oronation festivities. So various Conciliation Bills
were allowed to be read to the House of Commons and to reach Second
readings at which they were passed with huge majorities. Then they
came to nothingness by being referred to a Committee of the whole
House. Still a hope of some solution was dangled before the
oft-deluded women, who could hardly believe that British Ministers
of State would be such breakers of promises and tellers of
falsehoods. In November, 1911, there being no reason for further
dissembling, the Government made the announcement that it was
contemplating a Manhood Suffrage Bill, which would override
altogether the petty question as to whether a proportion of women
should or should not enjoy the franchise. This new electoral measure
was to be designed for men only, but--the Government opined--it
might be susceptible of amendment so as to admit women likewise.

[Probably the Government had satisfied itself beforehand that,
acting on some unwritten code of Parliamentary procedure, the
Speaker would rule out such an amendment as unconstitutional. At any
rate, this is what he did in 1913.]

The wrath of the oft-deluded women flamed out with immediate
resentment when the purport of this trick was discerned. Led by Mrs.
Pethick Lawrence a band of more than a thousand women and men (and
some of the presumed men were, like Vivie, women in men's clothes,
as it enabled them to move about with more agility and also to
escape identification) entered Whitehall and Parliament Street armed
with hammers and stones. They broke all the windows they could in
the fronts of the Government offices and at the residences of
Ministers of State. Vivie found herself shadowed everywhere by
Bertie Adams though she had given him no orders to join the crowd,
indeed had begged him to mind his own business and go home. "This
_is_ my business," he had said curtly, and for once masterfully, and
she gave way. Though Vivie for her own reasons carried no hammer or
stone and as one of the principal organizers of the militant
movement had been requested by the inner Council of the W.S.P.U. to
keep out of prison as long as possible, she could not help cheering
on the boldest and bravest in the mild violence of their protest. To
the angry police she seemed merely an impertinent young man, hardly
worth arresting when they could barely master the two hundred and
twenty-three arch offenders with glass-breaking weapons in their
hands. So a con