that also was coming to bear upon statecraft.
My first parliament was the parliament of the Suffragettes. I don't
propose to tell here of that amazing campaign, with its absurdities
and follies, its courage and devotion. There were aspects of that
unquenchable agitation that were absolutely heroic and aspects that
were absolutely pitiful. It was unreasonable, unwise, and, except
for its one central insistence, astonishingly incoherent. It was
amazingly effective. The very incoherence of the demand witnessed,
I think, to the forces that lay behind it. It wasn't a simple
argument based on a simple assumption; it was the first crude
expression of a great mass and mingling of convergent feelings, of a
widespread, confused persuasion among modern educated women that the
conditions of their relations with men were oppressive, ugly,
dishonouring, and had to be altered. They had not merely adopted
the Vote as a symbol of equality; it was fairly manifest to me that,
given it, they meant to use it, and to use it perhaps even
vindictively and blindly, as a weapon against many things they had
every reason to hate…
I remember, with exceptional vividness, that great night early in
the session of 1909, when-I think it was-fifty or sixty women went
to prison. I had been dining at the Barham's, and Lord Barham and I
came down from the direction of St. James's Park into a crowd and a
confusion outside the Caxton Hall. We found ourselves drifting with
an immense multitude towards Parliament Square and parallel with a
silent, close-packed column of girls and women, for the most part
white-faced and intent. I still remember the effect of their faces
upon me. It was quite different from the general effect of staring
about and divided attention one gets in a political procession of
men. There was an expression of heroic tension.
There had been a pretty deliberate appeal on the part of the women's
organisers to the Unemployed, who had been demonstrating throughout
that winter, to join forces with the movement, and the result was
shown in the quality of the crowd upon the pavement. It was an
ugly, dangerous-looking crowd, but as yet good-tempered and
sympathetic. When at last we got within sight of the House the
square was a seething seat of excited people, and the array of
police on horse and on foot might have been assembled for a
revolutionary outbreak. There were dense masses of people up
Whitehall, and right on to Westminster Bridge. The scuffle that
ended in the arrests was the poorest explosion to follow such
stupendous preparations…
3
Later on in that year the women began a new attack. Day and night,
and all through the long nights of the Budget sittings, at all the
piers of the gates of New Palace Yard and at St. Stephen's Porch,
stood women pickets, and watched us silently and reproachfully as we
went to and fro. They were women of all sorts, though, of course,
the independent worker-class predominated. There were grey-headed
old ladies standing there, sturdily charming in the rain; battered-
looking, ambiguous women, with something of the desperate bitterness
of battered women showing in their eyes; north-country factory
girls; cheaply-dressed suburban women; trim, comfortable mothers of
families; valiant-eyed girl graduates and undergraduates; lank,
hungry-looking creatures, who stirred one's imagination; one very
dainty little woman in deep mourning, I recall, grave and steadfast,
with eyes fixed on distant things. Some of those women looked
defiant, some timidly aggressive, some full of the stir of
adventure, some drooping with cold and fatigue. The supply never
ceased. I had a mortal fear that somehow the supply might halt or
cease. I found that continual siege of the legislature
extraordinarily impressive-infinitely more impressive than the
feeble-forcible "ragging" of the more militant section. I thought
of the appeal that must be going through the country, summoning the
women from countless scattered homes, rooms, colleges, to
Westminster.
I remember too the petty little difficulty I felt whether I should
ignore these pickets altogether, or lift a hat as I hurried past
with averted eyes, or look them in the face as I did so. Towards
the end the House evoked an etiquette of salutation.
4
There was a tendency, even on the part of its sympathisers, to treat
the whole suffrage agitation as if it were a disconnected issue,
irrelevant to all other broad developments of social and political
life. We struggled, all of us, to ignore the indicating finger it
thrust out before us. "Your schemes, for all their bigness," it
insisted to our reluctant, averted minds, "still don't go down to
the essential things…"
We have to go deeper, or our inadequate children's insufficient
children will starve amidst harvests of earless futility. That
conservatism which works in every class to preserve in its
essentials the habitual daily life is all against a profounder
treatment of political issues. The politician, almost as absurdly
as the philosopher, tends constantly, in spite of magnificent
preludes, vast intimations, to specialise himself out of the