The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward

by Janet Penrose Trevelyan

The last act in the drama of Women’s Suffrage found Mrs. Ward, as usual, active and on the alert, and still unconvinced of the necessity for the measure, or, still more, of the competence of the Parliament of 1917 to deal with it. It will be remembered that the question arose again on the “Representation of the People Bill” which the Government felt bound to bring in before the death of the existing Parliament in order to remedy the crying injustices of registration which deprived most of the fighting men and many of the munition workers of their votes. The opportunity was seized by the Suffragists to press the claims of women once more upon Parliament and public, and this time the response was overwhelmingly favourable. The pluck and endurance shown by women in all the multifarious activities of the War had brought the public round to their side; the men at the front were believed to be in favour of it, the militant outrages had ceased, and, last but not least, there was now a lifelong Suffragist at the head of affairs. The Speaker’s Conference, which reported on January 27, 1917, decided “by a majority” that “some measure of women’s suffrage should be conferred.” It was evident that the current of opinion was setting strongly in favour of the women’s claim, but Mrs. Ward still felt it to be her duty to protest, and to organize the latent opposition which certainly existed in the country. She wrote an eloquent letter to The Times in May, pointing out the obvious truth that the country had not been consulted, that the existing Parliament had twice rejected the measure and was now a mere rump, with some 200 Members absent on war service; she denied in a passage of great force the plea based on “equality of service” between men and women, appealing to the grave-yards in France and Flanders which she had seen with her own eyes, as evidence of the eternal inequality, and finally she pleaded for a large extension of the women’s municipal vote, in order to provide an electorate which might be consulted by Referendum. The Referendum was in fact adopted by the now dwindling Anti-Suffrage party in Parliament as their policy; but the House of Commons would have none of it, and the Second Reading of the Bill, which included the Suffrage clause, was carried by 329 to 40. It is obvious, of course, that in an elective Assembly, when the members are once convinced that a large increase in the electorate is about to be made, anxiety for their seats will make them very chary of voting against the new electors. Hence Mrs. Ward had to bewail many desertions. The Bill was finally passed by the House of Commons on December 7; but there still remained the Lords. Here the opposition was likely to be far more formidable, for the Lords had no hungry electors waiting for them, nor were they so susceptible as the Lower House to waves of sentiment such as that which had overspread press and public in favour of Women’s Suffrage. It was here, therefore, that Mrs. Ward organized her last resistance. The January Nineteenth Century appeared with an article by her entitled “Let Women Say,” appealing to the Lords to insist on a Referendum, while in the first week of January she (acting as Chairman of the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage) issued a Memorial to which she had obtained the signatures of about 2,000 women war-workers, and sent it to the press and to the Members of the House of Lords.

Lord Bryce wrote to her in response (January 8, 1918):

MY DEAR MRS. WARD,—

Thank you for your admirable article and for the copy of the Memorial, an effective reply to that of the Suffragist ladies. It is an achievement to have secured so many signatures so quickly—and this may be used effectively by Lord Balfour of Burleigh, when he moves his Referendum Amendment. No one can yet predict the result. Lord Loreburn will move the omission of the earlier part of Clause IV to-morrow; and I suppose that if it is defeated the Referendum issue will come next.”

There were a large number of distinguished Peers, including Lords Loreburn, Weardale, Halsbury, Plymouth, and Finlay, who were pledged to oppose “Clause IV,” but the rock on whom the Anti-Suffragists chiefly relied was Lord Curzon. He was President of the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage. He was an important member of the Government. His advice would sway the votes of large numbers of docile Peers. He had, however, sent Mrs. Ward a verbal message through her son, whom he met in the House on December 18, that his position in the Government would make it impossible for him to vote against the Clause: he would be obliged to abstain. Still he continued in active communication with Mrs. Ward, giving advice on the tactics to be pursued, and on December 30, 1917, wrote her a letter in which, after expressing admiration for her Nineteenth Century article, he added the words: “A letter (if possible with the article) to the Peers a few days before the Clause comes under consideration may bring up a good many to vote, and after all that is what you want for the moment.”

Lord Curzon gave no further warning to the Committee of the League that he intended to pursue any different line of action from that recommended here. It was still a question of “bringing the Peers up to vote,” though the Committee knew by this time that his own vote—on the formal ground of his being Leader of the House of Lords—could not be given against the Clause. What, then, was their astonishment, when on the decisive day, January 10, 1918, after a speech in which Lord Curzon condemned the principle of Women’s Suffrage in unmeasured terms and announced that his opposition to it was as strong as ever, he then turned to their Lordships and advised them not to reject the Clause because it would lead to a conflict with the other House “from which your Lordships would not emerge with credit.” The effect of the appeal was decisive; the Clause passed the House of Lords by a majority of sixty-three.

Thus fell the Anti-Suffrage edifice, and Mrs. Ward and her friends were left to nurse their wrath against their leader. A somewhat lengthy correspondence in the Morning Post followed, the echoes of which have long since died away, and Mrs. Ward retired soon afterwards to Stocks. Thence she wrote to Mrs. Creighton, on March 14, her little valediction on the Suffrage question:

“Yes, I have had rather a bad time of headache and weariness lately. The last lap of the Suffrage struggle was rather too much for me. But I felt bound, under all the circumstances (I should not have felt bound if the decision had been postponed till after the War) as a patriot—or what I conceive to be a patriot—to fight to the end, and I actually drafted the last amendment on which the House of Lords voted. Well now, thank goodness, it is over, for a while, though I see Mrs. Fawcett is still proposing to go on. Now the question is what the women will do with their vote. I can only hope that you and Mrs. Fawcett are right and that I am wrong.”

Nine months later, the General Election of December, 1918, gave women the opportunity of echoing their Prime Minister’s sentiments that the Kaiser should be brought to trial and that Germany should pay for the cost of the War. Mrs. Ward did not record her vote, for purely local reasons, but she had by this time adopted an attitude of quite benevolent neutrality on the merits of the question. She had fought her fight squarely and openly, and had finally been defeated by a combination of circumstances to which no combatant need have been ashamed of succumbing. To some of those who worked with her and who watched her endless consideration for friend and foe alike, in office and committee-room, who admired the breadth and versatility of her mind and who shared her belief in the “alternative policy” for which she so eloquently pleaded, it seemed that the failure of the Anti-Suffrage campaign lay at the door of those who obstructed her within her own walls, who could not understand her call to women to be up and doing, and who opposed a mere blind No to the youth and hope of the Suffrage crusade.

Be that as it may, Mrs. Ward had no reason, in looking back, to be otherwise than proud of her contribution to the great cause of women’s work and freedom in this country. From her earliest days she had forwarded the cause of women’s education. As her experience of life grew ever richer and more pitiful she had pleaded with her sex, using all her varied gifts of pen and speech, to give themselves, each in her degree, to the service of her fellows, and of the children. Her own example was never lacking to enforce the plea. Service, not “rights,” was in effect her watch-word. If she disbelieved in the efficacy of the vote to achieve miracles, it was because she believed far more in the gradual growth and efficacy of spiritual forces. The rule of the mob did not attract her, especially if it were a female mob; she would have offered it, instead, its fill of work and service. Perhaps it was too austere a gospel for our day, and in the end she watched her country choose the opposite path without bitterness, and even with some degree of hope. At any rate she had done her part in laying before her countrywomen a different ideal.