The present situation of woman suffrage in England recalls the old
puzzle: What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable
body? The irresistible force is the religious passion of myriads of
women, the fury of self-sacrifice, the righteous zeal that shrinks not
even from crime; the immovable body may be summed up as Mr. Asquith.
Almost as gross an incarnation of Tory prejudice as Squire Western, who
laid it down that women should come in with the first dish and go out
with the first glass, Mr. Asquith is all that stands between the sex
and the suffrage.
The answer to the old puzzle, I suppose, would be that though the
immovable body does not move, yet the impact of the irresistible force
generates heat, which, as we know from Tyndall, is a mode of motion. At
any rate, heat is the only mode in which the progress of woman suffrage
can be registered to-day. The movement has come to what Mr. Henry James
might call "the awkward age": an age which has passed beyond argument
without arriving at achievement; an age for which words are too small
and blows too big. And because impatience has been the salvation of the
movement, and because the suffragette will not believe that the fiery
charger which has carried her so far can not really climb the last
ridge of the mountain, but must be replaced by a mule--that miserable
compromise between a steed and an anti-suffragist--the awkward age is
also the dangerous age.
When the Cabinet of Clement's Inn, perceiving that if a woman suffrage
Bill did not pass this session, the last chance--under the Parliament
Act--was gone for this Parliament, resolved to rouse public opinion by
breaking tradesmen's windows, it overlooked that the English are a
nation of shopkeepers, and that the public opinion thus roused would be
for the first time almost unreservedly on the side of the Government.
And when the Cabinet of Downing Street, moved to responsive
recklessness, raided the quarters of the Women's Social and Political
Union and indicted the leaders for criminal conspiracy, it equally
overlooked an essential factor of the situation. The Cabinet of the
conspiracy was at least as much a restraint to suffragettes as an
incentive. It held in order the more violent members, the souls
naturally daring or maddened by forcible feeding. By its imposition of
minor forms of lawlessness, it checked the suggestion of major forms.
Crime was controlled by a curriculum and temper studied by a
time-table. The interruptions at meetings were distributed among the
supposed neuropaths like parts at a play, and we to the maenad who
missed her cue. With the police, too, the suffragettes lived for the
most part on terms of cordial cooperation, each side recognizing that
the other must do its duty. When the suffragettes planned a raid upon
Downing Street or the House of Commons, they gave notice of time and
place, and were provided with a sufficient force of police to prevent
it. Were the day inconvenient for the police, owing to the pressure of
social engagements, another day was fixed, politics permitting. The
_entente cordiale_ extended even in some instances to the jailers and
the bench, and, as in those early days of the Quaker persecution of
which Milton's friend, Ellwood, has left record, prisoners sometimes
left their cells for a night to attend to imperative affairs, or
good-naturedly shortened or canceled their sentences at the pressing
solicitation of perturbed magistrates. Prison was purified by all these
gentle presences, and women criminals profited by the removal of the
abuses they challenged. Holloway became a home from home, in which
beaming wardresses welcomed old offenders, and to which husbands
conducted erring wives in taxicabs, much as Ellwood and his brethren
marched of themselves from Newgate to Bridewell, explaining to the
astonished citizens of London that their word was their keeper. A
suffragette's word stood higher than consols, and the war-game was
played cards on table. True, there were brutal interludes when Home
Secretaries lost their heads, or hysterical magistrates their sense of
justice, or when the chivalrous constabulary of Westminster was
replaced by Whitechapel police, dense to the courtesies of the
situation; but even these tragedies were transfused by its humors, by
the subtle duel of woman's wit and man's lumbering legalism. The
hunger-strike itself, with all its grim horrors and heroisms, was like
the plot of a Gilbertian opera. It placed the Government on the horns
of an Irish bull. Either the law must kill or torture prisoners
condemned for mild offenses, or it must permit them to dictate their
own terms of durance. The criminal code, whose dignity generations of
male rebels could not impair, the whole array of warders, lawyers,
judges, juries, and policemen, which all the scorn of a Tolstoy could
not shrivel, shrank into a laughing-stock. And the comedy of the
situation was complicated and enhanced by the fact that the Home
Office, so far from being an Inquisition, was more or less tenanted by
sympathizers with Female Suffrage, and that a Home Secretary who
secretly admired the quixotry of the hunger-strikers was forced to feed
them forcibly. He must either be denounced by the suffragettes as a
Torquemada or by the public as an incapable. Bayard himself could not
have coped with the position. There was no place like the Home Office,
and its administrators, like the Governors of the Gold Coast, had to be
relieved at frequent intervals. As for the police, their one aim in
life became to avoid arresting suffragettes.
Such was the situation which the Governmental _coup_ transformed to
tragedy unrelieved, giving us in the place of ordered lawlessness and
responsible leadership a guerrilla warfare against society by
irresponsive individuals, more or less unbalanced. That the heroic
incendiary Mrs. Leigh, who deserved penal servitude and a statue, had
been driven wild by forcible feeding was a fact that had given
considerable uneasiness to headquarters, but she had been kept in
comparative discipline. Now that discipline has been destroyed, it is
possible that other free-lances will catch the contagion of crime; nay,
there are signs that the leaders themselves are being infected through
the difficulty of disavowing their martyrs. The wisest course for the
Government would be to pardon Miss Pankhurst, of Paris, and officially
invite her to resume control of her followers before they have quite
controlled her.
But even without such a crowning confession of the failure of its
_coup_, the humiliation of the Government has been sufficiently
complete. Forced to put Mrs. Pankhurst and the Pethick Lawrences into
the luxurious category of political prisoners, next to release them
altogether, and finally to liberate their humblest followers, their
hunger-strike on behalf of whose equal treatment set a new standard of
military chivalry, the Government succeeded only in investing the
vanished Christabel with a new glamour. The Women's Social and
Political Union has again baffled the Government, and come triumphantly
even through the window-breaking episode. For if that episode was
followed by the rejection of the second reading of the woman suffrage
Bill, second readings, like the oaths of the profane, had come to be
absolutely without significance, and the blocking of the Bill beyond
this stage has been assured long before by the tactics of Mr. Redmond,
whose passion for justice, like Mr. Asquith's passion for popular
government, is so curiously monosexual. The only discount from the
Union's winnings is that it gave mendacious M.P.'s, anxious to back out
of woman suffrage, a soft bed to lie on.
One should perhaps also add to the debit side of the account a
considerable loss of popularity on the part of the suffragettes, a loss
which would become complete were window-breaking to pass into graver
crimes, and which would entirely paralyze the effect of their tactics.
For the tactics of the prison and the hunger-strike depend for their
value upon the innocency of the prisoners. Their offense must be merely
nominal or technical. The suffragettes had rediscovered the Quaker
truth that the spirit is stronger than all the forces of Government,
and that things may really come by fasting and prayer. Even the
window-breaking, though a perilous approach to the methods of the Pagan
male, was only a damage to insensitive material for which the
window-breakers were prepared to pay in conscious suffering. But once
the injury was done to flesh and blood, the injurer would only be
paying tooth for tooth and eye for eye; and all the sympathy would go,
not to the assailant, but to the victim. Mrs. Pankhurst says the
Government must either give votes to women or "prepare to send large
numbers of women to penal servitude." That would be indeed awkward for
the Government if penal servitude were easily procurable.
Unfortunately, the women must first qualify for it, and their crimes
would disembarrass the Government. Mrs. Leigh could have been safely
left to starve had her attempted arson of that theater really come off,
especially with loss of life. Thus violence may be "militant," but it
is not "tactics." And violence against society at large is peculiarly
tactless. George Fox would hardly occupy so exalted a niche in history
if he had used his hammer to make not shoes but corpses.
The suffragettes who run amuck have, in fact, become the victims of
their own vocabulary. Their Union was "militant," but a church
militant, not an army militant. The Salvation Army might as well
suddenly take to shooting the heathen. It was only by mob
misunderstanding that the suffragettes were conceived as viragoes, just
as it was only by mob misunderstanding that the members of the Society
of Friends were conceived as desperadoes. If it can not be said that
their proceedings were as quintessentially peaceful as some of those
absolutely mute Quaker meetings which the police of Charles II.
humorously enough broke up as "riots," yet they had a thousand
propaganda meetings (ignored by the Press) to one militant action
(recorded and magnified). Even in battle nothing could be more decorous
or constitutional than the overwhelming majority of their "pin-pricks."
I remember a beautiful young lady, faultlessly dressed, who in soft,
musical accents interrupted Mr. Birrell at the Mansion House. Stewards
hurled themselves at her, policemen hastened from every point of the
compass; but unruffled as at the dinner-table, without turning a hair
of her exquisite _chévelure_, she continued gently explaining the
wishes of womankind till she disappeared in a whirlwind of hysteric
masculinity. But in gradually succumbing to the vulgar
misunderstanding, playing up to the caricature, and finally
assimilating to the crude and obsolescent methods of men, the
suffragettes have been throwing away their own peculiar glory, their
characteristic contribution to history and politics. Rosalind in search
of a vote has supplied humanity with a new type who snatched from her
testifyings a grace beyond the reach of Arden. But Rosalind with a
revolver would be merely a reactionary. Hawthorne's Zenobia, who, for
all her emancipation, drowned herself in a fit of amorous jealousy, was
no greater backslider from the true path of woman's advancement. It is
some relief to find that Mrs. Pankhurst's latest program disavows
attacks on human life, limiting itself to destruction of property, and
that the Pethick Lawrences have grown still saner.
There might, indeed, be--for force is not always brute--some excuse
and even admiration for the Terrorist, did the triumph of her cause
appear indefinitely remote, were even that triumph to be brought
perceptibly nearer by forcibly feeding us with horrors. But the
contrary is the case: even the epidemic of crime foreshadowed by Mrs.
Pankhurst could not appreciably delay woman suffrage. It is coming as
fast as human nature and the nature of the Parliamentary machine will
allow. To try to terrorize Mr. Asquith into bringing in a Government
measure is to credit him with a wisdom and a nobility almost divine. No
man is great enough to put himself in the right by admitting he was
wrong. And even if he were great enough to admit it under argument, he
would have to be godlike to admit it under menace. Rather than admit
it, Mr. Asquith has let himself be driven into a position more
ludicrous than perhaps any Prime Minister has occupied. For though he
declares woman suffrage to be "a political disaster of the gravest
kind," he is ready to push it through if the House of Commons wishes,
relying for its rejection upon the House of Lords, which he has
denounced and eviscerated. He is even not unwilling it shall pass if
only the disaster to the country is maximized by Adult Suffrage. It is
not that he loves woman more, but the Tory party less.
All things considered, I am afraid the Suffrage Movement will have to
make up its mind to wait for another Parliament. There is more hope for
the premature collapse of this Parliament than for its passing of a
Suffrage Bill or clause. And at the general election, whenever it
comes, Votes for Women will be put on the program of both parties. The
Conservatives will offer a mild dose, the Liberals a democratic.
Whichever fails at the polls, the principle of woman suffrage will be
safe.
This prognostic, it will be seen, involves the removal of the immovable
Asquith. But he must either consent to follow a plebiscite of his party
or retire, like his doorkeeper, from Downing Street, under the
intolerable burden of the suffragette. Much as his party honors and
admires him, it can not continue to repudiate the essential principles
of Liberalism, nor find refuge in his sophism that Liberalism removes
artificial barriers, but can not remove natural barriers. What natural
barrier prevents a woman from accepting or rejecting a man who proposes
to represent her in Parliament? No; after his historic innings Mr.
Asquith will sacrifice himself and retire, covered with laurels and
contradictions. Pending which event, the suffragettes, while doing
their best to precipitate it through the downfall of the Government,
may very reasonably continue their policy of pin-pricks to keep
politicians from going to sleep, but serious violence would be worse
than a crime; it would be a blunder. No general dares throw away his
men when nothing is to be gained, and our analysis shows that the
interval between women and the vote can only be shortened by bringing
on a general election.
There are, indeed, skeptics who fear that even at the next general
election both parties may find a way of circumventing woman suffrage by
secretly agreeing to keep it off both programs; but the country itself
is too sick of the question to endure this, even if the Women's Liberal
Federation and the corresponding Conservative body permitted it. That
the parties would go so far as to pair off their women workers against
each other is unlikely. At any rate, now, when other forms of agitation
are more or less futile, is the moment for these and cognate bodies to
take up the running.
But even if these women workers fail in backbone, and allow themselves,
as so often before, to be lulled and gulled by their male politicians,
there yet remains an ardent body to push forward their cause. Mrs.
Humphry Ward and the Anti-Suffragists may be trusted to continue
tireless and ever-inventive. Mrs. Ward's League to promote the return
of women as town and county councilors is her latest device to prove
the unfitness of women for public affairs, and since the Vegetarian
League for combating the carnivorous instincts of the tigress by
feeding her on blood, there has been no quite so happy adaptation of
means to end. If anything could add to the educative efficiency of the
new League, it is Mrs. Ward's scrupulousness in limiting it exclusively
to Anti-Suffragists.