; but there were to be no railway
accidents, no sinking of ships, no violent deeds dangerous to life.
At the height and greatest bitterness of militancy no statesman's
life was in danger.

The only recklessness about life was in the militant women. They
risked and sometimes lost their lives in carrying out their
protests. They invented the Hunger Strike (the prospect of which as
an inevitable episode ahead of her, filled Vivie with tremulous
dread) to balk the Executive of its idea of turning the prisons of
England into Bastilles for locking up these clamant women who had
become better lawyers than the men who tried them. But think what
the Hunger Strike and its concomitant, Forcible Feeding, meant in
the way of pain and danger to the life of the victim. The Government
were afraid (unless you were an utterly unknown man or woman of the
lower classes) of letting you die in prison; so to force them to
release you, you had first to refuse for four days all food--the
heroic added all drink. Then to prevent your death--and being human
you, the prisoner, must have hoped they were keeping a good look-out
on your growing weakness--the prison doctor must intervene with his
forcible feeding. This was a form of torture the Inquisition would
have been sorry to have overlooked, and one no doubt that the
Bolsheviks have practised with great glee. The patient was strapped
to a chair or couch or had his--usually her--limbs held down by
warders (wardresses) and nurses. A steel or a wooden gag was then
inserted, often with such roughness as to chip or break the teeth,
and through the forced-open mouth a tube was pushed down the throat,
sometimes far enough to hurt the stomach. This produced an
apoplectic condition of choking and nausea, and as the stomach
filled up with liquid food the retching nearly killed the patient.
The windpipe became involved. Food entered the lungs--the tongue was
cut and bruised (Think what a mere pimple on the tongue means to
some of us: it keeps _me_ awake half the night)--the lips were torn.
Worse still--requiring really a pathological essay to which I am not
equal--was feeding by slender pipes through the nose. The far
simpler and painless process _per rectum_ was debarred because it
might have constituted an indecent assault.

Was ever Ministry in a greater dilemma? It was too old-fashioned,
too antiquely educated to realize the spirit of its age, the pass at
which we had arrived of conceding to Women th