MILITANT AND NON-MILITANT.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXV, Issue 94, 28 April 1913, Page 4

MILITANT AND NON-MILITANT.

So many of our Home cables concern the doings of Mrs Pankhurst and her militant followers that we are liable to fall into the error of picturing the suffragette as an Amzonian female armed with chains', padlocks, and a parrot-diko’ war shriek of piercing quality, whose chief vocation is stabbing policemen with hatpins, tweaking Cabinet Ministers’ noses or repeating the exploits of Guy Fawes. Yet it must, in fairness be admitted that this is not the real type of suffragette, although one may bo excused for thinking so. Such is the notoriety which a certain section has gained through their senseless exploits, which cannot but hinder the real cause, that the greater body of law-abiding supporters of the movement are perforce brought more or less into disrepute. Now, four years ago, of the fifteen distict societies in Great Britain working for women’s right to vote only two announced a militant programme. It is under the auspi-

ces of one of these, the Women’s Social and Political Union, that most of the recent excesses have been committed. The other society, the Women’s Freedom League, has never gone so far as destroying property or assaulting public men to gain their object. Iho largest suffrage society, the National Union, from which all the others originated, is essentially non-militant, non-party, constitutional and law-abiding. It has over a hundred affiliated provincial societies, and in 1908 its membership, which has been steadily growing since, was 15,000. Its policy has always been to conciliate the Government, to convert the people and to support the suffragette candidates for Parliament. Its president, Mrs Henry Fawcett, wife of the Postmaster-General, was identified with the movement as long ago as 1867, when she carried a petition into tho House of Commons. Her most active colleague is Lady Frances Balfour, the president of the London Society. The/two societies of which these ladies are the respective presidents, not only refuse to participate in the actions of the extreme parties, but are aften at variance with them, and it is they only who have the right to be regarded as having the true cause at heart.