Page:The case for women's suffrage.djvu/220

 Four years later—in 1871—when the Ballot Act was passed, Mr. Gladstone said in the House of Commons that there could be no harm now in woman's voting. Mr. Gladstone meant that, now that the old rowdiness and publicity attaching to elections had been abolished, the last excuse for refusing to enfranchise woman had been equally swept away. Thirty-six years ago, then, there was not a vestige of a reason left for refusing woman the vote. Yet the logical animal, man, has gone on thirty-six years as a passive resister. Women unborn in 1871 have now got girls of their own, and if the women we see on this platform had not begun to wake things up, their granddaughters and great-granddaughters would probably be doomed to go on passing annual resolutions and awaiting the chivalry of their lords and masters. It is a strange thing that English ladies should have to go to prison to-day to bring home to Englishmen the words of the last four Prime Ministers in succession—Gladstone, Salisbury, Balfour, and Campbell-Bannerman.

But what other way is open to them? "Ah, if you had only been moderate and reasonable, we should have listened to you," lots of men will tell you to-day. Well, I have consulted the pages of history. Writing of a Women's Suffrage campaign carried on nearly twenty years ago, an impartial "The agitation for Woman's Rights was conducted with great sobriety, steadiness and moderation." And you see the result. Twenty fruitless years. Surely it was time to try insobriety, unsteadiness, and immoderation. It is true the Times will then seize upon your behaviour to prove the utter unfitness of woman for political life. If you act moderately no one will ever trouble to give you a vote, and if you act violently you are not fit to have it. "Them as asks shan't have, and them as don't ask don't want."

Even if you go to prison—what does that prove? Mr. Punch told you the other day that if any woman went to historian says: