Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/215

 abominable brutalities when they asked questions at meetings. (It was a most unhappy thought which struck them, when they found out how easy men's nerves and men's passions make it for a woman to break up a meeting.) Two Acts of Parliament and innumerable special orders have been devised to deal with them, and have failed. Everybody with the slightest political insight knows that the reform must come. When Mr. Asquith (House of Commons, 6th May 1913) attempted to define what he meant by a demand for the vote, he said—

"I mean a demand which proceeds from a real, deep-seated, and widely diffused sense of grievance and discontent. I do not think that my honourable Friends will dispute that that is a fair statement of the case. Of course, I do not deny for one moment—who could?—that there are women, and many women in this country, including some of the most gifted, most accomplished, most high-minded of their sex, who do feel in that way. It would be absurd and ridiculous to disguise the facts of the case. So, again, and this is a very serious consideration, it is clear from the phenomena of what is called militancy, to which I am not going to make any further reference, that there are women whose temperaments are such that this same sense of wrong, twisted, perverted, inflamed, as I think in their case it is, the same sense of wrong leads to anti-social courses which men and even women find it difficult to conceive."

This was, in fact, a complete abandonment of the anti-suffrage position, and a recognition that the