ould 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. T