WANTED: STRAIGHT THINKING ABOUT MILITANT SUFFRAGISTS
APROPOS OF THE RENEWAL OF VIOLENCE IN ENGLAND
ONE of the startling signs of the times is the recrudescence of violence among the militant suffragists in England. The physical attacks by women upon members of the government, including the hurling of a hatchet at the Prime Minister’s party; the attempt to set fire to a theater in which he was about to make an address, and other outrages, are in themselves a sufficiently deplorable symptom of lawless impulses, with which the government, as it was obliged, has dealt promptly and vigorously. As we have recognized in previous articles, this course of action has been disavowed in England by other prominent bodies of suffragists, who deserve honor for their refusal to be deflected from their “appeal to reason” to a policy which can only end in disaster. In this number of THECENTURYwe give place to an article by Mrs. Fawcett, President of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, of Great Britain, written at our request for a disavowal of this policy. If, besides the editorials in the New York “Evening Post,” there has been any similar official disavowal in America, it has escaped the attention of one careful reader of the daily news. Already many men in this country must be asking themselves whether it is wise to add to the electorate a body of voters who do not see the perilous influence of tolerating such actions—the influence not only upon women, but upon other impressionable classes having a real or fancied grievance.
And now comes another test of the wisdom and patriotism of these ladies. Before these lines shall be published, Mr. and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, two convicted lawbreakers of England, are to be honored by a reception by the National Woman Suffrage Association in New York, as Mrs. Pankhurst was received at Carnegie Hall after a similar conviction. We cannot conceal our sympathy with any person willing to suffer for opinion’s sake, but in these instances the punishment was inflicted not for opinion, but for deliberate violation of the elementary principles of civilized government—by the destruction of property (usually of unoffending persons) and the creation of public disorder. Of what use is it for conservative agencies to address themselves to the discouragement of lynching in the South, or in Pennsylvania, or of hired assassination in New York City, or the lawlessness of capital or of labor, or the lawlessness of brutal students, fashionable smugglers, bribed officials, or “fixed” juries, when the sentiment of so large and estimable a part of the community as the advocates of woman suffrage—teachers of the young—fail to see their responsibility toward their followers and the public? The defense that “no class has ever obtained its rights except by violence” is both false and insidious, and sets an example which will rise to plague the women themselves if they ever obtain a measure of responsible power. Deeper even than this vicious idea is the world-old delusion—which has its strongest exponent in politics—that the end justifies the means. The drift toward the employment of this standard is a hard blow to those who believe that women are to show us a more excellent way in government.
Admitting that this policy of terrorizing one’s opponents is valuable as advertising a movement, it seems never to have occurred to the advocates of woman suffrage that as effective a presentation of their cause could have been obtained without violence. Ruskin said that war would cease in Europe if on the declaration of hostilities Englishwomen would put on mourning. Ingenuity certainly could devise some form ofréclamemore worthy than the precipitation of delicately minded young women into the program of a New York vaudeville theater. Something must be allowed to the instinctive protest of human nature thateverythingshall not be thrown into the melting-pot of agitation.