1919. The Industrial Courts Act was improved by the Government accepting the amendment of the Labour Party that one or more members of these courts should be women.
It will be seen from the foregoing survey of the legislative activity of Parliament in the eighteen years under review that they divide themselves into two unequal portions, 1902-1914 and 1918-1919. The war years are omitted for obvious reasons. In the first and longer period of fifteen years we find five measures of varying importance—that is, at the rate of one to every three years. By far the most important of these measures are the Midwives Act, 1902, and the series of Acts dealing with the qualifications of women for local government elections; both of these were due to years of hard work—twelve in one case, and fourteen in the other—of very active and efficient women's societies. In the second, and far shorter, period, of less than two years—February, 1918, to November, 1919—we find seven Acts of value and importance slipping through Parliament without any trouble at all; ministerial swords leaping from their scabbards to remove impediments from the path of the free citizenship of women. This is the "difference" the vote has made.
FOOTNOTES
[[1]] This pointed to the probable application of the Parliament Act to the proposed Reform Bill.
[[2]] In view of the promise which had just been exacted of me not to use violence towards the Chancellor, the presence of his wife and daughter might have been explained on the hypothesis that in the event of assault and battery on our part they could have flung their persons between their husband and father and his assailants. But this possible explanation of the presence of these ladies did not occur to me at the time.
[[3]] Antisuffragists in the country had taken up the campaign of calumny against us, and had spoken of suffragists as "purveyors of vile literature," disseminators of "pestilential doctrines," and had used other flowers of rhetoric of the same description.
[[4]] See correspondence in the Morning Post, January 14th to 21st, 1918.
[[5]] The Bill was named the Franchise and Registration Bill, not a Bill to Amend the Representation of the People.
[[6]] Of these 8,654,467, more than 7,000,000 were white men enlisted within the British Empire. (See Report of War Cabinet published in August, 1919.)