The Great Events by Famous Historians

Personally I always try to remember, first, that militancy is the work of only a very small fraction of the women who want the vote and ought to have it, and, secondly, that there have been crazy men just as there are crazy women. Militancy has not affected my own individual attitude toward the main question and never will. But I recognize that it has killed the immediate Parliamentary prospects of any and every Suffrage Bill, and that so long as militancy continues the House of Commons will do nothing. Only a new movement altogether can now bring women to the goal of political emancipation; and it will have to be a sane, hard-headed, practical movement, as full of liveliness as you please, but absolutely divorced from stones and bombs and torches. When it arises the friends of the Women's cause will begin to take heart again.

ISRAEL ZANGWILL

THE AWKWARD AGE OF THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT

  "And what did she get by it?" said my Uncle Toby.

  "What does any woman get by it?" said my father.

  "Martyrdom

" replied the young Benedictine.

TRISTRAM SHANDY.

The present situation of woman suffrage in England recalls the old puzzle: What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable body? The irresistible force is the religious passion of myriads of women, the fury of self-sacrifice, the righteous zeal that shrinks not even from crime; the immovable body may be summed up as Mr. Asquith. Almost as gross an incarnation of Tory prejudice as Squire Western, who laid it down that women should come in with the first dish and go out with the first glass, Mr. Asquith is all that stands between the sex and the suffrage.

The answer to the old puzzle, I suppose, would be that though the immovable body does not move, yet the impact of the irresistible force generates heat, which, as we know from Tyndall, is a mode of motion. At any rate, heat is the only mode in which the progress of woman suffrage can be registered to-day. The movement has come to what Mr. Henry James might call "the awkward age": an age which has passed beyond argument without arriving at achievement; an age for which words are too small and blows too big. And because impatience has been the salvation of the movement, and because the suffragette will not believe that the fiery charger which has carried her so far can not really climb the last ridge of the mountain, but must be replaced by a mule—that miserable compromise between a steed and an anti-suffragist—the awkward age is also the dangerous age.