ffrage Movement will have to
make up its mind to wait for another Parliament. There is more hope for
the premature collapse of this Parliament than for its passing of a
Suffrage Bill or clause. And at the general election, whenever it
comes, Votes for Women will be put on the program of both parties. The
Conservatives will offer a mild dose, the Liberals a democratic.
Whichever fails at the polls, the principle of woman suffrage will be
safe.

This prognostic, it will be seen, involves the removal of the immovable
Asquith. But he must either consent to follow a plebiscite of his party
or retire, like his doorkeeper, from Downing Street, under the
intolerable burden of the suffragette. Much as his party honors and
admires him, it can not continue to repudiate the essential principles
of Liberalism, nor find refuge in his sophism that Liberalism removes
artificial barriers, but can not remove natural barriers. What natural
barrier prevents a woman from accepting or rejecting a man who proposes
to represent her in Parliament? No; after his historic innings Mr.
Asquith will sacrifice himself and retire, covered with laurels and
contradictions. Pending which event, the suffragettes, while doing
their best to precipitate it through the downfall of the Government,
may very reasonably continue their policy of pin-pricks to keep
politicians from going to sleep, but serious violence would be worse
than a crime; it would be a blunder. No general dares throw away his
men when nothing is to be gained, and our analysis shows that the
interval between women and the vote can only be shortened by bringing
on a general election.

There are, indeed, skeptics who fear that even at the next general
election both parties may find a way of circumventing woman suffrage by
secretly agreeing to keep it off both programs; but the country itself
is too sick of the question to endure this, even if the Women's Liberal
Federation and the corresponding Conservative body permitted it. That
the parties would go so far as to pair off their women workers against
each other is unlikely. At any rate, now, when other forms of agitation
are more or less futile, is the moment for these and cognate bodies to
take up the running.

But even if these women workers fail in backbone, and allow themselves,
as so often before, to be lulled and gulled by their male politicians,
there yet remains an ardent body to push forward their cause. Mrs.
Humphry Ward and the