enfranchisement obviously places in the hands of women a labor saving device of great possibility.

It is a device with which they can accomplish no result they have not the brains to plan and the courage to undertake. As the sewing machine and the needle are alike useful only to those persons who see the finished garment in relation to the cloth, so the ballot as an instrument can only aid-it cannot serve as a substitute for the plan already formulated. Those who see clearly the end sought and who therefore desire urgently to possess the most efficient instrument are often prevented by their very eagerness from seeing the more remote but more far-reaching and really more important aspects of the claims of women to be admitted to full political equality, because of the important bearing of their political or their economic status.

THE MILITANT SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT

BY MARY WINSOR,

Chairman of the Pennsylvania Congressional Committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and President of the Pennsylvania Limited Equal Suffrage League.

An estimate of the militant suffrage movement should be based, not on mere study of books, but on a first-hand acquaintance with the movement itself in England. In 1913 during part of July, August and October, and in 1914 from May 27 to July 14, I was in London investigating the woman suffrage movement in all its ramifications, marching in processions and pilgrimages, speaking in meetings both peaceful and militant, indoors and out of doors (the street is a grand place to study politics, especially in England), attending tax resistance auctions, escorting deputations to the House of Commons, witnessing the brutality of policemen and appearing in the police court to testify to what I saw, following Sylvia Pankhurst and East End working men and women to the House of Commons, accompanying Mrs. Pethick Lawrence to jail, hearing Miss Nellie Hall and Miss Grace Roe interrupt the course of their trial as a protest against an unjust system of justice, and interviewing and conversing with dozens of suffrage sympathizers and workers.

In this brief paper it would be time wasted to criticise the militant methods-violence, destruction of property, etc.-as these methods have already been denounced more than sufficiently by the newspapers. I shall put the case somewhat from the standpoint of the militant suffragettes themselves, trying to give some idea of the philosophy and ethical principles underlying the militant propaganda and, above all, with the hope of making clear to American readers some of the radical differences between English and American conditions.

The militants hold that they are at war with the British government, basing their right to rebel on the axioms that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that resistance to tyrants is obedience to God. As our colonial ancestors felt that a decent regard for the opinions of mankind should impe! those in a state of rebellion to declare their reasons, so the suffragettes

have repeatedly endeavored to set before the world the grievances for which they are suffering. The grounds for revolt may be classified, roughly, as follows: The miserable status of English women; the impossibility of obtaining attention for, much less redress of, their grievances by constitutional methods; the historic precedents established by the use of force by the British people whenever the progress of freedom has been blocked by the British government; the insincerity and brutality shown by the present Liberal government in dealing with the women's agitation as compared with the leniency shown to male political offenders both past and present; the determination of the newspapers to stifle the movement by persistently excluding suffrage news and propaganda from their columns. I cannot take up all these points in detail; for some I shall give a list of references to enable the reader to form his own judgment.

In the United States, though the great majority of women are still disfranchised and many of the unjust laws inherited from England continue to disfigure our statute books, the suffragists are absolutely peaceful. We owe this, not to American women, but to American men. In every country it is the men who should be held chiefly responsible for the tone and conduct of the suffrage movement, as the government is in their hands, authority and power are theirs, and they are able to make the task of the feminist comparatively easy and pleasant. Englishmen have chosen to make it very difficult. In England the militant movement is like a slave insurrection; it presents characteristics of the uprising of a servile class; the bitterness of those who have been treated unjustly, the determination of the down-trodden to rise and at all hazards to themselves to conquer respect and consideration for their sex; and the arming of the one part of the community-women-against the other part. If the word "slave," applied to contemporary English women seems an exaggeration, let me say that our colonial ancestors considered taxation without representation tyranny. When Patrick Henry said, "Give me liberty or give me death," there were no fetters on his wrists, nor was he to be sold in the slave market. He merely referred to the fact that he was being taxed without his consent a state of subjection so odious that death was preferable. Now, English women of today suffer not only from that grievance, but from many others. That the negro mother had no control of her child seemed to Abolitionists a potent argument for emancipation. Today the

English woman, if married, is not the legal parent of her child. The father is the parent and has the right to prescribe the child's education, religious training and medical attendance; he may take it away from the mother and may by will appoint a guardian without her consent. The position of a married woman is in many ways wretched: though her husband is supposed to support her, there is no legal machinery by which a woman can enforce this law; no husband is obliged to give his wife more than a bare maintenance, and may forbid her to pledge his credit; a man may disinherit his wife and leave her penniless with destitute children whom the law compels her to support. A life-time of unpaid service with possible destitution at the end is little better than slavery. The divorce laws are unequal, practically encouraging immorality on the part of the husband, as it is not a ground for securing a divorce from him unless coupled with cruelty or desertion. As for the industrial status of women, Miss Mary Macarthur, the secretary of the Women's Trades Union League, in giving evidence before the select committee on home work, estimated that the "average weekly wage of all women industrially employed, excepting only the most highly skilled, is 7 shillings a week." The government, as an employer, is one of the worst sweaters of women.

In America there is a spirit of justice and friendliness toward women, but in England the pressure to keep them down is fourfold, legal, political, industrial, social, and it might be added, religious. The militants do not think it strange that woman has rebelled, but that she has endured so long and so submissively. Perhaps heretofore the leaders and the inspiration were lacking. "Christabel" members of the W.S.P.U. have said to me with enthusiasm, "Christabel has given us a new ideal of womanhood." For centuries the feminine ideal has been semi-oriental. The world has thought that woman should purchase toleration for her existence and immunity from insult by making herself as inconspicuous as possible. The suffragettes have reacted from this silent, humble, Patient Griselda type to the extreme. They have not only been audacious enough to practise the militant virtues reserved to adorn the brows of man, but as the head and front of their offending, have claimed the right to exercise these virtues for the benefit of their own sex. As long as women were content to take part in man's revolutions, got up by men for the benefit of men, no matter how violent, how incendiary,

how murderous the feminine participants, they were considered heroines and patriots. When, for the first time in history, a revolution is organized by women for the benefit of women, though they are not murderous, merely violent and incendiary, they are considered not heroines and patriots, but vandals and viragoes. This is probably due to the lack of positive standards that prevails everywhere in church and state with regard to the ethics of fighting. Only one class has the right to condemn the use of violence by women, the Society of Friends, who have always condemned it equally in men and in women. The Quakers have never canted about brute force being noble and patriotic when used by men and abominable when used by women, but have said flatly that it was uncivilized, unchristian and degrading in any case. A study of the historic militant methods used by Englishmen, and still more by Irishmen, when struggling for liberty, prompts the suffragettes to ask embarrassing questions, such as, if it was praiseworthy for English people to cut off the head of Charles I when he tried to act the tyrant, why is it damnable for Miss Annie Kenney to break a window? If Henry VIII, in freeing religion from Rome, laid waste beautiful monasteries, and Cromwell stabled his horses in cathedrals and his troopers, for conscience' sake, broke imagery and stained glass, wherein do they differ from women who burn a church hoping thereby to rebuke the apathy and indifference of the woman-supported church of England? If Irishmen, who incited to riot, arson, cattle driving and even manslaughter, were rewarded by gaining sympathy and assistance from Gladstone and the Liberal party, why are the women who, under great provocation, resort to much milder methods, treated like the worst of criminals and their just demands for the franchise waved aside?

Among the services the suffragists have rendered to society, not the least is that they have raised this question of the use of force, and compelled the world to face it from a new point of view. For the first time in history the male sex has been able, as it were, to get a long distance view of violence, to see how it looks when exercised by the opposite sex, with no chance of contributing to masculine. vanity. Men have now seen a warfare in which all the courage, all the heroism has been shown by women, in which men have played the odious rôle of tyrant and oppressor. The suffragists have done much to establish a single standard of morals, and the international