and blood, the injurer would only be paying tooth for tooth and eye for eye; and all the sympathy would go, not to the assailant, but to the victim.  Mrs. Pankhurst says the Government must either give votes to women or “prepare to send large numbers of women to penal servitude.”  That would be indeed awkward for the Government if penal servitude were easily procurable.  Unfortunately, the women must first qualify for it, and their crimes would disembarrass the Government.  Mrs. Leigh could have been safely left to starve had her attempted arson of that theater really come off, especially with loss of life.  Thus violence may be “militant,” but it is not “tactics.”  And violence against society at large is peculiarly tactless.  George Fox would hardly occupy so exalted a niche in history if he had used his hammer to make not shoes but corpses.

The suffragettes who run amuck have, in fact, become the victims of their own vocabulary.  Their Union was “militant,” but a church militant, not an army militant.  The Salvation Army might as well suddenly take to shooting the heathen.  It was only by mob misunderstanding that the suffragettes were conceived as viragoes, just as it was only by mob misunderstanding that the members of the Society of Friends were conceived as desperadoes.  If it can not be said that their proceedings were as quintessentially peaceful as some of those absolutely mute Quaker meetings which the police of Charles II. humorously enough broke up as “riots,” yet they had a thousand propaganda meetings (ignored by the Press) to one militant action (recorded and magnified).  Even in battle nothing could be more decorous or constitutional than the overwhelming majority of their “pin-pricks.”

I remember a beautiful young lady, faultlessly dressed, who in soft, musical accents interrupted Mr. Birrell at the Mansion House.  Stewards hurled themselves at her, policemen hastened from every point of the compass; but unruffled as at the dinner-table, without turning a hair of her exquisite chevelure, she continued gently explaining the wishes of womankind till she disappeared in a whirlwind of hysteric masculinity.  But in gradually succumbing to the vulgar misunderstanding, playing up to the caricature, and finally assimilating to the crude and obsolescent methods of men, the suffragettes have been throwing away their own peculiar glory, their characteristic contribution to history and politics.  Rosalind in search of a vote has supplied humanity with a new type who snatched from her testifyings a grace beyond the reach of Arden.  But Rosalind with a revolver would be merely a reactionary.  Hawthorne’s Zenobia, who, for all her emancipation, drowned herself in a fit of amorous jealousy, was no greater backslider from the true path of woman’s advancement.  It is some relief to find that Mrs. Pankhurst’s latest program disavows attacks on human life, limiting itself to destruction of property, and that the Pethick Lawrences have grown still saner.