SUFFRAGETTES DIVIDED.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1607, 26 November 1912, Page 4

SUFFRAGETTES DIVIDED.

Something in the nature of a domestic crisis appears to have been precipitated in the suffragist movement in England by the secession of .Me. and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence from the Women's Social and Political Union. Mr. and Mrs. Pethicic Lawrence have found themselves unable to endorse a "new militant policy" outlined by Mrs. Pankhurst and Miss Ohristabel _ Pankhurst. The actual terms of this policy are not disclosed, nor are the material points of difference stated in detail, but the inference is fairly clear that the Pethick LAWRENCEsare prepared to dissent from any militant policy which commits its followors to the violent attacks upon property, and defiance of the law generally, which have hitherto discredited the suffragist movement. They have now, in terms of an arrangement incident to their secession from the Union, resumed the editorial control of Voles for Women, hitherto the representative organ of the movement, while the Union has started a new paper, The Suffragette, of which Miss Pankhurst is the editor. Following upon this significant development, both journals published policy articles under the hands of their respective editors. According to Mr. and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, Votes for Women will "advocate absolute political equality of status between men and women; consistently oppose every Government which refuses to give effect to this fundamental pnnoiple,

and show the futility of so-called constitutional methods while the only weapon which is really constitutional —the Parliamentary vote—is withheld from women."_ Miss Pankhurst, prefacine .her leading article in The su//*w//etf«.-with "an absolute and uncompromising denial" of certain "alarmist rumours" concerning the intentions of the Women's Social and Political Union—one of which was to the effect that life was to be attacked—declares that "the militancy sanctioned by the Union consists in defiance of legal enactments and in attacks upon property. The only limit .that the Union puts to militancy is that human life shall be respected. The new militancy is only a development of the old." The broad result seems to be that the more restrained section of the movement has separated itself from the "shrieking" element, and indicated its preference for constitutional methods, whioh, though militant in character, are within the law. This split in the suffragette camp is _ a hopeful sign. The extreme section will probably dwindle away, slowly perhaps, but surely, while those who are prepared to fight the cause of women's suffrage by legitimate methods will gain accessions of strength not merely through the secessions from the Pankhurst section, but through the participation in the struggle of a new element, which, while sympathising with the principle being contended for, could not join the fighting line while the weapons used were those of lawlessness and disorder.