The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

Such was the situation which the Governmental coup transformed to tragedy unrelieved, giving us in the place of ordered lawlessness and responsible leadership a guerrilla warfare against society by irresponsive individuals, more or less unbalanced. That the heroic incendiary Mrs. Leigh, who deserved penal servitude and a statue, had been driven wild by forcible feeding was a fact that had given considerable uneasiness to headquarters, but she had been kept in comparative discipline. Now that discipline has been destroyed, it is possible that other free-lances will catch the contagion of crime; nay, there are signs that the leaders themselves are being infected through the difficulty of disavowing their martyrs. The wisest course for the Government would be to pardon Miss Pankhurst, of Paris, and officially invite her to resume control of her followers before they have quite controlled her.

But even without such a crowning confession of the failure of its coup, the humiliation of the Government has been sufficiently complete. Forced to put Mrs. Pankhurst and the Pethick Lawrences into the luxurious category of political prisoners, next to release them altogether, and finally to liberate their humblest followers, their hunger-strike on behalf of whose equal treatment set a new standard of military chivalry, the Government succeeded only in investing the vanished Christabel with a new glamour. The Women's Social and Political Union has again baffled the Government, and come triumphantly even through the window-breaking episode. For if that episode was followed by the rejection of the second reading of the woman suffrage Bill, second readings, like the oaths of the profane, had come to be absolutely without significance, and the blocking of the Bill beyond this stage has been assured long before by the tactics of Mr. Redmond, whose passion for justice, like Mr. Asquith's passion for popular government, is so curiously monosexual. The only discount from the Union's winnings is that it gave mendacious M.P.'s, anxious to back out of woman suffrage, a soft bed to lie on.

One should perhaps also add to the debit side of the account a considerable loss of popularity on the part of the suffragettes, a loss which would become complete were window-breaking to pass into graver crimes, and which would entirely paralyze the effect of their tactics.

For the tactics of the prison and the hunger-strike depend for their value upon the innocency of the prisoners. Their offense must be merely nominal or technical. The suffragettes had rediscovered the Quaker truth that the spirit is stronger than all the forces of Government, and that things may really come by fasting and prayer. Even the window-breaking, though a perilous approach to the methods of the Pagan male, was only a damage to insensitive material for which the window-breakers were prepared to pay in conscious suffering. But once the injury was done to flesh 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.