That Sunday night the police were most kind, they allowed me to sit at a table outside my cell and write. My cell was much too dark for writing. To-night the place was more full of noise than it had been before. The wild yells, and blows on the doors, made my hand shake so that at first I could not write, but by holding the pencil, lent to me by the police, over the paper, it came sufficiently legibly at last. I wrote to my mother and my sister. I also wrote to the Times the following letter, from the eleven[11] who were imprisoned:—
“Sir,—We ask you to give us our last opportunity, before we go through the ordeal awaiting us in Newcastle Prison, of explaining to the public the action which we are now about to take.
“We want to make it known that we shall carry on our protest in our prison cells. We shall put before the Government by means of the hunger-strike four alternatives: To release us in a few days; to inflict violence upon our bodies; to add death to the champions of our cause by leaving us to starve; or, and this is the best and only wise alternative, to give women the vote.
“We appeal to the Government to yield, not to the violence of our protest, but to the reasonableness of our demand, and to grant the vote to the duly qualified women of the country. We shall then serve our full sentence quietly and obediently and without complaint. Our protest is against the action of the Government in opposing Woman Suffrage, and against that alone. We have no quarrel with those who may be ordered to maltreat us.
“Yours sincerely,
“Lily Asquith.
“Jane E. Brailsford.
“Kathleen Brown.
“Violet Bryant.
“Ellen Pitfield.
“Dorothy Shallard.
“Winifred Jones.
“Constance Lytton.
“Kitty Marion.
“Dorothy Pethick.
“Ellen W. Pitman.“Central Police Station,
“Newcastle,
“October 10, 1909.”
Footnote:
- [11] I handed this letter to a friend on Monday morning. At the trial Miss Davison was dismissed, so her name was taken from the signatures.
I wrote on the wall of my cell my name and the words which rung in my head over and over again, from the Book of Joshua: “Only be thou strong and very courageous.”
I received a letter in the police cell, saying that I had thrown my stone not far from a family residence of relatives of ours—did I not feel it hence a double disgrace? In answer to this I had thought some time. Who were those for whom we fought? I seemed to hear them in my cell, the defenceless ones who had no one to speak for their hungry need. The sweated workers, the mothers widowed with little children, the women on the streets, and I saw that their backs were bent, their eyes grown sorrowful, their hearts dead without hope. And they were not a few, but thousands upon thousands. Side by side I considered what they could do, what they had done, where women had the vote. The wife has half her husband’s wages, by law, and when he does not give it, she can have the amount paid direct to her. She is given money for her children by the State when her husband dies. When she is not married, if she has a child she is paid for it, not by the father direct, but through the public authority, and she has not to apply to the father for her money. I thought of all these helpless women, of the Parliament that had given its theoretic consent for over twenty years, but refused to pass a Bill, and I thought what are my relations? I do not know, but if anything, they are for us, and if they are still asleep, in the fog of the “don’t know and don’t care,” am I bound to consider their dreaming?
I wrote on the wall:—
“To defend the oppressed,
To fight for the defenceless,