'It's always the point.'

'It's the principle that's at stake,' Ernestine was saying. 'The most out-and-out Socialist among us would welcome the enfranchisement of six duchesses or all the women born with red hair; we don't care on what plea the entering wedge gets in. But let me tell you there aren't any people on earth so blind to their own interests as just you working men when you oppose or when you are indifferent to women's having votes. All women suffer—but it's the women of your class who suffer most. Isn't it? Don't you men know—why, it's notorious!—that the women of the working class are worse sweated even than the men?'

'So they are!'

'If you don't believe me, ask them. Here they come.'

It was well contrived—that point! It struck full in the face of the homeward-streaming women who had just been let out.

'We know, and you men know——' the speaker nailed her advantage, 'that even the Government that's being forced to become a model employer where men are concerned, the very Government is responsible for sweating thousands of women in State employments! We know and you know that in those work-rooms over yonder these very women have been sitting weighed down by the rumour of a reduction in their wages already so much below the men's. They've sat there wondering whether they can risk a strike. Women—it's notorious,' she flung it out on a wave of passion, 'women everywhere suffer most from the evils of our social system. Why not? They've had no hand in it! Our social system is the work of men! Yet we must work to uphold it! this system that crushes us. We must swell the budget, we must help to pay the bill! What fools we've all been! What fools we are if we don't do something!'

'Gettin' up rows and goin' to 'Olloway's no good.'

While she justified the course that led to Holloway—

'Rot! Piffle!' they interjected. One man called out: 'I'd have some respect for you if you'd carried a bomb into the House of Commons, but a miserable little scuffle with the police!'

'Here's a gentleman who is inciting us to carry bombs. Now, that shocks me.'