over a bone, marry with sensations of profound gratitude (or patriotic fervor) the armless, the legless, the blind, the terrible face mutiles, and drop forever out of the ranks of Woman as differentiated from the ranks of mere women.  What has hampered the cause of Woman in Great Britain and Europe so far is the quite remarkable valuation put upon the male by the female.  This is partly temperamental, partly female preponderance, but it is even more deeply rooted in those vanished centuries during which man proclaimed and maintained his superiority.  Circumstances helped him for thousands of years, and he has been taken by the physically weaker and child-bearing sex at his own estimate.  It is difficult for American women to appreciate this almost servile attitude of even British women to mere man.  One of the finest things about the militant woman, one by which she scored most heavily, was her flinging off of this tradition and displaying a shining armor of indifference toward man as man.  This startled the men almost as much as the window smashing, and made other women, living out their little lives under the frowns and smiles of the dominant male, think and ponder, wonder if their small rewards amounted to half as much as the untasted pleasures of power and independence.

It is always a sign of weakness to give one side of a picture and blithely ignore the other.  Therefore, let me hasten to add that it is a well-known fact that Mrs. Pankhurst had borne and reared six children before she took up the moribund cause of suffrage; and that after a season’s careful investigation in London at the height of the militant movement I concluded that never in the world had so many unattractive females been banded together in any one cause.  Even the young girls I heard speaking on street corners, mounted on boxes, looked gray, dingy, sexless.  Of course there were many handsome, even lovely, women,—­like Mrs. Cavendish-Bentinck and Lady Hall, for instance—­interested in “the movement,” contributing funds, and giving it a certain moral support; but when it came to the window smashers, the jail seekers, the hunger-strikers, the real martyrs of that extraordinary minor chapter of England’s history, there was only one good-looking woman in the entire army—­Mrs. Pethick-Lawrence—­and militant extravagances soon became too much for her.  There were intelligent women galore, women of the aristocracy born with a certain style, and showing their breeding even on the soap-box, but sexually attractive women never, and even the youngest seemed to have been born without the bloom of youth.  The significance of this, however, works both ways.  If men did not want them, at least there was something both noble and pitiful in their willingness to sacrifice those dreams and hopes which are the common heritage of the lovely and the plain, the old and the young, the Circe and the Amazon, to the ultimate freedom of those millions of their sisters lulled or helpless in the enchanted net of sex.