economic condition of working women, upon whom the low wages, long hours, and unhealthy surroundings, which are described by the general term of "sweating," pressed with far greater force than upon men. The second was the general improvement in feminine education, not only by the improvement of schools and colleges for women of the middle class and the public education of women of the working class, but by the development of women's organizations. Bodies like the Women's Liberal Federation, a purely political association, the National Union of Women Workers, an association of middle-class women for the study and improvement of women's labour of all sorts, the Women's Co-operative Guild, an association of working women, the various Women's Trade Unions, associations of women for the protection of their industrial interests, all these bodies, founded in the twenty-five years preceding the Liberal victory, had broadened and deepened the minds of women, extended their knowledge of affairs, increased their practical capacity, and given them that interest in association for the management of common concerns which is the basis of all political movements. In particular, their attention had been directed to foreign countries like the United States, Australia, and Norway, where women had recently been enfranchised, and more than one international association linked up the English movement with the rest of the universal progress of women. But the most influential of all the causes of the new strength of the agitation was the increased knowledge of physical facts and the consequences of sexual vice. The development of sick nursing since Florence Nightingale, the experience of work among prostitutes since Josephine Butler, and the study of medicine since Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake, had revealed to an increasing number of women the dreadful consequences of a moral standard which indulged men and degraded women. Prostitution appears to the Suffragist to be a direct consequence of the political supremacy of one sex over the other, to be the result of that encouragement of egoism which always follows the disposition of the political affairs of one class by another. There are in the United Kingdom at the
present day not less than one hundred thousand women who are kept, through no desire of their own, for no other purpose than that of the destruction of their bodies and souls for the gratification of their political superiors. In 1899 Englishmen went to war, as they supposed, to rescue some of their countrymen from oppressive taxation and the abuse of the machinery of justice. The Suffragists since 1906 have been conducting a political agitation of a milder sort, as they suppose, to rescue some of their fellow-creatures from an infinitely more dreadful fate. Those who require an explanation of their earnestness, or an excuse for their extravagance, will find it in their belief that social degradation is the inevitable consequence of political inferiority. The White Slave Traffic Act of 1913, flung by Parliament as a sop to womanhood in revolt, merely touches the surface of the problem. The whole system of sexual ethics is put in issue by the Woman Suffrage movement.[[364]]
The failure of the Government and their followers to deal liberally with this question has been an interesting revelation of the incompleteness of self-styled Liberalism, and of the power of the party machine to subdue independent thinking to the convenience of Ministers with stereotyped minds. The majority of members of the Liberal party, in the Cabinet and elsewhere, have acknowledged the justice of the demand, even though its sudden violence has taken them by surprise. A minority, which unhappily includes Mr. Asquith, have displayed a Toryism, in matters of sex, as complete as that of Castlereagh. It has been particularly unfortunate for the credit of the Liberal party that its leader at such a critical moment should be a man of little imagination. It is the large imagination, ever ranging beyond the bounds of the practicable and the expedient, and detecting in the obscurity of apparent chaos the currents of new social forces, which distinguishes the greatest statesmen from those who are merely
great. Peel had it, though in him it was often blind and groping. Disraeli had it, though spoilt by his mean and tawdry ideals. Gladstone had it, in full measure, and so, with less practical gifts, had Campbell-Bannerman. The mantle of leadership descended in 1908 upon the shoulders of a man who had all the qualities of a great leader except the greatest of all; and Mr. Asquith's inability to see the rightness of the women's movement has brought his party into great difficulty and greater discredit. In spite of his own public promise to adopt the opinion of the House of Commons, even if it be contrary to his own, a perverted sense of loyalty has caused many of his followers to find in his feelings a reason for the violation of their own express and public pledges. This dullness of vision in Ministers has been severely blamed. But it is not for the want of imagination which disables them from understanding the problem that they are to be condemned. The historian who wastes his indignation on such natural incapacities will have little to spare for the graver political vices. The blameworthiness of the Liberal party and the Government lies in their mismanagement of the disorder which was produced by their refusal to redress grievances. The writer has nothing to say in defence of the recent actions of the militant Suffragists. The earliest breaches of the law produced no substantial injury to anybody but the women themselves. Those of the last twelve months have in some cases been as wicked as they have in all cases been foolish. But however arrogant, reckless, and unscrupulous the militant movement may now have become, it was in origin as disinterested and as remorseless in its self-sacrifice as any political movement in history, and its corruption is due no more to the native ill-disposition of the women than to the folly of the Government and its supporters.[[365]]
However that may be, the treatment of the militant Suffrage movement since the death of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman has been in the very temper of the Toryism of the French Revolution. Trifling disorders, springing from political discontent, have been treated as serious crimes, and people who offended, not out of private malice or greed, but out of a desire to improve the conditions of society, have been subjected to harsh and degrading punishments. It has always been the contention of Liberals in opposition that a distinction should be drawn between criminals whose motives are political and criminals whose motives are personal, between those who break the law for private and anti-social ends and those who break it for ends which they honestly believe represent the advantage of their fellow-creatures. This distinction, obvious to the moralist, is expressed in the legislation of almost every other civilized state, as well as in that Act of Parliament which provides that a seditious libeller shall be treated in prison, not as a common offender, but as a first-class misdemeanant. The same ethical distinction impelled the Whigs to oppose Tory methods of repression during the French War, and was the basis of all modern Liberal attacks on Tory methods in Ireland. Liberals have always recognized that the maintenance of order is only a condition of the redress of grievances, and that those who are impatient for redress are to be restrained only and not to be injured. If there is one principle of administration more distinctively Liberal than any other, it is that wrongful action from right motives requires delicate handling, and that even if it must be punished, the motives which produce it must be destroyed, not by brutality, but by removal of the abuse which has created them. What the Government did with the militant Suffrage movement was to violate this essentially Liberal principle, and while they refused to remove the cause of discontent, they repressed its early and trifling symptoms with a severity which only dangerous crime could have deserved.[[366]] The
Government in fact did what Tory Governments have always done. They looked, not to the people concerned, to find out what they were, and why they acted as they did, but to the class brand which custom had placed upon them. They thought they were dealing with women, when in fact they were only dealing with human beings. They assumed that the disorder was due to something peculiar to the sex, and not to a state of mind which was common to men and women alike. Their formula was not the general political formula, "Disorder springs from grievances," but some hasty deduction from inaccurate assumptions about the physical constitution of women. They thought that they were dealing, not with political discontent, but with sexual aberration, and they sought for explanations, not in the history of Reform, Chartism, and Fenianism, but in medical treatises on the diseases of women.[[367]] They did not reflect that this revolt of women did not differ in any essential from previous revolts of men, or that as it sprang from similar causes it could be cured by the same remedies. When Ministers ought to have been giving facilities to a Woman Suffrage Bill, they were contriving means of avoiding vitriol, and based their policy upon speculations about erotic mania when they should have thought of nothing but common political principles. This sexuality of mind, exactly reproducing the mental habit of eighteenth-century Toryism, determined their fatal course of action.
Ministers could not reasonably have been required to introduce a Government Bill for the enfranchisement of women. The Cabinet had not been formed on that basis, and no Anti-Suffrage
Minister could be compelled to submit his judgment to that of his colleagues. But there has not been, at any time since 1906, any reason why facilities should not have been given for the passing of a private members' Bill. So long as the Government refused to help the women, and refused to allow private members to help them, even while they continued to inflict degrading forms of punishment, so long must their administration increase instead of diminish discontent. Facilities for the private Bill were refused year after year, until the militant women and their sympathizers had become convinced of the insincerity of the Government, and when at last the concession was obtained it was robbed of all value by the recollection of previous quibbling and evasion. In the meantime punishment had failed to do anything but poison the temper of agitation. Imprisonment in the third division among common felons was at first imposed upon women who had been guilty only of technical offences. When the women were roused to demand privileged treatment in the second division, the Government advanced to granting ordinary treatment in the second division. When the demand became a demand for imprisonment in the first division, the Government consented to privileged treatment in the second division. When the women refused to submit to any imprisonment at all, and prepared to starve rather than remain in jail, the Government made a partial surrender, and offered the leaders the first division, while it kept their followers, the tools and instruments of their conspiracy, in the second. Each stage of the disease has been conscientiously treated with those remedies which would have cured it at the preceding stage, and always without any result, except to increase the contempt with which the offenders regarded the Government. Concessions, which should have been made boldly and generously, have been made grudgingly and parsimoniously, and where prompt and spontaneous action would have been effective, this tardy and reluctant yielding to pressure has produced no good at all.
The folly of the Government has not been confined to their neglect. In two matters they have been guilty of positive action,