me and asks, Is she a cherished weakling or an equal mate, an
unavoidable helper? Is she to be tried and trusted or guarded and
controlled, bond or free? For if she is a mate, one must at once trust
more and exact more, exacting toil, courage, and the hardest, most
necessary thing of all, the clearest, most shameless, explicitness of
understanding....

2

In all my earlier imaginings of statecraft I had tacitly assumed either
that the relations of the sexes were all right or that anyhow they
didn't concern the state. It was a matter they, whoever "they" were, had
to settle among themselves. That sort of disregard was possible then.
But even before 1906 there were endless intimations that the dams
holding back great reservoirs of discussion were crumbling. We political
schemers were ploughing wider than any one had ploughed before in the
field of social reconstruction. We had also, we realised, to plough
deeper. We had to plough down at last to the passionate elements of
sexual relationship and examine and decide upon them.

The signs multiplied. In a year or so half the police of the metropolis
were scarce sufficient to protect the House from one clamorous aspect
of the new problem. The members went about Westminster with an odd, new
sense of being beset. A good proportion of us kept up the pretence that
the Vote for Women was an isolated fad, and the agitation an epidemic
madness that would presently pass. But it was manifest to any one who
sought more than comfort in the matter that the streams of women and
sympathisers and money forthcoming marked far deeper and wider things
than an idle fancy for the franchise. The existing laws and conventions
of relationship between Man and Woman were just as unsatisfactory a
disorder as anything else in our tumbled confusion of a world, and that
also was coming to bear upon statecraft.

My first parliament was the parliament of the Suffragettes. I don't
propose to tell here of that amazing campaign, with its absurdities
and follies, its courage and devotion. There were aspects of that
unquenchable agitation that were absolutely heroic and aspects that were
absolutely pitiful. It was unreasonable, unwise, and, except for its
one central insistence, astonishingly incoherent. It was amazingly
effective. The very incoherence of the demand witnessed, I think, to the
forces that lay behind it. It wasn't a simple argument based on a
simple assumption; it was the first crude ex