I say, unhesitatingly, that the main obstacle to women getting the vote is militancy and nothing else.  Its practitioners really seem to think that they can terrorize and pinprick Parliament into giving it to them; and until they learn something of the people they are dealing with, their whole agitation, so far as the House of Commons is concerned, is simply and utterly damned.  It is perfectly astonishing to recall with what diabolical ingenuity they have contrived to infuriate all their opponents, to alienate all their sympathizers, and to stir up against themselves every prejudice in the average man’s breast.  A few years ago they found three-fourths of the Liberal M.P.’s on their side.  They at once proceeded to cudgel their brains as to how they could possibly drive them into the enemy’s camp.  They rightly decided that this could not be done more effectually than by insulting and assaulting the Prime Minister, the chief of the Party, and a leader for whom all his colleagues and followers feel an unbounded admiration, regard, and affection.  When they had thus successfully estranged the majority of Liberals they began to study the political situation a little more closely.  They saw that the Irish Nationalists were very powerful factors in the Ministerial Coalition.  The next problem, therefore, was how to destroy the last chance that the Irish Nationalists would support their cause.  They achieved this triumphantly first by making trouble in Belfast where the only Nationalist member is or was a strong Suffragist, and secondly by going to Dublin when all Nationalist Ireland had assembled to welcome Mr. Asquith, throwing a hatchet at Mr. Redmond, and trying to burn down a theater.  That finished Ireland, but still they were dissatisfied.  There was a dangerous movement of sympathy with their agitation in Wales, and they felt that at any cost it had to be checked.  They not only checked, but demolished, it with the greatest ease by breaking in upon the proceedings at an Eisteddfod.  Now the Eisteddfod is not only the great national festival of Welsh poetry and music and eloquence, it is also an oasis of peace amid the sharp contentions of Welsh life.  To bring into it any note of politics or sectarianism or public controversy, even when these things are rousing the most passionate emotions outside, seems to a Welshman like the desecration of an altar.  That is just what the militants did, and Welsh interest in their cause fell dead on the spot.  But even then they were not happy.  They were still encumbered by the good-will of perhaps a hundred Tory M.P.’s.  But they proved entirely equal to the task of antagonizing them.  They began smashing windows, burning country mansions, firing race-stands, damaging golf-greens, striking as hard as they could at the Tory idol of Property.  There is really nothing more left for them to do; they have alienated every friend they ever had; their work is complete beyond their wildest hopes.