MRS. PANKHURST IN PETROGRAD.

Taihape Daily Times, 9 November 1917, Page 3

MRS. PANKHURST IN PETROGRAD.

LETTERS FROM xV SUFFRAGETTE. LEADER, "The woman rebel with the glorious revolutionary past." That is how Boris Mirsky in the "Ruskaia Volia" describes Mrs Pankhurst. "But," he ' adds, "she did remain a woman." Mrs Pankhurst has now been in Petrograd for some time She has had the fullest opportunity of watching the progress of the great political and social upheaval now going on in Russia. What has been her mission at this critical time in the history of that vast country? We have the answer in letters received from Miss Jessie Kenny, who is with the Sufffragette leader. Her mission, we learn, has been and is to counsel the women of Russia to exert all their efforts, by influencing the men and by their own work, to bring the war to a victorious conclusion and to liberate the small nations subjugated to the Germans and the Magyars. To the Russian men she has said: "You must fight to a finish." And, too, she is telmrg them the story of her own fight with the British Government, and how, when the great war came, the war with" the enemies of humanity, she and her followers were no longer opponents but friends of the Government, and did their utmost to inspire the people men and women, to throw their whole energies into the struggle. "We have sacrificed," she declared to her Russian hearers, "on the altar of our country all that we could have done, and not only the Suffragettes, but the great majority of the women of Great Britain have done so." Mrs Pankhurst and Miss Kenny have already addressed many meeting, and have always been well received. Even the extremists have been patient listeners though they were advised by the English Suffragettes to be careful not to exchange the Czar for the Kaiser One little sentence 0/ reference to the Suffragette campaign from an addres by Mrs Pankhurst is worth quoting. "I left free England," she "as a political slave, and I shall return from free Russia a free woman."