, in a sense, fashionable; they have no natural tendency to excess,
but are easily moved by their social environment; some of these are
rich, and the great principle--once formulated in an unhappy moment
concerning a rich lady interested in social reform--"We must not kill
the goose that lays the golden eggs," has never been despised by the
suffragette leaders; (2) the rowdy element among women which is not so
much moved to adopt the methods for the sake of the cause as to adopt
the cause for the sake of the methods, so that in the case of their
special emotional temperament it may be said, reversing an ancient
phrase, that the means justify the end; this element of noisy
explosiveness, always found in a certain proportion of women, though
latent under ordinary circumstances, is easily aroused by stimulation,
and in every popular revolt the wildest excesses are the acts of women.
(3) In this small but important group we find women of rare and
beautiful character who, hypnotized by the enthralling influence of an
idea, and often having no great intellectual power of their own, are
even unconscious of the vulgarity that accompanies them, and gladly
sacrifice themselves to a cause that seems to be sacred; these are the
saints and martyrs of every movement.

When we thus analyse the suffragette outburst we see that it is really
compounded out of quite varied elements: a conventionally respectable
element, a rowdy element, and an ennobling element. It is, therefore,
equally unreasonable to denounce its vices or to idealize its virtues.
It is more profitable to attempt to balance its services and its
disservices to the cause of women's suffrage.

Looked at dispassionately, the two main disadvantages of the suffragette
agitation--and they certainly seem at the first glance very
comprehensive objections--lie in its direction and in its methods. There
are two vast bodies of people who require to be persuaded in order to
secure woman's suffrage: first women themselves, and secondly their
men-folk, who at present monopolize the franchise. Until the majority of
both men and women are educated to understand the justice and
reasonableness of this step, and until men are persuaded that the time
has come for practical action, the most violent personal assaults on
cabinet ministers--supposing such political methods to be otherwise
unobjectionable--are beside the mark. They are aimed in the wrong
direction. This is so even when we leave