“Personally I do,” said the suffragette. “And mine is as good an answer as yours.”
“Both answers are very poor,” admitted Samuel. “You want the vote so badly that you think it worth while to become hysterical over it.”
“There is not much hysteria in the movement, only hysteria is the thing that strikes a hysterical press as most worthy of note. What hysteria there is, is a result—not a cause. Women never invented hysteria. How should we be anything but irresponsible, since you have taken responsibility from us? If we are bitter, you must remember that somebody mixed the dose. If the womanliness you admire is dead, bear in mind that nothing can be dead without being killed.”
“But who is your enemy? Who are your murderers? I have never noticed that the majority of men are fiends incarnate. You may not believe me, but I do assure you that at frequent intervals in my life I have met honest, just, and moral men. Have you met none?”
“In the Brown Borough I meet excellent men. Older and wiser men, who sit on committees and behave like one conglomerate uncle to the poor; young lovers too hopelessly out of work to marry, and yet always gay and good-hearted; large tired fathers who come in after a day’s work and sit under dripping washing and never slap the children.... But that such just men are not in a majority is proved by the fact that women continue to suffer.”
“Yes, but perhaps they suffer at the hands—not of men—but of circumstances.”
“Circumstances always favour people with a public voice.”
“And do militant suffragettes really think that by smashing windows they will attain to a public voice?”
“In what we do, we’re a poor argument for the Franchise. In what we are, we’re the very best. It’s not possible for the community to be hit without deserving it. It must look round and find out why it is hit—not how. Punishment is no good to a smasher of windows. Any woman can see if she’s wrong without punishment. If she thinks she’s right, punishment can never alter her opinion.”
“Smashers must be punished. It would be impossible to allow even the righteous to take the law into their own hands.”