"(Revolution—pistol shots—the fire-brigade comes.)
"'Twenty—thirty—forty novels a day.'
"(The Big Ben is howling—the Thames river floods Middlesex—the House of Commons suspends the Habeas Corpus Act.)
"'Or even ten novels every hour.'
"(The Albert Memorial leaves its place and takes refuge in the Imperial Institute—the crowd, in despair, falls on their knees and implores the speaker to have mercy on them—they promise the suffrage, at once, or somewhat before that.)
"'There! I told you, we do mean what we mean, and we have all sorts of means of making you mean what we mean. It is therefore understood that you will give us the franchise, and we shall stop publishing novels. But should you change your mind and go back on your present promises, then I must warn you that we have in store even more drastic means of forcing your hands. You must not in the least believe that the pressure we can bring to bear upon you is exhausted with the devices just enumerated. There are other devices. But for evident reasons of modesty I prefer calling upon my motherly guide, Mrs Pancake, to tell you more about them.'
"With that my tender friend retired, and up got a middle-aged woman with hard features and much flabby flesh. She was received with mournful silence. She began in a strident voice, which she accentuated by angular gestures cutting segments out of the air. She said:
"'You have, ladies and gentlemen, heard some of the disadvantages that will inevitably be entailed upon you by not granting us what Justice, Equity and our Costume render a demand that none but barbarians can refuse. I am now going to give you just an inkling of what will befall you should you pertinaciously persist in your obdurate refusal of the franchise to women. We women have made up our minds to the exclusion of any imaginable hesitation, change, or vacillation. We shall be firm and unshakable.
"'We have done everything that could be done by way of persuading you. We have published innumerable pamphlets; we have trodden countless streets in countless processions; we have been wearing innumerable badges and carrying thousands of flags and standards; we have screamed, pushed, rowdied, boxed, scuffled, gnashed our teeth (even such as were not originally made for that purpose), and suffered our skirts to be torn to shreds; we have petitioned, waylaid, interpellated, ambushed, bullied and memorialised all the ministers, all the editors, all the clergymen, all the press-men; we have suffered imprisonment, fines, scorn, ridicule; we have done, with the exception of actual fighting, everything that men have done for the conquest of the suffrage.