to be noticed in earnest after our first success in opposing a Liberal candidate. This was in a by-election held at Cockermouth in August, 1906. I shall have to explain that a by-election is a local election to fill a vacancy in Parliament caused by a death or a resignation. The verdict of a by-election is considered as either an indorsement or a censure of the manner in which the Government have fulfilled their pre-election pledges. So we went to Cockermouth and told the voters how the Liberal party had fulfilled its pledges of democracy and lived up to its avowed belief in the rights of all the people. We told them of the arrests in London and Manchester, of the shameful treatment of women in Liberal meetings, and we asked them to censure the Government who had answered so brutally our demand for a vote. We told them that the only rebuke that the politicians would notice was a lost seat in Parliament, and that on that ground we asked them to defeat the Liberal candidate.
How we were ridiculed! With what scorn the newspapers declared that "those wild women" could never turn a single vote. Yet when the election was over it was found that the Liberal candidate had lost the seat, which, at the general election a little more than a year before, had been won by a majority of 655. This time the Unionist candidate was returned by a majority of 609. Tremendously elated, we hurried our forces off to another by-election.
Now the ridicule was turned to stormy abuse. Mind you, the Liberal Government still refused to notice the women's question; they declared through the Liberal press that the defeat at Cockermouth was insignificant, and that anyhow it wasn't caused by the Suffragettes; yet the Liberal leaders were furiously angry with the W. S. P. U. Many of our members had been Liberals, and it was considered by the men that these women were little better than traitors. They were very foolish and ill-advised, into the bargain, the Liberals said, because the vote, if won at all, must be gained from the Liberal party; and how did the women suppose the Liberal party would ever give the vote to open and avowed enemies? This sage argument was used also by the women Liberals and the constitutional suffragists. They advised us that the proper way was to work for the party. We retorted that we had done that unsuccessfully for too many years already, and persisted with the opposite method of persuasion.
Throughout the summer and autumn we devoted ourselves to the by-election work, sometimes actually defeating the Liberal candidate, sometimes reducing the Liberal majority, and always raising a tremendous sensation and gaining hundreds of new members to the Union. In almost every neighbourhood we visited we left the nucleus of a local union, so that before the year was out we had branches all over England and many in Scotland and Wales. I especially remember a by-election in Wales at which Mr. Samuel Evans, who had accepted an officership under the Crown, had to stand for re-election. Unfortunately no candidate had been brought out against him. So there was nothing for my companions and me to do but make his campaign as lively as possible. Mr.—now Sir Samuel—Evans was the man who had incensed women by talking out a suffrage resolution introduced into the House by Keir Hardie. So we went to two of his meetings and literally talked him out, breaking up the gatherings amid the laughter and cheers of delighted crowds.
On October 23d Parliament met for its autumn session, and we led a deputation to the House of Commons in another effort to induce the Government to take action on woman suffrage. In accordance with orders given the police, only twenty of us were admitted to the Strangers' Lobby. We sent in for the chief Liberal whip, and asked him to take a message to the Prime Minister, the message being the usual request to grant women the vote that session. We also asked the Prime Minister if he intended to include the registration of qualified women voters in the provisions of the plural voting bill, then under consideration. The Liberal whip came back with the reply that nothing could be done for women that session.
"Does the Prime Minister," I asked, "hold out any hope for the women for any session during this Parliament, or at any future time?" The Prime Minister, you will remember, called himself a suffragist.
The Liberal whip replied, "No, Mrs. Pankhurst, the Prime Minister does not."
What would a deputation of unenfranchised men have done in these circumstances—men who knew themselves to be qualified to exercise the franchise, who desperately needed the protection of the franchise, and who had a majority of legislators in favour of giving them the franchise? I hope they would have done at least as much as we did, which was to start a meeting of protest on the spot. The newspapers described our action as creating a disgraceful scene in the lobby of the House of Commons, but I think that history will otherwise describe it. One of the women sprang up on a settee and began to address the crowd. In less than a minute she was pulled down, but instantly another woman took her place; and after she had been dragged down, still another sprang to her place, and following her another and another, until the order came to clear the lobby, and we were all forced outside.
In the mêlée I was thrown to the floor and painfully hurt. The women, thinking me seriously injured, crowded around me and refused to move until I was able to regain myself. This angered the police, who were still more incensed when they found that the demonstration was continued outside. Eleven women were arrested, including Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, our treasurer, Mrs. Cobden Sanderson, Annie Kenney and three more of our organisers; and they were all sent to Holloway for two months. But the strength of our movement was proved by the number of volunteers who immediately came forward to carry on the work. Mrs. Tuke, now Hon. Secretary of the W. S. P. U., joined the Union at this time. It had not occurred to the authorities that their action would have this effect. They thought to crush the Union at a blow, but they gave it the greatest impetus it had yet received. The leaders of the older suffrage organisations for the time forgot their disapproval of our methods, and joined with women writers, physicians, actresses, artists, and other prominent women in denouncing the affair as barbarous.
One more thing the authorities failed to take into account. The condition of English prisons was known to be very bad, but when two of our women were made so ill in Holloway that they had to be released within a few days, the politicians began to tremble for their prestige. Questions were asked in Parliament concerning the advisability of treating the Suffragettes not as common criminals but as political offenders with the right to confinement in the First Division. Mr. Herbert Gladstone, the Home Secretary, replied to these questions that he had no power to interfere with the magistrates' decisions, and could do nothing in the matter of the suffragettes' punishment. I shall ask you to remember this statement of Mr. Herbert Gladstone's, as later we were able to prove it a deliberate falsehood—although really the falsehood proved itself when the women, by Government order, were released from prison when they had served just half their sentences. The reason for this was that an important by-election was being held in the north of England, and we had distributed broadcast throughout the constituency hand bills telling the electors that nine women, including the daughter of Richard Cobden, were being held as common criminals by the Liberal Government who were asking for their votes.
I took a group of the released prisoners to Huddersfield, and they told prison stories to such effect that the Liberal majority was reduced by 540 votes. As usual the Liberal leaders denied that our work had anything to do with the slender majority by which the party retained the seat, but among our souvenirs is a handbill, one of thousands given out from Liberal headquarters:
Meanwhile, other demonstrations had taken place before the House of Commons, and at Christmas time twenty-one suffragettes were in Holloway Prison, though they had committed no crime. The Government professed themselves unmoved, and members of Parliament spoke with sneers of the "self-made martyrs." However, a considerable group of members, strongly moved by the passion and unquenchable ardor of this new order of suffragists, met during the last week of the year and formed a committee whose object it was to press upon the government the necessity of giving the franchise to women during that Parliament. The committee resolved that its members would work to educate a wider public opinion on the question, and especially to advocate suffrage when addressing meetings in their constituencies, to take Parliamentary action on every possible occasion, and to induce as many members of Parliament as possible to ballot for the introduction
