Well, one can not dignify such tactics and antics by the title of “political propaganda.”  The proper name for them is sheer organized lunacy.  The militants have erected militancy into a principle.  I am beginning to think that a good many of them are more concerned with the success of their method than with the success of their cause.  They would rather not have the vote than fail to win it by the particular brand of agitation they have pinned their faith to.  They don’t really want the vote to be given them; they want to get it and to get it by force; and they are quite unable to see that the more force they use the stronger becomes the resolve both of Parliament and of the country to send them away empty-handed.  If they had accepted Mr. Asquith’s pledge of two years ago and thanked him for it and helped him redeem it, woman suffrage by now would be an accomplished fact.  But they preferred their own ways, and what is the result?  The result is that working for their cause in the House of Commons to-day is like swimming not merely against a tide but against a cataract.  The real reason why the attempts to carry woman suffrage through the House of Commons during the past two years have failed is not merely the difficulty of trying to combine a non-party measure with the party system; it is, above all, the impossibility of using Parliament to pass a bill that the opinion of the country has been fomented to condemn.  The fact that in both the principal parties there is a clean division of opinion on this issue and that no Government, or none that is at present conceivable, can bring forward a measure for the enfranchisement of women as a Government, is a great, but not necessarily an insuperable obstacle.  The one barrier, there is no surmounting and no getting round, is the decided and increasing hostility of public sentiment; and for that the militants have only themselves to thank.

Personally I always try to remember, first, that militancy is the work of only a very small fraction of the women who want the vote and ought to have it, and, secondly, that there have been crazy men just as there are crazy women.  Militancy has not affected my own individual attitude toward the main question and never will.  But I recognize that it has killed the immediate Parliamentary prospects of any and every Suffrage Bill, and that so long as militancy continues the House of Commons will do nothing.  Only a new movement altogether can now bring women to the goal of political emancipation; and it will have to be a sane, hard-headed, practical movement, as full of liveliness as you please, but absolutely divorced from stones and bombs and torches.  When it arises the friends of the Women’s cause will begin to take heart again.

ISRAEL ZANGWILL

THE AWKWARD AGE OF THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT

  “And what did she get by it?” said my Uncle Toby. 
  “What does any woman get by it?” said my father.
  “Martyrdom” replied the young Benedictine.