The crises of 1912 moreover were not so acute as bitterly to envenom the struggle in the way that happened during the two following years.  There was always some hope that the Ministry might permit the passing of an amendment to the Franchise Bill which would in some degree affirm the principle of Female Suffrage.  It is true that a certain liveliness was maintained by the Suffragettes.  The W.S.P.U. dared not relax in its militancy lest Ministers should think the struggle waning and Woman already tiring of her claims.  The vaunted Manhood Suffrage Bill had been introduced by an anti-woman-suffrage Quaker Minister and its Second reading been proposed by an equally anti-feminist Secretary of State—­this was in June-July, 1912; and no member of the Cabinet had risen to say a word in favour of the Women’s claims.  Still, something might be done in Committee, in the autumn Session—­if there were one—­or in the following year.  There was a simmering in the Suffragist ranks rather than any alarming explosion.  In March, before Vivie went to Brussels, Mrs. Pankhurst had carried out a window-smashing raid on Bond Street and Regent Street and the clubs of Piccadilly, during which among the two hundred and nineteen arrests there were brought to light as “revolutionaries” two elderly women surgeons of great distinction and one female Doctor of Music.  In revenge the police had raided the W.S.P.U. offices at Clifford’s Inn, an event long foreseen and provided against in the neighbouring Chancery Lane.

The Irish Nationalist Party had shown its marked hostility to the enfranchisement of women in any Irish Parliament and so a few impulsive Irish women had thrown things at Nationalist M.P.’s without hurting them.  Mr. Lansbury had spoken the plain truth to the Prime Minister in the House of Commons and had been denied access to that Chamber where Truth is so seldom welcome.

In July the slumbering movement towards resisting the payment of taxes by vote-less women woke up into real activity, and there were many ludicrous and pathetic scenes organized often by Vivie and Bertie Adams at which household effects were sold and bought in by friends to satisfy the claims of a tax-collector.  In the autumn Vivie and others of the W.S.P.U. organized great pilgrimages—­the marches of the Brown Women—­from Scotland, Wales, Devon and Norfolk to London, to some goal in Downing Street or Whitehall, some door-step which already had every inch of its space covered by policemen’s boots.  These were among the pleasantest of the manifestations and excited great good humour in the populace of town and country.  They were extended picnics of ten days or a fortnight.  The steady tramp of sixteen to twenty miles a day did the women good; the food en route was abundant and eaten with tremendous appetite.  The pilgrims on arrival in London were a justification in physical fitness of Woman’s claim to equal privileges with Man.