TRISTRAM SHANDY.

The present situation of woman suffrage in England recalls the old puzzle:  What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable body?  The irresistible force is the religious passion of myriads of women, the fury of self-sacrifice, the righteous zeal that shrinks not even from crime; the immovable body may be summed up as Mr. Asquith.  Almost as gross an incarnation of Tory prejudice as Squire Western, who laid it down that women should come in with the first dish and go out with the first glass, Mr. Asquith is all that stands between the sex and the suffrage.

The answer to the old puzzle, I suppose, would be that though the immovable body does not move, yet the impact of the irresistible force generates heat, which, as we know from Tyndall, is a mode of motion.  At any rate, heat is the only mode in which the progress of woman suffrage can be registered to-day.  The movement has come to what Mr. Henry James might call “the awkward age”:  an age which has passed beyond argument without arriving at achievement; an age for which words are too small and blows too big.  And because impatience has been the salvation of the movement, and because the suffragette will not believe that the fiery charger which has carried her so far can not really climb the last ridge of the mountain, but must be replaced by a mule—­that miserable compromise between a steed and an anti-suffragist—­the awkward age is also the dangerous age.

When the Cabinet of Clement’s Inn, perceiving that if a woman suffrage Bill did not pass this session, the last chance—­under the Parliament Act—­was gone for this Parliament, resolved to rouse public opinion by breaking tradesmen’s windows, it overlooked that the English are a nation of shopkeepers, and that the public opinion thus roused would be for the first time almost unreservedly on the side of the Government.  And when the Cabinet of Downing Street, moved to responsive recklessness, raided the quarters of the Women’s Social and Political Union and indicted the leaders for criminal conspiracy, it equally overlooked an essential factor of the situation.  The Cabinet of the conspiracy was at least as much a restraint to suffragettes as an incentive.  It held in order the more violent members, the souls naturally daring or maddened by forcible feeding.  By its imposition of minor forms of lawlessness, it checked the suggestion of major forms.  Crime was controlled by a curriculum and temper studied by a time-table.  The interruptions at meetings were distributed among the supposed neuropaths like parts at a play, and we to the maenad who missed her cue.  With the police, too, the suffragettes lived for the most part on terms of cordial cooperation, each side recognizing that the other must do its duty.  When the suffragettes planned a raid upon Downing Street or the House of Commons, they gave notice of time and place, and were provided with a sufficient force of police to prevent it.  Were the day inconvenient