unger-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