red. We
have still, however, to consider the other side of the question.

Whenever an old movement receives a strong infusion of new blood,
whatever excesses or mistakes may arise, it is very unlikely that all
the results will be on the same side. It is certainly not so in this
case. Even the opposition to woman's suffrage which the suffragettes
are responsible for, and the Anti-Suffrage societies which they have
called into active existence, are not an unmitigated disadvantage. Every
movement of progress requires a vigorous movement of opposition to
stimulate its progress, and the clash of discussion can only be
beneficial in the end to the progressive cause.

But the immense advantage of the activity of the suffragettes has been
indirect. It has enabled the great mass of ordinary sensible women who
neither join Suffrage societies nor Anti-Suffrage societies to think for
themselves on this question. Until a few years ago, while most educated
women were vaguely aware of the existence of a movement for giving women
the vote, they only knew of it as something rather unpractical and
remote; its reality had never been brought home to them. When women
witnessed the eruption into the streets of a band of women--most of them
apparently women much like themselves--who were so convinced that the
franchise must be granted to women, here and now, that they were
prepared to face publicity, ridicule, and even imprisonment, then "votes
for women" became to them, for the first time, a real and living issue.
In a great many cases, certainly, they realized that they intensely
disliked the people who behaved in this way and any cause that was so
preached. But in a great many other cases they realized, for the first
time definitely, that the demand of votes for women was a reasonable
demand, and that they were themselves suffragists, though they had no
wish to take an active part in the movement, and no real sympathy with
its more "militant" methods. There can be no doubt that in this way the
suffragettes have performed an immense service for the cause of women's
suffrage. It has been for the most part an indirect and undesigned
service, but in the end it will perhaps more than serve to
counterbalance the disadvantages attached to their more conscious
methods and their more deliberate aims.

If, as we may trust, this service will be the main outcome of the
suffragette phase of the women's movement, it is an outcome to be
thankful for;