"You speak, Mr. Asquith, the suffragist said,
Of the Will of the People wholesale;
But has the idea never entered your head
That the People are not wholly male?"
Another, which was headed "Any Premier to any Suffragist," ran thus:
"So, lady, it is plain,
While at your claim one man shies,
Until you have the vote 'tis vain
To ask us for the franchise."
About this time the editor of the Daily Telegraph allotted space in his paper once a week, under the heading of "Women in Public Life," for the discussion of all kinds of women's activities, including suffrage. It also gave good telegraphic summaries of events bearing on the women's cause in foreign countries, and sometimes even printed the speeches of suffrage leaders verbatim. As our struggle for suffrage became more and more a struggle with Mr. Asquith it not unnaturally followed that those papers were naturally estranged from us which lived, and moved, and had their being in believing that he was the first of men, and that everything he said and did was perfect. They did not go back definitely, and in so many words, upon their former record in support of free representative institutions, but they gave us many a back-hander, published everything conspicuously which they thought likely to be damaging to us, and suppressed such events as told in our favour. I give an instance. In a copy of an evening paper in 1913 I saw in one column, apropos of some House of Commons incident, that "Mrs. Fawcett was in despair"; in another that "Mr. Birrell had finished with women's suffrage for ever"; and that "Mr. Wilfred Ashley had felt compelled to vote against it." As I knew I was not in despair, and had never given any justification for the assertion that I was, I contemplated with some calm the assertions about Mr. Birrell and Mr. Ashley. We did not complain of this sort of treatment. The tactics it revealed were too transparent to do our movement any real harm. The papers which we familiarly referred to as "the three Posts"—the Morning Post, the Birmingham Post, and the Yorkshire Post—remained out-and-out antisuffrage all through down to the very end of our struggle. But the Standard, which at one time had refused even to insert colourless paragraphs of suffrage news, passed to new editorship, and became much more favourable. It referred sympathetically to our by-election campaigns in 1912 and 1913, saying that suffragists "were displaying energy of the first order"; and after the procession in the Coronation year, which had attracted much favourable notice, it arranged for the daily appearance of a special page, entitled "Woman's Platform," in which facts and arguments for and against suffrage were inserted. This was of great use to us, and we welcomed the publication of the antisuffrage copy, because this gave the paper an entry into the strongholds of our opponents, and also enabled us to judge of their policy and tactics. For instance, it was in the "Woman's Platform" of the Standard, in 1913, that Mr. MacCallum Scott called upon his Liberal friends in the House of Commons to break their suffrage pledges in order to save Mr. Asquith from the humiliation of keeping the promises he had made to us.