The Pilgrimage also led to a deputation from the N.U.W.S.S. being received by Mr. Asquith. We noted, too, in his attitude and language a notable improvement; we felt that his education in the principles of representative government was progressing. Mrs. Harley, Miss Margaret Robertson, Mrs. Rackham, and Miss Royden spoke chiefly of the widespread interest in and sympathy with our movement which had been demonstrated during the Pilgrimage. It fell to me, as leader of the deputation, to try to wring from him some acknowledgment that he had not fulfilled the pledges he had given the suffrage deputation in November, 1911. I reminded him of these pledges, and maintained that they had not been fulfilled, and reviewed the series of events which had led suffragists to the unanimous conclusion that the only way in which their fulfilment was now possible was by means of a Government Bill. I reminded Mr. Asquith that several of his colleagues had repeatedly assured us that the opportunity offered them by him in November, 1911, was far better than any chances afforded by a private Member's Bill. Mr. Asquith at this point interjected, "So they were. It was the truth." This enabled me again to emphasize our main point—namely, that the offer of time for a private Member's Bill was a totally inadequate substitute for what we had lost by the Government's mishandling of their own measure. Proceeding, I recalled two comparatively modern instances in which Liberal Governments had been divided on the question of franchise reform. Lord Palmerston, leader of the Liberals in the early sixties, opposed the extension of the franchise to working men just as Mr. Asquith now opposed its extension to women. The result was that it was left to a Conservative Government to carry the needed reform. Lord Goschen, in 1880, had stood aside from active participation in party politics because of his opposition to the enfranchisement of the agricultural labourer. I pressed Mr. Asquith to follow the example of Lord Goschen rather than that of Lord Palmerston, and not to allow his own views to stand in the way of what he himself had acknowledged to be the desire of the majority of his colleagues in the Government and the House of Commons. Finally, I urged him not to shut his eyes to the fact that the women's demand to share in self-government was a vital and living movement, a development of the basic principle of democracy, and was founded on the growth of education and the wider industrial and professional opportunities which women had won for themselves during the last two generations. "We have ceased to have the serf's mind and the serf's economic helplessness, and it follows that the serf's political status no longer contents us. The Government is now meeting the demand of women for free institutions with coercion, and nothing but coercion. It is not thus that the victories of Liberalism have been won. I readily admit that the maintenance of order is one of the first duties of every Government. But another is to redress the grievances from which disorder has sprung."
In reply, Mr. Asquith confessed himself to have been greatly impressed by the Pilgrimage and its reception in the country; but though he admitted that we were in a position of great hardship, and virtually acknowledged that what he had offered us in January, 1913, was no equivalent for what he had promised us in November, 1911, he declined to say what steps his Government were prepared to take in the future on the suffrage question. But he said: "Proceed as you have been proceeding. Continue to the end;" and that it would be quite impossible for a minority in the Liberal Party to obstruct or prevent the realization of our hopes. Parliament would yield, as it had always hitherto done, and as it was bound to do, to the opinion of the country ... it was a matter which in the final resort must be decided by the people themselves. Asked how he expected the judgment of the people to express itself, Mr. Asquith replied: "I think, in the long run, there is only one way of finding out what people think, and that is by an election." But under present conditions, as we did not fail to remind him, those most concerned in the present matter would not possess one single vote. Members of the Government favourable to women's suffrage also received a deputation from the N.U.W.S.S. on the same day. The interview was private, but when members of both deputations compared notes, we agreed that the antisuffrage Prime Minister was less discouraging than his prosuffrage colleagues. They plentifully douched us with cold water. Only one of them, Sir John Simon, made any helpful suggestion.
One part of the remarks made by me to the Prime Minister seems to call for some further explanation: it is that in which I had referred to the existence of disorder, and that the Government's one and only remedy for disorder was coercion, and again coercion, ever more and more harshly and relentlessly applied, unaccompanied by any statesmanlike effort to redress the grievances from which disorder had sprung. This, of course, had reference to militantism, which was at its height in 1913. Liberals all over the country were quite willing to endorse John Bright's wise saying, "Force is no remedy"; but they seemed absolutely incapable of finding the real remedy—the extension to women of free institutions. Mr. Asquith had proclaimed that the object of his Government was "to set upon an unshakable foundation the principles of Representative Government," while maintaining that its application to women would be a political mistake of a disastrous nature. Quite recently, at a Lord Mayor's banquet, he had referred with well-founded complacency to the rapid reconciliation of the Boer population of South Africa, and had exclaimed, "Great is the magic of free institutions!" What we demanded was not the repetition of these mouth-filling phrases, but their application in our own case. The N.U.W.S.S. had consistently and persistently opposed militantism from the moment when the so-called militants attempted to promote their political aims by the use of personal violence. At the outset they had suffered violence, but used none; but this policy had, from 1908 onwards, been abandoned, and they openly took up the weapon of physical force, and in retaliation physical force was used against them brutally and unscrupulously. Forcible feeding, the Cat and Mouse Act, were the weapons of the Government. "Frightfulness" in the German sense had been used on both sides, and the frightfulness of the Government was as sincerely deprecated by all of us as the frightfulness of the militants. Again and again, on all possible occasions, we urged that the redress of grievances was the true remedy for disorder. We recognized, along with very large numbers of people hitherto uninterested in our movement, the courage and power of self-sacrifice of the militants, but we felt that the use of the weapon of physical force was the negation of the very principle for which we struggled; it was denying our faith to make our faith prevail.
In the early summer of 1913 an incident occurred which deeply touched the popular imagination, and placed the principle of self-sacrifice as illustrated by the militants on a hill-top from which it was seen not only all over our own country, but throughout the world. Courage calls to courage everywhere, and its voice cannot be denied.
The race for the Derby was held on the last Wednesday of May. The King's horse was the favourite. Crowds even more enormous than usual gathered to witness it; among them a young woman, a militant suffragist, Emily Davidson, of Morpeth, in Northumberland, had managed to place herself close to the winning-post against the rope barrier which kept the crowd off the actual track. As the King's horse swept by at a tremendous speed, Emily Davidson threw herself in front of it. Down came the horse with fearful violence; the jockey was, of course, thrown, and seriously injured; and there lay Emily Davidson, mortally injured. She had deliberately sacrificed her life in order, in this sensational way, to draw the attention of the whole world to the determination of women to share in the heritage of freedom which was the boast of every man in the country. The King enquired for the jockey; the Queen enquired for the injured woman. In a day or two it was announced that she was dead. She never recovered consciousness. She had died for her cause. After one of the military disasters which accompanied the early development of the Risorgimento in Italy, the historian writes that young Italy had, at least, shown that it knew how to die. Emily Davidson had shown that she, too, knew how to die. I happened to be in Vienna at the time, and I shall not easily forget the awed solemnity with which a Viennese with whom I had had some halting conversation in German on the suffrage question came to me and said, "Miss Davidson ist todt."
It is said that the urgency of the suffrage problem in Great Britain was one reason which induced the ex-Kaiser and his advisers to consider England a decadent power; if this is true, it is only an example of the way in which he misread every sign of the times and totally misunderstood this country. That a woman was capable of throwing away her life on the chance that it might serve the cause of freedom might have taught him to expect what happened about fourteen months later, when over 5,000,000 young Englishmen voluntarily joined the army in order to preserve the principles of liberty and self-government throughout the world.