and German spies.  Finally, it discovered a mare’s nest in the case of Sir Edward Grey that led to its suppression, and the last I have from this misleading and unrepresentative feminist faction is the periodic appearance of a little ill-printed sheet of abuse about the chief Foreign Office people, resembling in manner and appearance the sort of denunciatory letter, at once suggestive and evasive, that might be written by the curate’s discharged cook.  And with that the aggressive section of the suffragist movement seems to have petered out, leaving the broad reality of feminine emancipation to go on in a beneficent silence.

There can be no question that the behaviour of the great mass of women in Great Britain has not simply exceeded expectation but hope.  And there can be as little doubt that the suffrage question, in spite of the self-advertising violence of its extravagant section, did contribute very materially to build up the confidence, the willingness to undertake responsibility and face hardship, that has been so abundantly displayed by every class of woman.  It is not simply that there has been enough women and to spare for hospital work and every sort of relief and charitable service; that sort of thing has been done before, that was in the tradition of womanhood.  It is that at every sort of occupation, clerking, shop-keeping, railway work, automobile driving, agricultural work, police work, they have been found efficient beyond precedent and intelligent beyond precedent.  And in the munition factories, in the handling of heavy and often difficult machinery, and in adaptability and inventiveness and enthusiasm and steadfastness their achievement has been astonishing.  More particularly in relation to intricate mechanical work is their record remarkable and unexpected.

There is scarcely a point where women, having been given a chance, have not more than made good.  They have revolutionised the estimate of their economic importance, and it is scarcely too much to say that when, in the long run, the military strength of the Allies bears down the strength of Germany, it will be this superiority of our women which enables us to pit a woman at—­the censorship will object to exact geography upon this point—­against a man at Essen which has tipped the balance of this war.

Those women have won the vote.  Not the most frantic outbursts of militancy after this war can prevent them getting it.  The girls who have faced death and wounds so gallantly in our cordite factories—­there is a not inconsiderable list of dead and wounded from those places—­have killed for ever the poor argument that women should not vote because they had no military value.  Indeed, they have killed every argument against their subjection.  And while they do these things, that paragon of the virtues of the old type, that miracle of domestic obedience, the German haus-frau, the faithful Gretchen, riots for butter.

And as I have before remarked, the Germans counted on the suffragettes as one of the great forces that were to paralyse England in this war.