WOMAN'S WORLD

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 281, 24 May 1912, Page 6

WOMAN'S WORLD

(Conducted by "Eileen.") A USEFUL LIFE ■ "A chapter torn from the book of life." j Such is the description given by Mr. J. Ramsay Macdonald, M.P., to a most interesting little volume recently published. It is the "Autobiography of "a Working Woman," by Adelheid Popp. Frau Popp, who was born near Vienna in 1869, at eight was earning money for the family. A hard life roused in her the desire to help her fellows. At 22 she began to speak in public, and she is now one of the most respected and influential Socialist leaders on the Continet. Her own account of her early life is pathetic: I knew no point of brightness, no ray of sunshine, nothing of a comfortable home in which motherly love and care guided my childhood. What I recollect of my childhood is so gloomy and hard and so firmly rooted in my consciousness that it will never leave me. 1 knew nothing of what delights other children and causes them to shout for joy—dolls, playthings, fairy stories, sweetmeats and Christmas trees. 1 only knew the great room in which we worked, slept, ate and quarrelled. Ij remember no tender words, no kisses, j but only the anguish which I endured as I crept into a corner or under the bed when a domestic scene took place, when my father brought home too ) little money and my mother reproached him. A love of reading was her only consolation. She thus describes 'her first speech: As I mounted my steps to the platform my eyes swam and my throat was parched. I felt as though I were choking. But I conquered my excitej ment, and made my first speech. I! spoke of the sufferings, the sweating, and the mental poverty of working women. I demanded enlightenment, I culture, and knowledge for my sex, and' I begged the men to help us to them. The applause in the meeting was boundless; they surrounded me and \ wanted to know who I was. i It was one of the last acts of that J admirable woman, the late Mrs. J. Ram : . 1 say Macdonald, to arrange for the pubi lication of this engrossing little life-

story. ARGUMENT AND REASON. Presiding at a drawing-room meeting of the Hampstead branch of the Conservative and Unionist Women's Franchise Association, Lady Selborne expressed her satisfaction that the second reading of the Conciliation Bill, which had been put off owing to the industrial crisis, was not postponed by Mr. Asquith for very long. She could not, however, understand those who professed sym-! pathy with the women's movement, and' yet took the first opportunity to seize j the recent action of the militant suffragists as a pretext for withholding their ! support from the Conciliation Bill. She herself would support an honest antisuffragist for election in preference to those who so quickly drifted from the principles they had pledged themselves to uphold. The franchise cause, said Lady Selborne, should be advocated by argument and reason, rather than by militant methods, as she had faith in the reasonableness of the English people, and that the force of reason would eventually prevail. To appeal to violence was to put the matter on a wrong basis altogether. Methods of violence, .'however, advertised the movement, and obtained for it considerable publicity. People thus began to reflect upon the matter, and found a great deal was to be said on ! the side of woman suffrage. She infinj itely preferred the conduct of the miliI tants to that of those members of ParI liament who now went back on their word, as she regarded fraud as more reprehensible than violence. She recom- [ mended them to find out the character : of the legislation in those countries I where women had the Parliamentary | franchise. It would be seen that women | as a class were not opposed to male legis!lation, but were quite prepared to deal with the merits of the situation. They especially favored social legislation, and it was a striking fact that the death rate for infants was always low in those j places where women had the vote.

.IN DEFENCE OF MILITANT METHODS. Miss Beatrice Harridan, the author of "Ships that Pass in the Night," agrees with Miss Elizabeth Robbins, the actressauthor, who says "that the ideal for which woman suffrage stands has come, through suffering, to be a religion." In a letter to the London Times she says': "Miss Robbins is, indeed, right. How else could one account for the deep force at work which impels women of all ages and conditions—women of 80, middleaged mothers, young, wives and unmarried women of all professions and callings^—to do, dare, risk and sacrifice everything for the suffrage cause? Believe me, it is not merely the personal influence of the militant leaders. It is a rallying call to women, which is resounding over hill and dale. It is the r Weltschmerz' of the women. It is the accumulated sense of bitter wrong and injustice, borne patiently, too patiently, for centuries, and now in England finding expression in deeds of disorder, which would never have been perpetrated but for the deliberate policy of provocation persisted i in by this (Libers! Government during! these last six years." The suffrage movement has extended to Austria. The first Women's Suffrage Convention ever held in the Austrian capital was attended by over 300 delegates, who passed a resolution demanding that the Parliamentary vote should be given to both sexes. NEW USE FOR OLD PAPERS A wad of newspapers, five or six, damped and rolled tightly together, and bound at each end with a twist of wire, will burn like logs. Chalk, placed at the back of the fire, in quantities about equal to the coal, detracts nothing from the warmth or "cheerfulness, does not burn away, and saves 25 per cent, of coal. But much better and simpler than either of these devices is an ordinary builder's brick, broken into three pieces' and dropped among the coal when the fire is laid. The brick heats through, and gives out sustained hpat, besides taking on the appearance of ordinary coal. Newspapers rolled up tightly into a ball will light any ordinary coal without sticks.