It was a dangerous suggestion to make, or would have proved so, had these sneering politicians been provoking men to claim their constitutional rights:  bloodshed would almost certainly have followed.  But the leaders of the militant women ordered (and were obeyed) that no attacks on life should be part of the Woman’s militant programme.  Property might be destroyed, especially such as did not impoverish the poor; but there were to be no railway accidents, no sinking of ships, no violent deeds dangerous to life.  At the height and greatest bitterness of militancy no statesman’s life was in danger.

The only recklessness about life was in the militant women.  They risked and sometimes lost their lives in carrying out their protests.  They invented the Hunger Strike (the prospect of which as an inevitable episode ahead of her, filled Vivie with tremulous dread) to balk the Executive of its idea of turning the prisons of England into Bastilles for locking up these clamant women who had become better lawyers than the men who tried them.  But think what the Hunger Strike and its concomitant, Forcible Feeding, meant in the way of pain and danger to the life of the victim.  The Government were afraid (unless you were an utterly unknown man or woman of the lower classes) of letting you die in prison; so to force them to release you, you had first to refuse for four days all food—­the heroic added all drink.  Then to prevent your death—­and being human you, the prisoner, must have hoped they were keeping a good look-out on your growing weakness—­the prison doctor must intervene with his forcible feeding.  This was a form of torture the Inquisition would have been sorry to have overlooked, and one no doubt that the Bolsheviks have practised with great glee.  The patient was strapped to a chair or couch or had his—­usually her—­limbs held down by warders (wardresses) and nurses.  A steel or a wooden gag was then inserted, often with such roughness as to chip or break the teeth, and through the forced-open mouth a tube was pushed down the throat, sometimes far enough to hurt the stomach.  This produced an apoplectic condition of choking and nausea, and as the stomach filled up with liquid food the retching nearly killed the patient.  The windpipe became involved.  Food entered the lungs—­the tongue was cut and bruised (Think what a mere pimple on the tongue means to some of us:  it keeps me awake half the night)—­the lips were torn.  Worse still—­requiring really a pathological essay to which I am not equal—­was feeding by slender pipes through the nose.  The far simpler and painless process per rectum was debarred because it might have constituted an indecent assault.

Was ever Ministry in a greater dilemma?  It was too old-fashioned, too antiquely educated to realize the spirit of its age, the pass at which we had arrived of conceding to Women the same rights as to men.  Women were ready to die for these rights (not to kill others in order to attain them).  Yet for fear of wounding the national sentimentality they must not be allowed to die; they must not be saved from suicide by any action savouring of indecency; so they must be tortured as prisoners hardly were in the worst days of the Inquisition or at the worst-conducted public school of the Victorian era.