ame 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 h