e same rights as to
men. Women were ready to die for these rights (not to kill others in
order to attain them). Yet for fear of wounding the national
sentimentality they must not be allowed to die; they must not be
saved from suicide by any action savouring of indecency; so they
must be tortured as prisoners hardly were in the worst days of the
Inquisition or at the worst-conducted public school of the Victorian
era.

But Vivie's gradually rising wrath was to be brought by degrees to
boiling-point through the spring of 1913, and to explode at last
over an incident more tragic than any one of the five or six hundred
cases of forcible feeding.

Early in 1913, the Speaker intimated that any insertion of a Woman
Suffrage Amendment into the Manhood Franchise Bill would be
inconsistent with some unwritten code of Parliamentary procedure of
which apparently he was the sole guardian and interpreter. Ministers
who had probably prepared this _coup_ months before went about
expressing hypocritical laments at the eccentricities of our
constitution; and the Franchise Act was abandoned. A little later,
frightened at the renewal of arson in town and country, at
interferences with their week-end golf courses, at the destruction
of mails in the letter-boxes, and the slashing of Old Masters at the
National Gallery (purchased at about five times their intrinsic
value by a minister who would not have spent one penny of national
money to encourage native art), the Cabinet let it be known that a
way would be found presently to give Woman Suffrage a clear run. A
private member would be allowed to bring in a Bill for conferring
the franchise on women, and the opinion of the House would be sought
on its merits independently of party issues. The Government Whips
would be withdrawn and members of the Government be left free to
vote as they pleased.

It was a fair deduction, however, from what was said at that time
and later, that the strongest possible pressure--arguments _ad
hominem_ and in a sense _ad pecuniam_--was brought to bear on
Liberals and on Irish Nationalists to vote against the Bill. Had the
Second reading been carried, the Government would have resigned and
a Home Rule Bill for Ireland have been once more postponed.

The rejection of Mr. Dickinson's measure by a majority of
forty-seven convinced the Militants that Pharaoh had once more
hardened his heart; and the hopelessness of the Woman's cause at
that juncture inspired one