last
+resort, men are responsible for the present state of affairs--I put it
+to you that it is a very serious situation. You are not accustomed to
+deal with people like me in the ordinary discharge of your duties; but
+you are called upon to deal with people who break the law from selfish
+motives. I break the law from no selfish motive. I have no personal end
+to serve, neither have any of the other women who have gone through this
+court during the past few weeks, like sheep to the slaughter. Not one of
+these women would, if women were free, be law-breakers. They are women
+who seriously believe that this hard path that they are treading is the
+only path to their enfranchisement. They seriously believe that the
+welfare of humanity demands this sacrifice; they believe that the
+horrible evils which are ravaging our civilisation will never be removed
+until women get the vote. They know that the very fount of life is being
+poisoned; they know that homes are being destroyed; that because of bad
+education, because of the unequal standard of morals, even the mothers
+and children are destroyed by one of the vilest and most horrible
+diseases that ravage humanity.
+
+"There is only one way to put a stop to this agitation; there is only
+one way to break down this agitation. It is not by deporting us, it is
+not by locking us up in gaol; it is by doing us justice. And so I appeal
+to you gentlemen, in this case of mine, to give a verdict, not only on
+my case, but upon the whole of this agitation. I ask you to find me not
+guilty of malicious incitement to a breach of the law.
+
+"These are my last words. My incitement is not malicious. If I had
+power to deal with these things, I would be in absolute obedience to the
+law. I would say to women, 'You have a constitutional means of getting
+redress for your grievances; use your votes, convince your fellow-voters
+of the righteousness of your demands. That is the way to obtain
+justice.' I am not guilty of malicious incitement, and I appeal to you,
+for the welfare of the country, for the welfare of the race, to return a
+verdict of not guilty in this case that you are called upon to try."
+
+After recapitulating the charge the Judge, in summing up, said:
+
+"It is scarcely necessary for me to tell you that the topics urged by
+the defendant in her address to you with regard to provocation by the
+laws of the country and the injustice done to women because they are not
+given the vote as men are, have no bearing upon the question you have to
+decide.
+
+"The motive at the back of her mind, or at the back of the minds of
+those who actually did put the gunpowder there, would afford no defence
+to this indictment. I am quite sure you will deal with this case upon
+the evidence, and the evidence alone, without regard to any question as
+to whether you think the law is just or unjust. It has nothing to do
+with the case. I should think you will probably have no doubt that this
+defendant, if she did these things charged against her, is not actuated
+by the ordinary selfish motive that leads most of the criminals who are
+in this dock to commit the crimes that they do commit. She is none the
+less guilty if she did these things which are charged against her,
+although she believes that by means of this kind the condition of
+society will be altered."
+
+The jury retired, and soon after the afternoon session of the court
+opened they filed in, and in reply to the usual question asked by the
+clerk of arraigns, said that they had agreed upon a verdict. Said the
+clerk:
+
+"Do you find Mrs. Pankhurst guilty or not guilty?"
+
+"Guilty," said the foreman, "with a strong recommendation to mercy."
+
+I spoke once more to the Judge.
+
+"The jury have found me guilty, with a strong recommendation to mercy,
+and I do not see, since motive is not taken into account in human laws,
+that they could do otherwise after your summing up. But since motive is
+not taken into account in human laws, and since I, whose motives are not
+ordinary motives, am about to be sentenced by you to the punishment
+which is accorded to people whose motives are selfish motives, I have
+only this to say: If it was impossible for a different verdict to be
+found; if it is your duty to sentence me, as it will be presently, then
+I want to say to you, as a private citizen, and to the jury as private
+citizens, that I, standing here, found guilty by the laws of my country,
+I say to you it is your duty, as private citizens, to do what you can to
+put an end to this intolerable state of affairs. I put that duty upon
+you. And I want to say, _whatever the sentence you pass upon me, I shall
+do what is humanly possible to terminate that sentence at the earliest
+possible moment. I have no sense of guilt. I feel I have done my duty. I
+look upon myself as a prisoner of war. I am under no moral obligation
+to conform to, or in any way accept, the sentence imposed upon me._ I
+shall take the desperate remedy that other women have taken. It is
+obvious to you that the struggle will be an unequal one, but I shall
+make it--I shall make it as long as I have an ounce of strength left in
+me, or any life left in me.
+
+"I shall fight, I shall fight, I shall fight, from the moment I enter
+prison to struggle against overwhelming odds; I shall resist the doctors
+if they attempt to feed me. I was sentenced last May in this court to
+nine months' imprisonment. I remained in prison six weeks. There are
+people who have laughed at the ordeal of hunger-striking and forcible
+feeding. All I can say is, and the doctors can bear me out, that I was
+released because, had I remained there much longer, I should have been a
+dead woman.
+
+"I know what it is because I have gone through it. My own daughter[4]
+has only just left it. There are women there still facing that ordeal,
+facing it twice a day. Think of it, my lord, twice a day this fight is
+gone through. Twice a day a weak woman resisting overwhelming force,
+fights and fights as long as she has strength left; fights against women
+and even against men, resisting with her tongue, with her teeth, this
+ordeal. Last night in the House of Commons some alternative was
+discussed, or rather, some additional punishment. Is it not a strange
+thing, my lord, that laws which have sufficed to restrain men
+throughout the history of this country do not suffice now to restrain
+women--decent women, honourable women?
+
+"Well, my lord, I do want you to realise it. I am not whining about my
+punishment, I invited it. I deliberately broke the law, not hysterically
+or emotionally, but of set serious purpose, because I honestly feel it
+is the only way. Now, I put the responsibility of what is to follow upon
+you, my lord, as a private citizen, and upon the gentlemen of the jury,
+as private citizens, and upon all the men in this court--what are you,
+with your political powers, going to do to end this intolerable
+situation?
+
+"_To the women I have represented, to the women who, in response to my
+incitement, have faced these terrible consequences, have broken laws, to
+them, I want to say I am not going to fail them, but to face it as they
+face it, to go through with it, and I know that they will go on with the
+fight whether I live or whether I die._
+
+"_This movement will go on and on until we have the rights of citizens
+in this country, as women have in our Colonies, as they will have
+throughout the civilised world before this woman's war is ended._
+
+"That is all I have to say."
+
+Mr. Justice Lush, in passing sentence, said: "It is my duty, Mrs.
+Emmeline Pankhurst, and a very painful duty it is, to pass what, in my
+opinion, is a suitable and adequate sentence for the crime of which you
+have been most properly convicted, having regard to the strong
+recommendation to mercy by the jury. I quite recognise, as I have
+already said, that the motives that have actuated you in committing
+this crime are not the selfish motives that actuate most of the persons
+who stand in your position, but although you blind your eyes to it, I
+cannot help pointing out to you that the crime of which you have been
+convicted is not only a very serious one, but, in spite of your motives,
+it is, in fact, a wicked one. It is wicked because it not only leads to
+the destruction of property of persons who have done you no wrong, but
+in spite of your calculations, it may expose other people to the danger
+of being maimed or even killed. It is wicked because you are, and have
+been, luring other people--young women, it may be--to engage in such
+crimes, possibly to their own ruin; and it is wicked, because you cannot
+help being alive to it if you would only think.
+
+"You are setting an example to other persons who may have other
+grievances that they legitimately want to have put right by embarking on
+a similar scheme to yours, and trying to effect their object by
+attacking the property, if not the lives, of other people. I know,
+unfortunately--at least, I feel sure--you will pay no heed to what I
+say. I only beg of you to think of these things."
+
+"I have thought of them," I interjected.
+
+"Think, if only for one short hour, dispassionately," continued the
+majesty of law, "I can only say that, although the sentence I am going
+to pass must be a severe one, must be adequate to the crime of which you
+have been found guilty, if you would only realise the wrong you are
+doing, and the mistake you are making, and would see the error you have
+committed, and undertake to amend matters by using your influence in a
+right direction, I would be the first to use all my best endeavours to
+bring about a mitigation of the sentence I am about to pass.
+
+"I cannot, and I will not, regard your crime as a merely trivial one. It
+is not. It is a most serious one, and, whatever you may think, it is a
+wicked one. I have paid regard to the recommendation of the jury. You
+yourself have stated the maximum sentence which this particular offence
+is by the legislature thought to deserve. The least sentence I can pass
+upon you is a sentence of three years' penal servitude."
+
+As soon as the sentence was pronounced the intense silence which had
+reigned throughout the trial was broken, and an absolute pandemonium
+broke out among the spectators. At first it was merely a confused and
+angry murmur of "Shame!" "Shame!" The murmurs quickly swelled into loud
+and indignant cries, and then from gallery and court there arose a great
+chorus uttered with the utmost intensity and passion. "Shame!" "Shame!"
+The women sprang to their feet, in many instances stood on their seats,
+shouting "Shame!" "Shame!" as I was conducted out of the dock in charge
+of two wardresses. "Keep the flag flying!" shouted a woman's voice, and
+the response came in a chorus: "We will!" "Bravo!" "Three cheers for
+Mrs. Pankhurst!" That was the last I heard of the courtroom protest.
+
+Afterwards I heard that the noise and confusion was kept up for several
+minutes longer, the Judge and the police being quite powerless to
+obtain order. Then the women filed out singing the Women's
+Marseillaise--
+
+
+     "March on, march on,
+     Face to the dawn,
+     The dawn of liberty."
+
+
+The Judge flung after their retreating forms the dire threat of prison
+for any woman who dared repeat such a scene. Threat of prison--to
+Suffragettes! The women's song only swelled the louder and the corridors
+of Old Bailey reverberated with their shouts. Certainly that venerable
+building had never in its checkered history witnessed such a scene. The
+great crowd of detectives and police who were on duty seemed actually
+paralysed by the audacity of the protest, for they made no attempt to
+intervene.
+
+At three o'clock, when I left the court by a side entrance in Newgate
+Street, I found a crowd of women waiting to cheer me. With the two
+wardresses I entered a four wheeler and was driven to Holloway to begin
+my hunger strike. Scores of women followed in taxicabs, and when I
+arrived at the prison gates there was another protest of cheers for the
+cause and boos for the law. In the midst of all this intense excitement
+I passed through the grim gates into the twilight of prison, now become
+a battle-ground.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[4] Sylvia Pankhurst, who was forcibly fed for five weeks, during an
+original sentence of two months imposed for breaking one window.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+Prison had indeed been for us a battle-ground ever since the time when
+we had solemnly resolved that, as a matter of principle, we would not
+submit to the rules that bound ordinary offenders against the law. But
+when I entered Holloway on that April day in 1913, it was with full
+knowledge that I had before me a far more prolonged struggle than any
+that the militant suffragists had hitherto faced. I have described the
+hunger strike, that terrible weapon with which we had repeatedly broken
+our prison bars. The Government, at their wits' end to cope with the
+hunger strikers, and to overcome a situation which had brought the laws
+of England into such scandalous disrepute, had had recourse to a
+measure, surely the most savagely devised ever brought before a modern
+Parliament.
+
+In March of that year, while I was waiting trial on the charge of
+conspiring to destroy Mr. Lloyd-George's country house, a bill was
+introduced into the House of Commons by the Home Secretary, Mr. Reginald
+McKenna, a bill which had for its avowed object the breaking down of the
+hunger strike. This measure, now universally known as the "Cat and Mouse
+Act," provided that when a hunger striking suffrage prisoner (the law
+was frankly admitted to apply only to suffrage prisoners) was certified
+by the prison doctors to be in danger of death, she could be ordered
+released on a sort of a ticket of leave for the purpose of regaining
+strength enough to undergo the remainder of her sentence. Released, she
+was still a prisoner, the prisoner, or the patient, or the victim, as
+you may choose to call her, being kept under constant police
+surveillance. According to the terms of the bill the prisoner was
+released for a specified number of days, at the expiration of which she
+was supposed to return to prison on her own account. Says the Act:
+
+
+     "The period of temporary discharge may, if the Secretary of State
+     thinks fit, be extended on a representation of the prisoner that
+     the state of her health renders her unfit to return to prison. If
+     such representation be made, the prisoner shall submit herself, if
+     so required, for medical examination by the medical officer of the
+     above mentioned prison, or other registered medical practitioner
+     appointed by the Secretary of State.
+
+     The prisoner shall notify to the Commissioner of Police of the
+     Metropolis the place of residence to which she goes on her
+     discharge. She shall not change her residence without giving one
+     clear day's notice in writing to the Commissioner, specifying the
+     residence to which she is going and she shall not be temporarily
+     absent from her residence for more than twelve hours without giving
+     a like notice," etc.
+
+
+The idea of militant suffragists respecting a law of this order is
+almost humorous, and yet the smile dies before the pity one feels for
+the Minister whose confession of failure is embodied in such a measure.
+Here was a mighty Government weakly resolved that justice to women it
+would not grant, knowing that submission of women it could not force,
+and so was willing to compromise with a piece of class legislation
+absolutely contrary to all of its avowed principles. Said Mr. McKenna,
+pleading in the House for the advancement of his odious measure: "At the
+present time I cannot make these prisoners undergo their sentences
+without serious risk of death and I want to have power to enable me to
+compel a prisoner to undergo the sentence, and I want that power in all
+cases where the prisoner adopts the system of the hunger strike. At the
+present moment, although I have the power of release, I cannot release a
+prisoner without a pardon, and I have to discharge them for good. I want
+the power of releasing a prisoner without a pardon, with the sentence
+remaining alive.... I want to enforce the Law, and I want, if I can, to
+enforce it without forcible feeding, and without undergoing the risk of
+some one else's life."
+
+Interrogated by several members, Mr. McKenna admitted that the "Cat and
+Mouse" bill, if passed, would not inevitably do away with forcible
+feeding, but he promised that the hateful and disgusting process would
+be resorted to only when "absolutely necessary." We shall see later how
+hypocritical this representation was.
+
+Parliament, which had never had time to consider, beyond its initial
+stages, a women's suffrage measure, passed the Cat and Mouse Act through
+both houses within the limits of a few days. It was already law when I
+entered Holloway on April 3rd, 1913, and I grieve to state that many
+members of the Labour Party, pledged to support woman suffrage, helped
+to make it into law.
+
+Of course the Act was, from its inception, treated by the suffragists
+with the utmost contempt. We had not the slightest intention of
+assisting Mr. McKenna in enforcing unjust sentences against soldiers in
+the army of freedom, and when the prison doors closed behind me I
+adopted the hunger strike exactly as though I expected it to prove, as
+formerly, a means of gaining my liberty.
+
+That struggle is not a pleasant one to recall. Every possible means of
+breaking down my resolution was resorted to. The daintiest and most
+tempting food was placed in my cell. All sorts of arguments were brought
+to bear against me--the futility of resisting the Cat and Mouse Act, the
+wickedness of risking suicide--I shall not attempt to record all the
+arguments. They fell against a blank wall of consciousness, for my
+thoughts were all very far away from Holloway and all its torments. I
+knew, what afterwards I learned as a fact, that my imprisonment was
+followed by the greatest revolutionary outbreak that had been witnessed
+in England since 1832. From one end of the island to the other the
+beacons of the women's revolution blazed night and day. Many country
+houses--all unoccupied--were fired, the grand stand of Ayr race course
+was burned to the ground, a bomb was exploded in Oxted Station, London,
+blowing out walls and windows, some empty railroad carriages were blown
+up, the glass of thirteen famous paintings in the Manchester Art Gallery
+were smashed with hammers--these are simply random specimens of the
+general outbreak of secret guerilla warfare waged by women to whose
+liberties every other approach had been barricaded by the Liberal
+Government of free England. The only answer of the Government was the
+closing of the British Museum, the National Gallery, Windsor Castle, and
+other tourist resorts. As for the result on the people of England, that
+was exactly what we had anticipated. The public were thrown into a state
+of emotion of insecurity and frightened expectancy. Not yet did they
+show themselves ready to demand of the Government that the outrages be
+stopped in the only way they could be stopped--by giving votes to women.
+I knew that it would be so. Lying in my lonely cell in Holloway, racked
+with pain, oppressed with increasing weakness, depressed with the heavy
+responsibility of unknown happenings, I was sadly aware that we were but
+approaching a far goal. The end, though certain, was still distant.
+Patience, and still more patience, faith and still more faith, well, we
+had called upon these souls' help before and it was certain that they
+would not fail us at this greatest crisis of all.
+
+Thus in great anguish of mind and body passed nine terrible days, each
+one longer and more acutely miserable than the preceding. Towards the
+last, I was mercifully half unconscious of my surroundings. A curious
+indifference took possession of my over-wrought mind, and it was almost
+without emotion that I heard, on the morning of the tenth day, that I
+was to be released temporarily in order to recover my health. The
+Governor came to my cell and read me my licence, which commanded me to
+return to Holloway in fifteen days, and meanwhile to observe all the
+obsequious terms as to informing the police of my movements. With what
+strength my hands retained I tore the document in strips and dropped it
+on the floor of the cell. "I have no intention," I said, "of obeying
+this infamous law. You release me knowing perfectly well that I shall
+never voluntarily return to any of your prisons."
+
+They sent me away, sitting bolt upright in a cab, unmindful of the fact
+that I was in a dangerous condition of weakness, having lost two stone
+in weight and suffered seriously from irregularities of heart action. As
+I left the prison I was gratefully aware of groups of our women standing
+bravely at the gates, as though enduring a long vigil. As a matter of
+fact, relays of women had picketed the place night and day during the
+whole term of my imprisonment. The first pickets were arrested, but as
+others constantly arrived to fill their places the police finally gave
+in and allowed the women to march up and down before the prison carrying
+the flag.
+
+At the nursing home to which I was conveyed I learned that Annie Kenney,
+Mrs. Drummond, and our staunch friend, Mr. George Lansbury,[5] had been
+arrested during my imprisonment, and that all three had adopted the
+hunger strike. I also learned on my own account how desperately the
+Government were striving to make their Cat and Mouse Act--the last stand
+in their losing campaign--a success. Without regard to the extra expense
+laid on the unfortunate tax payers of the country, the Government
+employed a large extra force of police especially for this purpose. As
+I lay in bed, being assisted by every medical resource to return to life
+and health, these special police, colloquially termed "Cats," guarded
+the nursing home as if it were a besieged castle. In the street under my
+windows two detectives and a constable stood on guard night and day. In
+a house at right angles to my refuge three more detectives kept constant
+watch. In the mews at the rear of the house were more detectives, and
+diligently patrolling the road, as if in expectation of a rescuing
+regiment, two taxicabs, each with its quota of detectives, guarded the
+highways.
+
+All this made recovery slow and difficult. But worse was to come. On
+April 30th, just as I was beginning to rally somewhat, came the news
+that the police had swooped down on our headquarters in Kingsway and had
+arrested the entire official force. Miss Barrett, associate editor of
+_The Suffragette_; Miss Lennox, the sub-editor; Miss Lake, business
+manager; Miss Kerr, office manager, and Mrs. Sanders, financial
+secretary of the Union, were arrested, although not one of them had ever
+appeared in any militant action. Mr. E. G. Clayton, a chemist, was also
+arrested, accused of furnishing the W. S. P. U. with explosive
+materials. The offices were thoroughly searched, and, as on a former
+occasion, stripped of all books and papers. While this was being done
+another party of police, armed with a special warrant, proceeded to the
+printing office where our paper, _The Suffragette_, was published. The
+printer, Mr. Drew, was placed under arrest and the material for the
+paper, which was to appear on the following day, was seized. By one
+o'clock in the afternoon the entire plant and the headquarters of the
+Union were in the hands of the police, and to all appearances the
+militant movement--temporarily at least--was brought to a full stop. In
+my state of semi-prostration it at first seemed to me best to let the
+week's issue of the paper lapse, but on second thought I decided that
+even the appearance of surrender was not to be thought of. How we
+managed it need not here be told, but we actually did, overnight, with
+hardly any material, except Christabel's leading article, and with
+hastily summoned helpers, get out the paper as usual, and side by side
+with the morning journals which bore front page stories of the
+suppression of the Suffragette organ, our paper sellers sold _The
+Suffragette_. The front page bore, instead of the usual cartoon, the
+single word in bold faced type--
+
+
+                              "RAIDED,"
+
+the full story of the police search and the arrests being related in the
+other pages. Our headquarters, I may say in passing, remained closed
+less than forty-eight hours. We are so organised that the arrest of
+leaders does not seriously cripple us. Every one has an understudy, and
+when one leader drops out her substitute is ready instantly to take her
+place.
+
+In this emergency there appeared as chief organiser in Miss Kenney's
+place, Miss Grace Roe, one of the young Suffragettes of whom I, as
+belonging to the older generation, am so proud. Faced by difficulties
+as great as the Government could make them, Miss Roe at once showed
+herself to be equal to the situation, and to have the gift of unswerving
+loyalty combined with a strong and rapid judgment of things and people.
+Aiding her was Mrs. Dacre Fox, who surprised us all by her amazing
+ability to act as assistant editor of _The Suffragette_, manage a host
+of affairs in the office, and preside at our weekly meetings. Another
+member of the Union who came prominently to the front at the time of
+this crisis was Mrs. Mansel.
+
+In two days' time the office was open and running quite as usual, no
+outward sign showing the grief and indignation felt for our imprisoned
+comrades. Most of them refused bail and instantly hunger struck
+appearing in court for trial three days later in a pitiful state. Mrs.
+Drummond was so obviously ill and in need of medical attention that she
+was discharged and was very soon afterwards operated upon. Mr. Drew, the
+printer, was forced to sign an undertaking not to publish the paper
+again. The others were sentenced to terms varying from six to eighteen
+months. Mr. Clayton was sentenced to twenty-one months, and after
+desperate resistance, during which he was forcibly fed many times,
+escaped his prison. The others, following the same example, starved
+their way to liberty, and have ever since been pursued at intervals and
+rearrested under the Cat and Mouse Act.
+
+After my discharge, April 12th, I remained in the nursing home until
+partially restored, then, under the eyes of the police, I motored out to
+Woking, the country home of my friend, Dr. Ethel Smyth. This house,
+like the nursing home, was guarded by a small army of police. I never
+went to the window, I never took the air in the garden without being
+conscious of watching eyes. The situation became intolerable, and I
+determined to end it. On May 26th there was a great meeting at the
+London Pavillion, and I gave notice that I would attend it. Supported by
+Dr. Flora Murray, Dr. Ethel Smyth and my devoted Nurse Pine, I walked
+downstairs, to be confronted at the door by a detective, who demanded to
+know where I was going. I was in a weak state, much weaker than I had
+imagined, and in refusing the right of a man to question my movements I
+exhausted the last remnant of my strength and sank fainting in the arms
+of my friends. As soon as I recovered I got into the motor car. The
+detective instantly took his place beside me and told the chauffeur to
+drive to Bow Street Station. The chauffeur replied that he took his
+orders only from Mrs. Pankhurst, whereupon the detective summoned a
+taxicab and, placing me under arrest, took me to Bow Street.
+
+Under the Cat and Mouse Act a paroled prisoner can be thus arrested
+without the formality of a warrant, nor does the time she has spent at
+liberty, in regaining her health, count off from her prison sentence.
+The magistrate at Bow Street was therefore quite within his legal rights
+when he ordered me returned to Holloway. I felt it my duty,
+nevertheless, to point out to him the inhumanity of his act. I said to
+him: "I was released from Holloway on account of my health. Since then I
+have been treated exactly as if I were in prison. It has become
+absolutely impossible for any one to recover health under such
+conditions, and this morning I decided to make this protest against a
+state of affairs unparalleled in a civilised country."
+
+[Illustration: RE-ARREST OF MRS. PANKHURST AT WOKING
+
+_May 26, 1913_]
+
+The magistrate replied formally: "You quite understand what the position
+is. You have been arrested on this warrant and all I have to do is to
+make an order recommending you to prison."
+
+"I think" I said, "that you should do so, with a full sense of
+responsibility. If I am taken to Holloway on your warrant I shall resume
+the protest I made before which led to my release, and I shall go on
+indefinitely until I die, or until the Government decide, since they
+have taken upon themselves to employ you and other people to administer
+the laws, that they must recognise women as citizens and give them some
+control over the laws of this country."
+
+It was a five days' hunger strike this time, because the extreme
+weakness of my condition made it impossible for me to endure a longer
+term. I was released on May 30th on a seven days' licence, and in a
+half-alive state was again carried to a nursing home. Less than a week
+later, while I was still bed-ridden, a terrible event occurred, one that
+should have shaken the stolid British public into a realisation of the
+seriousness of the situation precipitated by the Government. Emily
+Wilding Davison, who had been associated with the militant movement
+since 1906, gave up her life for the women's cause by throwing herself
+in the path of the thing, next to property, held most sacred to
+Englishmen--sport. Miss Davison went to the races at Epsom, and
+breaking through the barriers which separated the vast crowds from the
+race course, rushed in the path of the galloping horses and caught the
+bridle of the King's horse, which was leading all the others. The horse
+fell, throwing his jockey and crushing Miss Davison in such shocking
+fashion that she was carried from the course in a dying condition.
+Everything possible was done to save her life. The great surgeon, Mr.
+Mansell Moullin, put everything aside and devoted himself to her case,
+but though he operated most skilfully, the injuries she had received
+were so frightful that she died four days later without once having
+recovered consciousness. Members of the Union were beside her when she
+breathed her last, on June 8th, and on June 14th they gave her a great
+public funeral in London. Crowds lined the streets as the funeral car,
+followed by thousands of women, passed slowly and sadly to St. George's
+Church, Bloomsbury, where the memorial services were held.
+
+Emily Wilding Davison was a character almost inevitably developed by a
+struggle such as ours. She was a B. A. of London University, and had
+taken first class honours at Oxford in English Language and Literature.
+Yet the women's cause made such an appeal to her reason and her
+sympathies that she put every intellectual and social appeal aside and
+devoted herself untiringly and fearlessly to the work of the Union. She
+had suffered many imprisonments, had been forcibly fed and most brutally
+treated. On one occasion when she had barricaded her cell against the
+prison doctors, a hose pipe was turned on her from the window and she
+was drenched and all but drowned in the icy water while workmen were
+breaking down her cell door. Miss Davison, after this experience,
+expressed to several of her friends the deep conviction that now, as in
+days called uncivilised, the conscience of the people would awaken only
+to the sacrifice of a human life. At one time in prison she tried to
+kill herself by throwing herself head-long from one of the upper
+galleries, but she succeeded only in sustaining cruel injuries. Ever
+after that time she clung to her conviction that one great tragedy, the
+deliberate throwing into the breach of a human life, would put an end to
+the intolerable torture of women. And so she threw herself at the King's
+horse, in full view of the King and Queen and a great multitude of their
+Majesties' subjects, offering up her life as a petition to the King,
+praying for the release of suffering women throughout England and the
+world. No one can possibly doubt that that prayer can forever remain
+unanswered, for she took it straight to the Throne of the King of all
+the worlds.
+
+The death of Miss Davison was a great shock to me and a very great grief
+as well, and although I was scarcely able to leave my bed I determined
+to risk everything to attend her funeral. This was not to be, however,
+for as I left the house I was again arrested by detectives who lay in
+waiting. Again the farce of trying to make me serve a three years'
+sentence was undertaken. But now the militant women had discovered a new
+and more terrible weapon with which to defy the unjust laws of England,
+and this weapon--the thirst strike--I turned against my gaolers with
+such effect that they were forced within three days to release me.
+
+The hunger strike I have described as a dreadful ordeal, but it is a
+mild experience compared with the thirst strike, which is from beginning
+to end simple and unmitigated torture. Hunger striking reduces a
+prisoner's weight very quickly, but thirst striking reduces weight so
+alarmingly fast that prison doctors were at first thrown into absolute
+panic of fright. Later they became somewhat hardened, but even now they
+regard the thirst strike with terror. I am not sure that I can convey to
+the reader the effect of days spent without a single drop of water taken
+into the system. The body cannot endure loss of moisture. It cries out
+in protest with every nerve. The muscles waste, the skin becomes
+shrunken and flabby, the facial appearance alters horribly, all these
+outward symptoms being eloquent of the acute suffering of the entire
+physical being. Every natural function is, of course, suspended, and the
+poisons which are unable to pass out of the body are retained and
+absorbed. The body becomes cold and shivery, there is constant headache
+and nausea, and sometimes there is fever. The mouth and tongue become
+coated and swollen, the throat thickens and the voice sinks to a thready
+whisper.
+
+When, at the end of the third day of my first thirst strike, I was sent
+home I was in a condition of jaundice from which I have never completely
+recovered. So badly was I affected that the prison authorities made no
+attempt to arrest me for nearly a month after my release. On July 13th I
+felt strong enough once more to protest against the odious Cat and Mouse
+Act, and, with Miss Annie Kenney, who was also at liberty "on medical
+grounds," I went to a meeting at the London Pavillion. At the close of
+the meeting, during which Miss Kenney's prison licence was auctioned off
+for L12, we attempted for the first time the open escape which we have
+so frequently since effected. Miss Kenney, from the platform, announced
+that we should openly leave the hall, and she forthwith walked coolly
+down into the audience. The police rushed in in overwhelming numbers,
+and after a desperate fight, succeeded in capturing her. Other
+detectives and policemen hurried to the side door of the hall to
+intercept me, but I disappointed them by leaving by the front door and
+escaping to a friend's house in a cab.
+
+The police soon traced me to the house of my friend, the distinguished
+scientist, Mrs. Hertha Ayrton, and the place straightway became a
+besieged fortress. Day and night the house was surrounded, not only by
+police, but by crowds of women sympathisers. On the Saturday following
+my appearance at the Pavillion we gave the police a bit of excitement of
+a kind they do not relish. A cab drove up to Mrs. Ayrton's door, and
+several well-known members of the Union alighted and hurried indoors. At
+once the word was circulated that a rescue was being attempted, and the
+police drew resolutely around the cab. Soon a veiled woman appeared in
+the doorway, surrounded by Suffragettes, who, when the veiled lady
+attempted to get into the cab, resisted with all their strength the
+efforts of the police to lay hands upon her. The cry went up from all
+sides: "They are arresting Mrs. Pankhurst!" Something very like a free
+fight ensued, occupying all the attention of the police who were not in
+the immediate vicinity of the cab. The men surrounding that rocking
+vehicle succeeded in tearing the veiled figure from the arms of the
+other women and piling into the cab ordered the chauffeur to drive full
+speed to Bow Street. Before they reached their destination, however, the
+veiled lady raised her veil--alas, it was not Mrs. Pankhurst, who by
+that time was speeding away in another taxicab in quite another
+direction.
+
+Our ruse infuriated the police, and they determined to arrest me at my
+first public appearance, which was at the Pavillion on the Monday
+following the episode just related. When I reached the Pavillion I found
+it literally surrounded by police, hundreds of them. I managed to slip
+past the outside cordon, but Scotland Yard had its best men inside the
+hall, and I was not permitted to reach the platform. Surrounded by plain
+clothes men, batons drawn, I could not escape, but I called out to the
+women that I was being taken, and so valiantly did they rush to the
+rescue that the police had their hands full for nearly half an hour
+before they got me into a taxicab bound for Holloway. Six women were
+arrested that day, and many more than six policemen were temporarily
+incapacitated for duty.
+
+By this time I had made up my mind that I would not only resist staying
+in prison, I would resist to the utmost of my ability going to prison.
+Therefore, when we reached Holloway I refused to get out of the cab,
+declaring to my captors that I would no longer acquiesce in the slow
+judicial murder to which the Government were subjecting women. I was
+lifted out and carried into a cell in the convicted hospital wing of the
+gaol. The wardresses who were on duty there spoke with some kindness to
+me, suggesting that, as I was very apparently exhausted and ill, I
+should do well to undress and go to bed. "No," I replied, "I shall not
+go to bed, not once while I am kept here. I am weary of this brutal
+game, and I intend to end it."
+
+Without undressing, I lay down on the outside of the bed. Later in the
+evening the prison doctor visited me, but I refused to be examined. In
+the morning he came again, and with him the Governor and the head
+wardress. As I had taken neither food nor water since the previous day
+my appearance had become altered to such an extent that the doctor was
+plainly perturbed. He begged me, "as a small concession," to allow him
+to feel my pulse, but I shook my head, and they left me alone for the
+day. That night I was so ill that I felt some alarm for my own
+condition, but I knew of nothing that could be done except to wait. On
+Wednesday morning the Governor came again and asked me with an
+assumption of carelessness if it were true that I was refusing both food
+and water. "It is true," I said, and he replied brutally: "You are very
+cheap to keep." Then, as if the thing were not a ridiculous farce, he
+announced that I was sentenced to close confinement for three days,
+with deprivation of all privileges, after which he left my cell.
+
+Twice that day the doctor visited me, but I would not allow him to touch
+me. Later came a medical officer from the Home Office, to which I had
+complained, as I had complained to the Governor and the prison doctor,
+of the pain I still suffered from the rough treatment I had received at
+the Pavillion. Both of the medical men insisted that I allow them to
+examine me, but I said: "I will not be examined by you because your
+intention is not to help me as a patient, but merely to ascertain how
+much longer it will be possible to keep me alive in prison. I am not
+prepared to assist you or the Government in any such way. I am not
+prepared to relieve you of any responsibility in this matter." I added
+that it must be quite obvious that I was very ill and unfit to be
+confined in prison. They hesitated for a moment or two, then left me.
+
+Wednesday night was a long nightmare of suffering, and by Thursday
+morning I must have presented an almost mummified appearance. From the
+faces of the Governor and the doctor when they came into my cell and
+looked at me I thought that they would at once arrange for my release.
+But the hours passed and no order for release came. I decided that I
+must force my release, and I got up from the bed where I had been lying
+and began to stagger up and down the cell. When all strength failed me
+and I could keep my feet no longer I lay down on the stone floor, and
+there, at four in the afternoon, they found me, gasping and half
+unconscious. And then they sent me away. I was in a very weakened
+condition this time, and had to be treated with saline solutions to save
+my life. I felt, however, that I had broken my prison walls for a time
+at least, and so this proved. It was on July 24th that I was released. A
+few days later I was borne in an invalid's chair to the platform of the
+London Pavillion. I could not speak, but I was there, as I had promised
+to be. My licence, which by this time I had ceased to tear up because it
+had an auction value, was sold to an American present for the sum of one
+hundred pounds. I had told the Governor on leaving that I intended to
+sell the licence and to spend the money for militant purposes, but I had
+not expected to raise such a splendid sum as one hundred pounds. I shall
+always remember the generosity of that unknown American friend.
+
+A great medical congress was being held in London in the summer of 1913,
+and on August 11th we held a large meeting at Kingsway Hall, which was
+attended by hundreds of visiting doctors. I addressed this meeting, at
+which a ringing resolution against forcible feeding was passed, and I
+was allowed to go home without police interference. It was, as a matter
+of fact, the second time during that month that I had spoken in public
+without molestation. The presence of so many distinguished medical men
+in London may have suggested to the authorities that I had better be
+left alone for the time being. At all events I was left alone, and late
+in the month I went, quite publicly, to Paris, to see my daughter
+Christabel and plan with her the campaign for the coming autumn. I
+needed rest after the struggles of the past five months, during which I
+had served, of my three years' prison sentence, not quite three weeks.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[5] Mr. Lansbury shortly before this had resigned his seat in Parliament
+and had gone to his constituents on the question of women's suffrage.
+Both the Liberal and the Conservative parties had united against him,
+with the result that a Unionist candidate was returned in his place. Mr.
+Lloyd-George publicly rejoiced in the result of this election, saying
+that Mr. Marsh, the Conservative candidate, had been his man. The Labour
+Party, in Parliament and out, meekly accepted this piece of Liberal
+chicanery without protest.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+The two months of the summer of 1913 which were spent with my daughter
+in Paris were almost the last days of peace and rest I have been
+destined since to enjoy. I spent the days, or some hours of them, in the
+initial preparation of this volume, because it seemed to me that I had a
+duty to perform in giving to the world my own plain statement of the
+events which have led up to the women's revolution in England. Other
+histories of the militant movement will undoubtedly be written; in times
+to come when in all constitutional countries of the world, women's votes
+will be as universally accepted as men's votes are now; when men and
+women occupy the world of industry on equal terms, as co-workers rather
+than as cut-throat competitors; when, in a word, all the dreadful and
+criminal discriminations which exist now between the sexes are
+abolished, as they must one day be abolished, the historian will be able
+to sit down in leisurely fashion and do full justice to the strange
+story of how the women of England took up arms against the blind and
+obstinate Government of England and fought their way to political
+freedom. I should like to live long enough to read such a history,
+calmly considered, carefully analysed, conscientiously set forth. It
+will be a better book to read than this one, written, as it were, in
+camp between battles. But perhaps this one, hastily prepared as it has
+been, will give the reader of the future a clearer impression of the
+strenuousness and the desperation of the conflict, and also something of
+the heretofore undreamed of courage and fighting strength of women, who,
+having learned the joy of battle, lose all sense of fear and continue
+their struggle up to and past the gates of death, never flinching at any
+step of the way.
+
+Every step since that meeting in October, 1912, when we definitely
+declared war on the peace of England, has been beset with danger and
+difficulty, often unexpected and undeclared. In October, 1913, I sailed
+in the French liner, _La Provence_, for my third visit to the United
+States. My intention was published in the public press of England,
+France and America. No attempt at concealment of my purpose was made,
+and in fact, my departure was witnessed by two men from Scotland Yard.
+Some hints had reached my ears that an attempt would be made by the
+Immigration Officers at the port of New York to exclude me as an
+undesirable alien, but I gave little credit to these reports. American
+friends wrote and cabled encouraging words, and so I passed my time
+aboard ship quite peacefully, working part of the time, resting also
+against the fatigue always attendant on a lecture tour.
+
+[Illustration: MRS. PANKHURST AND CHRISTABEL IN THE GARDEN OF
+CHRISTABEL'S HOME IN PARIS]
+
+We came to anchor in the harbour of New York on October 26th, and there,
+to my astonishment, the Immigration authorities notified me that I was
+ordered to Ellis Island to appear before a Board of Special Inquiry. The
+officers who served the order of detention did so with all courtesy,
+even with a certain air of reluctance. They allowed my American
+travelling companion, Mrs. Rheta Childe Dorr, to accompany me to the
+Island, but no one, not even the solicitor sent by Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont
+to defend me, was permitted to attend me before the Board of Special
+Inquiry. I went before these three men quite alone, as many a poor,
+friendless woman, without any of my resources, has had to appear. The
+moment of my entrance to the room I knew that extraordinary means had
+been employed against me, for on the desk behind which the Board sat I
+saw a complete _dossier_ of my case in English legal papers. These
+papers may have been supplied by Scotland Yard, or they may have been
+supplied by the Government. I cannot tell, of course. They sufficed to
+convince the Board of Special Inquiry that I was a person of doubtful
+character, to say the least of it, and I was informed that I should have
+to be detained until the higher authorities at Washington examined my
+case. Everything was done to make me comfortable, the rooms of the
+Commissioner of Immigration being turned over to me and my companion.
+The very men who found me guilty of moral obloquy--something of which no
+British jury has ever yet accused me--put themselves out in a number of
+ways to make my detention agreeable. I was escorted all over the Island
+and through the quarters assigned detained immigrants, whose right to
+land in the United States is in question. The huge dining-rooms, the
+spotless kitchens and the admirably varied bill of fare interested and
+impressed me. Nothing like them exists in any English institution.
+
+I remained at Ellis Island two and a half days, long enough for the
+Commissioner of Immigration at Washington to take my case to the
+President who instantly ordered my release. Whoever was responsible for
+my detention entirely overlooked the advertising value of the incident.
+My lecture tour was made much more successful for it and I embarked for
+England late in November with a very generous American contribution to
+our war chest, a contribution, alas, that I was not permitted to deliver
+in person.
+
+The night before the White Star liner _Majestic_ reached Plymouth a
+wireless message from headquarters informed me that the Government had
+decided to arrest me on my arrival. The arrest was made, under very
+dramatic conditions, the next day shortly before noon. The steamer came
+to anchor in the outer harbour, and we saw at once that the bay, usually
+so animated with passing vessels, had been cleared of all craft. Far in
+the distance the tender, which on other occasions had always met the
+steamer, rested at anchor between two huge grey warships. For a moment
+or two the scene halted, the passengers crowding to the deckrails in
+speechless curiosity to see what was to happen next. Suddenly a
+fisherman's dory, power driven, dashed across the harbour, directly
+under the noses of the grim war vessels. Two women, spray drenched,
+stood up in the boat, and as it ploughed swiftly past our steamer the
+women called out to me: "The Cats are here, Mrs. Pankhurst! They're
+close on you--" Their voices trailed away into the mist and we heard no
+more. Within a minute or two a frightened ship's boy appeared on deck
+and delivered a message from the purser asking me to step down to his
+office. I answered that I would certainly do nothing of the kind, and
+next the police swarmed out on deck and I heard, for the fifth time that
+I was arrested under the Cat and Mouse Act. They had sent five men from
+Scotland Yard, two men from Plymouth and a wardress from Holloway, a
+sufficient number, it will be allowed, to take one woman from a ship
+anchored two miles out at sea.
+
+Following my firm resolve not to assist in any way the enforcing of the
+infamous law, I refused to go with the men, who thereupon picked me up
+and carried me to the waiting police tender. We steamed some miles up
+the Cornish coast, the police refusing absolutely to tell me whither
+they were conveying me, and finally disembarked at Bull Point, a
+Government landing-stage, closed to the general public. Here a motor car
+was waiting, and accompanied by my bodyguard from Scotland Yard and
+Holloway, I was driven across Dartmoor to Exeter, where I had a not
+unendurable imprisonment and hunger strike of four days. Everyone from
+the Governor of the prison to the wardresses were openly sympathetic and
+kind, and I was told by one confidential official that they kept me only
+because they had orders to do so until after the great meeting at
+Empress Theatre, Earls Court, London, which had been arranged as a
+welcome home for me. The meeting was held on the Sunday night following
+my arrest, and the great sum of L15,000 was poured into the coffers of
+militancy. This included the L4,500 which had been collected during my
+American tour.
+
+Several days after my release from Exeter I went openly to Paris to
+confer with my daughter on matters relating to the campaign about to
+open, returning to attend a W. S. P. U. meeting on the day before my
+license expired. Nevertheless the boat train carriage in which I
+travelled with my doctor and nurse was invaded at Dover town by two
+detectives who told me to consider myself under arrest. We were making
+tea when the men entered, but this we immediately threw out of the
+window, because a hunger strike always began at the instant of arrest.
+We never compromised at all, but resisted from the very first moment of
+attack.
+
+The reason for this uncalled for arrest at Dover was the fear on the
+part of the police of the body guard of women, just then organised for
+the expressed purpose of resisting attempts to arrest me. That the
+police, as well as the Government were afraid to risk encountering women
+who were not afraid to fight we had had abundant testimony. We certainly
+had it on this occasion, for knowing that the body guard was waiting at
+Victoria Station, the authorities had cut off all approaches to the
+arrival platform and the place was guarded by battalions of police. Not
+a passenger was permitted to leave a carriage until I had been carried
+across the arrival platform between a double line of police and
+detectives and thrown into a forty horse power motor car, guarded within
+by two plain clothes men and a wardress, and without by three more
+policemen. Around this motor car were twelve taxi-cabs filled with plain
+clothes men, four to each vehicle, and three guarding the outside, not
+to mention the driver, who was also in the employ of the police
+department. Detectives on motor cycles were on guard at various points
+ready to follow any rescuing taxicab.
+
+Arrived at Holloway I was again lifted from the car and taken to the
+reception room and placed on the floor in a state of great exhaustion.
+When the doctor came in and told me curtly to stand up I was obliged to
+tell him that I could not stand. I utterly refused to be examined,
+saying that I was resolved to make the Government assume full
+responsibility for my condition. "I refuse to be examined by you or any
+prison doctor," I declared, "and I do this as a protest against my
+sentence, and against my being here at all. I no longer recognise a
+prison doctor as a medical man in the proper sense of the word. I have
+withdrawn my consent to be governed by the rules of prison; I refuse to
+recognise the authority of any prison official, and I therefore make it
+impossible for the Government to carry out the sentence they have
+imposed upon me."
+
+Wardresses were summoned, I was placed in an invalid chair and so
+carried up three flights of stairs and put into an unwarmed cell with a
+concrete floor. Refusing to leave the chair I was lifted out and placed
+on the bed, where I lay all night without removing my coat or loosening
+my garments. It was on a Saturday that the arrest had been made, and I
+was kept in prison until the following Wednesday morning. During all
+that time no food or water passed my lips, and I added to this the sleep
+strike, which means that as far as was humanly possible I refused all
+sleep and rest. For two nights I sat or lay on the concrete floor,
+resolutely refusing the oft repeated offers of medical examination. "You
+are not a doctor," I told the man. "You are a Government torturer, and
+all you want to do is to satisfy yourself that I am not quite ready to
+die." The doctor, a new man since my last imprisonment, flushed and
+looked extremely unhappy. "I suppose you do think that," he mumbled.
+
+On Tuesday morning the Governor came to look at me, and no doubt I
+presented by that time a fairly bad appearance. At least I gathered as
+much from the alarmed expression of the wardress who accompanied him. To
+the Governor I made the simple announcement that I was ready to leave
+prison and that I intended to leave very soon, dead or alive. I told him
+that from that moment I should not even rest on the concrete floor, but
+should walk my cell until I was released or until I died from
+exhaustion. All day I kept to this resolution, pacing up and down the
+narrow cell, many times stumbling and falling, until the doctor came in
+at evening to tell me that I was ordered released on the following
+morning. Then I loosened my gown and lay down, absolutely spent, and
+fell almost instantly into a death-like sleep. The next morning a motor
+ambulance took me to the Kingsway headquarters where a hospital room had
+been arranged for my reception. The two imprisonments in less than ten
+days had made terrible drafts on my strength, and the coldness of the
+Holloway cell had brought on a painful neuralgia. It was many days
+before I recovered even a tithe of my usual health.
+
+These two arrests resulted exactly as the Government should have known
+that they would result, in a great outbreak of fresh militancy. As soon
+as the news spread that I had been taken at Plymouth a huge fire broke
+out in the timber yards at Richmond Walk, Devenport, and an acre and a
+half of timber, beside a pleasure fair and a scenic railway adjacent, to
+the value of thousands of pounds was destroyed. No one ever discovered
+the cause of the fire, the greatest that ever occurred in the
+neighbourhood, but tied to one of the railings was a copy of the
+_Suffragette_ and to another railing two cards, on one of which was
+written a message to the Government: "How dare you arrest Mrs. Pankhurst
+and allow Sir Edward Carson and Mr. Bonar Law to go free?" The second
+card bore the words: "Our reply to the torture of Mrs. Pankhurst, and
+her cowardly arrest at Plymouth."
+
+Besides this fire, which waged fiercely from midnight until dawn, a
+large unoccupied house at Bristol was destroyed by fire; a fine
+residence in Scotland, also unoccupied, was badly damaged by fire; St.
+Anne's Church in a suburb of Liverpool was partly destroyed; and many
+pillar boxes in London, Edinburgh, Derby and other cities were fired. In
+churches all over the Kingdom our women created consternation by
+interpolating into the services reverently spoken prayers for prisoners
+who were suffering for conscience' sake. The reader no doubt has heard
+of these interruptions, and if so he has read of brawling, shrieking
+women, breaking into the sanctity of religious services, and creating
+riot in the House of God. I think the reader should know exactly what
+does happen when militants, who are usually religious women, interrupt
+church services. On the Sunday when I was in Holloway, following my
+arrest at Dover, certain women attending the afternoon service at
+Westminster Abbey, chanted in concert the following prayer: "God save
+Emmeline Pankhurst, help us with Thy love and strength to guard her,
+spare those who suffer for conscience' sake. Hear us when we pray to
+Thee." They had hardly finished this prayer when vergers fell upon them
+and with great violence hustled them out of the Abbey. One kneeling man,
+who happened to be near one of the women, forgot his Christian
+intercessions long enough to beat her in the face with his fists before
+the vergers came.
+
+Similar scenes have taken place in churches and cathedrals throughout
+England and Scotland, and in many instances the women have been most
+barbarously treated by vergers and members of the congregations. In
+other cases the women not only have been left unmolested, but have been
+allowed to finish their prayers amid deep and sympathetic silence. Some
+clergymen have even been brave enough to add a reverent amen to these
+prayers for women in prison, and it has happened that clergymen have
+voluntarily offered prayers for us. The Church as a whole, however, has
+undoubtedly failed to live up to its obligation to demand justice for
+women, and to protest against the torture of forcible feeding. During
+the year just closing we sent many deputations to Church authorities,
+the Bishops, one after another having been visited in this manner. Some
+of the Bishops, including the reactionary Archbishop of Canterbury,
+refused to accord the desired interview, and when that happened, the
+answer of the deputation was to sit on the doorstep of the episcopal
+residence until surrender followed--as it invariably did.
+
+As Holloway Gaol is within his diocese, the Bishop of London was visited
+by the W. S. P. U. and the demand was made that the Bishop himself
+should witness forcible feeding in order to realise the horror of the
+proceeding. He did visit two of the tortured women, but he did not see
+them forcibly fed, and when he came out he gave the public an account of
+his interview with them which was in effect the Government's version of
+the facts. The W. S. P. U. was naturally indignant, while all the
+Government's friends hailed the Bishop as a supporter of the policy of
+torture. Only those who have suffered the pain and agony, not to speak
+of the moral humiliation of forcible feeding can realise the depths of
+the iniquity which the Bishop of London was manoeuvred by the
+Government to whitewash. It may be true, as the Bishop comforted himself
+by saying, that the victims of forcible feeding suffered the more
+because they struggled under the process. But, as Mary Richardson wrote
+in the _Suffragette_, to expect a victim not to struggle was the same as
+telling her that she would suffer less if she did not jump on getting a
+cinder in her eye. "The principle," declared Miss Richardson, "is the
+same. One struggles because the pain is excruciating, and the nerves of
+the eyes, ears and face are so tortured that it would be impossible not
+to resist to the uttermost. One struggles, also, because of another
+reason--a moral reason--for forcible feeding is an immoral assault as
+well as a painful physical one, and to remain passive under it would
+give one the feeling of sin; the sin of concurrence. One's whole nature
+is revolted; resistance is therefore inevitable."
+
+I think it proper here to explain also the policy upon which we embarked
+in 1914 of taking our cause directly to the King. The reader has perhaps
+heard of Suffragette "insults" to King George and Queen Mary, and it is
+but just that he should hear a direct account of how these "insults" are
+offered. Several isolated attempts had been made to present petitions to
+the King, once when he was on his way to Westminster to open Parliament,
+and again on an occasion when he paid a visit to Bristol. On the latter
+occasion the woman who tried to present the petition was assaulted by
+one of the King's equerries, who struck her with the flat of his sword.
+
+We finally resolved on the policy of direct petition to the king because
+we had been forced to abandon all hope of successful petitioning to his
+Ministers. Tricked and betrayed at every turn by the Liberal Government,
+we announced that we would not again put even a pretence of confidence
+in them. We would carry our demand for justice to the throne of the
+Monarch. Late in December, 1913, while I was in prison for the second
+time since my return to England, a great gala performance was given at
+Covent Garden, the opera being the Jeanne d'Arc of Raymond Roze. The
+King and Queen and the entire Court were present, and the scene was
+expected to be one of unusual brilliance. Our women took advantage of
+the occasion to make one of the most successful demonstrations of the
+year. A box was secured directly opposite the Royal Box, and this was
+occupied by three women, beautifully gowned. On entering they had
+managed, without attracting the slightest attention, to lock and
+barricade the door, and at the close of the first act, as soon as the
+orchestra had disappeared, the women stood up, and one of them, with the
+aid of a megaphone, addressed the King. Calling attention to the
+impressive scenes on the stage, the speaker told the King that women
+were to-day fighting, as Joan of Arc fought centuries ago, for human
+liberty, and that they, like the maid of Orleans, were being tortured
+and done to death, in the name of the King, in the name of the Church,
+and with the full knowledge and responsibility of established
+Government. At this very hour the leader of these fighters in the army
+of liberty was being held in prison and tortured by the King's
+authority.
+
+The vast audience was thrown into a panic of excitement and horror, and
+amid a perfect turmoil of cries and adjurations, the door of the box was
+finally broken down and the women ejected. As soon as they had left the
+house others of our women, to the number of forty or more, who had been
+sitting quietly in an upper gallery, rose to their feet and rained
+suffrage literature on the heads of the audience below. It was fully
+three quarters of an hour before the excitement subsided and the singers
+could go on with the opera.
+
+The sensation caused by this direct address to Royalty inspired us to
+make a second attempt to arouse the King's conscience, and early in
+January, as soon as Parliament re-assembled, we announced that I would
+personally lead a deputation to Buckingham Palace. The plan was welcomed
+with enthusiasm by our members and a very large number of women
+volunteered to join the deputation, which was intended to make a protest
+against three things--the continued disfranchisement of women; the
+forcible feeding and the cat and mouse torture of those who were
+fighting against this injustice; and the scandalous manner in which the
+Government, while coercing and torturing militant women, were allowing
+perfect freedom to the men opponents of Home Rule in Ireland, men who
+openly announced that they were about to carry out a policy, not merely
+of attacking property, but of destroying human life.
+
+I wrote a letter to the King, conveying to him "the respectful and loyal
+request of the Women's Social and Political Union that Your Majesty will
+give audience to a deputation of women." The letter went on: "The
+deputation desire to submit to Your Majesty in person their claim to the
+Parliamentary vote, which is the only protection against the grievous
+industrial and social wrongs that women suffer; is the symbol and
+guarantee of British citizenship; and means the recognition of women's
+equal dignity and worth, as members of our great Empire.
+
+"The Deputation will further lay before Your Majesty a complaint of the
+mediaeval and barbarous methods of torture whereby Your Majesty's
+Ministers are seeking to repress women's revolt against the deprivation
+of citizen rights--a revolt as noble and glorious in its spirit and
+purpose as any of those past struggles for liberty which are the pride
+of the British race.
+
+"We have been told by the unthinking--by those who are heedless of the
+constitutional principles upon which is based our loyal request for an
+audience of Your Majesty in person--that our conversation should be with
+Your Majesty's Ministers.
+
+"We repudiate this suggestion. In the first place, it would not only be
+repugnant to our womanly sense of dignity, but it would be absurd and
+futile for us to interview the very men against whom we bring the
+accusations of betraying the Women's Cause and torturing those who fight
+for that Cause.
+
+"In the second place, we will not be referred to, and we will not
+recognise the authority of men who, in our eyes, have no legal or
+constitutional standing in the matter, because we have not been
+consulted as to their election to Parliament nor as to their appointment
+as Ministers of the Crown."
+
+I then cited as a precedent in support of our claim to be heard by the
+King in person, the case of the Deputation of Irish Catholics, which, in
+the year 1793, was received by King George III in person.
+
+I further said:
+
+"Our right as women to be heard and to be aided by Your Majesty is far
+stronger than any such right possessed by men, because it is based upon
+our lack of every other constitutional means of securing the redress of
+our grievances. We have no power to vote for Members of Parliament, and
+therefore for us there is no House of Commons. We have no voice in the
+House of Lords. But we have a King, and to him we make our appeal.
+
+"Constitutionally speaking, we are, as voteless women, living in the
+time when the power of the Monarch was unlimited. In that old time,
+which is passed for men though not for women, men who were oppressed had
+recourse to the King--the source of power, of justice, and of reform.
+
+"Precisely in the same way we now claim the right to come to the foot of
+the Throne and to make of the King in person our demand for the redress
+of the political grievance which we cannot, and will not, any longer
+tolerate.
+
+"Because women are voteless, there are in our midst to-day sweated
+workers, white slaves, outraged children, and innocent mothers and their
+babes stricken by horrible disease. It is for the sake and in the cause
+of these unhappy members of our sex, that we ask of Your Majesty the
+audience that we are confident will be granted to us."
+
+It was some days before we had the answer to this letter, and in the
+meantime some uncommonly stirring and painful occurrences attracted the
+public attention.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+For months before my return to England from my American lecture tour,
+the Ulster situation had been increasingly serious. Sir Edward Carson
+and his followers had declared that if Home Rule government should be
+created and set up in Dublin, they would--law or no law--establish a
+rival and independent Government in Ulster. It was known that arms and
+ammunition were being shipped to Ireland, and that men--and women too,
+for that matter--were drilling and otherwise getting ready for civil
+war. The W. S. P. U. approached Sir Edward Carson and asked him if the
+proposed Ulster Government would give equal voting rights to women. We
+frankly declared that in case the Ulster men alone were to have the
+vote, that we should deal with "King Carson" and his colleagues exactly
+in the same manner that we had adopted towards the British Government
+centred at Westminster. Sir Edward Carson at first promised us that the
+rebel Ulster Government, should it come into existence, would give votes
+to Ulster women. This pledge was later repudiated, and in the early
+winter months of 1914 militancy appeared in Ulster. It had been raging
+in Scotland for some time, and now the imprisoned Suffragettes in that
+country were being forcibly fed as in England. The answer to this was,
+of course, more militancy. The ancient Scottish church of Whitekirk, a
+relic of pre-Reformation days, was destroyed by fire. Several unoccupied
+country houses were also burned.
+
+It was about this time, February, 1914, that I undertook a series of
+meetings outside London, the first of which was to be held in Glasgow,
+in the St. Andrews Hall, which holds many thousands of people. In order
+that I might be free on the night of the meeting, I left London unknown
+to the police, in a motor car. In spite of all efforts to apprehend me I
+succeeded in reaching Glasgow and in getting to the platform of St.
+Andrews' where I found myself face to face with an enormous, and
+manifestly sympathetic audience.
+
+As it was suspected that the police might rush the platform, plans had
+been made to offer resistance, and the bodyguard was present in force.
+My speech was one of the shortest I have ever made. I said:
+
+"I have kept my promise, and in spite of His Majesty's Government I am
+here to-night. Very few people in this audience, very few people in this
+country, know how much of the nation's money is being spent to silence
+women. But the wit and ingenuity of women is overcoming the power and
+money of the British Government. It is well that we should have this
+meeting to-night, because to-day is a memorable day in the annals of the
+United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. To-day in the House of
+Commons has been witnessed the triumph of militancy--men's
+militancy--and to-night I hope to make it clear to the people in this
+meeting that if there is any distinction to be drawn at all between
+militancy in Ulster and the militancy of women, it is all to the
+advantage of the women. Our greatest task in this women's movement is to
+prove that we are human beings like men, and every stage of our fight is
+forcing home that very difficult lesson into the minds of men, and
+especially into the minds of politicians. I propose to-night at this
+political meeting to have a text. Texts are usually given from pulpits,
+but perhaps you will forgive me if I have a text to-night. My text is:
+'Equal justice for men and women, equal political justice, equal legal
+justice, equal industrial justice, and equal social justice.' I want as
+clearly and briefly as I can to make it clear to you to-night that if it
+is justifiable to fight for common ordinary equal justice, then women
+have ample justification, nay, have greater justification, for
+revolution and rebellion, than ever men have had in the whole history of
+the human race. Now that is a big contention to make, but I am going to
+prove it. You get the proof of the political injustice--"
+
+As I finished the word "injustice," a steward uttered a warning shout,
+there was a tramp of heavy feet, and a large body of police burst into
+the hall, and rushed up to the platform, drawing their truncheons as
+they ran. Headed by detectives from Scotland Yard, they surged in on all
+sides, but as the foremost members attempted to storm the platform, they
+were met by a fusillade of flower-pots, tables, chairs, and other
+missiles. They seized the platform railing, in order to tear it down,
+but they found that under the decorations barbed wires were concealed.
+This gave them pause for a moment.
+
+Meanwhile, more of the invading host came from other directions. The
+bodyguard and members of the audience vigorously repelled the attack,
+wielding clubs, batons, poles, planks, or anything they could seize,
+while the police laid about right and left with their batons, their
+violence being far the greater. Men and women were seen on all sides
+with blood streaming down their faces, and there were cries for a
+doctor. In the middle of the struggle, several revolver shots rang out,
+and the woman who was firing the revolver--which I should explain was
+loaded with blank cartridges only--was able to terrorise and keep at bay
+a whole body of police.
+
+I had been surrounded by members of the bodyguard, who hurried me
+towards the stairs from the platform. The police, however, overtook us,
+and in spite of the resistance of the bodyguard, they seized me and
+dragged me down the narrow stair at the back of the hall. There a cab
+was waiting. I was pushed violently into it, and thrown on the floor,
+the seats being occupied by as many constables as could crowd inside.
+
+The meeting was left in a state of tremendous turmoil, and the people of
+Glasgow who were present expressed their sense of outrage at the
+behavior of the police, who, acting under the Government's instructions,
+had so disgraced the city. General Drummond, who was present on the
+platform, took hold of the situation and delivered a rousing speech, in
+which she exhorted the audience to make the Government feel the force of
+their indignation.
+
+I was kept in the Glasgow police-cells all night, and the next morning
+was taken, a hunger and thirst striking prisoner, to Holloway, where I
+remained for five memorable days. This was the seventh attempt the
+Government had made to make me serve a three years' term of penal
+servitude on a conspiracy charge, in connection with the blowing up of
+Mr. Lloyd-George's country house. In the eleven and a half months since
+I had received that sentence I had spent just thirty days in prison. On
+March 14th I was again released, still suffering severely, not only from
+the hunger and thirst strike, but from injuries received at the time of
+my brutal arrest in Glasgow.
+
+The answer to that arrest had been swift and strong. In Bristol, the
+scene of great riots and destruction when men were fighting for votes, a
+large timber-yard was burnt. In Scotland a mansion was destroyed by
+fire. A milder protest consisted of a raid upon the house of the Home
+Secretary, in the course of which eighteen windows were broken.
+
+The greatest and most startling of all protests hitherto made was the
+attack at this time on the Rokeby "Venus" in the National Gallery. Mary
+Richardson, the young woman who carried out this protest, is possessed
+of a very fine artistic sense, and nothing but the most compelling sense
+of duty would have moved her to the deed. Miss Richardson being placed
+on trial, made a moving address to the Court, in the course of which she
+said that her act was premeditated, and that she had thought it over
+very seriously before it was undertaken. She added: "I have been a
+student of art, and I suppose care as much for art as any one who was in
+the gallery when I made my protest. But I care more for justice than I
+do for art, and I firmly believe than when a nation shuts its eyes to
+justice, and prefers to have women who are fighting for justice
+ill-treated, mal-treated, and tortured, that such action as mine should
+be understandable; I don't say excusable, but it should be understood.
+
+"I should like to point out that the outrage which the Government has
+committed upon Mrs. Pankhurst is an ultimatum of outrages. It is murder,
+slow murder, and premeditated murder. That is how I have looked at
+it....
+
+"How you can hold women up to ridicule and contempt, and put them in
+prison, and yet say nothing to the Government for murdering people, I
+cannot understand....
+
+"The fact is that the nation is either dead or asleep. In my opinion
+there is undoubted evidence that the nation is dead, because women have
+knocked in vain at the door of administrators, archbishops, and even the
+King himself. The Government have closed all doors to us. And remember
+this--a state of death in a nation, as well as in an individual, leads
+to one thing, and that is dissolution. I do not hesitate to say that if
+the men of the country do not at this eleventh hour put their hand out
+and save Mrs. Pankhurst, before a few more years are passed they will
+stretch out their hand in vain to save the Empire."
+
+In sentencing Miss Richardson to six month's imprisonment the
+Magistrate said regretfully that if she had smashed a window instead of
+an art treasure he could have given her a maximum sentence of eighteen
+months, which illustrates, I think, one more queer anomaly of English
+law.
+
+A few weeks later another famous painting, the Sargent portrait of Henry
+James, was attacked by a Suffragette, who, like Miss Richardson, was
+sent through the farce of a trial and a prison sentence which she did
+not serve. By this time practically all the picture galleries and other
+public galleries and museums had been closed to the public. The
+Suffragettes had succeeded in large measure in making England
+unattractive to tourists, and hence unprofitable to the world of
+business. As we had anticipated, the reaction against the Liberal
+Government began to manifest itself. Questions were asked daily, in the
+press, in the House of Commons, everywhere, as to the responsibility of
+the Government in the Suffragette activities. People began to place that
+responsibility where it belonged, at the doors of the Government, rather
+than at our own.
+
+Especially did the public begin to contrast the treatment meted out to
+the rebel women with that accorded to the rebel men of Ulster. For a
+whole year the Government had been attacking the women's right of free
+speech, by their refusal to allow the W. S. P. U. to hold public
+meetings in Hyde Park. The excuse given for this was that we advocated
+and defended a militant policy. But the Government permitted the Ulster
+militants to advocate their war policy in Hyde Park, and we determined
+that, with or without the Government's permission, we should, on the
+day of the Ulster meeting, hold a suffrage meeting in Hyde Park. General
+Drummond was announced as the chief speaker at this meeting, and when
+the day came, militant Ulster men and militant women assembled in Hyde
+Park. The militant men were allowed to speak in defence of bloodshed;
+but General Drummond was arrested before she had uttered more than a few
+words.
+
+Another proof that the Government had a law of leniency for militant men
+and a law of persecution for militant women was shown at this time by
+the case of Miss Dorothy Evans, our organiser in Ulster. She and another
+Suffragette, Miss Maud Muir, were arrested in Belfast charged with
+having in their possession a quantity of explosives. It was well known
+that there were houses in Belfast that secreted tons of gunpowder and
+ammunition for the use of the rebels against Home Rule, but none of
+those houses were entered and searched by the police. The authorities
+reserved their energies in this direction for the headquarters of the
+militant women. Naturally enough the two suffrage prisoners, on being
+arraigned in court, refused to be tried unless the Government proceeded
+also against the men rebels. The prisoners throughout the proceedings
+kept up such a disturbance that the trial could not properly go on. When
+the case was called Miss Evans rose and protested loudly, saying: "I
+deny your jurisdiction entirely until there are in the dock beside us
+men who are well known leaders of the Ulster militant movement." Miss
+Muir joined Miss Evans in her protest and both women were dragged from
+the court. After an hour's adjournment the trial was resumed, but the
+women again began to speak, and the case was hurried through in the
+midst of indescribable din and commotion. The women were sent to prison
+on remand, and after a four days' hunger and thirst strike were released
+unconditionally.
+
+The result of this case was a severe outbreak of militancy, three fires
+destroying Belfast mansions within a few days. Fires blazed almost daily
+throughout England, a very important instance being the destruction of
+the Bath Hotel at Felixstowe, valued at L35,000. The two women
+responsible for this were afterwards arrested, and as their trials were
+delayed, they were, although unconvicted prisoners, tortured by forcible
+feeding for several months. This occurred in April, a few weeks before
+the day appointed for our deputation to the King.
+
+I had appointed May 21st for the deputation, in spite of the fact that
+the King had, through his Ministers, refused to receive us. Replying to
+this I had written, again directly to the King, that we utterly denied
+the constitutional right of Ministers, who not being elected by women
+were not responsible to them, to stand between ourselves and the Throne,
+and to prevent us from having an audience of His Majesty. I declared
+further that we would, on the date announced, present ourselves at the
+gates of Buckingham Palace to demand an interview.
+
+Following the despatch of this letter my life was made as uncomfortable
+and as insecure as the Government, through their police department,
+could contrive. I was not allowed to make a public appearance, but I
+addressed several huge meetings from the balcony of houses where I had
+taken refuge. These were all publicly announced, and each time the
+police, mingling with crowds, made strenuous efforts to arrest me. By
+strategy, and through the valiant efforts of the bodyguard, I was able
+each time to make my speech and afterwards to escape from the house. All
+of these occasions were marked by fierce opposition from the police and
+splendid courage and resistance on the part of the women.
+
+The deputation to the King was, of course, marked by the Government as
+an occasion on which I could be arrested, and when, on the day
+appointed, I led the great deputation of women to the gates of
+Buckingham Palace, an army of several thousand police were sent out
+against us. The conduct of the police showed plainly that they had been
+instructed to repeat the tactics of Black Friday, described in an
+earlier chapter. Indeed, the violence, brutality and insult of Black
+Friday were excelled on this day, and at the gates of the King of
+England. I myself did not suffer so greatly as others, because I had
+advanced towards the Palace unnoticed by the police, who were looking
+for me at a more distant point. When I arrived at the gates I was
+recognised by an Inspector, who at once seized me bodily, and conveyed
+me to Holloway.
+
+[Illustration: (C) _International News Service_
+
+"ARRESTED AT THE KING'S GATE!" _May, 1914_]
+
+Before the Deputation had gone forth, I had made a short speech to them,
+warning them of what might happen, and my final message was: "Whatever
+happens, do not turn back." They did not, and in spite of all the
+violence inflicted upon them, they went forward, resolved, so long as
+they were free, not to give up the attempt to reach the Palace. Many
+arrests were made, and of those arrested many were sent to prison.
+Although for the majority, this was the first imprisonment, these brave
+women adopted the hunger strike, and passed seven or eight days without
+food and water before they were released, weak and ill as may be
+supposed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+In the weeks following the disgraceful events before Buckingham Palace
+the Government made several last, desperate efforts to crush the
+W. S. P. U., to remove all the leaders and to destroy our paper, the
+_Suffragette_. They issued summonses against Mrs. Drummond, Mrs. Dacre
+Fox and Miss Grace Roe; they raided our headquarters at Lincolns Inn
+House; twice they raided other headquarters temporarily in use, not to
+speak of raids made upon private dwellings where the new leaders, who
+had risen to take the places of those arrested, were at their work for
+the organisation. But with each successive raid the disturbances which
+the Government were able to make in our affairs became less, because we
+were better able, each time, to provide against them. Every effort made
+by the Government to suppress the _Suffragette_ failed, and it continued
+to come out regularly every week. Although the paper was issued
+regularly, we had to use almost super-human energy to get it
+distributed. The Government sent to all the great wholesale news agents
+a letter which was designed to terrorise and bully them into refusing to
+handle the paper or to sell it to the retail news agents. Temporarily,
+at any rate, the letter produced in many cases the desired effect, but
+we overcame the emergency by taking immediate steps to build up a
+system of distribution which was worked by women themselves,
+independently of the newspaper trade. We also opened a "Suffragette
+Defence Fund," to meet the extra expense of publishing and distributing
+the paper.
+
+Twice more the Government attempted to force me to serve the three
+years' term of penal servitude, one arrest being made when I was being
+carried to a meeting in an ambulance. Wholesale arrests and hunger
+strikes occurred at the same time, but our women continued their work of
+militancy, and money flowed into our Protest and Defence Fund. At one
+great meeting in July the fund was increased by nearly L16,000.
+
+But now unmistakable signs began to appear that our long and bitter
+struggle was drawing to a close. The last resort of the Government of
+inciting the street mobs against us had been little successful, and we
+could see in the temper of the public abundant hope that the reaction
+against the Government, long hoped for by us, had actually begun.
+
+Every day of the militant movement was so extraordinarily full of events
+and changes that it is difficult to choose a point at which this
+narrative should be brought to a close. I think, however, that an
+account of a recent debate which took place in the House of Commons will
+give the reader the best idea of the complete breakdown of the
+Government in their effort to crush the women's fight for liberty.
+
+On June 11th, when the House of Commons had gone into a Committee of
+Supply, Lord Robert Cecil moved a reduction of 100 pounds on the Home
+Office vote, thus precipitating a discussion of militancy. Lord Robert
+said that he had read with some surprise that the Government were not
+dissatisfied with the measures which they had taken to deal with the
+violent suffragists, and he added with some asperity that the Government
+took a much more sanguine view of the matter than anybody else in the
+United Kingdom. The House, Lord Robert went on to declare, would not be
+in a position to deal with the case satisfactorily unless they realised
+the devotion of the followers to their leaders, who were almost fully
+responsible for what was going on. Ministerial cheers greeted this
+utterance, but they ceased suddenly when the speaker went on to say that
+these leaders could never have induced their followers to enter upon a
+career of crime but for the serious mistakes which had been made over
+and over again by the Government. Among these mistakes Lord Robert cited
+the shameful treatment of the women on Black Friday, the policy of
+forcible feeding and the scandal of the different treatment accorded
+Lady Constance Lytton and "Jane Warton." There were Opposition cheers at
+this, and they were again raised when Lord Robert deplored the terrible
+waste of energy, and "admirable material" involved in the militant
+movement. Although Lord Robert Cecil deemed it unjust as well as futile
+for Suffragist Members to withhold their support from the woman suffrage
+movement on account of militancy he himself was in favor of deportation
+for Suffragettes. At this there were cries of "Where to?" and "Ulster!"
+
+Mr. McKenna replied by first calling attention to the fact that in the
+militant movement they had a phenomenon "absolutely without precedent in
+our history." Women in numbers were committing crimes, beginning with
+window breaking, and proceeding to arson, not with the motives of
+ordinary criminals, but with the intention of advertising a political
+cause and of forcing the public to grant their demands. Mr. McKenna
+continuing said:
+
+"The number of women who commit crimes of that kind is extremely small,
+but the number of those who sympathise with them is extremely large. One
+of the difficulties which the police have in detecting this form of
+crime and in bringing home the offence to the criminal is that the
+criminals find so many sympathisers among the well-to-do and thoroughly
+respectable classes that the ordinary administration of the law is
+rendered comparatively impossible. Let me give the House some figures
+showing the number of women who have been committed to prison for
+offences since the beginning of the militant agitation in 1906. In that
+year the total number of commitments to prison was 31, all the persons
+charged being women. In 1909 the figure rose to 156; in 1911 to 188 (182
+women and six men); and in 1912 to 290 (288 women and two men). In 1913
+the number dropped to 183, and so far this year it has dropped to 108.
+These figures include all commitments to prison and rearrests under the
+Cat and Mouse Act. What is the obvious lesson to be drawn? Up to 1912
+the number of offences committed for which imprisonment was the
+punishment was steadily increasing, but since the beginning of last
+year--that is to say, since the new Act came into force--the number of
+individual offences has been very greatly reduced. On the other hand, we
+see that the seriousness of the offences is much greater."
+
+This statement, that the number of imprisonments had decreased since the
+adoption of the Cat and Mouse Act, was of course, incorrect, or at best
+misleading. The fact was that the number of imprisonments decreased
+because, where formerly the militants went willingly to prison for their
+acts, they now escaped prison wherever possible. A comparatively small
+number of "mice" were ever rearrested by the police.
+
+Mr. McKenna went on to say that he realised fully the growing sense of
+indignation against the militant suffragists and he added, "Their one
+hope is, rightly or wrongly, that the well advertised indignation of the
+public will recoil on the head of the Government."
+
+"And so it will," interpolated a voice.
+
+"My honourable friend," replied Mr. McKenna, "says so it will. I believe
+that he is mistaken." But he gave no reasons for so believing. Referring
+to what he called the "recent grave rudenesses which have been committed
+against the King," Mr. McKenna said: "It is true that all subjects have
+the right of petitioning His Majesty, providing the petition is couched
+in respectful terms, but there is no right on the part of the subjects
+generally to personal audience for the purpose of the presentation of
+the petition or otherwise. It is the duty of the Home Secretary to
+present all such petitions to the King, and further to advise His
+Majesty what action should be taken. It was therefore ridiculous for any
+Suffragist to assert that there had been any breach of constitutional
+propriety on the part of the King in refusing, on the advice of the Home
+Secretary to receive the deputation."
+
+Also, said Mr. McKenna, in view of the fact that the petition for an
+audience was sent by a person under sentence of penal
+servitude--myself--it was the plain duty of the Home Secretary to advise
+the King not to grant it. He referred to the incident, he said, only
+because it was illustrative of the militant's methods of advertising
+their cause. He gave them credit, he was bound to say, for a certain
+degree of intelligence in adopting their methods. "No action has been so
+fruitful of advertisement as the recent absurdities which they have
+perpetrated in relation to the King."
+
+Coming down to the question of methods of meeting and overcoming
+militancy, Mr. McKenna said that he had received an almost unlimited
+correspondence on the subject from every section of the public. "Four
+methods were suggested," said he. "The first is to let them die. (Hear,
+hear.) That is, I should say, at the present moment, the most popular
+(laughter), judging by the number of letters I have received. The second
+is to deport them. (Hear, hear.) The third is to treat them as lunatics.
+(Hear, hear.) And the fourth is to give them the franchise. (Hear, hear,
+and laughter.) I think that is an exhaustive list. I notice each one of
+them is received with a certain very moderate amount of applause in this
+House. I hope to give reason why at the present time I think we should
+not adopt any one of them."
+
+The first suggestion was usually, not always, based on the assumption
+that the women would take their food if they knew that the alternative
+was death. Mr. McKenna read to the House in opposition to that view "the
+opinion of a great medical expert who had had intimate knowledge of the
+Suffragettes from the first." "We have to face the fact, therefore, that
+they would die," continued Mr. McKenna.
+
+"Let me say, also, with actual experience of dealing with suffragists,
+in many cases they have got in their refusal of food and water beyond
+the point when they could help themselves, and they have clearly done
+all that they could do to show their readiness to die.... There are
+those who hold another assumption. They think that after one or two
+deaths in prison militancy would cease. In my judgment there was never a
+greater delusion. I readily admit that this is the issue upon which I
+stand and upon which I feel I would fight to the end those who would
+adopt as their policy to let the prisoners die. So far from putting an
+end to militancy, I believe it would be the greatest incentive to
+militancy which could ever happen. For every woman who dies, there would
+be scores of women who would come forward for the honour, as they would
+deem it, of earning the crown of martyrdom."
+
+"How do you know?" called out an Opposition member.
+
+"How do I know?" retorted the Home Secretary. "I have had more to do
+with these women than the honourable member, much more. Those who hold
+that opinion leave out of account all recognition of the nature of these
+women. I do not speak in admiration of them. They are hysterical
+fanatics, but, coupled with their hysterical fanaticism, they have a
+courage, part of their fanaticism, which undoubtedly stands at nothing,
+and the honourable member who thinks that they would not come forward,
+not merely to risk death, but to undergo it, for what they deem the
+greatest cause on earth is making, in my judgment, a profound
+mistake.... They would seek death, and I am sure that however strong
+public opinion outside might be to-day in favour of allowing them to
+die, when there were twenty, thirty, forty, or more deaths in prison,
+you would have a violent reaction of public opinion, and the honourable
+gentleman who now so glibly says 'Let them die' would be among the first
+to blame the Government for what he would describe as the inhuman
+attitude they had adopted.
+
+"That policy," continued Mr. McKenna, "could not be adopted without an
+Act of Parliament. For the reason I have given I have not asked
+Parliament to remove from prison officials the responsibility under
+which they now rest for doing their best to keep those committed to
+their charge alive. But, supposing this legal responsibility were
+removed from the prison officials, let honourable members for a moment
+transport themselves in imagination to a prison cell and conceive of a
+prison doctor, a humane man, standing by watching a woman slowly being
+done to death by starvation and thirst, knowing that he could help her
+and that he could keep her alive. Did they think that any doctor would
+go on with such action, or that we should be able to retain medical men
+under such conditions in our service? I do not believe it.
+
+"The doctor would think, as I should think if I saw a woman lying there,
+'What has been this woman's offence?' It may have been obstructing the
+police, coupled with the obstinacy derived from fanaticism which leads
+her to refuse food and water. Obstructing the police and she is to die!
+I could not distinguish, and no Home Secretary could ever say, that this
+woman should be left to die and that that woman should not. Once we were
+committed to a policy of allowing them to die if they did not take their
+food we should have to go on with it, and we should have woman after
+woman whose only offence may have been obstructing the police, breaking
+a window, or even burning down an empty house, dying because she was
+obstinate. I do not believe that that is a policy which on consideration
+will ever recommend itself to the British people, and I am bound to say
+for myself I could never take a hand in carrying that policy out."
+(Cheers.)
+
+Lord Robert Cecil's favourite remedy of deportation Mr. McKenna
+dismissed on the grounds that this would be merely removing the
+difficulty to some other country than Great Britain. If the suggested
+distant island were treated as a prison the women would hunger strike
+there as they did in English prisons. If the island were not treated as
+a prison, the Suffragettes' rich friends would come and rescue them in
+yachts.
+
+The suggestion that the militants be treated as lunatics was also
+dismissed as impossible. Admitting that he had tried to get them
+certified as lunatics and had failed because the medical profession
+would not consent to such a course, Mr. McKenna said that he could not,
+contrary to the advice of the doctors, get certification by Act of
+Parliament. "There remains," said Mr. McKenna, "the last proposal, that
+we should give them the franchise."
+
+"That is the right one," exclaimed Mr. William Redmond, but the Home
+Secretary replied:
+
+"Whatever may be said as to the merits or demerits of that proposal, it
+is clearly not one I can discuss now in Committee of Supply. I am not
+responsible, as Home Secretary, for the state of the law on the
+franchise, nor is there any occasion for me to express or conceal my own
+opinions on the point; but I certainly do not think, and I am sure the
+Committee will agree with me, that that could be seriously treated as a
+remedy for the existing state of lawlessness."
+
+Coming at last to the constructive part of his speech Mr. McKenna told
+the House of Commons that the Government had one last resort, which was
+to take legal proceedings against subscribers to the funds of the
+W. S. P. U. The funds of the society, he said, were undoubtedly beyond
+the arm of the British law. But the Government were in hopes of stopping
+future subscriptions. "We are now not without hope," he concluded, "that
+we have evidence which will enable us to proceed against the
+subscribers" (loud cheers) "in civil action, and if we succeed the
+subscribers will become personally liable for all the damage done."
+(Cheers.) "It is a question of evidence.... I have further directed that
+the question should be considered whether the subscribers could not be
+proceeded against criminally as well as by civil action." (Cheers.) "We
+have only been able to obtain this evidence by our now not infrequent
+raids upon the offices, and such property as we can get at of the
+society.... A year ago a raid was made on the offices of the society,
+but we obtained no such evidence. If we succeed in making the
+subscribers personally responsible individually for the whole damage
+done I have no doubt that the insurance companies will quickly follow
+the example set them by the Government, and in turn bring actions to
+recover the cost which has been thrown upon them. If that is done I have
+no doubt the days of militancy are over.
+
+"The militants live only by the subscriptions of rich women" (cheers)
+"who themselves enjoy all the advantages of wealth secured for them by
+the labour of others" (cheers) "and use their wealth against the
+interests of society, paying their unfortunate victims to undergo all
+the horrors of a hunger and thirst strike in the commission of a crime.
+Whatever feelings we may have against the wretched women who for 30s.
+and L2 a week go about the country burning and destroying, what must our
+feelings be for the women who give their money to induce the
+perpetration of these crimes and leave their sisters to undergo the
+punishment while they live in luxury?" (Cheers.) "If we can succeed
+against them we will spare no pains. If the action is successful in the
+total destruction of the means of revenue of the Women's Social and
+Political Union I think we shall see the last of the power of Mrs.
+Pankhurst and her friends." (Cheers.)
+
+In the general debate which followed the Government were obliged to
+listen to very severe criticisms of their past and present policy
+towards the militant women. Mr. Keir Hardie said in part:
+
+"We may not to-day discuss the question of the franchise, but surely it
+was possible for the Home Secretary, without any transgression on the
+rules of the House, to have held out just a ray of hope for the future
+as to the intentions of the Government in regard to this most urgent
+question. On that point, may I say that I am not one of those who
+believe that a right thing should be withheld because some of the
+advocates of it resort to weapons of which we do not approve. That note
+has been sounded more than once, and if it be true, and it is true, that
+a section of the public outside are strongly opposed to this conduct, it
+is equally true that the bulk of the people look with a very calm and
+indifferent eye upon what is happening so long as the vote is withheld
+from women."
+
+Mr. Hardie concluded by regretting that the House, instead of discussing
+Woman Suffrage, was discussing methods of penalising militant women.
+
+Mr. Rupert Gwynne said: "Nobody is in a more ridiculous position than
+the members on the Treasury Bench. They cannot address a meeting, or go
+to a railway station, or even get into a taxicab, without having
+detectives with them. Even if they like it, we, the public do not,
+because we have to pay for it. It is not worth the expense that it costs
+to have a detective staff following Cabinet Ministers wherever they go,
+whether in a private or a public capacity.
+
+"Further," said Mr. Gwynne, "if the Home Secretary is correct in saying
+that these women are prepared to die, and invite death, in order to
+advertise their devotion to their cause, does he really think they are
+going to mind if their funds are attached?"
+
+Another friend of the Suffragists, Mr. Wedgwood said: "We are dealing
+with a problem which is a very serious one indeed. To my mind, when you
+find a large body of public opinion, and a large number of people
+capable of going to these lengths, there is only one thing for a
+respectable House of Commons to do, and that is to consider very closely
+and clearly whether the complaints of those who complain are or are not
+justified. We are not justified in acting in panic. What it is our duty
+to do is to consider the rights and wrongs of these people who have
+acted in this way. I attribute myself no value to the vote, but I do
+think that when we seriously consider the question of Woman Suffrage,
+which has not been done by this House up to the present, we should
+remember that when you see people capable of this amount of
+self-sacrifice, that the one duty of the House of Commons is not to
+stamp the iron heel upon them, but to see how far their cause is just,
+and to act according to justice."
+
+When such a debate as this was possible in the House of Commons, it must
+be plain to every disinterested reader that militancy never set the
+cause of suffrage back, but on the contrary, set it forward at least
+half a century. When I remember how that same House of Commons, a few
+years ago, treated the mention of woman suffrage with scorn and
+contempt, how they permitted the most insulting things to be said of the
+women who were begging for their political freedom, how, with indecent
+laughter and coarse jokes they allowed suffrage bills to be talked out,
+I cannot but marvel at the change our militancy so quickly brought
+about. Mr. McKenna's speech was in itself a token of the complete
+surrender of the Government.
+
+Of course the promise of the Home Secretary that subscribers to our
+funds should, if possible, be held legally responsible for damage done
+to private property by the Suffragettes, was never meant to be adhered
+to. It was, in fact, a perfectly absurd promise, and I think that very
+few Members of Parliament were deceived by it. Our subscribers can
+always remain anonymous if they choose, and if it should ever be
+possible to attack them for our deeds, they would naturally take refuge
+behind that privilege.
+
+Our battles are practically over, we confidently believe. For the
+present at least our arms are grounded, for directly the threat of
+foreign war descended on our nation we declared a complete truce from
+militancy. What will come out of this European war--so terrible in its
+effects on the women who had no voice in averting it--so baneful in the
+suffering it must necessarily bring on innocent children--no human being
+can calculate. But one thing is reasonably certain, and that is that the
+Cabinet changes which will necessarily result from warfare will make
+future militancy on the part of women unnecessary. No future Government
+will repeat the mistakes and the brutality of the Asquith Ministry. None
+will be willing to undertake the impossible task of crushing or even
+delaying the march of women towards their rightful heritage of political
+liberty and social and industrial freedom.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of My Own Story, by Emmeline Pankhurst
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