PROBLEM OF THE CRIMINAL SUFFRAGIST.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1721, 11 April 1913, Page 4

PROBLEM OF THE CRIMINAL SUFFRAGIST.

One of to-day's cable messages reports that Mns. Pankhurst is making good her promise not to take food in prison, and that so far the authorities have not ordered forcible feeding. Hers is the test case in (lie suffragist crisis, for it certainly is a crisis, if she, the leader of them all, nuccecds in making a farcc of the law, England may as well give itself up lo waiting for the shocking climax which wo mentioned the other day as one of the tilings nearer to certainty than to mere possibility. One of our dissident correspondents has told us that this climax—which, to put it quite plainly, is the appearance of Judge Lyncii—cau easily be averted by giving voles In women. Whatever weaknesses they may suffer under, the members of the British Cabinet have not come to the point, of surrendering to plain crime; and the

women arc not likely to gel; votes so long as they pursue the policy of outrage to the verge of murder. Their best friends in Britain, have admitted this, and. warned them accordingly. The English papers have been full of suggestions as to the best way of dealing with the criminal suffragists, and the favourite suggestions are deportation and the restoration of the money penalty which once used to lie supplementary lo imprisonment. What the authorities really fear_ is the successful sui- . ride of some misguided suffragist in prison. And so the law continues to be rendered farcical. Yet, as the Saturday Review says, "by one means or another the conspiracy and the lawlessness must be suppressed," for ''if, that be not done, only one 'consequence can ensue—mob violence in which one or several of the women will be mauled to death by public hooliganism.'' That disaster to the State find to society must be averted atuny cost short of the perilous price of surrender to propagandist crime.