The Daily News. TUESDAY, APRIL 2, 1912. THE WOMAN'S CAUSE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 235, 2 April 1912, Page 4

The Daily News. TUESDAY, APRIL 2, 1912. THE WOMAN'S CAUSE.

iThe rejection of the Conciliation Bill has moved the suffragettes to a fervor of protest that is almost hysterical. Unfortunately we have not all had the good fortune to be ladies, and it is difficult for the ordinary man to exactly acquire the point of view from which these delightful personages are working. At the moment we are more concerned with their manners and their methods, as picturesquely related by the cable, than with the rights and wrongs of their political propaganda. To some people it, is fatal to be noticed by greatness, and this particular notice has been, to a great extent, the undoing of the leaders of the suffragette movement at Home. They are the Carrie Nations of the franchise movement, and what their attitude lacks in sanity it gains in stromiousness. The latest Kho-aposllc to run amok is Mrs. Despard, who, we are informed, at a meeting of the Women's Freedom League,

in consequence of the rejection of the Conciliation Bill, advocated a boycott of male milliners, the stoppage of subscriptions to churches, the investment of money abroad, not to pay taxes, not to go to seaside resorts, and to advocate the return rf anti-suffrage members to the House • Commons. This lady appears to liav. en a typical "suffragette," and the ten-' ia rapidly developing into one of reproach where the sex is concerned. The fountains . of her great deep seem to have been broken up, so that she may rain the nine parts of speech forty days and forty nights. But in the meantime, apart from her own little clique, to quote Huckleberry Finn, she may well be left to "keep a-raging right along, running her insurrection all by herself, and everybody else mighty meek and quiet." Even should her drastic motion be approved by the sex the male milliners will probably be able to make a living breaking stones, the churches wift*survive the cessation of her modest threepenny bits, which she purposes investing abroad in wild-cat securities, the great Atlantic, upon which she threatens to spit, will survive the contumely and continue to nurse the seaside resorts in its motherly lap, whilst her refusal to pay taxes will probably find her summer holiday accommodation at the expense of the Government. Jesting apart, a programme of this sort, will and incoherent in its hysterical abjectneßS, cannot do the woman's cause one tittle of good. The reform which the suffragettes are seeking can only be won by moral suasion, and there is no better advocate of such suasion than a womanly woman. Mankind abominates a he-old-maid, and the tactics of the, suffragettes have done more to alienate sympathy from their cause than to provoke it. The path of a good woman is strewn with flowers, but they rise behind her steps and not before them. When the nettles spring before her the male of her species is apt to look for other paths.