gh the House of Commons
during the past two years have failed is not merely the difficulty of
trying to combine a non-party measure with the party system; it is,
above all, the impossibility of using Parliament to pass a bill that
the opinion of the country has been fomented to condemn. The fact that
in both the principal parties there is a clean division of opinion on
this issue and that no Government, or none that is at present
conceivable, can bring forward a measure for the enfranchisement of
women as a Government, is a great, but not necessarily an insuperable
obstacle. The one barrier, there is no surmounting and no getting
round, is the decided and increasing hostility of public sentiment; and
for that the militants have only themselves to thank.

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

ISRAEL ZANGWILL

THE AWKWARD AGE OF THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT

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

TRISTRAM SHANDY.

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

The answer to the old puzzle, I suppose, w