Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 6.djvu/750

 734 HISTORY OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE Women's Suffrage Amendment to next year's Franchise Bill a certainty. I am willing to do all in my power to help those who are labouring to reach a successful issue in the coming session. Next year provides the supreme opportunity and noth- ing but unwise handling of that chance can compass failure." There was plenty of unwise handling, but not, as I am proud to think, from the constitutional suffragists. The first was the wild outburst of "militancy" already referred to. Mr. Lloyd George was pursued by persistent interruption and annoyance deliberately organised by the Women's Social and Political Union. A meeting he addressed at Bath, mainly devoted to advocacy of Women's Suffrage, on Nov. 24, 1911, was all but turned into a bear garden by these deliberately planned and very noisy interruptions. Not to be outdone in "unwise handling" Mr. Asquith next had his innings. He received an anti-suffrage deputation on Dec. 14, 1911, about three weeks after he had received the suffragists, and in the course of his remarks to them he said: "As an individual I am in entire agreement with you that the grant of the Parliamentary Vote to women in this coun- try would be a political mistake of a very disastrous kind." This went far to invalidate the fair-seeming promises to us given about three weeks earlier. How could a man in the all- important position of Prime Minister pledge himself to use all the forces at the disposal of the Government to pass in all its stages through both houses a measure which might include the perpetration of "a political mistake of a very disastrous kind"? A member of Mr. Asquith's own party who took part in the^ anti-suffrage deputation interpreted this expression of his chief as an S.O.S. call to his followers in the House to deliver him from the humiliation of having to fulfil the promises he had given us. Every kind of intrigue and trick known to the accom- plished parliamentarian was put into operation. Every Irish Nationalist vote was detached from support of the Bill. A description of one of these discreditable devices, among them an attempt to hold up the N.U.W.S.S. to public contempt as pur- veyors of "obscene" literature, will be found in a book by myself called The Women's Victory and After, published in 1920. The first result of these intrigues was the defeat of the Con-