Since I came here I have seen nothing but “Votes for Women” chalked all over the pavements and walls of the town. These methods of propaganda are all so new to me.
I went to a Suffrage street corner meeting the other night, and I can assure you I never want to go again. The speaker carried her little stool herself, another carried a flag, and yet a third woman a bundle of leaflets and papers to distribute to the crowd. After walking for a little while they placed the stool outside a dirty-looking public-house, and the lady who carried the flag boldly got on to the stool and began to shout, not waiting till the people came to hear her, so anxious was she to begin. Although she did not look nervous in the least she possibly was, for her speech came abruptly to an end, and my heart began to beat in sympathy with her.
When the other lady began to speak quite a big crowd of men and women assembled: degraded-looking ruffians they were, most of them, and a class of man I had not yet seen. All the time they interrupted her, but she went bravely on, returning their rudeness with sarcasm. What an insult to womanhood it seemed to me, to have to bandy words with this vulgar mob. One man told her that “she was ugly.” Another asked “if she had done her washing,” but the most of their hateful remarks I could not understand, so different was their English from the English I had learned in Turkey.
Yet how I admired the courage of that woman! No physical pain could be more awful to me than not to be taken for a lady, and this speaker of such remarkable eloquence and culture was not taken for a lady by the crowd, seeing she was supposed “to do her own washing” like any women of the people.
The most pitiful part of it all to me is the blind faith these women have in their cause, and the confidence they have that in explaining their policy to the street ruffians, who cannot even understand that they are ladies, they will further their cause by half an inch.
I was glad when the meeting was over, but sorry that such rhetoric should have been wasted on the half-intoxicated loungers who deigned to come out of the public-house and listen. If this is what the women of your country have to bear in their fight for freedom, all honour to them, but I would rather groan in bondage.
*****
I have been to see your famous Houses of Parliament, both the Lords and the Commons. Like all the architecture in London, these buildings create such an atmosphere of kingly greatness in which I, the democrat of my own country, am revelling. The Democracy of the East is so different from that of the West, of which I had so pitiful an example at the street corner.
I was invited to tea at the House of Commons, and to be invited to tea there of all places seemed very strange to me. Is the drinking of tea of such vital importance that the English can never do without it? I wonder if the Turks, now their Parliament is opened, will drink coffee with ladies instead of attending to the laws of the nation!